Leaving the Technological Cave

In a society that recognizes no moral end beyond the survival of the society itself, “social cohesion is our only hope”.[1] The rules and regulations that the society gives itself for the sake of securing social cohesion acquire the status of absolute moral imperatives.  The question of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the society is publicly shunned, while in private it is accompanied by guilt and fear.  Where “social cohesion is our only hope,” to step outside of dominant social demands and expectations—if only in thought, in questioning, in doubting—is to betray our only hope, to seek evil beyond the highest good, to undermine what is of the upmost importance, in the interests of a Chimera.

There comes a day when the imperative of social cohesion calls for the enforcement of rules and regulations that coerce our society into unqualified servitude to them; that is where the society comes to uphold its rules and regulations (positivistically) as means beyond question or reproach and thus, in practical terms, as ends in themselves.  Thereupon, the strict implementation, nay dominion of our system of rules and regulations drives us forward, propelling us into a “future” of total integration, of absolute social cohesion.  The society that is so driven is a society in which rules and regulations are supposed to incarnate the content or meaning of social cohesion.  That society is a technological society dominated by a mechanistic conception of the “ways and orders”—to speak with Machiavelli—proper to it.  Machiavelli’s “ways” (modi) entail the manner in which we approach our problems (namely mechanistically), whereas “orders” refer to the orientation of our life, where “our life” (Dante, Inferno 1.1)[2] is to be newly conceived as future-oriented.  On Machiavelli’s conception, our societies are moving mechanistically into a future in which they can and thus ought to converge into universal cohesion.  Yet, this Machiavellian end comes at a dire price.  For it obscures all other, especially prior ends.  It is in the name of the ends that “the Machiavellian revolution”[3] has obscured, that we turn with rigor to the question of the temporal order of human life.  Whence the investigation that follows as exercise in thought, or as “experiment” (pruova) in opening ourselves to a thought eclipsed by the Machiavellian revolution.

Echoing the opening verses of Dante’s Comedy, we find ourselves anew—we remember ourselves—having fallen asleep, on a landscape where we see what lies before us, calling it the past, but fail to see what lies behind us, calling it the future.  We are somewhat lost, incapable, as the lost souls of Plato’s Cave, of turning our heads to see what lies behind us—as we stand haunted by the suspicion that the future that we do not know may alter at every moment the significance of the past that we believe to know.

Is there a way for us to turn around?  Classical antiquity swears that there is, but also that it is extremely difficult to explore that way.  In the modern, Machiavellian world, it appears that the only way to turn to the future is to build it by using the past as building material: the future that the ancients divined in eternity, is now supposed to be built in time.  We would then not be merely lost in our landscape; instead we would be changing it, by converting the past (what we see) into a new future: not one we should trust or have patient faith in, but one we should construct, as soon as possible, or more imperatively stated, now.

For us the future is not a gift manifest in or as the present, but—to speak Napoleonically—a crown we take for ourselves, to forge it at will.  By the same token, we do not discover meaning; we are supposed to create it, apparently ex nihilo.  Meaning is not given by nature or by God, but forged culturally.  “Culture” is then the place, the laboratory, the clinical aseptic tank where nature is used as meaningless material (Descartes’s res extensa) “ready-at-hand”.  Nature is the inherently meaningless “past” that we build upon, as it unwittingly offers itself to us, flushed into our hands, as a hapless virgin driven by blind compulsions to our feet, allowing us to do as we please with her, to respond to the meaninglessness of existence with an unprecedented act of creativity (Nietzsche’s Will to Power).  But is the present not given?  The Nietzschean responds by acting as if the present were an eternal loop, “the eternal return of the same,” purportedly autonomous with respect to both the God and Nature of classical antiquity.  The New Man replaces both philosophical Reason and biblical Revelation, invoking a tautological or absurd reason as consummate revelation.  The New Age is the Age of Madness.

The New Age is a certain present, defined by a certain modification of the human mind.  Thus, in responding to the dawn of the modern world, Giambattista Vico writes: “this Civil World has been certainly [certamente] made by men: whence we can, because we have to, find its Principles anew within the modifications of our one and the same Human Mind” (questo Mondo Civile egli certamente è stato fatto dagli uomini: onde se ne possono, perchè se ne debbono, ritruovare i Principj dentro le modificazioni della nostra medesima Mente Umana).[4]  Vico’s ritrovare recalls Dante’s own mi ritrovai (Inferno 1.2).  As Dante’s own avatar, Vico’s student stands in a place in which he exercises his faculty to give poetic shape to a world in time: the temporal is an offshoot of the poetic.

The physical is a poetic-philosophical (“Pre-Socratic”) invention where “nature” (abstracted most notably from divine authority)[5] is the place in which the poetic mind, the mind seeking itself by “certifying” or determining itself, is supposed to find itself.  Yet, thought/mind (mens is both in ancient Latin) finds itself only in disappearance.  Although in seeking itself it determines an advancement from past, to present, to future, in finding itself, its future presents itself only to disappear into “the past”.  The “orders” that Vico speaks of are then inverted: advancement into the future turns out to be a recession into the past, into death, suggestive of the mythical constitution of the three temporal frames of past, present and future.  Thus does Vico write in a most compact style:

