Del Noce was an anti-fascist Catholic philosopher from Turin, Italy. This collection of essays spans themes of Christianity, politics, technology, Marxism, revolution, nihilism, Gnosticism, secularization, authority, the Enlightenment, and man’s progress. He was solidly anti-modernist, but with a nuanced view of traditionalism. His writings make frequent references to the Italian intellectuals Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile, Antonio Rosmini, and Antonio Gramsci, as well as more well known philosophers like Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.
Del Noce first tackles modernity’s preeminent positioning of reason in the social hierarchy. “For rationalists, certainty about an irreversible historical process toward radical immanentism has replaced what for medieval thinkers was faith in revelation.” He approvingly quotes Emanuele Severino’s take on modernity’s fetishization of technology, “The history of the West is the history of technology. In Greek-Christian culture God is the supreme technician. In modern culture Man is the supreme technician—who by now plans the production and destruction of the totality of things…. In spite of the backwardness of the ancient world’s technological capabilities, Western theology possessed from its beginning all the essential features of the civilization of technology; and in spite of the fact that this civilization rejects God most radically, contemporary technology maintains the theological character of its origins…. In its essential meaning, the critique of the civilization of technology by secular or religious humanism is nothing but the protest by losing violence against triumphing violence.”
Modernity’s association with violence is another topic Del Noce expounds on. “From the viewpoint of revolutionary violence, what matters is that even the memory of the old man must vanish; there must be a change without conversion; the past must be erased, and thus even repentance. In short, the annihilation of memory…. Revolutionary violence cannot be discussed in terms of morality or immortality. The ethical dimension and revolutionary thought are absolutely incompatible.” Revolution is not evolution and, therefore, must be a complete break from all that came before. The revolution is beyond all ethics. The Revolution is, by definition, the new (and only) religion. “Precisely the historical outcome of the revolution, viewed as man’s great attempt to deny his own limitations, creates the conditions to reopen theological discourse…. Recognizing the philosophical power of the two great atheists Marx and Nietzsche is the condition for a renewal of religious thought.” Modernity attempts to secularize all of reality, leaving no sphere for the transcendent. “The term secularization attains its full meaning if we think of it in connection with what we can call the Marxist counter-religion: namely, Marx wants to achieve the complete rejection of any dependence of man on God…. The rejection of the dependence on God the Creator goes hand in hand with an extreme interpretation of the aspect of religion as liberation and redemption. The Marxist revolution keeps the appearance of a religion because it requires a conversion, since it marks a transition to a higher reality and to a reality that is totally “other,” even if absolutely not transcendent or supernatural.”
One esoteric concept that Del Noce grapples with repeatedly is the idea of Gnosticism. “Today’s historical situation should be described as the full revelation of the opposition between Christianity and Gnosticism, after the meaning of the latter became fully manifested in the wake of classical German philosophy.” He continues, “Ancient gnosis atheizes the world (by denying that it was created by God) in the name of divine transcendence. Post-Christian gnosis atheizes it in the name of radical immanentism…. In both cases what is being sought are rules to escape from the world as it is. However, whereas in ancient gnosis this is achieved by destroying the spirit of power within oneself, and by freeing the soul from the world, in post-Christian gnosis the exact opposite takes place…. Post-Christian immanentism searches for rules to build an absolutely new world…. A system which begins by projecting the ideal city into the world, as a reality that can be built by man, can only logically conclude to the divinization of man himself.”
Modern man has become a cultural and moral relativist. There are no eternal truths. “The bourgeois regards everything as relatively good because everything can be useful…. But precisely because he thinks of everything as relatively good, there is no Truth, there is no Good; a reality in which everything is “useful” excludes the possibility of absolutes. On the one hand, then, the bourgeois cannot but profess to be democratic; on the other he is radically anti-Platonic. For him the transcendent must be brought down to man’s level.” Del Noce contrasts this with the words of Plotinus, “Those who do not participate in virtue have nothing to carry them from this world to the one beyond.”
Del Noce’s pet peeve was modernity’s turn towards scientism. “Scientism cannot present itself to the awareness of its own advocates as a rational truth, i.e., as susceptible of an irrefutable proof. It is, literally, a resolution of the will: the resolution to accept as real only what can be verified empirically by everyone….The essence of scientism is hatred for religious transcendence…. The transition from science to scientism is not just an illegitimate intellectual extension but a voluntary and completely a priori rejection of religious transcendence. Such a rejection without a reason, on the part of those who want to subordinate everything to reason, seems to be a repetition of original sin and a proof of its effects.” He continues, “If science is neutral with respect to ideals and values, the same cannot be said about scientism, which suppresses metaphysics and claims to make science the exhaustive knowledge of reality.” For modern man, science has become the only truth. “Having accepted the collapse of metaphysical-religious tradition, only science remained standing, as mankind’s only salvation, symbol of modernity, and pillar of the new civilization. But science, at least in its modern sense, studies reality as a system of forces, not of values. It provides instruments but it does not determine goals. From the perspective of those who regard science as the only valid form of knowledge, one can speak of only one goal: incrementing vitality.”
For Del Noce, the problem with modernity is its total disregard for tradition and past knowledge. For modernity, the only truth that is real is that which is current. Truth is the ever-changing present, which feeds upon itself. “What is new is legitimate because it is new, because it does not respect anything and devalues everything. It is the legitimacy of a raging process which produces directly and automatically an ideological superstructure as it produces itself…. Revolution means replacing meta-physics with the ideal of meta-humanity, in which mankind will acquire those powers that it already possesses potentially, but from which it alienated itself during the development of history, projecting them outside of itself in the act of creating God…. As a consequence, the total revolution can be carried out only by history (all sides are de-sacralized, i.e., they are relative to a given historical situation.)” Politics replaces religion as the meta-structure for modern man. Ethics is completely subsumed within political action. “The revolutionary idea started from the negation of the doctrine of original sin, inasmuch as it claimed that it could substitute politics for religion in the liberation of man.” Del Noce concludes with a plea to return to the eternal values. In a piece written in 1970 titled “A “New” Perspective on Left and Right,” Del Noce presciently warns of today’s relativist culture overwhelming all facets of society. “If by “right” we mean faithfulness to the spirit of tradition, meaning the tradition that talks about an uncreated order of values, which are grasped through intellectual intuition and are independent of any arbitrary will, not even the divine one; and if by “left” we mean, on the contrary, the rejection not merely of certain historical superstructures but of those very values, which are “unmasked” to show their true nature as oppressive ideologies, imposed by the dominant classes in order to protect themselves, well, then it seems to me that in no other historical period has the left advanced so dramatically as during the last quarter century.”
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