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Phronêsis vs Scepticism: An Early Modernist Perspective
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
Taking advantage of the way in which Charles Taylor hinges his account of the rise of modern secularity around the year 1500, this article attempts a reassessment of some aspects of early modern thought which have been prominent in recent studies. In particular, it focuses on the thin boundary between illusion and reality, on the lure of scepticism, and on the changing role of the Aristotelian notion of phronêsis in human action.
- Type
- Symposium on Charles Taylor with his responses
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- Copyright © 2010 The Author. New Blackfriars © 2010 The Dominican Society.
References
1 See, for example, ‘Narrative Emotions: Beckett's Genealogy of Love’, in Nussbaum, Martha, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 286–313Google Scholar, and Taylor's discussion in A Secular Age, pp. 625–34.
2 Love's Knowledge, op.cit., p. 379.
3 Taylor draws on Brown, Peter, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (London: Faber & Faber, 1989)Google Scholar. For the Pauline opposition see Martin, Dale B., The Corinthian Body (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), especially pp. 123–28, 168–74, 194–97Google Scholar.
4 See for example, Bellah, Robert N., ‘What is Axial about the Axial Age?’Arch.europ.sociol., vol. XLVI, no. I, 2005, pp. 69–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Karl Jaspers coined the notion in Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (1st ed.). (München: Piper Verlag, 1949)Google Scholar, trans. by Bullock, Michael, The Origin and Goal of History (London: Routledge, 1953)Google Scholar.
5 Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 761. The links between the Scotist and the Avicennan understanding of being, both based on the complete subtraction of the notion of existence, are lucidly expounded in Gilson, Etienne, L’être et l’essence (Paris: Vrin, 1948), pp. 133–5Google Scholar.
6 Clark, Stuart, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), p. 5Google Scholar.
7 In the early sixteenth century, for instance, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola—not to be confused with his more accomplished forebear Giovanni—argued that the soul was incapable of knowing anything if the imagination did not constantly supply it with the images necessary for knowing. See Clark, Vanities of the Eye, op.cit., p. 44.
8 V.i.6–8, my emphasis.
9 Vanities of the Eye, op.cit., p. 57.
10 Malvolio: ‘I am as well in my wits, fool, as thou art’, Clown: ‘But as well? Then you are mad indeed, if you be no better in your wits than a fool’; Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, IV.ii, 91–3.
11 Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 246–7Google Scholar, 195. Nuttall's emphasis.
12 Ibid., pp. 194–6.
13 See Anthony Grafton, What was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 32, 35. Grafton explains that the likes of Bodin, Boudouin, Patrizi, and Chytraeus would have had no qualms about agreeing with Campanella's charming statement that those not interested in history were ‘sicut vermis in caseo, nil sciret, nisi quae ipsum casei partes tangent’—‘like worms in cheese, knowing nothing except the parts of the cheese that touch them’.
14 Shakespeare the Thinker, op.cit. p. 38.
15 Cited in Grafton, What was History? op.cit., pp. 43–4.
16 Vanities of the Eye, op.cit., 83–4.
17 Ibid., pp. 90–1, 236; cf. Thorne, Alison, Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare (London: Macmillan, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Perdo Calderón de la Barca's best known play, La Vida es Sueño (the English ‘Life is a Dream’ fails to bring out the delicious ambivalence of the Spanish) is perhaps the most profound theatrical treatment of the topic; see Lewis-Smith, Paul, Calderón de la Barca: La Vida es Sueño (London: Grant and Cutler, 1998)Google Scholar. On El Greco and Velázquez see Brown, Jonathan, Painting in Spain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 62–78, 179–90Google Scholar. A suggestive general survey is Robbins, Jeremy, The Challenges of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Seventeenth-Century Spanish Literature (London: Duckworth, 1998)Google Scholar.
19 The Skeptic Way: Sextus Empiricus's ‘Outlines of Pyrrhonism’, trans. and ed. Mates, B. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 97Google Scholar.
