‘One Does Not Escape the Philosophy of History’: The Disenchantment of the World and the Nature of Man
By Stéphane Vibert
Image made using “Marcel Gauchet en février 2017,” by 13okouran under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
This contribution proposes to consider the reception of The Disenchantment of the World through the lens of the philosophy of history that the work implies, particularly via the tension between, on the one hand, the autonomy of modern political society as the opening of man to his historical truth and, on the other, the persistence of a social exteriority to itself—even if now represented in the immanent form of the state. To accept this second proposition is to question the persistence of a “holistic” dimension within modern societies, beyond the individualist doxa, and to attempt to discern in Gauchet’s work traces of a reflection on those “structural invariants” inherent in all human sociality—for example, through the understanding of contemporary ideological phenomena.
One of the most important themes raised in the reception of the monumental The Disenchantment of the World concerns the relationship between Marcel Gauchet’s “transcendental anthroposociology” and the philosophy of history as it is characteristically expressed in Hegel’s work. Despite the author’s constant denials and his firm rejection of the errors of a teleological perspective, critics from anthropological or theological backgrounds have repeatedly pointed out the presence, throughout the book, of more or less explicit assertions about the nature of liberal democratic modernity as a historical moment marking the beginning of humanity’s self-fulfillment—discovering truth through and about itself—an accomplishment marked by the passage from heteronomy to autonomy.
Yet today, as Gauchet’s more recent works have become increasingly severe and short-term pessimistic about the fundamentally antidemocratic evolution of liberal societies, he is now more often accused of adopting a reactionary stance that calls into question the gains of the “age of identities,” characterized by multiculturalism and pluralism. It is clear, however, that Gauchet’s thinking seeks to clarify and reinterpret, at its own level, the dynamics of “democracy against itself,” taking a stand in favor of the political and collective dimension increasingly overshadowed by identity-based and corporatist demands born of expanding juridical and economic logics.
Gauchet’s thinking seeks to clarify and reinterpret, at its own level, the dynamics of “democracy against itself.”
Nonetheless, Gauchet’s descriptions and value judgments concerning the tensions and contradictions of the contemporary period prompt a closer reexamination of his analysis of modernity—an analysis framed only in contrast to the religious world, which provides a powerful counterpoint and is grounded in a universal view of the human condition. The assessment of modernity’s possible trajectories—and the normative positions that aim to guide it—cannot be separated from the “dimensions of invisibility and otherness that are constitutively within us,” in other words, from the recognition of the limits to any radical will of self-institution.
This recognition of limits—expressed in various terms with a shared family resemblance: “otherness,” “exteriority,” “the transcendent,” or “the absolute”—seeks to describe realities that, far from vanishing with the full departure of Western societies from the religious world, persist in renewed and transformed forms due to their anthropological grounding. These persistences play out on registers that may be antinomic. Indeed, the preservation of “regulatory otherness” in modernity manifests itself not only through institutional forms seen as highly positive in the genesis of political modernity—particularly because they support the expansion of autonomy (the nation-state seems, for Gauchet, to be the paradigmatic example of this first modern moment, during which vectors of immanence take on the appearance of transcendence, especially in how subjects perceive authority)—but also through the emergence of new figures seen as fostering a kind of “dispossession” (e.g., the growing hegemony of juridical and economic regulation, which disempowers collective agency).
Thus, the motley variety of these forms of otherness—supposedly evidencing a “continuity with the humanity of the age of religions”—must be delimited and ordered in order to distinguish, where possible, functions that truly stem from a “shared anthropological core” from those that abusively claim the status of naturalness and exteriority. It is also necessary to differentiate or connect, or both, the “experiences of the other, the invisible, and the one” that shape individual existence, on the one hand, and that underpin the cultural and sociopolitical foundations structuring the very formation of individuality, on the other.
While some critical analyses (see Section I below) interpret Gauchet’s thesis as a global narrative of “oriented historical development,” rationalist and progressivist, whose truth can only be perceived and articulated once the full trajectory is complete, Gauchet explicitly rejects this comparison—though he acknowledges the merit it may have: “I am (…) convinced that one cannot escape the philosophy of history: one either does it unknowingly or knowingly, that’s all, and in my humble opinion, it’s in our best interest to know which one we’re doing.” It is only in this very specific sense that Gauchet claims a relationship to a possible “philosophy of history.”