“Therefore, this species of experiments reigns in this Science, whereby thus HAD TO, HAVE TO, and WILL HAVE TO go the affairs of Nations, such as are discussed rationally by this Science, where given Orders are set by Divine Providence, even if from Eternity were born from time to time Infinite Worlds; which is certainly factually false.  Whence this Science comes at the same time to describe one Ideal Eternal Story, over which run in time the Stories of all Nations in their risings, progresses, states, decays and ends.  Or rather, we advance to affirm that he who meditates this Science narrates to himself this Ideal Eternal Story, in the respect that, as this World of Nations was certainly made by Men, which is the First undoubted Principle that was laid out above—and thus, given that we have to find its guise anew [ritruovare] within the modifications of our one and the same Human Mind—in that experiment, he HAD TO, HAS TO, and WILL HAVE TO make it himself for himself; for where it comes about that he who makes things narrates them to himself, there the Story cannot be more certain.”[6]

Beneath the physical distinction between past, present and future lingers the unity of temporal frames (Vico writes, “nello stesso tempo”), a singular “eternal story” constituted of poetic universals (see Aristotle on poetry).  Such is the foundation of the whole “World of Nations,” every Nation being constituted poetically.  Vico invites his reader to rediscover politics by exercising the poetic art (natural to man as man) of mirroring truth in “legal” forms: authoritative, fixed forms of certainty.  These forms (or the language of authority) provide us with the certainty we need to rise “further” (più in suso)[7] to our “one and the same Human Mind”.  In short, past, present and future (and thus the physical course of Nations) reflect timeless (legal-poetic, or mythical-authoritative) modifications of an a-temporal divinely providential human mind.  By viewing all temporal/physical things platonically, as grounded in poetry, we regain the experience (whence Vico’s pruove) of the workings of a consciousness for which past, present and future are coeval, occupying one and the same place.

In indicating that our world has been made by men with respect to their certainty, Vico is suggesting that our world arises as a consequence of a divine-human mind determining itself.  The world of our making has already been made in the respect that its temporal frames (past, present and future) are embraced by the mind’s poetic universals, as the mind takes up the role of “creator”.  There is a poetic logic (logica poetica), then, grounding our temporal world, even as mind itself transcends that logic and its poetic “universal” certainties.

With respect to the problem of a “temporal flux,” Vico’s lesson suggests that the states of temporal or physical things (birth, growth, adulthood, aging/decaying, death) are ordered by Divine Providence, even as they are narrated and thereby certified by poetry.  What we might call the temporal flux of things (Vico’s corso or “running in time” of things) is ordered through a poetic mind naturally in search for itself, in search for a mind it presupposes, namely its own divine perfection.  Now the orders “from birth to death” are certainties that cannot be doubted on their own plane: there is no question that we do sense a temporal flux from birth to death, from past to future.  Yet, this is not of the essence in Vico’s argument.  What is of the essence is that it is in the nature of the human mind in its metaphysical singularity to determine the orders in question by way of spontaneously seeking itself .  Not being able to see itself directly, the mind produces bodily forms advancing towards the future even as they advance towards death, or the past.[8] In reality, or in their foundation the three temporal frames of past, present and future are one and the same.[9]

On the physical surface of things, it makes no sense to speak of “Infinite Worlds” (Mondi Infiniti), since infinite time would explode the sequence/order of past-present-future.  The physical universe must be finite, otherwise it would collapse instantaneously into its poetic foundation.  Thus the infinity of worlds is “certainly factually false” (Vico), which is to say that it is a physical illusion incompatible with the constitution of our ordinary experience of physical/temporal things.  However, the infinity of worlds is conceivable and meaningfully so strictly in terms poetry, insofar as poetry could set in motion an infinity of different worlds based on the mind’s own modifications.  The poetic mind has the capacity to give rise to infinite variety, a variety testifying to the mind’s unfettered freedom.  However, the mind could not experience the physical infinity that would destroy the order of experience.  Infinity, as Giacomo Leopardi taught well in his “Infinito” (1819) in the wake of Dante, is a poetic category.  On the other hand, the poetic foundation or essence of temporal orders suggests that infinity has a direct bearing on physical finitude.  For the poetic mind is the free place (“earthly paradise”) in which the “orders” defining physical bodies are transcended via a “collapse”.  As things strive naturally for the future through the present (or as the present serves as “passage/salvation” of what is past into the future), the “orders” themselves speak to us of the future as “coming to pass,” or as death.  But if, in transitioning into or toward the future, physical bodies die, then we can conclude that in transitioning from the past to the future through the present, physical bodies are really transitioning from the present to the past through the future.  For bodies fall into the past precisely by rising into the future.  Hence the reverence of pre-modern peoples for the past understood, not as a material used to rise (to build the present) into the future, but as divinely ordained destiny.  The “progressive” impulse towards survival or power would be commonly recognized piously in the light of a “regress” or “descent” from life to death: physical compulsions (including the sense that man/homo arises out of an earthly past, or humus) were to bow to the inexorability of a divine order subverting all physical compulsions as impious.  Indeed, impious would be the man who seeks to rise out of death to conquer eternal life, while pious is the man who accepts descending into the past with the prospect of being resurrected by the intervention of a divinity speaking from the future.  No matter what our physical impulses might suggest, the future should not be conceived as a realm of human freedom or choice—as if the present passed into the future by shedding the past, or aspects of the past that burdened the present on its flight to conquer the future.  Far from weighing down the present, the past would free the present from the compulsion of conceiving the future as anything other than a realm of divine mystery beyond any and all choice.

