The Promethean Impulse…
Modernity’s Deconstruction of the Triadic of Being
“European civilisation rose on the principle of universal and eternal truths, in which all men participate — on the principle of the Logos, in other words”…
— Augusto del Noce
“Plato was the philosophical founder of Europe”…
— Augusto del Noce
“Only the principles of Christianity can save society from catastrophe”…
— Augusto del Noce
“Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened’”…
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
In the inaugural Neuhaus Lecture, Patrick J. Deneen explores the ideas outlined in Leo Strauss’s 1960s essay The Three Waves of Modernism and his prognosis that we are all now Post-Liberal.
In doing so, he is asking the important question as to whether we can ever return to a Classical Liberal state or whether Strauss’s critique of Modernism is so acute that it makes the end of Liberalism terminal.
In answering this question, it is worthwhile revisiting Strauss’s Essay and placing his analysis within the context of the accumulated and refined history of Western Civilisation’s Intellectual thought up until the emergence of Modernity.
“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
By standing on the shoulders of some of the intellectual giants of Western Civilisation that are grounded in a triadic of Judeo-Christian Theology, Ancient Greek Philosophy and Roman Law & Governance, it becomes clearer as to what the agenda of Modernity really is.
Namely:
- The attempted liberation of Man from God (Nietzsche — Death of God — Marx — Theology of Marxism — Modern Gnosticism) and a Divine Order;
- The attempted liberation of Man from Nature ( Technology Society — Technology System — Instrumental Reasoning — Legal Positivism (anchored in Marxism); and
- The attempted re-invention of Man’s Being and the creation of a new self for himself (Übermensch, Gnosis, Trans Humanism, AGI) — a new World Order.
A war on the Logos and the notion that God is the Logos — the Word — the creator of a Divine Order — the light that illuminates the intelligibility of Reality through both Divine and Natural Revelation.
“Tragedy occurs when man, through pride (or even through stupidity as in the case of Ajax) enters into conflict with the divine order, personified by a God or incarnated in Society. And the more justified his revolt and the more necessary this order, the greater the tragedy that stems from the conflict” …
– Excerpt from Albert Camus, On the Future of Tragedy
[ LINK ]
A Modern and Post-Modern World that was increasingly ignoring:
- Objective Eternal Truth (i.e. dismissal of Transcendental Metaphysics & Realism (Christian Theology & Platonism) — a drift towards Nominalism, Theology of Marxism, Nietzschean Perspectivism, Gnosticism, a Post-Truth Society, a Post-Truth Education, Managed Truth (Media)/Censorship/Propaganda, Modern Sophism, Peer Reviews, New Totalitarianism, Post-Modernism, Relativism, Nihilism, Materialism);
- Divine Order (i.e. deconstructing Thomism Philosophy — the relationship between God, Conscious Man & Natural World);
- Metaxic Semiotic Nature of Human Being (i.e. Intelligibility and the relational nature of Being, Knowing and Meaning);
- Triadic Nature of Being (i.e. ignoring Rosmini’s Triadic Nature of Being and the relationship between the dimensions of Real Being, Ideal Being and Moral Being that are all foundational to the Human Condition);
- Triadic Modes of Reason ( i.e. failing to integrate Charles Sanders Peirce’s (America’s Aristotle) ideas relating to Abductive Reasoning anchored in Semiotics & Being into a triadic understanding of Reason (i.e. Aristotle — Deductive Reasoning — and — Bacon — Inductive Reasoning));
- Triadic Categories of Thought (i.e. failing to integrate Charles Sanders Peirce’s ideas relating to Phenomenological Categories (Firstness, Secondness & Thirdness) into triadic categories of Thought (i.e. Aristotle — Ontological Categories — and — Kant — Epistemological Categories);
- The Universality of Reason (Kant) (i.e. ignoring the Universality of Reason and the inherent capacity of every human to bring an intelligibility to Reality, A gift of Reason that combines Faith and Reason);
- The Univocity of Being (Duns Scotus) (i.e. failing to understand the nature of the relationship between the Contingent Being of Man and the Necessary Being of God); and
- The Intelligibility of the Universe and the Semiotic nature (Peirce) of Man’s participation in Reality — this Being’s (Dasein) relationship with Being (Sein) (Heidegger).
The interpretation of Leo Strauss’s Three Waves of Modernity through the prism of Rosmini’s Triadic of Being — The Self-Destruction of Western Civilisation
“The instinct of self-preservation and the urge to self-destruction are equally strong in man! The Devil has equal a sway over humanity as God until a time still unknown to us”…
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The love of power is the demon of mankind”…
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Rather than view the intellectual ideas outlined in Strauss’s The Three Waves of Modernity through the metaphor of Plato’s rolling waves and an evolution of progressive intellectual thought that ultimately lead to the self-destruction of Classical Liberalism and the emergence of a Post-Liberal reality, his ideas can also be interpreted through the prism of Modern & Post-Modern Man’s attempts to liberate different aspects of his Being (i.e. Rosmini) from a Divine Order.
Modern Man’s (Conscious Self — Ego) self-reflection on different dimensions of Rosmini’s Triadic of Being:
- First Wave: The Decoupling from Moral Being and a Divine Order — an unshackling of Man from his Theological and Classical Metaphysical Foundations — A Semiotic deconstruction of Being (light of Being) — The beginning of the process of deconstructing a Unity in Being — the Triadic of Western Civilisation;
- Second Wave: The Decoupling from Ideal Being and Gift of Reason (combines Faith & Reason) — a transcendence of the Material through Society and History — An Epistemological deconstruction of Being; and
- Third Wave: The Decoupling from Real Being (act of Being) — the dissolution of Man as a stable subject that has a relationship with God and the Natural World (i.e. Contingent Being of Man and Necessary Being of God — Univocity of Being) — An Ontological deconstruction of Being.
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
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