Prof. Paul Eidelberg

[Extracted from Chapter 1 of my book Beyond the Secular Mind (Greenwood Press, 1989)]

Mankind is tottering on an abyss.  Violence punctuates daily existence in a world increasingly portrayed as meaningless.  We are strangers, not only to each other but to ourselves. The “crisis of identity” has become a cliché.  Familial and national ties have been eroded: we are homeless cosmopolitans. [Recall Barack Obama boasting in 2008 that he was a cosmopolitan!]

Not knowing who or what we are, we lack the hauteur and confidence of cosmopolitans of the past. They believed in Universal Man, in man sub specie aeternitatis; we believe in nothing.  Our humanism is hollow; we cannot even take our own humanity seriously.  Nihilism and relativism have rendered the distinction between man and beast problematic in theory and hardly discernible in practice.  What indeed is noble about man that anyone should boast of being a “humanist”?

When man becomes problematic, it is a sign of civilizational decay, but also of the possibility of renewal.  Such was the case some twenty-four hundred years ago when Greek sophists like Protagoras exulted in teaching youth that “man is the measure of all things.”  This unheard of and skeptical doctrine – the dogma of today’s universities – signifies that all ideas concerning the True, the Good, and the Beautiful are human creations, hence relative to time and place. Socrates saw that this secularism cum relativism, which was then spreading throughout the Mediterranean world, would eventually destroy the Olympian gods and was even then undermining public morality in Athens, the “open society” of the Hellenic Age. Various sophists, the Greek counterparts of todays “value-free” social scientists, were broadcasting the death of Zeus, the pagan god of justice. Without Zeus, what would hold society together?  Without the traditional understanding of right and wrong, men would devour each other like animals.

Socrates’ task, completed by Plato and Aristotle, was to substitute a restrained skepticism for the sophists’ unrestrained skepticism, lest men revert to beasts.  Their world-historical function was to construct a philosophy of man and the universe that would replace the no longer credible mythology of the Homeric world. Accordingly, and as dramatized in The Republic (when the god-fearing Cephalus leaves the dialogue), philosophy replaces religion – the philosopher – replaces Zeus. No longer are the gods to rule mankind, but reason, unaided human reason, would henceforth determine how man should live.

Of course, neither Plato nor Aristotle was so naive as to expect the generality of mankind to defer to the rule of philosophers. Apart from other considerations, philosophers are not only as quarrelsome as the offspring of Zeus and Hera, but, unlike the Olympians, they are mortal: here today, gone tomorrow. Something impersonal as well as immutable and eternal was therefore needed to command the obedience of man.  What else could this be but Nature – nature divested of Homeric Deities. Neither the gods nor man but all-encompassing Nature was to be the measure of all things.  And this Nature, far from being arbitrary and mysterious, was fully accessible to the human mind.

The magnitude of Aristotle’s program has not been surpassed in the history of philosophy. He merely set out to comprehend the totality of existence, to reduce heaven and earth and all between to an organized system of theoretical, practical, and productive sciences. To borrow the terminology of Rabbi J.B. Soloveitchik [Halakhic Man, 1983]: “Aristotle would tolerate no randomness or particularity, no mystery to obscure the fleeting events of existence.  Everything had to be fixed, clear, necessary, ordered.” Nothing was beyond the grasp of the human mind because Nature or the Cosmos was an intelligent and therefore intelligible whole.

With Greek philosophy a new type of man appeared in the forefront of world history, Cognitive Man.  Cognitive Man is a secularist who deifies the intellect.  He is therefore to be distinguished from his secular rivals, Volitional Man and Sensual Man.  Whereas Cognitive Man seeks to understand the world, Volitional Man wishes to change or conquer the world, while Sensual Man wants to enjoy it.  It is only with the ascendancy of Volitional Man, portrayed by Machiavelli in The Prince, that secularism comes into its own as the regnant force of history. [This is where we are today, even in Israel, waiting for her spiritual redemption, while Secular Man is at the helm.]

 (To be continued)