Last time I attempted to describe the difference between the Medieval knowledge of the world, and what took place in Modernity, which represented what might be called the “turn to the subject.” Many religious and cultural commentators understand the crisis of the Modern world to be theological, and perhaps even cultural, whereas the real problem is even more basic: it is in all actuality philosophical. There have been, as I see it, four major Revolutions that were spurned on by Modern epistemology, or this change in how man knows things. These Revolutions are:
- The Copernican Revolution
- The Protestant Revolution
- The Conciliar Revolution of Vatican II; and the system that under-girds them all
- The Kantian Revolution.
There are, of course the French and American Revolutions, but they also are the necessary outcomes of the Kantian Revolution, as are the others mentioned above. The Encyclopedia Britannica says this about Immanuel Kant, who is the major figure responsible for how modern people
understand themselves and the world:
…for Kant, human knowledge is merely the product of subjective
construction. This subjectivistic model by its intrinsic logic
denies humans access to the external world.
This is alarming, as this way of thinking although always present with some on the fringes of society, was now to become, incrementally, the way humans generally perceive reality. When I was in the Modernist college seminary for instance, we were told that the philosopher to know was Kant. Not Aristotle or St. Thomas Aquinas who both upheld a common sense understanding of reality, but Kant and his schizophrenic model. To put it concretely, 2+2 is now an opinion not a fact. As a matter of fact, in Modernity everything becomes an opinion, because we can never get to objective truth. This will produce nothing but a nightmare
scenario for humanity, as it also places belief in God as mere opinion. S.M. Henderson of Weber State University has stated:
Kantian morality is based on intention rather than consequences… And it is not based upon objective principles, because they cannot be known, as explained above. But the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, as we all should know.
To be continued.