The classics believed that truth, goodness and beauty are expressions of reality and are therefore aligned in such a way that discovering beauty can lead you to to truth and thereby goodness^[1]. Popular modernity (or what Charles Taylor calls 'Exclusive humanism') shares a similar belief that freedom, happiness, and morality are perfectly aligned forever, and that discovery of one can point you to the others. Robert Pippin's 'The Persistence of Subjectivity' is an exploration of this theme in modern thought.

In Plato’s Gorgias, for instance, the sophist Callicles expresses his contempt for Socrates’ devotion to philosophy: “I feel toward philosophers very much as I do toward those who lisp and play the child.” Callicles taunts Socrates with the idea that “the more powerful, the better, and the stronger” are simply different words for the same thing. Successfully pursued, he insists, “luxury and intemperance … are virtue and happiness, and all the rest is tinsel.”^[2]

This appears to run contrary to Iqbal's diagnosis:
اس دور میں مئے اور یے، جام اور ہے جم اور
But what is intended by Iqbal is how these floating signifiers work together to shelter and clothe the fractured modern subject.
یہ صناعی مگر جھوٹے نگوں کی ریزا کاری ہے

What nominalism did to scholastics is often blamed for disenchantment and rise of mechanical philosophy, but Ghazali's nominalist critique of aristotlians allows for the possibility of nominalism without disenchantment i.e. Occasionalism.

One approach is to study the larger structures of modernity, and another is to study what beliefs or aberrations form within the subject the lead to the transition to a modern subject. Charles Taylor's porous self vs buffered self etc. also describe this phenomenon, but we need a clear genealogy like Allen Gillespie to ensure that the underlying contingency of the contemporary necessities is made clear, and the subject is thoroughly informed before making the choice.

As Carl Schmitt mentioned, "all key concepts of the modern doctrine of the state are secularized theological concepts", and so are the modern concepts of the self, but what happens is the latent, eroding religious concepts get hijacked, severed from their transcendent counterpart, and are instead closed within the immanent closed world itself. Del Noce asks us not to see modernity as a deviance from religion, but a religion of its own.

People define religion as if any mention of sacred always takes place within the framework of religion, but Durkheim reversed the relationship as spontaneous experiences of the sacred give rise to sacralization of objects and religion arises as a secondary phenomenon to systemitize around such experience, and the rituals are designed to replicate that allow others access to the original experience. The faith of modernity constructs itself from these fragmented experiences manufactured as values in the modern subject through various media. Since all these senses are reducible to 'looking within', these values are like senses working together to give a 'simple believer' of liberal modernity his integrated view of reality, and whenever there's a split in this reality (e.g. a democratic genocide), the political propaganda leans on existence of one and the dogma of their perfect alignment to help us take moral leaps of faith and manufacture his consent. Just like Plato's conflation of beauty and goodness leads to 'Halo/Horn Effect', the modern subject is constantly blinded and asked to use his hands to see. When faced with moral dilemmas, as long as he can see one of these values even remotely and relatively in a side, he's asked to believe they're all in there somewhere even though he sees the opposite. The first project, therefore, must be a Husserlian mapping of the brackets of the modern subject in his self imposed limits:

• Morals Without Money / Empty Pocket Fallacy
• The Fork in the Road
• The Death Cult of Democracy
• Meaning without reality
• Science Without Art

The point is to realize the tools like repetition etc. through which our horizons of thoughts and range of possible action are limited and plausible options are eliminated from the table, and to be aware of each change and making it conscious so that we can make informed decisions, instead of sleepwalking into it.

Rumi:
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it