With the publication of Francis Bacon's 1620  'Novum Organum' ( New Tool)1 there began the Enlightenment march towards the 'singularity'. It entailed a belief in empiricism and scientific knowledge. It began what Francis Fukuyama would label as 'the world's most dangerous idea': Transhumanism. It was the turn away from the heavens to the subterranean. It was Marxism, believing in 'immanence on earth' which transcended the Christianity of the immanent heavens. It stemmed from the idea of 'responsibility'. Marxism wanted the removal of dependence on god. Likewise, with Nietschze's 'Superman' there also involved a transcendence of responsibility from the Christian god. Yet, as Del Noce points out, both approaches have led to a crippling nihilism based on the rejection of all metaphysical thinking. Transhumanist philosophy is a derivative of Enlightenment thinking. The Enlightenment/Marxist belief in transhuman progress, however, attempts to operate on the 'material' side of existence. It suffers from a conflation of transcendence and progress.

Whilst the twentieth century saw the Icarian leap of Marxism, the twenty first century has inherited a form reminiscent of that other genuinely transhumanist thinker of the nineteenth century: Nietzsche. The figure of Zarathustra marching down from the mountain with a warning for humanity, calling for transcendence, sets our present epoch at the precipice. It is the age of the 'nihilist' and Nietzsche is seen as the progenitor.  Reeling from the failure of Marxism and materialism, the modern world carries scientism and nihilism, like Sisyphus, on its shoulders. Yet this approach has failed to see the true inheritance of the axiomatic legacies of these two thinkers. As Hegel remarked 'philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought' 2, hence the 'interpretational' value given to these two philosophers in dissecting the twentieth century. Yet who will look back on our time, of the twenty first century, of total mobilisation and war?

The idea within Marxism was that philosophy is realised in future time. It's immanent arrival, it's progress. This merged with a confused view of the evolutionary scientism of Darwin. Its foundation was a 'post factum' belief in ideology, as opposed to say, Hegel's 'ante factum' analysis- realising an already reached state of affairs. Marxism, and its liberal antecedents, are looking at the total revolution of existing reality. Something will happen in the future, a type of Gnostic future. In this sense, it is immanent, based on something almost fictitious. An experiment in 'reason' which has led to a mousetrap for humanity: the panopticon of scientific reason.

Christianity, Marxism and Modernity are all linked by the idea of 'immanence'. However, whilst Christianity and Marxism both espouse a form of immanentism, a utopian end game, the liberal residue of Marxism is exhibited now in a shallow bourgeoise nihilism. Biological sex, metaphysics and family are being murdered, the apparitions of Macduff, ripped from their mother's womb. Marxism here is a corollary of rationalism and should be distinguished from theological belief. The Marxists and the Liberal pretenders to Marxism, all share the crucial delusion; that binding of modernism and 'progress' to some immanent heaven. Modernity, through Marx and Nietzsche, had tried to replace dependence on God with something else. For Marx this was the total revolution; for Nietzsche this was the 'Superman', leaving Christianity behind, and creating its own values. However, there was a crucial seminal difference in their ethical approach. Marxism meant the sublation of ethics into politics. This incorporation of ethics into politics set the state up as the arbiter of truth. The absorption of the chosen faith into the profane. The dangers were clear -whether this be the Catholic inquisition or the profane of the Communist party. Now Nietzsche, whilst being a profoundly ethical thinker, saw, as in the Christian monopolisation of truth, the horrors of messianic belief, of 'systems', of Kantian 'categories'.  His ethics were of the 'blond beast', the warrior ethic, and nobility, but ones he believed based on nature, and supreme individuals. Nietzsche was only 'nihilistic' when it came to Christianity. The solution was to build your own values, to become the Superman, but not for everyone. It was Dostoevsky who had proclaimed that it was atheism itself, at its extreme, at its meaningless juncture, which would lead to a rebirth of a profound spirituality. In essence the meaning of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche is akin to Thomas Mann's 'Magic Mountain' novel, on the eve of the first world war. Those questions of meaning, of disease, of faith, of 'fin de siècle' nihilism could be asked today.

The twentieth century was, therefore, a time of the unification of philosophy and practice (vis a vis Marx's famous remark on Feuerbach3 etc..'Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways... the point, however, is to change it'). The outcome of modern secular interpretation is therefore contradictory: at once succeeding rationalism with materialism and then succumbing to nihilism due to the relativism and absence of values, or what Nietzsche called the lack of  'Sinn' (sense). For Del Noce, this vindicated the disaster of secularism and the denigration of metaphysical thought. Never before had such a utilitarian, positivist assault attempted to undermine metaphysics. However, the attempt failed to recognise that the underlying metaphysic of Christianity was still there... in Marxism, in Liberalism. Nietzsche had noted this hangover from Christian forms, in the 'Genealogy of Morals' 4 in how 'Good' ( i.e a nobility of character) had been replaced by the priests into 'Evil'. Evil was now 'ressentiment', weakness, not pride of spirit. Del Noce maintains that this attempted assimilation of Christianity is incompatible with the sacred, as this incorporation is through materialism and secularism. Augusto Del Noce notes, in speaking of the Italian philosopher Gentile that:

