The Failure of the Modern Project: Part 3 of 4

“We are nothing; let us be everything!”

Across the first ten chapters of The Kingdom of Man, Rémi Brague has charted modernity’s grand project: the systematic effort to establish human sovereignty over nature, knowledge, and morality. From Bacon’s vision of restoring man’s “lost dominion” to Descartes’s methodological conquest of certainty, and from Locke’s labor-driven theory of value to Nietzsche’s transvaluation of all values, Brague has exposed how modernity reframed the world as raw material for human will. Yet as we arrive at Chapter 11, the stakes escalate dramatically. Here, Brague reveals how dominion ceases to be merely a practical ambition and becomes a moral obligation—a shift that marks both the apex and the instability of the modern project.

This chapter does not conclude Brague’s argument, but it represents a critical inflection point. Where earlier chapters explored how modernity seized control, Chapter 11 examines why this control could never satisfy its own demands. The “duty to reign” becomes modernity’s paradoxical trap: the more fiercely man asserts his sovereignty, the more he enslaves himself to the mechanisms of his own dominion.

The Moralization of Dominion

Brague opens by tracing how the Enlightenment’s pragmatic dominion (Bacon’s “knowledge is power”) morphs into German idealism’s ethical imperative. Kant’s “critique of practical reason” reframes nature as “pathology” to be subdued—not for comfort, but to fulfill man’s moral vocation. Fichte radicalizes this: freedom is not a right but a condemnation

“We are nothing; let us be everything!”

Mastery is no longer optional; it is the essence of being human.

“Man has the duty to work… to give, beyond the limits of his earthly existence and for all eternity, lords to nature.” —Fichte

This shift, Brague argues, exposes modernity’s Faustian bargain: by making dominion a duty, it renders man perpetually guilty for failing to achieve the impossible.

The chapter’s most incisive section dissects modernity’s redefinition of humanity. For Locke and Rousseau, man creates himself through labor and social contracts. German idealism takes this further: human identity is pure project. Once again, Fichte writes:

“Every animal is what it is; only man is nothing at all.”

Fichte’s “indeterminate man” eerily echoes Pico della Mirandola’s 15th-century vision of humanity as a self-shaping “chameleon.” But where Pico saw a divine invitation, Fichte saw a secular mandate—exposing how modernity hollowed out Renaissance humanism’s transcendent framework while retaining its rhetoric of limitless potential. The ‘duty to reign’ is what remains when the cosmos ceases to guide.

This indeterminacy, once a theological mystery (e.g., humanity as imago Dei), becomes a vacuum to be filled by will—a theme later chapters will show collapsing under its own weight.

Positivism’s Pyrrhic Victory

Brague then critiques Comte and Claude Bernard, who replace truth with utility. Positivism abandons the search for causes (Aristotle’s “why”) to focus on laws (the “how”), reducing science to a tool of control. Bernard’s chilling maxim—”Man can do more than he knows”—epitomizes the trade: mastery is purchased at the cost of understanding. Nietzsche’s gloss on this (“the victory of scientific method over science“) underscores the hollowness of this “triumph.”

Comte’s system explicitly rejects the search for ultimate causes, dismissing metaphysical questions as irrelevant in favor of a science that concerns itself only with observable laws and practical applications. This shift from understanding why things exist to merely determining how they function represents a crucial turning point in modernity’s trajectory. For Comte, the value of knowledge lies solely in its utility – its capacity to help humanity “modify phenomena to our advantage.” This utilitarian approach extends even to Comte’s vision of society, which he reimagines as fundamentally organized around the collective project of dominating nature. Brague highlights how this represents a profound departure from traditional understandings of human community, where societies were oriented toward higher goods or transcendent purposes rather than mere technical mastery.

