Individualism and Human Rights

Contemporary secularism’s attempt to eliminate God from public life has also led to the erasure of the concrete human person from that sphere and his replacement with a legal abstraction that dissolves under analysis and criticism. It is doubtful that human beings can establish a code that effectively protects their lives and rights if they overlook the most fundamental aspect of that life: that it is a gift, not just any available good, and that man is not the master of the universe but a contingent being and a creature.

The Freedom That Kills

According to Pavel Florensky¹, the “fundamental difficulty” of ancient metaphysics lies in how to reconcile unity with multiplicity.

Applied to the field of politics, this means figuring out how to integrate the unity of a nation, an institution, or a people with the multiplicity and pluralism of the differences that are part of it—namely, citizens, intermediate institutions, ethnic groups, and minorities.

A major transformation has taken place: for Plotinus, the One preceded being in ontological dignity. For postmodernists, all reality is an infinite difference where richness consists in not participating in a universal—that is, in nothing that is common to all.