How to be in the world? On experiences of being human

All unidentified page references in my text are to this translation.Google Scholar

“Beings” may well, of course, be a misprint, but that wouldn’t affect my point.Google Scholar

Shigehisa Kuriyama,The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone, 1999), 157, 123.Google Scholar

Especially in the English-speaking world the thought that ethics and consequent practice have their history has been made central above all by Alasdair C. MacIntyre,After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). In very different ways, thinkers like Charles Taylor and bernard Williams have followed this path, to draw, like MaiIntyre, conclusions for ethical practice now. Brague’s work is, rather, a kind of archeology. This is not to say Brague ignores implications for the present, raising some of them in the first two and last two pages of his final chapter (217–18, 227–8), but this closing chapter is really the “end” of an archeology of philosophers’ thinking about human ethical experience in the world.Google Scholar

Jacob Burckhardt,Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch (Basel: Schweighäuser, 1860);The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore, 2 vols. (New York: Harper, 1958) (from the 15th German ed.:Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch, ed. W. Goetz [Leipzig: Kröner, 1926]).—Charles Edward Trinkaus,In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).— Alexandre Koyré,From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957).—Michel Blay,Les raisons de l’infini: Du monde clos à l’univers mathématique (Paris: Gallimard, 1993);Reasoning with the Infinite: From the Closed World to the Mathematical Universe, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).—Ferdinand Tönnies,Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Abhandlung des Communismus und des Socialismus als empirischer Culturformen (Leipzig: Fues, 1887), since 2nd ed. (Berlin: Curtius, 1912) with the subtitleGrundbegriffe der reinen Soziologie; Fundamental Concepts of Sociology (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft), trans. and suppl. Charles P. Loomis (New York, Cincinnati, etc.: American Book Company, 1940), thenCommunity and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft), trans. and ed. Charles P. Loomis (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1957; rpt. New York: Harper & Row, 1963).—Max Weber,Wissenschaft als Beruf, Geistige Arbeit als Beruf 2 (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1919), rpt. in: Weber,Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, 6th ed., ed. Johannes Winkelmann (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1985), 582–613; “Science as a Vocation,” in:From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946; rpt. 1980) 129–56.Google Scholar

Rémi Brague,Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization, trans. Samuel Lester (South Bend, IN: St. Augustinés Press, 2002), 4. This work was first published asEurope, la voie romaine (Paris: Critérion, 1992), and has had at least two French editions since (1993, 1999) as well as translations into at least fifteen languages. Its popularity may owe not a little to the fact that whatever the originality of its thesis about Europe (that its uniqueness comes from its Latinity and its welcome of its derivativeness from that culture even as it seeks its own originality), it assumes familiar foundations. Brague builds a concept of Europe from its unstable history, even as he sets it on “commonsense”, “stable” concepts of man, virtue, science, nature, etc.Google Scholar

Peter F. Strawson,Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959), 10.Google Scholar

Brague,Eccentric Culture,, 15Google Scholar

Timothy J. Reiss,Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); for the overall argument, 1–25, for a brief statement akin to this one, 16. The arguments of this book lie behind many of my remarks on Brague’s very fine work and my overall argument here.Google Scholar

Given the importance I ascribe to this passage for my argument and the implications I suggest it has for Brague’s, I give here the French original, to which, however, the English is entirely faithful (save for the imperfect-tense verbs of the first sentence, which signal Brague as talking of past experience within a nature that in itself is always the same): “La nature qui déterminait l’éthique était bien ce que l’on entend habituellement par «la nature», à savoir l’ensemble des choses que l’homme ne produit pas (par sa poièsis),qu’il ne «fait» pas non plus (par sa praxis),mais qui sont là d’elle-mêmes. Cette nature est par suite l’objet d’un rapport purement passif, celui qui est de mise lorsqu’un objet se donne à l’observation. Mais la nature ainsi comprise n’a pour nous aucun rapport avec l’éthique. Ou si elle en a un, c’est, à la rigueur, à titre de domaine d’application parmi d’autres. Elle vient même après le domaine principal de l’agir moral, qui est, bien entendu, les relations inter-humaines. Pour nos ancêtres, en revanche, l’homme pouvait-voire devait-emprunter le critère de son action à la nature. La nature était alors source de moralité” (Sagesse 136–7).Google Scholar

I take the next five paragraphs, often much adjusted, from the Introduction toMirages (mainly 2–3 and 23).Google Scholar

Mirages several times describes paintings, statues, or engravings that seem to manifest such an experience, but the exploration really requires a complete art-historical analysis.Google Scholar

Charles Taylor,Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 124.Google Scholar

MacIntyre,After Virtue, 33.Google Scholar

MacIntyre,After Virtue, 58–9.Google Scholar

Aron Iakovlevich Gurevich,The Origins of European Individualism, trans. Katharine Judelson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 204.Google Scholar