Fateful Shapes of Human Freedom: John William Miller and the Crises of Modernity

Chapter 1 Crises of Modernity

1 1 Crises of Modernity The chaos of today is the historical consequence of a metaphysical lapse. But it is historical and fateful, as is any historical identity.1 — John William Miller, In Defense of the Psychological Karl Marx claimed humans make history but not in circumstances of their own choosing.2 The circumstances in which we live, however, are ineluctably maintained by our efforts to make a life for ourselves. Yet they are of such a character and complexity that they cannot be maintained without being revised: conservation requires innovation. In any event, our circumstances are not simply forced upon us by the inertia of the past. These circumstances are as much incorporated in our mode of existence as we are enveloped in these circumstances.3 In other words, they contribute greatly to our agency and thus our identity (see Taylor 1993; Macmurray 1957). We are what we have made of ourselves in circumstances we have maintained by our very efforts to shape a singular life from an inchoate inheritance .4 In addition, we are what we can yet make of ourselves. Our achievements cannot be gainsaid, but neither can our capacity for alteration. It may even be that what we are not yet is far more important than what we now are (cf. Hocking 1942, 4). Yet, just as all of our achievements are precarious (cf. Ortega 1957, 25–26), any determinate form of human life is transitional. We are continuously becoming other than we have been (Conrad [1900] 1961, 204–5), often only imperceptibly but occasionally in a dramatic and arresting manner. 2 Fateful Shapes of Human Freedom Even in “epochs of revolutionary crisis,” we are like those who in the process of learning a new language begin by translating the unfamiliar medium into our native tongue (Marx 1978, 595). We spontaneously translate the unfamiliar into the familiar. But the opposite of this is equally noteworthy : even in times of historical continuity, we are, apart from intention or awareness, contributors to novelty. We inevitably transform the familiar into the unfamiliar, the structures of our historical inheritances into resources of historical improvisation. Though transformation is inescapable, progress is not guaranteed. History is, however, neither a tragedy nor a farce.5 The literary genre of the novel is distinctively modern not only in origin but also in sensibility. It is nothing less than a vital expression of modern consciousness, without which modernity would be largely ignorant of itself. It encompasses the tragic and the farcical, as well as much else, but it is not reducible to these. The novel tends to depict human beings as simultaneously unwitting and knowledgeable actors, fated to be exiled from the commonplace and (wherever successful) to become reconciled with the foreign (cf. Rieff 1993). The novel is a form of historiography in which historicity and place are reclaimed as part of the everyday lives of ordinary people, caught up in the momentous task of holding themselves and their worlds together.6 It is a way of telling time—not the uniform regularity measured by clocks but the dramatic displacements, ironic reversals, and other reconfigurations only discernible by means of narration (Bradford 1997). As such, this genre concerns our struggles for self-possession and thus our phases of self-dissolution and our acts of self-annihilation. Despite our denials and evasions, our fate is of our own making, whereas the form of our freedom is initially the consequence not of our own private choices but of our shared circumstances (cf. Brockway 1985, 34–42; Burckhardt 1943). This form is part of our inheritance; the appropriation of this inheritance is our first exercise of autonomy, wherein human agency alone takes recognizable form. Accordingly, the fateful shapes of human freedom are, at every turn, due to the exercise of freedom, even when this exercise takes the form of acquiescence or resignation. The choices we make are ultimately irresponsible if they do not extend to the circumstances in which we exercise our autonomy. The totality of these Crises of Modernity 3 circumstances, actual and imagined, makes up our world. Our responsibility , consequently, extends to nothing less than our world.7 But our world is one in which we are fated to build amid the ruins of worlds we have often had a hand in destroying (cf. Hodges and Lachs 1999).8 How are we to rebuild our world amid ruins? Indeed, what are we to do...