The Hubris of Modern and Post-Modern Man…
Marxism, Communism, Fascism, Gnosticism, Scientism, Trans Humanism, New Totalitarianism and the Rejection of Transcendental Truth
“We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance” …
– John Archibald Wheeler
“The nature of a thing cannot be changed; whoever tries to “alter” its nature destroys the thing. Man cannot transform himself into a superman; the attempt to create a superman is an attempt to murder man. Historically, the murder of God is not followed by the superman, but by the murder of man: the deicide of the gnostic theoreticians is followed by the homicide of the revolutionary practitioners”…
― Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics & Gnosticism
“The general deculturation of the academic and intellectual world in Western civilisation furnishes the background for the social dominance of opinions that would have been laughed out of court in the late Middle Ages or the Renaissance”…
― Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections
hubris
/ˈh(j)uːbrɪs/
excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance
ego
the conscious self
self as it appears to self ( Phenomenal)
non-ego
the unconscious self
self as it is in itself ( Noumenal)
The Primacy of Human Consciousness
the axiom of the centrality of Human Consciousness in understanding and shaping Reality
The Primacy of Existence
the axiom that existence exists – the universe exists independent of Human Consciousness – that things are what they are – that they possess a specific nature , identity
The arrival of Modernity across Western Civilisation gave rise to a profound metaphysical (i.e. Study of Being — Science of Reality) shift in how the Modern Mind made sense of Reality .
Metaphysics underwent a seismic change as the broad embracement of ideas of William of Ockham (Nominalism) and Sir Francis Bacon (Inductive Reasoning, Empiricism and Scientific Method) metastasised into a new Reality anchored in an ever-growing confidence in the Primacy of Human Consciousness of Man ( Conscious Self – Ego) and the increasing rejection of Transcendental Metaphysics and Transcendental Truths.
The dismissal of a Divine Reality, Objective and Transcendent Truth and Metaphysics ( Study of Being ) – noting what 19th Century Theologian and Philosopher Antonio Rosmini outlined — To know Truth is to know Being, since Truth is nothing but Being understood by the Mind.
Without a priori knowledge of Being nothing can be thought and therefore, thought would be nothing.
“In Rosmini’s conception, speaking of a person means that in man there is a principle that transcends natural reality, which allows him to adhere to the truth, to “objective being”” …
-Augusto del Noce
The Univocity of Being brings together a sense of coherence – a common understanding – and at the same time a distinction between the Contingent Being of Man and the Necessary Being of God.
“The ultimate truth is so simple. It is nothing more than being in the pristine state. This is all that needs to be said. Only mature minds can grasp the simple truth in all its nakedness”…
— Ramana Maharshi
In other words, Modernity’s increasing denial of Transcendental Truths was Man’s denial of the Necessary Being of God and the Contingent nature of Being in Man.
It reflected Man’s attempt to decouple from Reality.
A Divine Reality, a hierarchy of things and the notion of a Creator and Created.
“Modern science … started in the 1600s when the search for “vertical causality” (from physics to metaphysics) was replaced by the one for “horizontal causality”, in the sense of searching for laws that express constant relationships between phenomena”…
– Augusto del Noce
Instead, what emerged post Modernity was the Primacy of Man.
The fusion of Idealism and Materialism into a Dialectical Materialism grounded in the Theology of Marxism.
Modern Alchemy and Theology of Marxism
“The Marxist theory is a form of economic determinism, distinguished by the belief that fundamental changes in economic relations are invariably revolutionary, involving a violent overthrow of the old order, and a collapse of the political ‘superstructure’ which had been built on it. The theory is almost certainly false: nevertheless, there is something about the Marxian picture which elicits, in enlightened people, the will to believe.
By explaining culture as a by-product of material forces, Marx endorses the Enlightenment view, that material forces are the only forces there are. The old culture, with its gods and traditions and authorities, is made to seem like a web of illusions – ‘the opiate of the people’, which quietens their distress” …
– Roger Scruton
Marx through the process of alchemy and inversion transforms Hegel’s Absolute Idealism into a Dialectical Materialism.
Instead of seeing history as driven by the development of ideas ( Hegel’s Absolute Idealism), Marx argued that it is grounded in material conditions – the ways in which human activity (Praxis) transforms material existence.
Marx’s inversion posits that material reality shapes consciousness, not the other way around.
Marx in his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy said:
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” …
[ LINK ]
For Marx, the dialectic operates in the material world, particularly in the class struggle.
“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence” …
– Karl Marx
Contradictions arise within the economy (e.g. between labour and capital) driving historical material change in contrast to Hegel’s focus on abstract contradictions in thought.
“ Marx’s idea is that materialism, in order to be consistent, must forego presenting itself as a philosophy of comprehension and must interpret thought not as a revelation but as an activity that transforms reality” …
- Augusto del Noce
Marx did not adopt Hegel’s notion of the Absolute, which for Hegel represents the ultimate unity through the culmination of history and thought.
In contrast, Marx views history as open-ended and rooted in the continuous development of material forces and human activity ( Praxis – practical activity – action) .
