Age of Reason, Age of Daring

“Our daring has forced a path to every land and sea, erecting timeless memorials to itself everywhere, for good and ill.”

Ask your friends, and many will tell you that modernity was a mistake. The smartest among them will call it a disease. In the name of reason, man was cut off from his roots. And in the name of science, nature was poisoned. From the so-called liberal conception of the individual that leaves us isolated and rootless, to the destruction of life by techno-industrial progress. And then there is this idea of democracy, — the power of the people—, but the people are stupid. There is philosophical and scientific materialism, but its proponents are driven by unheard-of religious fanaticism. In such a world, those with the best eyes are likely to be most critical, most likely to renounce this world and its origins. And so there is a general spirit of denial in these men, refusing to partake in this crime against life. Spengler writes about this I believe. He says that good men, who in past ages would maybe have become great scientists, statesmen, or inventors, now seeing the horror to which science and political ideology leads, choose instead to become farmers or to go meditate on a mountain. And so the best leave a world deemed beyond saving. Perhaps the great joke played on us, where we ourselves become the most destructive elements of the very system we deem destructive. Merely playing our role, I’d like to believe. The ascetic instinct, anti-life, or a way for life to protect itself from a life that is starting to rot? Whatever the case may be, I would like today to take a look at what we call modernity as a historical and spiritual moment, and I would like to look at it not so much with a critical eye, but with an eye for what is powerful in it. If anything is capable of changing the world in such a radical way, it must surely have some power. And besides, all the critique of philosophical and cultural modernity is all so tiring. With modernity here, I mean generally the new way of thinking that came to dominance in Europe from roughly the 17th century onwards, characterized by a belief in reason, science, and the individual, (and later less an affirmation of reason and more of sensuality and so on). So, I’m talking about what they call the ‘age of reason,’ the ‘enlightenment,’ and so on. Yes yes I know, thinkers like Descartes and Bacon are the cause of ‘global warming,’ industrial torture of animals, and the fact that you have to work like a slave in an office. It is all so tiring, and I’d like to entertain the idea that this ‘critique of modernity’ is itself a moment to be overcome. If there is a power, a spiritual disposition, capable of transforming the world, it must be this power that has the capacity to destroy the shit world you live in now. And this power of destruction and world-building, this power is at the root of modernity. This is the idea here.

So when I say modernity, I mean this transformation of consciousness that happens in Europe somewhere around the 17th century and that evolves until say the 20th. There is a general exhaustion, a fatigue, of all that came before, and an interest in something new. Key words here are ‘reason’, ‘individuality’, ‘science’, and so on. The new method, the new philosophy, the new science, the new society. Although we should be very careful of characterizing all these years of human development with one and the same idea. Things transform, and generally speaking, philosophically speaking, this modernity starts with an affirmation of reason and ends with a strong affirmation of sensibility. From Descartes to Schelling. Although I’d like to focus on the early period, which I believe it is correct to grasp in this idea of ‘the age of reason.’ In many ways the later interest in sensibility and the subterranean is already the result of a tiring of the will of modernity. Man’s being is uprooted and one seeks solace again in old myths and so on, for good reason, which is what one always does in such periods of spiritual desolation, look at today. If I can no longer think, I can always rely on instinct. If I can no longer will for myself, I can always return to doing the Will of the universe.

Today, interestingly, the left looks at modernity as the origin of what it sees as a dangerous White supremacy and the so-called patriarchy, and the right sees it as the great un-rooting. The left looks back to pre-modern primitive societies, to show how some shaman in the jungle was actually transgender. The right looks back to pre-modern societies for a vision of culture as an organic whole.

Really, most people seem really to be critical of this entire period. Of course, many a leftist love Kant or Descartes, often because they have some fantasy that the subject presented here allows for the possibility of equality. Generally speaking, the right, generally more historically minded, I don’t see it engaging in such re-appropriation as much. 

