Nature, in ceasing to be divine, ceases to be human." Penned in 1891 by John Dewey, the father-to-be of American pragmatism, these words describe the bleak spiritual landscape created by modern science and rapid industrialisation. For Dewey, the size of the disaster-the death of God-defines the size of the problems to which philosophy must now respond: how can there be meaning in the face of a wholly indifferent, godless universe? What happens to truth once there is no guarantee of one "big" truth? These were not just "philosophical questions," but the questions that had to be asked and answered-by philosophy-if life, anybody's life, was to be intelligible at all.
Today, philosophers no longer believe this to be the case. They have abandoned the "big questions" which once gave their discipline its point and meaning. By forgetting these questions, however, philosophy-once at the centre of culture-is now itself in danger of being forgotten. Contemporary philosophy is in the midst of a crisis, and yet seems unaware of it. Worse still, this crisis is self-imposed: there is a place for philosophy in modern culture, but the number of philosophers who are responding can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Among them was the British thinker Gillian Rose, whose death in December, aged 48, is the occasion of this essay.
Pragmatism-baldly defined as the view that whatever works is true-is symptomatic of the fate of contemporary philosophy. Its other founders, William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, shared, at least at the beginning of their careers, Dewey's crisis-ridden, modernist sensibility. This modernist sensibility involved a consciousness of a series of absences bequeathed by the Enlightenment-of gaps between knowledge and truth, power and authority, existence and purpose, history and meaning. Contemporary philosophy, if it were to be responsible-if it were to take the question of modernity seriously-would have to find new ways of thinking such terms as "truth," "spirit," and "meaning," to reform or transfigure them.
The Enlightenment was supposed to have dethroned God and kings and replaced them with reason. To insist that a post-Enlightenment modernist sensibility must still tackle the "big questions" is to admit that the rationalist project of the Enlightenment has failed: God and the kings may have been dethroned, but as yet nothing like a compelling account of a secular world, free from myth and superstition, has taken their place. Sadly, few philosophers are concerned to fill this void.
pragmatism, when it originated 100 years ago, seemed to carry an awareness of the questions of identity and belief thrown up by modernity. Today, however, it appears numb to the exigencies that so disturbed its founders. Pragmatism has become the unspoken creed of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. What were once a series of absences, wounds tearing the flesh of spirit, have become a series of conceptual puzzles. All the energy, sophistication and subtlety which once went into solving the "big questions" is now devoted to dissolving them. Contemporary philosophy prides itself in showing how terms such as "truth," "spirit," "meaning," are in reality flawed-how a "minimalist" account of truth is all that is required.
Anglo-American philosophy's lack of responsiveness to a modernist sensibility should not be altogether surprising. Complex, fragmented cultural realities have made it easier to inhabit an intellectual universe in which consistent meanings no longer exist, in which conceptions of how to govern one's life and make it worthwhile have become a question of mere private belief. Anglo-American philosophy has perfected an academicism in which the issues that matter most are either deflated or left altogether untouched. The great power of analysis and definition which one finds in the best English language philosophy rarely amounts to more than a virtuosity in the small details of form-without an in-forming vision.
Nor has contemporary continental philosophy altogether escaped this fate. Today, most of what passes for continental philosophy, as practised in Britain or on its home turf, is as academic in its way as the most baroque constructions of analytic philosophy. The earlier avant-garde of continental philosophy-Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, perhaps even Foucault-was intensely aware of the destruction of meaning that modernity involved. In typically avant-garde fashion, they each developed an historical form of reflection-questioning the dogmatic beliefs upon which previous philosophy had rested. The substance and edge of their writing derives from this critique of their intellectual inheritance: Nietzsche demonstrating how everyone has substituted truth for life; Heidegger showing how everyone has forgotten the question of Being, or Adorno's dialectical reminders that objects are "non-identical."
Avant-gardism depends upon sustaining this tradition of critique, on producing new possibilities out of old ones. But continental philosophy has ceased to generate a lively avant-garde culture. What is worse, the memory of the avant-garde past is so dim that the interpretation of these philosophers becomes increasingly indistinguishable from the dominant pragmatist culture it claims to be departing from. Pragmatist readings of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault abound: Nietzsche, who was interrogating and bemoaning the absence of spirit from society, is sanitised: don't worry about truth, just make your life into a work of art. Likewise the recent Cambridge Companion to Foucault offers us a nice, comfy French thinker who, recognising that all knowledge is infected by relations of power, just wanted to focus our attention on some unnoticed social ills.