'Gentile distinguishes two types of philosophy. The first is the traditional type from Plato to Hegel, symbolised by the Owl of Minerva, which rises at sunset as the day is ended. Gentile calls this type 'Intellectualistic' or... speculative, in the sense that it separates contemplation from action.'5

Gentile had what he called an 'active idealism'. The prevailing philosophical view before Hegel was that the subject was an abstract entity, whilst the objective world was concrete. Gentile, like Hegel, put forward the opposite. The world to be conceived in action, through a sacred culture or event, a breakthrough from nihilism. Therefore, transcendence is through action. For Gentile, the philosopher of fascism, this meant a dependence on the state, a greater narrative.

Nietzsche came closest to a transcendence of the individual. He saw the essential nihilism of science. In this he anticipated modern anomie and the liberal oxymoron; at once a barrage of universal rights and rules, whilst the mass cruelty of mechanised agriculture, the arms trade, and a Keynesian cycle of war death illustrate the fallacy of liberal 'values'. Besides Nietzsche, proffering the Dionysian above the Apollonian, conceived of the 'will to power' to overcome nihilism. Yet despite this, Heidegger believed that Nietzsche was still part of the metaphysical tradition, a 'forgetting of the being of being'6; therefore Nietzsche is part of the long tradition of western philosophy. Yet, rooted as it is in naturalism, Nietzsche wishes to replace the 'virtuous monsters and scarecrows' 7 who, seeking truth, miss out on life. Hence his emphasis on 'physis' and psychology. The real virtue is a 'nobility of spirit' to traverse the death of god. These virtues have been devalued so one needs a revaluation of all values.

Civilisations undergoing decadence suffer a 'forgetting' of fundamental values and nobility. These civilisations are marked by a lack of political ethos. The present liberal debacle, which was initiated through the age of industrial mobilisation and the 'dialectic of Enlightenment'8- in that the prescription of 'reason' has led to the modern forms of Marxism, fascism and materialism. Rationality exhibits itself in a form of sickness; a doting on egalitarianism, health and safety, corruption, a 'progressive' secular Vatican, and the misplaced destruction of naturalistic values. Transhumanism, rather than liberating, rooted in 'progress' and technology, uproots man from nature, killing transcendence.

One of the most fascinating insights by Del Noce9 is his belief that rationalism is by essence totalitarian. Therein it disallows any other outcome besides scientism. This is endemic to the modern phenotype. Through media, secular institutions -reason has been transmuted to scientism. This is totalitarian for this negates any other possibility. There is no place for the metaphysical. Likewise, the metamorphosis of freedom into 'the individual' is symptomatic of the atomisation of the individual through the industrial revolution and beyond. The technological end-game is the complete erosion of community and the identity of the individual10. This is due to a confusion of freedom being identified with individuality ( rather than in ancient civilisations liberation was seen as stemming from 'authority'). Scientism is a cul-de-sac since it denies any progress in any realm besides science. Consequently, nihilism infects all aspects of life; scientism, economics and politics. This is seen in the liberal denouement of total mobilisation (Ernst Junger) and endless war.

The overman, the eternal return, the idea of 'becoming', for Nietzsche, replaces the nihilist perspective. Absolute truth, the Platonic forms, Christian morality, Kantian 'things in themselves' are overcome by a Dionysian will. For Nietzsche ;

‘a nihilist is a man who judges the world as it is that it ought not be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (acting, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of the ‘in vain’ is the nihilists’ pathos.’11

This is the contradiction of immanent forms such as Marxism and liberalism; they posit how the world 'should be' rather than accepting its myriad of cultures, ideas and traditions. It sets the world up as achievable 'forms': but the reality is a desolation of anomie exhibited in a death of the soul. The liberal wants the universality of its own morality, but not of others. It is a paternalistic and ignorant exegesis. Del Noce sees the twentieth century as a process of materialism and secularism; that a dialectic of atheism pervaded both the Soviet and western post war period. The period of 'detente' was, according to Del Noce, not so much of forming bonds between the west and Russia, but that 'the west would be able to prevail against Communism only on one condition- by 'outdoing it in irreligion'. Therefore, in his view,  the west and east were not so much ideological adversaries- but secular bedfellows. Del Noce sees a continuity between the messianic nature of Communism in the Soviet Union and the myth of 'Moscow as the Third Rome'. So, Moscow is still, as a civilisational state, the heir to Byzantium:

'Thus, we face the greatest paradox of contemporary history: whereas Russia's official atheism 'guards' an explicitly sacral myth-which must necessarily bear the mark of its origins and act accordingly, regardless of the intentions of the rulers-the ....west can stand against it only as a democracy 'devoid of the sacred'. Russia constitutes the last bastion of the sacral mindset in the field of politics. On the contrary, Europe thought that it could renew itself by adopting the ways of the civilisation of 'well-being'. This is the reason why, so far, Russia has been left essentially unscathed by the process of self destruction that is affecting, without exception, the European countries and ...the United States...' 12

