“As geography is transcended, the feverish antipathy between ‘somewheres’ and ‘anywheres’ stands to be sublated…in that, from the standpoint of cyber-space, ‘somewhere’ already means ‘anywhere’.”
As the age of global economic governance makes way for a new age of “economic distancing,” two different but complementary trends take center stage. On the one hand, the neoliberal model of minimal government inaugurated in the 1980s has started to cohabitate with renewed forms of regionalist, quasi-Hobbesian statism, as the totalitarian capitalism of the “crystal palace” (“the global dream” of “a transparent, enlightened space without borders”) buckles under the pressures exerted by its own unwieldy globalist logistics. On the other, at the very moment when “countries turn inward and global companies shorten their super-efficient but highly fragile supply chains,” digitization seems to be reaching a new zenith in its long career, with the Fourth Industrial Revolution, centered around artificial intelligence, threatening to replace the sprawling “car cities” of yore with distributed “cyber cities”, which will purportedly “transcend geography” as such. What the simultaneity of these trends reveals is the illusory nature of the “turn inward,” which is better understood as a synthesis between formerly salient opposites. As geography is transcended, the feverish antipathy between “somewheres” and “anywheres” stands to be sublated (to use the polysemic Hegelian term) in turn—in that, from the standpoint of cyber-space, “somewhere” already means “anywhere.”
What our brave new world brings to the fore may well be the consummation of what Henry Adams thought would be the Ethereal Phase of human history, when “a change from the material to the immaterial” enables the contingent and the solvent to maximally intersect. What this would mean in terms of metaphysics is the final immanentization of an old deific motif. As Walter Russel Mead put it recently in his marvelous essay on the possible rise of the cyber city: “Like the description of God sometimes attributed to the philosopher Empedocles, the distributed city can be compared to an infinite circle whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere. The city and the countryside will be integrated, with human beings able to live anywhere from dense urban cores to remote rural retreats while fully participating in the economic, cultural, and political dimensions of urban life.” The infinite circle whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere, seems to have entered the lexicon of the modern West in the age of Giordano Bruno and later, Blaise Pascal, when it was first applied to nature instead of God. Since then, it has arguably served as the descriptor par excellence of the Faustian insatiability and limitlessness of modern subjectivity. The cyber city would complete the metaphorical evolution by finally integrating the limitless into the punctum of everyday life (as previously only totalitarianisms have tried to do, albeit unsuccessfully).
Central to this evolution, as intimated earlier, is the rollout of advanced artificial intelligence, the prospect of which has already ensorcelled the rising Dionyso-promethean coalition. Influential organizations like the World Economic Forum have been singing the same tune a while longer, emphasizing the pivotal role that “paradigm-shifting” developments in generative artificial intelligence (AI) will play in the coming transformations of industry, employment, and urban life more generally. As we continue our ascent to ethereality, the Midas touch of AI (and digitization more generally) is expected to affect more and more facets of our human condition, extending the logic of “civil society” (bürgerlichen Gesellschaft) to every as yet (miraculously) untouched nook and cranny of the modern lifeworld.
On some accounts, the coming transformations are likely to stimulate “a return to stronger communities and a recentering of human life on neighborhoods and families.” From a purely pragmatic perspective, this makes intuitive sense: by countering the spatiotemporal displacement imposed by urban sprawls with virtual ubiquity, the regional effectively becomes the cosmopolitan, such that the most obvious tensions between the two are expected to vanish. But we may well wonder whether the regional, by acquiring a cosmopolitan character, would not be wholly transfigured in its own right (and vice versa, as cosmopolitanism becomes its own kind of parochialism; as “the provincialism of the pampered” becomes provincialism tout court). If as Karl Marx puts it, the logic of civil society implies that “the social connection between persons is transformed into a social relation between things,” then it remains to be seen whether the solvency of the Ethereal Phase can be harmonized with “stronger communities,” the fabric of which, after all, is woven from “relations of personal dependence.” Just as Marx described communism as an artificial “community of free individuals,” the cyber city is expected to harmonize the sturdiness of community with the fluidity, the freedom of cyber-space, even to facilitate the former by means of the latter. Whether any of this is possible, depends a lot on the logic of alchemy—which, historically speaking, has not had the best track record, to say the least.
