Navigating the Apocalypse Axial Consciousness in a Post Modern Era

 

In an unexpected turn of events, humanity is compelled to confront the "outside" as an "inside," resembling a resurgence of the mythopoeic age, challenging the Promethean aspirations of Modernity—fulfilled despite our best and worst intentions. Modernity was envisioned as a rejection of the mythopoeic mindset, where the boundaries between inner and outer worlds were blurred, and the cosmos formed a complex interwoven tapestry. Scholars dismiss this as poetic fancy or differing worldviews, contrasting it with modern rationality. Yet, what was once dismissed as fantastical dreaming is becoming our actual destiny, albeit in uniquely modern ways.

 

Ironically, we find ourselves questioning, echoing Bruno Latour, whether we were ever truly modern. The founding myth of modernity lies within modernity itself, revealing a profound paradox embedded in the formative moments of the Axial Age mind.

 

The philosophical spirit that animated ancient Greek philosophy, evolving into the "waterless canals" of medieval scholasticism, sought infinite knowledge. Kant challenged this burgeoning hubris, but Hegel's revival of the dream of infinite knowledge brought a strange historical twist. Kant, paradoxically, outlined what this knowledge should be but showed why it couldn't be achieved, simultaneously opening it up as a determinate possibility. Heidegger's insightful discussion elaborates on divine knowledge as intuition, where the difference between infinite and finite intuition lies in creating the object of intuition from the ground up. To originate a thing from scratch implies infinite knowledge, a complete understanding without intermediaries, as the creator and the created form an originative unity. The very notion of "thought" as finite arises only when the creative origin of the thing has no existential connection to the thinker, emphasizing a Cartesian dichotomy.

Hegel envisioned history as the very essence of the human spirit's creativity, a process of remaking the existing world in our image. This transformative journey, a self-positing essence, aimed at achieving infinite or absolute knowledge, reflects the Hegelian perspective. Could it be that Hegel's historical narrative not only speculatively describes but literally unfolds in today's processes? Kant, by revealing the profound contradiction within Modernity's epistemology, exposed the tension between disciplined cognition and the infinite expanses unveiled by experimental evidence. Now, in the final act of Modernity, humankind emerges as an originative force, challenging the boundaries of finite understanding through knowledge of the laws of Nature.

 

Our impact extends beyond geological forces, permeating every scientific domain that has reached a certain originative maturity. In biology, we wield influence as an evolutionary force, shaping the trajectory of life itself. Theoretical physics unveils Promethean potentials, constrained only by our current limitations in harnessing necessary energies for cosmic-scale feats.

 

Examining Descartes, an early modern philosopher, reveals a paradoxical "post-modern" aspect. Descartes takes axial reflexivity to its logical end, subjecting everything to the scrutiny of the critical mind. Faced with Socratic ignorance and the disorientation of discovering flaws in ancient knowledge, Descartes questions if anything can be known with absolute certainty. This extreme reflexivity, where doubt undermines itself, foreshadows the end of modernity and the emergence of the mythopoeic mode of absorptive human consciousness. The struggle with this potential return to a neo-archaic mindset has persisted in European philosophy since Descartes.

 

Philosophy's trajectory since Kant grapples with Hegel's position on these questions. On one extreme, Deleuze views Hegel as deeply problematic, distorting existential movement. Deleuze aligns with Nietzsche in revealing the subterranean dimension of thought, unearthing authentic existential movement. This alternative tradition explores horizontal modes of human consciousness, challenging the myth of abstract rationality that underpins modernity. The complexities and critiques within this historical interplay continue to shape the philosophical discourse.

 

 Deleuze discerned in Nietzsche a rejection of transcendence in favor of immanence, exploring the somatic basis of thought and the depth-dimension of thought as a somatic phenomenon. Nietzsche's writing style, akin to a court jester, a wearer of masks, and a "player" of concepts, reflects his somatic diagnosis of the forces influencing Socrates in "Twilight of the Idols." Nietzsche observed reason becoming tyrannical with Socrates, a response to instinctual forces threatening social structures. This frenzy for the rational, according to Nietzsche, emerged as Athens faced cultural and moral decline, grasping for past glories.

 

In contrast to Deleuze's critical view of Hegel, contemporary philosophers like Zizek see Hegel as an unfinished project, particularly relevant post-Marx and psychoanalysis. Zizek posits that Hegel’s central idea, the Dialectic, is both psychoanalytic and ontological. However, the problem of the "transcendental horizon," escaping the hermeneutic circle of thought and being, persists. Zizek draws key insights from Hegel, despite Deleuze's critique.

 

The first insight revolves around the theory of the "subject" or subjectivity. It suggests that there is no essential core to what we "are"; instead, the "core" is the gap between self and other, constituting subjectivity. Even to oneself, one is an "other," and subject/object are not merely categories of thought but intertwined. Zizek emphasizes the Lacanian notion that "the substance (of self) is already subject before it is substance," revealing a movement within axial consciousness grappling with its archaic-somatic origins.

 

The second insight concerns Hegel’s dialectic, challenging the traditional understanding of neat successions of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Hegel’s development of concepts, exemplified in the master-slave relationship, reveals that the second moment is already implicit in the first, and the third moment, the synthesis, recognizes the inextricable unity between the two. Zizek contends that there are no "higher" stages, no vertical progression in the Hegelian dialectic. Instead, it operates as a purely horizontal movement of successive negations, a Moebius logic of concepts. Zizek's insight underscores that subjectivity is the substance of this dialectic, and the substance of reality is already subjective before being recognized as "substance."

Zizek’s second crucial insight into Hegel’s philosophy revolves around Hegel’s profound response to Kant, asserting that the antinomies of reason are not just about the limitations of human knowledge; rather, they are ontological. According to Zizek, Hegel realized that the dialectical ontology of reality precedes and conditions human reason. This means that questions concerning the finitude of the universe, the first cosmological moment, or the existence of a "prime mover" (God) cannot have conclusive answers because reality itself is inherently incomplete and caught in the perpetual act of becoming. Subjectivity shares in this inherent indeterminacy.

 

Hegel’s philosophy, as interpreted by Zizek, offers a language of incompleteness and a framework for thinking about openness and indeterminacy without forcing them into static conceptual categories. Hegel, in this perspective, writes the musical score of reality, finding its grammar and syntax. However, the challenge lies in the recognition that attempting to capture or stabilize this indeterminacy reproduces the ceaseless anxiety and inner tensions of the Axial Mind itself, acknowledging its inherent impossibility. Yet, the comprehensive logic of Hegel remains alluring.

 

In the contemporary context, there is a resistance to the vertical dimension of axial consciousness, evident in Zizek's Heggelian insights and much of his thinking, emphasizing the horizontal over the vertical. This moves beyond the modern vs. postmodern dichotomy, acknowledging that we were never truly modern. The present compels us to confront the resurgence of the mythopoeic past as an ancient and archaic future colliding with the present. Neglecting the category of "infinite knowledge" throughout history, it emerges as the only viable and unexplored category at the end of the Axial Age, encased in centuries of abstraction and idolatry. This revelation, signaling the collapse of dichotomies, may mark the first moment of an apocalypse—a revelation of an unknown future age of consciousness glimpsed dimly through the eyes of fictions, myths, and dream-eyes. To navigate this uncharted territory, there is a call to suspend the scholarly and approach it with the eyes of a new art, crafting a fiction of concepts capable of bringing this future into the past, recognizing that all philosophy comes too late.