Reject Modernism

“The true State incarnates those principles, those powers, those functions that in man correspond to the central and sovereign element, destined to give a higher meaning to life, to direct the purely naturalistic and physical sphere toward transcendent ends, experiences, and tensions. If one denies to the State the autonomy proper to a super-elevated power and authority, one negates its very essence, and nothing will remain of it but a caricature, something mechanic, disanimate, opaque, superimposed on a collective existence which is itself no less empty.” -Julius Evola

We live in such a time that only caricatures of the true State exist. Because of this, many are led to believe that the deviations and perversions characteristic of this epoch are all that the State can be. The Traditional understanding of State and nation have been so far removed that every remedy we come up with is just as corrupt as the original perversion. In reality, the State is an organic structure which establishes authentic order and directs those beneath it toward the divine. As this is the State’s true function, it does not necessarily have a violent origin; instead, those who have not eliminated the higher potential within themselves are inexorably drawn to the State and those who embody it.

“Luther is just as far from the true aristocratic German essence as is the ‘socialism’ of the Jew Karl Marx.” -Julius Evola

The effects of Luther’s revolt went far beyond the domain of Christianity, for through it, the modern spirit seemingly acquired higher justification. As such, the divine institutions of the Church and the Empire were both rejected for merely human constructions. Without the sacred element, these were doomed to failure, which we have seen through their continual regression and fragmentation. Only that sanctioned by the divine can endure.

“The true measure of freedom is love as the relationship which makes the flourishing of the other the condition of self-fulfilment. Human freedom becomes the icon of divine freedom where the freedom of divine grace constitutes the grace of human freedom ... That most poignant image of hope, the Kingdom of God, expresses the relation of free divine love and loving human freedom together in depicting the ultimate purpose of God’s action as the perfected community of love with his creation. The fulfilment of God’s reign and the salvation of creation are actualized together in the community of the love of God.” (C. Schwobel, 1995, pp. 80-81)

Western culture has paid a high price for its championship of radical individualism. There is a profound sense in realizing that “we did not know what we were doing.” This has produced deficit, ignorance, and extremism of character and lifestyle.

“Made for spirituality we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world. It is time, in the power of the Spirit, to take up our proper role, our full human role as agents, heralds, and stewards of the new day that is dawning. That, quite simply, is what is means to be Christian: to follow Jesus Christ into the new world, God’s new world, which he has thrown open before us.”

Community offers a context in which to develop character. Character, integrity, and virtue seem to be marginalized in our fast-paced, mobile society. But real character can only be developed in a supportive community where a person is both accepted and challenged toward nobility and personal excellence, where there is good mentorship and natural accountability. At the same time, negative attitudes such an arrogance, bitterness and vengeance can be recycled within community; there can be healing from a false self or a broken emotional-relational background. Taylor extends that thought.

“The original Christian notion of agape love is of a love that God has for humans which is connected with their goodness as creatures (though we don’t have to decide whether they are loved because good or good because loved). Human beings participate through grace in this love. There is a divine affirmation of the creature, which is captured in the repeated phrase in Genesis 1 about each stage of the creation, ‘and God saw that it was good’. Agape is inseparable from such ‘seeing-good.’” (Taylor, 1989, p. 516)

Utilitarian individualism encourages us to use other people for our own prestige, wealth or progress. The Christian faith, by contrast, challenges us to make other people an end in themselves, to nurture and care for them. Such commitments have an enriching effect. Bonds develop and affirm the worth, identity and potential of individuals. Genuine community is a space to contribute, to invest spiritually, and to find both security and significance.

Foucault highly values individual creativity but he lacks appreciation for how this relates to communal creativity of interdependencies and complementarity. His ethics is choice-focused and will-focused just like Descartes. Fulfilment in the right kind of community prevents the self from the most extreme forms of self-interest, narcissism.

In this anatomy of community, involving a recontextualized freedom with a sense of responsibility for the Other, the good can be both mediated and carried more robustly. One’s individual relationship to the good can be strongly enhanced by involvement with a group that allows the good to shape identity; the right community environment can provide a positive school of the good.