In many ways, modernity is nothing but this extreme fascination with the new. My intellectual interests lie mainly in philosophy, and so I think of men like Descartes, Leibniz, and later Kant. What unites these thinkers is, again, this fascination with the new. We have been doing philosophy in an old-fashioned and stifling way, and what is required is a new method, a new way of thinking. This is the spirit, which is announced clearly with Descartes: doubt everything which you thought to be certain, leave all books of old behind, and think only about what is absolutely certain now, and what you can create for the future. And it is repeated by Kant: “Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own reason!” 

It is this cry of modernity that the reactionary in spirit detest like nothing else. It is a shameless ‘no’ to tradition. An a-historical way of thinking, that nonetheless believes in progress like never before. 

But, we must consider, that the wish to leave behind is not always fuelled by resentment toward one’s past and one’s ancestry. There is such a thing as a positive forgetting, as Nietzsche claimed. And long before Nietzsche, the supposed founder of so-called neo-platonism —Ammonius Saccas— is said to have claimed that memory is that which prevents us from true intellectual insight. If you are thinking about the past, mental energy is wasted, that could be spent on thinking the task at hand, and the creation of a future. Although the scientific mind of the modern age could not be further away from the contemplative and inner-oriented mind of platonism, both proclaim a belief in the now, and a rejection of the weight of the past. In many ways, all healthy life —both the life of contemplation and the life of action— is characterized by a forgetting of the past, in favor of a future based in the now.

“Forgetfulness is not just a vis inertiae, as superficial people believe, but is rather an active ability to suppress, positive in the strongest sense of the word, to which we owe the fact that what we simply live through, experience, take in, no more enters our consciousness during digestion (one could call it spiritual indigestion) than does the thousand fold process which takes place with our physical consumption of food, our so-called ingestion. To shut the doors and windows of consciousness for a while; not to be bothered by the noise and battle with which our underworld of serviceable organs work with and against each other, a little peace, a little tabula rasa of consciousness to make room for something new, above all for the noble functions and functionaries, for ruling, predicting, predetermining (our organism runs along oligarchic lines, you see) — that, as I said, is the benefit of active forgetfulness, like a doorkeeper or guardian of mental order, rest and etiquette: from which we can immediately see how there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present without forgetfulness.”

(Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, II, §1) 

What unites all of modernity in philosophy is this desire for the new, driven by an active forgetfulness, it is the instinct of the explorer. Kant compared his own work with the exploration undertaken by a sea traveler, searching for the ends of reason, the bounds where she stops, and beyond which there is nothing to be seen or known. And when out at sea, driven by critique to leave behind the lands of old, our explorer finds an island of reason. Small, maybe, but an island nonetheless. After some Europeans had started exploring actual space, discovering new continents, others were starting to explore inner space. 

When describing Descartes, who we can consider as the father of modernity in philosophy, Nietzsche describes him as expressing a ’beast of prey’ type of energy. 

“Aristocratism: Descartes, rule of reason, testimony of the sovereignty of the will;

[…]

The seventeenth century is aristocratic, imposes order, looks down haughtily upon the animalic, is severe against the heart, not cozy, without sentiment, “un-German,” averse to what is burlesque and what is natural, inclined to generalizations and sovereign confronted with the past —for it believes in itself. Much beast of prey au fond, much ascetic habit to remain master. The century of strong will; also of strong passion.”

(Nietzsche, The Will to Power, I, §95)

We should take Nietzsche’s words literally, Descartes is beast of prey au fond. Au fond, that is, in spirit, in essence. What we read in the letter might give us a different image, but this is not what I’m concerned with. It is much more interesting to look at the underlying dispositions of soul. 

To many this might sound strange. Isn’t Descartes the man that made philosophy into a bland mental masturbation? What is there of a beast of prey in this neurotic Frenchman thinking about himself, and really about nothing much else? Is he not the prototype of the boring armchair philosopher?

