Classical philosophy vs. Modernity

It is common for people to have a knee-jerk reaction to talk of discerning meaning and value in life. That must be dogmatic, the thought goes--we have reason and science, and know that there is no value in life! Value is merely assertion. I want to take a moment to explore what we're really doing when we make this assumption.

We call ancient Greek philosophy "Western philosophy" but that is an error. "The West" is western Europe, not ancient Greece or Rome. Those are different civilisations. The West is the germanic Christian empire that rose a thousand years ago, whose worldview is an ideologically forceful version of Christianity.

For Western Christianity, or Christendom:
Life here is without meaning and value, its meaning lies in Christian revelation and the Christian after-life.
Life can only be understood through that revelation, through Christian theology.

For Western modernity, we drop the Christianity but not the essential ideology, the essential logic:
Life is without meaning and value.
Life can only be understood through a theory.

For the ancient Greeks, and for many other civilisations, especially those outside the Judaic-Christian-Islamic worldview:
Life is full of meaning and value.
Life is understood less through theory, and more through contemplation, deep attention.

Many people who dismiss the way I speak on this website—this Platonic or classical philosophical way of seeing the world—because they insist that there is no meaning or value in life, and that we must invent it, imagine that they are being rational and objective. In fact, they are giving voice to a Christian view of the world, even though many strongly reject Christianity.

Christianity is inherently nihilistic from a Greek point of view, from the worldview of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, and Plotinus. Many philosophers have pointed this out, including, famously, Nietzsche. This why Western modernity is nihilistic. It is nihilistic because it has abandoned Christianity. But it is Christianity which gave the West this logic of nihilism, this trap in which one is either Christian, or life has no meaning.

The modern, secular West is Christian in many ways that it does not see. It treats science and reason life religions, engaging in scientism and rationalism, which are deeply unscientific and irrational, for they ignore the nature and limitations of those concepts and practices. This is why the new atheists of the 2010s seemed so much like evangelical Christians in their tone and aggression. They would constantly speak of reason, but rarely engaged in it, instead using the rhetoric of reason, to the cheers of nodding adherents. This is why radical left politics so often resembles puritannical Christianity, with its witch hunts and purity spirals. This is why people who insist that life has no meaning, and human beings no value, often do so with such glee, and with such as sense of intellectual and moral superiority. 

Many people think assume they are being rational when they deny that life has meaning and value that is to be disccovered and discerned there in life. More deeply, they feel that they must think that way, that they are wrong to think otherwise. When modern Westerners rush to reject any notion that life is full of meaning and value, they claim that they are rationally critiquing "assumptions," when in fact they are blindly enforcing this same old Western ideology. Indeed, they are pushing a Christian worldview.

Because Greek and Roman worldviews are also layered into the seeds of our culture, Plato's worldview is accessible to us, at least in some important respect. Plato is the answer to the nihilism of Western modernity. His answer does not take the form we expect: an aggressive new ideology that claims to see through and answer everything. That would be another projection of the Western Christian mindset. Instead, this alternative is available as a quietly reflective, humble work of contemplation. We pay attention to life as we experience, instead of through the lens of a theology or related ideology. We pay attention to the irreducible richness of the ways that meaning and value structure our very perception, our entire way of being. We were like somebody dying of thirst in a boat that was stalled on a freshwater lake, who took it for salt water. That which will nourishes us is before our eyes, if only we will look.

I started out by saying that classical philosophy is very different to modern philosophy. Another name for modern philosophy is Modernity. This is the age of science and reason, which has benefitted us so much, but it is also the age of scientism and rationalism, both of which are decidely unscientific and irrational. This dark side of Modernity wants to reduce everything to mechanisms. The only things which are real, are those things that fit inside the little theories we have invented, which make us feel like masters of the universe who can see through everything. We tell ourselves we are brave, when like arrogant cowards we run from any mystery, from anything which transcends our comprehension. The apogee of this dark side of Modernity is the cliche of the Redditor. Modern philosophy takes many classical philosophical concepts, which in their original form are rich and whole, and reduces them to some part of them. Usually to some more mechanical part of them. 

For example, in Modernity the concept of the intellect is reduced to a kind of calculating machine. The classical concept of the intellect, by contrast, is that of consciousness. It is the field of awareness that we are. It is the inner-most us, who knows and loves. We cannot explain consciousness, we cannot reduce it to a mechanical explanation, indeed every attempt to objectify consciousness is itself an act of consciousness, so it fails at the outset. We are a mystery to ourselves. As intellect, we look and apprehend the whole, and the many forms within that whole. Only then, secondarily, do we reason and calculate. Intellect is intuition in the first place, and reason in the second. Modernity, or at least its darker side, always reduces the whole to the part, and so reduces intellect to calculative reason. Please keep this in mind every time I speak of intellect in all that follows; I am referring to the mystery of knowing and willing that is us. The I, the true You. If you assume the modern idea, especially without realising you are doing so, then you are likely to accuse me of expressing that idea—you will accuse me of expressing and favouring your distorted idea—and so you will reject what I say about the primacy of the intellect, not because of what I say, but because of your distorted, modern concept of it. You will accuse me of reducing life to calculative reason, without richness and mystery, but that will be a radical misunderstanding.

This issue extends to other concepts I will use, such as virtue and goodness. A virtue is any activity and habit that makes you and your life genuinely good. What is good? Wisdom is good, as is strength, as is healthy pleasure, and friendship, and moral goodness such as justice and kindness, and success in life is good. Virtue is an ancient Greek concept and its meaning is broad in this way. However, it has been passed down to us through the prism of Western culture, which has mostly been very Christian. The meaning of virtue thereby became narrow, in the sense of moralistic, and dismissive of the animal joys of life, and lacking the Greek sense that human beings are full of good potentiality, as opposed to flawed sinners worthy of Hell. The philosopher Nietzche pointed out that Christianity rejected the Greek view that meaning and goodness can be found here in life, and instead placed the source of meaning in the heavens. When that religion collapsed, we did not regain the Greek sense, but instead retained the Christian sense that there is no meaning here in this life, but now there was no next life either.

That is the long historical process which led to the nihilism of Modernity that harms us so much today. I see people of many backgrounds, but to Westerners who are struggling in this historical moment of our civilisation, I say this: you do not have to be a Christian, but neither do you have to be a nihilistic modern. Neither do you have to go searching in non-Western traditions such as Buddism if that does not work for your psyche, as Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama have pointed out. The Greeks offer an alternative, much richer vision of life, which is rooted in our human capacity to look and see which we moderns so greatly value, and which goes so deep in our culture and so in our psyche. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Plotinus...these philosophers offer a profound way forward for many people. Classical philosophy, and the philosophical counselling based on it, is a retrieval of an older, profound vision of life. It is the pursuit of truth, and goodness, and beauty, and justice. It is the attempt to embody these things, which is to say: the cultivation of wisdom and virtue.