On the Nature of Context: Beyond Technocracy

Modern secularism has long promised to provide us with a sustainable and profitable context for political-theological conflicts (conflicts concerning “what is right” and its ground, its “why”).  Yet, it is unclear to what extent, if any, modern secularism delivers what it promises.  Should contemporary secularism be understood in a broader context, or in the light of an underlying condition?  The crisis of modern liberal democracies—a crisis of identity, of standards, of interpretation—invites reflection on its roots and so on the truth about the context that modern secularism wants to be.

We might argue that, regardless of its shortcomings, modern secularism constitutes the only practical context for our lives, today; that returning to a premodern “worldview” would amount to descending into an open field of unbridled tribal warfare, where every tribe would delusively believe to represent a Sacred Order in radical opposition to the Profane Order represented by all surrounding tribes.   One might add that technology has made it impossible for us to revert to any premodern battlefield where the Sacred and the Profane stand in stark opposition to each other.  The attempt to return to old “wars of religion” (if only understood in terms of “clashes between civilizations”) is likely to prove catastrophic.  Modern secularism offers us security from a tribalism that modernity’s technological development has made decisively unsustainable.  And yet, modern secularism is in crisis; nor is there any telling how long that crisis can be endured before the current situation explodes in our face.  For the crisis affects the very foundations of modern secularism: scientific rationalism and the ideal of freedom.  Both have been brought systematically into radical question, not only from without the “Global Order” representing them, but also and more significantly from within that Order, where rampant skepticism and cynicism have “exposed” the lie about a “science” alien to life and a freedom devoid of any epistemic value.

Must we then face our current crisis blindly (not to say, blithely), as a collective fate, even as our secular context bows before the daily resurfacing of an ancestral disjunction between the Sacred and the Profane?  If, as Leo Strauss reminds us, the ancient civil religions that J.-J. Rousseau admired so are irretrievable, we are not by that very fact immune to the problems besetting those religions.  Our liberal societies are still forced to accept as ineluctable the disjuncture between Sacred and Profane, even though we may refuse to view that disjuncture in the context of tribal warfare, where foreign enemies would stand as reminder of the limits of our own Sacred Order.  Yet again, the contemporary (postmodern) “weak” defense/account of liberalism[1] proves inadequate in the face of the objectors to liberal democracy, especially where democracy decays into mass democracy represented by a global-scale trans-humanist corporate machine.[2]  Whence the question: is our current Regime sustainable?  Can it offer us context?

It is no secret that the modern world promises a worldly or secular substitute for the medieval Christian promise of salvation from ancient tribal warfare.[3] As modern men we are in the habit of deploring the difficulty posed by medieval Christianity, accused of dogmatically heralding abstract universality crushing empirical particularity.  Yet, medieval Christianity holds as its core tenet the incarnation of the universal in the particular: Christianity’s promised salvation comes through the Cross.[4] Revealingly, medieval Christianity has ghettos, but no extermination camps—no secular “final solution” to the problem of political alterity.  The same cannot be said of modernity.  In the attempt to overcome the shortcomings of medieval universalism, or the medieval tendency to use the Cross as means to establishing a universal Sacred Order marginalizing the Vulgar or Profane, modernity sets out to integrate “the margins” in the rise of a universally inclusive New World Order synthesizing the Sacred and the Profane.  The modern synthesis, or purported synthesis, is a project, a progressive or future-oriented movement, rather than a static “given,” that thrives only by incorporating alterity, or in expanding through the exploration and inclusion of the foreign, the alien, the uncertain, the undefined.  The Other stands, here, as fuel for the growth, or empowerment of the Expected, the Same—the Sacred-in-the-making.  The Sacred is not, then, an exclusive “secretive” possession (one containing a sacrum cor or “Sacred Heart”), but the evolving product of inclusion: the foreign, no less than the domestic, is integral to its constitution; until all objections to the affirmation of the universal come to be dismissed as mere ripples (of delusion) on the tide wave of History.  For the very category of “return” is now bound conceptually to a material beginning.  The return to origins cannot but appear absurd—as an adult’s return to his maternal womb.

The argument for progress begs the question by reducing the problem of origins (if only distinguished from formal, epistemic principles) to a genealogical one.[5] Erich Fromm’s confrontation with the problem at hand testifies to progressivism’s error.  Although Fromm pierces the smokescreen of Freud’s “sexual” debasement of our yearnings for return, he nevertheless fails to discern any goodness in our yearnings.  Guided by a progressive, neo-Kantian prejudice, Fromm is compelled to conceive those yearnings as leading, in the best of cases, to innocuous fantasies (bound to “symbolic substitutes” of a maternal womb), but in the worst cases, to outright and dangerous madness.[6]  The only sane alternative to the mad abandonment of our humanity is found in “the brotherhood of man,” where the individual “frees himself from the power of the past,” “fully developing reason and love” (262-63).  “Return” signals, in sum, abandonment of our destiny as citizens of the world, not to speak of contravention of our moral imperative to integrate in the universal, cosmopolitan society.

Yet, Fromm is well aware that his (Marxist) “Realm of Freedom” risks being supplanted, or left behind by our “contemporary cybernetic society,” a society in which every man is a “one” (here Fromm cites Heidegger) who, far from fulfilling his humanity, cripples it until he becomes a mere “thing” (264).  Now, is the newest cybernetic society not the logical result of the progressive liberalism that Fromm retraces all the way back to the first millennium B.C.?  Or is that liberal orientation not a much more recent innovation?  Might it promise “individual freedom” as a bait for exploiting entire populations (now “masses” targeted by “mass media”) to build their own collective cybernetic prison?  Fromm notices no link between the two—the modern liberal society and the postmodern society of cyborgs—just as he sees no cardinal difference between the freedom of “the individual” (freedom as self-determination) and freedom in its classical conception, namely choice-in-dialogue, choice disclosed in the context of a search for truth, or more precisely in turning-back to truth.[7] Were we to leave matters at Fromm’s account of the birth of freedom, we would have to concede that there is no sane alternative to modern freedom.  Modern logic would vouch for it.

Liberal democracy is the most glaring manifestation of the progressive logic of modernity.  Its political adversary appears as static, even monolithic, despotism.  The opposition here is between the liberal open society and illiberal closed societies.[8] From the standpoint of its non-progressive opponent, modern liberal democracy appears, to be sure, as the consummate mask of illiberality, where the modern expansion, or exportation of freedom stands as a mere euphemism for domination.[9] The modern mechanistic notion of “nature” as general horizon of conquest stands in the background of modern progressive politics, reminding us of the manner in which biological Darwinism stands in the background of (post-Darwin) social Darwinism.  In both cases, in the shadow of Hobbes, a mechanistic conception of man, of human society, is modeled upon a mechanistic conception of nature.  In a more contemporary jargon, our social sciences are to be shaped by our natural sciences: the Ought must be informed by the Is defined by physicists, chemists, biologists and the likes of them.  A moral imperative is at play, here, underpinning the tension between the Ought and the Is, defining both terms according to the logic of modernity.  Accordingly, the Ought is not supposed to be an exclusive certainty marginalizing the Is (reality) standing in its face, but an evolving power progressing (read, surviving) through the transformation of an otherwise inert, or aimless/hapless Is (a foreign land to be conquered roughly as nature is in the eyes of early-modern conquistadores).  Modernity’s progressive logic hands the Ought, or our consciousness of abstract universals, the compelling alchemic-like task of converting all that is unconscious of our universals into their concrete realization.  This process of realization is what makes what modern man calls History.

The Hebrew Bible offers an alternative: one God—that of the people he chooses as mirror of his intent, i.e. as vicar/testimony—is the true God, the God true for all peoples, even though they do not know it.  In other words, the Hebrew God reminds us, through his People, of an Order presupposed by, or underlying all political orders.  That primordial Order is what is lost, but cannot be found on practical or political grounds—no matter how progressive and inclusive our society might become.  Indeed, the more progressive our society becomes, the more it comes to resemble the dystopia of Babel’s Tower and thus a collective suicidal experiment.

Where does the Hebrew Bible leave its People?  How are we to understand the challenge it presents us with, the life it chooses its Nation for?  The Bible offers us a context for our own lives, but that context leaves space for what is outside of our own political stage—outside of our own mirror of a lost “Garden”.  Otherwise stated, the Bible allows for a profane/vulgar world alongside our sacred one.  The question we are left with pertains to the nature of the proper or original interaction between the two hemispheres, the Sacred and the Profane.  Does either engulf the other?  If not, are they both resolved in a “broader context,” namely what modernity calls History (as special repository of cosmic “evolution”).

Outside of the modern doctrine of History, which of the two, the Sacred or the Profane, might our true context be?  To paraphrase Cicero’s De Natura Deorum, it is truer that there are Gods than there are none; Stoicism is truer than Epicureanism.  The claim that the Sacred constitutes our true context is defensible, even though the Profane and claims raised on its behalf are not entirely dismissible as false.  The Profane stands merely as a corrupt version of the Sacred; it is the Sacred having “fallen”.  Yet, “the fallen” reminds us of the distinction between the outer and inner dimensions of the Sacred.  The Sacred stands in a fallen world.  That world is pagan, or profane and so the sacred nation must stand amidst profane antagonists.  On the other hand, the Profane being a corruption of a lost sacred condition, it is fair to say that the Profane or the physical world as such, is to be understood in the context of the Sacred.

The same problem may be restated in terms of the battle between mind and body, or between “idealists” and “materialists”.  Is mind the context of body?  Is the physical constituted in the context of consciousness?  Or, is the reverse the case?  The latter alternative is rationally indefensible for the obvious reason that reasoning as such is not a physical entity.  If it is on rational grounds that thought or consciousness is reduced to the bodily, then the reduction will be absurd or untenable, insofar as our reasoning—as ordering of words into forms of intelligibility—owes more to thought, to its proper end, than to the “subject matter” occasioning our reasoning.  The bodily alone, the body unaided by reason, is incapable of reducing thought to itself.  Nor will evolutionist dogmas empower the bodily sufficiently to allow it to overtake mind—to quantify the unquantifiable.  No “laws of nature” will then ever resolve ethical questions.

On the other hand, our mind fails to reduce the bodily to itself, were we even to make recourse to reason as ancilla theologiae, handmaid of mind or vehicle for the radical submission of the physical to mind as “Queen Free and Absolute of Nature”.[10] So we are left with a conflict between two poles and the only positive thing we can do about this is moderate or govern the conflict, rather than end it.

The good news for idealists is that moderation plays in their favor, insofar as it entails the preparation of the bodily for the “revelation” of mind as the source of all that is bodily: reason prepares the body to accept mind as master.  Medieval Christianity teaches this much when it presents natural reason as preparing the pagan world for biblical revelation.  Whence the promotion of philosophy as ancilla theologiae.  In Socratic terms, philosophy responds to a theological, divine mandate saving the City, the polis, from impiety, or the impious pretension of piety, akin to the vile pretention of virtue.

