Diagnosing the Decline
Unfortunately whilst pondering how to begin the introduction to Nietzsche insofar as it is relevant to contemporary right wing concerns I realised I needed to properly survey what the problem of modernity and postmodernity is in the first place. I also realised that I need, in as convincing and complete a way possible, to describe the dominant reactionary perspective on the solution to the problem of modernity and postmodernity so that I can then proceed to show how Nietzsche offers an alternative and more promising way out. The focus will be on European civilisation and I will describe the political, cultural and philosophical developments which lead to modernity and subsequently the failure of modernity in the 19th-20th centuries which lead to where we are today.
I will be presenting a completely holistic story which looks at things in the broadest way possible but which goes into immense detail at key moments to showcase the dynamics in play. The broad focus is on three areas, the evolution of modern consciousness, the origin of modern political systems, and the origin of modern philosophy. Subsequently the crisis of modernity will be explored, namely the crisis of modern political systems, the failure of modern philosophy, and the transformation in consciousness which constitutes what we call “postmodernity”. The overall story is one of the rise of social complexity, and the rise and fall of the literate rational subject.
The kind of genealogy of modernity which I will ignore is an idealist or intellectualist history. In this story, a not so subtle snake oils sale of whatever philosophical perspective is held by the pseudo-historian of ideas, modernity or postmodernity were caused by the abandonment or invention of a certain idea, and only by going back to an earlier idea can we find a way out. This sort of reductionism is beneath contempt and internally contradictory. If the idea was so obviously wrong that it can be summarised in a single history of ideas book-chapter why wouldn’t a refutation suffice to kill the trend there? But more importantly it’s implicitly anti-holist with respect to the social-historical organisms it examines.
Leftists understand that various ideas come together to form a social system which stands as a whole. They know that what they call “homophobia” “sexism” “racism” and so on all fit together as part of a structure. They call this “intersectionality” and collective resistance to every tenet of that traditional society, even if it’s from angles that are mutually contradictory (Muslim, trans) they still mould together in what would appear to someone without political savvy a weird coincidence into a social coalition. If you’re asking why a culture’s shared view of what constitutes a good life, of what it means to be a man or a woman, of what it means to behave ethically, of its view of what is sacred and profane, of why its conviction in its obligations to its descendants and ancestors collapsed, it didn’t collapse as the result of an abstract elaboration from first principle of a bad idea, it collapsed because piece by piece it was collectively ripped apart by multiple trends, in disastrous events, and in murder by people who hated it.
The historical ambition of this series is to describe and explain how first modernity, then postmodernity came about and what constitutes them, to diagnose why this is a crisis that demands an answer. To foreshadow the discussions into Kant, the hypothetical imperative, in other words the instrumental reason you should care, is if you care about the future of people of European descent across the world. Beyond that I do want to arrive at what I think what constitutes the real problem objectively. A catholic, Nietzschean, or pro-enlightenment liberal who is invested in the future of Europeans should all be able to read this and recognise they have to have a convincing answer.
The overview of what I will cover is the origins of Descartes rejection of Aristotelian physics and his solution in inventing the Cartesian subject, then I will move onto how that conception of subjectivity and change in our view of consciousness became a shared assumption of more or less all enlightenment rival projects to Cartesianism. Then I will take stock and look at the mechanisms behind this subjective individualist turn which preceded Descartes in both visual art and in the shift from oral to literate culture. Then we move into political theory and describe the mechanisms behind the transformation of political orders and how this relates to both consciousness and the media changes. Next we look at political modernity with the end of feudalism and the rise of absolutism and subsequently liberalism, continuing to look at its relation to media. With this covering more or less the full context behind modernity we then move into a detailed discussion of Kant’s attempt to resolve the problems of the enlightenment in the first critique. We then begin to diagnose what the crisis of modernity is: the collapse in the ability to derive norms from nature as a result of the scientific image of the world, we see exactly how this plays out in Kant as a paradigmatic example. We then turn to Macintyre’s holistic diagnosis of the collapse of the possibility of real ethical discourse as the best description of the crisis of modernity in its broadest and most abstract sense. We then turn to Kant’s attempt to solve these problems within enlightenment terms and we see that it fails. We then turn to the death of god more broadly and it’s implications for contemporary Europeans. We then move on to discuss the media theoretic explanation from McLuhan and others of the collapse of the literate rational subject with mass communications technology, we look at other angles and descriptions of this here too. We see that the results of this crisis are concrete and show how it enables complete chaos and parasitism within European political systems to emerge in the late 20th century. Finally I discuss why I reject the Aristotelian worldview as both false and as not a real answer to our problems, opening the door to my next blog series on a positive Nietzschean vision for the west.
The Origins of Cartesianism
The Enlightenment Subject
Orality and Literacy
Darwinism and Power
Absolutism, Liberalism and the Printing Press
Kantian Critique
Freedom and Nature
Macintyre’s Diagnosis
Kant’s Last Ditch Solution
The Death of God
The Collapse of the Literate Rational Subject
The Ticking Clock
Nietzsche vs Aristotle