Tone as a Practice of Time
In this essay, I want to work on practices of time related to religious and philosophical speech and writing. What do I mean by practices of time? Isn’t time just flowing naturally and inexorably forward? How can it be practiced? I won’t try to answer the whole of these questions in this essay. However, I can begin to unpack practices of time by looking at how we manage our attention when we speak and write. To be sure, time is non-essential and therefore dependently conditioned. As a basic example, there is no essence to the temporal gap between langue and parole, to use Saussure’s terms. If langue only exists in time as collective memory, then parole (as the instantiation of langue in an act of speaking or writing) can only unfold in the flow of time. There is no storehouse where we go to get our langue. We therefore have to conceive of speaking and writing as temporal actions, not spatial ones that can be nailed down. We don’t pull our words off a shelf and arrange them according to a recipe. We are not baking a cake when we parole.
We have to push this further, however. It is too easy to see the gap between langue and parole as always the same thing in all modes of speaking and writing. It is not. To be sure, I am not interested in adding yet another appreciative voice to the current infatuation with the in-between. It is far too easy and far too fashionable today to talk about the in-between as some sort of liberated emptiness, like “mindfulness” or an oversimplification of a Buddhist’s egolessness. In my last essay on Hamlet’s ressentiment, I tried to think through different ways that ressentiment structures the flow of time in the act of self-negation. Hamlet’s ressentiment sought to set right time-out-of-joint by reuniting himself to his obligation to avenge the death of his father. I argued that the force of Shakespeare’s play was to show how Hamlet occupied the later stages of ressentiment as a flow of time. Negation of the self had already occurred, and Hamlet is stuck in the in-between where ressentiment-as-negation has not yet grasped alternatives to revenge as the setting right of time. Rene Girard called this the “no-man’s-land of weakened revenge.” Paul’s letter to the Galatians is on the frontside of ressentiment — the initial negation of the self that is not yet seeking a resolution to the negation. This is a powerful temporality that need not resolve as violence and vengeance. Paul redirects this negation through Leviticus 19:18 — “love your neighbor as yourself.”
Ressentiment, I argued, has no essence, but it does have patterns that can be renewed, not all of which can be easily condemned as evil or bad. These patterns need not play out in the same way each time. In both cases of Hamlet and the ekklesiae of Galatia, time is practiced as a suspension of a culturally given expectation. For Paul, practices of deactivating, suspending, and making something inoperative (all encompassed in his use of the Greek word katargeo) are deliberately cultivated practices that must hold back from turning into a hatred of the things suspended. For Hamlet, we don’t know why he hesitates to execute Old Hamlet’s command to avenge his death. He is not weighing options; he is just hesitating to act. The only options he weighs are whether or not to exit this world or hang around to continue suffering the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” He remains in the suspended no-man’s-land of ressentiment between the initial negation (whatever its origin) and resolution as vengeance as the only graspable option.
What I can conclude here about time-as-practice is this: practices need not be understood in formal terms. We don’t need to use St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises as our template for what we always mean when we talk about practices. Practices don’t have to be a setting aside of time in the early morning to meditate or pray or otherwise work on oneself. Those practices can be quite valuable, and they are practices of time. But this formality is not the only way to conceive of practices of time. I want to argue for practices of time that operate within duration. These practices activate behaviors in the moment that are attentive to how time is unfolding in any given situation. As parole activates langue, time is activated as well, but it cannot be understood as always the same thing, as we will see in this essay. To channel Nagarjuna for a moment, the in-between is non-essential and dependently conditioned. We can therefore exercise some agency in how duration unfolds in our day-to-day interactions with others. We actually do this all the time, but we’ve been trained not to attend to it.
The Lover’s Question
To make this somewhat more clear, I should compare Bruno Latour’s Rejoicing with Rene Descartes’ Meditations. Both offer very different ways of occupying the temporal gap between our experience of duration and our representation of that experience to ourselves and others. Speaking and writing unfolds in this duration, but this duration has no essence, which is what this comparison will show. The comparison is legitimate because both are intimately related to what we think of as Modernity. We generally find Descartes places somewhere at the calendar-measured beginning of the Modern Age, and Latour has been a fierce champion and critic of what it means to be Modern and non-Modern. Descartes preoccupation with certainty figures prominently in Latour’s thinking as fundamental to being Modern. So the comparison has legitimate grounds on this basis alone.
