Reclaiming the Present

NB: This is an abstract of a lecture I will deliver at Ashoka University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology on Tuesday, November 17, at 2.30 pm. DS

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There is no ghost in the machine, not only because there are no ghosts, but because we are not machines. Stanley Rosen; Metaphysics in Ordinary Language, chapter 8

Between 1942 and 1943; Franz Neumann, a refugee from Nazism, wrote a work named Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism; which was to become a classic. The term is borrowed from the title Hobbes chose for his sequel to Leviathan. Behemoth is a demonic monster mentioned in ancient Egyptian and Hebraic legend.

Many terms are used to describe the complex global situation obtaining after the end of the Cold War: multipolarity; poly-crisis, techno-feudalism, etc. I will focus on two phenomena that underlie them all, viz., reification and soullessness. The latter includes the cultivated destruction of mind. If soul sounds odd in this scientific age, let us recall that in Marx’s remarks on religion, it is not only the word opium that is striking, but soul as well: Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. (See #43 in this link; for more on the soul, see #66)

By reification I refer to the the tendency of human creations to escape our control; to acquire momentum towards complete autonomy. The past century saw an acceleration of this tendency. Ours is the era of the ‘great beast’; referred to by Simone Weil, who borrowed the idea from Plato’s Republic (Book 6; # 493). It is also reflected in the replacement of mindful speech by ideology, a form of sophistry which suspends our experience of time via promises of a bright future over the retreating horizon. Disquiet with the present takes refuge in politicised nostalgia and prophetic dreams. History is sought to be rectified via textbooks and syllabi; presence transformed into transience; and human awareness shifts from an eternal present to an eternal waiting room

The ideas of four thinkers resonate with one another on reification and its ramifications for the human soul. I translate Weil’s ‘great beast’ as Behemoth, the monster-automaton which has mesmerised humanity. (Oswald Spengler aptly referred to the flavour of modern times as Faustian). The thinkers I have in mind are as follows:

Gunther Anders (Arendt’s first husband) saw it in technology post Hiroshima

Simone Weil saw it in violence, in her observations on Homer’s Iliad

Emmanuel Levinas saw it in the reduction of humans to sheer animality

Karl Marx saw it in the autotelic nature of capital, as something (naturalised as) beyond human knowledge or control (cf Robert Urquhart)

They all say the same thing in different ways: that humans have created a Frankenstein which we are incapable of controlling (here lies the function of cultivated stupidity). Violence, technology, racism and capital have fused into the modern avatar of the Behemoth; and the apocalypse is being steered by pathological lunatics. How did this happen? The first step toward answering this question is simple: recognise that it is valid.

Suggested readings:

Audrey Burowski – Gunther Anders: Philosopher of the apocalypse

The Concrete Possibility of Total Nihilism: Günther Anders and the Atomic Bomb

Emmanuel Levinas; Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism; (1934)

Simone Weil; The Iliad, or the Poem of Force (1940)

Robert Urquhart; Accumulation as bad infinity (2015)

The Crisis of Ideology

Alexandre Koyré: The Political Function of the Modern Lie (1943)

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The End of Liberalism

Socrates, the soul and the cosmos

Where The Mind Is Without Fear

Gaza and the End of Western Fantasy