the second thought I had last night was this, modernity as we know
it, is what?
we exist in a far different world then say, Hobbes… who lived before
this notion of modernity… how is modernity different then what
Hobbes felt…
there was a cohesion to Hobbes world that doesn’t exist in our world…
the cohesion was not in technology or the political sphere, but
in the cohesion of the information he received…the information flow
that he received is vastly different then we have now…and much
more cohesive then what we have now…
the knowledge that flowed to Hobbes was from the church, religion,
the state, be a good citizen or else, and from the university, in which
the information was in the form of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism
or in Scholasticism…which combine in some form, the two, either
Aristotelianism or Neoplatonism…think of Aristotelianism as a school,
and Neoplatonism as a school and Scholasticism as a school,
the number of such schools were basically three… almost all information
was coming to Hobbes from these three schools…and recall that
Scholasticism was in some parts, a combination of Aristotelianism or
Neoplatonism… so in effect, you had two schools…
the point of modern revolution was that our information coming to us
in the form of science was challenging these two schools because
the information we were receiving was different then the two schools
had taught… we see from Kepler that the sun was the center of the universe
but the two schools didn’t teach that… how does one put information into
a school of knowledge if the information contradicts the information of the
school? If the knowledge of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism is wrong,
and you only have two schools of thought, where would you put this new information?
You have to create a new school of thought that can understand and accept
the new information…so the era between Kepler and Newton was an attempt
to create a new school of thought that better understood the universe then
Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism…today we think of Aristotelianism and
Neoplatonism as philosophical systems, but they were also physical
descriptions of the world… if you wanted to understand how the physical
universe work, how the sun and earth and planets and stars acted,
you studied Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism in the middle ages and into
the age of Hobbes, this was true…but modern science
changed the way we understood how the universe worked
but we have to store that knowledge into some unified system
in which to understand it and to teach it…
so from Kepler to Newton was the search for a new school
that was needed to explain the new understanding of the universe…
So Hobbes answer was Empiricism, we understand and interpret
the universe through our senses and we reason from
the information gained from our senses to create a new
understanding of how the universe worked…
but what in gods name does this have to do with Modernity?
Everything…
the schools that arose from our new understanding of the universe,
empiricism and the enlightenment idea’s, which was a theory of thought,
and also such idea’s as the beginning of classical liberalism, all flowed
from the new knowledge that came from science… and not from the
study of the old forms of knowledge, Aristotelianism or Neoplaonism
or Scholasticism because they had a flawed understanding of
how the universe worked…
so these new schools flowed nicely until roughly, 1900
and then came the beginning of modernity… but why?
what happened in 1900? ah, Mr. Einstein happened…
and in 1905 published 4 papers which radically changed our
understanding of how the universe worked…
and that new understanding didn’t fit into any of the old
paradigms of empiricism or the enlightenment theories
or classical liberalism… so we once again, just as the Europe of
the years between Kepler and Newton, didn’t have a school able
to understand or to teach the new understanding of the universe,
we don’t have a school of thought in which to teach the new
understanding of the universe…that is the role that the thinkers
from Descartes to Leibniz played, creating the new systems of thought
that accommodated the new understanding of how the universe worked…
the 100 years from Descartes to Leibniz created the new systems that
existed until 1900, roughly 300 years… then Einstein happened…
but who were the creators of the new thinking? Ah, we begin
to understand the creation of modernity… Nietzsche was the first,
and perhaps the only one, who tried to explain the new world order,
the new understanding of how the world worked… he saw, as no one
has seen, that the new understanding of the universe, meant systems building
like the one that Hegel and Kant tried, no longer works…the new understanding
of the world meant that we cannot understand how the universe worked
via building a system, because we began to understand that a system
cannot hold all the information necessary to properly understand the
information we had gathered…we cannot build a system to understand
the information we have gathered because no system we built,
would be able to have all the information we need to understand
how the universe worked…so if you can’t build a system like
Aristotelianism or Neoplatonism or Scholasticism that allows one
to understand and teach that system, how do you now understand
or teach it?
and this fundamental understanding is the creation of what we
call modernity…we don’t have schools of thought like Aristotelianism
because no school of thought is possible given the new understanding
of the universe…so we have this flow of information, this massive
flow of information and we have no way to logically place it into
a school of thought or any type of system in which we can then
use to understand or teach…we have no way to place the
new information into context in which we can understand it…
we have 8 million people living in New York…
that is not information we can place into some system
because it can’t be placed into a system and thus we
have such random facts, which by their very nature are changeable,
and we can’t really do anything with them…we can’t place them
into some school of thought like Empiricism that would put that
information into context, because we have no such school of thought…
and thus we have modernity… which is the inability to create
a logical system of context in which to understand idea’s or facts…
and thus the need of philosophy to create such a logical context or
system in which to understand idea’s or facts…
we need philosophy now, more then ever because this
state of modernity will continue to exist until we create this
context or school of thought in which we can then begin to
understand and teach…
Kropotkin