The Supremacy of Language
Civil society and liberalism are coextensive. Regardless of whether a nation or society self-describes as liberal, as long as the dynamics of civil society prevail there, liberalism has either left its mark or exists embryonically (even if it has not been fully integrated as a self-consistent modus vivendi; “pseudomorphisms”, after all, are legion). To the extent that the ongoing integration of artificial intelligence is set to fulfill the promise of civil society, it completes the project of liberalism (casting serious doubt on the notion that a “postliberal order” might be around the corner). But the prospect of liberalism’s completion by way of artificial intelligence is itself predicated on the prior’s ulterior affinity with the latter, and relatedly, as Vincent Garton argues, on liberalism’s peculiar obsession with speech.
Based on the observation that “the most fundamental political claim of liberalism has always been the right to freedom of speech, to tolerance of the expression of opposing opinions,” Garton identifies liberalism—notoriously a parliamentary politics (with “parliament” deriving from parler, meaning “to speak”)—as “the supremacy of language.” Garton’s understanding of liberalism reiterates what Marx was driving at when he remarked on modern philosophers’ tendency to characterize “the reign of ideas…[as] the peculiarity of the new age.” The simple fact that civil society is animated above all by relations of “personal independence founded on objective dependence” (the money relation), avers Marx, is enough to create the illusion “that individuals are now ruled by abstractions, whereas earlier they depended on one another.” The reign of ideas, or abstractions, may well be an illusion, but illusions have their own reality. The supremacy of language, though grounded in a set of concrete “material relations,” technologies, habits, and practices, is precisely the reality of this illusion, which dissolves everything “in the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign,” just as “money is the universal self-established value of all things,” which “has…robbed the whole world…of its specific value.”
What Garton calls “liberalism” is perhaps more aptly described as the “parasitism of opinion on thought”—if we are to borrow a delightful turn of phrase scrounged up in one of Roberto Calasso’s byzantine tomes—or, as Garton himself suggests, as “sophistry”, which is the same thing. Sophistry famously maintains “that contradiction is impossible.” Garton, together with the Russo-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève, sees the same impossibility reflected in modern liberal philosophy; more specifically, in Kant, in whose system “[all] philosophical positions are, in the end, reduced indifferently to the various articulations of [the] critical method,” such that “to speak with Kant is to speak endlessly, to speak forever without ever contradicting oneself.” Not being able to contradict oneself reinforces “a regime of unparadoxical language,” a regime capable of incredible generosity only because it explodes, rips up everything that enters its interpretive sphere (just as money, by valuing all things, “degrades all the gods of man—and turns them into commodities”). In Garton’s telling, artificial intelligence, especially under the guise of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, signals “the definitive automation of liberalism’s central activity: the production of language.” Once completed, artificial intelligence will “truly [be capable] of expressing anything, and as such would be impossible to contradict,” thus vindicating the sophist.
On a Kojèvian reading—which Garton seemingly entertains—the eclipse of thought by opinion through artificial intelligence causes human discourse itself to disappear: “Animals of the species Homo sapiens…[will] react by conditioned reflexes to vocal signals or sign ‘language,’ and thus their so-called ‘discourses’ would be like what is supposed to be the ‘language’ of bees.” At the end of history, an endless buzzing, but also the impossibility of assuming real “positions,” as any position anywhere in the infinite circle is as good as any other. The Kojèvian outcome, the bee-topia, promises “authentic synthesis,” in the same vein as Marx’ “community of free individuals” (or the cyber city’s supposed harmonization of somewhere and anywhere). This, shall we say, is the happy outcome—the outcome Nietzsche alluded to when he spoke of the “last man”: “The earth hath then become small, and on it there hoppeth the last man who maketh everything small. His species is ineradicable like that of the ground-flea; the last man liveth longest. ‘We have discovered happiness’—say the last men, and blink thereby.”
An alternative exists which, ironically enough, contradicts the Kojèvian outcome. Garton himself alluded to this alternate possibility in an earlier essay. There, instead of instituting “artificial intelligence as state-form,” the rapid onset of “total technology” and the reification of the infinite circle—the latter, both spatiotemporally and linguistically, in the sense of AI speaking “incessantly, but without novelty, that is, in a circle”—point toward the “obsolescence of the state form itself, the self-overcoming of the Hobbesian era.” Garton’s language is very precise, for what the eclipse of thought by opinion entails is indeed a self-overcoming. It is the full working-out of the material and ideological premises of civil society, the self-negation of the modern state-form on account of the historical forces it sought both to suppress and to integrate. In lieu of aimless, reflexive buzzing, we are confronted with “an enthusiasm that will be absolute,” a thoroughgoing anti-statism plunging us back into “the expansive flux of the deep, green sea.” Here, opinion is revealed not as the empty talk that propels everyday society, the listless chitter-chatter that will go on forever, but as a thrumming of mantic voices, the doomful swell of the chorus prophesying the return of the “catastrophic occultist”—the very same shadowy figure that had terrified Thomas Hobbes at the beginning of the modern era, when Europe was embroiled in brutal religious conflicts between various “enthusiastic sects.” Talking endlessly, it seems, was a way of drowning out those men and women “throughout human history who have claimed that God could speak through them,” thereby neutering their madness for the benefit of the commonwealth.
