The Legitimacy of Modernity: Blumenberg, Lowith, Schmitt, Milbank and the Pomos

How did the Modern world emerge? Is it, as some claim, a disobedient child of modernity, or does it have a legitimate identity of its own, independent of Christendom? This is what Robert Wallace, translator of Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of Modernity has to say:

“Blumenberg makes it clear here that while the modern age is not the result of a transformation (whether through ‘secularization’ or any other process) of something that was originally Christian, this does not mean that it sprang into existence spontaneously, as though into a historical void. The continuity underlying the change of epoch is, he says, a continuity of problems rather than of solutions, of questions rather then of answers. Instead of remaining forever fixated on ‘doctrines’ or ‘ideas’ as the stuff of our tradition, we need to learn to relate these to the human activity of inquiring, of questioning, which gives them their relevance and concrete meaning. When we do so, Blumenberg suggests, we may find other kinds of continuity besides those of rightful inheritance or illegitimate misappropriation, and other kinds of novelty besides that of unprovoked ‘creation from nothing’” (Robert Wallace xviii).

Blumenberg wants to see modernity as springing from a Christian context, but what springs has to have a different composition then what fell. His critique of Lowith is on grounds of continuity. In emphasizing the illegitimacy of progress (bad providence), Lowith highlights how progress fails where providence didn’t. Blumenberg wants to claim the opposite. That progress is not deprived providence, but that providence was such an insufficient prototype of progress that we cannot highlight their identity; we must emphasize their difference, the rupture of Christendom. How did this rupture occur? 1. Science moved beyond Scientia; Bacon et al overcame Aristotle. 2. The literary arts overcame classicism (Wallace xvii-xviii). Both of these innovations occurred in the 17th century.
Do I agree with Blumenberg? Partially. I think that Blumenberg is right to complicate the genealogy of progress. If we stress continuity too much then we oversimplify the context and the issues that lead to progress. However, I think that Blumenberg is trying to smuggle Lowith’s thesis back into this text, by demonstrating how continuity is a mistake, but by linking providence and progress through a more complicated narrative.

However, I think that we need to turn to Carl Schmitt and consider how the idea of the nation state has emerged from Christendom. Blumenberg might have more on his hands then he thinks?:

“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development – in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God become the omnipotent lawgiver – but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries” (Political Theology 36).

What becomes clear in Schmitt’s analysis is that he is using analogical reasoning, which recognizes that when we highlight a similarity, that similarity is couched in a great number of differences (I want to say infinite here but I fear I may be misusing the term). I sense that Blumenberg has adopted a flat view of being, univocity, which interprets all things with being, as being of the same genera. Analogy would claim that there is always a difference between different orders of being. That we must preserve this distance between Being (of God) and being (of man). This complicates Lowith’s thesis on continuity – progress is analogously related to providence. The state is analogously related to the Church.

It struck me that Milbank’s interpretation of the liberal subject and the secular realm is relevant to this discussion. Milbank claims that the secular realm is not only related to the Church, but that it is a theological construction which emerges from Medieval thinking (religious and secular realms and priests). He also claims that the creation of secular space in protestant settings was firstly a theological creation. Milbank claims that Locke and Hobbes argued for private property by considering Adam's mythological position in the Garden of Eden. Milbank extends his argument to the providence in Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market place, and to socialism in de Bonald's (and Saint-Simon's) positive (and Catholic) state.

There is another level, or context, for this general argument – the relationship between Christendom and Modernity - that I we need to consider: Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy have launched a full fledged deconstruction of Christianity (and Foucault had an implicit argument about the relationship between Christian confession and modern subjectivity). Why do we need to deconstruct Christianity if Modernity is legitimate on its own? I think Derrida, Nancy and Foucault have sided with Lowith in claiming that Modernity is still intimately related to Christendom, so intimately that it must still kill the Christendom Father in order to evade its shadow.