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The Intellectual Origins of Modernity

The Intellectual Origins of Modernity explores the long and winding road of
modernity from Rousseau to Foucault and its roots, which are not to be found
in a desire for enlightenment or in the idea of progress but in the Promethean
passion of Western humankind. Modernity is the Promethean passion, the
passion of humans to be their own master, to use their insight to make a
world different from the one that they found, and to liberate themselves from
their immemorial chains. This passion created the political ideologies of the
nineteenth century and made its imprint on the totalitarian regimes that arose
in their wake in the twentieth.
Underlying the Promethean passion was modernity—humankind’s project of
self-creation—and enlightenment, the existence of a constant tension between
the actual and the desirable, between reality and the ideal. Beneath the weariness,
the exhaustion, and the skepticism of post-modernist criticism is a refusal to
take Promethean horizons into account. This book attests the importance of
reason, which remains a powerful critical weapon of humankind against the
idols that have come out of modernity: totalitarianism, fundamentalism, the
golem of technology, genetic engineering, and a boundless will to power.
Without it, the new Prometheus is liable to return the fire to the gods.

David Ohana is Professor of Modern European History at the Ben-Gurion

University of the Negev, Israel. He has been affiliated with the Hebrew
University, Jerusalem, Israel, the Paris-Sorbonne, Harvard University, and
the University of California at Berkeley. He specializes in comparative national
mythologies.
Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought

Experiencing Multiple Realities

Alfred Schutz’s Sociology of the Finite Provinces of Meaning
Marius I. Benţa

Human Flourishing, Liberal Theory and the Arts

Menachem Mautner

Rethinking Liberalism for the 21st Century

The Skeptical Radicalism of Judith Shklar
Giunia Gatta

Norbert Elias and the Analysis of History and Sport

Systematizing Figurational Sociology
Joannes Van Gestel

Progressive Violence
Theorizing the War on Terror
Michael Blain and Angeline Kearns-Blain

Democracy, Dialogue, Memory

Expression and Affect Beyond Consensus
Edited by Idit Alphandary and Leszek Koczanowicz

Common Sense as a Paradigm of Thought

An Analysis of Social Interaction
Tim Delaney

The Intellectual Origins of Modernity

David Ohana

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/series/RSSPT

The Intellectual Origins
of Modernity

David Ohana
First published 2019
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Taylor & Francis
The right of David Ohana to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ohana, David, author.
Title: The intellectual origins of modernity / David Ohana.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge
studies in social and political thought ; 138 | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018052284 (print) | LCCN 2019001577 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781351110518 (Master) | ISBN 9781351110501 (Adobe) |
ISBN 9781351110495 (ePub) | ISBN 9781351110488 (Mobi) |
ISBN 9780815363125 (hbk) | ISBN 9781351110518 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Civilization, Modern—Philosophy. | Political
science—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC CB358 (ebook) | LCC CB358 .O43 2019 (print) |
DDC 909.8—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052284
ISBN: 978-0-8153-6312-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-11051-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