It may be argued that natural reason unaided by authorities—theological or otherwise–can lead us astray, or that it can fuel and manipulate or cunningly channel the bodily, making strategic, even unnatural use of nature.  The objection is entirely legitimate when referred to modern, Machiavellian reason.  Yet, this clinical reason presupposes and indeed is parasitic on an original reason, precisely the natural reason upheld, if only “in vitro” or in a somewhat sublimated guise by medieval Christianity.[11] So natural reason does tip the scale in favor of idealism.

A second objection to natural reason is that it can topple the scale, leading to a formal, “theocratic” abrogation of nature, which is to say, to “medieval” despotism, not to speak of modern totalitarianism.[12] Not unaided reason, however, but reason instrumentalized by authorities, can resolve the physical in its divine perfection, its Paradise Lost.  Nor does natural reason require, in principle, any external help to spare itself a dismal fate, since in the very act of moderating physical motion (“the passions”), natural reason produces a civil arena allowing natural reason to thrive unfettered by any mechanical imposition, be this theological or anti-theological.  Which is why Vico would speak in terms of natural civil reason.[13]

The decisive attempt to resolve the conflict between the Sacred and the Profane once and for all finds its representation in modern “scientific” reason, which, however, does not so much resolve the conflict as obscure it behind the hypothesis of a “profane” nature evolving through the rise of a “sacred” consummation of History.  It is the still unverified status of that hypothesis (rooted in the original “Cartesian” postulation of nature as res extensa devoid of any sacred import whatsoever) that invites renewed reflection on the tension between the Sacred and the Profane as inevitable.  The commonsense, “Platonic” recognition that as long as men live there will be war, deserves respect even in our Open Society, especially where this comes to face itself as a sterile, monolithic reification of divine universality—a machine into which all particulars are flushed, not to gain life, but to lose it; to acquire not (positive) freedom, but a safety ultimately condemning all freedom as illegitimate selfishness.

If the tension between the Sacred and the Profane is inevitable, then the question before us does not concern the manner in which we might ever overcome that tension, but the way we are to live it.  Does the Secular State provide a viable answer where it establishes itself as a Sacred Order suppressing all “profane” alterity in the name of neutral “differences”?  Is the tension between the Sacred and the Profane to be lived in terms of the mercantile abrogation of any hierarchy of values in the interest of the proliferation of value-free differences?  Is the Profane to survive as a mass of consumers demanding and dying for ever-greater supplies of fuel, which is to say, of distractions?  Is the Sacred Order to be conceived—in spite of everything—as limited solely by the demands of the plebeian subjects of flattery?  Should we—can we—still cling onto a mercantile vision of Heaven?

An illuminating alternative to the practical collapse of the universal “market society” is found in the classical Hebrew lesson on account of which the Sacred is represented by the nation bearing witness to the God of all nations without falling into the temptation of imposing that God on all nations.  The “chosen nation” will be a “Beacon of Light,” a model of politics open to the eternal (evidently, a non-Machiavellian politics) and for which the Profane as such (“the pagan,” in Christian terms) is a reminder of the constitutional limits of the Sacred Order, challenging us not to incorporate, or assimilate all alterity, but to open the political dimension of the Sacred to its metaphysical or “otherworldly” counterpart.  The only “antidote” to tribal warfare, here, is reason as the dialogical opening of the opposition between Us and Them to a foundational stage of common problems—those very problems that “our true God” represents most formidably.

The difference between the “Hebrew” model in question and Rousseau’s “civil religions” is sharp: in the former case, the conflict between Sacred and Profane exposes the Sacred to its dual nature and so to the categorical distinction between 1. the positive and 2. the natural or hidden dimension of the Sacred—between what the Sacred is formally and what the Sacred is in itself, namely a metaphysical “secret”.  We turn to the intimate, esoteric, even philosophical dimension of the Sacred where the outward, or legal sense is challenged by the Profane represented most vividly by all that is foreign, including foreigners.  The foreign challenges us to question the roots of our Sacred Order to discover a bedrock of problems common to all nations, to all political orders, whether or not they are deemed sacred.  In this respect, the Hebrew alternative entails a civil religion that is at once natural to man as man (to “uncorrupted” of “unfallen” man, to speak biblically), even as it distinguishes the civil and the natural in virtue of the universal character of its revelation, or of the special understanding of its revelation as universal.[14]

What does this tell us about Christianity?  Christianity should not be understood as a legal “magnification” of Hebrew law (as might be Islam), but as a mirror of the natural principles of the Hebrew law.  As the enlightening revelation of the inherence of the Hebrew law in human nature, Christianity is not addressing primarily the Hebrews, but all Peoples who are not Hebrew, namely the pagan world, or more synthetically, “Rome”.  Christianity announces out-loud to the World of Nations what Judaism can afford to merely whisper to its neighbors.  Yet, no sooner has the annunciation of the Good News smothered its quiet precursor than the former lends itself to being misconstrued as representing nature independently of the legal limitations of closed societies.  A Christianity purporting to have replaced a Judaism thereby rendered entirely anachronistic or expendable, is likely to represent human nature as apolitical, or asocial.  For where nature “speaks” outside of the bonds of sacred law, or where revelation no longer represents the character of civil religion, the door is open to a conception of human nature incompatible with the thriving of political life.  Thereupon the political tends to be obscured by the looming cloud of the techno-ideological order that is often heralded under the banner of the Open or Global Society.[15]

Beyond the self-confidence of the Global Society, we face a dialectic of contexts: the Sacred within the Profane and the latter within the former.  The Sacred emerging through the Profane to guide the Profane within the Sacred.  Yet, the Sacred remains a secret; even in triumphing, its light hides.  Light dying into the night to illuminate the night from within.  The Sun yields to the Moon, even as a single light defines the logic of human life.  Mind hides in the bodily to raise it, to guide it back into mind.  How is the bodily, the profane guided back to its source?  The Sacred animates the Profane to seek the Sacred on profane grounds.  This is paganism, or what is sometimes still referred to as “false religion”.  A religion of imaginary divinities, of unloving loved Gods; of idols.  And yet, the Profane “motivates” us to discover the poetic interiority of the Sacred (the same may be said, mutatis mutandis, of Life and Death: Death “motivates” us to appreciate the poetic interiority of Life).  Paganism sets the stage for Christianity, for the Christian disclosure of Judaism’s meaning, or rather of Judaism to the world, the pagan world.  In Christianity, Judaism gives itself to the pagan, it dies into the Profane, so that the Sacred may resurrect–poetically.  This comes about through the Christ, the Messiah, the anointed one, the one chosen for the Cross, for serving as pivot of conversion of the world, as crossroads for a vertical reorientation of “the flesh”.  St. Paul speaks of Christ’s cross as key to the proper, original or true relationship between man and world.  Christ’s cross is the paradigmatic sacrifice through which the world is crucified to man, as man is to the world: mihi mundus crucifixus est, et ego mundo (ἐμοὶ κόσμος ἐσταύρωται κἀγὼ κόσμῳ: “to me the world has been crucified, and I to the world”—Galatians 6:14).  What does it mean for the world to be crucified “to me” (mihi/ἐμοὶ)?  In “dying” to me, the world dies unto (for) God—it “converts” to God—no longer standing as the object of human conquest.  But if the world is not “for me,” then neither am I for it.  Hence Saint Paul’s “and I to the world”.  On the other hand, in dying to the world, man gains or regains participation in the divine government of the world.  Hence the saint’s reference to boasting (καυχάομαι) in the Cross.  Human authority is redeemed through Christ’s paradigmatic cross, which discloses the “logic” through which the world dies to me and I to it: in disappearing to me, the world invites me to turn to God, thereby participating in divine providence.

My own sacrifice is meaningful only in the first sacrifice, the sacrifice that is elected by God, that of the Messiah, the one born for the sacrifice.  This primordial sacrifice orients my own sacrifice to God.  I do not, then, sacrifice myself for the world, or for my own self.  Rather, I sacrifice myself to God, albeit only where the world has “died” to me (as Job reminds us, God cannot mask worldly power).  The world must be crucified to me by God, so that I may renounce it entirely, thus die to it, in recognition of its having been rendered unto God.  Indeed, if the world is not for me, then neither am I for it.  Man is to thank God that the Messiah’s own sacrifice calls the world back to God.  For, deprived of the world, man renounces it; he lets go of it.  Yet, precisely at this point, as he lets go of the world, man finds his just pride (καύχημα), indeed his redemption.  For then, man can recognize his own sacrifice, his own life, as or in the context of a divine calling.

God dies in man so that the world may die to man so that man may die to the world.  But where does the “cycle” of sacrifice lead? God alone is not enough. He needs help and the “post-humanist” technological mindset (technology is no mere “tools”), including its mechanistic conception of life/nature has to be toppled before God can rest comfortable.  The Seventh Day has yet to come.

“Dying to the world” does not mean (need we any remined?) being recruited in a dead world as cyborgs (functional dead-meat).  The cycle of sacrifice points back to God, even as God points back to Man.  The technological apparent short-circuiting of the original ethical-theological cycle entails, in reality, mere alienation in a “loop,” where the dialectic of sacrificial “letting-so” is abandoned in favor of “life” as mechanical repetition.  Mechanical reproduction emerges as model for biological reproduction, which is thereby denied any transcendent end.  Our lingering-in-repetition, the mechanical reproduction of our daily experience, comes to constitute an entire world in which “return” itself has been mechanically reproduced in a vortex of self-referentiality, where to return is to reenact, to replay the same senseless day, the same script deprived of author (as were Pirandello’s personaggi), the same refrain waiting for the Absurd (Heidegger’s Gods, or a more prosaic Godot) to land on the scene (mechanically, to be sure), to interrupt the recording, severing the chains of Sisyphean repetition.

The cybernetic context exposes itself to an end, which it must conceive as absurd, not to say absurdly ineluctable.  Why should we abide within that context?  Why should we believe that there is no path of life leading out of it?  Why concede that there is no “right way” (Dante’s diritta via) out?  Why accept that the only way is itself trapped in absurdity?  That the only infinity to be attained to is that of repetition of the same: samsara.  Yet, samsara entails a repetitive failure to replicate nirvana, the “blowing out” of repetition and its immanentistic or secular context.

Samsara “flows” mechanically as a broken record of which only one track is played, continuously failing to account for any hierarchical shift, any advance from the Low to the High, but also any return from finitude to infinity, from boundaries to the boundless.  For, where nirvana (positive infinity) is posited outside of samsara (negative infinity), the only conceivable return from the latter to the former is mechanical.