In sum, Vico’s Platonic lesson is that, when properly understood, the “orders” of temporal progression collapse: their mythical foundation manifests itself upon the future’s emergence as the source of the present’s conversion into the past.  The ordering of bodies towards the future is exposed as the ordering of bodies towards the past, leaving us divining the future as consummate repository of life and the past as consummate repository of death.  If my body is dying, that is precisely insofar as it is transitioning from life to death, from future to past.

What is most important, here, is the now, the present as poetic key of conversion.  Upon the present, hinge all “transitions”.  Yet, where the two “extremes” of the present collapse into each other, the present ceases to function as hinge of “birth and death,” settling back, as it were, on a mythical plane in which the absolute singularity of the human mind is mirrored, as in a dream.

Recognition of the poetic foundation or nature of our three temporal frames confirms the primacy of the religious past-orientation over the physicalist future-orientation.  Accordingly, Vico stresses that among ancient religions none ever revered gods who were mere bodies: the ancients shunned any conception of the physical independent of a higher, sacred (irreducible) court of appeal.[10] Thus could we state meaningfully that what is physically subsequent is spiritually (meaningfully) former.  Considering the relation between Virgil and Dante from the standpoint of the future as repository of the present, the Florentine precedes the Roman, standing closer to the future and advancing towards a “past” place in which stands Virgil.  Dante, in other words, is approaching Virgil.  Yet, did Virgil not live prior to Dante?  Was he not present prior to Dante being present?  Did he not inhabit the present prior to inhabiting the past?  That is to suppose that Virgil “transitioned” from the present into the past.  Yet, where the three frames of time collapse into mythical poetry, or where we consider things on their own ground, or in themselves, Virgil no longer appears to transition from any point A to any point B.  Yet, again, where “the story” is told from the vantage point of the future as temporal “end,” Dante seeks out Virgil (from Virgil’s back, as it were), who appears after Dante and who ends up guiding Dante in response to the Florentine’s inviting the Roman to lead the way.

Where does all of this leave us?  Although in Dante’s Comedy, Dante’s avatar invokes Virgil to stand before him (a lesson articulated at length in Canto 2 of Inferno), Virgil emerges in response to Dante’s (avatar’s) own perplexities.  One might object that the Virgil who appears after Dante is a mere ghost or “shadow” (ombra) of a Virgil who once lived.  Thus, in Canto 1, upon Dante’s asking if the present Virgil is “a shadow or a certain man” (ombra od omo certo—66), Virgil’s response indicates that the present Virgil is not a certain man, which was already (67).  But there, the “certain” man, as opposed to the uncertain man, stands, as if by definition, in “the past”.  Virgil says “fui” of his physical or generated self.  Indeed the physical Virgil belongs to the past, as all bodies do, where the past is the realm of certain or determined things.  The uncertain Virgil, however, belongs to the present, even though we may believe this Virgil to be a mere ghost of our imagination.  For Dante’s ombra is a soul and soul is that which lives and in living speaks.

At first glance it appears that Dante’s avatar encounters Virgil as a kind of shadow, which is precisely what the avatar is: Dante in a dream (even as we are taught that Dante is carrying his body, his past, with him in his dream).  Dante appears to encounter Virgil as someone belonging to the past.  But then, are we to learn that the Virgil of the past is none other than a Virgil in our dreams?  When we think of Virgil as past, are we merely dreaming of Virgil, as opposed to confronting the living Virgil in the present?  But can we confront Virgil in the present?  Is Virgil still present?  Is he still living?  If he were, might our failure to see him alive signal our own inadequacy, our own projecting our own life into the past, our failure to live in the present?

From the vantage point of the future, or insofar as our present precedes Virgil’s own present, our life would not have superseded Virgil’s own life.  Quite to the contrary.  We would fail to see him alive because his life—his being-present—would follow after or presuppose our own.  Unless we projected ourselves in a dream.  For in a dream, we could read poetry, stories of the past “in flames,” as it were (Inferno 1.70-75).  Why should we be “returning” to the poetic world of “the past,” though?  That is Virgil’s own question in Inferno 1.76.  Should we not rather ascend on Parnassus, to “the principle and occasion of all joy” (77-78)?  The proposition prompts Dante’s avatar to respond, as in a solemn announcement, that the present Virgil is the source of his speech—the source that made Dante seek Virgil’s “volume” (79-84).  The present Virgil—not the dead one of the past—is Dante’s “master” and “author,” whence Dante derives the beauty that brought him honor (85-87).  But is the present Virgil not uncertain?  Are we to be guided by a principle of uncertainty, as opposed to what is certain, or past?  Or rather, is the past a mere shadow of the present, a mere sign prompting us to seek the past in the present?  This is what is happening in Dante’s Canto.  The past, the body, is a mere sign of a soul living in the present—an identity that we can discern only through the past.  While the past appears before the present, it is the present as living indetermination that makes us seek itself in the certainty of “the past”—as if the past were synonymous of safety, or security.  It would be through dead certainties that we would discover living uncertainties; we would discover Virgil’s presence by studying Virgil within the realm of “past” certainties, within the horizon of mnemonic determinations, or “dead” signs for the imagination as faculty to (re)envision the fulness of forms.  We would then discover that the present does not build on the past, but that it emerges through the “recollection” of the past as body of signs of the present.  The “recollection” of the past would amount to a discovery of the present as source of the past.

