Philosophy and Modern Crises

IBNA Religion and Thought Service – Mohammad Hassan Abolhasani; Behnam Joudi, translator and researcher of political philosophy, has recently undertaken the writing and publication of a collection titled ‘Crisis in European Consciousness’. He had previously translated works in the field of conceptual history and political thought into Persian and is now engaged in an ambitious project of authorship.

The ‘Crisis Thought’ series, with the subtitle ‘New Political Thought and Crisis Thought’, provides a comprehensive historical account of the evolution of modern philosophical and political concepts in Europe. In this book, we learn under what conditions key points and turning points of European thought occurred, how modern political thought evolved in Europe, and how the political and philosophical language we inherited emerged. The temporal scope examined in this collection is broad, encompassing the origins of modernity. Volume one covers 1500 to 1680 AD, and volume two covers 1680 to 1831 AD. At the beginning of both volumes, highly cited and classical sources are introduced whose discussions are present throughout the book; these texts are often important and indicate the author’s good familiarity: ‘The Legitimacy of the Modern Age’ by Hans Blumenberg, ‘Critique and Crisis (Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society)’ by Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Leviathan’ by Thomas Hobbes, ‘Theological-Political Treatise’ by Spinoza, ‘The Foundations of Modern Political Thought’ by Quentin Skinner, ‘The Debate of Old and New in Theology and Politics’ by Seyyed Javad Tabatabai, ‘The Myth of the State’ by Ernst Cassirer, ‘Patriarcha or The Natural Power of Kings’ by Robert Filmer, and other similar books.

Volume one of this collection addresses the crisis of European thought in the years 1500 to 1680. The contents of this volume are organized into six chapters: 1) Crisis in Pre-Modern Consciousness, 2) Crisis in Tradition (1100-1500 AD), 3) Crisis of Tradition and Renaissance (1500-1600 AD), 4) Machiavelli, Crisis, and a Plan for the Foundation of the National State, 5) New Consciousness, Crisis, and Novel Ideas, 6) The Dialectic of Security and Freedom: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Baruch Spinoza. The views of various authors are present in the book: Leo Strauss, Javad Tabatabai, Ernst Cassirer, Reinhart Koselleck, and perhaps most importantly, Hans Blumenberg. The author has placed a special emphasis on the crisis of thought and explains the aspects of this term in the introduction. ‘Various theories and ideas have been put forward to explain the emergence and evolution of political thought, especially new political thought. In a spectrum of these theories, ‘crisis’ is at the heart of the discussions. Of course, this should not be considered unusual or strange, as human thought and life always have a direct connection with crisis, and European man is no exception to this rule.’ Citing Thomas Spragens, the author enumerates major crises in Western thought: ‘The crisis of Athenian justice to which Plato reacted; the crisis of stability concerning political order that Machiavelli proposes; the crisis of security to which Hobbes’s Leviathan is the answer; the crisis of legitimacy for which Locke proposes liberal government; the crisis of the old regime that Enlightenment thinkers pondered; the crisis of moral inequality for which Rousseau proposed the necessity of using the general will; the crisis of political community for which Edmund Burke put forward the originality of tradition, and finally the crisis of capitalism for which Marx sought the real process of movement in history towards the establishment of a society free from the exercise of power.’ According to the author, crises have a decisive impact on the formation of ideas. The author also refers to the issue of secularization, around which discussions have taken shape in Iran; he points out that understanding the process of modernity is impossible without recognizing the transformations that occurred in the late Middle Ages and Christian thought. Understanding the modern era requires understanding the crises and issues that thinkers grappled with, and this in turn requires understanding the late Middle Ages as the root or background of those issues. Therefore, to understand modern thought, we must also understand the issues and perspectives of medieval Europe. In common understanding, European history is divided into three ancient, medieval, and modern parts, but today there are efforts to refine this classification or to remove and revise some of its parts, and the author has taken this into account. Citing the historian Jacques Le Goff, he notes that different periods of European history cannot be viewed as isolated and independent, and their internal connections must be expressed. In writing the book, the author has tried to avoid the approach of ‘reverse orientalism’ and ‘occidentalism’ and instead prepare an essay centered on the concept of crisis and change in modern political thought. He begins his narrative from the end of the Middle Ages, i.e., in the 12th to 15th centuries, which are considered the threshold of the modern era.

The author states that crisis has been a modern and fundamental concept but originates from Greek and has spread throughout all European languages. In Greek, this word means ‘to separate’, ‘to choose’, ‘to judge’, ‘to decide’, and a method or tool for ‘self-examination’ or ‘struggle’.

Volume two of this collection covers the period from 1680 to 1831 AD and examines the challenges philosophers faced with the crises and philosophical issues of this era. This volume focuses on two philosophical movements or currents: ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘German Idealism’. The first section, titled ‘Enlightenment and the Dispute over Tradition’, includes four chapters: 1) Continuation of the Dispute over Tradition and the Emergence of Enlightenment Thought, 2) Evolution of the Bourgeois World: The Modern Subject and the Public Sphere, 3) Crisis Consciousness of the Enlightenment: A Horizon Towards the Future, 4) Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Crisis and Freedom. The second section, titled ‘Crisis of Enlightenment and the Emergence of German Idealism: Philosophy of Freedom’, includes two chapters: 1) Disputes about the Autonomy of the Subject in the Bourgeois Public Sphere, 2) Crisis of Enlightenment and German Idealism.

From the very beginning of its emergence in the late 17th century, there have been disagreements regarding the definition of the Enlightenment. This movement has had passionate proponents and staunch opponents. The history of studies related to the Enlightenment has passed through four time periods: In the first phase, many fundamental discussions of the Enlightenment were raised by the pioneers of this movement; in the second phase, which lasted up to three generations after the 1789 Revolution, conservative and critical reactions to the Enlightenment emerged; in the third phase, after 1870, with the popularization of politics, interest in the Enlightenment was revived; and finally, in the 20th century, the Enlightenment was seriously re-examined and studied, especially with the rise of fascism and in combination with post-structuralist, feminist, and other perspectives. In the 20th century, the Enlightenment/Anti-Enlightenment dichotomy clearly emerged in various studies. One of those who defended the Enlightenment was Ernst Cassirer, who wrote ‘The Philosophy of the Enlightenment’ (1932). Also, the first serious and independent study on the opponents of the Enlightenment is likely the essay ‘The Anti-Enlightenment’ (1972) by Isaiah Berlin. According to Berlin, the Anti-Enlightenment is as old as the Enlightenment itself. What provoked the anti-Enlightenment thinkers were the ideas of the Enlightenment based on the autonomy of reason and the superiority of natural science methods as the sole reliable method of knowledge. According to Berlin, a kind of ‘relativism’ is prominent in anti-Enlightenment thought, rooted in the ancient world. Sternhell, in his book ‘The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition’ (2010), also expresses the view that from the 18th century, we are faced with two modernities: the first modernity is called Enlightenment, and the second is called Anti-Enlightenment.

Behnam Joudi