We are thus left to consider how Gauchet conceives of a philosophy of history while he rejects the speculative errors that marked its intellectual failure. He advances at least three fundamental arguments that allow his thesis to claim exemption—if not from the philosophy of history altogether, then at least from its teleological version:
First, Gauchet’s description of the religious modality of being-in-the-world as a coherent and consistent anthropological type, which—despite its lack of historicity—embodies an “existential” choice not confined to the archaic past but always present as a potential form of collective institution, even as we seem to move irreversibly away from it (Section II);
Second, his forceful rejection of the progressivist and teleological determinism associated with Hegelian-Marxist philosophies of history, in the name of the radical contingency that governs the adoption of major historical orientations—even when the logic of their emergence can be reconstructed in hindsight (Section III);
Third, this conception of history—one that gives room to novelty and creativity—can only truly emerge if it is subordinated to the transcendental dimension of Gauchet’s anthropological project, which posits a human nature and calls for a reexamination of the conditions of possibility for any human-social establishment, as well as the blind spots and one-sidedness inherent in its always-particular historical incarnations (Section IV).
The key concept in Gauchet’s position here is the notion of otherness, which expresses both a structural invariant and—through the diversity of its manifestations—the radical discontinuity that separates the religious universe from historical time (Section V). This exteriority thus becomes a pivotal notion for rigorously articulating anthropological permanence and historical creativity, and a fundamental modality of individual and collective existence—almost a universal, whether political, epistemological, aesthetic, or ethical—encouraging a rediscovery of “the constitutive nature of the political shaping of human communities.”
(I) The Accusation: A Rationalist and Finalist Philosophy of History?
Most critics of The Disenchantment of the World have placed the work in the wake of Hegelianism, reading in it a late version of the self-legitimation of liberal democratic modernity, which supposedly offers the key to the human adventure by opening the individual and collective subject to the truth of its condition as a transformative apprehension of the world. For the anthropologist Emmanuel Terray, Gauchet’s interpretation explicitly belongs to a “philosophy of history” by assigning humanity “a direction and a meaning.” For the theologian Paul Valadier, it draws its postulates from the “rationalist thought of identity,” reproducing the radical premises of Feuerbach concerning the reappropriation by religiously alienated man of his creative essence, and inscribing itself in Hegel’s philosophy of the “Same” through a linear and mechanistic reading of history.
While it is important to point out what these readings may involve in terms of misunderstanding, it is true that these assessments are not without foundation within Gauchet’s own writings. It does indeed seem possible to find in him traces of the assertion that the original Decision of humans in favor of religion results in a temporary renunciation of their very essence as historical beings. From the regime designated as “normal” for historicity to its perception as “the truth of man’s organization in what is most specific to it,” it is undeniably the case that the multimillennial religious moment of humanity could be interpreted unilaterally as a long blindness to itself, the mystery of religion being understood by the fact “that the human species, through a very remarkable difficulty in assuming what constituted it, entered history literally turning its back on itself, rigorously closing itself off from the data of its own nature, absolutely refusing the expression of its founding structures as a social species—a denial and rejection from which we are only just beginning to truly emerge.” Religion would thus be only an ideology, in the sense that it hides from actors the profound meaning of their existence in the terms of its generic grounding.
Against this theoretical possibility, Gauchet develops three main arguments to refute his belonging to a teleological philosophy of history.
(II) Religion as a Structurally Complete Mode of Being-in-the-World
Gauchet has never hesitated to repeat how much the influence of ethnology played a major role in the development of his thinking regarding the intrinsic coherence of traditional societies preceding the state, and thereby his conceptualization of historical evolution through the transition from religion to politics. The existence of these societies—not merely stateless but organized against the state (Clastres)—led Gauchet to evoke, always more or less explicitly, this “decision” or “choice” at the origin of the shaping of a religious universe, enigmatic in many respects, but indeed deriving from a true “sociological act” “for which no deterministic sequence can account”: the human species “opted for the religious path, it is in the process of renouncing it, it could have never taken it.”
