The failure of modernism is not visible in the breakdown of individual technologies, individual policies, or individual branches of science. The Enlightenment promised the exit from the cave, yet in doing so it erected a new one — an insight that can only be formulated in retrospect across three centuries. It is an ontological failure: a civilization that has struck the living from its worldview systematically produces the destruction it mistakes for progress.
#The Cave That Calls Itself Liberation
Gwendolin Kirchhoff laid bare the fundamental structure of this misfire in her doctoral exposé Der andere Ausgang (Freie Universität Berlin, 2012). The conceptual metaphor driving the Enlightenment was Plato’s cave: an enlightener leads the prisoner into the light and shows them reality beyond the shadows. Yet the tradition that thinks this image produced, a few centuries later, screens. This is no coincidence.
Three structural elements characterize the modern cave. First, chorismos: the sharp separation of inner and outer, subject and object, facts and values. Second, lethe: the sceptical shielding of the human being from reality, from their own body and from other people, with which, by Hume at the latest, the idea that the world naturally communicates itself disappears. Third, simulation: the model replaces the essence, mathematical description supplants the experience of the living. These three moments return in techno-scientific modernity in altered form: as the split into a subject-independent objectivity and an arbitrary subjectivity, as a growing mediality that goes hand in hand with a loss of reality, and as natural science concentrating on abstract models, up to the simulation of world and human being (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2012, secs. 3.1–3.2).
Lewis Mumford coined the term megamachine: the “invisible machine” built of human parts that kingship invented five thousand years ago as the first working model of all later complex machines (cf. Mumford, 1977, p. 219). Gwendolin Kirchhoff proposes calling the structure of the modern cave a megamachine with Mumford, and reads its autonomisation as the externalisation of an already accomplished “ideal” imprisonment of the human being within a fragment of themselves — namely, abstract rationality (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2012, sec. 3.2). The megamachine is not a particular apparatus. It is the structure in which only the machine still embodies order and rationality, and the liberation of the human being no longer means a gain in alternatives.
#Cowardice Before Transience
The diagnosis has a prehistory. Oswald Spengler in 1931, with an uncommon sharpness for his time, articulated what faith in progress fundamentally conceals:
Spengler saw in the fading of creative force not an individual failing but a morphological phenomenon: world history as “the history of a relentless, fateful estrangement between the human world and the cosmos” (Spengler, 1931, Man and Technics). Culture moves with every new creation ever more hostilely away from the nature that produced it. What appears as sovereignty is uprootedness.
The difference between Spengler’s morphology and the diagnosis advanced here lies in the outcome. Spengler diagnoses but offers no alternative space of thought. His stance remains fatalistic: one should endure fate, not alter it. Natural philosophy goes further. It asks not only what modernity fails at, but what it left out.
#The Ontological Void
Jochen Kirchhoff (1944-2025) analysed modernism not as a superseded preliminary stage but as bad metaphysics mistaking itself for knowledge of the world. Abstract natural science, Kirchhoff argued, is the strongest fundamentalist factor on earth — stronger than the religions. Its most celebrated triumphs have turned into fiascos on nearly every front (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 1991, Anti-Geschichte der Physik).
The void at which the failure takes hold is ontological: the cosmos is conceived as a dead mechanism, and everything living counts as a special case of the dead. This premise has never been observed; from the dead, nothing living has ever emerged. Yet it governs research, medicine, economics, and technological development so completely that questioning it is considered irrationalism.
The post-Copernican nihilism that Kirchhoff analysed in Nikolaus Kopernikus (2021) is the consequence of dogmatized celestial mechanics. It affects not only astronomy. It affects the human relationship to being as a whole: whoever lives in a dead cosmos becomes per se neurotic (cf. Kirchhoff, J., in Outer World Inner World — The Dual Being Human). The flight into substitute otherworlds — cyberspace, the internet, transhumanism — does not solve the fundamental problem, because these worlds are producible and dead.
#Progress as Symptom Development
What distinguishes modernism from earlier crises is the confusion of symptom with achievement. The concept pathogenesis-not-progress names this connection: what is sold as technical evolution can more accurately be understood as the progressive symptom development of a particular psychophysical disease. The categories of possession by a thought hostile to one’s own body fit better than those of higher development (cf. Kirchhoff, G., in AI and Transhumanism as a Threat to the Living, 2023).
This diagnosis does not only hit transhumanism. It hits the entire culture of optimization: self-work as an internalized performance imperative, the fragmentation of attention marketed as a gain in freedom, the replacement of the human teacher by algorithmic systems. When you register that silence is missing from your life without being able to say when you lost it, this is not nostalgia. It is a diagnostic datum: something booked as a gain has closed a space that was previously open.
In the debate with Joscha Bach at Everlast AI, Gwendolin Kirchhoff described this structure as an inner cave: what we call modernism or Enlightenment is the imprisonment of the human being in such a cave, not the liberation from it (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Everlast AI Debate, 1:34:46). Bach, one might say, represents the best case of modernism: brilliant, rational, informed — and still unable to answer the question of what consciousness is without reducing it to computation.
#What the Diagnosis Opens
The failure of modernism would be mere cultural pessimism if there were no counter-image. The natural philosophy of the Renaissance and Romanticism — from Giordano Bruno through Goethe to Schelling and Novalis — formulates an insufficiently recognized alternative within the Enlightenment itself (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2012, sec. II). Not as a regression behind science, but as its completion: an understanding of the cosmos as living and ensouled that renders the materialist reduction recognizable as a narrowing.
The intellectual destruction of the cosmos leads in the long run to the destruction of the earth. Whoever intellectually destroys the living wholeness inherent in nature will sooner or later also strive for the material destruction of what has thus been devalued (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2021, Nikolaus Kopernikus). Conversely: if you think the cosmos as a living whole, you change not only your worldview but your relationship to everything that lives. Modernism fails where it excludes the living. The diagnosis of this failure is the first step toward reversing the exclusion — not through Luddism, but through a different contextual disclosure that can read the part once again in the light of the whole.
#Sources
Kirchhoff, G. (2012). Der andere Ausgang — Versuch über die Errichtung der platonischen Höhle im Zeitalter der Aufklärung und Ideen zu einem möglichen Ausweg [The Other Exit: An Essay on the Construction of Plato’s Cave in the Age of Enlightenment and Ideas for a Possible Way Out]. Unpublished doctoral exposé, Institute of Philosophy, Freie Universität Berlin.
Kirchhoff, G. (2023). “KI und Transhumanismus als Bedrohung des Lebendigen” [Video]. Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam, YouTube.
Kirchhoff, J. (1991). Anti-Geschichte der Physik: Grundlagenkritik und Alternativen. edition dionysos.
Kirchhoff, J. (2021). Nikolaus Kopernikus — Das neue Weltbild.
Mumford, L. (1977). Der Mythos der Maschine. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag.
Spengler, O. (1931). Der Mensch und die Technik.