There was no ultimate Absolute but an ongoing process of material historical development and progress.
It was Marx’s dismissal of the Spiritual ( Mystified) orientation of Hegel’s Idealism and a reorientation towards the Material and a Reasoning focused on transforming Physical Nature at will and without limits.
“My dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e. the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurge of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought” …
– Karl Marx, Capital Volume One
****Note: – The sleight of hand by Marx – the Alchemy – was in simply reorientating Modern Metaphysics from Hegel’s Idealism to Marx’s Materialism. Both of which are “two sides of the same coin” ( i.e Mind and Matter or stated differently , the synthesis of Subject ( Conscious Self – Ego) and Object ( Material World) or the synthesis of Object ( Material World) and Subject ( Conscious Self – Ego) ) that reflect the temporal elements of Reality the Contingent Being of Man, and a Primacy of Man to literally create, shape and transform Reality.
Modernity and the Decoupling from Reality
“European civilization rose on the principle of a world of universal and eternal truths, in which all men participate – on the principle of the Logos, in other words” …
– Augusto del Noce
“The great discovery of Greek philosophy and the foundation of its lasting truth is that of evidence, understood not as force that constrains but as light that illuminates” …
– Augusto del Noce
Initially, the French Revolution replaced Temples of Prayer with Temples of Reason — a Cult of Reason — essentially declaring the Death of God and the decoupling of Man from any Higher Order Transcendent understanding of Reality ( i.e, a vertical form of metaphysics) such as Scholastic Realism and Christian Theology.
As the confidence of Man and his Ego grew in manipulating and transforming the Material World, the decoupling was extended horizontally to Man transcending Nature through the embracement of technology.
A synthesis of Hegel and Marx.
Man was apparently now God (Theology of Marxism) and could apply this new Knowledge (Gnosis, Gnosticism and Scientific Gnosticism) to manipulate and transform Reality through the application of Technology.
“For Marx, the interests that are advanced by an ideology are those of the ruling class. We might similarly suggest that the interests advanced by totalitarian ideology are those of an aspiring elite. And we might confront totalitarian ideology in Marxian spirit, by explaining it in terms of its social function, and thereby exploding its epistemological claims.
It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since, as Swift says, it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought” …
– Roger Scruton
Hence, the emergence of a whole new modern vernacular that reflected Man’s Will to Power.
The Industrial Age concepts of engineering were now being extended and applied to dynamic complex living systems in an attempt ( ie an ontological philosophical error – a category mistake ) to transcend nature.
“The world that is being created by the accumulation of technical means is an artificial world and hence radically different from the natural world.
It destroys, eliminates, or subordinates the natural world, and does not allow this world to restore itself or even to enter into a symbiotic relation with it. The two worlds obey different imperatives, different directives, and different laws which have nothing in common. Just as hydroelectric installations take waterfalls and lead them into conduits, so the technical milieu absorbs the natural. We are rapidly approaching the time when there will be no longer any natural environment at all. When we succeed in producing artificial aurorae boreales, night will disappear and perpetual day will reign over the planet” …
– Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
The traditional Triadic Structures that represented Conscious Man’s relationship with God ( Eternal ) and the external World ( Temporal) were now in the late stages of being completely deconstructed.
A City of Man without a City of God.
Education was no longer about the pursuit of Truth ( Veritas) but instead about indoctrination and social & cultural transformation.
Reality was now a social construct anchored in the Primacy of the Human Consciousness ( Conscious Self – Ego) and the World being created by Man (Self-Creation).
Reality was literally a social tribal consensus enforced by the Globalist Secular Liberal Orthodoxy and ruling Elite that shaped the semiotic industrial complex and managed truth.
“It is not coincidental that from the political standpoint atheism goes together with phenomena like the secular version of absolutism and totalitarianism” …
-Augusto del Noce
“The new totalitarianism is founded on the unbreakable unity of scientism, eroticism, and secularization theology that, in a sense, makes it complete, in as much as it absolutely denies traditional morality and religion without preserving or sublating any aspect” …
-Augusto del Noce
Del Noce’s critique of the Modern Mind and the inevitable cul-de-sac of European Rationalism
20th Century Italian Philosopher Augusto del Noce was one of a small group of emerging dissident intellectuals that were beginning to challenge the foundational metaphysical axioms of Modernity and the ideas of the established Intellectual Orthodoxy.
Del Noce maintained that the 20th Century should be viewed through the prism of a philosophical history because Western Civilisation was profoundly influenced by the ideas of the earlier century including Idealism, Marxism and Positivism .
He believed that such philosophical ideas became the secular, neo-gnostic surrogate of Christianity for the European educated classes post the French Revolution.
“What is good? – All that heightens the feelings of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is bad? – All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? – The feeling that power increases – that a resistance is overcome” …
– Friedrich Nietzsche
From a historical perspective, the 20th Century and early 21st Century were literally the experimental sandpit for this modern ideology where these ideas were embraced and put into practice around the World with all the profound and tragic real world consequences that would follow.