The problem of Zeno’s arrow (reemerging symbolically in Hume’s treatment of causation) responds to all mechanistic or materialist readings of nature.  Physical motion (the bodily) is never a closed or “self-sufficient” system.  There is no “evolution”—no shift from x to y—without the help of an immanent or latent z, a variable that is, however, not of the order of x and y, but that mediates the two, ad infinitum.  That z value is absolutely indeterminate insofar as it remains “vertically” open to a transcendent totality: eternity.  The materialist fails to recognize the value or quality of z aside from the quantities or determinations x and y.  Treating the mediating z as “just another quantity,” the materialist traps himself in a fractal universe where every supposed cause mediating any given two determinations (x and y) invites further mediation, as an h between x and z, and a g between y and z.  This way, the materialist outlook exposes itself to an indefinite number of causes, an open web of co-dependent causes (samsara), distracting us from any hierarchy of causes rising from a primordial z to an absolute hidden cause, a “First Cause” (Aristotle), which for classical “idealist” philosophy is the divine in itself.

On account of modernity’s special mode of materialism, negative infinity is supposed to be able to approximate positive infinity insofar as the latter is conceived as a mere function of the former.  Nirvana is now the product of samsaric creativity, where the “center” (the now) of samsara is seen as the foundation of the building of “salvation” on the grounds of “perdition”—of Heaven on infernal grounds (as Nietzschean Picasso, we no longer foolishly seek truth: we find it, i.e. we create it, as madmen).  Hence the “technological” character of the modern world, where the now is saturated by the “brainstorming” of infinite possibilities: the open market of fantasies evoking a final virtual fulfillment (“Final Fantasy”).  Not to participate in the brainstorming game is to become bigoted reactionaries assumed to be unjustifiably clinging onto “beliefs” unaligned with our collective destiny.  Ultimately, the only “conservative” left will be the “savage” of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian World.

Where the conservative[16] is conceived as a mere reactionary, he is replaced by a strawman for the rise of the progressive State, serving as scapegoat, used to “wash away” or whitewash the sins of his progressive nemesis.  The conservative can seek consolation in seeing himself as a gift granted by Heaven to wash the sins of a world fallen prey to the illusion of power cut off from ethical-metaphysical concerns.  In that world, power is expressed by an art (“technique”) exercised autonomously of any philosophical and religious consideration, thereby becoming opaque to its own limits.[17] It is the opaqueness of the new world that renders the conservative at once unwelcome and eminently useful.  For it is in denouncing the conservative that the progressive lover of opaqueness—of darkness (τὸ σκότος, reads John 3:19)—fuels his optimism, his sense of direction.  Even though the progressive does not bother asking as regards the significance of what he is denouncing.  For the opacity he loves is alien to the “sweetness and light” (M. Arnold’s blessed expression) cherished by the classical conservative.  Which is why, “though the light shines in the darkness, the darkness fails to grasp [comprehend or assimilate] it” (καὶ τὸ φῶς ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ φαίνει, καὶ ἡ σκοτία αὐτὸ οὐ κατέλαβεν (John 1:5).

It should come to no surprise that in our technological age, the conservatism in question should be largely ignored in favor of a conservatism based on the very notion of individuality cherished by progressivism.  The modern conservative counters assimilation in the stream of mass-mediocracy, in the name of an individual quest.  He sets out climbing “the mountain of truth” individually.  The ascent is conceived as original and unique for each of us, while its end emerges beyond individuality, altogether.  The ascent consists of an individual, or rather self-individualizing struggle to overcome individuality; the Self’s struggle to overcome itself.  As the Self ascends it individuates itself (its work becomes progressively unique); it personalizes itself; it becomes ever more personal.[18] But here is the problem, for heightened individuality masks the truth sought out, the truth awaiting at the top of the mountain.

Is this a realistic account of humanity’s spiritual challenge, of heroism?  Let us succinctly consider four lessons from premodernity.  The first is offered by Lucian of Samosata’s Hermotimus (2^nd c.); the second by Brunetto Latini’s Tesoretto (13^th c.); the third by the 1505 “Allegory of the Hill of Wisdom,” a Siena mosaic based on Pinturicchio’s design; the fourth by the 16^th century Journey to the West (西遊記), traditionally attributed to Wu Cheng’en (吳承恩).  These four overtly disparate accounts of journeys to wisdom share a common classical trait: far from recounting an individual’s “self-individualizing” ascent to a common consummation/transcendence of individuality, the four accounts present a journey of purgation of the marred/opaque conditions of our existential context.  The “ascent” is not, properly speaking, that of any “individual,” but of a person in the guise of one or more characters (personae) from obscurity (a dire predicament involving perplexity) to the dispelling of obscurity, or to the return to an immaculate life/nature.  In none of our four representative cases (cases representative of premodernity) do we find the drama of the (modern) Self reaching out to truth.  The question is rather one of showing how the self serves as carrier for the devesting of his world from confusion or violence.  This “ascent” is carried out in the mirror of a person (no opaque mask) letting go of certainties.  As the poetic character “lets go” of itself as obstacle to truth, the true nature of the context in which we all abide is exposed as free from impediments.  This is to say that the door is opened to divine providence (“living Being”) as primordial context/motor of life.  This is the case even in Lucian’s “satirical” Hermotimus, where a student’s “pre-Socratic” ascent to divine-like wisdom is exposed as ludicrous.  Lucian’s story ends with a Socratic teacher (Lycinus) seeing off Hermotimus, a youthful student of Sophists, extatically embracing the realization that the treasure of truth awaits us, not on the top of the Olympus of wisdom, but at its feet, the very common ground we tread daily even as we turn our gaze away from it.  And yet, unlike the interlocutor he leads to gleeful disenchantment, the Socratic Lycinus is in no monastic frenzy, inviting the reader to wonder about a second, or “other” journey (Dante’s Virgil would speak of an altro viäggio) leading from Hermotimus’ ecstatic joy to the “undercover mind” represented by Lycinus.  Latini’s own Tesoretto or “Little Treasure” points to an “other journey” that Dante, Latini’s student, would expose in his renowned Comedy.  For at the peak of Latini’s ascent, wisdom does not speak: Latini’s story is abruptly interrupted and the prospect of acquiring divine-like wisdom is serenely deferred indefinitely.  For what Latini’s journey calls for is a classical good life rather than any Faustian or Baconian conquest (of nature).

Pinturicchio’s own design (see image above) confirms Latini’s Socratic lesson: our philosophical ascent to wisdom involves the letting go of vices and deceptions, rather than any acquisition of power, no matter how much power is identified with divine bliss.[19] A lesson developed marvelously in the Buddhist Journey to the West ( “West” naming the Yang principle’s hiding in its Yin counterpart), where the “monkey” protagonist, Sun Wukong (孫悟空) is Sun (patronym etymologically indicating a “heir”), “the Awakened to Emptiness” (Wukong/悟空).  At the pinnacle of Sun’s quest for a deserved divine-like wisdom (Sun is, after all, its heir), Buddha hands him an invisible, silent lesson that defeats the purpose of the quest, even as it should shed light on the mysterious “cosmic” context evoked in the opening verses of Wu Cheng-en’s story.  On the other hand, Buddha offers a second, alternative lesson, a written lesson that everyone can benefit from, a lesson that thereby marks the beginning of “another journey” beyond Journey to the West, namely a journey to be undertaken by the story’s foremost recipients, those who are to journey Eastward to communicate Buddha’s thought in politically effective terms.  In sum, the initial metaphysical quest converts into an ethical one, even as the latter invites the former.

In our four classical references, metaphysics does not exhaust ethics, which, in turn, is in no manner of speech cut off from divine providence, or metaphysical agency.  The context of our empirical “ascent” is thus at once metaphysical and ethical, or rather, it is defined by an irreducible dialectic between the ethical and the metaphysical—as between Son and Father.  Rather than being grounded in any self-individualizing Self, experience emerges as belonging to reality understood in terms of a pre-empirical dialogue, an indissoluble relationship between the Human and the Divine.

There would seem to be much more to reality than experience and much more to experience than that of the modern “scientific” ego.  Once the “egoic” certainty wears out, once we die a modern death, however, we remain displaced, misfits in a world that supposedly is no longer.  This is Rousseau’s predicament: we cannot suffer living as moderns, but fail to return to the condition of the ancients.  Hence the philosopher’s solitary Promenades, ruminations of a man learning to walk in the shoes of the dead, to listen to what only the dead might hear, to become perceptive of the voice of plants, of air, the moon—speech hidden in death.  If we cannot live in the Cave of the living—be it the first Platonic one, or its modern replica—then perhaps we can live among the dead, live in hiding, live by giving up life, the allure of any cave-dwelling.  This is to let go of any pretense, of any gain, of any dream of conquest, of achievement, of success.[20] Yet, “success” in liberation from all imposture is unattainable as long as it is grounded in a self or will.  Hence the failure of modern psychology to save us from the modern impasse: alienation from nature/origins as positive context of our daily life experience.

Let us consider the representative case of renowned psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl.  While Frankl would rightly call us to transcend Freud’s “principle of pleasure” no less than Adler’s “principle of power/recognition,” Frankl’s “principle of meaning”—the appeal to meaning as primordial object of desire—remains inadequate as long as it does not expose desire itself to question, or as long as it does not convert the self into a question mark seated at the heart of meaning.  As long as thought posits an ego as striving for meaning and identifies with that ego, frustration will be inevitable.  The only concrete escape from frustration requires the transposition of the self into the problem of meaning (meaning as context).  But this is possible only in the mirror of the appearance of meaning, of intelligible wholeness, of awakening order.  Awakening would then take place in the mirror of art, of art as mirror, as the proper stage for our entelechy, the path of fulfillment of our natural mandate (of the mandate of beings aware of their being on a quest, or responding to an inward, uncompelled calling, or rather of being that response).  Frankl’s “logotherapy” is meaningful where it is understood as the cure that logos provides, a providential care defining our everyday existence.  It is not that meaning fulfills or satisfies the self, but that the self is redeemable only by giving itself to meaning.

How can the Self give itself concretely to meaning where the essence of meaning is defined in terms of modernity’s (and Frankl’s) amorphous “responsibility”?  Frankl’s appeal to “responsibleness” as “the very essence of human existence” reflects the existentialist’s habit of defining essence in terms of existence.  In rejecting “some existentialist philosophers [who teach] to endure the meaninglessness of life,” Frankl invites nevertheless a positive existentialism (to speak with Abbagnano),[21] calling us to bear the challenge of seeking meaning through a therapeutic, even “technical” logos exploring possibilities beyond ordinary “reason” as viable motivation to respond to life, where our response emerges ultimately as self-determination.[22]

The appeal to “motivation” (a subjectified motive) exposes us to the objection that our self-determination reflects a desperate impulse to escape despair—a meaningless drive to recoil in the face of meaningless existence.  That existence is the abyss that Nietzsche uncovers as the ultimate object of contemplation, suggesting further that once that object is exposed behind its “traditional” masks, we can rise in recognition that it is contemplating—now, properly speaking, “staring at”—us.[23] Our genuine freedom would then be redeemed as incarnation of the primordial impulse of the Abyss: creativity as “will to power”; meaning-formation as joyful expression of meaninglessness.[24]

The new ethics of “joyful creativity” comes with a backlash, namely revival of total war between multiple expressive determinations of meaningless existence.  Whence the rise of technology (or the technological market) as sole viable means to control the madness resulting from “joyful individuals” encountering others as hell itself.  L’enfer c’est les autres: “hell is the Other,” as Sartre’s would put it, insofar as the Other (any “individual” before me) mirrors the absurdity of my own life.  It is in order to avoid the maddening experience of hell that I as “individual” am compelled to embrace technology, the only available means to escape the hell left by the long-proclaimed disappearance of both God and Man, of both classical Theology and Ethics.  Technology alone promises to make freedom bearable where freedom is admitted as consummate curse.  And yet, the promise is unkept where the price to be paid is the abrogation of freedom as anything more than a meager promise.  Technology retorts, however, by normalizing the crisis of freedom.  We are supposed to be in crisis, “the new normal” where hell is our daily bread.

