Modernity's Wager by Seligman Adam B.; Seligman Adam B. B.;

Author:Seligman, Adam B.; Seligman, Adam B. B.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2008-02-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

THE SELF INTERNALIZED

THE PREVIOUS chapter ended with three themes linked in a somewhat unanticipated manner: recognition, authority, and extended self. It was very much the need for recognition, as noted by philosophers from Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith to G.W.F. Hegel, that formed the basis of what we are calling here the extended, or nonautonomous, self. Ferguson points to this need for approbation in noting that “what comes from a fellow-creature is received with peculiar emotion; and every language abounds with terms that express somewhat in the transactions of men different from success and disappointment.”1 He continues: “The bosom kindles in company, while the point of interest in view has nothing to inflame. . . . The value of a favor is not measured when sentiments of kindness are perceived; and the least misfortune has but a feeble meaning when compared to that of insult and wrong.”2 This is an idea of the self that would seem to belie the assumptions that later liberal thought developed from the reasoning of the Scottish moralists. The notion of a self validated by others was, after all, at the heart of eighteenth-century Scottish ideas of civil society and found its way, needless to add, into Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

We have observed how we today feel a contradiction between such orientations to a community of shared and mutual approbation and orientations toward authority or hierarchy. We have also noted that precisely within community is authority to be found, as subjugation of the will (as distinct from its coercion), which is the essence of mutuality. Community is authoritative, though specific communities define themselves differently, whether in more or less hierarchic terms or in terms of metaphysical equality. Modernity as a civilizational project has, in its Western European and North Atlantic variants, essentially defined community in terms of equality, though we are witness today to variants on the theme of modernity and consequently to different definitions of community.3

Western modernity has until now defined itself so thoroughly in secular terms that it difficult for us to appreciate how fully constitutive transcendence has been for most forms of human community. For not only does transcendence transform the problem of tyche into a theodicy and thereby organize and frame existence in knowable terms, but it also defines the idea of what is external to self in terms of an absolute authority. Absolute transcendent authority thus establishes community in terms that transcend not only the particular member but also the community itself. Hermann Cohen noted this in the context of Jewish monotheism, as opening the way to ethics:

The correlation of man and God is in the first place that of man, as fellowman to God. And religion proves its own significance first of all in this correlation of the fellowman to God, in which, indeed, man as fellowman becomes a problem and is engendered through this problem. The share of religion in reason is the share of religion in morality, and no problem of morality takes precedence over this problem of the fellowman.

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