Prologue 1

1 From Rousseau to Tocqueville: Janus Face of Modernity 29

2 1848: “We Are Sitting on a Volcano” 80

3 From Marx to Lenin: A Red Future 111

4 Anarchism, Nihilism, Racism 168

5 Foucault and Beyond 204

Epilogue 218

Bibliography222
Index234
Prologue

The Promethean Passion of Modernity

The Intellectual Origins of Modernity suggests that modernity and Enlight-
enment, far from being synonymous, are separate, different, and sometimes
even contradictory concepts. Modernity is humankind’s consciousness in the
last two to three centuries, of being able to form themselves with their own
hands. Some have sought do this in a context of freedom, and some in a con-
text of repression. The Enlightenment, on the other hand, which typified major
thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, promoted the idea of the
universality of mankind, the principle of the liberty and equality of all, and
the theory of progress whereby morality and the spirit of rational criticism
were spread through education and the dissemination of knowledge. Moder-
nity is a period marked by the Promethean desire to master the world, whereas
the Enlightenment was a normative outlook on the world. Modernity could be
enlightened, but it could also rebel against the values of the Enlightenment.
Modernity and Enlightenment have had a continuous history of friction
between them. The paths of modernity were tortuous, and its roots are not
to be found in a desire for enlightenment or progress but in the Promethean
longing of Western humankind to be their own masters, to impose their own
rationality, and consequently to mold the world in a form different from that
in which they received it. In order to carry out the project of modernity, its
representatives made use of the Enlightenment—rationality, universality, pro-
gress, and science—but solely for the purposes of the Promethean passion.
This passion motivated the political ideologies of the nineteenth century and
engendered the forms of the regimes that followed in the twentieth. These ide-
ologies and regimes were modern in that they sought to create a political and
social reality in the image of humanity. The Promethean passion of modern
humankind, which developed from a desire for independence to a desire for
unbridled power, is the hallmark of our time.
It is some small consolation that the twentieth century—the century of
mass extermination—was a short one. The century, which began late, in 1914,
ended early, in 1989. It began with a total mechanized war, the first of its kind,
which obliterated the difference between soldiers and citizens, a war without
2 Prologue
content—a “Nietzschean republic”, as one of its participants called it—and it
ended with the collapse of the last surviving totalitarian ideology of those that
sprang up between the two world wars. What were the intellectual roots of the
totalitarian nihilism, which reached its climax in the twentieth century?
The Intellectual Origins of Modernity investigates the question: what hap-
pened to modern human, the Prometheus who created his own world, when he
became his own ruler? What happened to Prometheus unbound? Is not modern
humankind, freed from all restraint, liable to create a new Golem? Does not
the inner logic of unlimited rationality and unbridled freedom finally engender
enslavement to oneself, a human-monster like Frankenstein? The myth of Pro-
metheus is like a thread running through Western culture, a central axis along
which one may perceive the changes that take place in mankind.
The human experience in the twentieth century was bound up with the meta-
morphoses of modernity from a desire for liberty to a will to power, from
Promethean humanism to Prometheus released from his chains. We are faced
with the Promethean paradox: from the classical world to modern times, Pro-
metheus was a symbol of humanism. How did he become a Caesar in the
twentieth century? An explanation of the matter requires a distinction between
modernity and enlightenment, two concepts that have been confused to the
point of becoming identical. How was it that modernity rose against Enlight-
enment in the twentieth century? In the light of this, it would seem that Pro-