Drawing on a potent mixture of Christian voluntarism and epicureanism, Hobbes—the emblematic thinker of the era of the liberal state—bequeathed a political legacy that denies the possibility of “objective reason” for fear of “men that think themselves wiser than all others.” Intellection of ultimate ends was replaced by greater or lesser calculative ability, in that “Reason…is nothing but Reckoning.” Similarly, “for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature,” what could previously still be discovered in the order of things, must now be the consequence of agreement or convention alone. Wanton opinion, itself the cause of so much strife, at once became the law of the land. To understand how a state-form founded on more or less arbitrary agreements dissolves once again into a cesspool of ecstatic enthusiasms, and, more importantly, how artificial intelligence contributes to this dissolution, we must now turn neither to Hobbes, nor to Kant, but to David Hume, Hobbes’ one true successor.
Hume is relevant for the dual reason that he is both a significant exponent of the liberal tradition and one of the earliest modern thinkers to have formulated the cognitive theory underpinning advanced forms of artificial intelligence—two facts which, unsurprisingly, are not unrelated. (As Garton writes, correctly to my mind: “The last word may well be the enthronement of the large language model as the archetypal form of ‘artificial intelligence’, a circumstance that could only have been accomplished under liberalism.”) Hume’s psychology is “associationist” and modern neural networks, and LLMs in particular, are at bottom (very) complex computational associators, whose cognitive activity is modelled in terms of the associations or connections that are formed between artificial neurons.
Liberalism and Associationism
Associationist psychology is structurally “liberal” in the sense that it is essentially, as Simone Weil notes, a species of “psychological atomism” (l’atomisme psychologique) just as liberalism proceeds from the assumption of social atomism. More significantly, both associationism and liberalism—which may hence be dubbed political associationism—are epicurean conceptions, epicureanism being the primary ancient source of most modern ideas. As Marx informs us: “it is sufficient to mention that the idea that the state rests on the mutual agreement of people, on a contrat social…is found for the first time in Epicurus.” The specific passage to which Marx is referring in the epicurean corpus can be found in the Principal Doctrines: “Natural justice is a pledge guaranteeing mutual advantage, to prevent one from harming others and to keep oneself from being harmed.” The word Epicurus uses to denote this so-called “pledge” is suntheke, which can mean either a convention or (again, not surprisingly) a compounding of words or sentences. Following this, we can say that associationism, either political or psychological, is inherently synthetic, in that individuals, elementa (whether persons, ideas, or linguistic rudiments) are said to gradually convene, i.e., compound, via associations. In both cases, the individual, the atom, the elementum, is the primary unit.
But, as Weil notes, “making associations is not the original [mental] fact.” In fact, “we begin by making dissociations.” Thinking starts from blobby clusters of mental detritus, vague generalities, and intuitions, and only very gradually manages to parse out the particular and the precise. (Even liberalism starts out as every modern child’s unconscious modus vivendi, and only becomes a conscious ethos, with various concrete attributes and affordances, once one has had the good fortune of an encounter with philosophy—i.e., with thought, as opposed to opinion. As George Steiner puts it, more brilliantly than I ever could: “Responsibly defined—we lack a signal term—serious thought is a rare occurrence. The discipline which it requires, the abstentions from facility and disorder, are very rarely or not at all in reach of the vast majority. Most of us are hardly cognizant of what it is ‘to think,’ to transmute the bric-a-brac, the shopworn refuse of our mental currents into ‘thought.’”) Marx made a similar observation regarding what he called the “unimaginative conceits of the 18th-century Robinsonades,” which, like Rousseau’s contrat social and Hobbes’ Leviathan (two of the most enduring modern variations on the epicurean political project), mistakenly envisioned “naturally independent, autonomous subjects [brought] into relation and connection by contract.” Channeling Aristotle, Marx set the record straight by insisting that the “human being is in the most literal sense a zoon politikon, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.” Or in other words, similar to what really happens in the realm of psychology, political individuation takes place post festum, not as a pregiven.