The implications of this positivist turn become even more stark in Brague’s analysis of Claude Bernard’s experimental medicine. Bernard takes Comte’s principles to their logical extreme, treating nature not as a cosmos to be understood but as raw material to be conquered. His famous declaration that “the physician is the conqueror of nature” (medicus naturae superator) encapsulates this aggressive stance. Brague identifies the crucial inversion at work here: where Francis Bacon had asserted that “knowledge is power,” Bernard claims that “man can do more than he knows.” This formulation reveals the Faustian bargain at the heart of positivism – mastery is purchased at the price of abandoning any claim to genuine understanding. As Brague notes, this represents a complete reversal of the Aristotelian tradition, where science sought causes (aitia) as part of a broader contemplation of reality. In its place, positivism offers only technical control, untethered from any deeper comprehension of the world.

The Pragmatic Cul-de-Sac

This critique deepens as Brague turns to pragmatism, which he presents as the inevitable conclusion of modernity’s trajectory. Where positivism still maintained a veneer of scientific objectivity, pragmatism explicitly reduces truth to what is useful or functional. Brague traces this development through the works of William James, F.C.S. Schiller, and ultimately Richard Rorty, showing how each successive thinker further severs knowledge from any claim to objective truth.

“The truth of any proposition consists in its consequences.” —Schiller

The implications are profound: truth becomes nothing more than “what works,” and ethics collapses into mere efficacy. What makes Brague’s analysis particularly insightful is his demonstration of how this pragmatic turn represents both a continuation and a distortion of earlier philosophical traditions. While thinkers like Epictetus had also emphasized practical knowledge, they did so within a framework that acknowledged transcendent goods. Modern pragmatism, by contrast, recognizes no such framework, reducing all thought to instrumental reason and all value to human utility.

The paradox that Brague uncovers in these systems is devastating. By making dominion an end in itself – by severing it from any higher purpose or understanding – positivism and pragmatism undermine the very rationality that made the modern project possible in the first place. The “duty to reign” becomes a tautological imperative: we must control because control is our duty. This circular logic leaves modernity without any standard by which to judge its own projects, any reason to prefer one form of dominion over another. As Brague suggests, this is the culmination of the trajectory that began with Descartes and Bacon—a trajectory that promised mastery over nature but ends in what Nietzsche recognized as nihilism.

Industrialization as the Realization of the Baconian Dream

Brague then turns to how the modern project of dominating nature transitioned from philosophical abstraction to concrete reality through industrialization. Where earlier chapters traced the intellectual foundations of modernity’s will-to-power, this chapter documents its material realization—and the paradoxical consequences that followed.

While Bacon’s vision of scientific mastery had been articulated centuries earlier, it was only with the Industrial Revolution that this project took tangible form. The steam engine, electricity, and synthetic materials (like Bakelite) transformed nature into a system to be engineered rather than a cosmos to be understood. This shift was not merely technological but ontological: industrial progress required the devaluation of nature itself, both as a source of wisdom and as a moral guide.

“Real science has directly observed… the extreme imperfection of this so vaunted natural order… Human works are in general very superior… to whatever the natural economy can offer.” —Comte

This rejection of nature’s primacy marked a decisive break with premodern thought. Where Marsilio Ficino had celebrated nature’s beauty as surpassing human artifice, the 19th century—from Schopenhauer to John Stuart Mill—increasingly portrayed nature as chaotic, cruel, or simply raw material to be corrected.

The Utopian Impulse and Its Discontents

Brague then turns to literary reflections of industrial optimism, particularly in Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Verne’s The Mysterious Island (1875) epitomizes the Baconian ideal: shipwrecked colonists, led by an engineer, recreate civilization through sheer technical ingenuity. Yet Verne’s narrative retains a theological undercurrent—the colonists attribute their success both to their labor and to Providence.

Wells’ Men Like Gods (1923), by contrast, presents a fully secularized utopia where science has eradicated disease, perfected eugenics, and achieved “the mastery of nature.” Here, nature is no longer merely imperfect but malevolent—a “purposeless and blind” force that humanity must ruthlessly subjugate. Brague notes the paradox: Wells’ Utopians, like modern transhumanists, rely on the very evolutionary processes they seek to overthrow.

