Things Fall Apart

...Second, the idea that humans could leverage themselves out of the center of the universe is maddeningly illogical...

...This evil is even more of the metaphysical order than of the moral order...

...The very same crusade lies near to the heart of Lukacs's work...

...With typical bluntness, Lukacs begins by stating that we are standing at the end of an age that began some five hundred years ago...

...There is no such thing as an entirely independent, isolated brute fact...

...To this day, the liberal world-view continues to believe that if only properly enlightened overseers could be entrusted with the bureaucratic-scientific apparatus, the world could be governed almost flawlessly...

...Wilson's dream of a one-page cosmic instruction manual...

...Since we are unable to jump out of our skin, knowledge will always be emphatically anthropocentric...

...In a series of essays on the nature of knowledge, Lukacs applies his unconnable good sense to the weighty question of man's place in the universe...

...Secular philosophers of mind today say we draw upon a "life-world" or "network," which only dresses up Pascal's statement that we believe and understand vastly more than we know...

...For both men, it is very late in the day...

...First, it overlooks the fact that the dream of attaining perfect knowledge is always hindered by the unhappy fact that we human beings, mysterious and quite fallible, are charged with the task...

...Objectivism has taken on wildly different forms in the hard and soft sciences, ranging from the search for "The Key to All Mythologies" to Voltaire's clockwork universe to Harvard biologist E.O...

...Lukacs's outlook is unabashedly "declinist," and brings to mind his close friend Jacques Barzun, whose recent From Dawn to Decadence also bid adieu to our lingering bourgeois era...

...and so on...

...Previous generations would not have been surprised that the effort to exalt human dignity, freedom, and purpose without traditional religious supports has led to self-mutilating moral inversions such as: The only truth is that there is no truth...

...Lukacs and Polanyi join the Jewish and Christian theological traditions in teaching that human activity issues from, and depends on, a religious or "pre-reflective" understanding of the nature of reality...

...Lukacs's argument is in many ways a restatement of the late Oxford philosopher of science Michael Polanyi's seminal book Personal Knowledge (1958...

...The resulting notion holds that the only proper subject of human inquiry lay in an observer-independent reality—the "world out there" considered apart from human consciousness...

...It seems to me that the debate today is being played out on that level...

...Wojtyla could have been speaking for Lukacs when he wrote: [My work is devoted] to the metaphysical sense and mystery of the person...

...Though sometimes entertaining, modern philosophy cannibalizes the values it once sought to foster...

...Despite its bold, even brash, humanistic concerns, objectivism came to view mankind as just another detached, passive, inert product of the universe...

...The lesson is the same: We have explicit knowledge of only a fraction of what we implicitly understand, and often what we know is of little or no use compared to what we only dimly believe, hope for, and grapple towards...

...It, however, remains united by an agreed-upon procedure for finding the truths of man and nature, that is, by observing the canons of scientific inquiry...

...For the story of man's misguided and mangled attempts to displace himself from the center of the universe has been shadowed by the history of man's repeated degradation at his own hands...

...Lukacs writes: "The known and visible and measurable conditions of the universe are not anterior but consequent to our existence and to our consciousness...

...Each says that over two millennia of human reflection have made it possible to discard the question "What is man...

...In a 1968 letter from Cardinal Karol Wojtyla to French Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac, the future pope took aim at the signature contribution of modernity to history—the annihilation of the human person...

...Any attempt to eliminate our human perspective from our picture of the world must lead to absurdity...

...Yet Lukacs has set his sights on something quite different, specifically a "new understanding of consciousness itself" that this upheaval will require...

...He quotes Owen Barfield's claim that we need to rethink "thinking itself" and that knowledge must be "grasped as something substantial to the being of man, as an 'existential encounter.'" At the End of an Age is not a meek book...

...the most authentic art shows beauty's arbitrariness...

...In a literal sense, therefore, the new Copernican system was as anthro-pocentric as the Ptolemaic view, the difference being merely that it preferred to satisfy a different human affection...

