Thus by the turn of the eighteenth century, something recognizably like the modern self is in process of constitution, at least among the social and spiritual elites of northwestern Europe and its American offshoots. It holds together, sometimes uneasily, two kinds of radical reflexivity and hence inwardness, both from the Augustinian heritage, forms of self-exploration and forms of self-control. These are the ground, respectively, of two important facets of the nascent modern individualism, that of self-responsible independence, on one hand, and that of recognized particularity, on the other.
A third facet must also be mentioned. We might describe this as the
individualism of personal commitment. I mentioned in Chapter
7
the legacyof the Stoic conception of the will, in its aspect of our power to give or
withhold consent-Chrysippus'
'synkatathesis',
or Epictetus''prohairesis'.
To make this the central human moral power is to open the way to an outlook which makes commitment crucial: No way of life is truly good, no matter how much it may be in line with nature, unless it is endorsed with the whole will. The Augustinian heritage was hospitable to this outlook Augustine identified the force of sin precisely as the inability to will fully. 1 The appeal of the various purified ethical visions of Renaissance humanism, of Erasmus, for instance, or of the later neo-Stoics, was partly that they offered such an ethic of the whole will against the more lax and minimal rules demanded by society at large.
And one of the driving forces of the Protestant Reformation, as central almost as the doctrine of salvation by faith, was the idea that this total commitment must no longer be considered the duty only of an elite which embraced 'counsels of perfection', but was demanded of all Christians indiscriminately.2 This was the ground for the reformers' vigorous rejection of all the supposedly special vocations of monasticism.
This three-sided individualism is central to the modern identity. It has
helped to fix that sense of self which gives off the illusion of being anchored
I86 •
I N W A R D N E S S
principal features coming to be i n these two centuries. I want to look a t two of these here.
The first concerns modern localizations. One facet of these has already been my central theme in these chapters: the growth of forms of inwardness
correlative of the increasing centrality of reflexivity in spiritual life, and th
;
consequent displacement of moral sources. But what may seem to common sense even more basic and unchallengeable is the location in general of the properties and nature of something 'in' that thing, and in particular, the location of thought 'in' the mind. A new way of distinguishing and ordering things comes to be conveyed by this too familiar preposition, a way which comes to seem as fixed and ineradicable from reality as the preposition is from our lexicon.
Thought and feeling-the psychological-are now confined to minds. This follows our disengagement from the world, its 'disenchantment', in Weber's phrase. As long as the order of things embodies an ontic logos, then ideas and valuations are also seen as located in the world, and not JUSt in subjects. Indeed, their privileged locus is in the cosmos, or perhaps beyond it, in the realm of Ideas in which both world and soul participate. This is the disposition of things which underlies the theories of knowledge of Plato and Aristotle. When Aristotle says that "actual knowledge is identical with its object",3 or "the activity of the sensible object and that of the percipient sense is one and the same activity, and yet the distinction between their being remains",4 he is operating with a conception of knowing which is far removed from the representational construal that becomes dominant with Descartes and Locke.5 Knowledge comes when the action of the Forms in
shaping the real coincides with its action in shaping my intelligence
(nous).
True knowledge, true valuation is not exclusively located in the subject. In a sense, one might say that their paradigm location is in reality; correct human knowledge and valuation comes from our connecting ourselves rightly to the significance things already have ontically. In another sense, one might say that true knowledge and valuation only arise when this connection comes about. In either case, these two-to us--"psychological" activities are ontically situated.
An example is cited by Walter Ong in his book on Ramus. In traditional
discussions of rhetoric, they spoke of the 'praise' of words (sometimes
'laus',
sometimes 'honoslhonor', sometimes also
'lumen'
of words).6 The 'praise'was attributed here to the objects worthy of praise. Where we think of an activity of subjects, exercised on or in relation to certain objects-here an activity of valuation-the tradition seems to put the valuation in the objects themselves. Or perhaps better, it is somehow both in the worthy objects and in the activity of praising them.