39. THE MYTH OF MODERNITY

   

    As the bearer of the ideals of the Enlightenment, the myth of Modernity presents autonomous individuals as creators of their own unique identities, masters of the universe through the knowledge provided by scientific advances, co-authors of ideal societies, lords of history, and arbiters of their own destiny.

     As a literary construct, it interweaves idealist conventions forged by Plato, Aquinas' formulaic depiction of God, the myth of pure beginnings generated by Descartes' methodical doubt, Rousseau's romantic insistence that human beings are made unique, free and creative by nature rather than by God, and Kant's abstract conception of the autonomous individual who is the sole author of the text which inscribes his autobiography.

     The role of conventions derived from Plato's realm of Ideal Forms is particularly evident in the confidence that reasonable beings will co-author a social contract capable of constituting an ideal society.

     The appropriation of Aquinas' depiction of God is equally obvious.  In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas presented God as a rational and purposive Creator of unique individuals who shared a universal human nature, the master of the universe, the author of a hierarchically structured social order, the lord of history, and the arbiter of human destiny.  To lend authority to their myth, Enlightenment authors simply replaced this abstract conception of God with Kant's equally abstract conception of the autonomous individual.

     To counter the traditional belief that God is active in human history, the myth placed autonomous individuals in a primordial state encoded in Descartes' myth of pure beginnings.  As Sartre's articulation of the human journey into the unknown dramatized, individuals who entered each moment of the journey of life as a pure beginning not only could, but had to create the sort of unique identities celebrated by a Rousseauean romanticism.  And since the replacement of God by autonomous individuals was seemingly accredited by the way that scientific advances conferred the ability to harness nature to human purposes, the equation of scientific knowledge and power by Roger Bacon accredited the belief that autonomous individuals were masters of the universe.

     The appropriation of the depiction of God as the Lord of history was more complicated.  Histories written by human beings are narratives designed to integrate the experience of memorable events in a coherent vision.  In this context, idealist conventions derived from Plato's posit were to legitimate ideologies which decreed that history moved, inexorably, toward a determinate end.

         (Paradigm examples of this dubious argument can be found in the works of Hegel and Marx.  Marx forged a hermeneutical theory capable of standing Hegel on his head because it revealed that the course of history was propelled by a dialectical structured matter.  With this peculiar conception of matter as his god-term, Marx developed a vision which defined the end of history as an ideal society governed by a single principle, "From each according to his abilities;  to each according to his needs."  And since history is the record of conflict among individuals, history would come to an end in an enduring state of eternal bliss.)

     At the dawn of the twentieth century, however, intellectuals who expected an imminent fulfillment of the promises of the myth of Modernity were profoundly disillusioned by World War I, a war to end all wars, and, in the following decades, by the eruption of World War II triggered by Hitler's seductive ideology and especially by the Holocaust.  To process this experience, Kafka and Beckett composed seminal texts which voiced this disillusionment long before philosophers became aware of the sterility of a myth which celebrated the autonomous individual and the workings of a detached, dispassionate voice of reason.  On this literary stage, however, Nietzsche's insistence that his exposure of the cultural relativity of prevailing moral discourses revealed the working of an all-pervasive will to power forced intellectuals to recognize that the celebration of personal autonomy deprived their protests against random eruptions of violence and concentrations of power in impersonally operating institutions of any semblance of moral authority.

    Decades later, adherents of the postmodernist movement exploited the fear that a moral discourse which promised a more fully human and uniquely personal existence could at best generate yet another -ism.  To expose the will to power inherent in judgments of any sort, the gurus of the movement entered an arena framed by the Protestant tendency to encode protests in slogans.  In this context, because the Protestant slogan, "sola Scriptura", invoked the conception of an autonomous text, it provided an easy target.  In effect, these critics used Nietzsche's slogan, "God is dead", to sound the death-knell for belief-systems, ideologies and theories centered in a god-term.  And from this starting point, they expanded their critique to include the authority accorded to the texts which had acquired canonical status in literature, philosophy and theology.  In the process, they added Barthes' announcement of the "death of the author" to Nietzsche's slogan, "God is dead."

  

    From my perspective, Nietzsche's slogan sounded a long overdue death-knell for Aquinas' baptism of Aristotelian metaphysics as the framework for theological inquiries concerning a relationship between grace and nature.  At the dawn of the Modern Era, Descartes' geometrization of the universe replaced the hierarchical and teleological structure of Aristotelian metaphysics with an empty literary space.  Without the need for added commentary, this revolutionary revision exposed the anthropomorphism inherent in the belief that a rational God had to inscribe his moral purpose in a teleologically structured Book of Nature.  And since my introduction to the philosophy of science had led me to welcome Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of Aquinas' conception of God for some time, I was far more intrigued by a slogan which sounded the death knell of Kant's conception of autonomous individuals who could author the stories of their lives in splendid isolation.   

    From a critical perspective, I agree with the insistence (1) that everyday languages exert a formative power on longings, passions, desires, perceptions, imagination, thought, motives, intentions and aspirations and (2) that a fictive voice of reason cannot provide a detached, god-like perspective on the interplay among language, experience and reality capable of liberating reasonable beings from that formative power in a way that allows a pure beginning.  As a result, I agree with the postmodernist deconstructions of the use of metaphors of individuality generated by Descartes' methodical doubt which converged in Kant's effort to ground moral discourse in an abstract conception of an autonomous individual.  Indeed, working backwards from a moral discourse generated by a metaphor of intimacy, I agree with the postmodernist subversion of each of the five promises of the myth of Modernity.

       I.e., experience has taught me that I am not and cannot be the sole creator of my personal identity.  But it has also taught me that fidelity to committed involvements which invite me to co-author a single story of a shared journey into the unknown evokes vulnerable self-revelations in which I speak in my own voice.  To discern the hold of the will to power enshrined in everyday English, I welcome the critical apparatus encoded in the hermeneutics of suspicion, but I cannot allow it to subvert repeated efforts to speak in my own voice.  Paradoxically, to speak in my own voice, I must not pretend that I have the authority to impose my judgments and agendas on others.  But if my vulnerable self-revelation speaks as a life-giving voice, it will speak for itself to those who are willing to listen.