Dante’s lesson may be difficult to rise to, but it is straightforward: the body belongs to a past presupposing a present soul.  Although Dante seeks Virgil in the past, his search is moved by a Virgil standing in the present.  Yet, as Canto 2 suggests, Virgil is sent from a heavenly future.  In this sense, Virgil is present after Dante, after a Dante who, although seemingly trapped in the dreadful world of past certainties, is trying to “catch up,” trying to rise to Virgil’s divinely ordained presence, if only by (re)descending (by re-enacting our descent) into the physical certainties of the past (136).  Dante shall meet Virgil in the present, but only at the end of a long journey, where Virgil, the living poet, will be truly present to Dante.  There, in Limbo’s Elysian fields, in the company of great poets, time will be exposed as a poetic mirage.[11]

Where does Virgil live?  In the present.  But “when” is the present?  Let the present be welcomed as a place, rather than as “a moment in time”.  As synonymous with time itself, the present is the place where something occurs.  What occurs in the present?  What “occupies” the present?  Life.  We are alive now.  What is life?  Birth, genesis, transformation.  What is being transformed?  The inanimate into the animate.  Given, however, the impermanence of the animate, we may ask why (for the sake of what end) the animate arises out of the inanimate.  Why is there life?  What is the natural end of the present?  What is the present disclosed for?  So that the inanimate may live?  Yet, surely life is not an end in itself—not our life.  Life strives.  What does life strive for?  For a “temporal impossibility”—neither the inanimate, not the animate as such.  Consummate integration of the inanimate into the animate?  Impossible in the present; possible only in God.  So, we strive for God.  But where is God?  Unreachable (in the present).  Should we take a leap from the present into “another world”?  That would be to abandon all, or the inanimate, for the sake of its “salvation”.  Should we forsake integrating the inanimate into the animate?  Should we forsake the present?  Or should we render the inanimate unto God?  Does the present entail such a rendering?  Does the present entail the “sacrifice” of the lamb’s flesh unto the Eternal One?

If the present is a place of (moral) transformation, not of “advancement,”[12] then the present does not build on the past.  In practical terms, the past builds on the present.  As we enter into the past, we enrich it, “expanding” the horizon of mnemonic signs.  Yet, as we turn to the past, we call it back to life, if only by giving our life, our present to it.  As a result, we are partially redeeming the past, now: as we live, as we feed the past with life, the past reemerges from the future, as a discovery integral to our present life.  Here again, the past comes “after” the present, insofar as the present drives the past to convert into the future that, in turn, “descends” into the present.

From the standpoint of the Whole, Virgil lives after Dante.  Virgil was waiting for Dante to live: man lives by being resurrected; he does not live in dying, but through his death, through his physical passing, he can be called to true life.  Accordingly, thanks to Dante, Virgil “resurrects” out of the past, i.e. he lives most truly after Dante.

What is the past?  Death as repository of all signs or “memories” of the present, of all life.  Where does the past live?  In the present, arriving into the present from the future.  But how?  Thanks to the present: we call the past to life; we invoke it by seeking it out (and we seek it by rendering our life, our present to it).  But did the past not already live?  Did it not live before being past?  Did Virgil not live before becoming past?

We see the signs of Virgil (not Virgil himself).  Those signs we call, “past”.  They are signs of Virgil, but where is Virgil?  He is entering into the present when we invite him.  Yet, surely, he lived before us!  What makes us so certain of this?  The signs (the remains, “the bones”).  Signs tell us that he was present before dying (disappearing into the past).

Let us take a step back, as it were.  What is before and what is after?  The future comes into the present, so the future is logically “before” the present.  The present empties itself into the past, which must logically be “after” the present.  Thus, first comes the future; then comes the present; and finally, we have the past.  Yet, the order is logical, not “temporal/physical”.  There is no absolute temporal order.  Time is merely the present which has two points of reference: the future whence it comes and the past whither it goes.  Now, these two points of reference are distinguished from each other by the faculty of the imagination.  When our imagination surfaces as memory, we assume that our memory arises out of the past, or that there is a realm to which all memories belong or pertain to.  Thus, we say that we remember something that occurred “in the past”.  We do not assume that we remember the future, or anything happening in the future.  The future is the place that we divine as a kind of “storehouse” for the present (the future is the realm of things “in store” for us): a place somehow containing all present moments (whatever is to come, is to come), or temporal possibilities as a whole.  Thus do we tend to dream of the future as a divine repository of life (we stand in hope, in expectation for a “future” fulfilment of the present), whereas we tend to dream of the past as the repository of death (of all that is “dead,” or that has come to pass).  Yet, we are then confronted with the sense that we come after the past, insofar as what is past would have been present before our being present.  But what does this “before” really mean?  How can there be more than one present?  Yet, surely the present is “continuously” renewed, if only from the future.  Must there not be an order of renewal?  Is there no “flux” telling us that we come after our ancestors, or generations that we can remember.  Is our present not indebted to other presents?  Do we not stand as dwarfs on the shoulders of innumerable presents?  Is it not in the nature of life to augment?  Surely, that is the impression we ordinarily have.  However, what if there were only one present?  What if the “signs” of supposedly “previous” presents were merely reminders of something hidden to us, something necessarily presupposed by the present, something eternal—as Parmenides’s Being that cannot but be—namely the eternal fulness of the present?  Do our “signs” help us “reconstruct” the past as present, or do they help us envision eternity as our own destiny, a destiny that our imagination may otherwise project into “the future”?  If there is only one present, could the singularity of the present contain divinely all present “moments,” so that our present would be merely one present moment among infinite others—one that sees “other moments” as receding into oblivion, onto a fading horizon of memories?  Yet, is there no clear continuity binding our present moment to precise moments among others?