Let’s start with the example that Latour uses throughout Rejoicing — one lover’s response to another’s question, “Do you love me?” He offers this as an everyday example of a mode of speaking and attention that we are all familiar with, but we don’t pay too much attention to how it works. It is an example of a mode of human interaction consisting ostensibly of words, but it has little to do with “undistorted communication.” As such, it is an example of religious speech and its challenges. We all experience this mode of speaking when we are actively negotiating a conversation with another person while being attentive simultaneously to what we are feeling, what they are feeling, the feeling that is flowing between us, and the tone that we adopt as we choose the words we say. We adjust all of this as we move through the conversation because we are seeking something that is beyond what the words mean. What we are saying has less importance than the adjustments we make to how we are saying what we say.
As I quote this at length, it is worth attending to the separation that Latour makes between tone and content, and that this separation creates an experience of following, which is different than understanding or comprehending the meaning of the words. Following is a practice of attention that can only be understood as privileging the temporality of speech over a fixation on transparent meaning toward which Modern truth-oriented speaking and writing strives: “As soon as we talk of love, the letter and the spirit part company.”
And so it isn’t the sentence itself [the chosen words] that the woman will closely follow [my emphasis], or the resemblance or dissimilitude between the two instances, but the tone [Latour’s emphasis], the manner, the way in which he, her lover, will revive that old, worn-out theme. With admirable precision, exact to the second [my emphasis], she will detect if the old refrain has captured the new meaning she is waiting for, if it has renewed in an instant the love that her lover feels for her, or if the weariness and boredom of a liaison long over shown through the worn-out vocables. (26)
I shall pause here to draw attention to the importance of following in what we have read so far. This mode of speech, in conveying its meaning, insists on a connection between the interlocutors that has little to do with the literal content of what is said between them. What Latour calls following is not attending to “the sentence itself,” but to “the tone, the manner, the way in which he, her lover, will revive that old, worn-out theme.” She will attend to his speech in duration — “exact to the second” — not spatially. The latter is a practice of attention that would focus on the stable meaning of the words spoken in response to the question, “Do you love me?” This mode of attention to words reaches outside of the relationship of asking-and-responding into a universal space of “what is love?” At the moment this becomes the mode of responding, the game is up. The communication has failed.
The challenge that the question “Do you love me?” issues to the respondent is the challenge of renewal that does not simply go back to the past as if the question were, “Do you love me in the same way that you always have?” If this were the question, love could never have the effective force that it does because it is ossified as the answer to a Socratic “What is?” question. A mode of speech that grasps for universals in this way is not the mode of speech that is asked for at this moment. What this question demands is renewal and transformation that is conveyed by the tone, the manner, the way of disposing ones’ whole body in the response. Latour continues:
No information is conveyed by the sentence, and yet she, the woman who loves, feels transported, transformed, slightly shaken up, changed, rearranged, or not, or the opposite, alienated, flattened, forgotten, mothballed, humiliated. They are sentences uttered every day, then, whose main object is not to map out references but which seek to produce something else entirely: the near and the far [Latour’s emphasis], closeness or distance. Who hasn’t had some experience of this? (26)
Italicizing near and far… Is this not the spatialization of time that Bergson calls our attention to? Should we not understand near and far as temporal effects of this mode of speaking? That is the only way that we can understand it, even if we imagine the bodily movement of the lovers leaning in or pulling back based on the transmission of tone. Such movement is, yes, spatial, but equally it is the motion of duration. Either they lean in to create a simultaneity of separate durations as physical and emotional closeness, or they lean back creating a time out of joint. In either case, time is already out of joint. It is just a matter of how tone either joins their durations together (simultaneity of durations) or pushes them further apart (time is out of joint).
This is fundamentally different than the philosophical and religious speech that we have inherited from Modernity, which has left us with a host of prescriptions that Latour seeks to undo (and Montaigne sought to prevent). As Latour’s example of the lover’s speech makes clear, these different modes of speech feel different. To put this difference in Bergson’s terms, they are different in kind (quality) not in degree (quantity). Qualitative differences are absolutely different from each other (different in kind) because there is no necessary commensurability between affective states as they unfold in durations. My love is not your love, and my love for you is not the same emotion from moment to moment for me. Differences in degree are quantitative because everything is made measurable by the same yardstick. To treat affective states (e.g., love, anger, ressentiment, envy, acedia) as essentially the same for everyone reduces the differences among them to intensity. My anger is the same as yours, but you are feeling it more intensely than me at the moment. Such speech assumes an underlying sameness to the affective state that all humans share. For Bergson, this is a classic case of neutralizing duration when we focus our attention on the nature of love or ressentiment or envy or anger or acedia as the essential and universal content of our experience.
