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3:22

(In »The four paradigms in the history of metaphysics«)

According to Kant and his followers, rationalism is a necessary linchpin in individualist mythology. Individualism requires blind faith in Man’s own thinking – given time and necessity – being able to understand and solve all the world’s riddles and problems. While rationalism does accept that the individual is not omnipotent today, for the individual is evidently a mortal being, but with the individual’s omnipotence – since she actually is a latent god – according to rationalism, the solution to the problem can only be a matter of time. From the early 19th century onwards, individualist metaphysics becomes as conveniently as it is effectively self-fulfilling: individualism is proclaimed from the universities, and at the same universities, professors and researchers are also organised as individuals, encased in increasingly specialised subject area atoms, where they devote their days to quoting one another within closed coteries under the pretext that they are engaging in some sort of objectively true knowledge production. And as long as one stays within the mythology of individualist metaphysics – and why wouldn’t you, if you are part of the elite that reap the full rewards of it – it is hard to see the individualised human being in relation to the atomised world in any other way. The external signals that interfere with the generally held mythology are of course immediately removed by the system itself.