Talk of modernity is plagued with paradox. A relativist stance towards modernity—the claim, for example, that modernity is just one cultural configuration among others—seems to contradict itself. The concept of “cultural configuration,” and similar notions (such as “language game,” “discourse,” “community,” or “myth”), are themselves the products of modern intellectual research and debate.Footnote 1 If the relativist claim is true, it appears to undermine the validity of those very conditions of modern intellectual debate that make the claim thinkable. But to argue for modernity's superiority over other cultural configurations seems equally problematic. If the criteria of superiority are themselves modern, then the argument appears question-begging. But if the criteria are not modern, then these non-modern criteria (by which the superiority of the modern can be discerned) would appear themselves to be superior to modern criteria.
In this discussion, “modernity” refers to a certain configuration of practices and beliefs of European origin, namely those associated with the notions of individualism, freedom of expression and of conscience, political participation, open rational debate, and scientific inquiry. Excluded for the present is the frequently associated process of development of infrastructures, markets, the money economy, and technological progress, often referred to as “modernization.”Footnote 2
Among the prominent scholars who have examined the question in recent years, some are acutely aware of the paradox that results from an attempt put a value on modernity. These scholars have offered a variety of solutions. However, an alternative approach to the paradox of modernity is suggested by recent work of philosopher Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel, who examines paradoxes of the same structure that have preoccupied philosophical thinking for over a century. Thomas-Fogiel argues that these apparent paradoxes are “performative contradictions”; that such performative contradictions are formal, not ethical, in character; and that they are self-refuting, and may be set aside as nonsense.Footnote 3
In the case of modernity's status, for example, to conduct oneself (to perform) as a modern scholar while asserting that modernity is just one cultural configuration among others is to assert something that is contradicted by the performance. The commitment to the adequacy of rational argument for arriving at truth, implicit in the performance of a rational argument, is contradicted by the explicit assertion that such a commitment can produce only culturally relative beliefs.
The concept of performative contradiction is hardly new.Footnote 4 But Thomas-Fogiel has simplified this notion and insists on its purely logical or formal character. If Thomas-Fogiel is right, it would follow that much current talk of modernity is self-refuting. To avoid the twin threat of relativism and question-begging, when offering a critical appraisal of modernity, one must apparently speak in a way that translates into both a modern way of talking and at least one non-modern way of talking at the same time.
By common consent, the late seventeenth century saw the publication of numerous founding documents of the modern outlook, including the works of figures such as Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Isaac Newton, John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Pierre Bayle. The period also saw the creation of early forms of constitutional government, and the passage of the Bill of Rights, the first of its type, in England in 1689. Some recent critics of modernity, as we will see, have focused on the religious preoccupations of these influential early works; the founders of the modern “secular” outlook, it is charged, were Christian thinkers concerned with theological issues. By implication, it is implausible that their parochial religious concerns could have led them to speak universal truths.Footnote 5 But Thomas-Fogiel's approach suggests that a different reading of these works might be possible. Perhaps some of these authors were attempting to speak in two registers at once—religious and secular. By this reading, their works may suggest an understanding of modernity that is not self-refuting.
One example will be examined in detail here, Pierre Bayle's Commentaire philosophique (1686). Bayle offers an argument for freedom of conscience that is at once theological and philosophical. He does not claim that his outlook is superior to all others, but focuses instead on convincing his readers of the dangerous implications of any precipitate claim to superior truth. He presents his reader with a stark choice: toleration or desolation (the latter caused by the mutual persecution of opposed religious sects). The possible resonance of his concept of “desolation” across “modern” and “non-modern” ways of thinking offers a way to secure his thought against the charge of performative contradiction.
THE PARADOX OF MODERNITY: FIVE RECENT VIEWS
The question of modernity has been very much in the air in recent years. A number of interesting debates focus on its character and value. In place of an unwieldy attempt to review them all, a comparison of five recent views of modernity brings out the paradoxical character of this concept. First presented between 2000 and 2006, these five views—namely those of Jonathan Israel, Stephen Gaukroger, Talal Asad, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Amanda AndersonFootnote 6 —are still being defended by their authors and debated by others.Footnote 7 Their concerns have been shaped by intellectual history, the history of science, Islamic studies, postcolonial studies, and gender studies, respectively; they reflect the broad spectrum of recent efforts to understand modernity. Working in different fields, seemingly unaware of each others’ work, they seem at times nonetheless to be directly engaged in conversations with each other.Footnote 8
Of these five scholars, only intellectual historian Jonathan Israel offers a full-throated defense of modernity. “The Enlightenment,” he asserts “has been and remains by far the most positive factor shaping contemporary reality and those strands of ‘modernity’ anyone wishing to live in accord with reason would want to support and contribute to.”Footnote 9 In addition, he insists, the “modern” core concepts of equality, democracy, and individual freedom could not have sprung directly out of “social change or cultural adjustment.” They could not have become “central to ‘modern’ society and politics,” or “enter the public sphere at all, without being forced, defined, and revised through a process of intellectual debate.”Footnote 10
For Israel, the particular approach to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European history that is associated with “new cultural history”—that is, most of the original research of the last forty years—fails to explain the success of the Enlightenment precisely because this approach fails to recognize or account for the superiority of Enlightenment ideas. Efforts to develop cultural interpretations or social explanations of the Enlightenment—through examinations of the book trade, Grub Street, the salon, the “public sphere,” Freemasonry, the coffeehouse and the café, academies and learned societies—are irrelevant in Israel's view, because they do not focus on the content of Enlightenment debates, and on why certain ideas won out over others.Footnote 11 Historians of “modernity,” as Israel understands it, must pinpoint what difference it makes that, compared to renewal based on theology, tradition, or dynasty, certain modern revolutions based their legitimacy on “far-reaching action and reform justified in secular, non-theological, and non-customary ideological terms.”Footnote 12 Modernity, insists Israel, is “an abstract package of basic values,” “an interlocking complex of abstract concepts.”Footnote 13
Israel celebrates the power of reason. He complains of the efforts of certain historical proponents of a “moderate Enlightenment” such as Locke and Hume to limit “reason's scope” or the “scope” of philosophy.Footnote 14 He praises the perseverance of those radical “Spinozists” who remained faithful to
the doctrine that geometrical “reason” is the only criterion of truth, so that there can be no limit to the application of reason operating on the basis of experience, and hence of knowledge, short of the furthest bounds of human awareness and perception, but that there is no other source of knowledge available to men.Footnote 15
For Israel, reason even seems to require an unquestioned allegiance. “No philosopher used skeptical arguments more than Bayle,” Israel notes, for example. “But he never employs skepticism, like Montaigne or Hume, to counter the force of reason but rather to undercut grounds for belief, undermine systems based on theological premises, and ridicule thinkers like Le Clerc, Jacquelot, and Locke whose efforts to blend theology with philosophy he scorned.”Footnote 16 Skepticism undermines, reason finds new grounds for belief, in the Cartesian vision which Israel upholds. But, apparently, like Orpheus leading Eurydice out of Hades, skepticism must never look back. (This, by the way, was surely not Bayle's view.Footnote 17 )
In sharp contrast to Israel, historian of science Stephen Gaukroger insists that “the reasons commonly adduced for the success of a scientific culture in the West in the wake of the Scientific Revolution—its use of adversarial non-dogmatic argument, its ability to dissociate itself from religion, its technological benefits—are mistaken and cannot explain this success.” A distinctive feature of the Scientific Revolution, Gaukroger insists, “unlike other earlier scientific programs and cultures, [is that] it is driven, often explicitly, by religious considerations: Christianity set the agenda for natural philosophy in many respects and projected it forward in a way quite different from that of any other scientific culture.”Footnote 18 These religious considerations resulted in a doctrine that modelled “all cognitive values on scientific ones,” a doctrine that has become “one of the most distinctive features of modern Western culture.”Footnote 19 Western science thus contrasted sharply with Chinese and Arab science in that Western thinkers, no matter what their topic, came to seek legitimation for their methods and doctrines on the grounds of their similarity to scientific methods and “discoveries.”
