What Happened When the Great Chain of Being Broke Down

Discussion

Brendan Graham Dempsey:

"As reductionism became more and more engrained in the scientific enterprise, and the mechanized world it produced became everywhere more impressive and ubiquitous, the pre-modern world and its religious worldview faded increasingly from sight.

The meaning-rich world of inherent value was replaced by a mechanistic, value-neutral objectivity (described by forces, not feelings). Value could not be shown to be something subject to force and motion, and so must not be fundamentally real. Values exist only in our minds, then—such that there must exist a sharp divide between the subjective and the objective. Mixing them together is the source of endless confusion, since, ultimately, only the objective world is real.

Likewise, with the explanatory power that particles and forces provided, there was no longer any need for supernatural explanations of phenomena. (As Laplace answered Napoleon when asked about the absence of God from his work: “Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis.”) Nor did mere associations or “correspondences” serve a use any longer, nor the supposed influence of the stars—which Newton had shown to be governed by the same laws as prevail on Earth. Everything could—or would—be explained by simple material part-icles in motion: a metaphysical framework known as materialism.

Thus, with the triumph of reductionism, the entire religious edifice of tradition cracked, its metaphysical Great Chain and cosmic story rapidly eroding. In its place was modernity’s new worldview—with its own metaphysics and unnerving new narrative.

This metaphysical framework was valueless. The hierarchy of reality was not organized by good and evil, only size—and the smallest parts were the most important. There was no personal God, only deterministic laws that govern the universe—and these were as indifferent to humans’ existential lot as any machine. Whatever could not be described in terms of fundamental particles in motion was either a fiction or an illusion.

The cosmic story of this worldview was, as a consequence, radically different from that of traditional religion. Having stripped a benevolent God of any causal power, there was no providential “creation” per se; the universe just was (and presumably always was; or, if it did have a beginning, arose from chance).

There was no divine drama or omniscient Plan. Human beings, and all life, were essentially just complicated machines, governed not by their agency but by their constituent parts following deterministic paths through space. And just as there is no meaning to turning gears or pumps, neither is there any meaning, ultimately, to human life.

In this way, it should be clear that reductionism was what first sowed the seeds of our contemporary meaning crisis. With the rise of modern reductionistic science, humanity’s role in a divine saga was lost, and the perceived whole of conscious human life itself was reduced to its smallest parts—where one no longer finds any meaning, only law.

This idea continues to reverberate and resonate today. Millions of despairing souls still believe it—and it is driving them to the nihilistic conclusions nascent in it. Until, at last, here we are: We have become parts without a whole, at the same time that we cannot even claim to be whole ourselves.

Our lives lack the larger context of a cosmic story in which we play an important causal role. Nor can we even claim to be genuine agents with volitional integrity, since our wills and even our conscious awareness itself are merely “epi-phenomenal” illusions: vestigial byproducts of particles acting in deterministic fashion deeper down.

By the dawn of the 19th century, through relentless differentiation of parts from the whole, modernity had revealed reality in all its countless sundered pieces. The subject had been cleaved from the objective world, value had been parsed from existence, and causation was sundered from conscious will to obtain only at the lowest material level of the universe."

(https://brendangrahamdempsey.substack.com/p/emergentism-from-religion-to-reduction)