The result of this unfortunate inversion is a conventionalist worldview that offers little reprieve from private madness. Because genuine thought is made impossible within an associationist paradigm—as Weil notes, under associationism, “the activity of human thought is nothing but a conglomeration of representations”—just as ultimate ends are deemed illusory from the standpoint of conventional, that is to say, civil society, communion based on the spiritual intimacy between intelligent souls (spiritual commonwealth) is precluded by design. Fortunately (though it seems, fruitlessly), some of the more troubling consequences of this hapless arrangement became apparent already very early on.
John Locke, hardly a stranger to the liberal canon (but perhaps a more ambiguous entry therein), is often considered a precursor of Hume with respect to the elaboration of associationist psychology. To be sure, there is much in Locke that is very congenial to a Humean reading, but, at least as far as associationism itself is concerned, he seems to have been just a tad more ambivalent than “le bon David.” Similar to other scathing critiques of associationism, such as the one made by Samuel Taylor Coleridge when he compared the “phantasmal chaos of association” to the “nervous fever” of a blathering young woman apparently possessed by a “very learned devil,” what Locke saw reflected in the tangle of associated ideas was an image of the raving mind that foregoes careful discernment and consideration.
Like Hume, Locke starts from psychological atomism in that he considers the “reception of simple ideas” to be the primary psychological mechanism, a mechanism in which “the understanding” has a “merely passive,” even a powerless, role to play. Indeed, “the mind is forced to receive the impressions; and cannot avoid the perception of those ideas that are annexed to them.” But contrary to Hume, who believed that “in the course of our thinking, and in the constant revolution of our ideas, our imagination runs easily from one idea to any other that resembles it, and that this quality alone is to the fancy a sufficient bond and association,” Locke was more cautious, taking care to emphasize the active involvement of our faculties in arriving at fruitful (“natural”) associations. Although Locke also believed that ultimately “even large and abstract ideas are derived from sensation or reflection, being no other than what the mind, by the ordinary use of its own faculties, employed about ideas received from objects of sense, or from the operations it observes in itself about them, may, and does, attain unto,” he was wary of the mind’s tendency to form wayward “[connections] of ideas wholly owing to chance or custom.” Such connections or associations, Locke insisted, may account for a “Degree of Madness found in most Men,” in that they “come to be so united in some men’s minds, that it is very hard to separate them,” even if they should prove to be “a great Cause of Errors,” and of much grief besides.
What Locke had in mind when referring to a “Degree of Madness found in most Men” was very similar to what Hobbes feared in the enthusiast: “Some such wrong and unnatural combinations of ideas will be found to establish the irreconcilable opposition between different sects of philosophy and religion; for we cannot imagine every one of their followers to impose willfully on himself, and knowingly refuse truth offered by plain reason.” What captivates men otherwise sound of mind is precisely the proclivity for arbitrary associations to take hold of them when overwhelmed by enthusiastic fervor: “some independent ideas, of no alliance to one another, are, by education, custom, and the constant din of their party, so coupled in their minds, that they always appear there together.” Fervency of this sort, often further inflamed by charismatic, sophistical displays, makes it almost impossible for wisdom to prevail: “When two things, in themselves disjoined, appear to the sight constantly united; if the eye sees these things riveted which are loose, where will you begin to rectify the mistakes that follow?” The arbitrary character of the conventions Hobbes deemed necessary for the maintenance of peace over and against idiosyncratic claims of good and evil—the endless “Captions of Words, and Inventions how to puzzle”—thus preserves, or actually, stems from, the arbitrariness of the “great diversity of taste,” where “nothing [is] generally agreed on;” and so, what shines through the enameled edifices upholding the commonwealth is once again the spectral outline of the “Kingdom of Darkness,” the “Confederacy of Deceivers,” brimming, as always, with “Daemons, Phantasmes…Spirits of Illusion.”