Gaukroger is equally dismissive of the idea that an age of “reason” began in the seventeenth century. He delineates the different approaches to knowledge—at times overlapping and at times contradictory—that traveled under the umbrella of “natural philosophy” in that period, including mechanism, experimental philosophy, physico-mathematics, and physico-theology. The idea that “reason” reigned over all these approaches—no matter how reason was defined—is simply spurious, in Gaukroger's view.Footnote 20 Spinoza's Cartesian conception of reason was, by the time of its appearance, widely regarded as old hat, according to Gaukroger, and met with “wholesale rejection.” Spinoza failed “to meet the demands of the natural philosophy he advocated.”Footnote 21 As for attempts to apply rigorous reasoning outside geometry, these amounted to “little more than a metaphorical extension of the idea of geometrical demonstration.”Footnote 22
Central to the unique cultural prestige acquired by natural philosophy in the seventeenth century, according to Gaukroger, one finds not the rational rigor of Spinozist monism, as Israel insists one does, but the interventions of physico-theology. Especially influential was Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth (1680). Burnet and other promoters of physico-theology “treated natural philosophy and the interpretation of revelation as being ultimately part of the same enterprise, for better or for worse.” The appearance of deism in the 1680s made clear “the radical possibilities of natural theology. At that point a ‘scientific culture’ developed in the West that was very different from anything that had gone before, as the Enlightenment heralded a wholly new conception of the world and our place in it.”Footnote 23 Thus the invention of a “secular,” “rational,” and “scientific” modernity at the end of the seventeenth century was itself a theological project, in Gaukroger's view—not just in origin, or in part, but in its personnel and its guiding concerns.
Talal Asad, an anthropologist working in West Asian and North African Islamic studies, is in agreement with Gaukroger on many points. He agrees that modernity is “neither a totally coherent object nor a clearly bounded one.” Asad insists that modernity is “a project—or rather a series of interlinked projects—that certain people in power seek to achieve.” Modernity as project involves “institutionalizing a number of . . . principles: constitutionalism, moral autonomy, democracy, human rights, civil equality, industry, consumerism, freedom of the market—and secularism.”Footnote 24
Like Gaukroger, Asad sees the modern secular outlook as, so to speak, theology in disguise. He charges that modern liberal democracies are founded on two “myths”: (1) an Enlightenment myth of “politics as a discourse of public reason whose bond with knowledge enables the elite to direct the education of mankind,” and (2) “the revolutionary myth of universal suffrage . . . [in which] the representation of ‘collective will’ is sought by quantifying the opinion and fantasy of individual citizen-electors.” “The secular theory of state toleration,” Asad continues, “is based on these contradictory foundations: on the one hand elite liberal clarity seeks to contain religious passion, on the other hand democratic numbers allow majorities to dominate minorities even if both are religiously formed.”Footnote 25
On the subject of reason, Asad complains precisely about what Israel considers reason's great advantage, its secular status and unlimited scope. “By successfully unmasking pretended power (profaning it),” Asad charges,
universal reason displays its own status as legitimate power. By empowering new things, this status is further confirmed. So the “sacred right to property” was made universal after church estates and common lands were freed. And the “sanctity of conscience” was constituted a universal principle in opposition to ecclesiastical authority . . .
These “secular” claims, Asad asserts, were immediately “transcendentalized,” and protected by legal and moral disciplines.Footnote 26
In contrast to Israel, as well as to Gaukroger and Asad, Dipesh Chakrabarty seeks to occupy a middle ground. He sees the Third World historian as caught on the horns of a dilemma, required both to espouse and to relativize European modernity. The “project of provincializing Europe,” Chakrabarty claims, “cannot originate from the stance that the reason/science/universals that help define Europe as the modern are simply ‘culture-specific’ and therefore only belong to the European cultures.”Footnote 27 Nonetheless, we must strive to recover that which “escapes the best human effort at translation across cultural and other semiotic systems, so that the world may once again be imagined as radically heterogeneous.”Footnote 28
The dilemma of the Third World historian is exemplified, for Chakrabarty, in the work of Ranajit Guha, the founder of subaltern studies. Subaltern studies, Chakrabarty says, are “constructed within the master code of secular history,” but those who write them “cannot ever afford to grant this master code its claim of being a mode of thought that comes to all human beings naturally, or even to be treated as something that exists in nature itself.” This code has “a particular kind of historicized memory, one that remembers history itself as an imperious code that accompanied the civilizing process that the European Enlightenment inaugurated in the eighteenth century as a world-historical task.”Footnote 29
When Ranajit Guha examined the Santal rebellion of 1855, for example, he sought in his usual fashion to make “the insurgent's consciousness the mainstay of a narrative about rebellion.” But, in doing so, Chakrabarty argues, Guha failed to accept the claims of many Santal rebels that they acted on the orders of a divine agent. “I rebelled,” said one Santal rebel, “because [the god] Thakur made an appearance and told me to rebel.” In denying their own agency in this way, Chakrabarty comments, these subalterns undercut the agency or subjecthood that the subaltern historian wishes to confer on them. Guha errs in regarding religiosity consistently as encompassed by the political. His narrative cannot allow “the divine or the supernatural a direct hand in the affairs of the world.”Footnote 30
In contrast to Guha, Chakrabarty believes that we must take into account the difficulty of “entering” or being forced into modernity. He speaks of “the violent jolt the imagination has to suffer to be transported from a temporality cohabited by nonhumans and humans to one from which the gods are banished.” To speak of this jolt, Chakrabarty warns, “is not to express an incurable nostalgia for a long-lost world. Even for the members of the Indian upper classes, in no sense can this experience of traveling across temporalities be described as merely historical.”Footnote 31 Talal Asad speaks in very similar terms of the blindness of modern rights discourse to
the anguish and mental suffering experienced by people in societies obliged to give up their beliefs and act “humanly” (in the sense understood by Euro-Americans) . . . The modern skeptical posture . . . regards such passionate conviction to be “uncivilized”—a perpetual source of danger to others and of pain to oneself.Footnote 32
Chakrabarty wants both to reformulate abstract, secular concepts in such a way that they finally become universally valid and also to identify what he calls “knots” in time. We find uniform modern secular time on one side of the knot, and on the other side quite different conceptualizations of time that are lived, not theorized, as features of common sense or a language game that no one articulates. Thus the Santal rebel stood on one side of a time knot, the subaltern historian on the other. To write the rebel's history properly would be to write theology or eschatology, not modern social history, however resolutely bottom-up in orientation.
Amanda Anderson, like Chakrabarty, proposes not a wholesale acceptance or rejection of modernity, but a revised understanding of modernity, derived from Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative action. Anderson is critical of present-day feminist theory and of its application to historical understanding. In her work on Victorian England, she found that
part of what defines the peculiarly Victorian response to the disenchantments of modernity is the attempt to imagine the methods of modern science, critical reason, and cosmopolitan detachment in terms of exemplary or heroic characterology: in this way, what we might call early antifoundationalism was underwritten by ethos, and thereby imbued with value, achieved or earned through practices that could successfully take on a human face.Footnote 33
But the present-day vocabulary of the self is inadequate for grasping this heroic characterology. “Indeed, the theoretical terms of art used to denote subjective experience in contemporary literary and cultural studies—identity, hybridity, performativity, disidentification, embodiment—simply fail to capture key features of character and ethos.”Footnote 34
Examining a number of feminist works in Victorian studies, Anderson complains that, on the one hand,
feminine agency is imagined as continuous with unreflective forms of power that are simply transmitted by culturally embedded subjects. Yet on the other hand, strange exceptions occur, wherein certain historical subjects are exempted from networks of power, and consequently accorded what I will characterize as “aggrandized agency,” which is marked by both critical lucidity and political potency.
Anderson cites, as a noteworthy case of this contradictory impulse, Mary Poovey's treatment of Florence Nightingale in Uneven Development.Footnote 35 On the one hand, notes Anderson, “Poovey's idealized middle-class wife unmistakably serves as the crucial conduit for the forms of power that secure modern identity.”Footnote 36 On the other hand, Poovey attributes to Florence Nightingale a remarkable critical insight into these forms of power, as she campaigns to establish nursing as a profession.
Anderson argues that the origin of this contradiction is to be found in a more general incoherence in the treatment of critical detachment in theories of modernity.
From one perspective, detachment is cast in a negative light and opposed to a valorized conception of situatedness or avowed positionality, as in critiques of liberal neutrality . . . Yet, from another perspective, through a logic of exceptionalism similar to the one that characterizes work on gender and modernity, detachment is implicitly celebrated as the negative freedom that permits parodic performativity or the exposure of constructed identities. This conflict is often especially acute within feminist theory . . .Footnote 37
Anderson's dissatisfaction with certain works of gender history closely parallels Chakrabarty's dissatisfaction with certain formulations of subaltern history. The forms of “agency” that historians are inclined to attribute to historical persons seem inadequate to both scholars. Neither for nor against modernity, Anderson and Chakrabarty insist that our understanding of it is inadequate, precisely because “critical detachment,” which is inherently modern, appears to be at once a suspect local cultural product and an absolutely necessary instrument of knowledge.