The post-modern pragmatist systematically denies the existence of big problems: to insist that society is suffering from the destruction of tradition-to see the growth of crime, the revival of ethnic conflict or the resurrection of fundamentalist religious belief as symptoms of an enormous failure-is to be nostalgic for a long lost, never to be recreated, unity. Contemporary philosophy not only insists on the absence of big problems; it charges those who think that there are such problems with being unmodern and na?ve.
This is a serious charge. How might modernity be understood in a non-nostalgic way? My opening quote from Dewey summarises a vision which all modernist philosophers share: the demise of God through the advancement of learning has simultaneously stripped the world, nature and society, of meaning. This is not a call for a return to religious belief to provide meaning. The diagnosis that Dewey is offering concerns instead the disenchantment of the world. An enchanted world is one where people project on to it their hopes, desires, fears and beliefs: gods, witches, demons-but also virtues, meanings, and purposes-are all such projections. Progress in science and philosophy arises from the ability to show that past understandings of the world were merely projections, and that we are increasingly able to distinguish between how we believe things to be and how they are, shorn of anthropomorphic elaboration.
For the modern philosopher committed to this project the thesis is even more radical: anthropomorphism, the projection of human meaning on to the (non-)human world, is the source of all error and illusion. The ideal of a perfectly true account of the world would be one in which the world appeared without any hint or taint of anthropomorphism. On this account, objectivity and truth are defined as the complete overcoming of the human-subjective-point of view. Even human beings should not be understood anthropomorphically, but rather as bits of nature like any other, as in the project to show that the human mind is just a sophisticated computer. The American philosopher Thomas Nagel nicely captures the paradox of this ideal of knowledge in denominating it "the view from nowhere." It is a powerful perspective operating on the basis of constant critique, uncovering deeper levels of illusion (even the perceived properties of objects, like colour, are anthropomorphic illusions). It is also terrifying because human subjectivity, as lived and experienced, is taken as nothing other than a source of error and prejudice-every desire, wish, ache, hope, shiver is just another blindness.
The disenchantment of the world made possible the project of science and technology-the elimination of anthropomorphic illusions. But once the target of science and technology is defined in those terms, the tensions within modernist philosophy (between knowledge and truth, society and spirit, history and meaning) fall away: what else could the terms "truth," "spirit" and "meaning" be, other than anthropomorphic illusions?
How might we respond? Dewey assumed that the poetic imagination is not affected by the disenchantment of the world inflicted by science, and that a new philosophy should be able to show that there is no contradiction between scientific knowing and the legitimate anthropomorphism of poetry's "quick na?ve contacts." This is itself a little na?ve, but it does capture the vision and motivation of all philosophical modernism since Kant: to demonstrate the limits of the disenchantment of the world by showing how scientific truth is not the whole truth-truth is a useful fiction (Nietzsche), or scientific knowing is grounded in a more primordial "being-in-the-world" (Heidegger), or knowledge is always bound up with "power" and hence always has a perspective (Foucault)-and thus inscribing a space of unavoidable and legitimate anthropomorphism. Hence, there is a "big question" for philosophy today: defining the limits of disenchantment while simultaneously demonstrating the possibility and intelligibility of a secular form of existence.
My sense that philosophy, when it is not bent on the sceptical course of disenchantment, has become barren is not novel, but a recurrent trope of modern philosophy. So in the very first chapter of Walden we find Thoreau asserting that "there are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers": and while this is a snipe at academics, it is more emphatically a worry about the absence of a truly modernist philosophy, a philosophy pained at the "lives of quiet desperation" Thoreau perceived his fellow citizens living. Nearly 150 years later, our desperations have become more diverse: some still quiet, others loud and raucous, others ironic or indifferent or cynical or plaintive-still, desperations..
Of course the production of a truly modernist, avant-garde work of philosophy is difficult. Of my generation, the only British philosopher to produce such work was Gillian Rose. Her main works-Hegel Contra Sociology (1981), Dialectic of Nihilism (1986), and The Broken Middle (1992)-as well as the testimony of her exquisite and painful fragmentary autobiography, Love's Work (1995), reveal a wholly modernist sensibility, a sensibility formed by the gaps and absences of modernity. It must be an indictment of academic philosophy in Britain that Rose never taught in a philosophy department.
