The Dream World of Modern Intellectuals

Sixteen centuries ago, Saint Augustine elaborated a profound theory of human freedom that—though roundly dismissed or ignored by Enlightenment thinkers in modern times—deserves a rehearing in our time. Warning of the spiritual dangers entailed by thinking about human freedom apart from divine grace, Augustine expounded the meaning of freedom in its truest sense.

For Augustine, human freedom is metaphysical, a gift from God that is meant to enable us freely to choose the good, but may also be used to choose evil. Thus it is not an unqualified, or primary good, but an intermediate good. It is not the absence of physical restraint—often called “negative” freedom—nor is it the Kantian freedom to make up one’s own moral laws (autonomy), and certainly not the Millian freedom to choose whatever, so long as the choice doesn’t directly harm another. It is the genuine freedom to submit to the Eternal Law, thus accepting gratefully the ordered cosmos that is the Creator’s gift to his creatures.

The appropriate response to this gift—as with any gift—is gratitude. Yet since the will is free, it is also open to rational beings to deny the gift. For Augustine, the choice between gratitude and ingratitude is an original choice that must be made by each person and continuously reinforced by faith, for the two mutually exclusive alternatives are always present in every rational being.

In developing his idea of freedom, Augustine perfectly elaborated an existential tension that had been described centuries before by Plato and his disciples. In Plato’s anthropology, human reality is experienced as a tensional struggle in a metaxy, an “in-between” of existence that lies between immanence and transcendence. This tension characterizes the experience of humans once they have recognized their status as creatures poised precariously between being and non-being, and it is the philosophical basis for the kind of experience that generated the spiritual crisis leading to Augustine’s famous conversion.

Classical philosophy is distinctive both in its clear awareness of these tensional forces and in its ongoing effort to hold them in an intelligible balance. The balance is struck when, having chosen gratitude, one remains fully aware of the transcendent without at the same time devaluing the mundane, by resisting the urge to escape from the tensions of everyday existence in a  revolt against the reality of common experience, and by remaining open to the mystery of existence in faith and freedom while resisting the natural human desire for certainty, closure and power.

Voegelin and Second Reality

Eric Voegelin’s writings expound the kind of experience that generates this Augustinian decisional framework. Taking his cue from a concept suggested by the Austrian novelist Robert Musil, Voegelin used the phrase “Second Reality” to describe what he saw as the morally decadent and intellectually bankrupt condition of European society and culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (thus providing the groundwork for the rise of the deadly political ideologies of the later twentieth century). According to Voegelin, the rise of these ideologies was the manifestation of a loss of contact with reality on the part of European intellectuals in the run-up to the two world wars, representing a loss of contact with the transcendent orientation of human nature toward the divine ground of being, resulting in a “de-divinization” of man that led inevitably to his “de-humanization” as well.

For Voegelin, as for Plato and Augustine, the fundamental reality of human experience is the consciousness of existence in tension between being and non-being, in which man is continually drawn to embrace the transcendent source of his being (the First Reality), but is left free to reject that invitation by denying the transcendent source (the Creator) or by renouncing the world (the Creation). This “condemnation to freedom” produces discomfort in the soul, and the resulting anxiety can lead to renunciation of—or revolt against—the tension-filled reality of common experience and the construction of fantasy worlds (second realities) that promise to assuage the anxiety thus produced. In “The Eclipse of Reality,” Voegelin asserts that “the contraction of his humanity to a self imprisoned in its selfhood is the characteristic of so-called modern man.”

Yet since the shrunken self is still a man, with relations to the primary reality of common experience,

frictions between the shrunken self and reality are bound to develop. The man who suffers from the disease of contraction, however, is not inclined to leave the prison of his selfhood, in order to relieve the frictions. He rather will put his imagination to further work and surround the imaginary self with an imaginary reality apt to confirm the self in its pretense of reality; he will create a Second Reality, as the phenomenon is called, in order to screen the First Reality of common experience from his view. The frictions consequently, far from being removed, will grow into a general conflict between the world of his imagination and the real world.

From this “primary deformation” of existence, there may develop “secondary deformations” that take the form of ideologies described by Voegelin as “scientisms” and “historicisms,” systems of thought that surround the original deformation of existence with philosophical support. Occasionally one of these deformations can become so widespread and influential as to attain historical significance. 

The ideologies that compose the dream world of modern intellectuals and that have attained historic significance can be viewed as a complex of related doctrines. The most distinctive common feature of these doctrines is the denial of the freedom that is the source of the existential discomfort to which we are “condemned.” The purpose and effect of this denial is to shield shrunken selves living in the dream world from the awful responsibilities entailed by that condemnation. The exercise of Augustinian freedom consists in opening the soul to grace in gratitude both for the reality of common, everyday experience and for the reality of the “beyond” which we strive to know. As was true for Augustine, “the heart is restless until it finds rest in Thee.” Alternatively, one may revolt against life in the metaxy and withdraw into the subjectivity of one’s selfhood.