The works of these five scholars are samplings from a much larger set of discussions ongoing in a number of fields, including gender studies, postcolonial studies, the history of science, and early modern intellectual history.Footnote 38 Neither these five scholars nor any participant in these discussions can avoid the paradox of modernity. The superiority of the modern is something that can neither be asserted nor denied, it seems, without self-contradiction. The efforts of Chakrabarty and Anderson to find a middle way also seem fraught with difficulties.
The failure of assertion
Jonathan Israel's claim that modernity is rational, secular, abstract, and ipso facto liberating follows from his approval of the credo he attributes to the radical Enlightenment, “that there can be no limit to the application of reason.”Footnote 39 However, the proposition “that there can be no limit to the application of reason” appears to involve a paradox. If reason has no limits, then rational debate should be empowered to resolve any question at all, including the question whether reason has limits. If the proponents of reason refused to debate whether reason has limits, they would set a limit on reason. But, by agreeing to debate the question of reason's limits, the proponents of reason would implicitly agree, a priori, to at least one limit on reason's applicability. They would agree that reason does not apply to the question whether reason is applicable to the question of the limits of reason. There seems no escape from this regress. The problematic status of Israel's claim is similar to that of Bertrand Russell's theory of logical types, discussed below.
Israel's numerous accounts of Enlightenment-era intellectual debates, which, he claims, are the neglected heart of the matter, do not show how Enlightenment “radicals” proposed to deal with this paradox. It is therefore difficult to see how the superiority of their arguments carried the day on the crucial question of reason's limits.Footnote 40
The failure of denial
As Chakrabarty points out, the “knowledge protocols” of academia are not neutral.Footnote 41 Any claim that modernity is just a language game or discourse or metanarrative meaningful only to those who, by origin or upbringing, accept its terms as common sense ends up implying the opposite. If modernity is just one more cultural configuration among others, it also happens to be the one that provided the skeptical context and the rules of debate that led thinkers to discover and outline the contours of language games, discourses, cultures, metanarratives, communities, competent speakers, and so on. It is not enough to grant dignity and seriousness to the competent speakers of non-modern communities, while they, like the Santal rebels, persist in understanding themselves as something quite different from “competent speakers” or “agents” and their god as something quite different from the personnages of a mere “myth” or “symbolic system.” Modernity is just a language game if and only if it is correct to call all ways of believing and acting “language games,” no matter how their participants understand them—that is, if and only if modernity is something more than just a language game.
Asad, in charging that modernity is just a set of projects “that certain people in power seek to achieve,” is engaging in a standard move of modern scholarship. After skeptical analysis of a claim or a system, one delivers the coup de grâce by unveiling the claim's utility to persons or groups pursuing money and power. This strategy has a long pedigree.Footnote 42 But to make this move consistently, one must explain how one's own thinking achieves critical detachment, where others have failed.
Asad has good reason to be dissatisfied with a modern conception of religious freedom as the right of the individual to believe whatever religious doctrine she wishes. The classic Muslim theological conception of the umma, or human community, cannot be applied on the basis of individual intentional acts such as an act of belief, Asad insists.Footnote 43 Within this community, imān, faith,
is not a singular epistemological means that guarantees God's existence for the believer. It is better translated as the virtue of faithfulness toward God, an unquestioning habit of obedience that God requires of those faithful to him . . . a disposition that has to be cultivated like any other, and that links one to others who are faithful, through mutual trust and responsibility.Footnote 44
Most human action is not fully intentional. The role of unconscious habit, of emotion; the impact of old age, chronic illness; the conflicting descriptions that can be applied to any action—these make the modern notion of a conscious, self-possessed agent into an abstraction. Within the umma, penalties, emerging internally or inflicted by the community, “are regarded as a necessary part of learning how to act appropriately.”Footnote 45 It is not possible that those committed to such a way of life can be “free” to exercise their religion within a national community that restricts religion to “mere belief or inconsequential talk in public.”Footnote 46
But the question also arises, what kind of freedom is compatible with the life of the umma? Asad hints at his answer when he wishes for “a democratic state that consists only of minorities. For where there are only minorities the possibilities of forging alliances between them will be greater than in a state with a majority presiding over several competing minorities.”Footnote 47 Asad, echoing Chakrabarty, also urges further thought about organizing “complex space and complex time.”Footnote 48 But in general it is hard to see how this strategy of argumentation, as deployed by Asad, can avoid underwriting some kind of assertion of rights to protect the powerless from the manipulations of those in power. But by what ecumenical conception of the individual may these rights be regulated? How can entry into, or exit from, a protected religious community be suitably protected, for example, without violation of the community's own understanding of its authority over its members?
The difficulties of the middle way
Of these five scholars, two, Chakrabarty and Anderson, aware of the paradoxical character of offering praise or criticism of modernity, attempt to find a middle way. But the solutions they offer are themselves, as they readily admit, paradoxical. We are urged to do the “impossible,” to reorder our lives according to what Anderson calls an “anti-ethos.” Noting the “impossibility” of provincializing Europe, Chakrabarty nonetheless calls for “a history that deliberately makes visible, within the very structure of its narrative forms, its own repressive strategies and practices, the part it plays in collusion with the narratives of citizenships in assimilating to the projects of the modern state all other possibilities of human solidarity.”Footnote 49
Anderson recommends the elaboration of an “ethos of argument.” She sees the ingredients of this “anti-ethos” of argument in Habermas's “proceduralism,” as she calls it. Habermas's “austere refusal of virtue talk, coupled with his critique of civic republicanism,” represents “a kind of stoicism: a rigorous ethos that aims to avoid any sense that we should rest comfortably within our visible horizons.”Footnote 50 Anderson's anti-ethos requires that one remain open not just to talk but also to subversive performativity of the kind praised by Judith Butler, that may take various forms, from cross-dressing to sadomasochistic performances, and that, if properly staged, can denaturalize gender roles and do “vital political work.”Footnote 51 But Anderson recognizes that universal validity must remain an aspiration, a regulative ideal that is never realized.
PARADOX IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY THOUGHT
Paradox of the kind that attaches to assessments of modernity is a common concern in theoretical formulations of the last century or so.Footnote 52 Philosopher Thomas-Fogiel has recently proposed a resolution of this kind of paradox. To appreciate her proposal, it is perhaps worth taking a moment to look back over this history. George Santayana's well-known warning seems especially applicable to the recent history of social theory: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”Footnote 53
One thread of the discussion began in June 1902, when Bertrand Russell wrote to Gottlob Frege about a difficulty that threatened Frege's current project. The difficulty, which became known as “Russell's paradox,” arose in considering the nature of the “class of all classes that are not members of themselves.” This class is a member of itself if and only if it is not a member of itself. This class appeared to be a properly formed propositional function, in Frege's terms, yet it also appeared to violate Frege's Axiom V, which stated that two functions were equal if their extensions were equal.Footnote 54 This particular function's extension could not be determined. “Your discovery of the contradiction has surprised me beyond words,” Frege replied to Russell, “and, I should almost like to say, left me thunderstruck, because it has rocked the ground on which I had meant to build arithmetic.”Footnote 55
Russell resolved the paradox by ruling out functions defined using expressions such as “all classes.” Elements of classes were organized into “types,” such that a first-order class could contain only elements that were not themselves classes, which Russell called elements of the first logical type. A second-order class could contain as elements only first-order classes, which were said to be elements of the second logical type, and so on.Footnote 56 The solution resolved the paradox completely, by, in effect, ruling out any vague (and therefore potentially self-referential) talk of classes of classes.
But questions soon arose. On what grounds was it admissible for Russell to assert that expressions such as “all classes” were inadmissible? How could this step be defended as “logical” if it was undertaken in order to ensure logic's integrity? And if it was not logical, was it just arbitrary tinkering with the rules? How many logical types of class were there? An infinite number? How were elements that were not classes to be distinguished from classes without introducing certain ontological assumptions into the system?Footnote 57
Concern over the status of logical and mathematical proof deepened with Kurt Gödel's proof, published in 1931, that an axiomatic system could contain true theorems which could not be proven on the basis of its axioms.Footnote 58 Truth and proof were unlinked, via an incontrovertible proof. Ludwig Wittgenstein soon generalized the inquiry.Footnote 59 To suppose that we could articulate the rules that govern our interpretations of rules—an implicit assumption of the efforts to articulate axiomatic systems—was to fall into an infinite regress. What rules permit us to interpret axioms correctly, after all? It seemed necessary to conclude that communities of speakers possess a shared understanding of how to interpret their shared speech, and that this shared understanding could not be articulated. The self-evident clarity of logic and mathematics was not “objective,” but valid only for a certain subset of human beings who happened to participate in the same “language game”—without being able to explain what the rules of this game were.