But Nietzsche knew how to read the spirit of a philosopher, and he was right about Descartes. For with Descartes, all energy becomes focused on the most radical questioning, a doubt like one has never seen before. A ruthless energy, daring to question all that was ever said and written. This is on the level of thought. And on the level of life, Descartes is the philosopher of creation. He envisioned the creation of new machines and medicines through the application of the new science. Inspired by a century obsessed with fables and illusions, Descartes says: ’Mundus est fabula’, the world is a fable, and it is for us to create. He says it in all seriousness. The world is a fable created by God, and we can become co-creators. For, in our essence, we too are pure will and thinking substance, all be it conceived of with some limitation. Whereas God is without limit. And the more we become like God in this way, the better. Why not, the world is only a fable anyway. 

Descartes is also far from being the quiet meditator sitting in his room with a candle, he is the philosopher of action. And his obsession with action is why he threw away all prior philosophy to begin with. For, being obsessed with reading texts of old, asking infinite questions, it comes to stand in the way of actually living out one’s ‘philosophy.’ As everyone knows, thought and study can be used as an excuse for action. And hence Descartes’ idea: I will come up with the most simple philosophy imaginable, consisting of absolutely clear and distinct principles that no one —not the village idiot, not the politician, and not even the learned philosopher— can question. All the most important questions we need to start actually acting on a basis of confidence will be laid to rest, and then we can build a new world. Descartes’ is a philosophy of confidence. Do away with all that you have been told, the self-limiting beliefs, the nonsense you have been told in the schools. They make you even question whether you exist or not! As now they make you question whether you are a man or a woman. 

Isn’t this —the fact that I am— the most evident of things? I think, I am. You know this, before you know anything else. You are, you think, and you knew this to be true even before someone taught you what ‘being’ or ‘thinking’ is. And this is all you need to know to start thinking, being, and acting for yourself. And all of this ‘new thought’, which Descartes himself actually described as “the most Ancient philosophy of all,” could only be created on the basis of a radical belief in the power of the will. The power of the will to be master of the passions, the power of the will to escape the tyranny of unconscious drives controlling us from pre-history.  

This brings us to one of the principal points of repulsion one feels towards thinkers like Descartes —the dreaded ‘liberal’ subject. ‘Think for yourself,’ Descartes says. But aren’t most people idiots, and is it not a great danger, to tell everyone to ‘think for themselves’? And, is there even such a thing as ‘thinking for oneself’, are we not always influenced by others? But here, Descartes would say that we have already entered the dangerous territory of philosophy, where questioning comes to weigh us down, where it prevents us from even trying to think for ourselves, and where philosophy turns against life. “Can I really think for myself?”, but you can only ask this question because you are already thinking. And so with men like Descartes, thought turns against all those inclinations of itself that lead to a depreciation and self-limiting of its own powers.

It is clear that Descartes would have never recommended his method to everyone. He says it himself, to doubt everything and truly think for oneself, one must be strong of spirit. For most, it is better to stay away from these things and follow someone else. If you would have proposed to Descartes to make everyone go to school by force to learn them ‘critical thinking’, he would have laughed in your face, or he might have challenged you to a duel. And besides, I do not believe that we should read the passage where Descartes praises the Spartan constitution as a mere example, given purely for the sake of analogy. With Descartes there is an aristocracy of spirit. No aristocracy of blood or money or anything else, but a sort of pure aristocracy, based only in the will and in the power of thought or spirit. This is really what comes to the fore with modernity. 

