THE HALF-COOKED PHILOSOPHY OF THE MODERN MAN
There are nights when I wake and hear footsteps on my ceiling, though I live on the top floor. It creaks above my skull. At first I thought it was a dream, but the rhythm was too precise—measured, almost mathematical, like Descartes counting his doubts in the dark. When I was writing my Who Will Bury The Dead God, I had this exact realization of the ghostly above-below cracked phenomenon. Then I realized: it was not a ghost, but philosophy itself pacing above me. Philosophy has become an insomniac—restless, unable to lie down in the grave, unable to bear the weight of its own body. Modernity is nothing but this insomnia: ghostly steps that never descend, echoing endlessly, a hallucination we are forced to share. If you listen closely, you may hear it too: the heavy boots of thought circling above, searching for a floor that does not exist and this floor-creaking metaphysical mysterious always giving me a visual output of the ghostly above-below cracked phenomenon on my learning of the modernity-sickness.
This way, I brush aside the cobweb of modernity through the ornament of vr̥tty-anuprāsa alankāra (repetition-based poetic device). Grammar is not my subject. Or rather, let me say—no subject is mine, as if I am subjectless. Modernity began when human language gradually detached itself from the heavy clouds of grammaticality; it is still detaching—for language is immature to address human sensitivity, and it has no end. It is precisely in this infinity of language that man gave birth to the half-cooked philosophy of modernity, in which human obscurity becomes easily visible. From here begins the downfall of man—inner conflict, suffering, future guilt—how then can one imagine the trembling, snow-covered state of this world? New literary ornaments only added confusion. Some thinkers tried to respond to human sensitivity alongside metaphysical expositions, but they achieved nothing except failure.
The ability to transform physical impulses immediately into social or psychological purpose is what we call "risk." The modern man trivializes risk, turning it into a dull lifestyle of political, social, or psychological welfare—an impotent impulse. I cannot deny the tragedy of seeing the "uncreated element" being crushed by modernization—its origin invisible both to you and your self-interest. Until the youth understand the slogan "Modernity is bitch", aesthetic experience cannot be realized. Ancient man (including modern man) lost the primal value of humanization when he sought metaphysical foundations for curiosity.
From the earliest times, man considered "intuitive knowledge" as the law of conduct and thus began philosophy. Yet the heavy cycle of history must be reversed in order to re-evaluate this "primal difference." Man has always sought happiness—this cannot be denied—and hence philosophy arose. In my upcoming book, Nauseous, I am trying to DE-philosophize this man's modern sickness. Nietzsche, in Human, All Too Human, asks: "What kind of knowledge allows man to live at peace in this world?" That was his reason for separating philosophy from science.
Plato's Symposium also shows how far the frenzy of knowledge may go. The sources of knowledge are two—supernatural (to daimonion) or thymos (spiritedness). There comes a moment when mental sensitivity desires proximity to the geisha—that is, to wisdom.
The Sophists rejected metaphysical truth. Democritus and Leucippus divided the world into "atoms" to grasp truth as knowledge. Yet the "modern ignorant" remain untouched. Plato transplanted beauty into "non-physical/non-being," ignoring actuality. Then what is beauty? What is nature? If the essence of the world is to be reflected in the discourse of purpose, then the intrinsic quality of matter is void, which brings us only to the edges of beauty.
When man is angry, his throat swells and his face reddens—this must be understood as the immediate process of pressure and heat transformation, what modern science calls "Boyle's Law."
If Vedic literature is "inner vision," Greek philosophy is "empirical." This is because Greek thought is rooted in practical notions rather than mental supplements. The sole cause of suffering is intellect—it confines the world to negative estimates, weakening the extraordinary force of aesthetics.
In Greek, there is a word Eudaimonia, central in Aristotle's ethics. It means "happiness." I make it more contemporary—it now means "life-plan." Ethics disturbs balance. This does not promote immorality, but it focuses on "planning," encouraging the useless thought over essentials.
I want to call it in one word—self-attachment. This is not a misinterpretation of ethics into religion or quantitative morality, but a leading path towards supreme ethics. Yet when man measures his success in terms of praise, power, political skill, and life-purpose, he actually turns toward self-attachment. This is a frightening road—a dead end. The energy of self-attachment ultimately leads to pathological issues. Perhaps we have misinterpreted philosophy, imprisoning "thought." Plato and Aristotle's "ideal state" accepted individual freedom as "invisible bondage," harming human aesthetic sensitivity—just as postmodern relativism damaged moral integrity.
Another cause of modernity's complex web is pouring "unnecessary impulses" into artistic inquiry—this adds psychological trauma. Sappho's poetry excites me, yet at the same moment makes me despair, because "art" is tied to the passions of time. Its transience exhausts me. Applied not only to art but also to politics, environment, and socioeconomic structures, the outcome is the same. This is also modernization. Nietzsche's notion of "tragedy" resonates here—Othello's jealousy or Macbeth's ambition are signs of the same error.