The new feed administered by the technological regime is hardly satisfying, even as we are told that we are hungry for nothing else.  Why, there is something terribly alien about our feed, something incompatible with our stomach, so much so that there comes a point where we are no longer sure if our stomachs are digesting the feed, or if the latter is consuming the former—if we are being fed only by way of being converted into feed.  The New Ethics.  No question asked.  Yet, what if we did ask; what if we did call our Regime into radical question, investigating the context of the genesis of our current predicament?

As our foregoing explorations suggest, technocracy’s crisis of liberty is retraceable to the (Machiavellian) severing of politics from theology, or of the shutting of ethics to its theological roots.[25] Once ethics is conceived immanentistically as a technical affair autonomous of philosophical-theological considerations—and this through the rise of the modern Self—the problem of freedom begins degenerating into an outright crisis of freedom: incapable of escaping self-referentiality, freedom short-circuits to convert into a will projected into a “super-ego” (as per Freud) defending us from a universe perceived as radically inimical, not to say patently evil.  The modern defense of freedom or of a peaceful sphere of life in which freedom may thrive independently of conflicts bygone (most notably “religious wars”) converts into a modern assault on all that stands outside of the sphere of modern freedom.  The “inside” justifies itself to and for itself only as a machinery of war against all that stands “outside” of itself: first and foremost, thought itself, which no “system” could ever contain.  Thought, thought as primordial context, is the first evil that the modern Tower of Freedom is to liberate us from, via the reification of thought into “system”.[26] The “new thought” belongs to the modern Self lost in amorphous, senseless existence (res extensa), a universe in which divine transcendence comes to naught, the place in which the divine is crucified.  The kingdom of God, divine transcendence itself, is debased now as evil “redeemable,” however, in the service of the “new world” built by the modern Self: a New Garden of goodness that converts “evil nature” (Descartes’s “matter”) into fuel for a totalistic world continuously at war with all that stands beyond it.  This world, this “garden”—this Tower—is nothing falling short of a gigantic machine of total war against the seat of divine transcendence, the old Garden (of Eden), and thereby against divine transcendence itself: “the Gods”.  Modernity as gigantomachia, is a brutal war waged by Giants against Gods, by gigantic Sons against their divine Fathers.  A war waged in the name of freedom no longer conceived as virtue bound to law (virtue as primordial nexus between boundary and the boundless, between πέρας and ἄπειρον), but as rebellion against divine, original boundaries.  War in the name of rebellion (“freedom from”) that, however, entails abandoning and further, or even more primordially, betrayal, a turning one’s back to the good, fatherhood.  Hence modernity’s overt and systemic, institutional assault on paternal authority, which is to be replaced by a technical authority, “authority” as a contractual mask of power, or of freedom conceived as empowerment.

The modern gigantomachia presents itself as the consummation of its ancient mythical evocations.  While old Giants attacked divine laws in the element of the imagination, our new Giants attack law in the element of “self-consciousness” situated, not within “myths,” but in the “natural” interstice between myths.  The new war is “historical” in the modern, universalist sense of the expression; the new war must then be “scientific,” insofar as it entails the project of controlling the hiatus between legal constitutions, thereby stepping “behind the Gods,” as it were—to symbolically stab them in the back.  In sum, modern Giants attack old Gods by (supposedly) appropriating the “natural principles” of war.  Hence the peculiarity of the new laws promulgated by modern Giants: not merely national “legal machines” countering national natural laws (the Gods of nations), but international contractual machines pretending to ground all divinely-rooted legal constitutions.

On a modern (Machiavellian or “neo-Epicurean”) reading, all law—both domestic and international—is contractual, so that international law is qualitatively identical to domestic law, even though the former appears weaker for large, powerful States insofar as they would prefer to rely on their own might, rather than accepting the restricting conditions of international contracts.  Yet, no single modern nation is mighty enough to be able to dispense with international law, which is the most formidable guise of law in the modern world.  For international law represents the natural interstice between all national legal constitutions, while in its representation, it channels nature to overcome “domestic law”.

Ultimately siding with the Gods (and with Parmenides over Heraclitus, anticipating Cicero’s defense of Stoic Gods against Epicurean impiety),[27] Platonism objects that law is not merely or essentially contractual, insofar as it “hides” or is somehow grounded in a permanent/natural intelligible order of things (which the Epicurean has ruled out).  But then law would be proper to natural polities, polities that are natural to man—polities that men desire by nature, and thus also by looking at or by responding to their nature.  But what sort of polity is desirable by nature?  What polity is appropriate to our own nature?  The question is best understood in the light of a more primordial question: what is the proper function, or rather end of politics?  What makes political society desirable to us?  Do we enter into political society moved by fear of the Void (Epicurus), or are we naturally political in the respect that we are naturally bent upon seeking truth in the mirror of political life, a poetic life, a life “imitating” our nature?

For the Platonist, every polity (πολιτεία) is a “closed society” insofar as an “open society” merely pretends to provide (through universal integration) a political solution to a pre-political problem; it merely pretends to resolve nature in political life (via laws conceived merely-technically, as mere contracts); it thereby ceases to function as mirror of nature, promising to be our Promised Land, a place where we can be finally at peace.  The closed society, on the other hand, is a society naturally at war with other societies.  The closed society will be one that honors martial art, the art of confronting war without abandoning peace, or of living peacefully with war.  But how is this living possible?  Only by looking back at peace as the natural foundation of political life, which is the life of the closed society, the relatively peaceful life continuously exposed to war as exception to peace.

If the only society natural to man is the closed society, the only law that is natural to man will be domestic law, the law of the closed society.  Any other law will be a modern, Machiavellian invention implying, if only on paper, the rise of an Open Society as context for all law, though primarily for “international law” (the modern “scientific” appropriation of the closed society yields the modern Nation-State, which blurs the distinction between closed and open society, thereby serving as stepping-stone for the emerging of the Open Society).  In the Open Society, international law dominates over domestic law, much as foreign interests take precedence over domestic interests, continuously threatening to supplant them altogether.

But perhaps international law is a blessing for all people lingering in the gravitational field of the Open Society.  “Perhaps”: a word leaving the door open to doubt (as opposed to suspicion) and thus to dispassionate dialogue.  Indeed, the foregoing considerations have not quenched our desire to doubt, to reconsider, to lift the veil of certainty they might have otherwise committed us to.  In turning back to those considerations, we work upon fulfilling a need peculiar to our nature as human beings.[28] It is never enough for us to rest satisfied, to abide within the certainties we establish for ourselves, but always we expose ourselves—in the very mirror of our certainties—to the challenge of lifting the veil of “the given,” to pierce into the darkness underpinning it.  How we approach that challenge will be a serious question.  Will we venture into “the abyss” carrying “baggage” with us?  Will we journey loaded with expectations to be projected over the abyss so as to neutralize its full import, its full capacity to draw us into its vastness, to show us that immensity, to enlighten us to its contents and significance, to raise us out of the boundaries of any certainty, of any limit?  Or must we abandon all certainties in order to seek out truth simpliciter?

The classical, properly philosophical alternative is given by the adoption of our certainties as mirrors of the uncertain, the finite as mirror of infinity, limit (πέρας) as mirror of the unlimited (the indeterminate, or ἄπειρον)—where the surface of things is the revelation of their depths, with the understanding that depths are not roots.  Human life stands here as logical interplay between boundaries and the boundless, a dialogue that is one with its eternal root, at once source of the disjuncture between form and content, between unity and what we often refer to as “multiplicity,” “plurality” or “diversity”.  This latter notion is likely to mislead us, however.  What is at stake is “the inconclusive,” “the unfinished,” “the not-yet-here,” and thus too “the dangerous,” “the terrible” and so “the holy/sacred”.  Human speech would then entail the interaction between the safe-haven of “evidence” and the fearsome “hiddenness” of things—between “disclosure” (ἀλήθεια) and “un-disclosure” (λήθη).  Not “truth” as “disclosure” would be the last word, but the coincidentia or “overlapping/co-presence” of disclosure and un-disclosure in and as logos (λόγος).  Truth as logos, rather than as mere “disclosure,” is key to our world (to its constitution) and that key, that fulcrum, that “pivot of conversion” is none other than the essence of man, the place where the human being lives—and where our life is meaningful.

Logos as telos (τέλος), as proper way of man teaches us what is good, but also what is evil.  Why does man distinguish himself from other life forms, other animals, by evil?  A “logocentric” answer discovers evil there where the mask of things ceases to function as a mirror of the interiority of things.  Where the human being produces “art(ifacts)” as resolving nature within them, art invites its own destruction; art becomes self-destruction.  Herein is the meaning of Nimrod’s Tower: the building of a world opaque to divine transcendence is an exercise in destruction; the original poetic language of building breaks down as it shuts itself to the source of its vitality, leading people into the arms of the absurd, where meaning is gibberish and reason is but madness.  Evil is the root of the Tower, the root of building destruction, of the senseless life, the life cut off from providence, from redemption as salvation out of a life replacing death, a life reduced to a funerary mask, as art pretending to be life: art as a stillborn reification of birth.

What happens to the Tower of Babel happens to every one of its characters, its personas.  Every person residing in the Tower is reduced to a shadow cut off from its own indefinite interiority, incapable of bespeaking a life outside of Babel’s stale replicas of life.  The resident of Babel occupies his place and is that place, finding his being as that place, that cell in the Babelic Leviathan.  For that resident, thought belongs to “cellular” (“monadic” for Leibniz) experience, so that the original sense of experience is lost, obscured, abandoned.  Lost by being stained, stained and thus darkened by having been abandoned.