From the right, there is generally a critique of the conceptions of subjectivity that became popular in philosophical modernity. The 17th century, Descartes: the subject as an I, empty of any other determination except for the fact that it is. Locke: mind as a tabula rasa; empty, not determined by the past, entirely open to experience. 18th century: Kant, transcendental subject. All different subjects, but a general affirmation of subjectivity as distinct from any and all other determination (now conceived of as entirely external to the subject: nationality, race, religion, body, tradition, state). I am who I am because I am who I am, not because of anything else. It is said that all of this is at the root of our troubles; an un-rooted ‘liberal subject’, ignorant of its connection to people, God, and nature. The individual has been cut off from his roots, and it has been a disaster for the human race, and for nature. Now, interestingly, when this critique voiced by the right says ‘liberal subject’, it really means ‘contemporary leftist subject’. And maybe I should look around more, but from the left I see little affirmation of these modern conceptions of the so-called liberal subject. This empty & free I, the left sees it as a place-holder for ‘straight white men’ thinking themselves free to dominate the world. This left is fundamentally materialist and cannot stand a subject that would not be held down and be deeply determined by its race, biology, state, and so on. Even among the most vehement trans-ideologists, I see little affirmation of this liberal subject; even if it says that the individual is not determined by such a thing as man or woman upon birth, going a step further than Locke’s idea that man has no innate ideas, and even if its twitter bio says #Kantian, its actions speak of an entirely different ideology, where the individual is determined through and through by his material being and his identity, which is never conceived of in terms of virtues or qualities of the soul, but always in terms of materially grounded mental illnesses, races (both real and imagined), and socio-cultural groups. In all, the critique from the left is eerily similar to the critique from the right. Both pre-modern and post-modern are anti-modernity. 

When it comes to the ‘liberal’ or modern subject, a genealogical perspective is useful. Now, we cannot deny that even the most abstract ideas are thought up by living individuals with a history and a certain biological constitution. So, why did these so-called straight white men see so much value in this affirmation of the individual’s free and undetermined nature? Why did European man feel driven to leave behind the determination by tradition, and choose self-determination? Nietzsche speaks about the positive power of forgetting. As much as memory can be a great source of inspiration, a well-spring of vitality and imitation, it can also be a force that holds us back. A weight, responsible for such life-denying sentiments as shame, regret, and self-hatred. Sentiments which, in all, hold man back from acting. In order to do something new, one must let go of the past. One must let go of old ways of dying, and adopt new ways of living. Leave old land, and explore anew. Forget old beliefs, and think anew. Not because the old is bad, but because it has become powerless. Because the reasons for which one affirmed it in the first place are no longer there. 

What arrives with Descartes is this strange subject, not characterized by anything but itself. I think, I am. Nation, biology, none of these things make me who I am. What makes me who I am, is the pure fact that I am. It is the arrival of a conception of subjectivity that marks all history going forward. And it is easy to say it is the arrival of all that is bad in this world. What happens to man, when he is not essentially connected to his nation, his family, his bloodline, and perhaps not even to his bod? If one cares the least bit about anything besides oneself, it is easy to renounce this entire history. From Descartes to Locke to Kant, all one big mistake. We are not an island of pure reason in the middle of the ocean, but a tree grown from roots that reach back to the distant past. Yet, renouncing these thinkers for their ideas, do we not sound eerily like the leftists renouncing them because they are straight white men driven by an instinct to conquer? Instead of renouncing the subject of modernity wholesale, in favour of a pre-modern conception of the self, we should ask what it is that drove White man to take up the conception of such a ‘liberal’ subject. These men whose blood we have, whose culture we inhabit, and who were animated by the very same spirit as ours, why this subject? 

Everyone knows that memory is not a good in itself. And neither is the imagination of the new. One can be weighed down by the past. And one can search for the ever-new in an attempt to flee from a past one fails to integrate. What philosophical modernity represents is a glorious reaction against the negative power of memory. If the past weighs us down, then fuck it. If the past is not life-affirming, then fuck it. And besides memory, if our connection to our land is making us fearful to explore any further, then fuck this land. If our schools are making us dumber, and shaming us for daring to go after the truth, then fuck them. 

It should not be taken lightly, that the age of exploration precedes the new conception of subjectivity brought forth by men like Descartes. If man needs nothing except for himself to thrive, then he can go everywhere, and he will thrive. It is a feeling of independence, autarchy, quite Stoic too; all the world is my home, for wherever I am, I am home. And wherever I am, God follows. 

