The French
Revolution of 1789 brought into existence the new revolutionary world and laid
the grounds for the advent of liberal modernism, which finds today in Western
democracies – specifically in the United States – its clear manifestation. The
French Revolution, which followed the American revolution of 1776, built a new
European society based on different foundations. Instead of being founded on
the medieval traditional institutions of Church and monarchy, Europe was now
going to be founded on democracy; instead of being founded on God it was now
going to be founded on man. The French Revolution did its best to pull down the
throne and the altar. Before the Revolution, during the Middle Ages and the
early modern age, Church and state were closely united. After the Revolution, the
modern man, i.e. the revolutionary man, turned away from the traditional
institutions and began worshipping the principles of the Enlightenment: he now
believed in rationalism, humanism, liberty, equality, and fraternity.
Following
the philosophical principles of liberalism, modern men replaced objective
reality with subjectivism. This process led to individualism and to the
destruction of social bonds and collective identity. The root of the modernist
problem is the singular man replacing individually the collective traditional
reality of the pre-modern world based on the communion between religion and
monarchy. The modernist mind does not conceive tradition and is led by a sort
of mania to reform and to change. What typically distinguishes the mind of a
modernist is skepticism: modernists do not attack just one truth, but all
truths, and thus their problem is not that they do not believe anything, but
that they believe everything. In other words, the modernist mind is
relativistic in the sense that every subjective reality can bear a portion of
objective truth. Skepticism and relativism lead modern minds to believe that
objective truth begins to change from one moment to another and from one person
to another because truth and belief are subjective and cannot be real per se.
The
modernist mind, which has been thoroughly influenced over the last two
centuries by European philosophy – specifically by thinkers like Descartes and
Kant –, follows, often unconsciously, a philosophical system that undermines
all truths. In particular, Immanuel Kant has influenced in a decisive way the
liberal modernist way of thinking. Kant changed the relationship between the
mind and reality, putting into effect the so-called “Copernican Revolution” in
philosophy. In astronomical geography, the Copernican Revolution introduced by
Copernicus, in questioning whether the Sun moves around the Earth or vice
versa, had stated that the Earth revolves around the Sun, thus undermining
the previous Ptolemaic geocentric model. Kant followed Copernicus’s model to
investigate whether reality turns around the human mind or whether the mind
turns around reality. In other words, Kant asked which goes around which: is it
reality or is it the singular human mind? Does the object tell objectively what
it is or is it men telling subjectively what the object is according to their
own opinion? Does the object turn around men’s mind so that they can
affirm it is whatever they want it to be, or is it men’s mind that turns around
the object so that, though seeing it from different perspectives, it can still
affirm it is the same object? Common sense would answer that it is the human
mind that turns around the object and submits to reality: reality tells to the
mind what an object is, and it is not the mind to tell reality what it is.
However, surprisingly, Kant affirms the opposite. For the Prussian philosopher,
it is not the mind that turns around reality (objectivism), but it is reality
that turns around the single mind (subjectivism). In his philosophical thought,
Kant built a system to enable men’s minds to escape from reality. This system
enabled men to pretend that their minds are the master of reality. Per Kant, it
is the mind that makes objects what they are, so that objects are no longer
what they are per se: an object is
not an object per se, but men decide
what it is. Furthermore, this philosophical system that affirms that men’s
minds control reality is selective since it is used arbitrarily, that is when
it is useful to deny a specific objective reality.[1] In
other words, the principle of the mind controlling the reality is used when men
refuse to adopt an objective truth, but is not applied when adapting to daily
objective realities like the need for eating, sleeping, working, etc. Therefore, this system may undermine all speculative
principles that men wish to reject by affirming that reality depends on one’s
mind and not on objective truth.
The Kantian
subjectivist system represents the theoretical foundation of modernism and
liberalism. It is a system of liberty that liberates the mind from anything it
wishes to be liberated from, because it unhooks minds from objective reality.
Modernists believe that things are true as far as their mind assert they are
so, not because they are true (or false) independently of their minds, which
dominate things: subjectivity comes before objectivity and all reality is at
the mercy of the modernists’ own – often diverging – ideas.
The Kantian
system of liberalism adopted by modernists is based on two fundamental principles:
the negative principle of phenomenalistic agnosticism and the positive
principle of vital immanence.
Phenomenalistic
agnosticism is the doctrine claims that phenomena are the only objects of
knowledge or the only form of reality and that all things consist simply of the
aggregate of their observable, sensory qualities. This principle states the
lack of knowledge beyond the phenomenon. Per Kant, men can reach the appearances of an
object with the senses, but their mind cannot know what is behind the senses.
In other words, behind the appearances men do not know what things are, since
it is the mind that fabricates what things are. Men see the appearance of
things through their senses, but do not know the essence of a thing in itself,
i.e. the noumenon or Ding an sich;
their mind cannot know anything that goes beyond the appearance of things, i.e.
the phenomenon. The mind follows the knowledge snatched by the senses, but
focuses only on the appearances where the sensory knowledge stops. Therefore,
if the mind is unable to know the essence of an object, it is automatically cut
off from the possibility of unfolding the essence of reality. The individual
uses his mind to fabricate for itself its own knowledge: it exploits the
appearance of things, then works out its own system of knowledge, and
transposes its own system onto the appearances giving them an identity. Kant
builds reality on the basis of the appearances. The Kantian man, who is the
present-day post-liberal, fabricates with his mind reality on the basis of the phenomena
that its senses perceive. His knowledge originates from the inside, not from
the outside. If a human being stares at a sunset, his visual sense gives him
the appearance of a sunset, but his mind should make him understand that the
phenomenon of the sun setting is an effect of a cause, not just a senseless and
disconnected event of nature: if his mind cannot go beyond the appearance of
the sunset, then it will not be able to understand the causal relation between
objective reality and subjective perception of it, and it can no longer read
behind the appearances.
On the
other hand, the positive principle of vital immanence is the psychological
process of the human consciousness unfolding itself from within and giving its
own interpretation of the world. In other words, vital immanence is what still
persists inside humans once they have wiped out through phenomenalistic
agnosticism the possibility of knowing objective reality beyond the senses. Since
the human mind cannot know anything that goes beyond the phenomenon, the heart,
i.e. the individual emotions and feelings, will replace it in grasping reality:
the emotions will feed from within the mind, taking its place. Thus, the truth
of the liberal, modernist man originates from within: it is immanent and
subjective. So being things, each individual possesses his own subjective truth
and bears his own vision of reality: his heart and needs build the Weltanschauung he prefers most. Subjectivism,
which is the superimposition of the subject over the object, is the core of
post-liberalism and modernism. Subjectivism makes the object depend upon the
subject, instead of making the subject depend upon the object. It follows that
a mind governed from the inside cannot pick reality at all and is destined to
live in a world of appearances fabricated by its own.
Modernism
coincides with the application of the philosophical system of subjectivism. Thanks
to subjectivist individualism, liberal societies are characterized by
disconnection, atomization, alienation, and lack of collective identity and
common sense.
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| The tomb of Immanuel Kant, Kaliningrad (Koenigsberg) |
[1] For instance, atheists use the
Kantian subjectivist principle to deny the objective reality of God’s creation.
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