The Deterministic World of Modern Philosophy

Much of modern philosophy is a deterministic fantasy world.The doctrine that most fundamentally characterizes modernity’s spiritual revolt is materialism. The fateful rediscovery of the ancient philosophers Democritus and Lucretius by René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and others in the seventeenth century led ultimately to a revolution in the way many people (especially intellectuals) conceive the nature of reality. Hobbes taught that everything is made of matter, and that even human thoughts are a result of the motion of material particles in the brain. It goes without saying that the implications of this teaching are vast, for if materialism is true, then much else will follow in its trail.

Materialism holds that all is matter. If this is true, then psychologism—the doctrine that human behavior is motivated entirely by underlying forces in the human psyche that are essentially and ultimately beyond our control—must also be true. This is the case for two reasons. First, if all is matter, the mind is matter and the laws that govern mind are the laws that govern matter. Hence mind is reducible to brain—atoms, molecules, electrical impulses and the laws that govern such things. Second, since the part of the human psyche that governs our relation to physical things is the appetite (desire and aversion), and since the part of the psyche that governs our responses to the satisfaction (or non-satisfaction) of appetite is emotion, it follows that, under materialism, human beings are necessarily governed by appetites and emotions. Since appetites and emotions are either unconscious or semi-conscious forces, the idea that a purely rational faculty exists that is capable of governing our appetites and emotions (what we want or how we feel) must be regarded as an illusion.

If materialism and psychologism are true, it follows in turn that determinism—the doctrine that all events, including human choices, are strictly determined by previous events or situations—is also necessarily true. This must be so because all matter—including the atoms, molecules, and electrical impulses that constitute the brain under materialism—is extended in space. That is, all material objects (however small) “take up” or “occupy” space. At the same time, all appetites take time (again, however small the interval) to fulfill or satisfy. So we might say that appetite is likewise extended, not only in space, but also in time.  This means that human choices, which are fully motivated and constituted by desire for material objects and the emotions consequent upon satisfaction (or non-satisfaction) of such desire, are strictly determined by the character and intensity of the desires.  In other words, the desires are always antecedent to their satisfaction or non-satisfaction, and the emotions are always consequent to the same. Thus Hobbesian atomism inexorably generates psychological determinism.

Epistemology

Scientific naturalism, or what I prefer to call “scientism,” is the chief epistemological complement of materialism. It is the doctrine that holds that the only route to knowledge is through the physical sciences, that we can only know what these sciences discover. Full-blown scientism involves a number of doctrinal corollaries, and all of these are rooted in materialism in one way or another. If materialism and its metaphysical complements are true, then all is matter, and it stands to reason that, since matter is all there is, then matter is all there is to know, is all that can be known, and the ways of knowing matter are the only ways of knowing anything at all.

Going hand-in-hand with the idea that the ways of knowing matter are the only ways of knowing anything, is the doctrine of empiricism, which in its general form holds that we can know things only through sense experience. This stands to reason because the five physical senses provide our only direct access to the material world. If matter is all there is, and all that can be known, then our knowing anything whatever must be wholly dependent on that part of the psyche that provides direct access to what may be known. When combined with materialism and scientism, empiricism takes a radical form that denies the existence of any knowledge not directly traceable either to sense impressions or to quantitative reasoning based on those impressions. As David Hume famously said, any other knowledge claims should be committed to the flames, for they “contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

Morals and Politics

Materialism and its epistemological complements have catastrophic implications for moral and political science. Perhaps the most obvious of these is hedonism: the doctrine that reduces human happiness to pleasure. Since human beings seek happiness, it is understandable that, if we think that all is matter, we will seek our happiness in the satisfaction of physical desire. Likewise, if we build our social science on this premise, we will seek to find a way to measure such satisfaction so that it can be made the basis for social policy. This leads straightforwardly to utilitarianism—the doctrine that happiness equals satisfaction maximized, measurable in “utiles,” and aggregable as a basis for policy decisions.

In the end, the metaphysics, epistemology, and morality of materialism generate an almost irresistible urge in some thinkers to attempt the construction of secular utopias via the employment of political power. The reason for this is clear: human beings cannot really live with the full implications of materialism and its complements, because the ultimate implication of all these doctrines is death. All such attempts are rooted in the illusion—the quintessential second reality—that Man can replace God as ruler of the world. 

The Big Three

Among the secular ideologies that have been developed in modern times are three that have particular bearing on how human beings think of themselves, especially in their impact on our understanding of human nature—of what human beings are. All these ideologies deny the existence of an essential human nature, all deny human freedom and are thus determinisms: biological, psychological, and socioeconomic.

First, Charles Darwin proclaimed that human beings are most powerfully motivated by the drive to survive and reproduce, and that humankind has both originated and evolved from simpler organisms by an essentially random process (i.e., neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology and biological determinism). Despite mounting evidence calling into question this scenario, the scientific establishment continues to pronounce it a “consensus” beyond debate—even going so far as to anathematize its critics as “anti-science.”