metheus’s fate was a degeneration. He abandoned his humanity for hubris and
herein resembled other myths in Western thought: the Golem, Faust, the sor-
cerer’s apprentice, and Frankenstein. Examples of Prometheus unbound are
science that changed in the modern age from a contemplation of nature to
a will to power, technology that became an instrumental rationality without
rational content, and the attempt to create a new human through totalitarian
ideologies or genetic engineering.
This dual aspect of modernity lies at the heart of the Promethean passion.
Our power has increased in the modern age, but the results of our actions come
toward us like a hostile and alien force, an independent force not subject to our
influence. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Alexis de Tocqueville, two French polit-
ical thinkers, were the first to criticize the supposed identity of modernity and
enlightenment.1 Hence Rousseau’s proposal to condition modern education in
his book Émile; hence the possibility envisaged by De Tocqueville in his works
on modern democracy in France and America that democratic despotism could
be a consequence of radical liberty. Rousseau and De Tocqueville perceived
the ambivalence of progress, the contradictory tendencies of modernity, and
the paradox of freedom in modern times. The failed revolutions of 1848
were the starting point of an attempt to translate social aspirations into politi-
cal terms. The fears of the liberal conservative De Tocqueville of a Promethean
socialism that would give birth to a new man were at the same time the hopes
of revolutionaries like Karl Marx and Auguste Blanqui. The year 1848 was a
parting of the ways in which the prophecies concerning revolutionary social-
ism saw it as a new servitude or the hope of society. From the mid-1800s to the
 Prologue 3
turn of the century, the optimistic revolutionary mentality changed to a sense
of decadence, a feeling that the modern world was heading toward destruction.
In The Intellectual Origins of Modernity, the universal and particular aspects
of one modern ideology, Marxism, are studied in the revolutionary approach of
Marx and in Vladimir Lenin’s view of nationalism. Marx examined the history
of political revolution from the 1789 revolution onward during a hundred years
of French history. According to Marx, this political revolution, a revolution of
the bourgeoisie, was supposed to pave the way for a class revolution, the revo-
lution of the proletariat. The Revolution of 1789, the Revolution of 1848, the
Louis Napoleon regime, and the Paris Commune of 1871 were examined by
him in the light of future revolutions that could only take place in modern soci-
oeconomic conditions. Marx said that the modern economy “rivets the laborer
to capital more firmly that the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock”.2
But the modern worker created a history of liberty over and above the envis-
aged outcome. The seventy years of Bolshevik history—a distorted mutation
of Marxist ideology—showed that, in the Soviet Union, Prometheus rebelled
against Caesar. Lenin, Marx’s Russian disciple, wished to carry out a universal
class revolution in a single country at the height of the First World War. Rapid
modernization, which required the subordination of means to ends and adapt-
ing the social situation to the ideology, enslaved a whole nation to a party for
seventy years. But parallel with the organized collective revolutionary path of
the party and nation, there sprang up on the revolutionary left an individual
revolutionism that sought to hasten redemption through explosives. From the
anarchistic propaganda-through-action at the beginning of the nineteenth cen-
tury to the nihilistic conclusion that the world cannot be repaired but only
destroyed, the way was not a long one. Was the logic that led from Bakunin to
Nechayev the same mode of thought that led from Sartre to Fanon and also to
Beider–Meinhoff? And apart from those who despaired of achieving utopia in
the modern world, there were thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse,
and Hannah Arendt, who condemned the metamorphoses of the Promethean
utopia in the twentieth century as distortion, repression, and banality.

