Found to Constructed Orders
On How, in Charles Taylor’s Reading, the Practices of Participation in Plato and Augustine Are Transformed in Descartes into the Construction and Examination of an Inner Order of Representations
Greetings readers,
I’m just wrapping up another leg of my ongoing research and writing into the history and philosophy of askēsis (spiritual-philosophical exercise), this one centering on the changing senses of askēsis that we find in the literature between the late medieval and early modern periods.
In the piece, I start off by examining Pierre Hadot’s writings on how the emergence of the modern university system (originating first with Medieval scholasticism) greatly changed our sense of what it means to live “philosophy as a way of life” within these new institutional settings.
I move from there to explore the kind of “ascetic rationalization” that Max Weber diagnosis in his famous work on the protestant work ethic, before rounding out the discussion with Charles Taylor’s meditations on the shifting senses of aesthetics, philosophy, and science that are also transformed in these periods.
I want to share below a short section of this work on Taylor where I draw him out on what he calls the shift from “found” to “constructed” orders—that is, from an order discovered in a more-than-human reality to one increasingly understood as produced through our own representations—a move he accounts for by detailing an evolution that moves from Plato to Augustine to Descartes.
In the section I’ve excerpted here, I first draw from Michael Allen Gillespie’s account of the modern, “self-positing” subject (this sense that to be modern is to be self-making) before following Taylor as he describes these deeper shifts in worldview.
There is a moment in this discussion, centered on Taylor’s reading of Descartes, that I find particularly interesting, and that is where Taylor suggests that with Descartes, while we certainly still have a sense of philosophy as a way of life rooted in spiritual exercise—as we see, for example, in the Stoic influence on him—there is also a newfound emphasis on the construction and ordering of our internal representations that takes a much more prominent character.
I’m interested in how we can see in this move a shift to a sense of practice that is much more self-referential, much more focused on our having the “correct” internal representations (indexed against an increasingly mechanical view of nature), and how this movement gives us a picture of philosophical practice that is very close to our own assumed view of “spiritual exercise” today.
Indeed, if we think of “spiritual exercise,” “meditation,” or “contemplation” these days, we are prone to thinking of these activities as something like “mindfulness,” or a careful attention to our own inner life, an attention to the rising and falling of our own personal feelings, memories, and representations.
This shift, I am arguing, is captured well by Taylor’s account of the movement from “found” to “constructed” orders. I’m sharing this excerpt below because it helps bring into relief how this trajectory of ongoing internalization is accompanied by real gains (a few that I note in the piece: a greater sense of individual freedom, an increased sense of personal responsibility for our formation as people, and a heightened willingness to criticize our “received” senses of authority).
However, at the same time, I think this increasing internalization is worth contemplating more deeply in terms of what we lose when we think of practice in this way alone. The question I want to raise, and that this excerpt begins to setup, is whether a picture of practice framed primarily in terms of constructing and regulating our inner representations can really do justice to older accounts of askēsis as a participation in an order that exceeds us and draws us forward.
Part of what I want to suggest in this piece is that we need to recover something of an older sense of askēsis, namely, one where practice is centered not only on examining or constructing our inner representations, but on being drawn beyond ourselves and opened up by a more-than-human order that contemplative practices disclose.
And that’s what this excerpt tries to describe.
(An aside: I don’t make a point of it in this piece, but surely there is also an implicit connection between this increasing sense of constructed, internal orders that emerges at roughly the same moment when the scientific and industrial revolutions give us the ability to quite literally “construct” the world around us in a new and more profound way that is worth thinking about.)
Found to Constructed Orders
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This nascent secular imaginary also saw the emergence of a new sense of individual agency—a self that sees itself as able to transform itself through its own will and through its own schemas of what a person is or should do,[1] without reference to intrinsic cosmic foundations, essences, or purposes, a marked difference from earlier asceticisms that were rooted in specific and universal teleologies of human development.
As Michael Allen Gillespie has argued, this emergent sense of a self-positing subject grows out of the late-medieval nominalist and voluntarist reconfiguration of God, above all in figures like Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, in which divine and human freedom are no longer understood as participation in a given teleological order but as the sheer power to posit order through will and choice.
In this new image, modern people come to appear as more formally autonomous and charged with the task of designing and realizing their own identity and purposes. Rather than discovering themselves within a pre-given hierarchy of ends, modern people, on this account, encounter norms and roles as contingent possibilities to be adopted or rejected in light of their own projects. In Gillespie’s own words:
To be modern means to be ‘new,’ to be an unprecedented event in the flow of time, a first beginning, something different than anything that has come before, a novel way of being in the world, ultimately not even a form of being but a form of becoming. To understand oneself as new is also to understand oneself as self-originating, as free and creative in a radical sense, not merely as determined by a tradition or governed by fate or providence. To be modern is to be self-liberating and self-making, and thus not merely to be in a history or tradition but to make history. To be modern consequently means not merely to define one’s being in terms of time but also to define time in terms of one’s being, to understand time as the product of human freedom in interaction with the natural world. Being modern at its core is thus something titanic, something Promethean.[2]
Ascetic discipline in this context is no longer primarily a training in conformity to an intrinsic order. Instead, it grows oriented toward the person’s own, self-chosen goals.