What has been abandoned?  Experience taking its bearings from thought as its own cradle.  Outside of the Tower, thought does not belong to experience as a means to produce “individuality” or to fuel self-determination; it is rather experience that belongs to thought as the place where thought returns to itself in the mirror of its personae.[29] But now, the persona in which thought sees itself directly is what the Bible calls Adam, the human being originally residing in the Garden of Eden.  Outside of that Garden, thought fails to see itself directly in man.  What Dante calls “another journey” (altro vïaggio), another, indirect way (via) of advancing, is needed for thought to return to itself.  Lost in a wild and bitter land, in fallen experience, thought’s mirror is obscured: man is lost, his life marred and with it, his imagination and memory.  He must learn to project himself in the medium of words, to find himself anew in his poetic imitation of the journey of mind to mind.  That imitation is an exercise in retracing the human to the divine, until the human frees itself from the illusion of depending upon mindless existence, upon a world devoid of providence, where man falls prey to the temptation of creating a new world providing for every one of our needs.  Outside of the Garden, Adam must not build Babel, but a City calling upon God, a polity invoking thought itself.  Whence the “birth” of ethics as man’s proper response to a divine mind he has lost, a thought he can only partake in and this in dialogue, a logos shared among friends.  We need not be in the Garden in order to partake in thought, to expose ourselves, our very life, to thought.  It suffices for us to build a polity as mirror of divinity, a polity returning all that is physical to the metaphysical, to what is hidden “after” (meta) the physical, namely “the Nature of nature” (as per Jacob Klein).  It suffices, to echo Saint Augustine’s City of God (De civitate dei), not to idolatrously mistaken the signs of divinity for divinity itself.

Does our primal motor drive us towards the realization of the Tower of “possessors of knowledge” (“the wise”)—to rise from physical necessity to spiritual freedom, freedom of the will?  Or does it invite us to rise further back to testify to a prior, hidden order, a realm of partakers in knowledge—descending through the compulsion to rise from the bodily ignorance to selfhood and self-attribution?  Is the modern Realm of Freedom anything more than a symbolic reification of the Realm of Necessity?  Is modernity’s Leviathan anything more than a transposition of what Hobbes called “the State of Nature” into creations of the modern Self, that “self-determination of thought” peculiar to modernity?  What is peculiar to the modern Self?  It is characterized by the belief to have formally freed itself of its natural limitations: the modern Self has rebelled, not only to authorities conditioning it from without, but against the motor within himself—against nature’s principles.  Such a rebellion stands on a special mechanistic conception of those principles.  Ancient “materialists” (Aristotle’s “philosophers of nature”) had conceived nature in mechanistic terms.  Yet, they conceived natural mechanisms as objects of contemplation.  Thus Democritus spoke of atoms in the void as the reality underlying our everyday life experience.  Neither his atoms, nor his void were supposed to be empirical entities.  Atoms are by definition devoid of dimension: they are not in space.  The void is by definition devoid of content: it is timeless.  Atoms in the void are mental realities.  In positing atoms-in-the-void as foundation of the empirical universe, Democritus is not denying the primacy of contemplation over (vulgar) praxis; he is merely projecting mind’s own attributes onto mind’s own contents: he is opening the door to the world as repository of mind.  With modernity, on the other hand, the essential attributes of mind are denied.

Early-modern thinkers (most notably Machiavelli, Hobbes and Spinoza) reject ancient materialism for having underestimated the resilience of “matter,” of vulgar passions, passions hostile to contemplation.  The attribution to matter of the properties of mind is not going to “appease” matter—no more than the attribution to plebeians of the properties of divine masters will ensure perpetual peace.  The properties themselves must be rejected and reified on material or “vulgar” grounds.  Instead of raising matter in the mind via thought’s projection of its properties into matter, modernity attempts to start from a tabula rasa, a “blank slate” devoid of any divine property, a symbolic “form/mind” on which the properties of matter are to be projected.  Thus, with Descartes, the ego is to be filled with the world around it: the self as “new mind” (the thinking-thing or res cogitans) is now the repository of the powers of its empirical context.  Pure contemplation is out, while the divine emerges as an “ideal” filled with a humanity filled, in turn, with the vortex of sub-human powers.  If the age of Plato and Thucydides had come to see Gods as images of men; if it had faced a crisis of both religious authority (impiously denounced as false) and philosophical reason (imploded in radical skepticism), it had not yet set out to synthesize religious authority and philosophical reason into a single “Science”.  For the ancients, the crisis of authority and reason signaled war, chaos, anarchy and the return to the Gods.  There was no progressive faith in transcending the cyclicity of human and divine things.  The very notion of experimenting in building a new world devoid of Gods, or shut to eternity, would be deemed absurd—as was Nimrod’s Tower, or the “perfect city” hypothesized by Socrates in Plato’s Republic.  Human authority without divine authority appeared as ludicrous and foolish as the apotheosis of human freedom.  Yet, with modernity the crisis of humanity and divinity is supposed to signal a final crisis of cyclicity and the concomitant revelation of a primal progressive impulse cutting through all “return,” a drive to the constitution of a world beyond both Man and God.  Beyond the two, we would not be condemned to chaos, but to a New World Order beyond both death and eternity, a Present in which the Past could be gathered to build a Future at once autonomous of Eternity and capable of not relapsing into the Past (death).  To echo a semantic distinction stressed by Dante in his Comedy, moderns do not stop at the folly of the “flight” of ancient materialists, but rise further to the madness (mattia) of those believing to be the concrete repositories of what their ancient precursors had merely contemplated.  The Tower of Babel was inadequate because it was not scientifically sound.  It underestimated the problem of foundations and of context.  It was still conceived in terms of rebellion.  Modernity’s Tower attributes to divine authority the vulgar attribute of rebellion: the imposter is not the Tower, but the Realm of God.  The “unmasking” of that divine kingdom, lends credibility to the modern project of transcending the ancient crises of religion and philosophy, to capitalize on them.  Crisis is no longer seen as exceptional failure exposing us (again) to origins, but as the fuel of unprecedented triumph.  The “exception” (crisis) is now seen as the rule for the rise of a new reality.  There are no Heavens left for our Tower to reach, so we moderns no longer need to bother with the “foolish flight” (folle volo) symbolized by Dante’s Ulysses.  The modern Tower is ultimately an enterprise in building the Heavens themselves—divine limit as a function of unlimited power of which the Tower dwellers are supposed to be repositories, or at least primary share-holders.  Here, in this intuition into the nature of our foundations and context, we find the master key to modernity, the “new ways and orders” (modi ed ordini nuovi) Machiavelli announced at the dawn of the modern world.  Modern man is the repository of the original disclosure of origins, the true revelation of the nature of things, beyond all ancient categories of thought and speech.  Finally, it becomes possible to realize Babel’s Tower.  For the first time, Babel’s project becomes fully credible.  God himself, incarnated in Nature’s powers, makes that project possible.  The apotheosis of freedom is, if not ready at hand, at least approaching.  Sustained by its “new divinity,” the new Tower builders are set loose in a world of “virgin lands” begging to be colonized, even raped (but what is rape if consent is inevitable and self-worth demands it?), in the name of the new God, spirit of infinite progress.  In sum, the new Tower is not conceived as a mere possibility, but as a fateful actuality, an actuality fatefully in the making.

The Tower of modernity masks reality beyond premodern expectations, for it does not merely occlude our vision of the entrance of Plato’s Cave by seducing us into orienting our lives towards the Cave’s inner-wall shadows; in the new Tower “the outside,” the beyond itself is supposed to be integrated in the realm of shadows for the sake of a synthesis of shadow and reality.  Our new divine context no longer stands outside of our Cave, for it is none other than the Cave itself.  A new Cave, to be sure; one that projects its features outside of itself, into the Heavens.  The work entailed here is not that of the old Tower which uses “heavenly features” to reach the Heavens.  What is at stake now is the building of new Heavens by projecting earthly features onto the old Heavens.  The new Cave will be the old one projected outside of itself.  Seeking the Heavens within the old Cave proved foolish.  The modern remedy to ancient foolishness consists of establishing our heavenly ends by transposing the Cave’s arts into outdoor nature conceived, again, as inert or incapable of opposing the new arts.  The Cave dwellers are driven, in other words, to “colonize” the divine landscape extending outside of the Cave.  Confident that they have been able to coopt the old Heavens, or the old Gods, as fuel for their project, the residents of the modern Cave no longer rest satisfied with following shadows; they now seek to establish shadows as realities above old shadows, myths above old myths.

The modern strategy is reminiscent of that of old Hebrews who had posited one true God above all other Gods who would be, thereupon, deemed false.[30] The new Cave posits itself as the “phenomenological realization” or final revelation of all that is true, with the understanding that the false must have been abolished altogether.  The establishment of the new Cave presupposes the annihilation of all alterity.  No lies are tolerated, with the understanding that all that is within the new Cave must be true.  The enemy of the new Cave is not a lie (strictly speaking an anachronism), but suspicion against the Cave, especially where suspicion gains visibility.  The new Cave’s last adversary is “conspiracy,” or “terrorism”.

Exiting the new Cave would entail exiting the stream of “evolutionary nature,” thereby recovering a pre-symbolic sense of heroism.  As pursuer of “ideals” realized in our feeling of heroism, the new hero is perfectly fit for the new Cave.  His heroism is success within the new Cave, rather than success in transcending the cave-context.  He seeks mastery of evolutionary nature (mastery as integration or assimilation), rather than mastery of the art of transcending any evolutionary compulsion.  Accordingly, it is enough for him to feel good, most notably about himself, as opposed to being good.  Or he will assume that he is good because he feels good; just as he will assume to be “happy,” simply because he feels thus.  He might, of course, consider the limitations of his purported heroism: he might begin looking down upon our daily pretenses, our ordinary heroic masks of pettiness, of fear, even of outright mediocrity.  And in the face of his recognition, he might reinvent heroism as the practice of exposing the manifold guises of its imposture.  If heroism is what gives life its meaning, the new hero might venture into defending “true heroism” as the “individual’s” act of exposing the meaninglessness of life.[31]

This negative response to nihilism (hammering on old “idolatrous” religions and their Gods) is but one side of contemporary Nietzscheanism; on the positive side of the coin, we find “creativity” unleashed by the proclamation of absence of permanent principles or standards (“God is dead!”).  Thus do our “ideals” survive in the context of evolution as marketable values, tokens of exchange distracting us from an otherwise meaningless existence (which our new “values” were, perhaps still are, supposed to “express”).  One might say that our generation feels condemned to “create meaning” lest we fall into outright despair; whence our welcoming of digital machines to do the “dirty work,” the “heavy lifting” for us.   For we no longer share the strategic optimism characteristic of Frankl’s therapeutic “idealism”; nor are we consoled by Fromm’s philo-Marxist (or neo-Hegelian) historical contextualization and its capacity to usher into the vision of a global Promised Land for humanism.

The “heroic crowds” of late/post-modernity’s “creative imagination” shrink before their newly gained freedom, which fails to render the meaninglessness of life any more palatable than old religious threats of Hellfire do.  Having learned to shun pain, to seek convenience in cunning, to love our masks and despise all honor, we invoke our toys to entertain us, to provide us with our daily thrills, our daily sleep, the poison that allows us to pretend to live or die, to fade under the ingrained assumption that all evil gathers into a single act, that of being.