Numerous fruitful proposals and approaches were developed as the search to avoid paradox unfolded. Some of them were highly technical; others brought about whole intellectual movements that influenced the discipline of history along with many other social-science and humanities disciplines. It was not insignificant that Russell's thinking seemed to be consonant with complaints made by Nietzsche, who questioned our eagerness to categorize our speculative and moral capacities as “human” in character. A human thought, which classified thought as “human”—was not that a violation of Russell's theory of logical types?
Heidegger's existentialism, Lévi-Strauss's structuralism, J. L. Austin's speech act theory, Kuhn's paradigms, Foucault's post-structuralism, Habermas's theory of communicative action—these and other influential theoretical constructs were each proposed, at least in part, to provide a resolution to, or at least to take into account, the paradoxical status of rules or criteria of rationality. Each has inspired numerous followers and generated fruitful debate; none has won anything close to a consensus.
THE SOLUTION PROPOSED BY THOMAS-FOGIEL
In publications of the last ten years, philosopher Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel has proposed to end this impasse not by going “beyond” the linguistic turn but by rethinking speech act theory.Footnote 60 She insists that one take into account the self-reference of all speech acts. Self-reference is explicit in speech acts containing performative verbs (“I order you to close the door”), and implicit in all other utterances, including descriptive speech acts ([I affirm that] the sky is blue). This much was established by early speech act theorists, and has been widely accepted as the “performative” dimension of language use. But Thomas-Fogiel (following Karl Otto ApelFootnote 61 ) insists that this self-reference, because it is inherent in speech acts, is independent of context and speaker. It is universal and transhistorical. Thomas-Fogiel argues that a condition of the truth of a speech act is that this self-reference of the speech act be self-consistent.
Thomas-Fogiel has no need of Russell's questionable theory of logical types. The first step in handling any speech act, for Thomas-Fogiel, is to consider whether it could be and/or has been performed by a speaker in a manner that is self-consistent. A speech act that is not self-consistent is self-refuting in Thomas-Fogiel's view, and, as a result, “false.” As “false,” in this sense, a speech act need not be considered in any logical or mathematical theory. By Thomas-Fogiel's reckoning, the famous liar's paradox (“I am lying”) is no paradox at all. Whereas Bertrand Russell regarded the liar's paradox as having the same structure as the class of all classes that are not members of themselves—a genuinely paradoxical structure—Thomas-Fogiel interposes her a priori condition of self-consistency. “I am lying” is a performative contradiction; it is not self-consistent (because, if true, it is false, and vice versa), therefore it is no paradox, but simply “self-refuting.”Footnote 62
Screening for performative contradiction is particularly rich in implications for the human sciences, in Thomas-Fogiel's view. “I have shown,” she writes,
that any thesis concerning human rationality must be subject to a model or schema in which three factors, not two as in physics, must be considered: the scientist's discourse, the contents and the form of rationality attributed to humans, and, as in physics, reality, whether this reality is conceived as a system of arbitrary conventions or rules (according to a more or less Wittgensteinian thematization) or as a series of immutable laws (according to a classically positivist thematization).Footnote 63
By “any thesis concerning human rationality,” Thomas-Fogiel explicitly includes a wide spectrum of arguments in various social sciences. Her discussion does appear to offer a significant clearing of the decks; she shows how this analytical tool can be used to expose self-refutation in a wide array of twentieth-century works, stretching from neuroscience to theology, and passing by way of Husserl, Austin, Cavell, Rorty, Foucault, Habermas, and Levinas. Over and over, she makes the same point. “The neurologist, for example, cannot define the brain's activity in general and exclude from this definition the scientist's own cerebral activity.”Footnote 64 On Rorty, Thomas-Fogiel quotes Hilary Putnam: “Briefly, as Putnam underlines, Rorty's problem is that he tells us ‘that from a God’s-Eye View there is no God’s-Eye View,’ thus bringing pragmatic contradiction, the gap between a statement's contents and its status as an utterance, to its peak.”Footnote 65 Likewise, Thomas-Fogiel approves of Luc Langlois and Albrecht Wellmer's complaint that Habermas's theory of communicative rationality presupposes “something beyond argument and discourse, that is, the very thing for which it is supposed to provide the index of rationality.”Footnote 66 (Her treatment of Habermas is discussed further below.) Thomas-Fogiel, finally, disputes J. L. Austin's claim to be the first philosopher to concern himself with performativity; she argues that speech act theory, by other names, has played a key role in the history of philosophy, offering in evidence an extended examination of Fichte's critique of Kant.
Thomas-Fogiel's test also seems to pinpoint the problem encountered in the discussions of modernity examined above. Modernity, as the scholars in question describe it, entails a theory about human reasoning capacity and its proper utilization. Open-ended secular rational debate is a crucial facet of modernity so described; it is the procedure appropriate both to scientific inquiry and to public political discussion. The granting of individual rights of conscience and expression helps to ensure that nothing but “the ‘unforced force of the better argument’” has “the final say.”Footnote 67 But, applying Thomas-Fogiel's test, when Israel asserts the superiority of abstract principles and the limitless applicability of reason, he makes claims that cannot be proven or disproven in open-ended secular rational debate, because they are practical presuppositions of such debate. To deny them in a rational debate is to fall into performative contradiction, and is self-refuting. Israel's insistence on the superiority of “far-reaching action and reform justified in secular, non-theological, and non-customary ideological terms” appears therefore to be circular.Footnote 68 It is as if he were to say, “I argue that open-ended rational argument is the best way to establish right answers. To attempt to refute this view, one must accept its validity in practice. Therefore, I am right.” But those like Gaukroger and Asad, who claim that modernity is theological or mythical in origin, and therefore parochial, or merely cultural in character, fall into the converse trap. In offering analysis and historical evidence to back their claims, Gaukroger and Asad performatively accept the validity of modern intellectual debate. Chakrabarty accepts the unavoidability of such traps, urging only that they be pointed out.
These treatments of modernity appear to fail Thomas-Fogiel's test of self-consistency. Rather than being paradoxical, they involve, by her approach, performative contradiction, and are simply self-refuting.
Anderson is a slightly different case; she is acutely aware of ongoing disputes concerning performative contradiction. Launched by the Habermas–Foucault debate, these disputes have embroiled post-structuralists, pragmatists, queer theorists, and their critics, among others.Footnote 69 Anderson rejects the attempts that pragmatists such as Richard Rorty or Barbara Herrnstein Smith have made to shrug off the charge of performative contradiction. Smith, for example, simply states that she is quite “comfortable” with the idea that her claims about the contingent character of truth are themselves contingent. Anderson sees here a reverse “ad hominem” argument.Footnote 70 Where does this comfort come from? Anderson asks. It must involve an ethos; that is, a very stable set of practical and mental habits which is part of the pragmatist's character. But such an ethos appears itself to be proof against the instability that contingency is said to imply, according to the pragmatist, for all concepts of selfhood. Anderson instead follows Habermas in arguing that avoiding performative contradiction is an ethical obligation. Extrapolating from Habermas, she insists that avoiding performative contradiction must constitute a style of thinking that is embodied in an ethos, the anti-ethos of argument itself. Such an anti-ethos could reconcile modernity to itself and ensure its continued openness to difference.
Thomas-Fogiel, however, rejects the idea that avoiding performative contradiction is an ethical or moral obligation. She traces this mistaken idea back to Karl-Otto Apel, who insisted repeatedly that, in a discussion, even the Devil is obliged to obey certain ethical norms.Footnote 71 Apel's insistence on the implicit ethics of discussion, Thomas-Fogiel concludes, appears to mean simply that, if one enters into a discussion, “there are a certain number of rules immanent in that discussion.”Footnote 72 The Devil's obligation, for example, to obey the rules of syntax, is formal, not moral or ethical, and likewise so is his obligation to avoid performative contradiction—it is the obligation to avoid nonsense if one wants to engage in a discussion, even if it is only with the aim of lying or deceiving.Footnote 73 Apel and Habermas (and by implication Anderson) have inappropriately elevated the formal requirements of discussion to the status of a universal moral obligation in the Kantian sense.