Mirrored through others, the good can offer both accountability and real empowerment of the self. Group covenant and commitment to one another sustains the self in its agency; the younger self especially is released from the burden to invent his whole moral universe, and to be the complete person with all the strengths that he needs to flourish. Moreover, communal discernment advocates for the weak and challenges the strong and wealthy with the moral strength and maturity to give back to society, reducing societal injustice and reigning in excessive greed. Moral self-constitution of this thicker, weightier, and more complex sort exceeds the capacity of the individual self; it requires a robust sense of community.

According to Christian biblical teaching, individuals are created by God with the purpose of serving other human beings (Genesis 1: 26, 27). Humans are not self-created or created for self alone or for maximal autonomy. Psalm 139 gives insight into how intimately God knows and cares about them. In fact, the two greatest principles in the entire Bible are: First discern the love of God with the true and complete self. The second is to love the Other (human and animal) deeply: to watch out for and be there for the Other, to treat with respect and dignity. This is the foundation for community where individuality is respected, and where trust, honour and virtue are emphasized. Motivated by stepping into God's love (agape), individuals thereby recover freedom to do good in the world (I John 4:7). Taylor has captured the true dimensionality of this possibility.

“Our being in the image of God is also our standing among others in the stream of love, which is that facet of God’s life we try to grasp, very inadequately, in speaking of the Trinity. Now it makes a whole lot of difference whether you think this kind of love is a possibility for us humans. I think it is, but only to the extent that we open ourselves up to God, which means in fact, overstepping the limits set by Nietzsche and Foucault.” (Taylor, 1999, p. 35)

Foucault, among many other radical individualists who have shaped the soul of Western identity, holds to a faulty assumption of chronic distrust, that is, that the Other will always try to control and manipulate my behaviour for his own purposes. Although such manipulation occurs, this is a jaded and cynical Hobbesian (all against all) perspective on human sociality.

The autonomy that modernity cannot do without (a famous Foucauldian phrase) needs a dialectical relationship with community as a balance to one’s self-reflexive relationship to oneself. The nature of autonomy cannot be confined to a radical self-determination but must involve the possibility of recognition by and dependence upon other people within a larger horizon of significance. Flight is by far the easier (although sometimes necessary for safety) and least complex default option; it is always easier to cease speaking with a difficult neighbour or to opt out of a relationship that is painful; it is more challenging and painful to take other selves seriously in terms of the good that they are, and the good that they can offer, or to work towards reconciliation. Redeemed freedom can emerge through a wiser discernment and exploration of the communal dimensions of subjectivity, as freedom to cooperate with, and freedom to serve the Other. Trust building is a tentative but necessary exercise for the moral health of the self.

Without community, humans cannot find full emotional and psychological health. Within community, they can live out of their truest selves, not apart from other people but in the midst of them: at work, in love, during learning. Psychiatrists confirm that there is tremendous personal health to be discovered in long term commitment to other people, Jesus of Nazareth affirmed this insight that when we lose self (sacrifice self) in serving the Other, we actually find a deeper, more durable self. (Matthew 10:39).

This newly discovered type of freedom and accountable individuality is destined to find its fulfilment, not in a self-justifying control, but in seeking out a communion of love, similar to the relations within the Christian Trinity. Here lives a healthy vulnerability, interdependency and mutuality (complementarity), with an ear tuned in to the voice and needs of the Other. It promotes the relocation of the dislocated self into a new narrative, a new drama that involves us, within the relational order of creation. Others can help discern the self, in order for it to find its own space for freedom and calling with responsibility. One of the basic tenets of ecology, as articulated so well by Stephen Bouma-Prediger in his book For the Beauty of the Earth, is the need to look at the larger and richer context of where we are, rather than the current myopia or compartmentalization. He encourages us to assess and discern our home amidst the whole of human and non-human creation.

Individualism is in denial of that larger, richer picture in the quest for individual fulfilment and enlightened self-interest.

One can often imagine that the best growth occurs on one’s own, even during one’s greatest rebellion, but in fact one can only grow as a person while in direct and significant relationships, complementary partnerships with others. A person (Evola) finds one’s true and soulful being in mutual love and communion. Some intellectuals believe that love is more basic to our identity than reason, although not against reason. One can attempt to be an individual alone but will fail to become a person on one’s own.

