Feelings and Modernity
An insight from Dallas Willard’s Renovation of the Heart on Modernity and feelings. Feelings, by the way, can also be called ‘passions’. That word is often used when referring to this subject in Ancient Greek philosophy and other philosophy such as that of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher and historian David Hume.
David Hume notoriously claimed that ‘reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions’. He meant by that, at least partly, that reason is the not the governing force in our lives but that even our reason is ultimately driven by passion and desire. The reasons that we have for things are therefore servants of passion. We imagine reasons for passions in order to justify the former. And that, so he says, is how things “ought” to be.
Dallas Willard makes an interesting connection between this observation and the “life form” that we live under which is called “Modernity”.
There are various ways of understanding what Modernity, in this technical sense is, but here are a couple of points:
Modernity sees the modern age as a break from the past order which was characterised by blind obedience to religious authority, irrationality, and superstition. These authorities are seen as limitations to individual liberty.
Modernity involves belief in societal progress. This includes technological and scientific progress, but moral progress too.
Modernity places great value in the notion of human rationality and scientific understanding to the extent that science is often seen as a replacement for Christianity or for “religion” more generally.
It is in relationship to the first of those points that Willard’s observation comes: Modernity constitutes a complete break from the past, which is thought to be restrictive and diminishing to the individual.
And as a result of this, ‘revered ritual and personal relations do not smoothly govern life, because human solidarity (in family, neighbourhood, school, workplace, church) has been pulverised. There are few things of equal significant to this fact for serious Christians to understand today’ (Willard, Renovation of the Heart, pp.128-129).
He goes on to contrast this with the experience of Leo Tolstoy, who became disillusioned with his life of mixing with wealthy, upper-class Russians and who, instead, threw his lot in with that of some Russian peasants. Tolstoy came to understand that these peasants had not had their identities liquidated in the acid of Modernity: ‘They had solid traditions of faith and community that provided a ritual form of life - and of death’ (Willard, Ibid., p.129).
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