 The modern world, says Del Noce, is epitomised by a movement from Vertical to Horizontal framing. Therefore, modern science, sociology, politics seeks solace in 'constant relationships' between phenomena, horizontal causality rather than vertical, metaphysical explanations. Consequently religion, sociology, business must be incorporated into progressivism. If not, it must be archaic. Here we meet Nietzsche’s 'death of God'; a dead end. The dialectic of the Enlightenment, was not Fascism, as Adorno and Horkheimer13 explicated, but the triumph of the secular, a nihilistic epiphany whereby the statues of modernity, like on Easter Island,  having been built, cannot be explained by ancestors. The Occidental west, through the Cold War and detente sought to 'attract' the despotic Orient. By 'showing itself' would be enough, through the culture of 'well-being'. Combined with the philosophy of consumerism and 'well-being' it would force Russia's capitulation to the West.

This form of horizontal thinking is embedded into western academia and sociology. However, it has always been 'apropos' a skewed view of the East. We are now at the dawn of a collapse of the Occidental mindset, and a realisation that transcendence through technology and scientific progress has been a chimera. When the Owl of Minerva takes flight at the end of the 21st Century - ideas of materialism and transhumanism will be seen to suffer the same dystopian 'turn' as the Enlightenment. Transcendence, transhumanism must be metaphysical, in the sense that AI, or technology, are only descendants of 'technics'- an attempt to speed up materialism whilst ontological truth is slowing down as we move further away from being.

This dysfunctional thinking is reflected in metapolitics, geopolitics and is the cause of the era of resource war. The relationship between east and west, is, in fact, symbiotic, rather than contrary. From the age of the Silk Roads -ideas were traded and exchanged. Global capital, however, needed a one way autobahn, of investment and extraction, and that was colonialism and globalisation. Space and distance may have been contracted by technologies- but ontological closeness has widened. Simone Weil wrote that:

'It seems that Europe requires periodically genuine contacts with the East, in order to remain spiritually alive. It is also true that there is something in Europe , something which opposes the oriental spirit, something specifically western. But that something is to be found in America in its pure state and to the second power, and we are in danger of being devoured by it..the Americanizaton of Europe would lead to the Americaization of the whole world'. 14

Bearing in mind Simone Weil was writing in 1960. Since that time dysfunctional cities, drug addiction, poverty, are exponentially worse.

Western liberalism rests on a contingency (of forms) that do not exist. Instead, a teleology is needed, based on sense and instinct, without needing a justification based on reason and science. As Foucault noted, liberalism works as the good shepherd, but not for the benefit of the flock. It morphed from Marxism, and , realising its failure, into the secular promotion of morally vacant peripheral groups whilst abandoning the indigenous working class. Responsibility has been removed; at first replaced by god and now by the individualistic cul de sac of the market.  A responsibility to family, tradition and nobility is the overman, in art but most importantly in our relationship to a community of others.

Del Noce meets Nietzsche therefore in a deafening cry for 'the sacred' , for responsibility and the escape from the 'Wasteland'. Man today only exists in part, not fully, encased in a panopticon of liberal rules and regulations formed on nihilism. The liberal world is chained in Plato's cave, today's market. For Mircea Eliade 15 the 'sacred' appears in our world at sunset as hierophanies ( an occurrence of the sacred into the world)  , the epiphany of the sacred without intermediaries of reason or law. The hierophanies jump out of history as supreme individuals, as 'the event'. Heidegger had noted, in the' Contributions'16, that the last god will arrive in the Geist of art or poetry and a new sense of being. The 'first beginning' for Heidegger was the metaphysical thought of the Greeks. The 'last god' appears to be a sacredness of the secular. A heroic figure or a cultural event may be a catalyst to a new sacred way of being. Therefore, this view harks back to a pre-technological way of being. What Heidegger meant was that the modern epoch consists in a technological framework and that total mobilisation, war, nature as commodity, are all part of this forgetting of being. In 'Building Dwelling Thinking' Heidegger claims the need to receive the 'sky as sky', to allow it to be itself, to be sacred. He maintained the need for a preparedness:

'philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavour. Only a god can save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and poetizing, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god in the time of foundering [Untergang]; for in the face of the god who is absent, we founder'. (Only a God can Save Us)17

Brian Patrick Bolger studied at the LSE. He has taught political philosophy and applied linguistics in Universities across Europe. His articles have appeared in ’The National Interest’, 'The Montreal Review', 'The European Conservative' ,’The Salisbury Review’, 'The American Spectator', ' Deliberatio', 'Geopolitical Review', 'Merrion West', ‘The Village’, ‘New English Review’, ‘The Burkean’, ‘The Daily Globe’,  ‘American Thinker’, ‘Philosophy Now’. His new book, Coronavirus and the Strange Death of Truth, is now available in the UK and US.

***

***