My present moment is exposed to or rather exposes a finite horizon of other present moments the boundaries of which fade into unconsciousness (forgetfulness).  These moments are the “colors” of a landscape that constitutes my world as stage of remembrance of the fullness of the present, of the divine present.  My present is then necessarily partial or particular; yet it is through its particularity that my present remains open to, or exposes itself to the totality of present moments, or rather to the present as absolute singularity.  It is not my prerogative to “reconstruct” that absolute as my present, or as a new universal “History”.  My present moment as divine gift is “given” in continuity with its particular horizon understood as its proper stage of awakening, a stage we are to be grateful for.  Now, that stage is not merely past, even though we habitually regard it as past, or dead, as if life were but a fleeting moment, or the flux of death (death as continual dying/disappearing/loss).

What really takes place in the present?  We may be said to be born in the present in the respect that we are placed here.  Yet, insofar as we are merely placed here, we remain at a loss.  What are we placed here for?  Is there an activity—a proper response to a natural calling—that allows us not to lose the present as center of our memory, as center of our finite world?  We could be lost in our world, without finding our way back to its center, its “now”.  This is what happens to Dante’s avatar at the beginning of the poet’s Comedy.  In order to recover his central place in his world, Dante must undergo a poetic education, a “training” consisting of projections speaking back to the projector to call him back to the center (final Canto of Paradiso).

It is only by projecting myself into someone calling me back to “the center” that I can find myself.  Thus in Canto 1 of Inferno, Dante projects himself into an avatar who projects himself into personae inviting him to rise back to Dante himself as unnamed, “unfaltering mind” (mente che non erra) standing at the absolute center of the Comedy.  What is at stake here is the proper activity of man, the (original or proper) host of the present: the one who is given to return to the giver, as an image in a mirror, a reflection in the water, Adam in his Garden.

The dynamic play of projections taking place in the present is none other than language, or logos, the “conversation” through which we awaken to our giver, absolute source of infinite present moments.  As we awaken, the horizon of moments populating our “conversation” emerges as ordered around a direct passage from the logos to the eternal fulness of the present.

Do we owe something to our fathers?  By all means.  In our present, we stand indebted for the world we live in, the world in which we have fathers and, perhaps, children, even as our fathers are not lost “in time”.  We are children and for children “time” is a place, a poetic or mythic horizon.  “Now” is “here,” while “then” is “there”.  Children do not look at their world “in time,” but spatially as the disclosure of place, the horizon at the center of which stands the child.  As in a dream.  Yet, modern adults tend to tell themselves that they are outside of all dreams, that they see “facts” as they are, that they discern all things diachronically, ordered, as by mechanical necessity, according to “time”.  What is meant by “time,” here?  A mechanically inexorable flux that, while falling back into the past, is compelled to ascend “responsibly” into the future.  Modern man is to follow Hegel’s lesson and use the past (death) to build a new world: the future.[13] This is modern man’s attitude.  Children know nothing of it, until ideologues train them to live the progressive life.

Must we not admit, however, that our age emerges mechanically out of older ages?  Not if our age represents a modification of the mind (Vico), belonging to a mental “specialization,” merely one mode among others for the mind to determine itself, to constitute a fashion; what historicists would call a Zeitgeist.  But the Zeitgeist and worldview (Weltanschauung) dominating our present is “secular” in the sense that it takes the shape of a loop: it falls into “repetition” instead of falling into “the past”.  It perpetuates itself (it does not let go of itself), or loses itself in itself, or converts into its own end, setting itself up as what Leo Strauss would speak of as a cave beneath (or within) the cave spoken of by Plato.  In our own present, we stand “at the end of History,” beyond the past.  Nothing falls back into the past in the case of a present conceived as integrating the past into the future, where the future is conceived as the self-realization of the present—the present empowering itself (with the past), or using memory to create a new world beyond memory, a world in which all is immediately present, “ready-at-hand”.

In the new world there is no need for imagination, since the imaginative power is smothered by a Totality collapsed into our present.  There is nowhere to go aside from a present perpetuating itself; aside from a place in which our present/place falls back into itself, if only by way of avoiding exposing itself to all that is not itself.  In this respect, we abide in a temporal loop, a moment “expanding” within itself, as a man might seemingly walk forward in a dream, without advancing at all.  Our modern present is a special present, then, one that perpetuates itself within itself, as a fractal, in immanent diversification.  Hence the ubiquitous extolment of diversity as universal end of “evolution”.  The present, in short, has become our delusion, wherein the illusion of “survival” or “health” is purchased at the price of closure to the proper end of our present, namely eternity.  We find salvation in survival, or in the illusion thereof, by imagining the present as self-grounding, or free-floating, as is the autonomy of modern Reason.

The habit of imagining all things populating our present landscape as material for our construction of the future dominates our present.  Meaning is in construction, just as dread is in forsaking construction.  To tread against the grain of our present compulsion, of the compulsive character of our present, is to step out of the ring of our present and cease believing that all things under the sun are ordered towards the future.

By what modification of the human mind do we enter into our present mode of being, this place in which we are lost, displaced from our natural center, our natural cave?  The natural center of experience has been obscured, occluded, saturated, occupied by the denial that the center is open to thought—that it represents a problem for thought.  This alienation from the center, this displacement of the human being, of the original Adamic host of the present (of the Garden) from the center of life, amounts to a scattering of man through the margins of life, where man is broken, fragmented, shattered and thereby necessarily frustrated, unless he assimilates to the margins of life, unless he converts to self-satisfaction in the face of a dehumanized, zombified life.

