Abstract
A stationary eddy that constantly re-forms in the riverbed of the evolution of Western normative institutions, Legal Critique dates back, beyond modernity, to the beginning of the so-called Common Era. But critique also shapes the historical review of earlier phases of this evolution, and this not only as a method of the examination of sources, but also as a transferential displacement that tends to project into history the divides and aporias which define a present political situation. Unsurprisingly, this proceeding betrays more about current conceptions than it reveals about those of the past. The fate of the philosophical topic of immanence and transcendence and that of the proto-modern politics inaugurated by the distinction of God’s absolute versus ordered power offer a significant case in point. Certain critical orientations find in the long and complex history of these divides merely their own anticipated echo. Yet, the split between the adepts of an Aristotelian universe rooted in the being of the good and the followers of Spinoza, accustomed to absolute power and immanent causality, resists such simplifications and warrants a new examination.
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Notes
While the first answer is widely shared, at least as some form of a compulsory working hypothesis, by most diverse schools of thought, the second one underlies the work of one thinker of Western legal evolution, Pierre Legendre, whose reluctance to concede Western culture an exceptional standing both in terms of justifiability and of function, is unfolded throughout his oeuvre. See for instance Legendre (2004).
The divide is most concisely expressed in the enlightening formulation of William Maitland’s Inaugural from 1888: ‘The lawyer must be orthodox otherwise he is no lawyer; an orthodox history seems to me a contradiction in terms’. See Maitland (1911).
On the genealogy of Christianity’s claim to be more than a religion, see Margel (2005).
Cf., for an exemplary study of the normative/historical tension at work between religion and religious sciences, Smith (1990).
The contamination of universal values and norms with their Western context of origin can give rise to diverse forms of shame, such as (1) about the Western self-importance and arrogance manifested in the fact of claiming a privileged role with respect to norms and values now universally shared; (2) about the appalling fashion in which the Western-Christian tradition and its personnel have often used their unequalled power in dealing with outsiders; (3) about the hope, maintained and relentlessly reproduced, that, one day, every individual on earth will be something like an enlightened or disenfranchised, potentially atheist Christian—a zero-degree Christian benefitting from a modicum of New Testament discreetly added, if unbeknownst, as some form of global-civil meta-religion, to each particular religion (or ‘cult’).
Material circumstances of life were, on the contrary, of very comfortable standards for instance in the case of the two mendicant founders Saint Dominic, 1170–1222, and Saint Francis, 1182–1226.
Francis’ calling for humbleness led him time and again to reject, in a spirit of unforgiving self-effacement, the notion of a ‘rule’, setting himself off from the earlier monastic founders Saint Benedict, Augustin and, closer to himself, Bernard. See the biographical Speculum perfectionis, ch. 68, translated in Sherley-Price (1959, p. 85).
See for economic history, Todeschini (2004).
They have also given rise to more anecdotic vestigies, such as the insult ‘dunce’ which, today out of fashion, has been popular for long—eighteenth century writer Alexander Pope still devotes to it his Dunciad, an anonymously published satire on contemporaries—after having been instrumental for the slowly upbuilding attack of humanism against scholastic philosophy (a long-lasting, powerful and violent attack which included book autodafés). Yet, if formed after Duns Scotus’s name, the insult applied only to his later followers. For more anecdotes on the scotism/humanism relationship, cf. Margolin, ‘Duns Scot et Erasme’, in Bérubé (1978, pp. 89–112).
Ordinatio, II, 3. Cf. Virno ‘Les anges et le general intellect: l’individuation chez Duns Scot et Gilbert Simondon’, quoted after the French tr. in Multitudes 18 (Fall 2004, 33–45). For the relevant texts in Duns, cf. the volume by Sondag (1992).
Virno, op.cit., 38; Duns Scotus, Ordinatio II, 3, §8; p.89.
See Samuel Pufendorf, letters 137 (19.6.1688) and 138 (17.7.1688) to Christian Thomasius [Pufendorf (1996, pp. 193–198)]. The ‘shameless atheist’-trope is endemic throughout Spinoza’s lifetime and for a further century, with numberless occurrences especially if one looks into the writing of professional academics (Spinoza himself never considered the possibility of becoming a professional academic, cf. his letter 47). Amusingly, Pufendorf also remembers: ‘I have known Spinosam. This was a frivolous bird !, deorum hominumque irrisor [a mocker of gods and humans]’. And he mentions a curious detail, not found in other sources, that sheds a uniquely lively light on what might be understood—although other interpretation are possible, too—as the philosopher’s inscrutable humour. Spinoza, Pufendorf tells his correspondent (ibid.,195), ‘had the New Testament and the Coran bound together in one single volume’. This ‘practical joke’ that Spinoza plays on the two competing religions, implying the cruel subjection of their respective Holy Texts to a mutual exposure which, given the reciprocated aversion that animates both, must be understood as a metaphorical plight of mutual wounding and hurting. It ias indeed dificult not to associate another anecdote, this one known to all Spinozians, on the philosopher’s enjoyment when observing fights between spiders…
For Descartes, God can create a triangle the sum of whose angles amount to more or to less than 180 degrees: ‘To hold that mathematical truths are independent from God is like speaking of Him as if He were some Jupiter or Saturn, and subjecting Him to the Styx and the destinies. […] It is God who poses these laws in Nature, in exactly the same way in which a King decrees the laws of his kingdom.’ (Letter to Mersenne, April 15, 1630); Adam and Tannery (1897, p. 149).