Prometheanism Unleashed

The chapter’s most striking section analyzes Soviet techno-utopianism, where the domination of nature became state dogma. Lenin’s electrification campaigns, Lysenko’s pseudoscientific agriculture, and grandiose plans for cosmic conquest (including planetary engineering!) revealed the hubris at modernity’s core. Brague highlights the irony:

“The Soviet Union, poor in real inventions, was the country of longevity serums and ‘resurrections’ of drained animals… The dream of nature’s malleability became a substitute for actual progress.”

This “iron rod” of industrial dominion, Brague suggests, ultimately proved brittle. The more aggressively modernity sought to reshape nature, the more it revealed its own metaphysical poverty—a theme he will develop in later chapters.

A New Way to be Human

In Chapter 13, Brague examines more closely the 19th-century transformation of humanism from a Renaissance educational ideal into a philosophical project asserting human sovereignty over nature and history. He traces the semantic shift of the term “humanism,” which originally referred to the study of litterae humaniores but came to signify an ideological program centered on man’s self-sufficiency.

Brague begins by tracing the evolution of “humanism” from its Renaissance origins to its 19th-century ideological form. Originally tied to the study of classical texts (litterae humaniores), the term later came to signify a philosophical project centered on human autonomy. The suffix “-ism” here denotes not just a scholarly pursuit but a worldview: “the valorization and choice of a privileged point of view from which everything is thought to receive meaning and value” (p. 121). This shift marks the transition from humanism as cultural refinement to humanism as a declaration of human sovereignty—over nature, history, and even the divine.

Brague thus identifies two key strands of modern humanism: (1) ideological Humanism: The claim that man alone is the source of meaning, rejecting theological or metaphysical foundations; and (2) cultural Humanism: The effort to cultivate humanity through engagement with classical texts.

Feuerbach and the Theological Reduction

He then pivots to Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841), which Brague identifies as a watershed moment. Feuerbach’s claim that “the secret of theology is anthropology” reduces God to a projection of human attributes, a move Brague terms “anthropotheism.” For Feuerbach, “God” is merely the summation of the human species’ idealized qualities:

“God as the peak of realities or perfections is nothing other than the summation and summary of the properties of the species for the use of the individual.”

Brague notes the irony here: Feuerbach’s atheism retains a theological structure, merely inverting its terms. Feuerbach’s “anthropotheism” posited that theology should be dissolved into anthropology, with the human species becoming the supreme object of study. This idea resonated widely, influencing later philosophers and writers who sought to ground meaning entirely in human experience and the material world.

Marx and the Materialist Turn

Brague then analyzes how Marx and Engels radicalize Feuerbach’s project.

“The root of man is man himself.”—Marx

Marx viewed work as the means through which humanity could dominate nature, transforming it into an extension of human will. He envisioned communism as the culmination of humanism and naturalism, resolving the historical conflict between man and nature. Engels expanded on this, imagining a future where socialized production would allow humans to become “conscious and effective masters” of both nature and their own social conditions. Meanwhile, other thinkers like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Ernest Renan, and Auguste Comte explored humanism as a secular ethical framework or even a new religion, with Comte’s “religion of Humanity” and Renan’s vision of a future where material mastery would enable spiritual freedom.

“Real humanism coincides with materialism, the logical basis of communism.”

A recurring theme in the text is the celebration of the earth as humanity’s rightful domain, replacing heavenly transcendence with an emphasis on earthly existence. This idea was reflected in the works of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and others, who advocated for a “fidelity to the earth” and portrayed nature as something to be mastered. Literary and artistic movements echoed these sentiments, with figures like Dostoyevsky, Wagner, and Soviet proletarian poets exploring the consequences of atheism and the glorification of human labor. 

Cultural Manifestations

The chapter concludes by examining how 19th-century art and literature reflect this new humanism. From Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio (which Brague links to Marx’s “humanism = naturalism” equation) to Nietzsche’s call for “fidelity to the earth,” the rejection of transcendence becomes a cultural motif. Brague notes the quasi-religious tone of these secular movements, as in Renan’s vision of a future where “material need will no longer be a motive”—a secularized eschatology.

