LITMIR.BIZ

      Born into a provincial family of modest means, Charles Péguy became an internationally famous intellectual in the years before the Great War; he was killed in that war at the age of forty-one. As a poet, journalist, and philosopher, for generations his writing prompted fascination, awe, fury, scorn, searching criticism, laughter, wonder, little imitation, and no indifference.

      Among Péguy’s most abiding enquiries was the question of what it means to be modern. We are often modern, thought Péguy, in two different ways. One way advances an inexorable becoming; another opposes it.

      Credentialed, procedural, and managerial in affect, the advocates of a new, entirely immanent becoming, thought Péguy, work to transform institutions patiently from within rather than seeking their overthrow. Sustained in ways great and small by the ultimate assumptions and insatiable expansion of global markets—with the market and its technological artifices as the ubiquitous and paradigmatic form for all human relations with others and with the world—this process brings the imperatives of negotiated, contractual exchange and profitable consumption to all our experiences, guided by the ongoing labor of sciences natural and social. Human being is increasingly encompassed by an ever more uncompromising immanence, from which the transcendent appears only through cracks in locked doors of long disuse, the unceasing glare within obscuring prospects without.

      These advocates sense by no means an unreserved concord of discrete practices or ultimate purpose, but rather, a profound and ongoing alignment between their aspirations and the general direction of a society propelled forward by a technological market. Hence they express a deep if occasionally irritable confidence that their triumph is assured. While they work within free republics, they are not always or even often sympathetic to notions of individual free will, or sovereignty of the people; they wish supremely to see their shared idea of the future vindicated, which, they assume, will require the persistent and expansive guidance of accredited specialists in diverse fields of enquiry and policy.

      The adherents of this way are generally sympathetic to determinism, in either material or social forms. As long as there is history, science and technology will always allow human beings to remake our world continuously (often in ever more complete accord with science itself). They assume the ultimate reality of an experimental becoming against the illusions of a persistent (or worse, eternal) being. They tend toward agnosticism or atheism, to the desirability of practical arrangements among persons and societies governed by continuous negotiations about contingent “values” that often “cash out” to some increasingly self-concious, increasingly pervasive validation of material and social interests, even if a diminution in communal meaning and purpose is the object of abstract speculation.

      For most of their advocates, these assumptions should generally not be positively defended. Rhetorics of indirection, irony, and above all, applications of putatively dispassionate method are much to be preferred to making direct claims about the ultimate nature of reality that inevitably elicit pointless and tedious but—annoyingly—not refuted counterargument. Direct disagreement with the supereminent assumptions underwriting their historical advance is hence embarrassing. Set directly before a person or persons who insist on such disagreement, it is generally best not to engage with them at all but to continue one’s work with the like-minded, secure that one’s own positions are and will be sustained by a deeper and inexorable logic working through political economy, culture, scholarship, technology, and institutions.

      The specifically scholarly advocates of this immanence often complement the progress of technology and of the social sciences with a highly developed if selective historical consciousness. A methodical and comprehensive “contextualization” regularly falls with force upon philosophies of life and the world different from their own; the injustices that might or ought to be attributed to these views receive close attention, and the injustices that might or ought to be attributed to the scholar’s views are passed over in silence. It is assumed—and thus unsurprisingly concluded—that alternative meanings and accounts of the whole ultimately owe their existence to atavism, and with it more intellectually

Скачать книгу