Cosmopolis - The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, Stephen Toulmin

I picked up this book not knowing what to expect, not knowing the author but being intrigued by the premise, which discussed pointing the way toward the philosophy of the future and escaping the “trap” of modernity. Stephen Toulmin (1922-2009) was a British philosopher and academic whose main claim to fame was moral philosophy. In tackling the modernist tradition from the Enlightenment to the present day, he was continuing what he saw as the work of 20th century philosophers like (later) Wittgenstein and Rorty who said “we don’t really know everything we claim to know.” This book is tracing out the steps in history that took us to where we are today and was a fascinating read, half-history and half-philosophy.

So first in tackling modernity, you have to define what “modernity” even means. There are multiple starting points you can choose for “modernity” according to your tastes and the argument you’re making. For Toulmin’s case, he defines it along two axes – the scientific and the philosophical. Scientific modernity, he argues, starts with Newton, who ushered in modern science by transitioning from Aristotle’s model of pragmatic case-based argument to a Platonic ideal of mathematical, universal proof. By contrast, the ‘natural philosophers’ of previous centuries (e.g., Montaigne) were skeptical about reaching total consensus and were wary of the human capacity of self-deception. How can we say we know for sure? We can only say that we see it this way. Often, they described natural phenomena as they observed them but remained agnostic about ultimate cause. Along the philosophical dimension, he identifies modernity with Descartes (he of “I think, therefore I am” fame, and Cartesian mind-body dualism). The assumptions made by Descartes – that the mental and physical were two different substances, that a ‘pure’ (disembodied) rational mind could observe from ‘outside’ as it were, the notion of Absolute truth, etc. defined the modern era.

Despite his argument that one could trace multiple valid outlines for what is the ‘modern’ (for example, one could use the appearance of the modern nation-state in the 16th century, or the French Revolution in the 18th, etc.), his own choice of definition seems particularly potent because these scientific and philosophical viewpoints are arguably the “base” on which the Enlightenment grew. By framing the modern, he also ends up defining the ‘post-modern,’ which is not some ‘new philosophy’ but a loose association of discourses that are in fact embedded in modernism and ultimately mere reactions to its excesses, especially its claims to absolute knowledge. Postmodernism, taking modernism as its base, does not truly progress beyond it but merely modifies it. But how to move beyond?

Here he turns to the ‘pre-modern’ mindset of the 15th and 16th century humanists. The imagehere is not of dark-age philosophers counting the angels that could dance on the head of a pin, but Renaissance humanists whose outlook was remarkably cosmopolitan and absolutely more open-minded than that of the modernists of the following centuries. The common narrative of pre-Enlightenment Europe being in an ignorant, superstitious dark age is really a myth created to reinforce the assumptions of modernity, and handily skips the open-minded humanism of the Renaissance which doesn’t ‘go’ with the story of progress from dark ages to enlightenment. Questions which are only now being raised in the postmodern era (for example, interrogating whose system of thought is being elevated as an example of the rational) came quite naturally to people of the 1500s like Montaigne. Toulmin notes that the medieval ecclesiasticism and church dogmatism had given way at this point to a more tolerant humanism, with classical Greek and Latin texts being widely available to lay readers across the continent by this time. Natural skepticism was seen as a check to human hubris, and in this relatively wealthy and peaceful Europe of the 1500s, the differences between religions, nations and people were seen as part of the richness of the world and not cause for alarm.

And then Henri the IV was killed. This one assassination destroyed a delicate balance the resulting political ambiguity led to decades of war (the Thirty Years War, they called it). In the aftermath of this horrific time, the 17th century saw a counter-Renaissance where science, like religion and politics, became more dogmatic and rigid. Ambiguity was out, and certainty was in. Battle lines were drawn and rationality became a proxy for legitimacy, a weapon to prove who was right. It is against this backdrop of chaos that rationality emerges as an appealing matrix to facilitate the reintegration of Europe. The treaty of Westphalia that ended the war also ended the feudal system and saw the development of the modern state, ushering Europe into an age where they thought they were right about absolutely everything.

Here, Toulmin really ties together the worldview of modernism with the political structures it emerges from and reinforces. Nation states (and later capitalism) would benefit from the ‘rational matrix’ that defines truth according to a narrow set of known and knowable quantities, and also posits the world to be in a stable order ordained by God (the motion of the spheres), with natural hierarchy and concentricity that seemed to echo the order of relations between the center (Sovereign) and successive spheres of power. Later the crystalline spheres of Newton gave way to social Darwinism, and the logic of the invisible hand of the market but the notions were the same: the oppression of society is rooted in absolute truths that are logical, unavoidable, and were totally not decided by people maintaining a position of social power. Honest! The idealization of the rational and objective and depreciation of the emotional, relational and subjective are the root of the solipsism, alienation and narcissism that we identify with the ‘modern’ condition. The roots go way back.

So how do we progress beyond it? Well, the good news is we already are. The artificial barriers between humanity and nature, world and mind have been in a long process of breaking down. He points to the emergence of the novel as helping restore emotion to the field of respectable discourse. The emergency of psychology (here he points to Freud and then many others followed) started what was seen as a change in human nature. Already the logical positivism of the first half of the 20th century seems like a bad dream. Finally, postmodern discussions on the limits of rationality point to the end of the modern.

Some people’s desire to do away with the ills of modernism and ‘clean the slate’ with some new “post”-post modern mode of thought is, he argues, itself a display of a modernist taste for the absolute. You’re searching for some universal baseline for thought when the lesson to be learned is precisely that there is none. Instead, the project he envisions is a reform which re-incorporates the very humanism that was ejected in the 17th century. Instead of rejection of modernism, it functions as a “yes, and…”

For example, ethical concerns previously divorced from science should be folded back into the scientific debate. He cites nuclear science (e.g., non-proliferation efforts) as an example, but this certainly applies just as much to genetic engineering. Rhetoric and narrative are also resurgent, instead of abstract explanation. Alongside that is what is called casuistry – that is, arguing based on specific cases rather than abstract principles (think case law). These modes of thought will grow, he argues, and allow us a more flexible worldview that will face the future. What the present world requires is diversity and adaptability instead of the uniformity and stability 17th century Europe craved.

What he’s ultimately here to say is that you can’t abstract knowledge away from the situations and practices that produce it, and in this book he is attempting to ‘re-situate’ our knowledge of modernity itself, giving us a way of seeing the current era through the lens of the past, and seeing the connection between the philosophical, the scientific and the political. It is a revolutionary sort of book with a very quiet and unassuming style, but the ideas it puts forth will stick with you.

Read it!