Just finished reading this. S tier book. Incredibly insightful analysis of the nature of the modernist worldview. Highly recommend. It’s a shame Gillespie hasn’t written more about general topics related to modernity or history in general. He is very good at analyzing how ideas and trends affect history and society, as well as the individuals and movements that came up with them and clarifying what their core ideas really were.
>>24931149So what are the theological origins of modernity?Can you give us the skinny of it?
>>24931149He is currently writing a sequel, but even that was as of a year ago. >>24931255Nominalism and humanism and their ideas emerged out of the long scholastic theological debates and laid the groundwork for both the reformation and the likes of Francis Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes who secularized much of these prior theological ideas in launching modernity and the enlightenment. Full account of how modern ideas are just secularized carbon copies of their theological forebears.
>>24931269sounds like dialectics but gay and retarded
would i get anything out of this if i've already read everything by jordan peterson
>>24931269I call this the Luciferian Enlightenment. A turning away from the One to the Many. A tragedy for human kind, but all part of the theodramatic arc.
>>24931317Yes. Especially when you read the works of Bacon, it’s so Promethean that it’s inescapable in concluding otherwise, and he was the giant that Descartes and Hobbes stood upon, and obviously Prometheus is the Greek parallel to the Abrahamic Lucifer. Doesn’t help that Bacon was supposedly a big time Freemason. >the theodramatic arc.Care to elaborate?Also are you OP?
>>24931149Now read dialectic of enlightenment by Adorno.
>>24931317The One is evil.>The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.~Blake.
I have this in my backlog since it was suggested in one of those medieval mindset threads from a couple weeks back. Some autist compiled every one of the dozens of books mentioned in the thread and uploaded them to share. That autist was me.
>>24931383That's rich coming from a literal heretic. Milton did hold some unorthodox views of the trinity, though.
>>24931379QRD?
>>24931386>muh heresythis is why the One is evil btw. It labels anything different from it which can't be subsumed under it as 'evil' or 'heresy' and seeks to eliminate it. That's why God throws Satan out of heaven. if the west actually became nominalist, then the holocaust would have never happened.
>>24931390Man is NOT the measure of all things.
>>24931390This is a bunch of abrahamic mindmush.
>>24931393There is no measure of all things.
>>24931398No, just another spiritualist wandering in to barf up heterodox opinions after missing a dose of their medication.
Oh this junk again.I got halfway through some Catholic's piece on how the church invented leisure time before finding out how full of farts he was.
>>24931376WTF is going on with claims about Bacon and freemasonry?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occult_theories_about_Francis_BaconI smell massive rabbit hole
>>24931416The rabbit is self-conscious about that, and would probably prefer if you'd stop sniffing her.
>>24931376Agreed on Bacon. He was the beginning of the tyranny of the exterior, the precise, the quantifiable, the observable. But that era will soon be ending, finally. A return to Platonism, idealism, and the mystical wisdom of the saints is already under way.
>>24931383I don't see the relevant to the One.
>>24931390>this is why the One is evil btw. It labels anything different from it which can't be subsumed under it as 'evil' or 'heresy' and seeks to eliminate it.Imagine being this tragically clueless.
Some of ya'll need to go back to /x/ and stay there. Weirdos.
>>24931273just like your sex life
>>24931379The problem with their take is assuming man is rational, or ought to be - because otherwise nazis will come out of the woodwork.
>>24931416He was also a massive homosexual
>>24931429
>>24931443I'm not an atheist
>>24931447Can you actually detail what is unacceptable here and needs to be sent to the schizo shit posting board?
>>24931447I know i was just clowning on you
>>24931421Bacon revived Plato's method of counterinduction which is more than any fart huffing neoplatonist churchfag ever managed
>>24931538Bacon denounced Plato as a deluded theologian and Aristotle as the greatest of all sophists in between sessions of sacrificing babies to moloch. Read his immaculate birth of time.
>>24931544Masculine* not immaculate ffs
>>24931421Platonic realism is nonsense. Dogs are the product of selective breeding, the sun and the heavenly bodies subject to entropy, everything conceivable in permanent flux through social factors. Platonism falls apart immediately as linguistic babble.
>>24931774The physical universe being subject to change and entropy doesn’t deboonk the reality or existence of universals/forms/transcendental realms
i don't know man, I think the massive economic and social dislocations that occurred at the turn of the 16th century are pretty obviously the cause of modernity. This is like looking at the city of dresden burning down and saying "hm flammable material caused this." Very one-sided fixation some tradcaths are obsessed with on this board. If anyone here is actually interested in the emergence of modernity, you gotta start with the transition debates (Dobb, Sweezy, Brenner, et al. but also Wallerstein on world-systems, Arrighi on long century accumulation cycles, Anderson on absolutism) if you want at least a working basis for what happened, you need to look at shifts in agrarian relations, emergence of money economies, coalescence of commodity networks in northern italy, dutch mercantialism, the whole atlantic shit that kicked off, not some dudes in the University of Paris who started thinking about the problem of universals wrong. Let's have some perspective here. I'm not denying it didn't have a part or that the destruction of Christendom and the medieval world of the via antiqua, the great Summas, etc. wasn't tragic but that's a second order effect. all those ideologies had precedents before the 13th century and which never kicked off or it got re-interpreted into the dominant platonic philosophical attitudes of pre-modernity because the environment wasn't conducive to its destruction. if that nominalist guy in the aristotle threads is right, then its been around since the 4th century bc; mechanism was implicit in the atomists, there was centuries long tradition of epicureanism that everyone else tried to pretend didn't exist except as an insult for centuries and who let their writings rot to nothingness, etc.