Thomas-Fogiel strips speech act theory of those Kantian ethical implications that Apel and Habermas wish to endow it with. But in doing so, she undermines at the same time the related attempts of speech act theorists to develop taxonomies of the kinds of validity claim implicit in all speech acts. Habermas identified three types of validity claim that every speech act must address, referring to them, for brevity's sake, as truth, rightness, and sincerity.Footnote 74 Apel accepted this analysis with modifications.Footnote 75 A command such as “Shut the door,” for example, to be valid, must refer to an existing door (truth); it must be issued by someone authorized to make such a command (rightness); and its sense, as a command, must reflect the considered intention of the speaker (sincerity)—for example it must not be intended as a joke or uttered in the course of a theatrical performance.
Anderson derives the need for a modern anti-ethos of argument from the third of these types of validity claim. Just as sincerity is a requirement of communicative action, in Habermas's theory, so it becomes a moral obligation of modern rational argument: “Whether construed as one of the [three] ‘validity claims’ of communicative action (Habermas) . . . or simply presupposed as a necessary condition of the public use of reason (Rawls), sincerity is a central value of proceduralism.”Footnote 76
Thomas-Fogiel, however, carefully distinguishes between the reference of a speech act to the speaker and the reflections of a speaker about herself.Footnote 77 A person who says to her subordinate, “Close the door,” knowing that the subordinate will find it difficult to close the door because the latch needs repair, may “sincerely” intend to issue this command; that is, it may be her considered intention to issue this troublesome command, even though the command is also a trick, prompted by an unavowed ulterior motive—perhaps to irritate or humiliate the subordinate. A person who speaks about herself as follows: “I sincerely wish to support you,” but who does not so wish, does not speak sincerely, because she is lying. But it is only the first, technical or formal, kind of “sincerity” that is implied in Apel's or Habermas's analyses.Footnote 78
THE LIMITS OF THOMAS-FOGIEL’S THEORY FROM A HISTORICAL POINT OF VIEW
Thomas-Fogiel blocks any attempt to build an ethical edifice on a speech act's implicit claim to sincerity. But the historian must go further, and question the universal applicability of this whole taxonomy of three separable types of validity. The taxonomy itself inadvertently imports a modern disenchanted world view into Habermas's theory. Habermas's three dimensions of validity assume the separability of internal experience from social context, and the separability of these two from a shared empirical world.Footnote 79 But such separability was not even thinkable prior to the emergence of a modern secular outlook, and therefore it is hardly surprising that, in Habermas's theory, this taxonomy appears to confirm the privileged status of the modern outlook.Footnote 80 Apel's and Habermas's insight that validity claims are inherently open to negotiation is of great value. But there is no reason to accept that they are universally negotiated in terms of these three separable types of validity.Footnote 81
What of the speech acts of a god such as Thakur? Presumably they would not be covered even by Thomas-Fogiel's merely formal rule of self-consistency. Not being a human, Thakur's remarks about humans have no bearing on his status as a speaker. It is in fact suggestive to consider, with reference to the problem of modernity, that what a god or goddess says about humanity easily passes the test of self-reference proposed by Thomas-Fogiel, because the god or goddess does not include him- or herself in the class of entities under discussion. In addition, a goddess or a god may be conceptualized in such a way that all her or his speech acts are always true, right, and sincere—valid in every way. Similarly, a demon or devil may be understood as always speaking lies (that is, engaging in speech acts that are untrue, lack rightness, and are intended to deceive).
But none of the prominent speech act theorists, it appears, has attempted to consider the “communicative action” of gods, oracles, prophets, humans in trance, or divinations (apart from Apel's occasional and inadequate references to the Devil). None of these theorists has attempted to examine alternative speech act theories that may inform speech acts in other times and places. With the exception of Thomas-Fogiel's work on Fichte, this whole range of questions is fallow ground for speech act theory, as it is for history and ethnography.
A theologian, for example, could offer observations about human rationality, in the guise of interpretations of the statements or views of divine beings, without fear of performative contradiction. But a “modern” secular thinker cannot take advantage of this loophole. Perhaps the doctrines and values that can be said to be “modern” could be defined in just these terms; that is, in relation to the applicability or not of Thomas-Fogiel's test of self-consistency (which she regards, erroneously, as universal in its application). Discussion of human rationality appears to fall within the sphere of Thomas-Fogiel's test only insofar as it is mutually agreed that the discussants are all humans, engaged in something akin to rational argument.Footnote 82 Otherwise, the utterances of participants are not self-referential. This rule suggests an alternative definition of the secular, as a sphere of disenchanted communication (disenchanted in the sense that it is communication in which nonhumans do not participate). Only in disenchanted communication would speech acts that include implications about human rationality be subject to Thomas-Fogiel's test of self-reference. As we will see, Bayle's argument for freedom of conscience relied on, indeed pleaded for, just such a notion of disenchanted communication.
CHRISTIAN SPEECH ACT THEORY
A close reading of Pierre Bayle's 1686 essay in favor of liberty of conscience, the Commentaire philosophique, reveals its conformity with a number of facets of Thomas-Fogiel's thinking. A best seller in its own time, this essay rivaled in influence the (now) better-known essay by John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). Both have long been considered milestones in the slow spread of religious toleration in Europe. But Locke's Letter, especially in the light of his other works of the same period, goes much further than Bayle's Commentaire philosophique. Locke distinguishes among what could be called, approximately, the empirical, political, and subjective spheres in a manner quite consistent with Habermas's analysis of external, normative, and internal validity claims (claims to “truth, rightness, and sincerity”) of all speech acts. These distinctions ground Locke's insistence that the magistrate can have no role in matters of belief, and his call for a complete separation of political and religious institutions.
Bayle was much more cautious.Footnote 83 Yet Bayle's Commentaire philosophique certainly belongs to the list of works important in modernity's formative period. A close reading reveals that Bayle's argument includes a carefully worked-out speech act theory, one quite different from those of Austin, Apel, Habermas, or Searle. Further, if read simultaneously as theological and philosophical, his argument passes Thomas-Fogiel's test of self-consistency.
