Fun with modern philosophy

“If there is no God, then I am God!”,  says a Dostoyevskian mad man in one of his great novels, The Possessed (Kirilov, part 3, Ch. 6, A Busy Night). If one were forced to define the essence of secular modernity in a line---a bumper sticker definition---this would be the best among all the other contenders. Modernity, and secular-modern life in general, in the West (its authentic home) and in the non-West, is essentially marked for its Godless character, for the absence of any sense of the Sacred. It is peculiarly neglectful of transcendence; it has this total disregard for the Biblical axiom that says, “Man shall not live by bread alone…” (Mathew 4:4). Indeed, modern man lives by bread and bread alone.*

“God is dead” pronounced that "illuminated psychopath" Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th century. And, therefore, “Man is God” on earth. Given the colonial, imperialist and racist history of much of the past couple of centuries, this new "man" is actually the modern, Western white (and now, the whitewashed) man. With this death of the “object”---or of objective Reality of which man has always been a shadow, a reflection or image and form on earth in the millennial sacred traditions---modern man moved toward a Kantian subjectivity. Objectivity is denied and we are left to indulge in our subjectivities. This is also the beginning of modern philosophical relativism and, in a sense, of nihilism.

Postmodernism (PoMo), which is the current condition of this modern man, now screams: “This man, this God-killing modern Western man, is dead!” PoMo and its prophets of suspicion have now murdered the already sick and violent subject of modernity, too! (the “de-centered subject” as it is known in the academia) With its “anything goes” Weltanschauung, the PoMo superhero moves a step closer to nihilism. The absurdity of PoMo can be summed up as follows: “There is no Truth. There is no ultimate Reality, no God. And this is the Truth!”  (postmodernism is, therefore, self-defeating)

For Nietzsche “Power is Truth”. Man is “will to power”. Further, there is no truth: there are only interpretations. “Truth is a mobile army of metaphors…truths are illusions” said the man.  Nietzsche’s follower, Michel Foucault, a giant of the PoMo pantheon, stretches this suspicion further: Truth is nothing but a construction of power. Power defines what is true and what is real. 'Truth' is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. 'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. These systems are called regimes of truth. Now, contrast this with what the perennial Tradition of man, or authentic religions say: Truth is power (right is might, and that vincit, omnia veritas). Only Truth (Haqq) IS: everything else is mere interpretation.

Before Nietzsche, Kant—the so-called “philosophers’ philosopher”---said (in words to that effect): “We can never know noumena (things in themselves, things as they really are) because our perception stops us from having a pure and undiluted access to it. In other words, Ultimate Reality or God is impossible!  What this sage of Konigsberg was saying amounts to this:  “I cannot jump and slam dunk. So, there is no such thing as the sport of basketball!” (this is the famous epistemic turn of modern Western philosophy after which modern man became solely concerned with how questions of epistemology and forgot all abut ontology, which Heidegger tried to revive in the twentieth century). This man, Immanuel Kant, never left his small European town where he lived, never met a non-European, but was not hesitant, just like his predecessor David Hume, to pronounce Eurocentric and even racist evaluations of Africans and other peoples. The millennial traditions of Asians and Africans with their rich and diverse ways of knowing, doing and being amounted to nothing to him! Says Bruno Berard about Kant in a recent article:

If, in philosophy, there is a 'before an after Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), this is because he has inverted the meaning of intelligence (Verstand) and reason (Vernunft) as understood by all preceding philosophers: from Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Leibnitz, Malebranche, and beyond, all said to labor under an illusion which he (Kant) alone was able to recognize and dispel!

Frithjof Schuon adds, on Kant and Kantianism, as follows: 'If we take the example of a doctrine which is apparently completely intellectual and inaccessible to the emotions namely Kantianism, considered as the archetype of theories seemingly divorced from all poetry we shall have no difficulty in discovering that its starting point or “dogma” is reducible to a gratuitous reaction against all that lies beyond the reach of reason acting alone; it voices therefore, a priori an instinctive revolt against truths which are incomprehensible rationally and which are considered annoying on account of their very inaccessibility to ordinary reasoning. All the rest is nothing but dialectical scaffolding, ingenious or “brilliant” if you wish, but contrary to truth. What is crucial in Kantianism is not its pro domo logic and its few very limited lucidities, but the predominantly “irrational” desire to limit the intelligence which it voices; this results in a dehumanization of intelligence and opens the door to all the inhuman aberrations of our century. In short, if the state of man earns the possibility of surpassing oneself intellectually, Kantianism is the negation of all that is essentially and integrally human.' (F. Schuon, Reflections on Ideological Sentimentalism)

Whereas modernism says “God is abstract / is an abstraction; we are the real/reality”, authentic, revealed religions say, “God is the Real; we are the abstraction”.  Cogito ergo sum ( “I think, therefore, I am”) said Descartes, the father of modern rationalism and of modern philosophy.  Cogito, ergo Est ("I think, therefore God is” or "Because God is, I can, therefore, think") say the sacred religious traditions of man.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great Austrian-German philosopher who was most responsible for giving this modern philosophy a "linguistic turn", focused on the limits of language and ended up saying:  “The limit of my language is the limit of my world” and that “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” For him, all reality is nothing but constructions of language, nothing but language games; truth, reality, goodness----all are social, linguistic constructions. “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes”, he went on to say before his death. Heidegger, another well known continental philosopher of the twentieth century also confirmed this kind of linguistic determinism when he said, "Language is the house of being." Hans Gadamer was only too happy to agree: "Being that can be understood is language."

Jacque Derrida, perhaps the greatest of the PoMo thinkers, dresses his similar suspicions differently. Says he: “There is nothing outside the text.” By “text”, he does not mean just some written book. Everything is a “text” for him: books, works of art, history, man, truth, beauty, goodness and so on---the so- called grand narratives---texts that must be read and, because they are all arbitrary constructions, they must be endlessly “deconstructed”. We are, therefore, stuck in this never ending exercise of constructions-deconstructions-constructions-deconstructions... 

Despite its claims to be "after" or "post" modernity, postmodern relativism which a Muslim thinker has aptly called the New Jahilliya, is actually a form of late modernity---as many Marxists have insisted---a continuation of its worst tendencies, especially atheistic ones even as it puts efforts into developing a PoMo “death of God theology!” But to deny the existence of God is to see the wave and deny the existence of the ocean. To deny God is to see a speck of dust and deny space. To insist on asking for the “proofs” of God is to be like that naïve, little fish that asks its mother for the proof of the existence of water. The fact that we can actually ask such questions is the proof of God is something that is never entertained by the profane(d) mind!

* Note: I use the word “man” in these blogposts in the old sense of the word, as homo and as al-insan, which is inclusive of both the sexes of the species.

For more, please click: Chacha (uncle) Marx, On Solitude