It doesn’t take much belief to assume that, as it comes to man’s constitution, characteristics, and inclinations, everything was already there from the very beginning. Yet, certain historically located dispositions of spirit emphasize certain characteristics to a larger degree. So, the Christian spirit emphasized forgiveness more than others. And in this very way, the Modern spirit shows all the characteristics of man’s nature, but emphasizes his nature as a beast of prey, a free being driven by the positive power of forgetting. 

It might be true that modernity has taken much away from man, stripped his being from his connection to tradition and nature. But it has also given him something; the confidence that his own self is all he needs. Descartes claims that all we know for certain is the fact that we exist. ‘I think, I am’. All else is dubitable at best. The world is a fable. The world is no longer given, the subject is not characterized by an ‘openness towards being.’ No, the world has to be created, and the subject is shut off from it. If he wants any access, he has to take it for himself. Philosophical modernity is the re-discovery of a layer of subjectivity that does not rely on anything besides an internal feeling of self-confidence. 

Descartes himself said that his philosophy was the most ancient of all. For, before any philosopher had ever thought about anything, he existed, and he was thinking. I think, I am—the most ancient truth of all. 

In one of his very earliest writings, Descartes writes to himself a verse by Ausonius: ‘quod vitae sectabor iter?’ What road should I take in life? And with his later writings, he answers the question: whatever the fuck I want. Man is free, and he has the power to create whatever he wants. This is the key realization that leads to what Descartes considers the supreme virtue, generosity — man’s knowledge that nothing truly belongs to him except for his freedom, and the resolution and self-confidence required to use this freedom for what he judges to be best.

Man is not a sheep, confined to eating and staying behind a fence all day. And he is not a lion, who cannot stray too far because he’ll suffer from a different climate. Man is the apex predator, the beast of prey par excellence, because he is not dependent on anything, except for his own freedom, and his own will to make good use of it. All he needs is his confidence in himself, and the creative imagination needed to create the circumstances required for his survival. In much of anti-modern discourse, both from the left and the right, there is a proposed ‘returning’ to animality and natural ways of living. From the left one hears that man should live like an animal again. Confined to the pod, eating bug and plant slop all day. But from the right too, one hears similarly: stay in your place, go back to nature, become dependent on the land again, and so on. One proposes a regression, so you will. But any true ‘return to nature’ should return to the realization that man is partly an unnatural being. One does not need to be religious to see the wisdom in this idea that man is created in God’s image. For, like God, man is not given his environment and his destiny in the same way as an animal is given its habitat and instincts. No, man has to create his own environment, he has to create for himself the conditions in which he can thrive. 

One should be generally skeptical of all ideologies that tell you about the powerlessness and dependent nature of man. 

Man is strong enough to survive a little change of environment, and I don’t think missing a single day of barefoot grounding, or having a bad night’s sleep, is enough to fuck up your hormones to such a degree that you become a vegan. Now, the anti-modern critique of modernity is not bad for its proposed ‘return to nature’, but for its lack of belief in man’s creative and imaginative power, which is his true nature. A true return to nature would entail recognizing that man is much more powerful than you think, precisely because he is not chained to his environment like an animal is. 

Both critiques of modernity, from left and right, have elements that are entirely foreign to the explorative and creative spirit of man. Man is an animal of the hunt, and wherever it takes him, he should go. What is important is that men like Descartes did not throw away our connection to our past, strictly speaking. What was merely re-discovered is the essence of this connection. In the first place, we are not who we are because of our nation, our family, and so on. We are who we are because of our spirit, which is the spirit of nature’s apex predator, man created in God’s image —infinitely powerful, infinitely creative. A wanderer, a hunter, a creator, a lover, an explorer. Much of ancient thought, too, speaks of man having two lineages, both a biological one and a divine one. Do not worry about what is being done to your home, for you are not your home, you are in the spirit that runs through you, and this spirit has the power to conquer the entire world, and even galaxies, as Leibniz dreamed of doing once, and as our CEO is dreaming of doing today. 