To appreciate these aspects of Bayle's thought of the 1680s, it is necessary to recall the tumultuous context of those years. John Marshall has recently detailed the upsurge in religious violence and persecution in Europe in the period leading up to the Glorious Revolution in Britain, including the dragonnades and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in France and the campaigns to eradicate the Waldensians in Savoy.Footnote 84
In France, a renewal of violent persecution of Huguenots, resulting in about 500,000 being forced to convert to Catholicism, and another 200,000 fleeing into exile, was justified by what we might call a “non-modern” or “Christian” speech act theory. In support of the Revocation, the French Catholic Church cited the parable of the wedding guests in the Gospel of Luke 14:15–24, which ends with the master commanding his servants to compel passers-by to come to the wedding. Augustine had been the first to use this parable to justify persecution, in his case persecution of the Donatists of North Africa. According to the Catholic clergy of France, the Huguenots were, like the Donatists, schismatics, not fully fledged heretics. Huguenot baptism was regarded as valid. But their schismatic church was still a diabolical force. Its adherents were unfortunately entangled in its institutions by the bonds of routine, by sentiments of affiliation, and by personal and community ties. Therefore depriving them of property, office, right of assembly, places of worship, and cemeteries promised to shake them free of these ties and routines, and render them open to hearing the word of God and attending to the stirrings of grace within.Footnote 85
In the spring of 1686, Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, former preceptor of the dauphin and prominent Bishop of Meaux, wrote a pastoral letter welcoming the newly converted former Huguenots of his diocese. Bossuet denied that violence had played any role in the wave of conversions, preferring to see the hand of God in this miraculous turn of events. In coming into the Catholic fold, Bossuet told the former Huguenots, “your baptism was secretly recalling you.” When Bossuet preached the sacred word to them, “the Holy Spirit made you feel [ressentir] that I was your pastor.”Footnote 86
Bossuet, like many before him, believed that the rational arguments of theological controversy could only go so far. Of his debate with the Huguenot pastor Jean Claude in 1678, Bossuet remarked, “One can speak forever; we have said it all and have nothing more to do but begin again.”Footnote 87 In a sermon of 1661, Bossuet had explained that besides “the sound that strikes the ear,” there must be “a secret voice that speaks within, and this inner spiritual discourse is the true preaching, without which all that men say is no more than useless noise.”Footnote 88 Bossuet's “theory of communication,” as biographer Jean Meyer calls it, involved an invisible spiritual back channel by which a conviction of the truth of someone's words could be injected, wordlessly, by the Holy Spirit, via the gift of grace manifesting itself as an emotion, or via a kind of inner voice that echoed the outer voice of a sermon.Footnote 89
In terms of speech act theory, the workings of grace ensured that, when Bossuet affirmed “I am your pastor,” his claim was true, right, and sincere all at the same time. Speech in Bossuet's theology, and more generally in Christian theology, had only one type of validity. The Scripture, if it was the word of God, was true, right, and sincere. Claims about the meaning of the Scripture, such as the Lutheran slogan sola fide, sola scriptura, sola gratia, were likewise widely understood to be all at once true, right, and sincere—or the opposite: false, unauthorized, hypocritical. Since at least Augustine, theologians had taught that heretics were ipso facto hypocrites, or at best willfully (and therefore culpably) self-deluded.Footnote 90
From early in the Reformation, the apparent sincerity and certainty of one's convictions was taken to be a sign of the truth of one's claims. As Benjamin Kaplan notes, when Calvin was attacked for supporting the execution of anti-Trinitarian Michael Servetus in 1555, he replied, “Those who would spare heretics and blasphemers are themselves blasphemers.” We hear God's command; he extinguishes love of brothers, parents, neighbors, friends, spouses, “and practically denudes men of their nature lest any obstacle impede their holy zeal.”Footnote 91 Intense ecstatic talk—of condemnation as much as of salvation—was the outward emotional sign that guaranteed the reformer's speech act as valid in all respects. Olivier Christin has recently examined the harsh facial expressions worn by reformers in portraits circulating in the mid- and late sixteenth century.Footnote 92 Faith, certainty, judgment, zeal were all wrapped into a single Reformation emotional style.Footnote 93
By the late seventeenth century, attitudes had shifted.Footnote 94 Almost everyone conceded, with reservations, that at least some people were sincere in their delusions. But this concession was often hedged about with provisos. In 1662, Bossuet warned Parisian Catholics that they must live according to the word of God, and mistrust certain internal sentiments, “because certain imitations of true sentiments frequently arise in the heart, by which a man can delude himself; so much so that one must not believe in certain fervors nor in certain imperfect desires.”Footnote 95 Presumably, “imitations” could be distinguished from “true sentiments,” if one were alerted to the danger. But could one be alerted without back-channel help? If one were sincere, would God permit that one remain in error? Truth, rightness, and sincerity were still seen as indistinguishable in Bossuet's thinking.
Miracles, in the Christian tradition, had long served the role of validating the claims of teachers or holy persons. The New Testament itself often characterized Jesus’ miracles as confirmations of his divine authority. In Matthew 9:6, for example, Jesus demonstrates his “authority” (ἐξουσία—a common Greek term used in governmental as well as religious contexts) to forgive sins by healing a paralytic. Throughout the Middle Ages, miracles were relied on to confirm the validity of claims about the sanctity of saints’ lives and thereby of persons and institutions devoted to their cult. In all such discussions, a miracle confirmed all at once the truth, rightness, and sincerity of such claims.Footnote 96 There was no need for a taxonomy of the types of validity that spiritual speech acts claimed.
BAYLE’S THEORY OF DISENCHANTED COMMUNICATION
When Bayle took aim at the Revocation in 1686, he singled out this age-old Christian theory of communication and subjected it to a sustained critical challenge—but it was a challenge made on theological grounds. By the time Bayle, safe in Rotterdam, began composing his Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jésus-Christ, “Contrains-les d’entrer” in late 1685, he had learned of his brother Jacob's death in prison in Bordeaux. Jacob had been arrested by the royal government in an effort to silence Bayle; Jacob's passing freed Bayle's pen.Footnote 97 His critique was therefore both an intellectual and a very personal challenge to the government and Church of France.
Bayle called his essay a “philosophical” commentary, insisting that he relied on the “natural light” of reason to offer a new kind of argument about Luke 14:15–24. Reason, quite simply, taught that any literal interpretation of the Scripture that required one to commit crimes is a false interpretation. Augustine himself said this. All theologians, in the end, whether they admit it or not, agree that “reason, speaking through the axioms of the light of nature,” is the supreme judge of the validity of scriptural interpretation. The mental contorsions that theologians engage in to avoid being charged with bad philosophy show this clearly enough, Bayle remarked.Footnote 98
With this bold claim, Bayle gave himself the right, as a philosopher by training, to engage in a closely reasoned theological argument. He conceded that the gift of grace was necessary for salvation. But he made the following points:
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1. Only a very few—a Luther, a Calvin—were permitted to know with certainty that they had received the gift of grace.
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2. Anyone who gave a command implicitly authorized the recipient of the command to interpret it as best as she or he could.
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3. Everyone agreed that Scripture, which represented, in effect, God's messages to us, including His commands, was very difficult to interpret.Footnote 99
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4. Therefore Augustine's literal interpretation of Luke 14:15–24 led to the absurd conclusion that every Christian who worked out a plausible interpretation of Scripture was immediately obliged by God's command to persecute all Christians who disagreed.
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5. Augustine's literal interpretation was also out of harmony with the peaceful and loving tenor of Christ's own behavior and message, the clear dictates of Christian morality in all other domains of life, and the natural light of reason.
In discussing the second point, which constituted Bayle's speech act theory, Bayle compared the so-called heretic to (1) the wife whose husband has disappeared long ago, but who is now confronted with a person claiming to be that husband (citing the famous case of Martin Guerre), and (2) the son or daughter who wrongly believes that her or his mother's husband is her or his own father. In each of these cases, Bayle suggested, the person is obliged to have, or to make a good-faith effort to obtain, assurance of the identity of the husband or father. And in each case, Bayle observed, once in possession of such assurance, even if it is erroneous, one is obviously both authorized and obliged to act in accordance with it; that is, to acknowledge, as wife or daughter or son, the validity of that person's commands as husband or father.Footnote 100 In cases such as these, extramarital sexual intercourse is not adultery, and receipt of an inheritance one has no right to is not theft. Bayle did not put in doubt the duty of submission owed by women to their husbands or by children to their fathers, but he did insist on their equal status as interpreters of the validity of communications. Issuing a command entails licensing the recipient to interpret it, Bayle insisted.Footnote 101
Bayle likewise did not challenge the divine authority of Scripture or the role of grace. But he did challenge the divine status of anyone's interpretation of Scripture or claim to be moved by grace:
It is not necessary for me to warn my reader that I do not exclude grace from that act which makes us adhere to revealed truths. I want nothing more than that it be grace which makes us believe that such-and-such a meaning of the Scripture is true, and which modifies us in such a way that precisely the meaning that is true appears true to us. But I do claim that the grace which produces this sentiment does not, for all that, enable us to know any certain proof, beyond contradiction, for the meaning we believe to be true.Footnote 102
A subtle adversary may outdo us in open debate, Bayle continued; “we remain convinced nonetheless that it [our position] is the revealed truth. This may be an effect of grace, to be sure; God forbid that I should contest it.” But an interior sentiment, a conviction of conscience, is also “a mark that can be found in the most heretical of men.”Footnote 103 Here Bayle called on all, even those who were certain of their beliefs by virtue of a back-channel spiritual message, to speak as if communication were disenchanted, and to rely solely on strong reasons for convincing others of one's beliefs. He warned that one's counterpart in a debate might often reject extremely well-formulated arguments. Such obstinacy might be the effect of grace or of heretical self-deception. In either case, inner conviction could not by itself license resort to coercion.
In sum, Bayle proposed a world in 1686 that was not fully disenchanted. Bayle accepted the influence of providence, revelation, and grace. He also accepted that miracles represented a special kind of validation of religious claims. But caution was in order in interpreting miracles. No number of miracles could undermine belief in the self-evident truths of reason, Bayle insisted, such as that the whole is greater than any of its parts. In addition, God permitted the Devil to perform counterfeit miracles from time to time. Nonetheless, Bayle argued, Moses proved to the Israelites that he had a special mission by means of the splendid miracles he worked.Footnote 104 Jesus performed so many miracles that one must accept his doctrine, unless it could be shown to contradict the natural light of reason—which was not the case.Footnote 105
Bayle's theory of communicative action was not Habermasian. Nonetheless, for Bayle, “to err in good faith” about the truth of a dogma or the authority of a spiritual leader was to err about the validity of a communication.Footnote 106 Using Habermas's terminology, Bayle grouped sincerity and rightness together, and separated them from truth. A sincere effort of conscience to find the truth yielded a belief one was obliged to accept as right, whether it was true or not. To grant that sincere error was possible in spiritual matters was to isolate the human interpreter from nonlinguistic spiritual messages, from back-channel secret voices, and from sentiments implanted by the Holy Spirit; it was to disenchant communication. Even the Scripture, expressing divine intent and divine commandments, was to be taken not as a set of incantatory formulae with mysterious powers, but as a set of ordinary speech acts that were “mysterious” only in being quite difficult to interpret.
