A Book Review… The Dominion Of Man Over The Rest Of Things
By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Brague, Rémi. The Legitimacy of the Human. Translated by Paul Seaton. South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine Press, 2018. xiii + 177 pp.
The present work is based on a series of lectures given at the Catholic University of Louvain when Rémi Brague occupied the Cardinal Mercier Chair in 2011. Reflections initiated there were further developed in two subsequent works, Eccentric Culture (2012) and On the God of the Christians and One or Two Others (2013).
The focus of these works is the character of European civilization, its formation, development, and challenges.
“European culture,” Brague declares, “was formed by Christianity, the religion of the Creative Logos.”
Today that culture is on the defensive. What took centuries to construct has taken only a few decades to contest. Given the present schizophrenia that seems to characterize European intellectuals, Brague finds it necessary to state what and who man is, and his difference from the rest of nature.
Man is understood as constituting a species distinguished from others by certain properties he possesses exclusively. He is a rational animal, a social animal, a political animal, superior to all other living beings. He is cognizant of the intention of nature. “Nature may be said to glorify herself in him.” His status as the greatest success of nature assures him proximity to the divine. Man realizes his superiority in his conquest of nature. Francis Bacon spoke of “the kingdom of man,” and René Descartes of “the master and possessor of nature.”
But the dominion of man over the rest of things has not gone without saying. In antiquity Brague finds Pythagoras and Porphyry promoting questionable accounts of the nature of man. Modern natural science similarly is often guilty of ignoring the unique status of the human being. Biologists have said that the human species is a deviation of nature — a faux pas, as Max Scheler put it. From that viewpoint the very existence of man is taken as a danger to other species.
Brague reminds his readers that those engaged in the natural sciences do not deal with the human as such. “The science of nature in its modern version is a dehumanizing authority.” We falsely expect the improvement of the human condition by means of a scientific increase in our knowledge of the nonhuman.
But in the modern study of nature one finds no trace of human values. Science refuses to answer the question posed by man, namely, the question of purpose or the final cause of nature and human nature. The scientist is forbidden to ask why? He is confined to description and the formulation of laws. “The motto of modern science is fundamentally the same rule that governs the conduct of inferiors vis-à-vis their superiors in the army: no need to understand.” As needed, the scientist may seek the complicitous aid of philosophers, who will explain that those “why” questions are meaningless.
We turn to the “humanities” for correction, but more and more the humanities are eclipsed by the exact sciences. The term “humanities” itself dates to antiquity. Ever since Cicero, the type of learning he called humaniora has entailed the study of good authors. “The classics,” we call them now. They were thought to render one who read them more human. We speak of Renaissance humanism. In the nineteenth century, the Weimar authors Goethe and Schiller came to be regarded as the foremost representatives of humanism.
Following the order of his Mercier lectures, Brague devotes a chapter to the thought of Alexander Blok (1880-1921), the Russian poet. Another chapter is devoted to Michel Foucault (1926-1984), the French philosopher and historian, and yet another to Hans Blumenberg’s book, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.
“Modern times” is understood by Brague as a rupture vis-à-vis the preceding period, not simply as something that is more recent than that which preceded it, but as something that “tore itself decisively away from a past in order to establish itself in its own and definitive reality.” The transition to modernity was not simply undergone but consciously willed. To be modern, Brague insists, is to want to be modern and to know one’s self as such. The passage to modernity is a choice — a repudiation of the past — a rupture in the unbroken continuity of history.
If we attempt to define it, its description would contain reference to the conquest of nature, application of mathematical physics, and technology that gives control. But one cannot live by modern science alone.
A return to the perspective of the Middle Ages is inevitable. What sort of Middle Ages? Not one devoid of modern industrial achievements or devoid of contemporary medicine. Alfred Loisy is quoted as saying, “[Early Christians may have] expected the Kingdom of God but it was the Church that came.” The Middle Ages conceived of man as a creature of God. The subject of origins, says Brague, has to be raised anew. What or who made man? Who or what deserves to be called man’s creator?
Distinguishing between the idea of “creation” and “Creationism,” which rests on a naive reading of Genesis, Brague finds inspiration in the biblical narrative that tells us that God looked upon His creation and found that it was good — thus attesting to the value of what exists. The natural sciences may describe reality, but it is not theirs to say that it is good or bad.
Much of this perspective is affirmed in the May 2017 Paris Declaration, “A Europe We Can Believe In,” signed by thirteen prominent European intellectuals, including Rémi Brague, Pierre Manent, and Robert Spaemann, whose works have been reviewed within these pages.
