Modernity versus Man (Think Piece 1)

In the highly technical and industrialized world of modernity where capitalism (and money) is lording over the once citizen-driven society, the people are the ones who are actually defeated (Arendt, Connolly, Marx, Kant, Foucault). This is not only due to Hobbes’s killing of God nor to Nietzsche’s complete ignorance of an existing God, but to the implicit assumption—however redundant it may sound—that man is a perfect being, master of his own self, who needs no one or nothing else other than his own reason—if it may be considered reason—to live and, as if the world is not enough, transform the society fundamentally, if not leave it ultimately. This is what Arendt elucidates in the Prologue to The Human Condition: That men, in their insatiable quest towards progress (until everything—including religion and history come to an end), desire to escape the earth and live in the universe. They so much long for development so as to eradicate whatever is on earth, because they think that what is given to them is not enough; they go as far as fancying to live eternally. The assumption here, then, is that men have the power and the capacity, not to mention knowledge, to do whatever they want. Apparently, science is, in the final analysis, man’s enemy. Though they may regard it as their best friend,—what with all the scientific discoveries that make life more livable or comfortable or easier, whatever term one satisfies to call it, made through labor and work—by being greatly amazed by scientific progress is no less than a slap in their face. They are dehumanized. In the society thus described, men don’t engage in dialogues with one another, no less than in intellectual discourse (speech), which, according to Arendt, is what politics is all about. According to her, speech is what makes man a political being, and I think speech is what keeps politics alive. Following this logic, politics in the modern age is on its way to its demise, which Arendt is preventing to happen in Chapter I of The Human Condition.

The same focus is explained by Connolly in “The Order of Modernity.” To him, modernity is characterized by thoughtlessness. People no longer think the way the Greeks and the Romans did, hence the total oblivion and death of the richness of tradition. Included in this chapter is a section which talks about the death of God. God, as any Roman Catholic should have been properly taught, is infinite; he is eternal, he doesn’t sleep, he doesn’t die. To say that God is dead is obviously blasphemous, but it is more hubristic than sacrilegious, and to me overt and excessive arrogance is greater evil than blasphemy. What is the basis for this claim? Man is finite, mortal, and—I’d go as far as saying—ridiculous. Evidently, he is the complete opposite of God and his nature. The former is earthly while the other divine. This is probably the reason why man, as described by Arendt, so much wants to escape from the earth: to ultimately break away from what is given to him precisely because he doesn’t recognize the existence of a God who created him. How hubristic! How can a man kill God? But, a closer analysis reveals that it is not man, or a person for that matter, who killed God. It is actually the mind, the thought, the reason. In the final analysis, however, these mind, thought, and reason belong to man. So, using the transitive property in Mathematics (a product of the human mind), if the one who killed God is the mind, and this mind belongs to man, then the one who killed God is man.

Kant’s Enlightenment (as for Foucault) and Marx’s Jewish Question follow similar paths. In general, their thoughts come together to what Connolly coins as the demystification of the political. Kant mentions of legislation as something participated in by the people; Marx talks about emancipation (political and civic). This Kantian idea of legislation as justified by the partaking of the citizens is contradictory to the Greek’s conception of power as visible and politics as mysterious, in the sense that the lawmaking body is outside of it. Kant’s (and Frederick’s) notion of “Argue all you want, but obey!” does nothing but cloud, if not displace, the more acceptable definition and nature of politics. Following this, I find no community in his thought in his idea of enlightenment as maturity, or being independent of others, capable of thinking for oneself. This is visibly not what a community is, and this is the consequence of being too much reliant on one’s own reason or, should I say, knowledge. (Again, this is hubristic!) As for Marx, he appears to be contramodernity as evident in his repudiation of Bauer’s claim that religion needs to be abolished in a secular state for the people in that particular society to be fully emancipated—that is, politically and socially (even humanly). In the end, what Marx says is true, which is about capitalism (as what we can expect from him): that however people may be politically and spiritually liberated, they still remain to be bounded by some material constriction on the basis of economic components. Man, therefore, as a preemption of Hegel as for Kojeve, is a slave of himself.

Patrick Manalo
PoS 61-A