Metamorphoses of the Myth of Prometheus

According to David Hume, the task of the historian of ideas is to trace the
history of the human consciousness. Voltaire added that it is more important
to know how people thought in times gone by than to know how they acted.
The myth of Prometheus is an inseparable part of modern thought. The criti-
cal modern reader takes a distance from the naive beliefs that gave birth to
myth so that only its symbolic meaning remains. In modern times, mythical
texts are not regarded as sacred or objective but are viewed as contributing
to humanity’s self-knowledge. The hermeneutist Paul Ricœur said that there
is no need to disprove myths, to reject myth as such because of its primitive
character—in fact, de-mythicize it—but one must decipher the symbolism it
contains. Hermeneutics, which is a midrashic and innovative deciphering of
4 Prologue
texts, permits modern humankind to recapture the message of a myth through
its interpretation.3 In this, Ricœur is close to Claude Lévi-Strauss, who claimed
that myths—logical and linguistic structures—think themselves through us.
Instead of the religious message of a myth—in theological terms, its
kerygma—the deconstruction of a myth into its component parts reveals a kind
of human consciousness. The structural analysis of a myth, like that of Pro-
metheus and its representation in various cultures, illuminates the unity of the
human race and the intellectual closeness of different peoples in the face of
similar problems of existence.4 When a text is detached from its author and his
cultural context, it becomes a challenge for an up-to-date reading and a novel
interpretation. The great task of hermeneutic interpretation in the historical
context is to bridge the gap between the cultural reality of the past, in which
the mythical text is anchored, and the modern reader living in the present.
From being a symbol of Greek man who constructed his future in the king-
dom of secularism, cut off from transcendental horizons, Prometheus became
the image of a Caesar who sought to replace God. Renaissance humanism,
Romanticism, and the Enlightenment gave revolutionary meanings to Pro-
metheus, who became the symbol of man who puts himself in God’s place and
even boasts of creating a man in his image.
There is a series of myths in Western culture—Prometheus, the Golem,
Faust and Frankenstein—that express the ambivalence of human knowledge,
of boundless desire, with its attractive and threatening possibilities, whose cul-
mination is the creation of a new human. For many thinkers of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, Prometheus was the supreme symbol of the liberation
of humankind, the equality of all, the crossing of human boundaries and the
discovery of new horizons. As the representative of the human race who stole
fire from the gods and spread the light of knowledge and reason among human-
kind, he was the standard-bearer of universal human values. This was the man
who rose against the gods, took their place, and himself attempted to embody
divinity. His revolt against the father of the gods was a protest against a situa-
tion in which there were absolute values beyond man. The myth of Prometheus
was first introduced by the poet Hesiod at the turn of the eighth and seventh
centuries BCE in the “Thenogia” and in “Acts and Days” and by the dramatist
Aeschylus in “Prometheus Bound”, the only surviving tragedy from the fourth
century BCE.5 The tale of Prometheus is the story of the birth of humankind
and its attempt to sever its umbilical cord from its metaphysical parent: a story
of rebellion, sin, and punishment, and also a story concerning the limitations
of humans and their attempts to transcend them.6
In the Greek mythological universe, Uranus is considered the first ruler.
A war of succession took place between King Cronos and the titans on the one
hand and his son Zeus (Jupiter), together with various monsters, on the other.
At first, Prometheus fought against Zeus and advised the titans, who repre-
sented anarchic tendencies, to be careful and sparing in the use of force. The
titans refused to listen, and Prometheus decided to transfer his allegiance to
Zeus. Finally, with the help of the Olympian gods, Zeus, the father of the gods,
 Prologue 5
overcame the titans. In return for his help to Zeus, the gods gave Prometheus
the task of creating man. Prometheus’s intellectual qualities (his name meant
“forethought”) made him wiser than the gods. His brother Epimetheus (mean-
ing “afterthought”) changed his mind all the time and behaved the same way
with people. At the end of the apportioning of gifts to the different creatures,
Epimetheus did not leave anything for humans, and he was full of remorse
and called for his brother. Prometheus responded to the challenge by creating
a human who was greater than an animal. In those days, the cultural level of
humans was close to that of animals. Hoping to create a higher culture, Zeus
wished to eradicate inferior beings and produce a higher human strain. In his
compassion for the human race, Prometheus created an erect man in the image
of the gods. He subsequently rose to the heavens, lit a torch, and brought it
down to earth. Prometheus instructed humanity in arts and crafts and taught
men not to fear death by blurring their consciousness, but Zeus repaid him for
his sin in stealing the light by binding him to a rock.7
Plato, in his “Protagoras” dialogue, supports the tradition that ascribes the
creation of man to Prometheus:

There was once a time when there were gods, but no mortal creatures.
And when to these also came their destined time to be created, the gods
moulded their forms within the earth, of a mixture made of earth and fire
and all substances that are compounded with fire and earth. When they
were about to bring these creatures to light, they charged Prometheus and
Epimetheus to deal to each the equipment of his proper faculty.8

