Ryan Hanley

 

Ryan P. Hanley
Assistant Professor, Political Science
Marquette University, United States

Ryan Patrick Hanley is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Marquette University. He received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania, his MPhil from Cambridge University, and his PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Prior to arriving at Marquette he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University’s Whitney Humanities Center. His principal area of research is the political philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, and his articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Review of Politics, History of Political Thought, European Journal of Political Theory, and several other academic journals and edited volumes. He is the author of Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge University Press, June 2009).  With Darrin McMahon, he is editor of The Enlightenment: Critical Concepts in History, forthcoming in October 2009 from Routledge; and editor of the Penguin Classics edition of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, also forthcoming in October 2009, featuring an introduction by Amartya Sen. Hanley’s work has been supported by fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Altruism’s Wisdom
This project’s main claim is that three kinds of love are central to human nature and have been traditionally expressed across cultures: the love of the divine, the love of others, and the love of self. The central project of modernity, in the form that it took in early modern Europe, was to contain the first love and encourage the second. The necessary but tragic consequence of this shift was to reduce the second love to the third. Our challenge today, in the wake of this shift, is to establish a path towards recovery of what is most essential to the first love so that the second can be preserved and the third contained. This argument is advanced through the development of five hypotheses. First, a striking range of classic philosophical, religious and literary texts, Western and non-western, spiritual and secular, share a conception of self-transcendence culminating in other-directedness as the peak of human excellence. Second, this tradition conceives other-directedness neither as a sentiment nor an act, but as a fixed disposition of character best understood as love. Third, this love is best grounded on wisdom understood as the knowledge of the human being’s relationship to social, divine and universal orders, and is vitiated by skepticism, sentimentalism and rationalism. Fourth, wisdom, in making love of others possible, is instrumental to human flourishing. Fifth, recovery of love requires appreciation of elements in our political condition today that can promote it. The broader impact of the project will be felt in several fields. It aims to provide historians with an account of a vibrant world tradition of thinking about love; economists and biologists with an account of the limits of conceiving other-directedness as either act-based altruism or sentimental compassion; political theorists with a reminder of epistemology’s centrality to ethics and politics; and positive psychologists with an account of the relationship of character strengths of humanity to those of transcendence and wisdom. This impact will be made by publishing the results as a book and journal articles, and the incorporation of its findings in presentations and two proposed courses.

Hanley’s wisdom research to date has focused on wisdom in eighteenth-century moral and political philosophy. His specific interest is how this concept shaped the Enlightenment’s understandings of other-directed sentiments, including benevolence, compassion, pity and sympathy. His research in this vein recently led him to the exciting discovery of the entry on wisdom (sagesse) penned by Louis de Jaucourt for the monumental Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert (1750-62). De Jaucourt’s definition is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it usefully expands our conception of wisdom in a manner well worth recovering today. Far from assuming that wisdom primarily benefits the individual – as definitions of “practical wisdom” and human flourishing often do – its focus is on wisdom’s role in helping us fulfill our duties both to ourselves and to others. Second, in grounding wisdom in transcendent conceptions of divinity and immortality, it calls into question any convenient assumption that the Enlightenment was hostile to theism as a foundation for morality. In addition to writing up his discoveries on this front, Hanley has also completed an article on the epistemological grounds of Hume’s conception of humanity, and is at work on a study of the theological foundations of Rousseau’s conception of pitié.

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