Cartesian Time
To better understand, let’s compare the foregoing with Descartes’ Meditations, which is in almost every respect the opposite of what Latour has described in the religious speech of the lovers. As we saw above, the lovers’ speech is not contained within the specific words chosen. The whole body speaks in a way that cannot be reduced to the meaning of the chosen words.
There are no bodily senses in the words of the Meditations. No sight, no sounds, no listening, no taste. There is only a very brief moment of touch as he feels the pen and paper in his hands and the heat of the fire. Neither of these is referenced as touch, only as sensations to be noticed, and doubted, by a cogito in the process of disengaging itself from its entanglements with the world, including its body. The Cartesian consciousness annihilates the senses and withdraws from conversation and moves away from holding our attention on the affective reaction of other(s). It is a solitary act of the self. The movement away is simultaneously a relentless movement inward — a withdrawal, which is a technical term for Descartes’ intellectual practice. All of his meditative energy flows inward toward the natural light that is the overcoming of time in the apprehension of truth. While also being the overcoming of time, it is the confirmation of the self’s existence as only ever essentially a thinking thing.
Crucially, and this is often missed, the apprehension of truth cannot exist only in the disembodied cogito. To be affirmed as certain truth, a thought must exist in words, and by virtue of being in words, it gains a fixity and a power that it did not have prior to this moment. A single passage will suffice to demonstrate how this works in the Meditations. In the Preface to the Reader, Descartes begins his synopsis of each Meditation. He starts with justifying his practice of radical doubt:
Although the utility of so extensive a doubt is not readily apparent, nevertheless its greatest utility lies in freeing us of all prejudices, in preparing the easiest way for us to withdraw the mind from the senses, and finally, in making it impossible for us to doubt any further those things that we later discover to be true. (6, my emphasis)
We must follow Descartes’ practice of time that is demonstrated here. Time is structured by telos — a fulfillment that begins with a negation of what has come before. The telos of the flow moves from 1) doubt to 2) “withdrawal from the senses” to 3) certainty to 4) written words. The importance of withdrawal as both the withdrawal from the world and from the body’s senses is apparent. To call “doubt” a “utility” is to put the emphasis on doubt as a practice of time that is teleological — the striving toward an end state. The final sentence, which I have emphasized, sheds light on the temporal goal of withdrawal, and much of our Gnostic Modernity finds its expression here. The negating movement away from the world and away from the body is in the service of landing one’s knowledge outside of time — “to make it impossible for us to doubt any further those things that we later discover to be true.” Once we discover a certain truth, doubt must come to an end on that particular point, and we set it outside of history.
A Gnostic disposition is actualized by Descartes’ doubt which negates the body’s senses as having anything to do with legitimate knowledge. Words are the vehicle of this negation. Words annihilate the world and the senses as the cogito seeks the one simple instance of truth. This truth returns only the cogito to itself stripped of the body and its senses. The cogito floats above the world without the entanglement of senses that connect us to the world and the others in it. The cogito experiences itself but only as a mere register of existence. Nothing more than that. This is a Gnostic division between self and world that is actually deeply internal to the human being. It is also a function of the Modern language of truth.
I want to be clear why this is Gnostic. Descartes’ telos proceeds from a negation of what has come before. “And thus I realized that for once in life I had to raze everything to the ground and begin again from the original foundations, if I wanted to establish anything firm and lasting in the sciences” (Meditations 1.18, my emphasis). Unlike Ignatius — whose Spiritual Practices serve as a template for the Meditations — there is no personal fulfillment that arises from this negation. The self is lost; only “the sciences” are fulfilled. Sure, we can say that there is some sense of fulfillment and pride that Descartes will find in this telos, but that is not what he says. He must negate most of himself to “establish anything firm and lasting in the sciences.” We do not have a reordering of the body and its senses within the world. As I’ll cover in more detail in the next section, we don’t have Ignatius’ daily practices of renewal and self-ordering. We have the negation of the body’s senses as legitimate sources of knowing anything — they furnish only a sense of existence and objects of doubt. The actual telos that Descartes seeks is the published and commodified text of the Meditations as a foundational monument for the sciences. It takes on a life of its own because it is commodified, circulates, and is separated from its origins in a human body.
