X. Transition: The Present Void
The Enlightenment is dead. Its premises have been tested and found wanting. Its political philosophy produced tyranny in the name of freedom, oligarchy in the name of democracy, censorship in the name of liberty. Its economics produced models that do not describe reality and policies that impoverish those they claimed to enrich. Its science produced institutions incapable of correcting their own errors and a theory of life that cannot survive contact with basic arithmetic. Its epistemology consumed itself, beginning with the enthronement of reason and ending with reason’s abdication.
And yet nothing has taken its place.
The modern educated person, the heir of the Enlightenment, the product of its institutions, and speaker of its language, now finds himself in an uncomfortable position. He cannot return to the pre-Enlightenment world; too much has changed, too much has been learned, too many of the old certainties have been genuinely superseded. But he cannot remain in the Enlightenment world either, for that world has been exposed as built on sand. He is suspended between a past he cannot recover and a present he cannot believe.
This suspension is not sustainable. Human beings require coherent frameworks for understanding reality, grounding morality, and orienting action. The borrowed capital of Christendom, upon which the Enlightenment drew even as it denied the debt, has been spent. The contradictions can no longer be papered over. Something must replace what has failed.
But what will replace it. What can replace it.?
The pre-Enlightenment philosophical tradition was Aristotelian, Scholastic, and Christian, avoided the pathologies that have undone modernity. It understood reason as participatory rather than autonomous, as a faculty for apprehending truth rather than constructing it. It grounded rights in the nature of things rather than in social contracts that no one signed. It integrated fact and value, knowledge and goodness, in a unified vision of reality ordered toward transcendent ends. It did not make the errors that the Enlightenment made, and therefore it did not create the series of self-inflicted catastrophes that the Enlightenment has inevitably caused the men of the West to suffer.
But the classical tradition, as it existed before the Enlightenment, is not sufficient for the present need. It was formulated to address questions that were live in the thirteenth century; since then it has ossified and has not been adequately developed to address the questions that challenge Man today. It failed to seriously resist the rise of the Enlightenment, in part due to the false promises of the Enlightenment, in part because it had grown rigid, defensive, and backward-looking, more concerned with preserving past formulations than with pursuing present truth. A tradition that neglects to evolve to meet present and future challenges is a tradition that is unlikely to endure.
What is needed is neither a return to the pre-modern tradition or modern philosophies, but something new: a philosophical framework that recovers the structure and coherence of traditional thought while incorporating what has been genuinely learned in recent centuries, an intellectual structure that avoids the errors of the Enlightenment without ignoring the challenges it raised, a conceptual architecture that not only offers a critique of what has failed but provides a positive vision for what actually works to build successful societies and a healthy, thriving civilization.
The outline of this framework begins to take shape in what follows in Part Two: The Defeat of the Western Philosophical Tradition.