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3:29

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

René Descartes opened the way to individualism by penning the 17th century’s most famous tweet: I think, therefore I am. But what consummates individualism’s metaphysics is Immanuel Kant’s transcendentalism a century later. By isolating the subject from the object, Kant makes it possible for the subject to both deify the object and simultaneously plan for its material and sexualised seduction, conquest and colonisation. History repeats itself: God created the world in order to be able to deify and then seduce, conquer and colonise it. Now it is the 18th century’s growing bourgeois middle class of patriarchal Enlightenment philosophers, scientists, industrialists, capitalists and colonists that see and grab the opportunity when the new individualist and atomist metaphysics lends support to their ambitions. Bourgeois ambitions are quite crassly transformed into the individualist ideal.