Through Narcissus' Glass Darkly: The Modern Religion of Conscience

Two Disenchantment and the Religion of Conscience

t w o Disenchantment and the Religion of Conscience The fate of an epoch which has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must know that we cannot learn the meaning of the world from the results of its analysis, be it ever so perfect; it must rather be in a position to create this meaning itself. — m a x w e b e r , Methodology To say that the modern subject is, as Hobbes and Rousseau hinted and Kant explicitly claimed, a citizen neither of the sensible realm nor of the intelligible realm, but finds itself somewhere ‘in between,’ seems harmless enough. But to go on to say that this is equivalent to the modern subject being ‘homeless’ poses more of a challenge. As the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty observed, the modern ‘in between’ means that perceptions and thoughts operate differently from what antecedent forms of intellectual life had claimed, and that neither subject nor object could be described in such traditional ways.1 In other words, when we speak of the modern subject from the standpoint of the ‘in between,’ we are on the threshold of some perspicuous redescription, some new intellectual landscape . So if we want to understand the new mind-set, we will need to discern not only what is new in this construal of things—however obvious that might be to us, because it functions for us as a background assumption—but also, in order to grasp its full import, what it artfully eliminates from past: traditional descriptions of the subject.2 48 Disenchantment and the Religion of Conscience 49 Such, in any event, is the task of this essay. In the prior essay, I argued that because Kant construed the modern subject as neither suspended from heaven nor anchored on earth, the religious import of the his philosophy was to secure belief against the encroachments of fanaticism and dogmatism by containing it within the limits of critical rationality. By exposing what he conceived of as religious ‘madness,’ Kant sought to excise any rule of judgment or mode of representation that obscured from view the crisis of free thinking and acting: the inextricable link between freedom and evil. In staving off the threat of such encroachments, Kant thought that it would be possible not only to curb the threat of state-sponsored religio-political censorship , but also to safeguard the prospect that the modern subject could stand firm in its freedom. Yet Kant’s proviso that freedom implied the impossibility of eradicating evil tempered the ambitions of human self-assertion . It is upon this tempered sense of self-assertion that I now propose to build. I shall urge a reading of Max Weber’s notion of ‘disenchantment’ that holds together both the claim that the modern subject’s vocation is to assert itself against the world and the idea that the modern subject is steeped in loss. To help fill out this reading, I will ask what it means in this context to speak of ‘loss,’ especially in light of the subject’s ‘vocation.’ I will argue that modern self-assertion is a medium through which the modern subject reinterprets its own rationality in a way that purloins the role that spirit once played. Disenchantment The particular state of things that nineteenth-century thinkers began to understand as modernity included the conviction that one can and should assert one’s own truth against the world. This emblematic conviction sums up the idea that humans can grasp what is distinctive about themselves and galvanize their energies in a way that advances this distinctiveness. Early modern thinkers differed over how best to assert one’s own truth. Descartes argued that reason could provide the means by which man could become ‘master and possessor’ of the natural world.3 Spinoza claimed that when man is ‘‘prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune.’’4 Hobbes observed that ‘‘good successe is Power . . . which makes men either feare [it] or rely upon [it].’’5 Thinking in these ways, however, amounted to more than the claim that everyone knows what they 50 Disenchantment and the Religion of Conscience desire and can, according to its dictates, manipulate their environs. Such thinking assumed, further, that humans have a built-in affinity for truth, or—more radically—that they are already in possession of the truth that can set...