The preamble (Carlo Lancellotti’s Translator Introduction) of 20th-Century Italian Philosopher Augusto del Noce’s book The Crisis of Modernity captures the essence of this radical revolutionary Marxist shift which is literally grounded in a new modern notion of Freedom as “Self-Creation” and the unshackling of Man’s from all dependencies (especially God but also extending to Nature).
A quote:
“Del Noce’s study of Marx’s philosophy — culminating in his 1946 essay “La ‘non-filosofia’ di Marx”, later re-published in the book “Il problema dell ateismo” — marked a turning point in his intellectual journey. The position of the “Catholic Left” was predicated on the notion that atheism is an accessory element of Marxism, and that the core of Marx’s thought is a socio-political analysis that can be separated from the “religious” aspect and used in order to fight Fascism and promote social justice. Del Noce realised that, on the contrary, all of Marx’s thought is a consistent development of the radical metaphysical principle that freedom requires self-creation, and thus the rejection of all possible forms of dependence, especially dependence on God. Therefore, Del Noce came to see that in Marx “atheism … is not the conclusion but rather the precondition of the whole system.”For this reason, Marx’s philosophy (and not his political or economic theories) is a crucial node of Western cultural history. On one side, it is the fully consistent and irreversible endpoint of the evolution of European rationalism since Descartes. On the other, it is the origin of the idea of “total revolution” that shaped the history of the twentieth century, namely “the promise … of a new situation of mankind in which the problem of God will no longer arise.” An important corollary of this idea is that ethics must be subordinated to the progress of the revolution, and not vice versa. This realization led Del Noce to reject for good the possibility of a Catholic-Communist alliance”…
— Carlo Lancellotti
The attempted transcendence of Modern and Post-Modern Man away from Christian Theology and Ancient Greek Philosophy.
“The great discovery of Greek philosophy and the foundation of its lasting truth is that of 𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦, understood not as force that constrains but as light that illuminates” …
- Augusto del Noce
No longer was the pursuit of Truth and Man’s attempts to understand an independent Reality from the Conscious Self -Ego central to the Enlightenment Project.
“Since the time of Bacon, the discovery of every new science has been accompanied by the proposal of a utopia” …
-Augusto del Noce
Instead, Man was now unshackled and was free to pursuit a Nietzschean Will to Power.
“For Hegel, freedom was not just a psychological phenomenon but the essence of what was distinctively human. In this sense, freedom and nature are diametrically opposed. Freedom does not mean the freedom to live in nature or according to nature; rather, freedom begins only where nature ends. Human freedom emerges only when man is able to transcend his natural, animal existence and to create a new self for himself. The emblematic starting point for this process of self-creation is the struggle to the death for pure prestige”…
― Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man
Or was what was continuing to unfold an increasingly Theatre of the Absurd as the Christian Theological teachings that were the foundations of the rise of Western Civilisation were in the late stages of being dismantled by an increasingly Globalist Marxist Elite who were intent on transforming Physical Nature at will and without limits (Trans Humanism) to arrive at a New World Order.
“The French Revolution gave rise to ideas which led beyond the ideas of the entire old world order. The revolutionary movement which began in 1789… gave rise to the communist idea which Babeuf’s friend Buonarroti re-introduced in France after the Revolution of 1830. This idea, consistently developed, is the idea of the new world order”…
– Karl Marx
The apparent arrival of the Modern and Post-Modern Übermensch embracing a Nietzschean Will to Power.
“Humility is truth”…
- Desiderius Erasmus
Or alternatively, was it symptomatic of the growing hubris of Modern and Post-Modern Man?
“We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilisations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part”…
– Allan Bloom
Footnote:
Was there an alternative interpretation of freedom linked to Man’s relationship with God?
A core belief of Western Civilisation’s Enlightenment Project since the beginning of Christianity.
An idea of liberty which 18th Century British political philosopher Edmund Burke reminded the World was linked to a transcendental moral order.
“Liberty does not exist in the absence of morality”…
– Edmund Burke
For liberty to flourish, social and personal order and morality must exist, and radical innovations must be avoided.
It is an idea anchored in the Univocity of Being and the nexus between the Necessary Being of God ( Creator ) and Contingent Being of Man ( Created).
The Christian teaching of incarnation that God became human in Jesus Christ.
The nature of Jesus’s Being exhibits a hypostatic union.
One that is divine and also human.
It is through Jesus incarnation that humanity understands how God interacts with the world, provides salvation, and reveals himself in a tangible way.
It is through incarnation that Christians believe that God has entered into human history to redeem and transform it.
It is through incarnation and its divine mystery that requires human faith and belief that God, in his infinite love and humility, chose to enter the human experience to save and restore humanity.
It is through incarnation that Jesus demonstrates how humans are called to live in love, humility, and obedience to God.
It is through incarnation and Jesus life, death, and resurrection, Jesus provides salvation and restores the broken relationship between God and humanity.
It is through incarnation that an alternative form of freedom is presented to humanity. Christianity teaches that freedom is not simply doing as one pleases but living as one ought, in alignment with God’s design and empowered by his Grace, true freedom is found in Christ.