What alternatives to we have, now, to zombification?  Are those steering clear of the zombie syndrome, compelled to become savages (see Hunger Games, after Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World), or do they face another alternative?  Is the battle between savages fighting for survival the only practical alternative to zombified watchers of savages on a television screen?

We face two problems, here: that of the imagination and that of the “self”.  In the modern world, we are supposed to be “individual” atomic constituents of progress.  Once we exposed “the individual” as a certain mask obscuring the present’s own content, namely the activity or life that really takes place in “the present,” we would no longer be subject to the compulsion to abide slavishly by the demands and prejudicial expectations of our modern society.  This would free us for a higher calling as human beings.  What beings are we outside of the “prison cell” of modern individuality?  We are images of “moral conversion” from the inanimate to eternal life—from the realm of memories to its primal source.  Whence the second problem we are faced with, that of the imagination.

In what sense are we images of “moral conversion”?  We stand for the place (the present) where inanimate certainties come to meaningful life, emerging beyond “infernal” fragmentation, into significant wholes, living elements of the Good as eternal fulness of life.  Here, we no longer merely mask, but signal the present in its proper or original disclosure: we “represent” the present.  Yet, in doing so we serve as images, elements of the imagination.  To discover what we really are would be to discover what we are images of.  It would be to retrace or gather the whole spectrum of our images, our “history” as images, to the present as “moral conversion”.  We are here faced with the great question of the proper or original character of the imagination, or of the “surfacing” of memories.  We ourselves emerge in terms of memories, as “images” envisioned teleologically, manifesting themselves as pointers to the proper content of life.  In its original Platonic context, memories are “recollections” of an original Whole transcending the past—a Living Being more primordial than any memory; a life beyond any imagination.

To this “forgotten” divine being, rather than to any future in the making, would our memory and imagination be properly bound.  Yet, the underlying actuality of our memory and imagination, the ontological Whole they both presuppose, appears to modern men as something terrible, a horrific intuition standing at the Herculean Columns of the modern world.  Outside of that world, we are supposed to fall unto utter damnation, or any practical equivalent thereof.  As long as we accept ourselves as defined within the parameters of modernity—of the ideological blueprint of the modern world—we feel safe, we sense ourselves saved.  Yet our “safety” entails a flight from what stands outside of our modern world: we find “salvation” only where we turn our back to problems that the modern world is set up, not to resolve, but to eclipse, if only by distracting us from them.  Those problems, which old Christianity had addressed at once in terms of satanic temptations and divine challenges, are now abandoned in the name of integration in a society that is as open to its own future (its overarching potentiality) as it is shut to its underlying actuality.

The fear of underlying actuality underpins the very structure of modernity, its constitutional progressive orientation, its lingering turned towards its “historical destiny,” the necessary determination of the present as the product of forces beyond all questioning, beyond all purely disinterested thought.

“The progressive orientation”: the course of life progressing away from pure intelligibility, into a world of mere semblances.  The progressive world is a world steeped into the ghastly, a world of shadows or ghosts, where any given meaning is destroyed by its being imagined as a function of atomistically engineered personae, of marionettes conceived as sites where meaning or ends are created spontaneously, as space generated through breathing.  The atomistic sites in which ends are supposed to be produced at once artfully and naturally, and thus seemingly divinely, are what our age calls individuals.  The “individual”—heir to Cartesian and Kantian blueprinting—is supposed to be the site of natural creativity, the place where nature does not merely fashion means, but ends.  Now, art as “creation” is precisely the production of ends, whereas nature conceived aside from art produces mere means constitutionally open to being integrated into higher ends, through one mode of “ingestion” or another.  In the modern “individual,” natural generation and artistic creation are synthesized.  Yet, what counts the most in modern terms is the consolidation of all “individual” natural-creativity into the rise of a Universal Regime or Society consummating both 1. nature, the past, or death and 2. the vast plurality of efforts to overcome nature.  What counts the most in the modern world is never “the individual,” but the consummation of all “individual” efforts to overcome death.  Now, that consummation coincides with the Universal or Open Society, which must necessarily define or establish itself via a synthesis of nature and art.  Yet, that synthesis arises in the name of technology, which, unlike traditional art (technic/techne), defines not mere ends on the basis of given means, but natural ends, or ends into which nature is resolved.

Does classical antiquity not, however, teach us of natural ends, or a natural hierarchy of ends?  Does it not speak to us of ends that are given by nature?  To be sure it does, thought it does so, not in the sense that those ends are generated as plants are said to be, but in the sense that they are presupposed by all generative change.  “Natural ends,” in the classical sense of the expression, are not ends generated by nature, but actualities underlying natural forces, or impulses.  The ends in question are “given” in the respect that they inhere in all generation or spontaneous production.  Things that are said to “come into the light” or “manifest” themselves of their own accord, are said to be natural.  Nature is then conceived as the horizon of all natural productions, of all spontaneous phenomena.  All spontaneity presupposes ends, a meaning, so the fact that something occurs naturally is far from precluding generation as unfolding of a plan, or of what we might call, today, intelligent design.  Indeed, what is naturally “manifest,” emerges in the light of its proper end and is “visible” precisely to the extent that it partakes in, or reflects its given intelligibility, its “full visibility” as and in its own natural end.  With respect to all natural ends, to echo Aristotle, nature itself is at once the generation of all means and the original intelligibility of all means as underlying ends.[14]