If cultural modernity is the lapse of tradition, then every philosophical modernist must discover philosophy anew, re-invent it, transfigure it. The exacting nature of this endeavour is exacerbated by disenchantment, by the absence of any certainties, foundations, absolutes. But these sceptical conditions cannot be dissolved, only reformed. Gillian Rose saw in the philosophy of Hegel not a pre-modern, metaphysical rationalism, but an avant-garde, modernist thinker who could be re-worked in order to address the present. An odd claim, to be sure-imagine someone claiming that Constable is in fact a modernist like Manet, C?zanne or Klee.
The key to Rose's philosophical practice was her way of utterly inhabiting the gaps and absences of the modernist agenda. As a modernist, she knew that we are unable to re-unite the dualisms between knowledge and truth, unable to provide a conception of virtuous politics or a power wholly drenched in legitimate authority. Perhaps her hardest and most stringent criticisms are addressed to those who seek, through force or fantasy, to deny the brokenness of our condition.
For Rose, if the dualisms could not be engineered back together again, neither could they be dismissed or dissolved: we may not possess a conception of truth worthy of its name, but every attempt to dismiss it ends up reducing human knowing to conventionalism or relativism or traditionalism. We may be very unclear about what virtue could be for us (as opposed to what it was for the Greeks), but a politics based solely on a conception of humans as utility maximisers or rationally self-interested is quite implausible. No stable order is possible on those terms alone. As things transpire, most of us are, unknown to ourselves, possessed of virtue, and of motives and allegiances no rational calculus can explain.
Showing, as Rose shows repeatedly, that the dualisms of the present can be neither resolved nor dissolved would be an accomplishment of a high order all by itself. But what gives her philosophy its weightiness is that she never leaves the dualisms of the present as mere abstract concepts. Inhabiting those dualisms means revealing them as human creations inscribing our relations with others and ourselves. Rose's potent image of this existential condition is "the broken middle," a space related to beginning and end which remains forever distant from both.
This is the leitmotiv of Rose's philosophy: there is an unavoidable anthropomorphism in every concept; no concept can escape equivocation and complicity. For example, there has been a continuous attempt in modern philosophy to isolate violence, and to find thereby a secure niche for "pure" morality or politics or knowing. So law, power, reason and love have variously been logically refined until all the violence is removed from them. Such a purified concept would make for an ideal beginning or perfected end-and as such is impossible. One cannot, Rose argues, oppose the "power" that informs and creates community to the "violence" of the powerless, in the manner of Hannah Arendt, since the "power" of political community includes its monopoly on the means of legitimate coercion-violence. Equally, not only is there a love of violence, but there is a violence in loving because it includes, however refined, moments of possession, invasion, appropriation and exclusion. Violence, Rose claims, "is inseparable from staking oneself, from experience as such-the initial yet yielding recalcitrance of action and passion. Without 'violence,' which is not sacrifice but risk, language, labour, love-life-would not live."
In saying this Rose is not, absurdly, suggesting that love or power are the same as violence. Rather, her philosophical work consists in identifying the greater violence that would be involved in denying the existence of violence in worldly love and worldly power. The intrinsic difficulty of worldly action is echoed in the difficulty of Rose's prose.
Putting some of the lineaments of Rose's case in this direct manner smoothes over the difficulties of her books. Her highly wrought texts are mannered, rhetorical, enticing and argumentatively austere, all at the same time-such is modernist philosophy, continually testing what we think philosophy is and could be. When that testing fails to occur, when we can with confidence assume the terms of "the debate" and our place in it, then the urgent claims of the present become silenced. That this is how things almost always are in philosophy now is its failure.
The fundamental task of avant-gardism is to keep culture moving and open in dark times; alas, a modernist sensibility and avant-garde aspiration are all but absent from contemporary philosophy. Her voice is not enough. Worse still, I suspect the reason why Gillian Rose's work failed to find a wide readership in her lifetime was that she too often focused on easy, fashionable or little known "continental" targets rather than taking on the more permanent and recalcitrant philosophical mammoths of modernity: Enlightenment rationalism, naturalism, scientism, pragmatism, liberalism. None the less she is an exemplary figure, revealing in word and deed, in success and failure, how indigent our state is. Her modernist reading of Hegel should inspire similar efforts elsewhere. Indeed, the revival of a modernist tradition would be, however small, a form of hope-a sign that philosophy still has a place in culture.
