In the beginning was not the Word, but the trick. Western consciousness, one might say, was born on the night of Troy—that mythical primal scene in which cunning, deception, and instrumental rationality were first put to the test as tools of self-assertion.

The walls of Troy did not collapse because they were weak, but because the human spirit learned to master matter through cunning. Already here, the tension that has since shaped the history of Western thought was foreshadowed: the increase in control over the world stands in direct proportion to alienation from it. This relationship—as we shall see—is not contingent, but necessary. The evolution of the human episteme has proceeded under the premise of a misunderstanding: humankind has repeatedly confused its growing capacity to instrumentalize the world with an “improvement" of itself. The Trojan Horse is the first allegory of a process that inevitably culminates in Hiroshima: a path that was always celebrated as progress reveals itself, in retrospect, as a path of self-endangerment.

Instrumental Reason: From Cunning to Domination

The cunning of Odysseus, that archetypal embodiment of intelligence, is not merely a narrative climax, but an epistemic principle: from the very beginning, intelligence has meant viewing the world as something that can be made available. This fundamental attitude is not only the seed of Western science but also the ethos of a culture that defines itself by its ability to manipulate its environment.

With the Enlightenment, this process attains its self-reflection. The world is demystified, the universe is mechanized, and humanity appoints itself the rational architect of its own destiny. Yet as humanity breaks nature down into equations, the distance from it grows simultaneously. The myth that knowledge is power obscures the fact that this power always takes the form of a shattering: the walls of Troy, the shattered horizons of colonial empires, and finally nuclear fission, which finds its apocalyptic expression in Hiroshima.

The Christian-Western tradition, however much it morally distances itself from the idea of progress, has paradoxically paved the way for this path. Its metaphysical duality—the Above against the Below, the Spiritual against the Carnal, the Good against the Evil—has nourished the attitude that conceives of the world as a counterpart to be dominated. The digitally apotheotic progress of technical reason, which now once again accelerates everything, thus becomes a stepping-away from unity with the world. Humanity splits not only the atom, but also itself—into a subject that “knows" and a nature that is “dominated."

Hiroshima: The Culmination of the Misunderstanding

With the splitting of the atomic nucleus and the neuromorphic fission of consciousness, the irony of this progress becomes apparent. In an act of utmost precision, which brings together all the knowledge of the Western episteme, the world is not enriched, but endangered.

Robert Oppenheimer's famous quote from the Bhagavad Gita—“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"—is not merely an expression of personal upheaval, but the paradoxical self-realization of a civilization that recognizes itself in the destruction of its very foundations.

Artificial nuclear fusion and the separation of biological consciousness from itself are more than intellectual self-transcendences; they are instruments of annihilation; they are the mathematically materialized metaphors of Western intellectual history. They demonstrate that progress, which has always been understood as self-elevation, has always also been a process of self-endangerment. Technical rationality, which triumphed from Troy to Hiroshima, reveals itself in its triumph as life-threatening hubris.

One might consider this portrayal of the history of instrumental consciousness exaggerated in light of its undisputed partial successes, were we not currently witnessing its successful application in realpolitik.

(Without the threat of the atomic bomb, there would likely be little of this paranoid helplessness of democracies in the face of the world's potentates.)

The Present: The Final Stop of Progress?

This shows: we are living today in the afterpains of this process. What we call progress has lost its innocence. The awareness that every technical innovation, alongside its inherent promise, carries within it a potential catastrophe has become an integral part of our present. Digitalization, biotechnology, artificial intelligence—all these advances show that the path of instrumentalization cannot be undone, but rather leads us into a new phase of uncertainty.

What remains is the question of whether humanity will ever see through the misunderstanding that has shaped its history. Can it decouple progress from the self-endangerment it itself perpetuates? Or will it, like Troy, like Hiroshima, like all civilizations before it, perish by its own cunning?

Perhaps the answer lies not, however well-intentioned, in another step forward, but in self-recollection. The evolution of consciousness may have set a direction, yet history shows that any progress not accompanied by simultaneous reflection remains blind.

From Troy to Hiroshima: it is the story of an illusion—and perhaps the last chance to see through its Trojan nature.

This final challenge is described by the philosopher and writer Wolfram Eilenberger in his lucid essay “The Presence of Philosophy." He calls for—not only for the discipline, one must add—“self-enlightenment in the mode of disillusionment, even open heresy."

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