In pulling back the veil of pretension from old Gods, our age seems to have stripped itself of its own capacity to discern any goodness, folding into cynicism as bio-product (bio-weapon, one might say, today) of the ascent to the triumph of freedom-from.  That ascent did not make us more virtuous, but more shameless, a circumstance suggesting that virtue is not tied to freedom-from more than accidentally; that it is rather inseparable from freedom-for.  Yet, our generation has been raised to assume that the only legitimate freedom-for is grounded in freedom-from; as if true Gods rose only where we deface “false” ones; as if we were fated by meaningless existence to deface, to efface faces, to obscure any reminder of what is not a mask.  As if Socrates, finally, ought to have armed himself with a Nietzschean hammer.

Be that as it may, heroism survives today by and large as the feeling thereof, a (mostly narcissistic) feeling that, as Becker would argue, we would have been able to enjoy authentically only in a “primitive” society.  Yes, insofar as that fierce society is unattainable, today, what we are left with is mere and vain reifications of heroism, abstract pretenses (conceit) allowing us to cope together with our otherwise (supposedly) meaningless life.  For our pretenses buy us social recognition to make up for lack of divine recognition.  We then sit in our cave reassured that there is but hell outside, compelled to consciously pretend to be “heroes,” meaningful (because socially fit) entities (“ideally” integrated in the “Metaverse” context of videogames), given that we fail to return to a society in which we could feel genuinely heroic, a society in which what counts would be recognition by Gods, rather than Men.

Our own feeling is unequivocal: we can hardly avoid feeling that there is something terribly wrong, something deeply rotten, about our own feeling good.  No number of masks, no amount of investment in entertainment—no matter how “interesting”—can remove the stain, the stench of a betrayal upon which stands our Brave New Tower.  Nor does our numbness grant us comfort; nor can we live when condemned to live, or even bear to wear the mask of freedom where freedom is but our curse.

Could we escape our curse, our freedom (to provocatively evoke Fromm)? To do so we would need to reconsider its source, bringing into question the modern rise of “the individual” as repository of freedom.  What is freedom prior to the rise of the modern Self?  The prospect of escaping from modern freedom points to the possibility of a sustainable premodern alternative not couched in individuality, or, for that matter, in any communitarian conflation of individuals.  Freedom outside of the Self?  How are we to understand such a freedom?  We could begin by freeing freedom from the Self—by setting freedom free—even if this means shaking the foundations of modern selfhood.  But could we ever transcend the modern Self?

We begin transcending the modern Self as we begin thinking, if not realizing that freedom is not grounded in it—that we are not the source or center of freedom, but that we partake in freedom by partaking in its source.  On a classical logocentric understanding, we partake in freedom to the extent that we give ourselves to dialogue, the logos proper to human beings, a logos of disclosure of the world, of its extremes or contradictions, unto truth (its underlying reality).  Freedom would not begin with the Self.  Instead, the Self would be constituted on the horizon of freedom.  It would be a mistake to say that freedom belongs to us, but reasonable to assert that we belong to freedom.  Our every choice would not entail our self-determination: choice would not be grounded in anyone’s act of the will, or in our “will power”.  Modernity’s “individualism” collapses before the weight of accountability.  The self would not justify itself in the face of life’s indetermination through an act of self-determination or self-assertion (pace Romanticism), but by letting the self’s own ground speak for itself.

Modernity (Frankl’s case is typical) calls us to respond to existence by determining ourselves—and this through the production of ideals for us to realize.  We are now assumed to “respond” to existence, or live “authentically,” by realizing our ideal projections of our imagination.  This is to live responsibly, “integrating” our lives in the realization of our ideals—realizing ourselves in them.  Yet, this project of “self-realization” or “self-actualization” presupposes a particular conception of the ground of the self as incompatible with human life and reason.[32] This is precisely why Immanuel Kant effectively banned all investigation of the ground of our freedom.  For Kant, that would mean reconsidering the natural ground of the self as containing the principles of the constitution of the world of political-ethical life.  Now, Kant rejects any natural ethics, in favor of an “ideal” ethics to be realized in a “contractual” manner, by modern “contractual” discourse.  The “universal” ethics of modernity is a contractual ethics possessing global amplitude.  A new historical universal is supposed to supersede the old natural universal: a new superficial triumph is to supplant a retrograded heroic quest for “deep” triumph, triumph that does not belong to our will, but to the will’s ground and so to a sphere of reality encompassing the empirical.  If in modernity the hero determines himself as an “individual” in the face of “the world,” our classics “return” to a triumph of the ground of “the self” understood as a person that cannot possibly convert into an “individual,” or an undivided self.  The (human) person is constitutionally broken or divided.  It is through our fissures, our imperfections, our incompleteness that what is complete emerges.  Through the finite that the infinite shows itself; through our limits that the boundless enters into our world as a miracle.

Certainly—would stress Vico in response to Hobbes—is our world made by men, but not truly.  Man partakes in the creation of his world opening himself to his divine ground.  Human providence acts through divine providence.  Yet, the divine itself speaks through the human.  Hence the dialogical mode of constitution of our world.  The political-ethical world is the product of the interplay of Man and God, of Man hiding in God and of God showing himself as Man.  Hence the classical “cycle”: from God, back to God.

Modernity objects by positing a pre-political ego/self at the foundation of all political life and order.  Our original context would be the pre-political “swamp” that early modernity calls “the State of Nature”.  It is only upon man’s entering into a political context through a free, “individual” choice—a “spiritual” act of self-determination—that the problem of providence begins to acquire meaning.  In our “State of Nature,” there is no providence, but chance and material-necessity, “plebeian” terms designating the sub-human, or the unconscious.  It follows that man emerges out of a Realm of Necessity into a Realm of Freedom characterized by consummate “self-awareness” as something that knows to know.

Erich Fromm has articulated the problem at hand with distinctive eloquence.  In the “Man’s Nature” section of his The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Fromm describes the challenge of returning to an original experience common to all men independently of racial inheritance—an experience characterized by self-knowledge that is at once knowledge of ignorance.  Fromm appears to believe that he and some of his contemporaries are the first to have set out to account for this original mindset scientifically (e.g. through “psychoanalysis”), as opposed to having evoked or replicated it in the imagination (via “drama, poetry, art, myth”—256).  Yet, Fromm’s account stands on the shoulders of the likes of Hobbes, whose first men hopped as Cartesian “frogs” lost and terrified in an existential swamp (the “State of Nature”), compelled to enter into a “social contract” for the sake of escaping their predicament (253).  These first men knew themselves as empty of knowledge and as needing to acquire knowledge.  The only way they could do so would be to enter into a society.  There, they could gain knowledge/power if only at the price of forgetting their first experience or mode thereof.  Socially-gained knowledge would build on the first dreadful experience common to all men and defining their pre-social condition—the experience of being limited to and yet torn apart from “nature” as material context of animal instincts.  In response to man’s alienation from instinctive animality, man builds character (255).  Character is supposed to “solve” the problem of our alienation in the production of a new context, a world in which we may finally feel and be at home.

Fromm’s explorations of the problem of common origins and thus of human nature are perhaps best understood in the light of the objection that Vico had articulated, most notably in his 1744 Scienza Nuova, to the doctrine of Thomas Hobbes considered as notable representative of early-modernity’s rejection of divine providence.[33] On Vico’s reading, modern political thought leads us astray in assessing the mindset of the “first men”.  These first men had a “poetic nature” (natura poetica) that “in these civilized [ingentilite] natures of ours it is factually impossible to imagine and we are allowed to understand it only at the price of great pain”.[34] “Now it is hardly possible to understand and factually impossible to imagine how the First Men who founded Human Gentility thought”.[35] “Now” (ora) says Vico, because their nature, their way of thinking, was almost as that of beasts, whose minds, being entirely buried in physical sensation and thus unaware of any direction in life (any natural teleology), are incapable of discoursing (229-30).[36] For us to see as “primitive” men do is for us to forsake all of those abstractions without which we could hardly distinguish between “then” and “now,” between our universals and particulars.  We would need to stands in an incipient now, a place that is no longer within civil society insofar as it constitutes its beginning, a crucial watershed between the human and the beastly.  But who is “factually” allowed not to live within our world of abstract conventions?  Who is allowed to show himself, to appear “in public” at the dawn of civility?  Who would ever be permitted to stand as a man who is incapable of abstracting humanity and divinity from one another?[37]

Our first fallen thought (Vico is speaking of the pagan founders of Gentile society) is “fallen” into a brutal and terrible condition, but it is not altogether cut off from a prior, “lost” condition, namely an integral, divine thought that allows us to understand our “first men,” without losing our civility/gentility and thus our status of pagan men, as opposed to men taking any particular divine revelation for granted (ibid., “Of the Elements,” §114, p. 86).  Although there is no full return to the First Adam (in practical terms, we cannot live like him), we do have access to his thought in the mirror of civility and thus of our present consciousness.

The early-modern (Machiavellian, Hobbesian, Spinozist, etc.) attempt to imagine the nature/thought of first men misleads us into portraying them in function of our abstractions, alienating their particularity from universality and so fostering the impression that they were utterly lost in what Descartes called res extensa, a “material nature” devoid of any mind—of any care and so of any providence.  Descartes’s first man is an ego that has to take care of himself “individually” given the absence of any divine providence; he must “sign” a social contract to account for his monastic solitude.  It is only then that he can swear by a God above him, a God who can vouch for the Cartesian ego’s modern quest to “master nature” if only by incorporating nature in the historical creation of a concrete “Paradise” of which the Eden evoked by the Bible can be no more than a mere shadow.

Vico objects that God is not originally a lofty justification of society as conceived by early modern political philosophers writing in the wake of Machiavelli.  Prior to appearing ex machina to save us from any “State of Nature,” God is hidden in nature, which, in turn, will not be Descartes’s “extended stuff” (res extensa), but a context mysteriously constituted through a mind or thought that is at once divine and human.[38] To speak against the grain of Hegelian progressivism, the first men were aware of universality, even though they did not abstract it out of particularity.  They were not godless “individuals,” but beings (“ways of thought”) in whom divinity and humanity were inseparable from each other.

The key lesson Vico leaves us with is that rather than trying to reduce the conscious to the unconscious, we are to understand the unconscious in the light of the conscious—the Low (as debased) in function of the High, even though the latter does not mark the end of our journey.  Indeed, the very first paragraph of Vico’s magnum opus, call us to rise above the God of heavenly contemplation, to discern in him, the world of men.  Hence the Platonism or irreducibly dialectical character of Vico’s message: the human and the divine cannot be understood aside from each other, even as neither is reducible to the other and given that there is no tertium non datur.