Did Descartes and others like him deny the rootedness of man to an absurd degree? Of course. But consider, that when listening to others has only led to destruction, it is wise to cover one’s ears and choose instead to listen to the voice of God, and his message to become a co-creator. When the world is only selling lies, you can only rely on yourself. This is part of the living motivation that is at the root of these modern conceptions of subjectivity. 

With all daring, there occurs both bad and good. All exploration has its casualties. And it is precisely of the nature of the explorer to accept this as a part of the process. If one truly wants to achieve a goal, one has to will not only the joy that will come from achieving it, but also the terrible suffering and hardship needed to arrive there, and the possibility that the end itself, once reached, ends up being more bad than good. It is this that Nietzsche wants us to realize when he quotes the passage mentioned at the beginning of this text: 

“It was the noble races which left the concept of ‘barbarian’ in their traces wherever they went; even their highest culture betrays the fact that they were conscious of this and indeed proud of it (for example, when Pericles, in that famous funeral oration, tells his Athenians: ‘Our daring has forced a path to every land and sea, erecting timeless memorials to itself everywhere for good and ill’). This ‘daring’ of the noble races, mad, absurd, and sudden in the way it manifests itself, the unpredictability and even the improbability of their undertakings — Pericles singles out the rhathumia of the Athenians for praise — their unconcern and scorn for safety, body, life, comfort, their shocking cheerfulness and depth of delight in all destruction, in all the debauches of victory and cruelty.”

(Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, I, §11) 

What is truly sad, however, is throwing out one’s spirit upon seeing the destruction its expansion causes. Like there are those who fester a hatred of God or nature when they see the suffering present in this world, there are those who fester a hatred of Man for the suffering that necessarily accompanies his expansion. This is the sense of optimism, light-heartedness, and love of life that drove European man when modernity arrived. It is perhaps best expressed in the work of Leibniz, the cruelest optimism one can conceive of. Even the most violent of sicknesses and catastrophes, even the most terrible of cruelties, you must love even this if you want a chance at salvation. It is an optimism that required a strong will and a lightness of heart, a lightness which most cannot bear. And, Leibniz says, God has created the best possible world for us, with paradise as the end. Knowing this, you must accept all the horros present in this world, for it are only the necessary birthing pangs of paradise. In a world very different from ours today, it was said that contrary is known by contrary. And the more cruelty and evil one sees, the more one should rejoice, for the more the Good can depart from itself, the more it can know itself. 

There is a daring at the heart of the modern age, a daring to explore, create, and know. A daring which is in essence no different from the daring praised by the Homeric Greeks. A daring which Plotinus even placed at the heart of reality, when he claims that Intellect and Soul came to be because they dared to depart from the One. In many ways, God or Nature is this daring, and nothing else. And such daring, evidently, results in both bad and good. Now, to curb one’s daring once faced with the evils it results in is nothing else than a denying of that spirit through which one shares in the divine. It is of the nature of the One to flow out of itself, to expand, thereby coming to know what is other and contrary to itself. And as contrary is known by contrary, to gain greater knowledge of itself. It is easy to proclaim that modernity was a mistake, when one sees the destruction our industry has caused to the health of nature and man, when one sees the stifling of spirit that science has caused, but to take this as an argument against the very spirit that lives underneath modernity is an affront against life itself. One would be no different from those left-wing youth, who destroy monuments of history’s great men, all be it one reacts against one’s past for different reasons. One can critique the particular systems, technologies, and so on, to which the spirit of men of old has given birth, but to deny this spirit itself, is to deny one’s own spirit. 

