The Unfolding of Truth – 8: Modernity – From Substance to Subject and the Collapse of Metaphysics

The Turning Point: From the World to the Self

With the collapse of the medieval synthesis, the philosophical gaze shifted dramatically. No longer anchored in substance metaphysics or a transcendent order, modernity turned inward, to the thinking subject as the new foundation.

This was not merely a shift in emphasis. It marked the beginning of a radical inversion:

• No longer was Being the starting point, as with Parmenides.
• No longer did things participate in eternal Forms or proceed from a necessary One.
• Now, certainty would be found not in what is, but in what thinks.

Descartes opened this new horizon: Cogito, ergo sum. The self, not Being, becomes the indubitable foundation. What remains real is not the eternal structure of things, but the act of consciousness.

A profound rupture had occurred. The ancient tension between Being and becoming was now sidestepped, not resolved. Truth became subjective, and Being, once the absolute, was now filtered through the fragile lens of thought.

The Rise of the Transcendental Subject: Kant’s Critical Revolution

Descartes cleared the ground; Kant systematized it. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant declared:

• We do not know things as they are in themselves (noumena), but only as they appear to us through the categories of the mind.
• Space and time are not properties of reality, but forms of intuition imposed by the subject.
• Metaphysics, as a knowledge of the eternal, is thus rendered impossible.

What Kant preserves is order, but an order grounded in the subject, not in Being. The eternal is no longer out there; it becomes the precondition for experience, buried in the faculties of cognition.

This was not a liberation; it was a closure. The gate to Being had been sealed. And yet, Kant still harbored a faint echo of the old metaphysics: morality, freedom, and the divine linger in the margins, now relegated to faith rather than reason.

Hegel’s Dialectic: Becoming as the Logic of Truth

If Kant denied knowledge of Being, Hegel claimed to recover it, but only through becoming itself.

In Hegel’s dialectical system, truth unfolds historically:

• Being becomes its opposite (nothing), which gives rise to becoming.
• Through a triadic process, contradictions are sublated (aufgehoben) into higher unities.
• History is the self-realization of Spirit (Geist), a logic of development without static foundations.

For Hegel, truth is not eternal, but historical. The contradiction that ancient thought tried to eliminate is now made the engine of thought itself.

Yet this move comes at a cost:

• Becoming is no longer a problem; it is the essence of the real.
• Identity is no longer fixed; it is the product of a process.
• Being is absorbed into the dialectic, and thus loses its immutability.

In this, Hegel represents the last metaphysical system: a totality that tries to make room for contradiction without collapsing into relativism. But the seeds of collapse are already present.

Nietzsche and the Death of Metaphysics

Hegel’s grand system could not hold. In its wake came Nietzsche, who pronounced the death of God, and with it, the death of all fixed truths.

Nietzsche’s thought is the mirror of modernity’s exhaustion:

• There are no eternal structures, only interpretations.
• Truth is a will to power, not correspondence to Being.
• Metaphysics is a hidden morality, a disguised imposition.

With Nietzsche, we reach the apex of nihilism:

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”
“God is dead, and we have killed him.”

What began as a shift toward the subject ends in the evaporation of foundation. Not only is Being no longer necessary, it is now considered a delusion, a prison from which modern man must liberate himself.

But what replaces it? Only the void: flux, contingency, and endless becoming.

The Fragmentation of Thought and the Abyss of Freedom

From Nietzsche forward, philosophy no longer seeks to unveil the eternal; it now dances around the edges of absence:

• Heidegger reopens the question of Being, but locates it in historical disclosure, not in necessity.
• Sartre declares that existence precedes essence, and freedom is the burden of creating one’s own being.
• Post-structuralists (Foucault, Derrida) dismantle even the subject, leaving only traces, games, and power.

Where once thought aspired to eternity, now it celebrates its own collapse.

Modernity ends not in resolution, but in fragmentation. Each thinker tries to respond to the ruins, but none restore the foundation. Truth becomes provisional, Being becomes optional, and freedom becomes unbearable.

The Final Consequence: From Thought to Technique

With metaphysics in retreat, modernity’s most powerful child, technology, rises to fill the void.

Science, once rooted in metaphysical assumptions about order and being, now marches forward without a foundation. Its goal is no longer truth, but control. The world becomes not something to understand, but to use.

And so:

• The human being becomes an object among objects.
• Nature becomes material for manipulation.
• Meaning becomes a product of systems, not insight.

This is not merely a sociological shift; it is the ontological culmination of a philosophy that no longer believes in Being.

What Was Lost

The trajectory of modern thought is not an error; it is a necessary development. Each thinker, from Descartes to Derrida, reveals a different phase of the same contradiction: the attempt to think truth without Being.

But in so doing, something essential was lost:

• The distinction between appearing and Being.
• The eternal identity of things, which do not become, but appear as becoming.
• The possibility of grounding thought in what cannot not be.

What began with the subject ends in contingency. The truth of Being, glimpsed by the ancients and strained by the medievals, is now forgotten, or worse, denied.

And yet, the contradiction remains. It cannot be ignored. The path beyond modernity is not behind us, but ahead.

It leads not to a new synthesis, but to a radical resolution: a recognition that what is cannot become nothing, and that every being is eternal.

That task was finally undertaken, not by returning to old metaphysics, but by revealing their hidden contradiction and overcoming it once and for all.

To this we now turn.