Redeemed freedom by definition takes on a distinctively communal character; it is contextualized within a conversation, within relationships between fellow interlocutors, against the backdrop of larger narrative that makes sense of self. This is the deep structure of self. Individual freedom gives up sovereignty ground to community and makes space for the Other in order to avoid some of the pitfalls and deficits of radical autonomy. As one gains a stronger identity as a social being, one reaps the benefits. The move is towards a deeper, more complex, communal character of self, a thick self. Foucault articulates freedom as flight from one’s neighbour; the aesthetic self is part fugitive, part manipulator; its context is reduced to a life of contest with the Other (agonisme), manipulating power relations and truth games to one’s own advantage. There is a certain validity to these concerns, but from the perspective of Taylor’s comments (and those of other key thinkers), they lack vision for relationships that are other than a manipulative contest of wills, that is, relations informed by love, compassion and cooperation. Prominent social thinker J. Habermas, in response to Foucault’s ethics as aesthetics argues that the preoccupation with the autonomy or self-mastery is simply a moment in the process of social interaction, which has been artificially isolated or privileged:

Both cognitive-instrumental mastery of an objective nature (and society) and a narcissistically overinflated autonomy (in the sense of purposively rational self-assertion) are derivative moments that have been rendered independent from the communicative structures of the lifeworld, that is, from the intersubjectivity of relationships of mutual understanding and relationships of reciprocal recognition. (Habermas, 1987, p. 315)

In the light of this critical investigation, it is suggested that there is a need to rethink individuality in terms of a reconciliation between self and the Other, self and society, to put it metaphorically, in terms of self and one’s neighbour. The direction of reformulation is the recovery of a social horizon, including a stronger concept of the social body, and the common good; one needs the courage and determination to face the neighbour as a good. A radical pursuit of private self-interest, to the exclusion of the presence and the needs of the Other, is rendered untenable and dysfunctional after this critical dialogue.

THE PROBLEM OF ABSOLUTE FREEDOM

(Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society; Dr. Gordon Carkner)

“Complete freedom is absurd; it seeks to escape all historical-cultural situation and narrative. Pure freedom without limits is nothing; it has no context; it is chaos, destructive; it is no place, a void in which nothing would be worth doing. It is often abused. Foucault’s view
of freedom, although attractive for its pioneering spirit and some of its tools for creative self-articulation, is quite vulnerable to manipulation (a precarious autonomy); it is both exhilarating and dangerous. This empty freedom hollows out the self and can be filled with almost any moral trajectory or motive, whether constructive or destructive.”

Further, Taylor sees four dangers with this stance:
a. Self-trivialization and lack of depth
b. The Dionysian danger:
If free activity cannot be defined in opposition to our nature and situation, on pain of vacuity, it cannot simply be identified with following our strongest, or most persistent, or most all-embracing desire either. That would make it impossible to say that our freedom was ever thwarted by our own compulsions, fears, or obsessions. One needs to be able to separate compulsions, fears, addictions from higher more authentic aspirations.... We have to be able to distinguish between compulsions, fears, addictions from those aspirations which we endorse with our whole soul. (Taylor, 1979, p. 157, 158)
c. Problem of despair:
This type of freedom can be a ruse to trap one inside one’s self, as Kierkegaard wrote—with the risk of nihilism and the death of meaning
d. Lost potential in relationships:
It rejects the possibility of human complementarity through a quest for an uncolonized, suspicious self. It is a key insight that absolute freedom misses the point about the distortions of inauthentic (suspect) and malevolent desires, and how they can lead to a life of mediocrity, self-indulgence, or even self-destruction. We see here the contrast of freedom as an escape from responsibility to community (Foucault) and freedom as calling within community (Taylor) grounded in the acceptance of one’s defining situation, together with its opportunities and responsibilities. Freedom that limits itself to discussion of new possibilities of thinking and action, but heroically and ironically refuses to provide any evaluative orientation as to which possibilities and changes are desirable, is in danger of becoming empty or worse, predatory and malevolent. This is the darker side of radical freedom, rendering it a dangerous first principle. We need a more full-blooded conception of freedom and individuality.