There is, then, a routinization and calcification at the level of social structure—the newly rationalized paradigms of productivity—but an increasing sense of inner freedom previously unavailable before this period. I have emphasized a certain loss associated with these changes, but they have also yielded substantial gains. I would list examples that include a heightened sense of personal responsibility for self-formation, a new appreciation for ideals of equality and individual rights, and an expanded capacity to criticize arbitrary forms of authority.
Taylor characterizes the broader shift here as one from “found” to “constructed” orders, a change that reshapes how we imagine rational, scientific, and moral sources of identity, changes which we can now explore.
In addition to the economic and cultural transformations that underpinned these shifting conceptions of reason and asceticism, the scientific revolution itself re-organized the space of epistemic possibilities. “There is a deep change,” writes Taylor, “in what it is to live according to nature which separates the eighteenth century from its ancient sources.”[3]
To be sure, reason and nature maintain a privileged relation in this new image, but this relation slowly becomes, as I noted above, an increasingly instrumental one, wherein reason calculates its advantage in the terms of the mechanical systems it can manipulate for utilitarian gain.
However, as Taylor emphasizes, this is not simply a loss, as the same transformation also founds new disciplines of inquiry, the affirmation of ordinary life as a site of dignity, and a heightened sense of responsibility for how we shape the world rather than simply conform to its given order.
I want to pay special attention to how each of these shifts mark not the thinner transformation implied by a changing theoretical account in our knowledge of the world alone. They are, more primarily, shifts in our sense of phenomenological comportment with the world and with how the world shows up for us at all. This shift, I am arguing, is in part downstream of the changing senses of practice we have been exploring, and in what these practices can be said to deliver in terms of transformations in perception.
For Taylor, in each stage of this transition, ideas migrate from something found—an order discovered in the structure of things—to something increasingly seen as built or constructed within the mind itself, both in terms of how we justify our rational claims and in how we situate our lives in terms of moral sources of guidance.
Taylor tracks three decisive transformations, exemplified in the works of Plato, Augustine, and then Descartes, to tell this story.
Plato, he says, offers a substantive picture of rational attunement and moral nourishment. That is, for Plato, both our senses of reason and morality, when rightly ordered, point beyond ourselves as individual or private reasoners and into in a public landscape of shared cosmic sources for both. The key here, as we saw in our reading of the Republic (509b), is the periagōgē, which referred to the turning of the soul toward the Good, so that reason is here oriented by a luminous order it encounters rather than creates.[4] Taylor invokes this image of turning and conversion to underscore Plato’s substantive conception of reasons and morals. He writes:
In an important sense, the moral sources we accede to by reason are not [for Plato] within us. They can be seen as outside us, in the Good; or perhaps our acceding to a higher condition ought to be seen as something which takes place in the ‘space’ between us and this order of the Good.[5]
Augustine, who carries this centering motion inward without discarding its ontological grounding, emphasizes this same turning of attention. However, here the Platonic light of the Good becomes the inner illumination of God, and cogitare—meaning “to think, to consider,” understood etymologically as co-agitare, a “gathering-together”—comes to refer to the recollective movement by which the scattered soul is unified under the higher measure of God. In Taylor’s words,
Our principle route to God [for Augustine] is not through the object domain but “in” ourselves. This is because God is not just the transcendent object or just the principle of order of the nearer objects, which we strain to see. God is also and for us primarily the basic support and underlying principle of our knowing activity. God is not just what we long to see, but what powers the eye which sees. So the light of God is not just “out there,” illuminating the order of being, as it is for Plato; it is also an inner light.[6]
Here the movements Taylor is tracking begin to take clearer shape. The substantive account of reason in Plato organizes and centers the person into the shape of a pre-given order, and in Augustine this centering movement grows increasingly inward, whilst still linked to the broader, illuminated reality we find in Plato.
In Descartes, Taylor continues, this inward sense grows more radical as this centered inwardness begins to disengage from the larger cosmic horizon. Cogitare, in Descartes’s sense, now organizes and constructs representations within the subject alone. A sense of mastery through reason remains, but in this more internal sense. Thus, in a post-Cartesian world, periagōgē no longer means a conversion toward the Good, seen as a robust and pervasive reality, but at most as a turning toward the methodological norms of clarity and control that govern our own constructions.
As periagōgē is redefined in this way, the meaning of askēsis is likewise transformed, from a practice of participation in a more-than-human order to a discipline ordered primarily to the production and regulation of our own representations.
