<p>"Amid the continuing stream of books about modernity, Rémi Brague’s <i>The Kingdom of Man</i> stands alone. His treatment of the modern age is at once complex and unified, rooted in stunning erudition and an ability to construct a compelling narrative. Completing a trilogy that includes previous books on antiquity and the middle ages, Brague provides an account of the sources—textual, political, economic, and ecclesial—of our current world for which there is no substitute and no current competitor." —Thomas S. Hibbs, Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Culture, Baylor University</p>
<p>"No one ranges over the history of ideas like Rémi Brague. <i>The Kingdom of Man</i> is not just an index of Brague's astonishing learning but a pulsing inquiry into the dreams of our modern imagination. Those dreams, contends Brague, re-worked reality itself and proposed a human innocence that is proving far from benign." —Graham James McAleer, Loyola University Maryland</p>

<p>“. . . it was a delight to turn to Rémi Brague’s <i>The Kingdom of Man: Genesis and Failure of the Modern Project</i>. This is a genuine academic work by a scholar of remarkable erudition.” —<i>Public Discourse</i></p>

<p>"Concise, clear, and compelling, <i>The Kingdom of Man</i> provides an account of the genesis and failure of the modern project. Although a familiar story, Brague presents it with erudition and detail that is enriching rather than overwhelming and helps us understand who we are today." —<i>Law and Liberty</i></p>

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<p>"[Rémi Brague] is aiming at something more difficult than a history of ideas. The goal is to lay bare the internal logic of modern hubris, to disinter link by link from the debris of history the chain of ideas that took us from early modern theistic humanism, through atheistic humanism, to today's regnant antihumanism, which expresses itself in art as ugliness and distortion of the human form, and in social science as the program of abortion, euthanasia, and assisted suicide—from early modern utopian dreams to current dystopian nightmares. . . . The book is nothing like a jeremiad . . . Brague is trying to do what a philosopher at the peak of his illustrious career should do, disclose to his reader the underlying logic of the age; not offer answers, but equip the reader to find them. In this he succeeds." —<i>Touchstone</i></p>

<p>"The story may be familiar in broad outline—the death of God entails the death of man—but it has never been portrayed with both such a thorough command of the broad strokes (for example, masterful compact discussions of canonical thinkers from Francis Bacon to Heidegger) and at the same time a simply amazing wealth of detail, fine brush strokes of testimony from lesser known or practically unknown authors and artists that add vivid cultural flesh to the big story. In the end, the portrait of secular humanism’s collapse upon itself is stark, more than sobering, but informed by an understated but bright hope that humanity’s goodness has 'anchors in the heavens.'" —Ralph Hancock, Brigham Young University</p>

<p>"Rémi Brague provides in this book a longue-durée historical and philosophical explanation for anyone who has ever wondered about our civilization’s willing spiral into self-destruction. Brague shows that the will to modernity is the will to take control of human nature, isolate it from any cosmological or theological context, and render the truth about it provisional, subject to endless experiment and modification. This is a timely and important book." —James Hankins, Harvard University</p>

<p>"With <i>The Kingdom of Man</i>, Brague completes a trilogy in which he presents a panoramic view of theological and philosophic thought, ‘ancient and modern,’ primarily but not exclusively ‘Western.’ Most such efforts are cringeworthy exercises, superficial and canting, but Brague has read not only widely but with care, profiting from work done by Strauss and his students while maintaining an independent view. . . . A summary of Brague’s argument shows why his book provokes and stimulates." —<i>Interpretation</i></p>

<p>"<i>The Kingdom of Man</i> deserves an audience as wide as the author’s great erudition, for Brague tells this familiar-enough story of decline in new ways culminating in a clear critique." —<i>Journal of Church and State</i></p>

<p>“The thousands of slight turns of thought over the centuries leading up to our own... are the subject of Brague’s exposition. The author is, himself, a Catholic who is more of a lamenter than a champion of this story, but his tone throughout is uniformly calm and professorial. His criticism of modern developments, primarily implied or insinuated, is under the surface of the placid text.” —<i>Reading Religion</i></p>

<p>"Reading his book is a unique experience for anyone interested in the history of ideas — like taking a transatlantic Concorde flight over the entirety of the course of Western history." —<i>Los Angeles Review of Books</i></p>

