INTRODUCTION
One of the main challenges that prevents the honest discussion of religion in Western society is the fact that, by itself, religion is poorly understood by those who discuss it.
And one of the greatest myths of Scientism itself lies around what I call the modern metaphysics of subjectivity, ergo, the way that modern man sees, grasps and interacts with nature and with the reality around itself.
Years ago, perhaps, I posted about two almost forgotten intellectual giants: Rene Guenon and Oswald Spengler. These men were very learned, much more so for the standards of our time when intellectual discourse has argueably fallen, and they both, together with some other intellectuals of note - like for instance T. Burckhardt, Ivan Kireyevsky, Tomas Melendo, Maritain and even the controversial and obscure Julius Evola, present a sort of reaction - a baclklash - to the tyrannical dominance of this metaphysics of subjectivity in our times.
I wrote an essay for Alexander Dugin, in which I laid down my views that were the result of perhaps 28 years of a young life, but nonetheless marked with deep interactions with other traditions, with continental Slavophilia, Eastern Orthodoxy, Sufism, and other forms of religiosity that are little known to the Anglo-Saxon West.
Now Alexander Dugin!? Isn't he a fascist creep, and a notorious ex-member of the National Bolshevik Party? Perhaps. But perhaps he represents something of an other, something that the West wants to expunge, because it represents a genuine challenge, a genuine something that is completely alien, and thus offensive, to its own liberal and progressive Western mentality.
Perhaps I am right in saying and arguing, that there's a whole world out there, and the Western world remains as provincial and unaware of it as it was during the parochial old days of Montesquieu-style Orientalism, Hollywood movies of the 30's, and the like.
In this sense, we seem to be very much conditioned by a certain sense of perception of the Other, as well as of our own past, that is very much the byproduct of the bias and preconceptions of the world of the Enlightenment. Orientalism is itself a byproduct of that, but another problem lies in the concept of civilization that was developed by European minds during the 18th century - a concept that was linear, and consigned the "Other" to the dustbin.
Progress would naturally lead, in a Hegelian fashion, towards the sort of development that has ocurred in Western society since the XVIII century.
And the "Middle Ages" were a sort of dustbin of history...!
In sum, in a very egocentric fashion, the metaphysics of subjectivity developed by the West after Descartes would be a sort of natural pinnacle of intellectual development. Not a FALL, a fundamental forgetfulness, as it should be, but rather, the pinnacle.
... In sum the Western world can no longer conceive of what the world was before Descartes. Of what "Wisdom" and "Philosophy" amounted to in the days of the Medieval Scholastics, or even in the days of Ancient Greece - we skip over Plato and Aristotle. We don't truly know the Pre-Socratics. We barely grasp anything that has to do with the Catholic thinking of the Middle Ages.
And the Catholic ontology of the Middle Ages is precisely the point at which the West was still a "civilization", not in the Hegelian post-Enlightenment sense, of course, but in the sense of something different, something attained to genuine transcendence, something that still worked within the framework of Being as the main philosopher I would like to mention, Martin Heidegger, would say.
In sum, that the discourse which argues the Middle Ages were an age of obscurity is itself an obscure discourse, which has obscured yet more as to the fundamental roots of the Western tradition, and has led us straight into what would I call - in a very Nietzschean, Heideggerian fashion perhaps - straight into Nihilism.
And Nihilism is the inevitable byproduct of the modern post-Cartesian and post-Hegelian metaphysics of subjectivity, to be sure
CONCLUSION OF THESE THOUGHTS
I am very much indebted to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Guenon, Ahmad Fardid, Ali Shariati, Neo-Thomism, and even currents as diverse as Sufism and Vedanta for making this critique, which is as thorough as it can get.
Basically, if we are able to perceive, akin to Heidegger, that the metaphysics of the Enlightenment since the dawn of humanism consists in a movement of entrapment in one's one subjectivity, of enframing within pseudo-categories, and that Western metaphysics ignores the question of Truth, of ontology, of Being qua Being, instead submerging itself in the shadows of its own subjectivity.
In sum, if we are to realize that that Western metaphysics entraps man into Plato's cave, to grasp at his own shadow, rather than the light outside, we are coming close to what I want to express and convey in here.
... The wisdom Traditions of the East have never conceived man according to the categories that modern philosophy has thought to be apodictical and axiomatic. That's because these categories, in themselves, are questionable.
And the fact remains that, they are subjective. In sum, they remain a projection of one's own subjectivity, as opposed to a genuine ontological judgment. And the main abyss of Western philosophy is the abyss of subjectivity, the fall into relativism, nihilism, and a myriad of questions about the individual's subjective perception, as opposed to genuine questions of Truth.
GOD'S EXISTENCE IN LIEU OF PRE-MODERN VS MODERN METAPHYSICS
Therefore, the question of whether God exists, of whether there's a God of Being, and also beyond Being and Non-being, remains constricted by the fact that the Western mentality has forgotten to speak about ontology and instead talks only about specific objects that are the byproduct of subjective thinking.
It is the not the projections of the subjective mind that dictate reality, but rather, the apperception of reality by the faculties of this very same mind. And in the same fashion, we can say that a mentality which cannot understand Being, and Truth, in the logical, and ontological sense, is well nigh *INCAPABLE* of discussing the basics and fundamentals of Traditional Religion, before Protestantism came in of course.
If we speak of "Tradition" in the sense that Rene Guenon worked it out, we can argue that every Tradition had its own fundamental ontology, its own fundamental justification in rational grounds that do not amount to the rationalism of the Moderns, but something that would approach Aristotle's approach.
And in this sense, it becomes impossible to justify the existence of God using the Platonic Proof of the One (as elegantly polished and recovered by Edward Feser in Five Proofs of the Existence of God), if we are incapable of understanding the basic, metaphysical level of discussion beyond the Cartesian subject-object dichotomy.
In sum, it's not the problem with Traditional religion, but rather it consists in the problem of the Western metaphysics of subjectivity, and its own Nihilism, that we are incapable of judging religious tradition beyond what amounts to contigent and solipsistic terms.
Finally, besides recommending a thorough analysis of Melendo, Heidegger, Feser, Aristotle, Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Plotinus, Ahmad Fardid, ibn Arabi, Rene Guenon, Julius Evola, and the likes, I would conclude with a few brief summaries, one of them of my authorship, dedicated especially to this subject:
https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/articl...cientific-myth
https://py111.wordpress.com/2008/03/...-of-descartes/
https://www.philosophicalcatholic.co...e-of-descartes
https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cont/ContMans.htm