>>24932151basically, someone should explain to me why it is that the two great pre-modern philosophical traditions, One-Many platonism and non-nominalist Form-matter aristotelianism, utterly collapsed in early modernity by intellectual forces that had already challenged it multiple times centuries prior. pretty weird it only happened once these economic earthquakes and disasters started happening. could the economic base determine the superstructure "in the last instance"?
>>24931149If you liked that, you might really like Peter Harrison's Some New World, which is focused on particular changes in the language of epistemology and justification. "Justification" is originally something that happens to a person, and intrinsic, internal change. With Luther, it becomes an extrinsic imputation from the divine will. But then epistemology (first religious, and then as a whole) becomes obsessed with justification. Knowledge goes from the mind's grasp of being to justified true belief. As secularization occurs, "justification" becomes all about method and the community (later the "language community" becomes the ground for what makes anything any thing at all in many philosophies, "usefulness" becomes a metaphysical primitive, and we basically see the voluntarist's God democratized, whereas other philosophies make the individual into God).He covers other stuff too. It's quite good.Or, if you don't mind stuff that is super dense:Funkenstein's Theology and the Scientific Imagination shows step by step, in detail, how theology shaped science and empiricism.C.S. Lewis' The Discarded Image is a really nice overview of the "model" that was lost, particularly how notions of reason got deflated. Pic related.D.C. Schindler's Freedom From Reality shows how modernity inverted notions of freedom to define it in terms of potency instead of actuality, and I actually think this analysis goes the deepest because it shows what was driving the voluntarists (which led them to nominalism) and pretty much everything since.And then John Millbank does this for the social sciences in Social Theory and Theology.However, Harrison is pretty accessible and the others are not (except for Lewis, who is writing primarily about Renaissance and Medieval literature).
>>24932416The next pages are helpful. You can find Lewis' work and this section of Google if you search for a PDF.I also find Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life very relevant here (also on Google) because he shows how the practices and day to day lives of Enlightenment philosophers were also radically different, although he doesn't really get into how this probably radically altered the shape of thought.But just consider the forcible closing of the monasteries and convents and the huge effect that would have.
>>24932151>>24932160I mean what was so unique about mediaeval Europe that the Renaissance, scientific revolution, the enlightenment, capitalism, liberalism and finally industrialism all sequentially developed from primitive feudal states that paled in comparison to Roman organisation? Why didn't Rome ever experience any of this? Where was the humanist thought in Rome? The feminism? The mercantilism? The only deciding difference one could argue was it's faith and that faith's scholarly dimensions. The idea that an all encompassing religious worldview that informs every aspect of a people's life has no effect on economic and political organisation and development is a ridiculous Marxist notion. Weber will be vindicated.
>>24931149I mean yeah, there's a reason why modernism didn't emerge from Islam
The Very Short Introduction on Decadence is actually pretty neat on the cultural side here.Lord have mercy.
>>24932151It's not totally unique. The triumph of voluntarism in Islam centuries earlier plays out in a similar way. Both involve cataclysmic violence as a source of disruption as well. The European Wars of Religion were significantly more deadly than both World Wars combined and intellectuals/monastics and texts were particular targets of destruction.You also have to understand the way in which the Church had made the underlying philosophy come to be identified with it, such that rebellion against the Church took the form of inverting its philosophy.
>>24932432But Islam became modernist
>>24932416How is picrel?
>>24932484It went reactionary
>>24932482This. The rise of Ashʿarism as a reaction to Muʿtazilite rationalism is very similar. Modern Islam is what the West would look like if the Reformation had been victorious instead of winning a stalemate.
>>24932539>what the West would look like if the Reformation had been victorious instead of winning a stalemateLuther wasn't mad about the Renaissance though
Another similar book is 'Radical Platonism in Byzanitum.'Super interesting, especially in how it detailed rationalist-pagan thought. The eastern Christians were privy to these elements but the Latin were not, to the effect that these elements infiltrated the Latin Church and later caused various ills of the west. (Though this is my take, I'm pretty sure the author thinks it a positive thing)Funnily enough the cover is very similar to your book
>>24932603Interesting. Pic related traces the origins of some of the core theological disputes re nature versus supernature and nature versus grace to the lack of the essence/energies distinction in the West. In the East, the deleterious effects of the dialectic of nature versus grace are avoided because the distinction is instead created versus uncreated and sin versus theosis.It's a bit one sided and reads later problems into Augustine and Aquinas, but it's still very interesting in the technical parts.
Ok so it was nominalism. What of it?