Was humanity created, or do humans create themselves? In this eagerly awaited English translation of Le Règne de l’homme, the last volume of Rémi Brague's trilogy on the philosophical development of anthropology in the West, Brague argues that, with the dawn of the Enlightenment, Western societies rejected the transcendence of the past and looked instead to the progress fostered by the early modern present and the future. As scientific advances drained the cosmos of literal mystery, humanity increasingly devalued the theophilosophical mystery of being in favor of omniscience over one’s own existence. Brague narrates the intellectual disappearance of the natural order, replaced by a universal chaos upon which only humanity can impose order; he cites the vivid histories of the nation-state, economic evolution into capitalism, and technology as the tools of this new dominion, taken up voluntarily by humans for their own ends rather than accepted from the deity for a divine purpose. Brague’s tour de force begins with the ancient and medieval confidence in humanity as the superior creation of Nature or of God, epitomized in the biblical wish of the Creator for humans to exert stewardship over the earth. He sees the Enlightenment as a transition period, taking as a given that humankind should be masters of the world but rejecting the imposition of that duty by a deity. Before the Enlightenment, who the creator was and whom the creator dominated were clear. With the advance of modernity and banishment of the Creator, who was to be dominated? Today, Brague argues, “our humanism . . . is an anti-antihumanism, rather than a direct affirmation of the goodness of the human.” He ends with a sobering question: does humankind still have the will to survive in an era of intellectual self-destruction? The Kingdom of Man will appeal to all readers interested in the history of ideas, but will be especially important to political philosophers, historical anthropologists, and theologians.
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Remi Brague argues that with the dawn of the Enlightenment, Western society has rejected traditional theophilosphical ideas in favor of human authority and autonomy, ultimately causing the erasure of divinely ordered humanity.
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Introduction Part One: Preparation 1. The Best Of The Living Things 2. Domination 3. Three Incomplete Prefigurations 4. Metaphorical Dominations 5. The New Lord Of Creation 6. Attempts And Temptations Part Two: Deployment 7. The Formation Of The Modern Project 8. The Beginnings Of The Realization 9. The Master Is There 10. Moral Dominion 11. The Duty To Reign 12. The Iron Rod 13. The New Meaning Of Humanism 14. The Sole Lord Part Three: Failure 15. Kingdom or Waste Land? 16. Man, Humiliated 17. The Subjugated Subject 18. Man Remade 19. Man Surpassed and ... Replaced 20. Checkmate? 21. Lights Out Conclusion
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For a long time, modernity was not merely lived, but also conceived, as a project. Descartes wanted to entitle the Discourse on Method: “The project of a universal science that can raise our nature to its highest degree of perfection.” Nietzsche characterized his time as “the age of attempts.” Two centuries earlier, in one of his first works (1697), Daniel Defoe indicated that the fashion was all for projects, to the extent that one could call the time “the age of projects.” Above all he had in mind the speculations of transatlantic commerce, such as the one that had just ruined him, since commerce was “in its principle, all project, machination and invention.” In 1726, Jonathan Swift satirized the members of the Royal Society under the features of the distracted passengers of the flying island of Lagado, whom he ridiculed with the name of projectors, in that way also performing a self-critique because he confessed to having been “a sort of projector in his youth.” The embodiment of this type, after the Spanish arbitristas of the seventeenth century, was the Abbé de St. Pierre and his Project for rendering peace perpetual in Europe. However, in itself the word projector had nothing pejorative or ironic. One could claim it for oneself, as was the case with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. According to a more serious anthropology, man is a being who is not merely unrealized, but “projected.” Thus Fichte: “All the animals are fully developed and complete, man is but a sketch and a project.” Heidegger defined the life of Dasein as a “project,” then deepened the idea by making the project no longer a human initiative, but a fundamental trait of Being. Sartre took from it the definition of man, who “is nothing other than his project”; and contemporary ethicists conceive of the history of the individual as a “life-project.” The word “project” is not without its teachings. Its Latin form does not correspond to a word in the Roman lexicon. The Romans knew the adjective projectus, with the meaning of “preeminent,” often with a pejorative nuance, “excessive.” But the substantive is not found in Antiquity. A pro-ject is above all what its etymology declares: a –ject (from jacere, to throw or toss), a movement in which the thing in motion (the “projectile”) loses contact with what set it in motion and pursues its trajectory. Ancient physics did not find a place for the phenomenon in its explanatory schemes, except by means of very implausible theories. Oddly enough, Modern Times, the age of pro-jects, are also the time when, in physics, one began to make –ject as such conceivable. Napoleon, the very type of modern man, i.e., “Faustian,” sensed this, he who compared himself to “a bit of stone thrown into space.” Three ideas fundamental to modernity can be derived from this master-image of –ject. A project implies 1) vis-à-vis the past, the idea of a new beginning which causes the forgetting of everything that preceded; 2) vis-à-vis the present, the idea of the autonomy of the acting subject; and 3) for the future, the idea of a supportive milieu that prolongs the action and assures its successful completion (Progress). The modern project bears two faces turned in opposite directions, one towards below, to what is inferior to man, the other above, to what is superior to him.
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780268104252
Publisert
2018-10-30
Utgiver
Vendor
University of Notre Dame Press
Vekt
687 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Dybde
24 mm
Aldersnivå
00, G, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet

Forfatter
Oversetter

Biographical note

Rémi Brague is emeritus professor of medieval and Arabic philosophy at the University of Paris I and Romano Guardini Chair Emeritus of Philosophy at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (Munich). He is a member of the Institut de France and author of many books, including Curing Mad Truths: Medieval Wisdom for the Modern Age (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019).
Paul Seaton is associate professor of philosophy at St. Mary's Seminary.