But if one could err in good faith, then theology and preaching must undergo a revolution. If one could err in good faith, speaking with holy zeal was ill-advised. From being a mark of the gift of grace, holy zeal became associated with “priestcraft,” the mark of self-deception, a manifestation of “passion,” in the negative sense; that is, of an irrational, self-interested emotional arousal. By the 1680s, many thinkers had proclaimed the need for such a revolution. Passion, Hobbes explains, gives rise to dogmatic learning “in which there is nothing not disputable because it compareth men, and meddleth with their right and profit in which, as oft as Reason is against a man, so oft will a man be against Reason.”Footnote 107 In an unpublished manuscript of 1660 John Locke blamed the Puritan Rebellion on the “overheated zeal of those who know how to arm the rash folly of the ignorant and passionate multitude with the authority of conscience.”Footnote 108 In similar terms, Bayle in 1694 denounced those déclamateurs who “are content to persuade by the interposition of passions; they go right to the heart, and not right to the understanding; they try to excite love, hate, anger.”Footnote 109
In the context of disenchanted communication, emotions undergo a profound transformation. No longer outward signs of the workings of the Holy Spirit, they become purely private matters. Zeal no longer serves as a supplementary signal of the validity of a speech act; it is more likely to signal the reverse. With nothing but intellectually forceful arguments, strong reasons, to bring people together (and all agreed that strong reasons were weak and unreliable), zeal must be replaced by a more appropriate stance, what Locke called “the softness and civility of good usage.”Footnote 110 Bayle insisted that reasons for believing must be “sweet and charitable” in their expression.Footnote 111
BAYLE AND MODERNITY
In relation to the present-day paradoxical debate over modernity, consideration of Bayle's argument for religious toleration raises three points:
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1. Bayle's modern theology of communication did not impose a uniform secular time and space; it imposed a moral obligation to act as if such a time and space existed when dealing with persons whose rites, customs, or beliefs differ from one's own. We must speak to each other as if there are no back channels, as if all communication is subject to the uncertainties of interpretation and verification that wives face when evaluating the claims of long-lost husbands. Inner conviction and the zeal it inspires are no guarantee of truth.
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2. Bayle does not engage in self-refuting performative contradiction. Bayle's argument for toleration is not a form of relativism. Bayle recognized that those who believe Augustine's literal interpretation of Luke 14:15–24 would find themselves obliged in conscience to persecute “heretical” Christians. But Bayle deployed his tireless intellectual energies to convince them they were wrong.
Bayle was acutely aware that religious allegiances were anchored in community practice, and inculcated in children long before they were capable of critical evaluation. He recognized that religious affiliation for the most part did not involve a considered intellectual commitment to a bundle of doctrines, but was reflected in deeply meaningful practices and habits of mind. For Bayle, this was an additional argument for toleration, but it was not an argument for relativism.Footnote 112 For Bayle was also acutely aware that the opposing confessional communities of his period had grown from new theological positions, hammered out in disputes and polemics. Bayle respected community and custom, but he also praised those who loved the truth for its own sake and who were not afraid to hear an explanation of another's dogmas even at the risk of finding them “more reasonable than those they learned from the cradle.”Footnote 113
Bayle neither asserted the superior truth of a secular outlook nor recognized the incommensurability of different cultural configurations. The alternative to his proposal for speaking as if communication were disenchanted was simply, in Bayle's mind, something much worse, a “frightful and lamentable desolation” in which religious difference licensed incessant persecution, by the party with the upper hand, against all other parties.Footnote 114
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3. Bayle's world was well peopled with powerful figures like Bossuet who were separated from him by a kind of “time knot.” They had yet to under go that “violent jolt the imagination has to suffer to be transported from a temporality cohabited by nonhumans and humans to one from which the gods are banished.”Footnote 115 Bayle, by comparison, was at least halfway through it. Some of these figures were found in Bayle's own camp. The Huguenots in exile in the United Provinces were deeply split by the success of William of Orange's invasion of England in 1688. Some saw William's victory as heralding a new era of greater religious toleration and freedom of expression. But a well-organized group under the leadership of Pierre Jurieu, Bayle's colleague in Rotterdam, viewed William of Orange as a scourge sent by God to defeat the Catholics, and called for a Protestant holy war against the Catholic countries.Footnote 116
Bayle kept a respectful distance from Jurieu, but in early 1691, Jurieu publicly denounced Bayle as an atheist. Jurieu's authority within the Huguenot community was shaken by this outrageous claim. The town government of Rotterdam brushed aside Jurieu's attempt to bring Bayle to trial; the Rotterdam consistory ordered Jurieu to cease further public discussion of Bayle. But Jurieu's influence remained substantial. Bayle was confident that Jurieu could not find evidence of atheism against him. Thus Jurieu could only win, Bayle remarked in a letter, “by affirming that, through unequivocal signs, God had conferred on him [Jurieu] such a gift of prophecy that he could see everything that occurred in people's hearts. If he does not work more miracles than Moses,” Bayle continued, “no one will take his word for it . . . given how many mistakes he has made in the past.”Footnote 117 But a political shift in the Rotterdam government did lead to Bayle's dismissal from his teaching post in 1693.
Seeing no more benefit in martyrdom than he did in coercion, Bayle had gone into exile to escape the likes of Bossuet in 1681, and in 1691 he relied on the local consistory, and the magistrates of Rotterdam, to protect him from Jurieu. In a stream of printed rejoinders, Bayle sought to publicly humiliate Jurieu, displaying little concern about whatever anguish or jolt such humiliation entailed.
DISENCHANTED COMMUNICATION AND TIME KNOTS
Bayle's theory of disenchanted communication was formulated as a weapon of the weak; it guided his response to back-channel hardliners whether Catholic or Protestant.Footnote 118 Bayle consistently attempted to communicate across a kind of time knot, refusing to accept that an “incommensurable” gap might separate him from promoters of persecution. This time knot is surely not the only kind that one could identify. It lay within Christian theology and separated two starkly different ways of thinking about spiritual communication, and thus about sacred history, providence, and the self. But the persuasive power of invoking the “frightful and lamentable desolation” that religious persecution must produce relied on a common history—including a history of ideas about the ways in which a Christian community ought to flourish in this world and also about the failure of providence to designate a clear winner in the religious wars of the previous era.
Locke denounced the tyranny of absolutist kings. Bayle in 1686 consciously sought out common understandings that could link together the subjects of absolute kings. Bayle couched his argument in terms that an adviser of Louis XIV could have espoused without disloyalty. The individualism of Bayle's Commentaire philosophique was strictly theological in character; liberty of conscience was grounded in the spiritual function of conscience—when faced with the ambiguous linguistic messages of Scripture—to determine, with the help of reason, their true meaning, and to dictate the path of duty.
To point out that modern doctrines have a religious origin, as Gaukroger and Asad do, is no real critique of modernity. As Bayle's thinking suggests, theology and some forms of disenchantment are not necessarily opposed, nor does religious affiliation rule out willingness to bow to the “force of the better argument.” The stark alternative between toleration and desolation presented by Bayle might well be translated into the terms of many “religions”; translated, that is, into the languages of many alternative temporalities beyond the time knots that separate them from modern secular history. As an alternative to desolation, Bayle's call to speak as if communication were disenchanted has much to say for it—not as a superior method of discovering the truth, but as a kind of diplomatic stance, a weapon of the weak, a convention of negotiation, a necessary ground for the cessation of mutual persecution.
Of course, what one party calls “desolation” might be considered by another party as preferable to certain kinds of “flourishing,” and vice versa. In many traditions, human nature is not understood as unified, and what counts as “flourishing” for some persons might require that other “lesser” persons (slaves, for example, or paraiyars) subsist in much less happy states (all of whom moderns would call “humans,” equally endowed, in Bayle's terms, with “consciences”). But Bayle's Christian individualism derived from a missionary faith born within a large polyglot empire. As such, it resonates with features of other missionary faiths, such as Manicheism, Buddhism, or Islam. When combined with his theory of disenchanted communication, the individualism of missionary theologies might well lead on to discussion of individuals’ rights of various kinds.
