From the perspective of the self-determining and self-creating subject whose history we traced with respect to some important traditions in the preceding chapters, a number of basic judgments about antiquity emerged. I would like to briefly summarize and recapitulate these once again.

From this perspective, antiquity as a whole appears as an age characterized by an untroubled faith in a comprehensive, “natural” order to the world. This “naïve” faith is the enemy that is criticized in the most varied areas and from various standpoints in early modernity. The starting point for this opposition is the view that this idea of a universal order is linked to an uncritical attitude toward the subjectivity of cognition and an estrangement of the individual from itself. The individual in antiquity seems — one only needs to recall the citation from Vico at the beginning of the first part — not to have freed himself from his dependency on external being nor does he seem to have arrived at a knowledge of the autonomy of his own interior existence or of the interplay between subject and object, between the internal and the external, between the self and the world. That is why early modernity, in a series of renewed attempts, characterizes its essential goal as the liberation of the individual from this naïve dependency on an external order and constantly seeks renewed legitimation of the insight into the absoluteness of the subjective, constructivist character of being and cognition.