Descartes’ Spiritual Exercise
At this moment we can understand Descartes’ innovation and transformation of St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises. For Ignatius, The Spiritual Exercises occur daily under the guidance of an expert. They are, as such, aligned with ascetic Christian practices that address the challenges of daily renewal as one awaits the end of time. Ignatius is clear that the exercises are “the means of preparing and disposing our soul to rid itself of all its disordered affections and then, after their removal, of seeking and finding God’s will in the ordering of our life and the salvation of our soul” (The Spiritual Exercises, George E. Ganss, S.J. ed. 121). This is not a one-and-done practice: the incipientes should make progress over time and through serious repetition under the guidance of an expert.
At first read, this is very similar to Descartes’ Meditations. Both practices move from self-negation to self-ordering. Both require physical and mental withdrawal from the world. Both have an atomized notion of the soul as a personal possession and the object of salvation. However, Descartes requires no oversight, no obedience, and no need to repeat what he has done. He requires objections, which also must be published, but this is not the same as Ignatius’ practices of guidance and obedience. Descartes is alone in his endeavor “sitting here next to the fire, wearing my winter dressing gown.” The Meditations are structured as a series of “proofs” and “conclusions” that should be readily apparent for his readers. He is not providing guidance, as does Ignatius’ text, on how to lead another through the process; nor does he show you how to do this yourself. Rather, Descartes stands in for everyone for all time. His text, unlike Ignatius’ instructional text, is a monument that need not be repeated — “to make it impossible to doubt any further.” If the temporality of The Spiritual Exercises teaches a progressive unfolding of a cycle, Descartes’ Meditations is a telos as a terminal state that cannot and should not be revisited. The work is done; you can read it for yourself and internalize his conclusions and proofs.
Thus the words of the Meditations have a different purpose from the words of The Spiritual Exercises. Descartes’ words seek an exit from time in the documentation of clarity, which requires the negation of the senses. More than this, the Meditations, as the documentation of permanent truths — “clear and distinct perceptions” — should prevent each of us from having to go through this same discovery ourselves. To read the Meditations is better than doing it yourself. Descartes did it for you and better than you. No one needs to repeat this exercise: all that anyone needs to do is read and understand Descartes’ demonstrations: The Meditations “are lengthy and require a particularly attentive reader; thus only a small handful of people will understand them” (Letter of Dedication 4). Descartes, unlike Ignatius, does not ask his reader to reproduce the Meditations as a personal practice. But there is a practice of withdrawal that is required to read the Meditations and absorb the claritas of their documented truths: the Meditations “demand a mind that is quite free from prejudices and that can easily withdraw itself from the association with the senses” (Letter of Dedication 5). It requires, crucially, an “aptitude for geometry.”
Paul’s “Deactivation” and “Fulfilment”
To push my argument further, I want to undo any leftover sense that the Cartesian telos I’ve described has an essence. Not all teleologies are essentially the same. Giorgio Agamben details a quite different telos in his reading of Paul’s letters. Paul’s use of the Greek terms telos and katargeo function more as a deactivation (of the law) that leads to the fulfillment of that which is deactivated. Deactivation does not destroy what came before; it is not a destructive negation. Katargeo is a suspension of a culturally given meaning so that another meaning becomes graspable. Paul’s telos fulfills as it transforms. The phrase from 2 Corinthians 3:12-13 is telos tou katargoumenou, “fulfillment out of that which has been deactivated.” For Agamben, this is messianic deactivation and fulfillment as a structure of time: “Messianic katargesis does not merely abolish; it preserves and brings to fulfillment” (The Time that Remains, 99). This telos does not, therefore, destroy the past in the name of an external claritas, but suspends its culturally reified meaning so that renewal and fulfillment of what is suspended can be activated. This is how Paul treats the law (nomos). He suspends its normative and codified aspects in order to find within the nomos a pneuma (often translated as Spirit) that deactivates the letter of the law in the act of fulfilling its true intention. And suddenly we find ourselves back at Latour’s lovers who “As soon as we talk of love, the letter and the spirit part company” (26).