The effect of this Decision proves to be an “instituted non-power,” which expresses, in a manner certainly unexpected for moderns, a reflexive capacity of the social regarding its own existence, in full freedom so to speak, without this resolution being able to be linked or reduced in any way to external conditions (biological or material), non-political, of the collective being-in-the-world. From the depths of history, humanity is indeed “always already engaged in highly elaborated systems of institutions and beliefs which can only be understood as materializations of a certain disposition of itself.” Gauchet moreover uses the term “unconscious intentionality” to emphasize that “religion is, in the strongest sense of the term, a fact of institution, a human-social stance of heteronomy”—an institutional stance which stems from an “unpremeditated choice” for which Gauchet would have acknowledged the conceptual lineage with Heidegger’s radical gift of Being, but which here tends rather to elevate the religious choice to the status of a paradigm of the freedom of human social establishment in relation to the biological or natural substrate that supports it, even if only to block the historicity potentials that begin to appear through this primordial negation of the given.
Gauchet uses the term “unconscious intentionality” to emphasize that “religion is, in the strongest sense of the term, a fact of institution, a human-social stance of heteronomy.”
For “nothing absolutely compelled the human species to enter history through the door of the denial of its power of history; nothing required that it tear itself from this, in part, through the appearance of the State, and once this crucial step was taken, nothing necessarily led it to switch entirely to the side of deliberate and reflective historical production—just as nothing absolutely prevents it from tomorrow returning to the obedience of the past and to submission to something higher than itself.” And Gauchet concludes: “These are two structurally equivalent systems of options, one of which I value more, but which must be described in their internal logic and completeness.”
This duality of collective orientation all the more strongly refutes the possibility of a teleological philosophy of history “in that there is not one history, we might say, but two histories, driven, from the same human elements, in two different directions.”
(III) The Rejection of Progressivist Determinism
In correlation with this first point, which tends to refute the irreversible linearity of historical evolution from one type of symbolic organization (religious) to another (political), Gauchet endeavors to highlight the absence of what is undoubtedly the most salient feature of philosophies of history: the very necessity of historical development according to an evolutionist and progressivist schema. Gauchet is entitled to assert that “the perspective adopted, insofar as it reasons in terms of the exceptionality of the modern experience, immediately stands in opposition to any idea of necessary development of the Hegelian-Marxist type”: “Not only am I not saying that ‘the disenchantment of the world’ is the meaning of history, but I am saying the opposite: it is the characteristic as singular as it is improbable of the world we live in.”
Thus, the disenchantment described by Gauchet is constructed in opposition to the Hegelian historicist option. The very concept of “disenchantment” is not a simple process of rationalization “involving the necessary advent (…) of humanity to the truth of its powers.” Likewise, the categories of “laicization” or “secularization,” when used to offer a spontaneous understanding of the process of exiting religion, prove to be sources of profound misunderstanding: “The historical process contains no goal toward which it would direct itself on its own and which would reveal itself from within. It is we who shape it, more or less successfully, from the outside and who subjectively assign it the values and goals toward which it is to tend. We have definitively left the Hegelian orbit.”
This resistance to being carried away by historicist drift does not, however, mean a rejection of the very project of intelligibility regarding the meaning of human history. It is thus necessary to reclaim the full and entire significance of the power of historicity, most intensely expressed by the modern experience, by detaching it from its theological anchoring, perceptible in the ambition of total reflexivity, which ends history at the very moment it unveils it.
(IV) A Transcendental Anthropology of ‘Human Nature’: Otherness to Oneself
If the discontinuity between religion and modernity proves insurmountable at the level of the inevitable choice of a mode of collective being, it nonetheless rests on various formal invariants and a transcendental necessity unchanged since the advent of human societies, leading Gauchet to assert that “Humanity, from the point of view of its ultimate values, lives in relative continuity with itself.” Religion and politics must ultimately be conceived as two fundamental institutional choices, two economies of being that embody two different ways of distributing the same constitutive elements and of responding to the same necessity, namely “(…) the enigmatic capacity to determine oneself in relation to an outside of oneself. A capacity that underlies both a phenomenon such as political power and an individual property such as consciousness.”