>>24932416Op here. I already read that. And I have those other ones on my reading list already.
Thinking in movement's is a child's view of history they pick up from their textbooks. Some people always believed "modernist" atheist stuff and others did not, even going back to like the egyptians
>>24932430Rome was extremely inefficient, placed huge tax burdens on its population to feed its massive armies, constantly depopulated different regions through civil wars, and had 0 labor saving technological innovation other than the water screw over the 1000 year history of its existence. Renaissance Europe was a sort of explosive mix of very dynamic and expansive feudal seigneurialism forced to accommodate powerful commodity networks developing in the urban interstices of feudal europe (Northern Italian/Rhine valley/Dutch coast) and capable of capital accumulation and financialization that remained independent of the massive parasitism typical of other feudal landlordisms or bloated mandarin bureaucratic states like Rome. That’s the whole basis of absolutism, go read Perry Anderson. Plus feudal Europe witnessed huge agricultural efficiencies, opened up the entire continent to the three field system, and exploited various labor saving innovations like the mill that couldn’t have happened under latifundia chain-gang slave labor (relatedly, you could read about the total shithole the southern US was in the 18th and 19th centuries). Thats why Europe exploded in 1500, as soon as the Spanish injected huge amounts of currency into the system from South American mines, the whole thing took off and became the molochian entity it’s become. Whatever philosophical undercurrents existed at that time ended up as useful weapons to wield against any obstacle remaining to constructing those regimes of accumulation we know of today as nation-states, the primary enemy of which was the Church until about 1860. It’s really funny how this history isn’t even talked about by tradcaths except insofar as some Protestants did bad stuff in Europe, like the whole causality behind the emergence of capital in the 1500s is too scary and Marxist I guess so they do these one-sided analyses that sound patently ridiculous. like we have global cartels of corporate power and value chains spreading across six continents that erupts into planetary world wars every few decades because of debates within scholasticism 800 years ago. I promise you reading some Marxist historians won’t hurt you, it might give you some perspective on what’s at stake. Maybe it would even mesh well somehow with Christianity’s eschatological tradition, a demonic process-without-a-subject, or what Althusser calls a decentered totality (I am reminded of the soul of those in Hades in Homer, also think of Marx’s constant references to Moloch, ghosts, blood-sucking vampires, humans turned into mere personifications of inhuman processes, etc), emerging out of material configurations in human society, destroying Christendom and initiating the end times. Or just keep obsessing over culture wars, I can imagine which a tradcath will choose since the frisson of feeling superior about yourself will always take precedent and reading about 16th century agrarian class structure is too boring.
>>24932753Pipe down, you dolt.
>>24932865NTA, Which parts of Marx/Capital do you recommend to focus read? Also don’t let this muddy what Gilispies whole study is, which is intellectual history centered, but which still doesn’t neglect historical circumstances, such as the Islamic revival of Aristotle after the first crusades causing the church to have a complete melty that leads to nominalism, which influenced the reformation and religious wars, or that the Black Death influenced Petrarch and his development of humanism (to the side of Black Death setting the stage economically and agriculturally for Europe to be the origin for that explosion of capital within a few centuries afterwards). All that said ideas have their weight and impact and that is seen with the consequences of the reformation, to the Baconian drive to dominate all of nature, to Muslims flying planes into the financial and military centers of capital 500 years after all this. I don’t think ultra-determinism is appropriate either way.
>>24932753This is by far one of the dumbest posts I have ever seen on here.
>>24932865>since the frisson of feeling superior about yourself will always take precedent
>>24932865>It’s really funny how this history isn’t even talked about by tradcaths except insofar as some Protestants did bad stuff in Europe, like the whole causality behind the emergence of capital in the 1500s is too scary and Marxist I guess so they do these one-sided analyses that sound patently ridiculous. like we have global cartels of corporate power and value chains spreading across six continents that erupts into planetary world wars every few decades because of debates within scholasticism 800 years ago. IWhat a ridiculous strawman. You either haven't read the works in question or are just be disingenuous. The genealogical turn is, for the most part, fairly recent (lots of work since 2000) and it makes ample use of earlier histories, including those focused on changing material history. But it also offers a counter to the ridiculous reductionist histories that have dominated up to this day, whereby "everything is class, race, and sex... because those are our categories of analysis" (which is of course just an update from trying to turn history into economics). That's more the matter of history than the form though.One could hardly ignore changing technologies and economic forces. You went from texts being copied based on the opinions of experts to the defining criterion for philosophical merit becoming "how many pamphlets can they sell?" That alone would be a huge shift even without the mass murder of intellectuals and the destruction of a large part of the existing network of scholarship and formation that occured during the wars of religion.
>>24932936kek, >>24932865 is one of the least self-aware posts I've seen in a while. You'll note that these will never mention specific works (which they haven't read) but will instead appeal to meme labels like "tradcath" (apparently secular Jewish historians, etc. are now traditional Catholics...).
where the fuck do I even start here
>>24932865The industrial output of the Roman Empire exceeded every other society prior to the industrial revolution you moron.
Bump