It is clear that, for Plato, the very definition of justice requires a higher and a lower and distinguishes our love of one from our love of the other. Christian faith could take this idea over while giving it a different content, and so Augustine speaks explicitly of “two loves”. Recognition that there is a difference in us between higher and lower, straight and crooked, or loving and self-absorbed desires opens an intellectual space in which philosophy has a crucial role—as the attempt to articulate and define the deepest and most general features of some subject matter—here moral being. (Taylor, 1999, pp. 120-21)

Thus, we are arguing that radical freedom and individualism needs to be redeemed or recovered. One wants to win through to a freedom that includes limitations, admission of finitude and responsibility for the Other.

The redemption of freedom is liberation from freedom for freedom, from the destructive consequences of absolute self-constituted freedom and for the exercise of redeemed and created human freedom which is called to find fulfilment in communion with God ... Redeemed freedom is ... essentially finite, relative freedom, freedom which is dependent on finding its orientation in the disclosure of the truth of the gospel ... freedom as created, as the freedom of creatures whose freedom is not constituted by them but for them. (C. Schwöbel, 1995, p. 78)

“Now what is ‘rational’, that is, whatever relates exclusively to the exercise of individual human faculties, can obviously never in any way reach the Principle itself and, under the most favorable conditions, can grasp only its relationship to the Cosmos.” -René Guénon
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This is the source of many errors perpetuated by modern philosophy and modern religion (specifically Protestantism); by reducing everything to man’s level, man becomes incapable of grasping that which transcends him. Rather than allowing the divine to elevate him through mystery and intellect (that is, spirit), which would grant him understanding, he seeks to lower the divine, or at least his comprehension of it, to the merely human plane.

Moreover, this reduction implies that moderns are utterly incapable of understanding God. At most, they can recognize the subordination of the Cosmos to Him, but this is hardly enough to serve as a basis for partaking of the divine. Hence, the Vatican II/Protestant tendency to anthropomorphize God and to reduce “experience” of the divine to feeling and sensation.

“Individualism includes a dangerous mythology at its heart; taken to an extreme, it can reap destruction for individual persons, families, institutions and society. Something essential to our humanity, especially the values and virtues of the communal, is at high risk in this pursuit; it can lead to social failure and personal loss, cynicism
and even despair. As a way of life, it constitutes an abstraction that hollows out the self, emptying life of some of its balance and richness. One’s identity can actually become quite brittle and fragile in this attempt to escape accountability and soar with the eagles. There can be a serious form of escape amidst the brilliance and creativity, and even a move towards a soulless existence.”

[There emerges] a dislocation in the relational order: when they aspire to be more than human, they actually become less than human....We often find the radical conception of freedom as absolute and unlimited lies at the heart of many of the most dehumanizing tendencies...in modern history. Where freedom is seen as radically self-constituted, responsibility is restricted to the responsibility of agents to themselves, and it is at this point that the claim of radical autonomy cannot be distinguished from the escape into unaccountability. (Schwöbel, 1995, pp. 73-74)

Theomania, the desire to be like a god, is real (or surreal) and has worked its ruin. Schwöbel notes that there is an interesting historical-cultural co-incidence between the birth of radical concept of freedom and the denial of God in Western philosophy (1995, pp. 72-75). He suggests that it results from humans attempting the kind of freedom one normally attributes to God—omniscient, omnipotent, infinite. This perspective on freedom tends to imply that the self must occupy or usurp the space once given to God in Western consciousness—human and divine freedom in a strange way are set up in a direct conflict and competition

“The faces of men and women [in the modern world] take on the appearance of masks, ‘metallic masks in one, cosmetic masks in the other’” -Julius Evola
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These modern masks can in no way be assimilated to the ancient concept of the persona. The persona was the mask worn by ancient actors, signifying the person or deity they portrayed (Evola).

Our English term “person” is derived from the persona, and should we understand it according to its ancient significance, the “person” is the higher element in man associated with something typical, non-individual, and even supra-individual. Modern masks on the contrary, are expressions of the individual; they are abstract and formless, paving the way for the reign of quantity. When modern man dons such a mask, he forfeits his person in favor of his individuality, and becomes no more than a numerical unit in mass society.