However, if the discussion of rights drifted away from Bayle's argument for disenchanted communication as a negotiating stance, and toward acceptance of the truth of a fully disenchanted (secular) vision of history, then such discussion would tend to fall into performative contradiction of the kind Thomas-Fogiel has targeted. A modern intellectual cannot argue that gods or goddesses, if they exist, do not interfere to any significant degree in history or in human thought or experience. Such noninterference is a presupposition of disenchanted argument, and a precondition of the modern reliance on a human capacity to be swayed by the force of the better argument. If gods or goddesses do interfere in history, they may well interfere with the mind, as Bossuet believed of the Holy Spirit. Without denying this possibility, Bayle insisted that such supernatural interference did not improve the quality of one's reasoning. A theory of communication such as Bossuet's could not be disproven; but it could be set aside, Bayle suggested, on the grounds of the “desolation” that such theories seem, historically (or rather eschatologically, or both), to have produced. The right to noninterference by other humans (in effect, to liberty and equality) is grounded on the (diplomatically) presumed, not proven, noninterference of nonhuman persons in human affairs.
CONCLUSION: HISTORIOGRAPHICAL IMPLICATIONS
By now, several generations of intellectual historians have attempted to apply the lessons of twentieth-century philosophical debate. Acknowledging the force of Wittgenstein's argument, that it is impossible to articulate all the rules that permit us to understand each other (and that permit us to agree on at least some rules), historians had to accept that critical reflection could not possibly review all of our current beliefs. As Quentin Skinner has put it, we easily “fall under the spell of our own intellectual heritage.” The mission of the intellectual historian is, therefore, to quote Skinner again, to “prevent us from becoming too readily bewitched” (even though, by implication, we will become bewitched to some extent) by the language games of our own day. Pursuing this mission requires the historian to move well beyond established canons of great works, in order to uncover, as best as possible, the “bewitched” states that past thinkers fell into.Footnote 119
Since the 1970s, debate has focused on exactly how to accomplish this. Some insist one must engage in careful reconstruction of what Skinner, following Austin, called the “illocutionary intentions” of past authors—understood as the intentions they had in writing as they did.Footnote 120 Others agree with Foucault, that the very concept of an author, as a person possessed of certain intentions, may be an illusion of our time.Footnote 121 Scholars working on gender, race, and empire have sought to expand our understanding of the boundaries of past conversations to include genres of expression not explicitly “intellectual” in content, such as the novel, the lawyer's brief, or the slave autobiography, and to include activities that were stigmatized at the time and subsequently dismissed or ignored by many scholars and historians, such as that of a salon hostess or that of a participant in a slave rebellion.Footnote 122 Jonathan Israel has attempted to break with this type of project. Rather than pursue the at least partial mitigation of our own bewitchment via the reconstruction of past contexts, he has claimed to uncover the existence of a Spinozist faction whose members were the standard-bearers of a new kind of truth that compels our assent. But this venture has attracted seemingly unanimous disapproval.
Speech act theory as revised by Thomas-Fogiel (and further adjusted, as suggested above) offers intellectual historians a new point of departure and two new tools. The new point of departure stems from the rejection of relativism not as an ethical or moral failing, but as a performative contradiction that is formally self-refuting and therefore nonsense. If we are not prepared to speak to all comers, to speak across time knots and the gap between past and present, we slip into an Alice-in-Wonderland world, where things we say are both true and not true. We cannot consistently argue that there are incommensurable language games, paradigms, or cultures.
But speaking across time knots and temporal gaps does not mean ignoring their existence. Ethnocentrism and presentism may be avoided by the use of two new tools:
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1. The idea of performative contradiction as a formal error that is self-refuting invites reflection about how speakers or authors in the past, whatever their genre of expression, may have avoided this formal error, or fallen into it. It cannot be excluded that the danger of performative contradiction was appreciated in other times and places. After all, the skeptical paradox, which was of great concern in the seventeenth century, involved recognizing the performative contradiction of a claim such as “I know nothing for certain.” Montaigne's famous motto, “Que sais-je?” was an attempt to sidestep this performative danger, as was Descartes's “Cogito, ergo sum.”Footnote 123
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2. By setting aside Habermas's taxonomy of types of validity claim, a taxonomy that imports a modern world view into his theory of communication, one is prompted to reconstruct the history of speech act theory avant la lettre—that is, the history of a set of concerns about the relationship between speaker and world. To employ these tools is to remain concerned with “statements,” not “sentences,” and with illocutionary intent.Footnote 124 Without engaging in a post-structuralist critique of intentionality as a modern illusion, one is nonetheless quickly led to recognize that the status of speakers, both human and nonhuman, has been understood in a wide variety of ways. Even within modern European intellectual history narrowly defined, the variety appears to be significant.Footnote 125
Using these two tools together, this essay has offered a preliminary sketch of “Christian speech act theory,” by which the validity (in every sense) of speech acts is guaranteed by their relation to revelation, ecclesiastical tradition, or the gift of grace. Using these two tools, one can see that Pierre Bayle, when he called for liberty of conscience, proposed the separation of the truth of speech acts from their (combined) rightness and sincerity. In making his argument, he avoided performative contradiction by speaking consistently across “time knots”; that is, by refusing relativism. He did not claim that toleration was required by the incommensurable gap separating one set of beliefs from another. On the contrary, he praised those who, out of love for the truth, were willing to reconsider beliefs they had “learned from the cradle.”
The identification of performative contradiction as a formal error and the examination of past conceptualizations of implicit validity claims, together, may open up a vista of new opportunities. There are clear implications for the history of emotions, which must include the examination of the ways in which emotional expressions serve to imply or emphasize validity claims about the speech acts they adorn, as in Calvin's “holy zeal” or Locke's “softness and civility of good usage.” Much work is under way on the intellectual history of emotions, and of the reason/passion distinction. But this work should be expanded to include the practical use of emotional styles to indicate implied validity claims, in addition to the normative self-regulating and self-exploratory dimensions of such styles.Footnote 126
In 2001, I argued that emotional expression should be understood by analogy to speech act theory. Just as there are speech acts such as promises or orders that “do things to the world,” so emotional expression represents an effort as much to do something to oneself—that is, to organize and channel one's emotions—as it does to communicate their content. Like the “performative,” therefore, the “emotive” represents an act, in this case an act of self-exploration and self-organization.Footnote 127 However, in that work, I neglected to consider the centrality of emotional expression in providing signs of, or implicit pledges about, the validity of speech acts. This essay represents, therefore, a first attempt to fill out that dimension of the theory of emotions. As with emotions, so with speech acts: the historical landscape offers a wide variety of different understandings and practices, but it seems that every community provides its own set of commonsense ideas and practices, in which one often finds the two dimensions—emotive and performative—closely linked.
Not least among the potential applications of this approach is the possibility of a more sharply etched definition of modernity. Of course, merely to consider the concept of modernity in relation to the seventeenth century is to introduce a concept unknown to that period. But one must be wary of accepting that some incommensurable gap separates present discussions of reason, secularism, and liberty from seventeenth-century discussions of reason, superstition, and toleration. Modernity could be said to be associated not with the disenchantment of the world, but with the disenchantment of communication, as in Bayle's Commentaire philosophique. By this definition of modernity, the mere fact that it emerged out of an ongoing debate over Christian theological issues in no way limits its potential universal significance.
By this definition of modernity, as well, one can see that moderns are especially prone to performative contradiction. Whenever one moves beyond disenchanted communication to embrace a fully disenchanted world (in which only humans are persons, or in which even humans are said to be mere mechanisms), one problematizes all pronouncements about the place of human reason within that world. All such pronouncements are self-referential, and become self-refuting the moment they attempt to reduce reason to a mere algorithmic or logical (or in some other way rule-governed) process. This kind of self-reference opens the door to the skeptical critique enunciated by Wittgenstein, and reiterated by so many others. Thomas-Fogiel is as impatient with reductionistic assertions about human capacities as any other recent critic of the “science of man.” In this respect, much of the critical work of recent decades retains its value, including Foucault's wide-ranging critique of the social sciences, Asad's critique of secular liberalism, queer theory's critique of sexology, Chakrabarty's critique of subaltern studies, and Anderson's critique of the vocabulary of agency. It is self-contradictory either to praise or to condemn modernity. But, remembering its origin as a weapon of the weak, one may, with perfect consistency, propose a modified modernity as an alternative to desolation—and write its history.