Jean-Paul Sartre praises the God of Descartes as ‘the freest God fabricated by the human mind, the only creator-God […], not subject either to principles—be it that of identity—or to a sovereign Good of which he would then be merely the enforcer’. Sartre (1975, pp. 382–408 (403)) ; Engl. trans., ‘Cartesian Freedom’, in Sartre (1955, pp. 289–308 (305)).
Cf. his Summa contra gentiles Aquinas (1264), II, 25, §1022; also qu.25 of the First Part of his Summa Theologiae (Aquinas 1274). See de Muralt (1995, p. 144ff.). Spinoza, in order to reach this same result, will rely, again and again, upon one of his most stunning philosophico-theological manœuvers: the argument that there is no difference between claiming that God has decreed that a triangle’s three angles equal two right angles, and claiming that God understands that a triangle’s three angles equal two right angles.
The theme of God’s absolute power is, together with its biblical references, expounded by eleventh century Saint Peter Damian and restrictively commented upon by Peter Abelard (earlier twelfth century). Abelard initiates a long line of authors who, moving in the opposite direction to the one pushed to its extreme by Duns and Ockham (and, in their wake, seventeenth century classical philosophers), incurred a censure for trying to ‘limit’ divine power.
Edited and printed in no less than four different editions (some still in the making), Duns Scotus’s work takes, in its most complete version, the in-folio edition published in the Vatican, copiously more than two meters of shelf space. It is composed to its largest part of the Lectura, and abreviated version of an Oxford course, the Reportata Parisiensia, established by his Parisian students, and the uncompleted Ordinatio—three successively written series of commentaries to one single work, Peter Lombard’s mid-twelth century Four Books of Sentences. This is a work which, commented upon until the end of the fifteenth century by at least 1,400 authors, has provided the scholars of the Middle Ages with the general theme serving a vast and increasingly unfettered doctrinal gamut of variations. Its extreme importance is often underrated. Although, to be sure, not by everyone. Heidegger for instance writes: ‘Not only has the hermeneutical structure of the commentary to the Sentences of Pierre Lombard—which until Luther governs the effective becoming of theology—remained unanalysed, but the possibilities of its questioning and its evaluation that would be required for this are still entirely lacking’ [Heidegger (2001, p. 21)].
See Traversino (2009) specifically on the cosmological implications unfolded, two centuries after Scotus, in Giordano Bruno’s heterodox views.
In our days, this neutering agenda in Spinoza is re-enacted by Niklas Luhmann’s move to reconceive society as the sum-total of communications. Just as, for Spinoza, drives and fears, virtues and vices, duties, preoccupations or prohibitions cannot be said to belong to God, people, with their whims and consciousnesses, are for Luhmann not part of society. In his last work, the 1997 German-published and still untranslated 1,150 page study Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (‘Society’s society’), Luhmann (Luhmann 1997) acknowledges this debt. The motto of this book, taken from Spinoza’s Ethics (I, Axiom 2), says : ‘That which cannot be conceived through anything else, must be conceived through itself.’
Among the claims censored were: ‘That God could not create several different universes’; ‘That God could not move the heaven by a rectilinear movement, as this would create empty space’, cf. Denifle and Châtelain (1885), art. 34 et 49, 545. See also Grant (1979, pp. 211–244), and for a summary of the discussion, König-Pralong (2005).
Cf. Marmursztejn and Piron (2004). Let me note that it would obviously be wrong to overemphasize a passage that draws the powerful impact it exerts on its current reader largely from the light thrown upon it by an event of the twentieth century. Whether, today, in the context of an analysis of immanence and absoluteness, this aspect of Duns Scotus would not best be forgotten, is almost a legitimate question. But while the hypersignificance that the text acquires post festum by the simple fact of being read after Auschwitz needs to be flagged out, its effects bracketted, and any ‘symptomatological’ reading discarded, what Duns’s votum relating to Pagans and Jews throws a compelling light upon is the history and political structure of evangelic militancy. In no case the passage should be allowed to undergo a form of ‘sequestration’ in its own turn.
Duns Scotus (1988), 529. Spinoza’s converging and equally absolutist view—‘we do not desire something because we say it is good, we say something is good because we desire it’—is in the scholium to Ethics, III, prop.9. Both aim at Aristotle’s claim: ‘We desire the good because it appears to us as being good, and not: it appears to us as being good because we desire it’ (Met. 1072a29).
Ockham (1985, p. 352).
Discussed in de Muralt (1991, p. 240ff.)
Boulnois (1994, pp. 57, 279ff.), interpreting Ordinatio I, d.44.
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Schütz, A. A Quandary Concerning Immanence. Law Critique 22, 189–203 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-011-9088-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-011-9088-z