Another mythological source of the origin of humankind is the legend of the

five ages in which the gods themselves created the human race. The creation
of humanity was performed in laboratory conditions through types of metals,
from precious to inferior ones. In the first age, humans were made from gold.
They were ordinary mortals but devoid of pain like the gods. In the silver age,
men were wolves to one another and lacking in wisdom. The third race, formed
from brass, loved war; the fourth race was made up of heroes resembling the
gods. The fifth race, made of iron, was wicked from youth onward. Hesiod
thought that human culture went from bad to worse, but Aeschylus believed
that humanity progressed from a barbarous to a civilized state.
Whatever the case, in the golden age there were no women in the world.
Women were created later on the orders of Zeus as a punishment for Pro-
metheus, who benefited mankind and deceived the gods when offering sacri-
fices intended for gods and men. Instead of the good sacrificial meat intended
for the gods, Prometheus deceitfully gave them bad meat. When choosing
between two piles, a pile of meat covered with intestines and a pile of bones
covered with fat, Zeus chose the pile covered with fat that Prometheus had
provided. In revenge, Zeus created Pandora, who was outwardly beautiful
but was really a curse for the human race. After punishing mankind, Zeus
revenged himself against Prometheus, the chief of sinners. His servants, force
6 Prologue
and violence, dragged Prometheus to the Caucasus, bound him with chains to
a rock, and an eagle was sent to eat his liver. This was the treatment meted out
to the man who loved the human race and honored mankind.9
Despite the tortures, Prometheus’s spirit was strengthened, and he refused to
yield to the savage creatures. From Greece to modern times, Prometheus has
personified the human rebellion against tyranny; he is the symbol of the crea-
tive human spirit, the representative of critical thought.10 It is not known how
or when Prometheus was liberated, whether it was because Hercules killed the
eagle or because the centaur Chiron, who was immortal, chose to die in his
place. The tragedy “Prometheus Unbound”, which is lost, was written after
“Prometheus Bound” and “Prometheus the Fire-Bearer”. In this play, Pro-
metheus, for a long period, was spared imprisonment in Tartarus, but he was
bound to the rock in the Caucasus. Zeus delayed Prometheus’s liberation until
the latter granted his request and revealed to him the name of the mother who
would give birth to the son of the father of the gods who wished to depose his
father and take his place. The end of the lost tragedy was paradoxical: the liber-
ated Prometheus saw Zeus as the protector of humanity.
From Fichte and Schelling to Marx and Camus, Prometheus’s seizure of the
light represented man rebelling against arbitrary forces beyond himself. He
was the symbol of the German philosophy of idealism.11 Fichte, for example,
wrote:

You need nothing outside of yourself; not even a God; you yourself are
your own God; you are your Messiah and savior [. . .] A worthy image of
this way of thinking is the presentation which an ancient poet makes of
Prometheus.12

The revival of classical culture in the early nineteenth century was a meet-
ing point of Enlightenment and Romanticism. Schelling contributed to seeing
Greek mythology in a modern and universal way:

Prometheus [is] will unconquerable [. . .], which for that reason can resist
God [. . .] Prometheus is the thought in which the human race, after it has
brought forth the world of gods out of its inner being, returning to itself,
becomes conscious of itself and its fate.13

