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I think this attitude probably above all proves the basic fact that the Enlightenment effort failed. This failure was despite the fact of the promulgation of the ability to manipulate our environment with its ideals, as in, we as human beings were made one with the environment that we were supposed to study (the ‘phenomenological’ world, as Kant would express) and hence the idea of conscious experience (the ‘noumenon’ representing qualitative experience, the ‘self’) was somehow shifted into the categories of the empirical world; we began to see our conscious-experience as just another ‘thing’ we should study with the mind instead of it being a top-down observer which had to enter into that world of materiality to understand it.
And consequently, as we were skeptical of that empirical, phenomenological world, we were skeptical of our own conceptions of uniqueness—we began to collapse that luster of what experience really meant as a liberated agentic ‘force’ which could impact reality as mere dumb things couldn’t, we made the sharpness of the edges of the conscious mind in comparison to the dullness of the mundane things around us analogous to those mundane things, just with added processes hitherto unknown that were compossible with those mundane things, and were probably just another mundane thing that we hadn’t categorized yet. Hence we stopped thinking of people as having ‘souls’, but just being flesh-automatons piloted by electricity. Lovecraft, or other fictional views of the world in this stead, just espouse the same basic idea of life inherently having no pattern, no uniqueness, that if we were all swept away tomorrow it wouldn’t matter—and yet this was seen as something that should be accepted unflinchingly! As just an extrapolation of the inevitable axiom of the Enlightenment project, to seek truth wherever it was, even as this truth hurt to look at.
And yet that ignores the fact that the methodology of this conclusion might be faulty on its own terms, for if we are to assume human flourishing as related to social norms is also a fact of life, a fact as true as the fact that we have evolved from single-celled organisms billions of years ago, then we aren’t to flinch from that, either. If we are to assume that the idea of the pursuit of truth is worthwhile because it pursues some ‘good’, with this good being expressed in terms of human flourishing (since the idea of ‘there’s no pattern in this world, we are alone’ would be antithetical to the idea of formulating the pursuit of truth in any way beyond a utilitarian mode), then that also would carry for those social norms being good for the same goal. For if we are to abstract truths from their ‘metaphysical’ qualities as the materialist extrapolation of the Enlightenment project says we should do, then there is no difference between these two facts after all, and if one (the pursuit of flourishing) even supersedes the fact of pursuing truth that could diminish the flourishing of the first, then we must necessarily choose the former—since, as said, the only motivation towards pursuing truth whatsoever would be to maximize the pursuit of flourishing to begin with. The latter is embedded in the former, not the other way around.
And yet, again, this is only something brought up if the Enlightenment project’s conclusions are bought on their own terms for the sake of argument. There are reasons to even reject the conclusion that materialism is well-founded, especially from the skepticism that regarded us as believing in materialism in the first place (due to being skepticism of our own skepticism, for instance—a ‘critique of pure reason’, if you will). Not to mention the fact that if the truths of this reality and the evolution of our subsequent conscious minds would be based on the materialistic framework, then accepting the naturalistic model of the world because our conscious minds (operating on a process of materialistic accidents) would similarly be irrational. Our conscious minds in totality, as a thing-in-itself, should be ‘beyond’ the phenomenology expressed and filtered through that consciously-reflected sense experience; to attempt to understand our conscious minds through that world would be an instance of relative self-reference, which could cause loads of paradoxes due to circularity and things like that.
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