About this Blog

This blog is a philosophical and literary exploration that attempts to bring logical and poetic commentary together with the purpose of exploring the tension that exists in me, a 28 year old Catholic man living in 21st century California.

Exposing my journey as prime example, I hope to reflect the universal tension that exists between modern and classical thinking today, and the inability for these two clashing worldviews to be reconciled despite anyone’s best intentions.

I say that it is impossible to reconcile these two worldviews not because I do not have faith at their ability to co-exist, or even for them to learn from each other, but rather because in order for true integration to happen between them, one worldview must dominate the other. Obviously, modernism rules today, and this is true even within circles who admire the classics and consider themselves to be classicists, but what is to become of the circle who believes that it is only through classical dominance that we can ever live without oppressing ourselves?

First, let me explain what I mean by classical and modern worldviews, for while they are very broad terms, I think given the right parameters they suffice to at least make them a useful frame of reference for what is going on philosophically in the world today. By modern worldview, I mean that way of thinking which puts faith on the “I” or the subject above any end that can possibly exist outside of the subject. When Descartes declared, “I think therefore I am,” this could not be a more clear declaration of modern thinking. Existence justified, not through existence in itself (outside of the individual experience), but rather through the individual experience of the person, which is the only affirmed reality that purely modern minds can agree on as a starting point to all other thinking.

For the modern mind, to look into Reality (or towards telos, essence, substance, being) is not only an impossibility (as Kant affirms of the noumena) but a classic naiveté on the part of the ancients. One can do so only as long as one knows that this is one’s subjective opinion and not a reality by which the entire world can be understood. To start with the object is thus for the moderns a methodological mistake that leads to dogmatic enslavement and the hindering of the progress of society. And the modern mind has much they like to use to prove for this – Modernity took birth in the Renaissance, and it has had a long history of scientific, creative and industrial progress ever since. Innovation is today’s religion – with the creative process becoming our new holy and spiritual moment.

On the other end, classical thought, starting with the ancient Greeks, explored reality with an emphasis on the object. They believed that the philosophical search was meant to be explored through the subject yes, but they also saw that we as individual subjects are capable of looking straight into actual objects to speak to us of the reality and nature of the Universe (the Telos, or end towards which we move). For Thales, the ultimate end (and source of everything else) was water, for Pythagoras it was numbers, for Plato it was the Forms, and for Aristotle the actual substance ended in the unmoved mover.

For Christians like myself, it is Jesus Christ, and through His Incarnation and Passion, early Christians, with neo-Platonic and, later, Aristotelian influences linked the early works of the Greeks with the completed picture of Reality that came to mankind as a result of the philosophical and theological comprehension revealed to us through the appearance of Jesus into the historical reality of our world. Out of this integration, and after much synthetic thought, there came into being the schoolmen, the group of men who laid ground complete metaphysical systems holding the ultimate end in mind – God, or Existence itself.

While classic thought is typified by having a specific end in mind by which to understand Reality, there are still, even within classical circles, disagreements as to the implications of the full nature and reality of this end. In  the realist schools of the Scholastics for example, there are the Thomists, the Victorines, the Scotists, the followers of Abelard (sometimes even referred to as the father of modernism) and many more. This does not mean however that one cannot discern which one of these schools is really searching for God as the true end. That is the beauty of the subject exploring the object. With the right intent, one ultimately finds it.

Philosophically speaking, the right intent consists in loving wisdom, inl ooking to honestly understand reality through an end that does not narrow the search, but much rather expands it. Thus it is not to pretend to know while affirming the end, but to admit that one does not know exactly because of the nature of the end (the nature of God). Thus the way the subject (us humans) defines the object (God), must allow for the object to be qualified to the best of our abilities, which can only be in the way of analogy. Thus, despite heavy philosophical qualifications of fundamental principles that guide our understanding, the object still remains a mystery, due to its infinite and all-encompassing nature.

It should thus be very evident why the modern and the classical approaches are so radically different. The modern mind, which starts with the subject cannot ever escape from the subject itself. If it ever did, it would cease to be modern. This ‘egocentric predicament,’ as pointed out by neoscholastic thinkers of the 20th century, prevents a true communication between the two worldviews. On the other hand, the classical mind can, and does indeed, move from the object into the subject because for the classical mind the subject exists and can be explored independently, yet it also has access to Reality. Therefore its approach, in itself, is broader and more capable of expansion.

The historical reality of man today is that our leading thinkers are stepping deeper into the webs of modernity, and in fact, post-modernity, where the biggest affirmation is that Reality as such does not exist, and the deconstruction of all built-in systems (including language itself) is the way to go, fragmenting us and our fields of knowledge even further.

But this intellectual and academic reality is not the same reality of us men. We are left at the mercy of our leading thinkers, scientists, technologists and politicians. And the everyday man walking on the street today is neither modern nor classic. It is both, and it is both very cruelly.

Most men have goals in mind or beliefs in a worldview or Universe that is deeper than them, and from which they learn from. This makes them more classic than modern, but the subjectivism of the modern era is too potent for them to explicitly make this distinction, leaving them lost and confused without an objective angle (or morality) by which to anchor on. False religions and caricatured mythologies become easy to follow, while hard realities and ascetic paths of revelation become hard or impossible to see.

In the modern extreme, there is a deeper denial of all that is real, and deeper emphasis on technique and the confusion of the machinistic side of man over the substance of man. In the anti-modern extreme there is pure emotion, an emotion so shallow and sentimental that it no longer posits itself of real substance. In the middle, there is the brave men living peacefully in the shadows of the world today, but offering the light that has been with us always.

Thus I find myself longing for this middle path, and in my modern environment I find myself more often influenced and absorbed by the dark and the melancholic of the modern creation, which longs for something which it does not have, rather than that of its extreme angles, which either pretend to have something deeper than they actually do or relish in the superficial landscape that admits that there is nothing deeper and does not care to look for it either.

Starving for substance, I grab onto bits and chunks of it still reflected in our modern era across artists and thinkers looking for truth in the midst of this confusion. Radiohead over Britney Spears. Chuck Palahniuk over Nora Roberts. Stephen Colbert over Bill O’Rielly.

Like a good student of the schoolmen, I seek to learn from the classics. But also like a good student, I seek to absorb what is true and good from this era too. And thus I find myself torn, exploring the tensions that exist between the modern and the classical.