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Legitimacy and Modernity
Some New Definitions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Extract
Over the past three centuries in the West, there has been a sort of oscillation between two antagonistic visions of the world. One sees the world as being fundamentally inert, in such a manner that all hopes, dreams and technological delights are permitted. The other thinks of the world as inhabited by a spirit who consecrates all its parts by recording them in a great whole. We can think of the pantheism that sets itself in opposition to Newton's materialism or, more exactly, to the materialist interpretation given to Newton in the 18th century. In the 17th century the opposite had occurred. The magic universe of the Renaissance had given place to the triumphs of the Cartesian mechanism. As for protestantism, which is said to have been one of the most powerful factors of disenchantment after the 17th century, how was one not to see it prolonged, by reaction, into a philosophy for which nature is the tangible presence of God? When Calvin wrote that nothing happens in nature that is not a direct effect of the divine will, we already see appear in the background the mystic ecstasies that Rousseau experienced in nature. For if no single leaf flutters and no breeze blows without divine intervention, then receiving the slightest sensation would mean, according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, entering into direct contact with God.
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- Copyright © 1986 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1 See Calvin's Institution de la religion chrétienne, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1936, vol. I, pp. 52-56.
2 Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, London, The Cresset Press, 1970.
3 For further details on this point see my "World Order or World Control?", Review of Politics, 1985:4, pp. 588-610.
4 It is in logical positivism and logical atomism that can best be seen this tendency to "eliminate" the world. By excluding the possibility of a word between the mind and the world (everyone is familiar with Wittgenstein's famous proposition stating that nothing can be said of the world), these two philosophical movements have systematically denied that it was possible simply to receive the significance of a phrase dealing with the world. According to A.J. Ayer, for example, a phrase "has a veritable significance for a given person only if that person knows how to verify the proposition it means to express." Language, Truth and Logic, New York, Dover Publications, 1952, p. 35. Although the theme of the verification of a proposition is more complex than it seems, nevertheless let us note that to demand verification means rejecting or (at least) ignoring any given significance.
5 Edmund Husserl, Recherches logiques, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1959-1963, tome II, 2nd part pp. 178-80.
6 This was clearly seen by Heidegger for whom, according to Françoise Dastur, it is necessary "to open oneself to that which in language shows itself only by eliminating itself'. Histoire de la philosophie, Paris, Gallimard, 1974, tome III, p. 626 (italics mine).
7 Accepting an ontological division in things means accepting that things are not everything that is. By ontological division I mean something like what Husserl called the suspension of the thesis of the world, if it is true that this suspension, as René Schérer observes, allows us to escape the obligation of "referring all the meaning of being to the being-object." Histoire de la philosophie, op. cit. p. 540.
8 See E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday & Company, 1954, pp. 198-99 (first published in 1924).
9 See R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1969, p. 44.
10 Robert' Lenoble, Esquisse d'une histoire de l'idée de nature, Paris, Albin Michel, 1969, p. 115. See also Ernan McMullin "Cosmic Order in Plato and Aristotle" in The Concept of Order, Saul G. Kuntz, ed., Seattle and London, The University of Washington Press, 1968, pp. 63-76.
11 Jacques Ellul, Le Système technicien, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1977, p. 23.
12 Saint-Simon, De la philosophie appliquée à l'amélioration des institutions sociales, Paris, 1875-76, tome 39, p. 180.
13 Karl Mannheim, Idéologie et Utopie, Paris, Marcel Rivière, 1956, p. 232 (French translation).
14 Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1978, p. 146.
15 See Carl Schmitt, Legalität und Legitimität, Munich, 1932.