The Crisis of Modernity (McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas Book 64)

by Augusto Del Noce

(Idealism, Marxism, Positivism). These philosophies had become the secular, neo-gnostic surrogate of Christianity for the European educated classes after the French Revolution,

developed a deep and original non-reactionary interpretation of the trajectory of the modern world in the light of the classical and Christian tradition.

The position of the “Catholic Left” was predicated on the notion that atheism is an accessory element of Marxism, and that the core of Marx’s thought is a socio-political analysis that can be separated from the “religious” aspect and used in order to fight Fascism and promote social justice. Del Noce realized that, on the contrary, all of Marx’s thought is a consistent development of the radical metaphysical principle that freedom requires self-creation, and thus the rejection of all possible forms of dependence, especially dependence on God.

in Marx “atheism… is not the conclusion but rather the precondition of the whole system.”9

Marxism paradoxically was instrumental in the rise of a new secular, relativistic, neo-bourgeois society that accepted all of Marx’s metaphysical negations but rejected his religious/messianic message.

Mircea Eliade, Simone Weil, Eric Voegelin, René Guénon, Abraham Heschel, Hans Sedlmayr, and Manuel García Pelayo.

the affluent society is intrinsically totalitarian and anti-traditional because its underlying philosophy is a form of radical positivism that recognizes the empirical sciences as the only valid form of knowledge.

This has the result of turning Marxism upside down into an absolute individualism, which serves the purpose of giving the technological civilization the false appearance of being a ‘democracy’ and the continuation of the spirit of liberalism.”

the sequence modernity-revolution-secularization

“the ‘totally other’ reality… which for a gnostic lay beyond the empirical world, for a modern revolutionary lies instead in the future.”

Starting with Rousseau and Marx, total revolution “implies the replacement of religion by politics as the source of man’s liberation, since evil is a consequence of society… and not of an original sin.”21

all other major secular political movements of the twentieth century can be understood only in reference to Marxism, either as a development (Fascism), as an inversion (Nazism), or as its decomposition (the affluent society after the Second World War).

Because of their bias toward the axiological value of modernity, Western intellectuals misdiagnosed Fascism and Nazism, not as secondary forms of revolutionary thought but as “reactionary phenomena.”

Whereas in the classic and humanistic tradition authority was associated with liberation from the power of sub-human instincts and arbitrary social forces, today authority is associated with repression. As a result, Western culture confuses authority and power, with disastrous consequences.

We often hear that periodization schemes are of a “conventional” and “pedagogical” nature. It is not true.

For rationalists, certainty about an irreversible historical process toward radical immanentism has replaced what for medieval thinkers was faith in revelation.

we must abandon the notion that the idea of modernity possesses an axiological character. Instead, it must be regarded as the period in which the phenomenon of atheism manifested itself and burned itself out.

libertinism continued as decadentism, the revolutionary spirit as Marxism, and the scientistic spirit as positivism

According to Descartes, the first certainty is that there is an I who freely doubts natural reality (i.e., deprives it of reality).

From the viewpoint of revolutionary violence, what matters is that even the memory of the old man must vanish; there must be change without conversion; the past must be erased, and thus even repentance. In short, the annihilation of memory, according to a popular phrase.

the idea of creative violence has its roots in a reaffirmation of the Gnostic structure of thought.

But those who do not participate in virtue have nothing to carry them from this world to the one beyond.16

The scholars of Gnosticism have identified the rebellion against the idea of cosmic order as its essential characteristic.

the desecrating libertine attitude is basically identical: we should just notice that today’s decadent libertinism is much more closely related to the Gnostic version than to the pre-Enlightenment form that originated from the Renaissance.

suicide is the philosophical destiny of the revolution,

totalitarianism, i.e., institutionalized revolutionary violence.

the civilization of technology is destroying irreversibly all traditional forms of civilization – Christian, bourgeois, Marxist – and this destruction of tradition constitutes a philosophical revelation

as if it were an example of “bad Spenglerism.”

today’s historical situation should be described as the full revelation of the opposition between Christianity and Gnosticism

we must admit that when the true conception of life is defeated by opposite conceptions, there must be a flaw in the form in which it is being proposed.

Why though? Falsity just makes in-roads because humans.

it is impossible to develop a critique of violence starting from any form of ethics that claims to be autonomous from metaphysics and theology

authentic philosophers from academic philosophers (Schopenauer’s “philosophy professors”).

“novelty” is a synonym of regression rather than progress.

how is it possible to say that both revolutionary thought and the nihilistic denial of values have a Gnostic origin? How can the strongest devaluation of worldly reality have been the preparation for the strongest affirmation that there is nothing beyond the empirical world?

Is not the spirit of total revolution a secularized version of Gnostic asceticism? And is not the spirit of moral nihilism a secularized version of libertine Gnosticism?

the so-called “theology of secularization” can only be described as the Gnostic prison of Christianity.

contemporary nihilism must be described as the catastrophic collapse of the Gnostic dream.

the “totally other” reality (and it is hard not to give this formula, dear to so many contemporary theologians, a Gnostic interpretation), which for a Gnostic lay beyond the empirical world, for a modern revolutionary lies instead in the future.

today “for the first time in history the physical survival of the human race depends on a radical change of the human heart.”56 In other words, for the first time in history worldly survival is entrusted to religious conversion.57

there is no minute detail of human life that does not reflect or, to be exact, does not “symbolize” a general conception of life.)

Fractality; also symbolism of nature

people used to contrast the concepts of “revolution” and “evolution”).

Fascism is actually a heresy of Communism

Nazism, it is a “revolution going in the opposite direction” rather than a reactionary form, and seems to confirm the condemnation of this type of politics that had already been expressed by de Maistre in a famous statement ( “A counter-revolution is not a revolution in the opposite direction, but the opposite of a revolution”9).

The mistake of reactionary thought is that it confuses the affirmation of supra-historical principles with the image of a realized historical situation, so that it ends up thinking that in order to affirm eternal principles one cannot admit “new problems,” problems that must be solved in relation to those principles but after having been recognized as “novel.”

Does it though?

But in fact “purely” reactionary thought does not exist. It is a mixture of the supra-historical interpretation of the permanence of principles with utopianism shifted to the past.

“value” is the foundation of tradition and not the other way around.

today the ultimate categories that define the struggle between opposing political positions are not “progress” and “reaction,” but rather “revolution” and “tradition.”

unity of classical philosophy and Catholic religious faith, whose negation is the origin of religious-political Modernism in all its manifestations.

today we must move on from the relevance of Marx and Nietzsche to the relevance of de Maistre, precisely in the sense that we cannot give Marx and Nietzsche the place they deserve in the history of philosophy without recognizing what de Maistre represents.

there is really nothing remarkable about the fact that nihilism follows revolutionary thought. It is the result of the revolution: of its success in demolishing the old values and of its failure to build new values. Not by chance, the same young intellectuals who earlier preached the revolution in the name of Marx have become reconciled with neo-capitalist society in the name of Nietzsche, making a perfectly smooth transition from their old position to the new.