August Wilhelm Schelling enunciated a Promethean imperative: “Even if eve-

rything appears to conspire against you, [your] inner power shall nevertheless
prove itself triumphant”.14 Karl Marx, of course, read Fichte and Schelling,
and also Schlegel, who was his teacher in two courses in the University of
Bonn. His doctrinal thesis was dedicated to Karl Friedrich Koppen, who in
turn dedicated to Marx his work on Frederick the Great and the Enlightenment.
This is how Koppen quoted Frederick the Great: “[The Enlightenment] was
Prometheus who brought the heavenly light to earth in order to enlighten the
blind, the people”.15
 Prologue 7
In his personality and literary output, the exemplary figure of Goethe
embodied the Promethean Enlightenment. In his great poem “Prometheus”,
the gods are rejected for considering themselves superior to Prometheus. The
self-esteem of modern humankind, released from the chains of the gods, gives
Goethe the strength to challenge them. Prometheus finds within himself the
spiritual means to overcome the pains of life without the aid of metaphysics.
This independence does not constitute absolute liberty or a clear victory over
suffering but is a sign of self-awareness.16 The cosmos surrounding humanity
is created in their image: it is the universe that humans have made. Prometheus
does not consecrate the world to the gods but creates it for himself alone. The
classics scholar Càroli Kerényi thought that “Goethe’s Prometheus is [. . .] the
impartial prototype of man as the original rebel and affirmer of his fate. The
original inhabitant of the earth, seen as an anti-god, as Lord of the Earth”.17 He
was endowed with three qualities: creativity, independence, and courage.
Did Goethe’s Faust personify the rebellious Prometheus who now made a
pact with the devil? With Goethe, Faust gained a new, modern meaning: he rep-
resented the development of the human race. The quest for new horizons ended
in tragedy, in expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The first work on Faust, the
Historia von Doktor Johann Fausten (Story of Doctor Johann Faust), pub-
lished by Johann Spies in 1587, already condemned a desire for knowledge
outside the confines of the Church. An antireligious tendency began to be in
evidence about twelve years later, in G. R. Widmann’s reediting of Spies’s
work on Faust. The renown of the magician and sorcerer who gained super-
natural powers through a pact with the devil traveled westward from Germany.
Lessing, who in the eighteenth century first raised the possibility of saving
Faust’s soul, saw his thirst for knowledge as a leading principle of the Enlight-
enment. Nickolaus Lenau, in his poem “Faust” (1836), and Paul Valéry, in Mon
Faust (My Faust) (1946), pointed out the dangers of a correlation between a
thirst for absolute knowledge and a desire for the power to attain it.18 Thomas
Mann, in his novel Doktor Faustus, which described the corruption of the
chief character and of German society through a pact that they made with the
National-Socialist devil, drew a historical conclusion.
An innovation of Goethe’s was the idea that the outstanding feature of
Faustian man is action and that persistence has a value in itself, regardless of
its aims. This idea is closely connected with that of the continuous and ever-
changing interrelationship of modernity and enlightenment and of humankind
as a self-created entity that indefatigably seeks the truth. Goethe was doubt-
ful of the basic assumption of the premodern religious philosophers that the
nature of a human being is a static “being”, that a person’s transient exist-
ence is like a husk in a world of arbitrary changes, and the true “essence” will
only be revealed in eternity. In contrast to this view, Goethe saw action as
the true nature of humanity, revealed in movement, development, and growth.
Humanity is not homeless in the world but a product of time and the universe.
The Promethean desire to possess the tree of knowledge of good and evil is
expressed in Goethe’s words: humans know themselves only to the degree that
8 Prologue
they know the world.19 Is there not in Goethe’s Prometheus a suggestion of
the structural connection between Faust and Mephistopheles, between modern
humans and the Satan that lies in wait for them?
Many commentators have noticed the points of similarity between Pro-
metheus and Satan, and the poet Shelley went further and revealed the
strong resemblance between them. Zvi Werblowsky, in his book Lucifer and
Prometheus, analyzed the deep archetypical and mythical points of identity
between these two literary figures.20 After reading Milton’s Paradise Lost, he
concluded that in every human action there is a certain hubris, Promethean or
satanic: Lucifer, the lord of hubris, is deeply entrenched in Prometheus’s desire
to be liberated from his chains. The Promethean myth is ambivalent: fire illumi-
nates but it also burns, destroys and entices like Lucifer himself. In this respect,
the Promethean myth could refer either to Jesus or to the Devil: every human
action contains an element of sin, and in Christianity there is no escape except
through the intervention of divine grace. This suggests a closeness between
the suffering and desire of Prometheus and those of Jesus and Lucifer. In all
desire for knowledge, there is inevitably an element of pride, sin, and human
suffering. Goethe was fond of the romantic poet, Byron, who wrote as follows:

And be the new Prometheus of new men, Bestowing fire from Heaven,
and then, too late, Finding the pleasure given repaid with pain.21