One can find this formulation throughout Paul’s letters, but one passage from Galatians should suffice for my purposes here: “For the whole law can be summed up in a single commandment, namely, ‘you must love your neighbor as yourself’” (Galatians 5:14). This is the formulation of a telos that deactivates and fulfills in the same time. The letter of the law is no longer what is important. Now the spirit of the law is what we should attend to, and that spirit can be summarized in a new commandment to love each other as we love ourselves. This is not the same kind of “thou shalt” commandment that Moses brought down from the mountain. It is a different mode of law altogether — it focuses on intention and our relationship to others without giving hard and fast rules.
To return to Latour’s example of religious speech of the lovers renewing their love (or ending it), the interaction is more about tone than content. The same emphasis is found at the end of Galatians:
Brothers and sisters, if a person is discovered in some sin, you who are spiritual restore such a person in a spirit of gentleness. Pay close attention to yourselves, so that you are not tempted too. Carry one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. (Galatians 6.1-2)
There are no words here that carry the essence of a “spirit of gentleness” that “restores.” There is only tone and body language and sensations that are passed among the members of the ekklesiae as they mutually support each other. Galatians is very far from being the transmission of Cartesian truth through the clarify of words. And it certainly isn't the annihilation of the body and the world to find the divine light of truth.
Often when we speak of Paul, we want to know what he is really saying. What is his doctrine? But he is not prescribing a Cartesian telos. Rather, we need to ask what is he doing? Paul writes in order to do something. What he writes is wrapped in what he does. We so desperately want Paul to have delivered a Cartesian Method or Meditation that we put Romans in front of the others in the New Testament because it comes closest to doctrinal statements of truth. That is not what Paul was doing. He was transmitting tone — “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control…. If we live by the Spirit, let us also behave in accordance with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, being jealous of one another” (Galatians 5:22-26).
None of this has anything to do with a mode of writing and speaking that conveys clarity as codified truths. Paul offers no proofs, no conclusions as settled fact that the reader must passively accept. Galatians wants the reader to follow its duration rather than accept the communication stable truths. If we need any further evidence that Paul’s writing is about tone and following, we need look no further than 6:11: “See what big letters I make as I write to you with my own hand!” We misunderstand Paul if we wish he was Descartes. We do not find pure negation here, nor do we find doctrinal claritas. Paul’s telos is intimately associated with the power of deactivating reified truths so that they can be transformed into something new while remaining what they are. This transformation does not require utter destruction as a desire for clarity that comes from somewhere else. It takes what is given — the law (nomos) — and finds a Spirit (pneuma) within it that becomes a new practice of time. Rather than following the codified truths of the law to the letter, we find the moral intention of Leviticus 19:18: “love your neighbors as yourself.”
Descartes’ telos, on the other hand, is unabashedly sustained negation in the seeking of a stable state outside of the world, the body, and its senses. It is a transition from a fallen state that must destroy most of the self in order to attain the complete transparency of a disembodied, commodified, and documented scientific knowledge. The body is not transformed. It is negated in order to attend to the “natural light” that is not Descartes’ only but is everyone’s, and it will be that which “establishes anything firm and lasting in the sciences.” Despite Nietzsche’s protestations to the contrary, we do not find Paul’s slave morality in Galatians, but we do find the ascetic ideal in Descartes’ Meditations.
Gnostic Words
To summarize: Descartes’ words chase universals outside of the realm of interlocutors. In the process, the words become more powerful than the practice of meditation. Understood as duration, the practice documented in the Meditations transfers the proofs and conclusions of thought into the text as a monument to be read, not a practice to be imitated. There is no need for any of us to undertake the Meditations ourselves. All we need to do is read and understand what has already been done for us. As long as we have the right level of attention — “an aptitude for geometry” and the willingness to set aside our bodies — we will accept Descartes’ proofs and bring an end to any doubt about the existence of God and our souls. We will therefore end the need for a permanent skepticism.
How is this Gnostic? Here I will follow Hans Blumenberg who was one of the twentieth century’s most subtle thinkers on the persistence of Gnosticism in Christianity and Modernity. We have to think of Gnosticism as theodicy — the intellectual process of reconciling actual human suffering with the existence of a benevolent God. For Blumenberg, the transition to Modernity emerges out of theological problems that are not reducible to either a secularization of religious ideas or a Kantian emergnce from intellectual immaturity. Enlightenment and Modernity were not inevitable developments of human evolution. We have to look within the challenges and problems of theology and epistemology to find the strands that led to Modernity as a transformation within and of these, not their negation from rationality as an outside invader. The latter is to read from the perspective of Descartes and to accept his telos as negation that leads to clarity.