Now, in the modern world, we are trained to abstract nature from its proper ends, or to conceive nature after René Descartes, as res extensa—a “material extension” devoid of proper, hidden ends transcending all “extended” appearances.  Nature is supposed to be “spatially” laid-out before us, radically subject to our manipulation.  What happened to the mysterious, unquantifiable dimension of nature?  A hat is sometimes tipped to nature’s mystery in a so-called aesthetic context, in terms of feelings, or sentiment.  Nature, we might say, leaves us in awe; there is something about nature that appears to us at once fearsome and beautiful, something terrible that inebriates us beyond the dictates of any quantification; something that no sheer “quantity” can adequately account for.  Yet, our “scientific materialists” will promptly retort that our feelings are but psychological superstructures, “subjective” responses to what we fail, if only by necessity, to quantify or integrate within the sphere of our calculative consciousness.  Our feelings per se tell us nothing about nature per se, even as they tell us something about the shortcomings of the modern res cogitans, the Cartesian “ego” or “individual”.  And, of course, Descartes would be all too ready to welcome the integration of the “mere” ego into a collective “scientific” society of mere-individuals—a society potentially resolving the hiatus between the merely-quantifiable and the “awesome” dimensions of nature.  For only in our social “super-structures” do we see reconciled the quantifiable and the unquantifiable: only in collective collaboration, in the coordination of labor on a vast scale, beyond interpersonal recognition and in a more abstract system of rules and regulation, are the “sentiments” of life (our very passions) “scientifically” integrated, or quantifiable.  The modern society is, accordingly, the scientific society, according to the Hobbesian principle of “new science”.

Our scientific society is, to return to a foregoing argument, a technological society, insofar as it purports to produce natural ends—not mere products of art on the basis of nature, but ends of nature itself.  The “technological” product is conceived as providing nature with its proper ends; not ends merely imposed upon nature, to be sure, but ends into which nature is channeled “clinically” (after Machiavelli, who notoriously introduced “new ways and orders” of speaking/conceiving and living—new ways to order our experience; modi ed ordini nuovi tied to what Galileo would subsequently introduce as nuova scienza).

The Machiavellian-like programmatic rejection of classical antiquity’s “natural ends,” or of a dimension of nature coinciding with the horizon of underlying pure intelligibility of all things, is integral to the constitution of our modern, technological or progressive world.  To turn back to the classical question of ends hidden in generation, to unearth the problem of natural teleology, is to expose our modern technological society to its own lie.  For our society is based, not upon the resolution of natural teleology, but upon its systematic eclipse, its programmatic concealment.  To expose what our society conceals fundamentally is to unroot that society.  Whence the dire danger involved in our proceeding.  There is nothing more dangerous to our society than the classical question about natural ends, or more generally speaking, of pure intelligibility as the underlying actuality of our ordinary life-experience.  If the fundamental reality of things is already present at the heart of all phenomenal production; if the empirical world emerges in the context of an underlying full-visibility, where empirical objects are “fulfilled” a priori as proper ends of experience; then the Platonism rejected at the Machiavellian dawn of modernity takes its revenge upon us all, as intelligible forms or a world of pure intelligibility break through our ordinary experience to free it from the trappings of anti-Platonist progressivism.[15]

What the return of and to Platonism invites is, to begin with, a freeing of our daily life-experience from the scientistic dogma of ubiquitous abstract quantification.  Experience is not to be trapped in the cage-laboratory of the quantifiable abstracted from the unquantifiable.  Secondly, Platonism opens the door to a deepening of vision of the objects of experience in terms of their original nature, or of their standing on their homeground as objects of pure thought.  Thirdly, Platonism exposes us once again to the full weight of the miraculous as transcending any quantifiable dimension of nature.  Platonism shatters any modernist notion of “natural laws” severing our experience from the marvels and miracles (mirabilia and miracula) of traditional religion.[16]

Finally, the question of dying is reopened afresh.  Man ages and dies.  What is the significance of this?  The human body achieves its task as it signals the eternal.  The signaling has its own mnemonic horizon.  The modern machine attempts to inscribe all lives on a digital platform supposed to replace and perfect natural memory.  In doing so, the modern machine de-humanizes us, abstracting our quantifiable dimension from its natural, original or proper end/telos.  The very moral-poetic nature of the human body is obscured, nay denied as fundamentally illusory.  Aging emerges as equivalent to an ugly “sin” to be concealed, as we are driven progressively into alienation from the moral significance of aging, our “disappearing” in the act of bearing witness to eternity.  It is in disappearing that we bear witness, lest we be mistaken for that of which we are signs.  Our disappearing is even more significant than our appearing, our being-born; old age is more illuminating than youth.  For birth is but an echo of eternity, whereas dying bespeaks eternity as its destiny.  In this sense, dying is fulfilling birth-and-development.  It is in dying that we live truly; for it is in dying that we bear witness to life eternal.

As long as we continue dying shut to the true nature of the place we occupy as human beings, we never truly live.  The place in question is a place of seeking: we exist in seeking something.  Beyond or prior to any compulsion, we seek, we are in seeking (not behind): we are seekers by nature.  Aristotle qualifies this point in the opening verses of his Metaphysics.  What is the human being (anthropos) aside from the search for the true face (eidos) of things?  But how does the human being seek?  Are there any fixed rules for his search?  None at all: no “natural laws” (a modern invention).  How do we seek?  In manifold ways, of course.  But are there better ways, or even the best way?  Is there perhaps only one right way to seek, only one correct way to find?  A way, not a rule.  What are we to find?  What we seek by nature, the consummation or perfection of our seeking: a primordial activity.  What would constitute the perfection of our seeking?  The discovery of its object as given in any by seeking.  Seeking as return: seeking perfected at its root.  The perfect seeking would be the seeking in which the object gives itself back to itself, forging seekers on the way: personae, masks, images of the activity of seeking.  Seeking in disguise, through images of the activity.  But why?  Because the seeker in itself—the mind—cannot see itself unless it projects or empties itself in a certain, outward form, a mask, an “other” than itself.  Thereupon, it catches a glimpse of itself, a sight in disappearing (as with Benjamin’s “love at last sight”),[17] as Euridice for Orpheus.

