The Implications of Modern Philosophy: The Will To Fiction (History of Modern Philosophy) (Remastered)

Rushdoony argues that when modern philosophy narrows reality to inner experience excluding God and “things-in-themselves” it produces a “will to fiction” that reshapes art, literature, politics, and daily life: earlier figures like Rubens still worked as disciplined, reality-tethered artisans and businessmen, but modern “artists” increasingly treat imagination as truth and self-mythologize, illustrated by Thoreau’s largely staged Walden, Whitman’s carefully constructed “common man” persona borrowed from George Sand, and D.H. Lawrence’s messianic self-delusions and nature-mysticism; this cultural shift fuels a mass appetite for fiction (novels, serials, radio, film, TV) so intense that people live inside invented worlds for hours a day, weakening creativity, confusing expectations of real history with movie plots, and driving “rising expectations” that demand instant utopia; consequently, society’s validation has drifted from God and objective order to pure desire “what I dream, what I want” leaving theology and economics unable to persuade a culture that no longer recognizes external meaning, and culminating in therapeutic man who seeks pleasure rather than salvation (Rieff) and in nihilistic thinkers like Michael Novak who deny stable selfhood and admit life is only chosen “myths,” yet cannot justify why one myth (his) is better than another (Hitler’s); the end-state is cultural and personal breakdown because validation-by-fiction cannot hold, so the only escape is a return to objective meaning ultimately, for Rushdoony, God’s reality without which “salvation” itself becomes unintelligible.