From Dominion Over Nature to Rivalry with God

Brague concludes the second part of his book by tracing the shift in modern thought from a vision of human dominion over nature (as delegated by God) to a project of rivalry with God Himself. Whereas premodern traditions saw man’s mastery of nature as part of a divine order, with all its important theological constrictions, modernity reframed this mastery as a zero-sum contest.

“There could only be one Lord.”

This “exclusive humanism,” as Brague terms it, necessitated atheism—not merely indifference to God, but active displacement of Him.

Key to this shift is the modern reimagining of God’s role. No longer a benevolent Creator entrusting nature to man, God becomes either an oppressive figure (as in gnostic dualism) or an incompetent demiurge (as in Comte’s critique of “providential optimism,” which deemed nature imperfect and requiring human correction. At the same time, this transformation reflects more than changing theological attitudes; it represents a fundamental reorientation of humanity’s self-understanding from participant in creation to sole claimant of absolute authority.

Brague carefully examines competing explanations for the link between modern atheism and the project of nature’s conquest. Drawing on Leo Strauss, he notes how modern man’s alienation from nature bred a hostile, skeptical stance that demanded nature’s subjugation. Eric Voegelin’s gnostic interpretation receives attention, particularly the idea of creation as the work of a deficient demiurge against whom rebellion becomes duty. Most significantly, Brague engages Hans Blumenberg’s argument that nominalist theology’s volatile God—all power without wisdom—destabilized the medieval cosmos, forcing humanity to assume control. This analysis reveals the paradoxical nature of modernity’s theological foundations: even as it rejected traditional conceptions of the divine, it remained entangled in theological problematics, particularly regarding the relationship between divine omnipotence and paternity.

“Since the model of the divine that it presupposes is pre-Christian, it was a recycled Greek mythology that became the source from which one drew.”

The symbolic dimensions of this transformation emerge in Brague’s examination of mythological figures. He presents a compelling account of how Prometheus was reinterpreted from Aeschylus’ reconciled benefactor to modernity’s emblem of rebellion. Marx’s designation of Prometheus as “the first saint of the philosophical calendar” epitomizes this ideological refashioning, which Brague characterizes as a “perversion” of the original myth. The contrast with Hercules—who acted within Zeus’ order—highlights modernity’s preference for narratives of autonomous human agency over those of delegated authority. This mythological analysis serves as a bridge to Brague’s discussion of Enlightenment epistemology, where the Cartesian rejection of “prejudices” and Locke’s tabula rasa theory reflect the broader cultural impulse toward radical recommencement.

The political manifestations of this epistemic shift receive detailed treatment. Brague demonstrates how revolutionary rhetoric appropriated theological language while evacuating its transcendent referent. Thomas Paine’s declaration that “We have it in our power to begin the world over again” and the French revolutionaries’ quasi-creational pronouncements

“Say ‘let light be,’ and light will be.”

reveal what Brague identifies as modernity’s paradoxical reliance on the very theological frameworks it sought to overcome. The conservative critiques of Burke and Maistre, which emphasized the impossibility of creating ex nihilo, underscore the tensions inherent in modernity’s project of historical rupture.

The chapter culminates in an incisive analysis of humanity’s self-divinization. From Marx’s proclamation of human self-consciousness as “the supreme divinity” to Comte’s explicit substitution of Humanity for God, Brague traces the logical terminus of exclusive humanism. Particularly noteworthy is his observation of how Comte inverted traditional chronology, claiming that in the Middle Ages “God usurped the place of Humanity”—a striking example of modernity’s ideological reframing of history. The persistence of theological structures within ostensibly atheistic systems forms a key insight, as Brague demonstrates how concepts of sovereignty, eschatology, and even liturgy reappear in secularized forms.

Several critical tensions emerge from Brague’s analysis. First, the inherent contradiction in asserting human autonomy while relying on premodern conceptions of human nature. Second, the theological borrowings that persist even in aggressively secular frameworks. Third, the practical and philosophical challenges of maintaining a coherent notion of “humanity” once severed from its transcendent moorings. These tensions suggest that the “Kingdom of Man” may be less a stable achievement than an unstable imitation of the divine order it sought to replace.