20 The classic study is Popkin, Richard, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle, revised and expanded edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979)Google Scholar.
21 I draw on Clark's discussion in Vanities of the Eye, op.cit., p. 337.
22 Grafton, What was History?, op.cit., p. 254.
23 De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, quoted by Miner, Robert C., ‘Verum-factum and Practical Wisdom in the Early Writings of Giambattista Vico’, Journal of the History of Ideas vol. 59, no.1 January 1998, p. 53Google Scholar.
24 Shakespeare the Thinker, op.cit., p. 213 (Nuttall's emphasis).
25 V.i.23–26.
26 Shakespeare the Thinker, op.cit., p. 123.
27 Romeo and Juliet, II.iv.82–83.
28 Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker, op.cit., p. 106.
29 Ibid., p. 383.
30 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 60 vols., xii (1a. 84–89), Durbin, Paul T., ed., Human Intelligence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. xxiGoogle Scholar.
31 Quoted in Clark, Vanities of the Eye, op.cit., p. 283.
32 Ibid., p. 94.
33 Cf. Francisco Suárez, Disputationes Metaphysicae, Disputatio 5 De unitate individuali eiusque principio http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/Michael.Renemann/suarez/index.html). See the excellent brief discussion of the unpropitious climate of opinion for the reception of Thomism in the late medieval period in MacIntyre, Alasdair, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (London: Duckworth, 1990), p. 150Google Scholar. For the more general context see Oberman, Heiko, ‘Via Antiqua and Via Moderna: Late Medieval Prolegomena to Early Reformation Thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 48, no.1, Jan.–March, 1987, pp. 23–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34 The modern word ‘prudence’ completely fails to convey the classical and medieval sense and is best avoided. The closest modern equivalent is perhaps Jane Austen's ‘good sense’ in Sense and Sensibility which, in his recent, fifth, posthumous book, Herbert McCabe refers to as ‘arguably the best treatise on prudentia in English’. On Aquinas, ed. Brian Davies (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), p. 104. Further on, McCabe explains that prudentia is ‘the acquired … disposition of the mind to do well the job of deciding what to do about achieving some good end that we desire: it is “right practical reason”’, ibid., p. 134 (McCabe's emphasis).
35 McCabe writes: ‘these [internal senses] are the sensus communis (or “co-ordinating” sense), the imagination (retaining what it was like to experience something), the sensus aestimativus (or “evaluating” sense, which grasps the sensual significance of bits of experience), and the sense-memory (which stores up what it was like to have such significant experiences)’. On Aquinas, op.cit., pp. 116–17. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a, 78, 4. The modern understanding of senses as mere things we use for understanding the world around us leads Anthony Kenny to dismiss Aquinas's notion of internal senses as contradictory. McCabe writes that Kenny ‘would get nearer the truth if he began by recognising that what makes something a sense is that it is a bodily activity by which we interpret the world. St Thomas speaks of external and internal senses in a quite literal way’. On Aquinas, op.cit., p. 111.
36 Buckley, Michael, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.
37 Taylor mentions a number of studies ‘which show how the subject was changed through a series of steps involving late Scholasticism, Duns Scotus, nominalism, “possibilism”, Occam, Cajetan and Suárez, Descartes, where each stage appeared to be addressing the same issues as the predecessors it criticized, while in fact the whole framework slid away and came to be replaced by another. … I haven't been able to do justice to this work here, but the story I have been telling is in a sense complementary to theirs.’ See A Secular Age, p. 295. Among the works Taylor lists are MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981)Google Scholar, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London: Duckworth, 1988)Google Scholar, and Three Rival Versions; Kerr, Fergus, Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985)Google Scholar and After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002)Google Scholar; Burrell, David, Analogy and Philosophical Language (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973)Google Scholar; and Milbank, John Theology and Social Theory 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.