The Failure Of The Enlightenment For Man's Moral Education


Just like the microscope, modern day science as a whole, in many ways, makes the world in which we live a lot uglier. In its fanatical fight against "illusion" at any cost, its Promethean bid to infiltrate to the hidden causes of all things, it has forgotten the humanly essential phenomena itself and robbed Life of the natural perspectives which render it worthwhile. When it attempts to address these phenomena at all, i.e. in the form of psychiatry, it has turned into a mere parody of itself, utilizing the jargon of science and its claims to universality, merely to sacralise unthinking and vulgar societal norms. Meanwhile, it teaches that Facts and Values are irreducible to one another, effectively rendering (at least for those under the sway of this absurd theory) the natural arbiter, which is Reason, impotent when it comes to deciding upon practical courses of action, and giving intellectual (i.e. the highest) license to absolutely anything - which in practice usually means whatever most other people are doing, but also includes the most stupid and heinous crimes imaginable. It has thus abnegated its duty to cultivate our souls through the sweet allure and enchantments of poetry combined with the noble, careful exposition of philosophy, towards the True, The Beautiful, The Just. In its materialist myopia, its mono-mania for what is universally perceptible and reducible to numerically verified Laws, i.e. the outward physical world, it not only draws our attention away from our lived experience, (which is only truly revealed to the bearer), co-opting the mental apparatus for issues foreign to its real needs and desires, but often denies the very ontological reality of our own inward life (for instance, in the case of Behaviourism). Again, the inevitable result is self-alienation and shallow conformism. In Sum: what was originally intended to be the liberation of Man has been turned into an ideal ideology for the production of unreflective cookie-cutter slaves. Today's religion, i.e. 'Science', is anti-life in a more radical sense than the desert dogmas ever were.



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