It cannot be said exactly when modernity began, but its problems cannot be denied. Many fail to see how its pseudo-form erodes the idea of "true man." The more modernity advances, the more man must pay the price of "truth." Perhaps foreseeing this, poets like Robert Southey and Rousseau urged the abandonment of modernity. Rousseau's Confessions (1782, possibly the first modern autobiography) describes one event. He came across a newspaper essay contest asking: "Does the progress of science and the arts contribute to the purification of morals, or to their corruption?" Rousseau wrote: "The moment I read this, I saw another universe, I became another man." I have never seen such a powerful discourse elsewhere. In his essay he wrote: "Science and art are chains of iron pulling man downwards." At a time when science was leading backward, superstitious Europe towards liberation, Rousseau's thought became revolutionary. In this "renewal," the insight remains strong—neoliberalism, rather than guiding humanity towards Vedic refinement, pulls it towards self-attachment. Perhaps Rousseau could not accept divine monarchy shifting into egalitarianism. By the 1700s, Europe had passed the Age of Reason, moving into Enlightenment.
Modernity had not yet stepped firmly, but Husserl and Nietzsche repeatedly warned of a modern crisis. The Enlightenment age challenged the Catholic Church on grounds of reason and individual freedom. Renaissance humanism had already sown the seeds of modern crisis, replacing afterlife with man. Medieval narrowness was overturned by the Renaissance, and Enlightenment developed "modernity" in the name of humanity.
The fall of Constantinople scattered its scholars into Europe, sparking Renaissance. Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and other navigators benefited, discovering America and new sea routes to Asia. In a sense, Petrarch began modernity in the name of humanity. Bacon's rationalism further fertilized European humanism. The Renaissance intellectual movement flowed into Enlightenment. But no one saw that beneath this movement of knowledge, lay a disguised hostility to freedom. Growing tolerance and rationalism also dragged society into crisis. Descartes emerged from this urge for knowledge. He was impatient to grasp truth, yet breaking Scholastic thought was no easy war. People preferred Aristotle's metaphysics or politics to Galileo's telescope. Descartes' lustful philosophy—I call it salacious corpus, because it stormed philosophy like satyrion (aphrodisiac)—challenged all.
If we study history's philosophers, their aim is "rational awareness of the world." Yet this does not produce systemic knowledge, only distrust towards existence. Civilization has spent five millennia in sequential awareness, but philosophy has always rested upon causality. Such vision only adds complexity. It is to solve this complexity that modern philosophy was born, which answered many metaphysical questions correctly. Descartes attributed errors of science to "misguided intuition." Rationalism and empiricism are not separate branches, but like the horses of a cart, one behind the other. Rationalist, empiricist—front and back. Heraclitus said: "The world cannot be known, because it is in flux; and knowledge of flux is impossible." Descartes said: "It is best not to go on for great quest for truth, it will only make you miserable." Thus distrust towards existence grows.
The quest for real knowledge adds pessimism—another problem of modernity. Philosophers tried to establish truth through science, but modern masters like Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Russell, Sartre, and Foucault warned against self-attachment. Does their mastery give us strength to escape modern pessimism? Ignorance has two forms—āvaraṇa (veil) and vikṣepa (distortion). From these two forms we can see the ignorance of modernization. Because the distinction between truth and imagination weakens, modern false paths cannot be discarded.
As Classics of Western Philosophy (18th ed., p.1157, edited by Steven M. Cahn) notes: "We think of matter as having existed long before there were any minds, and it is hard to think of it as a mere product of mental activity. But whether true or false, idealism is not to be dismissed as obviously absurd." Similarly, modernization cannot be dismissed as incoherent. It appears in human life as a reflection of philosophical consciousness. To the idealists, the world is void. To the anti-modernists, modernity is a universal issue.
My point: How does philosophy induce aesthetic depression in a competitive society? I call this a philosophical hallucination. It arises when man cannot internalize faith. Faith looks cunningly at absolute existence, indifferent to proof. Each morning, though we never doubt our food, it is not poisonous, whether we believe or doubt. The eater does not die of suspicion (aesthetic-depression).
The difference between man and beast is that human consciousness is regulated by education—though we rarely ask how education is acquired. If we follow La Mettrie's L'Homme Machine, which reduces philosophy to bodily pleasure, perhaps atheism would end, and with it centuries of religious wars and man's "inner brain wars." This could lessen modern recklessness and restore aesthetic-joy. To Voltaire, La Mettrie's view was stupidity, but it cannot be denied that it diagnoses human error. Man has spent centuries searching for identity. The Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad resolves this doubt:
Ultimately, the problem cannot be concluded so easily. Russell, in The Problems of Philosophy, described philosophy's poverty in unique ways. The above verse (turīya, as explained by Gauḍapāda in his Kārikā) sheds light upon Self's existence. Intellectualism only brought doubt, not truth. Empiricism opposed intellectual destruction, seeking creation through experience, but in the end it too produced only exhaustion. Thus man forgets the face of beauty, and walks into false paths from which return is nearly impossible.