Romanticism praised the “new man” who was born in an aesthetic context.
Friedrich Schiller, who continued this line of thought, gave a good account of
the special quality of Prometheus: “A pure consciousness can only give and
not receive”. This is the universal power of giving, like the power of God.
This power is the essence of God within us, God within mankind. In satisfying
hunger, in giving to the weak, Schiller’s Promethean self finds God in human-
ity and arrives at a reflective consciousness of man as a creator of values, as a
giver, as the embodiment of the power: “Love places [its center] out of itself in
the axis of the universal whole”.22
Mankind’s Promethean consciousness, which extends over time, is at the
heart of the Hegelian philosophy of history. Man advances from the world
of the ancient East to the modern world. Reason is the measure of history:
the rational is progressively realized in history. In the introduction to his
Philosophy of Law (1821), Hegel enunciated his dual principle: “Whatever
is rational is real, and whatever is real is rational”. In this double sentence,
Hegel describes the relationship between the actual and the desirable. Hegel’s
1819 manuscript (discovered over ten years ago) supports the view that it is no
accident that rational radicalism comes first in the double sentence while the
conservative justification of the existing order only appears at the end. And this
is how it is expressed: “Was vernünftdig ist, wird wirklich, und das wirkliche
wird vernünftig” (Whatever is rational becomes real, and the real becomes
rational).23 Rationality is not identified with reality, and the intention is a pro-
cess whereby the rational becomes real.
 Prologue 9
Historical reality is a process in which the Promethean passion, from being
a principle, becomes a realization. It is people who make history and not forces
outside them. Historical insight became a metaphysical system: after Kant,
Hegel sought to create an all-embracing system in which truth was only pos-
sible within the framework of a complete and comprehensive view of things.
But the Golem (politics) rose against its maker (historiography): in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries, Hegel’s disciples split into the political left and
right. The idea of having a total comprehension of historical reality, and hence
a desire to construct the future on a totalitarian political model, is facilitated
by a neglect of details and a sanctification of ends. From the point of view of
the lord of history who, like the owl of Minerva, looks at changing events only
at the onset of darkness—at the end of the historical process—the details, the
means or the values are of little importance.
For the young Marx, philosophy was above all Hegelian philosophy, a way
of seeing, a desire to know the completion that would achieve human totality.
In a famous letter to his father on the 10th of November 1837, he acknowl-
edged his Hegelianism:

Philosophy makes no secret of it. The confession of Prometheus: “I hate

the packs of god” [phrase originally in Greek] is its own confession, its
own aphorism against all heavenly and earthly gods who do not acknowl-
edge human self-consciousness as the highest divinity. It will have none
other beside.24

The myth of the fall, the suffering, and the self-redemption of Prometheus
created a dramatic model for Marxism as a modern ideology of redemption.25
When reality is represented as a story of redemption, history undergoes a
dramatization. The classicist Kerényi already showed that the Greeks did not
appreciate the redeeming figure of Jesus as much as they appreciated the need
for redemption: hence the pretension of modern humans to embody divinity
themselves. Modern humankind takes its place in the arena of sanctity: a new
surveillance by a supreme eminence that cannot tolerate any authority other
than its own.
The Nietzschean Prometheus is a parting of the ways. Nietzsche did not
have a progressive philosophy of history and consequently rejected the ideol-
ogy of redemption. His criticism of rational progress on the one hand and of
the regressive religious view on the other left Nietzsche with a cyclical imma-
nent view of history.26 Nietzsche rejected both the metaphysics of the religious
church and of the secular church of the Enlightenment. In Nietzsche’s Pro-
methean myth, humans deal with the fire voluntarily and do not receive it from
heaven. They raise themselves progressively and acquire their culture them-
selves. The rise of the individual is bound up with the decline of the gods and
represents a rebellious faith in a capacity to create people and to destroy the
Olympian deities. The tragic foundation of the Promethean myth is the fact that
humans acquire the good for themselves by means of sin. Punishment is meted
10 Prologue
out to the human race because of its aspiration to rise too high: the Greek origi-
nal sin is the first philosophical problem and reveals an insoluble contradiction
between humanity and its aspiration to divinity. This contradiction, according
to Nietzsche, is at the root of all culture. The Promethean dilemma of the sin-
ning and suffering individual is his heroic aspiration to totality and his desire
to be the one eternal being. Nietzsche warned of the liberated Prometheus who
was liable to turn rebellion into despotism and culture into a new barbarism:

I point to something new: certainly for such a democratic type there exists
the danger of the barbarian, but one has looked for it only in the depths.
There exists also another type of barbarian, who comes from the heights:
a species of conquering and ruling natures in search of material to mold.
Prometheus was this kind of barbarian.27

Through a genealogy of ideas, Nietzsche concluded that modern humankind

is the creator of light. The God of light, fire, and humanity does not really exist
but is a metaphor. Nietzsche’s radical interpretation was that through world-
creating aesthetics, humans controlled their god from the beginning, and there-
fore they can easily kill him:

