THE LOST KNOWLEDGE OF THE MODERN AGE

I am a fan of Ed Feser's writing.  I've enjoyed his articles at Right Reason, Tech Central Station, and elsewhere on the web.  Once I broke my hard habit of scientific naturalism some years ago, I apprehended the incompleteness of the modern grasp of the world.  It has been the crisp and clear work of philosophers like Feser that put this incipient understanding into sharp focus.

After the end of the High Middle Ages we began to lose knowledge of two of the four Aristotelian causes, given fullness by Thomas Aquinas, of all that is real.  As Feser says in the introduction of his recent review of philosopher Daniel Dennett's contribution to the "new atheism", Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon:

"Aquinas, following Aristotle, held that a complete understanding of any natural phenomenon requires the identification of each of its four causes: its material cause, the stuff out of which it is made; its formal cause, the form or essence that stuff has taken on; its efficient cause, that which brought it into being; and its final cause, the end, purpose, or function it serves.  This doctrine was (and is) central to Scholastic philosophy and theology, but modern philosophy, inaugurated by the likes of Hobbes, Descartes, and Locke, is largely defined by it rejection of two of Aristotle’s four causes.  For the moderns, there are no formal or final causes, no fixed essences or purposes in nature.  The world is rather a gigantic machine, all the diverse phenomena it exhibits being entirely reducible to inherently meaningless causal interactions between material parts."

Whether inadvertantly, perversely, or deliberately, in the six centuries or so since the advent of the modern age, nominalism, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and finally the scientific materialism of Marx, Darwin, and Freud discredited the truth that each and every thing that exists has a God-given essence and a purpose (the formal and final causes), leaving us only with matter and mechanics (the material and efficient causes) to explain who we are and the universe we inhabit.  And even when the inadequacies of this scientific naturalism had become apparent to us in the wreckage of the twin catastrophes of fascism and communism, so many of our best and brightest did not look for what was lost in the modern age, but instead took up the assault upon the last two respectable Aristotelian causes under the banner of post-modernism.

In his excellent review of Dennett's book, Feser exposes the feebleness of today's bein pensant intellect that is the result of the modern man's long decadent decline.

Comments

[doctor(logic)]

I'm curious about something you've said here. You refer to "modern man's long decadent decline."

What do you mean by this? By what measure has modern man declined? Murder rate? Life expectancy? Education? Faith? Pacifism? Anti-environmentalism? Capitalism? Abortion rate? Public health?

One other question. Do you think man has made moral progress in the last 2000 years?

[Bill]

Hello, Doctor Logic.

What has decayed in modern man is knowledge of the soul. This ignorance, which has approached invincibility in many cases, entails a loss of knowledge of our purpose, the reason why God created us.

Absent this knowledge, modern man has repeatedly embarked upon utopian projects to fulfill the designs that HE has for his fellow men. Because the grand purposes mere men substitute for the divine purpose God has for us are not in accord with our nature (i.e., the soul), they are false and can only ruin those subjected to them. Hence modern history is the story of despair, mass murder, and destruction on tremendous scales DESPITE the material blessings of technological progress.

So, the modern age has represented a significant falling away from the moral progress man has made in the past 2,000 years. Of course, the current era is not entirely dismal. Many great and good things have come about, both materially and morally. But the decadence I have spoken is real and woeful and beckons even worse times ahead.

Regards, Bill

[doctor(logic)]

Hi Bill,

"What has decayed in modern man is knowledge of the soul. This ignorance, which has approached invincibility in many cases, entails a loss of knowledge of our purpose, the reason why God created us."

Well, this uses the metric of agreement with your personal metaphysical opinions. Sort of like me saying that, by the metric of belief in geocentrism or logical positivism, man has declined.

"Hence modern history is the story of despair, mass murder, and destruction on tremendous scales DESPITE the material blessings of technological progress."

There's always room for improvement, but I don't think you'll find any reasonable metric by which modern man has declined on a per-capita basis. Wars are less deadly (even accounting for the Holocaust), torture is less common, health is better, psychiatric treatment is better, people are less likely to fly into a rage, people are less likely to approve of murder (or rape or torture) by their own tribe, there's less crime, lower infant mortality, more opportunity, far better labor conditions... the list goes on and on. Quality of life is improving dramatically.

There are certainly dangers. We now have an unequaled ability to destroy ourselves, e.g., with nuclear weapons. If nukes were in regular use, one might be justified in citing a lack of progress, but they haven't been used since their debut.

I think there's a very strong correlation between one's religious and political outlook and one's perception of historical progress. The thing that baffles me is how it's possible for an informed person to maintain the perception that we're not making progress. The only thing I can think is that, for the detractors, the dynamics of modern society are scarier than the the myriad of ills we leave behind.