But is the “material” world not an obstacle to our dialogue?  Who can afford living in dialogue with the divine?  Why, it would seem that few of us can “afford” (both economically or psychologically) the leisure to live a life open to metaphysical questions.[39] Yet, who cannot afford that leisure?  Who cannot afford recoiling before the stream of compulsions of a world shut to the beyond?  To be fair, ordinarily we do not know what we are doing in the respect that what we do appears opaque to reason, to meaning.  We do what we do, but without asking “why?” The question seems incompatible with “actually doing,” with our responding to the demand of the moment; so, we follow a stream of daily demands as if we could not “afford” any alternative; as if the stream were ineluctable.  But in fact, who cannot afford not seeing our stream in the light of transcendence?  Who cannot avoid dissatisfaction, or discord in the face of the ordinary?  The question is not whether or not we struggle against compulsion—the ostensibly inevitable—but how.  Even the most rudimentary mode of resistance constitutes a ceasefire; every doubt is itself a truce, a window, no matter how minute, exposing the finite to the positive infinity of divine perfection.  Who cannot afford a truce, peace in the midst of war? (And who cannot afford not to waste the truce by filling it with new compulsions, renewed distractions?) Who cannot afford to fight backwards, to fight for the sake of returning to peace?  Who cannot afford to carry his cross properly, with honor?  Who cannot afford to endure suffering as a testimony of return, of rendering?  Why, who cannot afford to live as a man?  A man among men, whose dialogue with the divine is, properly speaking, dialogue between our life and its divine perfection; a dialogue we participate in by carrying our share of pain—our body, our prison—unto divine deliverance; without leaving any trace of pain, any ounce of experience behind.

For the human being to be a dialogical animal is for all aspects of his life to be ethical, where the proper context of our lives is an ethics of dialogue, our being–responsible for one another as partners in dialogue, our “being-in-responsibility” for one another.  Our “being” would then necessarily entail our capacity to respond to the good of our friends, those we care for, or more precisely those in relation to whom we are provident; for to care for someone is to look out for what is good for him.[40]  But the human being facing another—man in dialogue—is mortal, or finite.  Indeed, only another human being, another being in dialogue with me can remind me of my mortality (only a man can be my friend, or my enemy; properly speaking, we love and hate only human beings, genuine interlocutors in a dialogical/ethical context).  Not only can he tell me about my limits, objecting to my being as represented by my convictions, certainties in which I determine myself as man; what is more, my partner in dialogue can mirror my limits: in his own limits, I remember my own; the sight of his own mortality (whether he exposes it voluntarily or not is irrelevant, here) reminds me of my own.  The problem of care, or love as care (caritas), is inseparable from that of death: in loving each other, in caring for each other, we become aware of each other’s obstacles, or limits; we grow aware of our death.  It is impossible to truly love someone who is not mortal, who does not face death with us, which is to say, in dialogue with us.  Of course, we can love something, but then that something is loved only to the extent that it reminds us of someone; only to the extent that it serves as metaphor for a human being, a partner in dialogue.  Nor do we truly love immortal beings, or Gods, if not in the respect that they are anthropomorphic.  Accordingly, we never love a God—superior to us and so authoritative for us in virtue of his immortality—as an “it,” but always as a he, or a she—as a father, or as a mother.

Our care for one another is one with our commitment to dialogue; the intensity of our love for one another is at once the intensity of our dedication to living in dialogue with our loved one and so in reminding each other of our end understood both in positive and negative terms, with the understanding that our end is to be understood in the context of dialogue.  Why, our end coincides with the end of our own dialogue.  What is the end of dialogue?  Silence, or death, but also truth and life eternal—a life immune to the limits, the death that we strive to overcome in dialogue.  Superficially speaking, dialogue ends in its negation; yet, substantively, dialogue ends in its positive consummation or perfection.  What is the positive end we pursue in dialogue?  What is the positive end of dialogue?  What positive end do we really seek in dialogue, in being responsible for one another, in caring for one another, in true love?  Regardless of the manner in which we conceive that positive end, it will remain, in practical terms, inseparable from the problem of death, the problem that holds us back from leaping unto any concrete “solution” to dialogue.  It is in no small measure thanks to death that we remain in dialogue, that we keep loving each other, that we keep being human, that we keep striving for immortality, or for divinity in an ethical context and so in the light of the problem of death.  Death—the limit we discover in dialogue, in providing for each other—calls us to seek life within it, rather than dreaming of life as escape from death.  Death as limit calling us to discover the unlimited within it, or to turn ourselves into the discovery of infinity within finitude.  But this discovery that is none other than the heart of dialogue is at once none other than the essence of our own life.  So that we cannot truly live without attending to death, which is always someone’s death, or rather someone’s dying.  We can find no true life outside of the dying, the disappearing of our partner in dialogue.  Why, it is only in following our friend in his dying that we gain a glimpse of the end of dying, which is to say, of the positive destination of negativity.  Far from eradicating dialogue, death—our dying—introduces us to it as “care among the dead,” among those hiding in death, those living in the intangible recesses or interstices of our mortal existence.  Yet, who are these beings “living in death” if not ourselves, men who have died unto life, who have carried their cross into a realm immune to dying, a realm beneath the one of mortals?

It was in denial of our underworld that early modern thinkers of the caliber of Machiavelli and Spinoza evoked the new world that Leo Strauss would refer to as a cave beneath the (Platonic) cave.  The modern world would have been then conceived as a replica of the world of the dead, the realm of dialogue among the dead.  In the modern “Cave,” we are as dead, insofar as we pretend to be alive, to be in dialogue, to care for each other, to love.  Modern love could be carnal, to be sure, or purely “spiritual,” as some would say, but not poetic, or confronted with the problem of death as positive challenge.  For modern love is as secular as are its “individual” actors.  For modern man as such, death can be nothing more than the mark of love’s eradication.  In this respect, modern love is an imposture: as moderns, we care for one another, not to discover the content of death (thus not providentially), but to escape from death—to defy death.  Caring for one another will finally translate into using each other to deny the presence of death; collaborating in the building of a realm beyond death, a cave in which death is banned and life is but pretense, pretending that death awaits somewhere “in the future,” even as it summons us here and now.

Modernity carries with it a double denial, one of death and one of eternal life; a denial of both the negative and the positive end of humanity and consequently of both ethics as “preparation for death” (as per Socrates) and theology: both Athens and Jerusalem.  Denial of both human and divine authority—of both human and divine paternity—in the name of a new freedom, a new context that, notwithstanding its complexities, builds on the simple principle of raw denial.  Denial of death in the respect that modern life shuns any investigation of the content of death; but also denial of life insofar as life, uprooted from death, is denied access to our positive ends, namely the perfection of our qualities; the metaphysical perfection of ethics.

Over the alleged ashes of both God and Man (the human as mirror of the divine), a new “material world” is proclaimed, one in which both God and Man are supposed to be lost, or exposed to the new world’s “finding” and using them to fuel its own “evolution”.  Yet the new world is a symbolic abstraction feeding off of the mere nominal guise of humanity and divinity—their sheer shadow.  What fuels the modern world is the shadow of the past, not a past rooted in its origins, its proper end.  The new evolutionary context is made of dreams barely reminiscent of divinity and humanity in their proper or original dialogical context.

It is this primal context that the Christian Gospels evoke when inviting us to understand that our true nourishment does not reduce us to itself (we are no fertilizer for the earth), but invite us to return to its source—and to save (not “improve”) the world (from itself) on the way.  Carrying the world as a cross is “the way,” an ethical path through which bodies have access to life eternal.  For the cross we carry we carry in confronting each other in dialogue: dialogue as the way through which the “material” world is saved from itself—as we learn in John 4.

John 4’s Samaritan Woman parable is introduced by a reference to baptism by people, if only from God.  Men are sent by God to purge or purify one another.  Their “water” (as in the ancient Roman purging aqua et igni, markers of the dawn of humanity)[41] is only apparently physical, or “dead”; for it does not merely clean our bodies, but purge ourselves of our bodies—as “living water” (ὕδωρ ζῶν), which is none other than “the living word,”[42] the word flowing purely out of its source.[43] Water is originally “living”.  Properly understood, the physical is given by God to return to God, thereby partaking in a human journey.  John’s parable is itself a living word reminding us that our bodies are, properly speaking, ethical bodies.  The Gospel, the Good News, is a word that converts us from the “materialist” mirage that we are lost among “mere bodies,” to recognition that all that is physical is born in a context that is at once human and divine, at once ethical/political and theological/metaphysical.  The Good News frees bodies from the “physicalist” mirage alienating them from their proper life, which is our own eternal: αιώνια ζωή, permanent life, life that never dies; a gift, a present that never falls back into the well of the past (John 4:14).  This life provides the proper context for the physical world.  Accordingly, in John 4:11, the divinity of water is not an attribute imparted ex machina, for water “flows” naturally from a divine source, albeit through human agency.  Somehow, we are vehicles, the very path through which the physical flows out of the “metaphysical” (divine) and through which it returns to it (13-14), as long as we are on the right, lawful path, or “married” to the living word (16-17).  That word is present to the Samaritan woman or wife (γυνή) as a Lord, an authoritative κύριος (15, 19),[44] neither merely in the wilderness (“on this mountain”), nor in cities (Jerusalem—21), but through the latter and from within the depths of the former—“in spirit and in truth” (ἐν πνεύματι καὶ ἀληθείᾳ–23), that is, in the emerging of the divine in the present (νῦν).  The living or nourishing word is neither physical, nor nominal, even though it is known nominally (22 and 32).  To know that living word is to encounter the city in the wilderness (Jerusalem in a pagan desert, so to speak), to see law in nature—law, not as a human creation, or as something other than man, but as the form of the present, the form sustaining (indeed, saving) the present as an open window of salvation from the well of oblivion that is this world, our κόσμος (34-38 and 42).

NOTES:

[1] Gianni Vattimo’s metaphysically-uncommitted “weak thought” (pensiero debole) comes to mind.

[2] On the fundamental discrepancy between “mass democracy” and “the original conception of democracy”, see Leo Strauss, “Liberal Education and Mass Democracy,” in Higher Education and Modern Democracy: The Crisis of the Few and Many, ed. Robert A. Goldwin.  Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1967: 73-96.

[3] The modern “substitution” involves the replacement of God with “World,” or of ontology with cosmology—as in Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.  New York: Holt and Company, 1973: 259-60.

[4] Christianity’s doctrine of the Incarnation exposes the divine to mortality, so that in the heroic Savior/Lord (Christ) all men may witness what it means to die.

[5] Noteworthily, Kant opposed radical empiricism’s genealogical reductionism (where freedom collapses under the weight of its natural context) by appealing formal “transcendental categories”.  Meanwhile, “scientific” evolutionism—based on the very rationalism that Kant sought to defend—redefines the real context of our conceptual categories suicidally, as “Evolution,” i.e. ever-shifting-Being.

[6] Erich Fromm, op. cit., 261-62.

[7] In the Phaedrus, Socrates shows that, to speak with early moderns, we cannot go back to nature: we fail to understand the language of cicadas, to say nothing of trees.  In order to understand anything of importance, Socrates needs to return within city walls, to proceed in (human) dialogue.  Dialogue is Socrates’s way back to reality (the “what” of things, beyond mere hearsay and the appearances it mediates).  Yet, Socrates does not reach God (the “Sun,” or the Heavens); nor does he try to (as ancient natural philosophers would).  His “maieutic” work attests to “the return of all things” (to a grounding-place/τόπος of intelligibility to which things originally belong), inviting others (partners in dialogue) to partake in Socrates’s vital testimony in the mirror of poetic forms (the “ideas” Socrates induces his interlocutors to give birth to).  But the testimony is more than a testimony.  For it is through the testimony that “things return”.  Hence Socrates’s “discovery” (for us) of the ethical/political as key to the physical and theological, alike.  That being said, the primary function of Plato’s Socrates is to playfully invite readers to engage in dialogue, rather than engage in actual dialogue. (In the Gospels, the return to God is achieved “at the end of time” or in an absolute future, which can be no more/better than restoration of the beginning: the return is disclosed in a divine promise, a living word that draws us back to the good life, i.e. to desire of the good itself.)