Did Prometheus have to fancy first that he had stolen the light and then
pay for that—he finally discovered that he had created the light by covet-
ing the light and that not only man but also the god was the work of his
own hands and had been mere clay in his hands?28

God has been killed, but the Übermensch has not yet been born. Modern
humanity is faced with the consciousness of nihilism. They are homeless, and
the question is where can they turn now? Nihilistic criticism paved the way to
the will to power, the desire for independence. This is the modern situation:
a world created in one’s own image without reference to God. The Nietzs-
chean revolution is the reflective self-awareness of the modern human who
constructs the world out of personal creativity. The axis of the revolution is not
reason but aesthetics; not Judeo-Christian morality but the principle of the will
to power; not knowledge but creation; not essence but existence. The death of
God is the announcement of the possibility of the birth of modern humankind.

What Is There Between Modernity and Enlightenment?

Modernity is humanity’s desire in modern times to mold itself and its fate with
its own hands. The idea of modernity could be described as the triumph of criti-
cal reason over the hallowed principles of the old world, whose foundations
were religious salvation, metaphysical redemption, and the Lord of history.29
The new principle of modern society was that everything may be judged and
criticized: the social order, the political system, economic activities. Modernity
is made up of all the products of rational activity: scientific, technological or
 Prologue 11
administrative. If the hallowed old order was based on a total concept, the
modern order was divided into separate critical categories that consequently
were essentially secular. The social differentiation of politics, economics, and
family affairs led at the same time to different critical categories. Religion was
no longer the sole principle according to which life was organized and the
motive force behind everything. In its place, one had divisive and subversive
reason.
Modernity is identified above all with the process of secularization. Criti-
cism of secularism, which is the very heart of modernity, is based on three
main arguments. One denies the possibility of a modernity founded on secular
norms and values and claims that these inevitably lead to revolution, violence
and nihilism. According to this view, the separation of modern culture from
its religious source must necessarily lead to self-destruction. The second argu-
ment denies the concept of historical development and doubts the possibil-
ity of exchanging theology for historicism or replacing religious redemption
with secular progress. The third argument is that there can be a messianic or
transcendental significance to history only on a religious basis, and one conse-
quently cannot hope to create a secular future as envisaged by the great secular
mass ideologies.30 This represents a protest against the very idea of secular
modernity, secular historicism, and the secular ideologies filling the gap left by
the decline of religion.
Max Weber described modernity as a process of intellectualization, meaning
that modernity is a break with the finality of the religious spirit.31 The religious
vision hopes for a final accomplishment of God’s plan and thus expects an end
of history. Historicism, on the other hand, finds meaning in historical events
but not beyond them. Modernity is the contrary of the idea of an end to his-
tory and can be described as an end of prehistory. Prehistory is the totality of
the events and personalities of traditional society, the feudal system, the royal
dynasty, aristocratic privileges, of traditions, beliefs and prejudices. In the sev-
enteenth and eighteenth centuries, the modern consciousness, utilizing reason,
differentiation, and criticism, believed it was promoting universal objectives.
The Enlightenment was characterized by three elements: reason, nature, and
progress. The main contribution of the Enlightenment to human thought was
the universalization of reason. Reason related to all human beings in the same
way. Allan Bloom wrote that what distinguished the Enlightenment from all
previous philosophies was its intention of extending to everyone what had pre-
viously been the property of a few: a life based on reason. This was not ideal-
ism or optimism but a new science, a new type of political science.32
The intellectual origins of political science are already to be found in the
classical world, in the Platonic enterprise of creating the conceptual model
of a perfect state, and in the world of the Renaissance, in Macchiavelli’s pro-
ject of separating politics from religious or moral criteria. The revolutionary
innovation of modernity was the creation of a rational model of politics for
all of humankind. A scientific theory of this kind lay behind the attempts of
Hobbes (1651) and Rousseau (1762) to propose a rational conditioning of
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