Dark Enchantment in the Global Village
In the final analysis, sectarian madness and bourgeois convenience both issue from the same relativistic, conventionalist, associationist fount. The myriad ways they come to resemble one another more closely are there for all to see on even the briefest of sojourns along the gulfs of cyber-space. The quintessential feature of life online is a subtle and not-so-subtle kind of derangement, both in the sense of an ambient, depersonalized, decontextualized “banality of evil” (i.e., the casual callousness and cruelty meted out routinely and in utterly thoughtless fashion) and in that of the often febrile attempts—not dissimilar to the obsessive regulation Hobbes envisioned his Leviathan exercising—at controlling the whole mess through calculated, quasi-totalitarian suppression. Online, of course, we actually do encounter one another as radically equal, even pseudonymous, individuals. And LLMs, disembodied, virtual beings as they are, actually do bear witness to the radical consequences of psychological atomism, as reams and reams of digital corpora are ingested with abandon, the LLMs themselves rendered powerless to “avoid the perception of those ideas that are annexed to them.”
The “expansive flux of the deep, green sea” (or, as Coleridge puts it: “a broad stream, winding through a mountainous country with an indefinite number of currents”) which is about to overwhelm the Hobbesian state-form is the very same “phantasmal chaos of association” which was believed to have instituted that state-form to begin with. (As happens so often, the hypothetical origin reappears as the end result.) As the bourgeois wealth machine shifts into high gear, the utmost consequence of our imminent ethereality may well be precisely this: chaos, the very same yawning abyss mentioned in Genesis 1:2; a boundless, phantasmic whorl, with no shoreline to fall back on. The whorl is all interior, virtuality everywhere, or as Adams puts it: “Thought in terms of Ether means only Thought in terms of itself, or, in other words, pure Mathematics and Metaphysics.”
On account of this interiority, itself merely a corollary of endemic virtualization, any claims that we might be witnessing the emergence of a new “post-atomic politics” seem premature. If atomic politics “postulates human individuals as Newtonian atoms,” then post-atomic politics would instead like us to pattern individuals on the postulates of quantum mechanics, recognizing both particle and wave—the wave supposedly expressing an occlusive correction to liberal democracy’s naïve presumption of transparent political representation. But this underestimates the degree to which classical mechanics and quantum mechanics (and their political sequelae) are not in fact discontinuous, but rather, successive. Pure mathematics and metaphysics were an intrinsic feature of atomic physics from the outset. The theoretical distinction between primary and secondary qualities, made explicit by the likes of Descartes and Locke, is already attested to by the great epicurean poet Lucretius in Book II of his De Rerum Natura. Atoms have no sensory (“secondary”) qualities in themselves, which are therefore relative to the observer. Precisely because of the perceptual split engendered by psychological atomism—the fact that “external objects become known to us only by those perceptions they occasion,” which are themselves “without any resemblance to the qualities of the objects”—Hume is able to say: “Let us chase our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appear’d in that narrow compass.” Hume’s narrow compass presages Adams’ description of the Ethereal Phase as “Thought in terms of itself,” just as Lucretius’ “wide inane”—the infinite void in which all atom-streams roil ceaselessly—presages the mare immensum, “the unmeasured main,” which, if Garton is correct, now threatens to submerge us.
A “post-atomic politics…[that needs] to account not just for the particle but also the wave, which is to say form or potentiality,” by taking into consideration wave-particle duality as an ontological commitment, does not swerve away from, but accelerates tendencies already latent in moribund particle politics. As Werner Heisenberg wrote in Physics and Philosophy, in the wake of relativity theory, “we may say that all elementary particles consist of energy,” a statement which, in turn, “could be interpreted as defining energy as the primary substance of the world.” The older, indestructible atoms had a number of tangible, plastic (“primary”) qualities or affectations, such as size, figure, texture, and motion, which had the power “to produce various Sensations in us;” the newer atoms by contrast are inherently more “wave-like” in their energetic capacity: “Energy is in fact that which moves; it may be called the primary cause of all change, and energy can be transformed into matter or heat or light.” As a result, “elementary particles…can actually be transformed into each other.” The “sea of matter” of which Lucretius spoke is now just a sea, an endless flux of mutability—mors immortalis (“immortal death”), “imperishable change, that renovates the world.” Instead of Kojève’s circle, we get Nietzsche’s: “energy everywhere, the play of forces and force-waves, at the same time one and many, agglomerating here and diminishing there, a sea of forces storming and raging in itself, for ever changing, forever rolling back over in calculable ages to recurrence, with an ebb and flow of its forms.” (This is no coincidence either. What Hobbes was to Galileo, and Hume was to Newton, Nietzsche was to Roger Joseph Boscovich, who posited something like a proto-quantum-theory.)