It is ultimately this elevation of otherness to oneself to the level of a transcendental condition of human experience—declinable in multiple, distinct but interdependent forms (political, ethical, psychological, aesthetic)—that constitutes for Gauchet the irreconcilable and definitive hiatus between his perspective and all philosophies of history, still marked by the religious-origin fascination with the ontological One. The exhaustion of the “secular religions” embodied by philosophies of history represents not the dissolution of modernity but its full realization, and Hegelianism is thereby radically deposed. Unambiguously, the full unfolding of this phase—an attempt to restore total possession of oneself by and through history—concluded in totalitarian and revolutionary madness, supposedly aimed at repairing the split within political communities caused by the externalization of states in relation to civil societies.
In the evolution Western societies have undergone over the past 30 years, what we are witnessing is far more a metamorphosis of ideologies than their disappearance. It is as “secular religions” that they wither and vanish, only to be recomposed through a deepening of historical consciousness and the mechanism of societies’ self-production, now seemingly impermeable to the narrative of Progress and of Humanity reconciled with itself. Hence, the emergence of a new ideological pathology, “a pathology of non-belonging” based on the appearance of “the figure of a pure individual, owing nothing to society, yet demanding everything from it.” Entry into a “market society” induces an “individualism of disconnection or disengagement” whereby individuals conceive themselves as prior and superior to the social bond that shapes them. Yet this individual of authenticity is “the first individual to live without knowing that he lives in society”, relying on a symbolic and cognitive rupture with the social whole, in favor of localized and instrumental connections aimed at allowing him to be a “self.”
In the evolution Western societies have undergone over the past 30 years, what we are witnessing is far more a metamorphosis of ideologies than their disappearance.
But what truly is the nature of this “immanent otherness” once it is irreversibly transported into the human world? If one defines otherness as that which always escapes, from a certain point of view, rational mastery by individuals or collectives, is there not in Gauchet’s thought an implicit distinction between its constitutive forms (as expressions of transcendental conditions of relation to self and world) and its pathological ones (as effects of modern man’s inability to accept his finitude), both incarnated in this unalterable dimension of human experience?
(V) Contemporary Forms of Otherness to Oneself, Individual and Collective
Gauchet’s wager is to account rationally for this human openness to a dimension that exceeds it, without stretching it metaphysically into an unfathomable mysticism, nor reducing it scientifically to a causal or psychic process. In other words, the goal is to elucidate the original donation (this primordial “debt of meaning,” stripped of its religious shell) that allows man to become what he is, and to be what he becomes.
The exploration of this “earthly absolute” was initially structured in Gauchet’s work around a classic tripartition of the relationship to oneself, to others, and to the world. The internalization of otherness at the heart of modernity thus plays out on three levels: of the subject (divided from itself, as shown notably by the discovery of the unconscious), of society (with social conflict and the State), and of nature (with labor and resource exploitation). Among the activities that encourage the perception of this “otherness to oneself,” which continues, despite the exit from religion, to nourish subjective experiences, Gauchet mentions a heterogeneous set where festivities, sports, music, and even drug use mingle—a “religiosity that ignores itself.”
The interpretation of the notion of “autonomy” thus operates under a renewed meaning—not full mastery and capacity for detachment, but endless work of reflexive elucidation, which concerns both subjectivity and collectivity: “When metaphysical identity—autonomy—takes hold, humanity’s relationship to itself becomes a relationship of functional otherness, whether on the collective level, in society, in politics, or on the individual level. Everything plays out between self and self, but by means of a practical exteriority to self. This is the modern economy of subjectivity. It is the notion of that general form of relation where the effectuating difference is the support of an open identity, in search of itself, unfinishable.”
