The First Principle of Modernity

    Imagine the world as do those who believe that there is no more in Heaven or on Earth than can be researched and (in principle at least) measured, quantified, and thus known by the methods of science. There is nothing else, nothing (in one version of this) that the equations of physics cannot (in principle at least) cannot predict. Thus human life, what we think of as our inner or spiritual life as well as what we can know, is part of a closed system. The laws that determine everything in the system are the laws of physics (or perhaps physics plus chemistry and biochemistry). The universe's origin, life, and what we understand as self-consciousness are all a function of the closed system of “nature.” This system has no purpose and no meaning, except what evolution has programmed us to imagine and project. We did not exist for an eternity before we emerged and we will not exist for an eternity after we perish. Our existence is like a blink of an eye. We are insignificant because there is no significance in a closed system except as a naturally occurring system of illusions promoting the perpetuation of the species. Our morality reduces to this system of illusions. No God exists outside the system – God is an unnecessary hypothesis – to remember us, care about us, add meaning and purpose to our lives. After my death, oblivion. After my children die, no one will even no I existed. Soon no one will know my children existed. Soon even no one will ever human beings existed. The earth will also cease to exist. This universe will cease to exist. Whether other universes will come into being is unknown and doesn’t matter in the end. If all our loves and lives matter only to us insofar as we exist in this weirdly alienated form – alienated as self-conscious beings from the closed system of nature that is our reality and from which our species-preserving illusions separate us – the only value is in our heads, insofar as we cannot accept the truth of our situation. Our “reason” is a kind of biochemical computer with an AI that allows us to manipulate our environment as an aid to survival. We know that our self-consciousness lives are embedded in the Matrix of a closed natural system, which our AI can understand to a limited extent, but we cannot get out of our programming, we are locked into a biochemical-computer-generated illusion that we are a self among others, that our self-consciousness somehow exists apart from and outside of the Matrix: a veil of Maya generated by a subsystem that programs us to define ourselves as individuals. Imagine that is the way the world really is.

    What consequences follow? We could resign ourselves and view the world with detached curiosity. Despair makes sense. We could embrace our illusory selves and increase pleasure and power – there is no (moral) reason not to for there is no morality in the closed system. We could pretend we were real and define for ourselves goals and meanings, as though these too were real and mattered. We could try not to think about it. We could make up religions that functioned like opium. We could eat, drink, and be merry: the taste of good food and wine seems real enough. We could detach ourselves like a good Buddhist and pity humanity, indeed all of life. We can choose to live as if nature (at least our nature) were not a closed, mechanistic system. We can choose, as Macbeth put it, to strut and fret our hour on the stage, or we can choose to end it. Perhaps there are other options; the world as I have imagined it limits those options. (Any way you imagine the world always limits intelligible responses to it.)

    What all these options share is a picture of the unreal self as the source of all (ultimately illusory) value, purpose, and meaning. The death of the self is the end of an illusion, but also the end of (ultimately illusory) meanings. The self – albeit illusory – is all we have left. It takes the place of God. We see this in our culture in this: someone questions the desirability of a person's choices, and get answered: "he likes it" or "I like it." Now that is a non sequitur. It functions is to cut off thought about the desirability of the choice. But it makes perfect sense if the "I" is apart from anything that could provide a criterion to judge the choice by. It makes perfect sense if reality has nothing to say. If what is good is reducible to what a person happens to like.  And by the way, connecting to my last two entries, if we embrace this ontology, then homosexuality or any kind of sexuality violates nothing because there is nothing to violate. Given a choice between that nihilism, let's call it, and the 7th circle of Hell (the burning desert and the fire rain), I'd take the nihilism! So it is understandable to me that most homosexuals opted out of reality.  

   What I have done is to picture the ontology – the picture of reality as a whole – that informs “autonomy.” It is not the only possible ontology compatible with “autonomy.” You can imagine with Descartes an immaterial soul somehow working in inexplicable coordination with a material body. But I think that historically, sociologically, the picture I described has (largely below the surface of consciousness) structured our pop-moralities of autonomy.

   Nothing forces anyone for purely rational reasons to find the ontology compelling. It is no more rational or irrational than any of the theistic ontologies, for example. It is true you don’t have to posit realities outside the domain of natural science. That seems an advantage of this ontology to many people. But the price is the making unreal of our inner lives and of human history. Under the circumstances of modern culture, it has become compelling to many people.

   It is as though the devil had been our metaphysics instructor for the past few centuries. Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas (for all their faults, which can be corrected in revisions) were much better instructors. With homosexuality, it is a matter of making space within nature, within reality, for a loving way to exist - not closing off this possibility in advance, as did Thomas following tradition.