The modern view of the particle further amplifies our alienation from the world; it is in that sense still “more radical.” In addition to having no sound, no smell, no taste, “even the other qualities are taken from the elementary particle”: “the concepts of geometry and kinematics, like shape or motion in space, cannot be applied to it consistently. If one wants to give an accurate description of the elementary particle…the only thing which can be written down as description is a probability function.” As Heisenberg himself admits, “the elementary particle of modern physics is [therefore] still far more abstract than the atom of the Greeks.”
Post-atomic politics, then, is really hyper-atomic politics, just as “the return of participatory meaning” is an exaggeration of the participatory element already inherent in the atomic mode of representation. Instead of ushering in an altogether new era, hyper-atomic politics marks yet another reversal in the civilizational see-saw referred to as the “dialectic of enlightenment,” as once again “enlightenment reverts to mythology.” The result is indeed something like the “retrieval of premodern cognitive modes alongside those of the contemporary era.” But “prayerful silence” will be the least of it. Instead, perhaps, it is more instructive to analyze the oncoming “authentic synthesis” with reference to descriptors like “global village” and “dark enchantment.”
Writing prior to the Ethereal Phase, during what Adams called the Electric Phase, Marshall McLuhan prophesied “a brand-new world of allatonceness [sic]. ‘Time’ has ceased, ‘space’ has vanished. We now live in a global village…a simultaneous happening. We are back in acoustic space. We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us.” Referring to the “high speeds of electric communication,” McLuhan wrote about the informational deluge besetting the human race in terms that will feel very familiar to contemporary net-natives: “Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition.” Pattern recognition is widely considered to be the province of associative learning, as attested by thinkers like Hubert Dreyfus who praised “parallel distributed processing systems [that] can recognize patterns and detect similarity and regularity.” Connectionist machines, as Dreyfus referred to them, or neural networks, as they are more commonly known, would seem to exhibit (and now reinforce, as increasingly more information is produced and circulated by such machines) a neo-primitive, “enthusiastic,” tribal mentality.
Already in the late 2000s, there was talk of civilization being catapulted into “an era of ‘secondary orality’” by emerging technologies. Neo-oral society, or alternatively, “post-literate society,” retrieves patterns of social engagement very similar to playground dynamics, but manages to scale these up by a millionfold. Backward, mostly infantile practices like “cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk…Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards [read: influencers] revel in name-calling and in ‘enthusiastic description of physical violence.’ Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all.” Within this new era of reemerging neo-enthusiastic ferment, we may expect what some writers have called “dark enchantment” to take hold of increasingly large swaths of the populace, as the same “Daemons, Phantasmes…Spirits of Illusion” feared by Hobbes proliferate online. If one thought modern people could not get any WEIRDer, well…prepare to be amazed.
The last time enlightenment reverted to mythology, culminating in the tragedies of the twentieth century (it hardly needs repeating), we witnessed “the apotheosis of the ego and the principle of self-preservation as such culminate in the utter insecurity of the individual, in his complete negation.” There was no glorious reconciliation of reason and nature, such as philosophy always dreams of, in short, no “authentic synthesis.” Rather, the synthesis that did occur was “satanic,” precisely in that “the repressed mimetic impulse [returned] as a destructive force exploited by the most radical systems of social domination.” Things will be very different this time around, of course, but a similar madness remains the order of the day. The thing to avoid most, as always, is an approach to historical movement that ignores the longue durée in favor of “vibe shifts”—already a sign of faltering attention.
Thankfully, wisdom can flourish even in times of madness, perhaps not as a civilizational principle, but nevertheless as something that sees “beyond the terribly mutilated Herm of contemporary…life.” The “parasitism of opinion on thought,” which prevails in oral and neo-oral societies, can be effectively opposed by a parasitism on parasitism, by extracting “thought from the discourse of others,” as Socrates once did in a similar situation: “In Socrates, thought, under the pressure of sophistry, abandons the seat of authority and substitutes irony at a distance: The stink of the rabble that Nietzsche sniffed in him is the price, heroic and degrading, of this first contact with opinion”—and not only degrading, but in his case, deadly. While the cliché and the stereotype, in short, the commonplace, will prevail in the coming years, most likely at the expense of the common good, thought is still possible, even if it appears ridiculous under the circumstances. For the time being, we may have to endure the reign of the “Memoria technica,” a “blind mechanism” deluging us with weird phantasms nonstop, but like everything else, this too will pass. Wisdom, on the other hand, abides.
Michael Weyns is a Ph.D. candidate at Ghent University.