Blumenberg’s argument goes like this. I’ll start with the sixteenth century. The “innovations of Luther,” to use Montaigne’s phrase, painted a picture of the world as wholly and completely centered on God — a theocentric world. When this theocentricity combines with God’s absolute omnipotence, intellectual integrity requires that humanity be left powerless. To fully think that God is all-powerful requires humanity to be all-powerless, that is if one is committed to the logical conclusion. The world was made by God for God, and therefore not at all for humans. Any notion of providence can only be rescued through concepts of grace and predestination as completely up to God, who is wholly in charge. Humans cannot be at home in the world unless God decides to make it so.
For Blumenberg, this is an untenable situation in the long run, and it leads to Modernity emerging out of this theological dead end as a preference for human “self-assertion” against a world that wasn’t made for us. The intellectual currents of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be understood as various efforts to deal with this dead end. Blumenberg’s key figure is Copernicus. Far from being the radical heliocentrist who kicked humanity out of the center of the universe, Copernicus sought to restore a benevolent anthropocentrism. Blumenberg makes the forceful point that Copernicus’ innovation was to “make the Earth a star,” not not to displace humanity from the center of creation. In fact, humanity hadn’t been in the center for quite some time. There never had been, with the exception of early Stoicism, a hard alliance between anthropocentrism and geocentrism. The world, as creation, can be seen as oriented to humanity without demanding that we be in the spatial center of it all.
Modernity emerges as a solution to these problems of a theocentric world run by an omnipotent God who is not at all required to save his creation. The solution does not require us to jettison theology and theodicy but to see how they provided the structures of thought that made theological alternatives possible. Thus Modernity remains thoroughly theological for Blumenberg, especially with respect to Gnosticism as theodicy. Theological solutions to the problem of an omnipotent God who lets his creation suffer do not require a just God who need not listen anyhow. One possible resolution was to definitively break down any requirement for “neediness” between God and humanity — they do not need each other in any essential way.
This is the difference between Descartes and Copernicus that marks the crossing of a threshold from the late Middle Ages to Modernity. By making the Earth a star, Copernicus saw himself as restoring neediness between humanity and creation. How did this work? He collapsed Aristotle’s hard separation of cosmology (knowledge of the heavens above) from physics (knowledge of life on earth) and made the universe into one big object of knowledge. Human rationality is adequate to the task of knowing how to orient ourselves to the world even if there is no requirement to be at the spatial center. Descartes accepted the power of human rationality, but he also sent God to the sidelines by simply reducing him to a guarantor of a non-deceptive access to claritas of perception. Instead of putting humanity back in the metaphorical center (if not the spatial center) of creation, Descartes untethered the cogito from creation with the small but important exception that God simply gave us the power of clarity — the natural light. With that guarantee — that also guarantees that God doesn’t change the terms of this clarity willy nilly — humanity is set free to do as it wills with the world. For Blumenberg, this is the moment when Modernity emerges as humanity’s self-reliance in the face of a mechanized Nature.
Therefore, Copernicus remains non-Modern in the sense that he was still trying to hold onto an anthropocentric optimism about the goodness of God’s creation for humanity. Copernicus saw himself as restoring a neediness between God and humanity by calling the Earth a star, not in spite of that insight. Descartes broke the neediness by relegating God to simply a guarantor that the “natural light” of certainty need not be our deception by an evil demon. There is, however, no requirement that God guide human reason or that there is any formal symmetry between God’s power as creator and the human ability to attain certainty of knowledge. Put simply, the Cartesian Method is the moment when a completely autonomous and self-contained human rationality “no longer seems to have need of any anthropocentric teleology.”
This nonneediness is the real difference between the modern age’s rationality and Copernicus, a difference that makes his [Copernicus’] claim to truth, and what that claim presupposed, obsolete, and excludes it, as a transitional episode, from being part of the epoch. (The Genesis of the Copernican World, III.2, 313)
This brings us back, full force, to the power of words once the neediness is obsolete. Cartesian words displace one telos for another. Copernicus gave his world a telos motivated by human re-connection and re-orientation to the world and God. Descartes gave his world a telos driven to “the perfection of a terminology designed to capture the presence and precision of the matter at hand in well-defined concepts” (Blumenberg, Metaphorology, 1; emphasis added). In other words, Modernity hasn’t done away with telos: it has displaced it from an external neediness that connects humanity, the world, and God to an internal neediness as humanity’s fully autonomous need to pursue carefully chosen words.