To be sure, while Descartes’s method and ontology take new shape, we still find underlying it a connection to older sources of moral and spiritual development, especially in their Stoic forms.[7] However, in this picture, what had been practices of attunement to an order already there become procedures for securing clear and distinct ideas, in the person’s private mentality. It is at this point in Taylor’s narrative—once the turn inward has detached itself from a substantive order—that modern reason becomes constructive rather than receptive. As Taylor puts it:
Just as correct knowledge doesn’t come anymore from our opening ourselves to the order of (ontic) Ideas but from our constructing an order of (intra-mental) ideas according to the canons of evidence; so when the hegemony of reason becomes rational control, it is no longer understood as our being attuned to the order of things we find in the cosmos, but rather as our life being shaped by the orders which we construct according to the demands of reason’s dominance.[8]
This movement in Descartes—of internalization and disengagement, on the one hand, and of mechanization and representation, on the other—whilst still accountable to a (reformed) objective world, nevertheless puts our practices into a tighter loop with our own constructed representations, rather than with the broader loop found in practices that push the person out beyond themselves (as we find in Plato and Augustine).
Viewed from the standpoint of practice, then, what is at stake in this sequence is a gradual redefinition of the very exercises by which one lives, moving from practices that attune the soul to a found order (Plato), through practices that interiorize that order as an inner light (Augustine), to practices that primarily construct and manage an intra-mental domain (Descartes).
The full detail of Taylor’s account lies beyond the scope of this section, but the structural shift is clear: where ancient and medieval frameworks imagined reason as attuned to an order already there, modern reason must forge its own order internally, guided by a practice of construction that no longer appealed to an ontic logos.
In a phrase, reason ceases to be a mode of participation and becomes a mode of production. I quote Taylor again, “Rationality is now an internal property of subjective thinking, rather than consisting in its vision of reality.”[9] One could say that askēsis, in this view, is increasingly displaced from the register of participation in Being to the register of the production and regulation of representations; the form of practice remains, but its ontological orientation is slowly inverted.
Recall that in the introduction and chapter 1, we saw that ancient accounts of theōria physikē and spiritual exercise understood practices, in part, as a set of methods through which the human being could, in a sense, “go beyond the human,” through an askēsis by which attention was expanded beyond merely private interests and was re-situated within a living, ordered whole.
In that frame, contemplative exercises do not simply regulate an already given subject by reordering his or her representations or actions; they transform the subject by aligning it with an ontic logos, so that to practice was to participate in a cosmic order that precedes and addresses us, calling us forward to practice. In this sense, Taylor’s account shows us that practice does not disappear in the modern period, but that the ontological anchoring of these practices is progressively transformed.
Practices persist, but they are increasingly ordered toward the internal construction and management of representations, toward the mastery of functional domains and needs, rather than toward participation in a reality that is received as ordered and whole in a fuller sense.
These are transformations marked by complex reconfigurations of the human sensorium, internal and external. Gone is the deeper sense that contemplative practices deliver insight into the nature of the real, to Being, and that they do so in a way that goes beyond the reductionism of the special sciences.
In Taylor’s words, “Under the impact of the scientific revolution, the ideal of theōria, of grasping the order of the cosmos through contemplation, came to be seen as being vain and misguided, as a presumptuous attempt to escape the hard work of detailed discovery.”[10] In this shift one sees how ascetical contemplation loses its grip on the reality that is its mooring.
What remains—and here the line of continuity is important for my argument—is a powerful sense that practice still matters but is now seen as the disciplined labor of inquiry and self-formation within an immanent frame, rather than as the exercise by which the human is drawn beyond itself into a more-than-human order. But gained, as we noted above, is a new capacity for individual transformation and capacity for investigation and inquiry.
Thus, far from rejecting ascetic practice altogether, we should see the scientific method as grounded in its own asceticism that reinforces through its practices and aims the disengaged stance that is essential to its epistemic method—and to the deliverances it makes available as scientific knowledge.
[. . .]
[1] Abbey, Charles Taylor, 206.
[2] Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity, see especially 19–43 for the longer discussion. The paragraph on the modern subject is from the introduction, p. 2.
[3] Taylor, Sources of the Self, 278.
[4] Ibid., 123.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., 123.
[7] Indeed, readers may notice in this account of a disciplined examination of representations a similarity with the earlier account of Stoic askēsis I offered in the introduction, where we also find a similar examination. However, Taylor is quick to point out the key difference between the two practices: “Rational mastery requires insight, of course; and in a curious way, Descartes follows the Stoics in founding his ethics on a ‘physics’ . . . But the insight is not into an order of the good; rather it is into something which entails the emptiness of all ancient conceptions of such order: the utter separation of mind from a mechanistic universe of matter which is most emphatically not a medium of thought or meaning, which is expressively dead,” Ibid., 148.
[8] Ibid., 155.
[9] Ibid., 156.
[10] Ibid., 213.