But above all, the aim is to uncover the nature of the political as “otherness to self.” For the stakes of the political are transcendental: “the political, beyond politics, remains instituting, invisibly or implicitly. It remains instituting without being determining—at least in an open way.” Unlike sacred power, whose legitimacy is anchored in an invisible beyond, politics as rediscovered in the modern, post-religious era “no longer needs to be that which commands the order of the community; it is that which institutes it, that which allows it to exist as a community. It does not dictate its way of being—it makes it be.” (ibid.:302).
Nonetheless, this reflexive “collective autonomy” in action is not expressed in full mastery of the causes and consequences of its historical destiny. Depending on the triumph of democratic principles—which affirms the possibility that some of its specific components (the market and law as regulatory spheres, the individual as a primary value) may turn against the very conditions of possibility that ensure and determine its existence (the nation as a historical-cultural form of being-together, and the State as the instrument of self-determination for the sovereign political community)—moderns find themselves led to a “forced and constrained rediscovery of the political.” Even though, for the past 30 years, the political has been progressively obscured by the predominance of the “liberal fact” (expressed through the expansion of the juridical and economic domains at the expense of the nation-state collective), it remains an irreducible dimension of human experience, even if contested by proponents of a more or less theorized cosmopolitanism.
This split in modern autonomy helps explain why multiple processes—which, strictly speaking, arise only from the voluntary interactions of individuals and organizations—end up projected into a form of hidden and insidious heteronomy. For “explicit autonomy,” left to itself, proves to be infinite and unlimited—in the name of claims to authenticity, expressivity, self-sufficiency, dignity—until it turns against all the foundational dimensions of otherness, all the structuring institutions indispensable to the subject’s becoming fully human within free collectives: the State, the nation, the school, the family, etc.
And thus, the unbound subject continues nonetheless to fuel logics of regulation (reconfigured at other levels) that escape all control, because they are presumed to directly express a “neutral” and descriptive point of view (expert, scientific, juridical: all that superficially appears to escape political or ideological influence, now rendered synonymous with arbitrariness). The macro-social, systemic constraints that bind the individual prove all the more incomprehensible and opaque, in that they are fed by the proliferation of rights and claims that are impossible to order or hierarchize through shared norms: “Decision, from then on, either tends to become a sort of automatic outcome of pressures exerted from all directions—constantly renegotiated—or is relegated backstage, its elaboration becoming the affair of a technical oligarchy.”
Conclusion
The unexpected rehabilitation of a “human nature” as the foundation of transcendental anthroposociology appears to be the keystone of the difficult theoretical balance attempted by Gauchet, in order to do justice to the dimension of historicity specific to the moderns without elevating it to the stature of an immanent Spirit. Condemned as he is—like all of us—to historicity, Gauchet perhaps deepens, as liberal modernity unfolds beyond all trace of the One, both a previously unnoticed possibility—the dissolution of the very idea of society, and thus of collective reflexive grasp over human endeavors—and the axiological necessity of theoretically salvaging this aim of collective self-determination, even if it means reinscribing it within the dimension that makes man what he is, namely the commitment to that which transcends him: “It is this dimension that religious societies privileged, to the point of making it the keystone of a complete system of meaning placing the human condition in total dependence on an extrinsic donation.”
The quest for “that which makes man capable of history” thus requires a “new understanding of anthropogenesis,” a “radical reconsideration of what makes us human.” If “the experience of otherness, eternal matrix of dependence” has “become the constraining benchmark of freedom,” there is no doubt that modern freedom presents itself as a constraint—both for individuals and collectives—an absolute constraint to never be what one wishes and thinks oneself to be. This is a dispossession that, although internal and immanent in appearance, may be even more radical than the debt of meaning assumed by heteronomous societies—not so much because it knows itself to be final, but because it is experienced as unjustifiable; not because it will remain unatonable, but because it ultimately expresses itself as senseless.
Stéphane Vibert is full professor at the University of Ottawa (Canada). He holds a PhD in social anthropology from the EHESS (Paris) and degrees in political science and comparative sociology. His research focuses on the concept of “community” in the social sciences and contemporary societies, as well as on the theoretical and epistemological understanding of holism, through an examination of collective identities.