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In my last post, I discussed Roberto Calasso’s notion that secular humans are existential tourists whose freedom comes at the cost of stable meaning and purpose. Taken out of its immediate context, the great diversity that is the parade of life becomes unnamable. An individual may respond to this situation in a variety of manners. In this essay, I sketch our subsequent culture of amusement through consumerism, the narcissism of identity games, and drug usage as responses to the unnamable present.
What exactly has homo saecularis lost? Philosopher Robert Pippin provides a helpful lens when he elucidates how characters in American Film Noir of the 1940s and ‘50s show us ‘literally what it looks like and what it feels like to live in a world where the experience of our agency has begun to shift’ (p.22). He argues, quite convincingly, that ‘art is an aesthetic form of self-knowledge…that engages our affective and imaginative lives’ (p. 24), and that in this cinematic genre we perceive our own modern dilemma: the drama of agency in the shadow of fate.
I would like to draw a further connection to the situation of Goethe’s Faust, where we encounter an “exploration of how human life unfolds when it emancipates itself from the ordinations of tradition and embarks on a project of energetic self-assertion and self-optimization” (David Wellbery, 2014). It is a “creative destruction” that emanates from a “metaphysical homelessness” to which Wellbery directs us in the play. Modernity is a duplicitous consciousness consisting of the ability to step outside one’s self to view, with cynicism, our reality of infinite self-creation—fettered to conflict-laden finitude. Indeed, as the Lord tells Mephistopheles, “men err as long as they keep striving” (Prologue in Heaven, line 317).
The role of agency, and the sensation of exerting free will, is crucial to leading a life whose value and meaning take place in the context of humanism, that elevated conception of mankind. On a practical level, humanism refers to the Liberal Arts: rhetoric, ethics, grammar, history, and poetry; the very tradition it is a college educator’s responsibility to impart to students. These threads of Renaissance culture continue as wisdom traditions which imply, as Petrarch wrote, that there is nothing a human has accomplished that is not worthy of our interest. Secularism is considered by many a continuation of Renaissance Humanism. And yet, in between us and the origins of humanism lies the industrial revolution, the rise of the nation-state, and countless other elements of modernity.
Humanism has come under attack from several directions, including notably by groups of individuals, like colonized peoples and subjugated members of society, who feel left out of humanist formulations as Western civilization writ large. Nevertheless, humanism provided a staging ground for a tremendous amount of rich and edifying cultural products about the human condition, from which we still draw to frame meaning and ethics in our lives.
While humanism is still eminently relevant, transformations in our notions of equality and the validity of notions of agency are chipping away at it’s foundation. Indeed, philosopher John Gray argues humanism is just a secular religion thrown together from the decaying scraps of Christianity. In the 19th century, Arthur Schopenhauer similarly sought to dissolve core elements of humanism—like personal identity, free will, and moral autonomy—by postulating a sort of universal will which courses through all forms of life.
Some of the arguments against humanism are old, and some which integrate knowledge gleaned from the scientific method are new. What are our contemporary responses to such challenges to humanism and agency in the unnamable present?
One response to existential confusion is a decadent hedonism of ‘let’s enjoy it while it lasts.’ Indeed, John Gray argues that the function of the new economy is furnishing legal and illegal methods to entertain and distract a population which, though busier than ever before, secretly suspects that what it is doing is useless (p. 160).
As I have discussed elsewhere, drugs offer one such tool to entertain, distract, amplify, or attenuate our gregariousness and productivity. They serve as release valves for labor and social relations, therein selectively reducing or augmenting our sense of personal agency. They also serve as a form of deviance and transgression which imparts a blip of jouissance within the capitalist churn of the Christian era.
To fill the modern void created by boredom or a loss of desire or meaning in the world, we can in the words of Neil Postman, ‘amuse ourselves to death’ with cultural products like movies, TV shows, and other theatrical pleasures. John Gray claims these new vices are prophylactics against the loss of desire which is the chief threat to affluent society (p. 163). As Roberto Calasso argues in The Unnamable Present, homo saecularis craves antidotes to the boredom of living in a rootless world.
In addition to drugs and the spectral amusements of media, an individual can bask in the unending intrigue of her own identity. The thrill of transformation, documentation, and self-presentation provides a panoply of games to draw in one’s interest and attention. By harnessing effort across media towards creating the documentary of her life, one can curate presentations of her self within the consumer cosmos of taste to be viewed once she departs the earth.
Within this form of response to boredom, the merchants of attention in Silicon Valley create tools to pursue our basic self-centeredness, with beeps and buzzes of social endearment that speak directly to our vanity. This cycle has its momentary fascinations, as does gossip. But a permanent Reality TV reality is only spreading into a sensationalism of gestures within the void, from deranged individuals carrying out murder for fame to unqualified television personalities taking on positions of power.
In a future installment, I will contemplate the roots of humanism and consider whether it has a chance against the forces of amusement and vanity created to fill the void of desire at the heart of homo saecularis.
References
Calasso, Roberto (2018). The Unnamable Present. USA: MacMillan books.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von (2014). Faust I & II. Introduction by David E. Wellbery. Princeton University Press.
Gray, John (2002). Straw Dogs: Thoughts on humans and other animals. USA: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Pippin, Robert (2010). Nietzsche, Psychology, and First philosophy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