Yet in truth, neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology is only part science. It is also part scientism, and thus part second Reality. The part of Darwinism that is almost universally accepted science is microevolution by means of random mutation and natural selection. The part of Darwinism that is not science is based on the assertion that macroevolution (creation of new species) occurs by the same means. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt noted the political dimension, as well as the unscientific perspective, of many Darwinists early on, writing that 

Darwinism met with such overwhelming success because it provided, on the basis of inheritance, the ideological weapons for race as well as class rule. . . . Finally the last disciples of Darwinism in Germany decided to leave the field of scientific research altogether, to forget about the search for the missing link between man and ape, and started instead their practical efforts to change man into what the Darwinists thought an ape is.

Second, Karl Marx taught that human beings are most powerfully motivated by their social and economic status and their position in a historically determined sequence of class antagonisms of which they have no control and, in most instances, no awareness (Marxian sociology and economic determinism). Marxism is a close relation of Darwinism, exhibiting a scientific strain (the historico-economic analysis) as well as a prophetic strain (the dictatorship of the proletariat and the transformation of human nature into “socialist man”). Whereas Darwinism is a “scientism” with enormous historical implications, Marxism is a full-blown “historicism” that led Marx himself to the utopian fantasies of historically inevitable revolution and the wholesale transformation of human nature, and led his disciples to gulags and mass murder.

Third, Sigmund Freud, the most influential late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century psychiatrist, taught that human beings are most powerfully motivated by deep, unconscious or semi-conscious drives and desires that stem from unremembered (or half-remembered) childhood traumas and other early experiences (ergo, psychological determinism and modern psychoanalysis). These experiences determine the shape of the adult lives of human beings and, according to Freud himself, the fate of entire societies.

From the standpoint of this essay, the most significant common feature shared by Darwinian evolutionary biology, Freudian psychoanalytic theory, and Marxian sociological theory is that all three ideologies conceive human motivation entirely in terms of unconscious (or semi-conscious) drives. In other words, they all view the underlying source of human motivation as a force over which we have little or no control, that is essentially “irrational” and yet utterly compelling, that is impermeable to the influence of Mind or Reason, and against which we are powerless to assert our freedom.

Freedom and Gratitude

We are now living in the eclipsed reality generated by the deterministic dream world of modern philosophy. Given this background, we should not be surprised that culturally and politically dominant majorities now appear to believe that matter is all there is, that physical science is the only sure route to knowledge, that human beings are different from apes only in degree and not in kind, that human nature is malleable, not essential, that morality is circumstantial, and that genuine human freedom is an illusion. We are witnessing the increasing predominance of the second realities of wokeism, transgenderism, critical race theory, pseudo-scientific macroevolutionism, pseudo-scientific climate alarmism and a host of other isms and ideologies, all grounded on the ideological support of the scientisms and historicisms discussed above.

As Aristotle said, we all desire to know. To organize our ongoing quest for knowledge, we observe, experiment, calculate, and theorize. Each of the doctrines in the dream world discussed above contains valuable knowledge and important truths. But each is a half-truth. If, in our ongoing search for truth, we begin to pretend that a half-truth is the whole truth, the quest becomes, in Mark Shiffman’s words, a “theoretical reduction of reality,” a characteristic of all ideologies—and a second reality.

In the penultimate chapter of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, at a gathering of luminaries in Vienna during the run-up to the First World War, a puzzled and exasperated general from the Austrian War Ministry reports an argument between a Marxist and a Freudian about whether a person’s “ideological superstructure” is entirely determined by his “economic foundations” or his “instinctual foundations.” A short time later, the Man Without Qualities completes the general’s observation: “Every time a partial truth has been taken for the sole explanation of things, there has been a heavy price to pay.” It appears that now—more than a century later—we’re paying that price.

In his brilliant introduction to Democracy in America, Tocqueville rightly observed that human freedom is “the source of all moral greatness.” The deterministic intellectual world that has been generated by the confluence of the doctrines critiqued in this essay has eviscerated the self-confident moral freedom and political liberty required to sustain healthy democratic institutions and a flourishing civil society. As freedom is the complement of faith, determinism is the complement of doubt.

Our society is not merely divided; it is also confused and in doubt. “Victimhood” is all the rage, and we rage against God. We are ungrateful for what we have—even for what we are. We take a little knowledge—like that in the doctrines of the dream world—and stretch it into a dangerous thing, committing and recommitting the original sin, trying to become like God. Our age appears to be in full rebellion against God and His Creation. And since we are creatures, even against our own nature. Ingratitude is thus the cardinal sin of our time.  

Saint Augustine taught that gratitude is the complement of Grace, and Romano Guardini has well said that gratitude can exist “only in the realm of freedom.” It is time to reaffirm the First Reality, exercising our Augustinian freedom to exist gratefully in the “in-between” of our existence.

Image by RPL-Studio and licensed via Adobe Stock.