...In the anti-human systems of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in their day, as in those of Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Peter Singer in ours, man's ill-fated attempts to erase himself can be seen...

...The universe is such as it is because in the center of it there exist conscious and participant people who can see it, explore it, study it...

...By eliminating man's central and constitutive role in the act of knowing, it reduced man himself to cosmic folderol...

...That the two go together is not at all coincidental: If man is a plastic plaything of marginal cosmic concern, then what reason can there be to love or respect him...

...The problem with this is very basic, and contains two related mistakes...

...In charting the triumph of objectivism, Lukacs highlights Descartes's separation of the observer from observed objects and Newton's belief in a mechanical world of cause and effect...

...Matthew Rose is an editorial assistant at First Things...

...Agree or disagree with Lukacs's remarkable thesis—and there is certainly much to haggle with—the implications of denying it are not academic...

...Both imply the self-evident truth that advances in knowledge are unavoidably the story of human history, human imagination, human creation, and the product of human beliefs, feelings, and wills...

...And yet the question reveals the degree to which modern thought has cultivated a disastrous knack for self-deception...

...Their "man" is a trainable trifle...

...For those among us who have never been invited into Socratic dialogue by, say, a porterhouse, the question is dumb in ways rarely thought possible before...

...freedom is found in totalitarian obedience...

...To bring about this "encounter," Lukacs works to demolish the philosophical folly of modernity, which he calls, perhaps too crudely, "objectivism...

...This astonishing and too-often overlooked work opened with the statement that man's repeated attempt to place himself on the periphery of the cosmos was a self-refuting effort: "As human beings, we must inevitably see the universe from a centre lying within ourselves...

...Man is at the center of the universe, objectivism concluded, only in the way a drain is at the center of a sink: It's where the rubbish gathers...

...At the End of an Age quietly inches towards the realization that with self-knowledge comes a faint awareness of God-knowledge...

...As Lukacs notes, in Greek the word for truth, aletheia, also means "not forgetting," and in English and other Germanic languages "world" comes from wer + weld, meaning "man-age" or "age of man...

...What later came to be called the "Enlightenment project" cemented these ideas together...

...is the headiest of questions...

...This overturned the Western intellectual tradition by setting as a standard for both historical and scientific knowledge the absolute separation of man from what he is studying...

...Thus it is proper that Lukacs closes with a confession of pious unknowingness: "Such an insistence on the centrality, and on the uniqueness, of human beings is a statement not of arrogance but of its very contrary, perhaps even of humility: a recognition of the inevitable limitations of mankind...

...Indeed, Lukacs could have turned his perfect ear for bad notes to the politics of anti-humanism...

...Continuing a set of "meta" questions explored in Historical Consciousness, Confessions of an Original Sinner, and The Passing of the Modern Age, Lukacs here asks about the philosophical underpinnings of science and history...

...The "Bourgeois Age"—with its uncritical beliefs in progress, domestic life, the nation-state, and the individual—is at the brink of exhaustion...

...In this inside-out world, "Are human beings different from meat...

...Polanyi could have mentioned the Darwinian perspective as well: They're anthropocentric all the way down...

...But their attempts will fail, as every word that falls from their lips disproves them...

...Etymology shows us how self-contradictory this idea is from the start...

...Lukacs wisely fastens upon the most disastrous and self-refuting mistake of objectivism...

...In his latest book, At the End of an Age, John Lukacs looks to find the reasons for this confusion...

...Any fact is inseparable from our association of it with another fact and our statement of it...

...Less cunning, but still important, is the degree to which leftist politics generally is still infected by this ideology...

...Lukacs is a Catholic, and knows that in his church he will find his deepest support...

...To this disintegration planned at times by atheistic ideologies we must oppose, rather than sterile polemics, a kind of "recapitulation" of the inviolable mystery of the person...

...The evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation, indeed in a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person...

...For them, the question is meaningless and unanswerable because there is no such thing as man in any enduring sense...

...This ideology asserts that reality itself is defined by external, material facts that can be empirically discerned and logically ordered only by an impassive observer...