The Modern Age and Classical Science
If there is one thing by which the age in which we live, the modern age, will be known, it is science. Some may say it is technology, but behind the ubiquity of technology in our times stand science and capital. Technology is the capitalization of science, the expression of the will to power in our times applied to the will to knowledge as science. In stating it like this, it is not the predominance of science as a discipline among other disciplines that is meant but as the mode of our modern existence, the assumptions that frame reality for us theoretically and methodically. In fact, to talk of "disciplines" is already to assume the scientific method, a "disciplined" form of inquiry and a consequent way of "disciplining" the world. But even more central than method is the theoretical foundation of modernity as a mode of knowing, a centring of the subject in the rational ego (cogito) and a separation and objectification of the world under the assumption that universal knowledge is available to the human being due to the rational (causal) constitution of reality. This "separation" of human as subject from nature and all its objects completed the transition from a pre-modern world to a world of humanism, the age of the human, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in what has been called the Enlightenment. The human, here, was understood as sufficient in its power to know and master Nature, whether inanimate or animate. "Nature", "World", "Self" and "God" were all considered abstract categories, unknowable or non-existent in themselves and conceptualized only in the human mind as the universal totality of their constituents. These constituents were grounded in foundational "entities" conceived analogically on the model of objectifiable sense-reality, ultimate particles, the "dust of substance", or atoms, the building blocks of the material world and thereby of all reality. Actually, atomism goes back to c. 5th century BCE to Leucippus and his student Democritus of Abdera. In this philosophical belief system, consciousness was considered, if at all, an epiphenomenon of material atomicity. Such sufficiency had no place for transcendental agency and implied an absolute independence of the individual united with other humans through universal knowledge premised on the fulfilment of rationality, the human mastery of the world and itself. This is the mode of existence of our modern world, centred in the monadic individual ego, seated in the rational omniscience of material knowledge and its application, the ultimate fulfilment of the Enlightenment.
This separation of the subject and its radical pluralization in individuality, from its entanglement with nature and its constituents, leading to the isolated independent individual of our times, occurred through a gradual transition from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, in a shift of the dependence of man on God and his authorized spokespersons, the Church, to a properly Godless world explainable by science in itself. If the Church lost its authority over knowledge, those who continued to believe in God, either thought of Him as a non-interfering transcendental clockmaker, who had set the universe into action using rational laws, giving humans the power of reason to understand and perfect its workings, the position of deism.
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