[8] This formal opposition ordinarily distracts us from an underlying opposition.  On the “surface” what we see is 1. a phenomenon we could designate as disneyfication (the drive to turn the world into a borderless Disneyland of sorts) and 2. resentment against freedom as represented by disneyfication.  Yet the resentment feeds directly into the consolidation of the “Disney-like” shiny façade and so in the rise of the technological, transhumanist society, a System of spiritual corpses injected with the “virtual life” of digital avatars.  In our technological Age, the real wars—both domestic and international—fought around the world stand on the shoulders of a fundamental opposition between the last, resilient vestiges of humanity and the totalitarian denial of all humanity.  Any other wars are distractions from the question of who best represents our humanity, or the genuine interests of humanity.  Who is fighting for humanity?  Is there any “party” that does not feed into the “logical” outcome of the contemporary rise of global technocracy?

[9] For a study of an ancient Athenian version of modernity’s imperialism beneath a democratic veneer, see David Grene, Man in His Pride: A Study in the Political Philosophy of Thucydides and Plato.  Chicago: University of Chicago, 1949.

[10] “Signora Libera, et Assoluta della Natura” (G.B. Vico, Scienza Nuova 1744, edited by Paolo Cristotolini and Manuela Sanna.  Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2013; digitally reproduced in ISPF, vol. 13, 2015: 13).

[11] Christianity blesses natural reason with a sublime reassurance of salvation, which includes but is not limited to safety from condemnation.

[12] Here is the kernel of the “social critique” (amphibian expression abhorred by Adorno) of classical Platonism that is the staple of 20^th century modernism—from Popper to Heidegger.

[13] Athens’ “legal” condemnation of Socrates may be imputed to civil authorities’ mistaking Socratism for the pre-Socratism of established Sophists.

[14] Vico’s Scienza Nuova 1744 (op. cit.) includes an illuminating systematic account of the three categories at hand—the natural, the civil and the revealed.

[15] See my “Leaving the Technological Cave,” in VoegelinView (Feb. 2, 2022), at https://voegelinview.com/leaving-the-technological-cave/.

[16] On “conservatism,” see Leo Strauss, “Letter to the Editor,” National Review (January 5, 1957): 23.  See also Nathan Tarcov, “Leo Strauss and American Conservative Thought and Politics,” in American Conservatism, Vol. 56 (2016): 381-401.

[17] But “the Arts are nothing other than imitations of Nature, while Poems are in a certain way real” (“l’Arti non sono altro, ch’imitazioni della Natura, e Poesie in un certo modo reali”—G.B. Vico, Principj di Scienza Nuova [1744], Book 1, “Of the Elements,” 52).  For insofar as our “artifacts” are made through speech, they are poetic imitations of reality.

[18] I am indebted to my friend Paul Rhodes for this formulation.

[19] Dante, Paradiso 1.67-72.

[20] On “success,” see Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island.  San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt, 1983 [1955]; Chapter 7 (“Being and Doing”): 117-30.

[21] On Nicola Abbagnano’s “positive existentialism,” see Nino Langiulli, Possibility, Necessity and Existence: Abbagnano and his Predecessors.  Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992.

[22] Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search of Meaning.  Boston: Beacon Press, 2006 [1959]: 109, 118-19, 122 and 131.

[23] Nietzsche is turning Christianity on its head.  Before the madman, behind all idols, it is God himself who is contemplating us.

[24] Fromm is not far behind where he presents meaning as the product of labor invested in the realization of ideals/idols (op. cit., 260-261).

[25] Leo Strauss read the Defensor Pacis (“Defender of Peace”) by Marsilius of Padua (1275-1342) as taking a decisive step towards the rise of modern Europe (and thus of technocracy).  See the “Marsilius of Padua” chapter of Strauss’s Liberalism Ancient and Modern, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995 [1968]: 185-203.  It is worth noting that, today, consciousness of the modern “crisis of liberty” is alive—to the extent that it still is—mostly in the United States of America, last standing bastion for the defense of positive religious freedom.  For the Nation was founded in the name of religious freedom, as opposed to freedom from religion.  It is only to the extent that America was overtaken (especially after WWII) by Machiavellianism that it began taking the crisis for granted, thereby remaining oblivious to its significance: in failing to believe in positive or meaningful freedom, America began losing its uniqueness (see the opening pages of Strauss’s Natural Right and History.  Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1965 [1950]).  This is when America began its “Europeanization,” in the respect that modern European nations were founded on strictly secular principles (George Washington’s “apotheosis” notwithstanding, unlike its French counterpart, the American revolution never rejected the Bible).  Those very founding principles still prevent most Europeans from conceding that our crisis of liberty is retraceable to the early-modern (Machiavellian) war against religious authority.

[26] Jacob Klein reminds us that pre-modern man knows of all kinds of systems, but not of a “system of thought” (Lectures and Essays, Annapolis, Md.: Saint John’s College Press, 1985: 201.  See also James Richard Mensch, Knowing and Being: A Postmodern Reversal.  University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1996; Chapter 3, “The Reversal”: 67-72).

[27] See Cicero’s De natura deorum (On the Nature of Gods).

[28] Is there a hierarchy of needs, perhaps one to be conceived along the lines of Abraham Maslow’s notorious “motivational” model?  See Maslow’s 1943 “A Theory of Human Motivation” and its emendation in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature.  New York: The Viking Press, 1971.  In this late work, still in the cone of influence of Kant’s “enlightened self-interest,” Maslow attempts to transcend the “self” in terms of an ideal to be experienced, a motivation of/for the self, even as the “common origin” of all of our “needs” is not investigated (Eric Fromm, op. cit., 250).  On Maslow’s journey, see Mark E. Koltko-Rivera, “Rediscovering the Later Version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: Self-Transcendence and Opportunities for Theory, Research, and Unification,” in Review of General Psychology, 10.4 [2006]: 302-17.  Beyond Maslow, should we speak of a shift (“evolution”?) from need (necessity) to desire (freedom)?  Is there any third reasonable alternative?  In his Scienza Nuova 1744, Vico would argue that “men first sense the necessary; then they open themselves to the useful; thereafter they turn to comfort; further yet, they take delight in pleasure; whence they dissolve in luxury; and finally they go mad by wasting substances” (“Gli uomini prima sentono il necessario; dipoi badano all’utile; appresso avvertiscono il comodo; più innanzi si dilettano del piacere; quindi si dissolvono nel lusso; e finalmente impazzano in istrappazzar le sostanze”— Book 1, “Of the Elements,” §66—op. cit., 74).  However, philosophy shows us that our arts’ overt (or vulgar) end is benign (benigna) delightful pleasure, rather than self-destruction (compare ibid. §52 and §67): philosophy emerges (from within the bosom of our life) as the educator of the arts—of our very lives as art—lest they turn malignantly against themselves.  Succinctly speaking, on Vico’s Platonic alternative to the modern notion of a hierarchy of needs, man is not himself in rising from necessity to freedom, but in rising through (physical) necessity back to virtue.

[29] In decrying the modern alternative, Romanticism fosters the conviction that, as a function of experience, thought is susceptible to being trapped in unnatural, artificially-restricted contexts, leading us to extreme frustration expressed in bouts of violence.  See William Blake, The Four Zoas, “Fifth Night,” final sentence: “When Thought is closd in Caves. Then love shall shew its root in deepest Hell”.  Platonically speaking, Blake’s “Cave” is a place of alienation from thought, while our passions explode where we can no longer bear alienation from (not of) thought.  In this case, the “Cave” is not really a cave (pace Gnosticism), but a well-rooted society mistaken for a fundamentally unjust and unnatural prison.

[30] See my “Epistemology’s Political-Theological Import in Giambattista Vico,” in Telos, 185 (Winter 2018), 105-27.

[31] As far as I can tell, this is the “promised land” Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973) points to, if only tacitly.

[32] On Abraham Maslow’s account, “what humans can be, they must be.  They must be true to their own nature.  This need we may call self-actualization” (Motivation and Personality, p. 22).  Nietzsche would agree.  See, however, Fromm, op. cit.: “regrettably, Maslow did not try to analyze the common origin of [man’s] needs in the nature of man” (250).  It is unclear whether Fromm fairs any better than Maslow in questioning our progressive drive to “self-actualization”.

[33] See my “Autobiography as History of Ideas: An Intimate Reading of Vico’s Vita,” in Historia Philosophica: An International Journal, Vol. 11 (2013): 59-94.

[34] “natura poetica di tai primi uomini in queste nostre ingentilite nature egli è affatto impossibile immaginare, e a gran pena ci è permesso d’intendere » (p. 31 of Scienza Nuova 1744, op. cit.).

[35] “or’ appena intender si può, affatto immaginar non si può, come pensassero i Primi Uomini, che fondarono l’Umanità Gentilesca” (ibid., 105).

[36] See Martha C. Nussbaum, “Human-Animal Differences: Time, Language, Norms,” Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions.  Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press, 2001: 144-51.

[37] See Vico’s pertinent references to Catullus and Terence in Scienza Nuova 1744, op. cit., 230.

[38] See “Autobiography as History of Ideas,” op. cit.

[39] This consideration was graciously brought to my attention by my friend, Kate Kleiderman.

[40] “Providence” (from the Latin provideo) entails literally “vision of what lies ahead” and by extension conduct in the light the proper end of those we care for.  To exercise providence vis-à-vis someone is to provide for that someone’s good.

[41] Scienza Nuova 1744, op. cit., 102.

[42] John 4.39-42 signals the consummation of the “living words” (λόγια ζῶντα) evoked in Acts of the Apostles, 7.38.  Those words are to be lived, “now”.

[43] On living water as Savior/Christ, see Bincy Mathew, The Johannine Footwashing as the Sign of Perfect Love, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018: 369.

[44] On the authoritative import of κύριος, akin to the ancient κυρία (from χείρ or “hand”), originally indicating a “lordship,” as in the Roman curia (later converted in the Papal homologue) as curanda republica (“polity to be cared for”), entailing the care of lords, see Vico, op. cit., 187 and 208.  (Vico does not retrace curia, as is usually done today, to the Latin coviria, “assembly of [authoritative] men”.) John’s “Lord” offers a caring hand to the Samaritan woman/wife (γυνή), as a “husband” speaking from within her bosom, thereby encouraging her to recognize herself as κυρία or “Lady” (who “now” has no husband aside from the “Lord” speaking to her as “water” flowing from within).

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