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Immanentism in Modern Dualism as the Root of Western Secularization![]() |
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In relating to deity, modernism is characterized by immanentism, which is the root of atheism and secularization in the west. Immanentism is a philosophical theory that postulates that God is immanent in the world and in the individual. Modern philosophy considered as a whole is characterized by a basic immanentism which distinguishes it and places it in opposition to medieval philosophy, which are based on transcendence. As seen among the Enlightenment thinkers, immanentism does not find its justification in pure speculation, but in scientific and empirical motive, and in the struggle against Scholasticism and against the authority of the Church. As a consequence, it became essentially atheistic.
Immanentism & Dualism in ModernityThe scientific reason in the post-Enlightenment age was a factor that contributed to the grow of immanentism. The atomist-reductionist worldview, coupled with a deterministic account of the laws of physics, make divine action problematic: how could God act in a world whose events are all determined by the laws of physics? Theologians have had the option of a view of divine action either as intervention or as immanent working in all the processes of nature and history (Murphy 1999). Conservative theologians generally share the view of an interventionist account of divine action. Liberals can be characterized by their immanentist accounts of God’s relation to the world (Murphy 1999). One of the main characteristics of modernism is dualism, which was mainly influenced by René Descartes’ epistemological assumption. His dualism was the product of his doubt in search for “indubitable knowledge.” Dualism has been the root of secularism in modernity, one of the most influential factors for the secularization of western culture.
Barth’s Critique of DualismCartesian worldview is founded upon a radical dualism and self-assertion. These are the basis for Enlightenment thinking; the distinction between consciousness and being, mind and world, and the will for form (Nietzsche’s will to power). And both these axioms are the consciousness of doubting. Cartesian dualism became the seed of atheism in the west. As Barth indicates, “Atheism is lurking somewhere at the doors” of modernity. Dualism enabled modernity to constitute a world as separate from the sovereignty of God as its creator. This way dualism is the root of secularism in modernity. From Barth’s analysis the worldview of God shaped by Descartes’ dualism is immanentism, not transcendence. In his discussions of the movement of ideas from Leibniz to Schopenhauser, Barth hints that the developing immanentism increasingly guarantees and completes the secular world picture. With radical immanentism not only does dualism, and therefore transcendence, disappear, but also all notions of difference, of alterity, of otherness.
The worldview that Descartes announces is based upon relating perceptions of the external world to mathematics and geometry. Barth, however, uncovers that Descartes’ worldview is founded upon a radical dualism and self-assertion. These are the basis for Enlightenment thinking; the distinction between consciousness and being, mind and world, and the will for form (Nietzsche’s will to power). And both these axioms are the consciousness of doubting: ‘All the wretchedness of human life is bound up with the fact that sound feet on the ground of the confidence that the created world is real.’ Barth concludes his analysis with a thought experiment: “What if Descartes had fully faced the doubt he never seriously engaged? Then the insubstantial nature of modernity’s foundations would have presented itself and Descartes would have fallen into despair; having recognized ‘his own nothingness, and then also the nothingness of his own thinking and of the whole external world” (CD III/1: 362). On this ground Barth traces nihilism back to Descartes’ dualism. According to him, modernity is characterized by philosophical skepticism and its nihilistic consequences (Ward 2000). Nihilistic consequences of modernity was inevitable when the basis for scientific analysis is founded upon a radical dualism and self-assertion. Outside God man makes himself and, as Barth notes, the ungrounded nature of this making becomes conscious of itself in existentialism. Sartre’s conviction that man can be as he wills to be and imagines himself to be is another version of modernity’s will for form. This is the apotheosis of the human, and its nihilism and its pessimism are evident. For Sartre (and Heidegger), “our existence itself is a projection into nothing and is constituted by our enquiry into it; how to be open to nothing is the fundamental virtue of existence” (CD. III/3). The road to humanism in modernity led to nihilism, and what followed this development was the appeal by many postmodern thinkers to nihilism. It is, however, noteworthy that Descartes was not a secular person and another kind of his dualism kept the west from being wholly secularized. In Descartes the horizontal dualism (between mind and world) is held in place by a vertical dualism between the finitude of being human and the infinite, transcending God. A cross-hatch of dualism kept the world from being conceived as merely secular. Although Cartesian dualism became the seed of atheism in the West, this cross-hatch of dualism kept the world from being conceived as merely secular. |
http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/9463/109814