This is a Cartesian practice of time that must be understood because it is so pervasive that it is invisible to us. Every legitimate form of knowing now exists only in what can be written down and read by others. This should not be undersold. It is a temporal practice that moves from metaphors to concepts, from introspection to clear words, from imagination to logic: “From this vantage point, all forms and elements of figurative speech, in the broadest sense of the term, prove to have been makeshifts destined to be superseded by logic” (Metaphorology, 2). To speak and write in figurative language is immature. The goal is clarity, and clarity requires that metaphors be transitions and therefore must be abandoned in the end — along with the body and its sensations. The body and its senses are not knowledge and must be left behind as the source of error. They are only experience. Descartes writes at the outset of the Third Meditation, “I will now shut my eyes, stop up my ears, and withdraw all my senses….”
I am a thing that thinks, that is to say, a thing that doubts, affirms, denies, understands a few things, is ignorant of many things, wills, refrains from willing, and also imagines the senses. For as I observed earlier, even though these things that I sense or imagine may perhaps be nothing at all outside me, nevertheless I am certain that these modes of thinking, which are cases of what I call sensing and imagining, insofar as they are merely modes of thinking, do exist within me. (Meditations 3.34)
Shutting out the senses in order to capture clarity in words — this is the Modern condition, and it is resolutely Gnostic.
Gnosticism Is Non-Essential
To be sure, to call this Cartesian clarity Gnostic cannot be to condemn it wholesale, though certainly the tone of this meditation pushes in that direction. Seeing the world in such a way that human progress is possible has had undeniable benefits. Advances in healthcare, infrastructure, agriculture, et alia have certainly alleviated a lot of human suffering and opened up possibilities for human experience that simply were not available before Modernity. This cannot be denied, and none of this is possible unless the Cartesian rationality takes up a Gnostic denigration of a world whose time was badly out of joint. To be sure, something had to be done, which would have to start with a powerful act of Gnostic ressentiment to find a mode of existence other than the alternatives available during the Thirty Years War.
We could argue that we find ourselves in a similar situation today. The trusted stabilities of Modernity no longer hold true. Democracies are struggling to remain relevant. Billionaires are planning their permanent exit to Mars rather than seeking solutions that don’t necessarily line their already deep pockets. The changing climate is quickly out-running evolution’s ability to keep pace. New modes of existence are required to inhabit time and space in ways that recognize the magnitude of the challenges without giving into the purely negative side of Gnosticism and ressentiment. Positive negations are required — the world is objectively broken — and they may have to be as powerful as Descartes’ practices of time.
The trick here is not to look outside of Gnosticism for something else. We may have to reverse the flow of Descartes’ telos, and we should take Blumenberg seriously when he wrote about Modernity as “the second overcoming of Gnosticism.” By this he means that Gnosticism provides a continuity between the Middle Ages and Modernity, but that thread is not the same thing. It changes as we move through calendar time. The first overcoming occurred before Modernity with multiple attempts to reconcile a particular problem within monotheism. How could the same God create a world that required redemption? Mythological Gnosticism made the answer simple: the creator God (Ialdabaoth) is not the same as the redeemer God (Barbelo). Christianity, however, remained wedded to monotheism and therefore had multiple twists and turns to hold this contradiction together. While the Catholic Church was selling indulgences as part of its solution, Luther and Calvin (following Augustine) simply said that God is omnipotent and your only hope is grace. You can orient yourself to God through faith, but neither your faith nor your works have anything to do with whether or not God saves you. Neither of these is a sustainable solution to theodicy.
As humankind continued on its way, new practices of time were made possible by all manner of technical, economic, political and other innovations. A new mode of Gnosticism took over that could empower and justify what was happening by negating the mess of the Thirty Years War. But this comes with baggage. Another way to look at Gnosticism is through the lens of Nagarjuna. It is, like all existing things, fundamentally empty — i.e., without an essence that stabilizes it as always the same thing. That doesn’t mean that it is inert or ineffective. It is precisely its emptiness that makes it effective. It can be transformed and renewed much like we saw at the beginning of this essay in Latour’s presentation of the lovers expression of love. To say that love and Gnosticism are empty is simply to say that they can renew and change to suit the circumstances — they are dependently conditioned by other things going around them. In the renewal there is a sameness, but it is not the essential sameness of a Socratic answer to a “What is ___?” question.