And so, one breeds a shame for oneself, for man, the heavens darken, and the world becomes closed off. “What right do I have to conquer, to explore, to know?” And so one starts to think that one needs to be given rights, as if the mere fact that you exist is not reason enough to expand your powers. Leibniz’s idea was that God had the possibility to choose between an infinite amount of worlds, and he chose this one. And thus, if one has faith in God, one must love this world, knowing that it is the best of all possible worlds. It is accompanied by a belief in ends. If God has chosen this world, why? He must have some grand end in sight for which this world had to come into existence —paradise—, and so, the radical optimism. All of this world is part of God’s plan, and so we should play our part. Although conceived of within an entirely Christian framework, Leibniz’ philosophy echo’s the most ancient and pre-Christian cruelty of optimism that Nietzsche speaks about —Amor fati. And even without a belief in an end in paradise, the same teaching resounds throughout modernity: it is the best possible world, not because God has chosen it, but because it is the only world, and that makes it God’s world, because God is all that is. And it can get even better, —that is, it can expand, for both good and bad.

It is said that from the 16th century onwards, the West enters the age of reason. In philosophy, the great rationalists —Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, and later, Wolff, Kant, and so on. But behind this ‘reason,’ there lies something else entirely different, a great aristocracy of the will. Reason can only exercise its dominion in the hands of a will capable of resisting all that is not reasonable. This so-called ‘rape of nature’ due to rationalist materialism is a terrible thing, but one should have some appreciation for those men, for we now know that nature is not a blind whore to which you gain access for a few shekels, you have to beat her into submission, and nature is much more powerful than you can imagine. Man is really pushing it, and he still cannot bring her to warm up. But man has an impact on other things, no doubt. It is a great achievement in all, a terribly cruel one, to be sure, but an achievement nonetheless. The capacity to do such a thing, not the thing itself, is what is of the essence of man, and it is what should not be forgotten. 

It might be tempting to believe that if the philosophers and scientists of the age of reason could see what all their science, industry, and philosophy have led to, they would think twice about proclaiming the dominion of reason and freedom. Yet one cannot say that they were entirely unaware. In his essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Kant proclaims what he takes enlightenment to be: “man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage.” For all of history, man has lived as a slave, obeying the lows of nature, men, and self-proclaimed prophets. But now, man must take his fate into his own hands. To think for oneself, and more importantly, to have the courage and will to do so, this is enlightenment. An animal is told what to do by its instincts, but man is in all a much more slavish creature. He has freedom, but he cannot bear it, and he wants to live in chains.

“It is so easy not to be of age. If I have a book which understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet, and so forth, I need not trouble myself. I need not think, if I can only pay - others will easily undertake the irksome work for me.”

Now, if man decides to break free from his chains, and to think and live for himself, to explore and create what he thinks best, the process is not easy sailing. Man has never been free, and getting used to what it means to have full control over one’s life, he will make many mistakes, he will experiment, and most experiments will fail. He will hurt himself, and others, and when all of this happens, he grows discouraged. Was it not easier, better, following my old masters? I might not have been free, but at least I was fed and protected, and at least I didn’t have to think and work so hard…. When man throws off his chains, he makes “an uncertain leap over the narrowest ditch because he is not accustomed to that kind of free motion.” At this point, old masters gladly make use of the man’s low point in his journey. 

“After the guardians have first made their domestic cattle dumb and have made sure that these placid creatures will not dare take a single step without the harness of the cart to which they are tethered, the guardians then show them the danger which threatens if they try to go alone. Actually, however, this danger is not so great, for by falling a few times they would finally learn to walk alone. But an example of this failure makes them timid and ordinarily frightens them away from all further trials.”

There are those who do best to never think for themselves, and many others who could in principle attain freedom never do so, when they are confronted with the difficulty and responsibility this entails. And then there are those who are capable, but are afraid of doing so because they are ashamed of their own powers and what they entail. A great shame hangs over man, and it grows. 

If one has eyes to see, it is easy to become discouraged, to give up, really. For where has it led? And with some knowledge of history one could even assume that, if one tried, we’d end up in the same place again in the future. So why even try anymore, better to go back, no? And this is the point, this is what modernity was an answer to; this weight of knowledge, this weight of the past.

The future can make us afraid, and it can make us excited, but it can never weigh on us like the past does. It can be a terrible weight, and it takes a strong will to shake it off and go forth unencumbered. Now this shaking off, this is what is represented by philosophical modernity. And it is what is required by all creation.