Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 7 (XXIII)

A Quibble

Lear continues his criticism of subjectivism, now extended to embrace the central tendency of modern philosophy. For such a view is implicit in all attempts to know the “self” in abstraction from its history and, by extension, the “world” in which that history unfolds.

Hegel famously critiques this subjectivistic tendency in Descartes, Locke, and Kant. Each essentially supposes — as an unexamined “presupposition” — that the faculty-of-knowing, cognition, may somehow be examined, viz. “known,” in advance of knowing-proper — that is, of the nominal “objects” both of metaphysics and natural science. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit suggests that this subjectivistic standpoint has a particular history, one that sprung logically out of the collapse of other standpoints. Moreover, Hegel claims this development of the soul’s “structure” is inseparable from a parallel development of the wider social world.

Now, my friendly criticism of Lear’s book thus far is that it scants this history-of-a-world as relevant to his “history-of-an-I.” One would not imagine, from his language of “good-enough” environments — ones that either do or do not provision the conditions of I-hood, that are either lovable or not — that, in the West, the structure of the self has radically changed since Ancient Greece. (A commonplace in the modern humanities is that the “individual” — its peculiar reflective, conscientious structure — really appeared only in the modern era.)

To be sure, Lear’s account is not obviously incompatible with this enlargement of focus. He might argue, as he periodically hints in the Introduction and this concluding chapter, that it is only in the modern ear that

  1. I’s emerge that are explicitly committed to the values of self-reflection, individuation, and free self-determination, precisely because it is only now that

  2. a sufficiently loving and lovable, “good enough” world (on a culture-wide scale) has crystallized to condition this “I”

In other words, only now is there a social-cultural-political “environment” offering this range of lovable identificatory objects (values, traits, capacities, myths…), and not merely “parental figures,” who are often enough simply ambassadors of this wider environment, unreflectively transmitting its substance to the next generation.

Hence we might begin with an “I-history,” both empirical and transcendental: both the development of a particular, concrete person, from infancy to adulthood, in a particularly family, in a particular time and place; and the universal structure of the “I,” construed (in Hegel’s words) as a shape-of-consciousness. But we would then “restore” this I-history to its proper context of “world-history” — again, at empirical and transcendental levels of analysis.

If Lear is prepared to go this far, however, I would also ask that he correct another impression his book has made on this reader: namely that the “histories” in question are to be plotted on some kind of a continuum (even a quantitative one — Lear’s ostensible opponent!) running from lesser to greater lovability, from worse to “good-enough” to best worlds. For this conception blurs and weakens the “logic” of these histories and the more differentiated transformations undergone by both “I” and “world.”

Naturally, Lear might complain that I am unfairly critiquing him for not being Hegel — for failing to develop his argument in directions that are far removed from his task in this book. But my point is that Lear’s book itself, implicitly, already gestures in just these directions, without, however, acknowledging the implications.

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Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 7 (XXIV)

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Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 7 (XXII)