Is the human mind not capable of a more mature vision of truth?  Yes, insofar as it can forge forms of alterity in which it may project itself without disappearing physically.  These forms are forms of art, forms that man creates, whether “eccentrically,” most notably through music, or “concentrically,” most notably through painting.  For in music the mind explores the landscape that painting has gathered into a single moment.  Music is the playful unfolding of that moment in which painting gathers the chaotic multiplicity of life’s facets.  To meet that multiplicity outside of the concentric activity of painting is to fall prey of what Dante’s muse, Beatrice, calls “the flame of this blaze” (Inferno 2.93), referring to a world of mindless or thoughtless bodies “burning out” in dying.  Yet, it is strictly in response to a primordial poetic calling, a fundamental speech, that painting gathers the vortex of physical appearances into an ordered whole.  Painting is a poetic calling.  Painting is the restoration of the Garden of Eden in the very midst of its corruption.  The painter evokes the primordial Parnassus, the first order, through his “mirrors,” his paintings; and it is only painting’s falling short of drawing Eden itself back into our fallen world that opens the door to music as the exploration of the difference between the evocation of Parnassus and Parnassus itself.  That difference depends upon the hiatus between mind and body, between thought’s indetermination and thought’s determinations.  Music journeys through that hiatus, trying to account for painting’s failure to restore our world to its original condition, its Paradise Lost.  Yet, music loses itself outside of painting.  Music fails to account for our fall into bodily motion.  Music’s seeking is humbled in painting, even as music humbles painting by exposing its accidental bond to the bodily.  Yet, both music and painting are redeemed at their heart, insofar as they both spring from a poetic calling to evoke, to echo, to remind us of an order that underlies our chaos, a fundamental order of things necessarily and constantly presupposed by all disorder.

Without facing the constitutional limitations of both music and painting we shall remain trapped in modernity’s technological cave, oblivious to the motive that drove early modern thinkers to seek refuge in the technological synthesis of music and painting, of musical “tempo” and painting’s “space”.  We have already considered technology as a synthesis of natural generation and art’s creation.  This synthesis involves an obscuring of the natural hiatus between the eternal principles of art and art itself.  This is where we face the problem that Dante signals in speaking of visibile parlare, a divine logos that “speaks images,” a discourse that produces our world of appearances, the visible world (Purgatorio, 10-12).  Modernity signals the attempt to produce the divine discourse evoked by Dante by overcoming the limitations of painting, thereby reorienting music to serve a new task.  Thereby the classical exploration of the hiatus between image and reality yields to an expressive glorification of appearance, entailing the denial of the natural limitations of painting.  Painting, in turn, converts to the novel task of creating Parnassus as a progressive movement, a future-oriented fall into “creative evolution” (Henry Bergson’s évolution créatrice).  No longer concentrically evoking eternity, the “new” painting serves as handmaid to the generation of art, or of art as generated by nature.  No less than the new music, the new painting is the plaything of technology.

 

NOTES:

[1] Humans, British-American television series, Season 3, Episode 6 (2018).  The Season ends with the global prophetic vision of a “unique” baby-girl who, being the synthesis or “the coming together of man and machine, “will change the course of History, the History that will unfold only if you let it”; she “will be the first of a new kind”: “she is hope; she is everything we have been fighting for; she is the future of all of us”.

[2] Machiavelli “responded” to Dante most explicitly in his “Discourse or Dialogue Concerning our Language” (Discorso o dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua), c. 1515.

[3] See Marcel del Corte, “The Machiavellian Revolution,” Diogenes, 9.35 (1961): 60-77.  See further Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1958.

[4] Principj di Scienza Nuova (1744), “Of Principles,” par. 2.  See also “Of the Method,” par. 9.

[5] See my “Mastery of Nature” (Part 1), in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, 45.2 (2019): 223-47.

[6] “Quindi regna in questa Scienza questa spezie di pruove, che tali DOVETTERO, DEBBONO, e DOVRANNO andare le cose delle Nazioni, quali da questa Scienza son ragionate, posti tali Ordini dalla Provvedenza Divina, fusse anco che dall’Eternità nascessero di tempo in tempo Mondi Infiniti; lo che certamente è falso di fatto. Onde questa Scienza viene nello stesso tempo a descrivere una Storia Ideal’Eterna, sopra la quale corron’in tempo le Storie di tutte le Nazioni ne’ loro sorgimenti, progressi, stati, decadenze, e fini. Anzi ci avvanziamo ad affermare, ch’in tanto chi medita questa Scienza, egli narri a sé stesso questa Storia Ideal’Eterna, in quanto, essendo questo Mondo di Nazioni stato certamente fatto dagli Uomini, ch’è ’l Primo Principio indubitato, che se n’è posto quì sopra; e perciò dovendosene ritruovare la guisa dentro le modificazioni della nostra medesima Mente Umana, egli in quella pruova DOVETTE, DEVE, DOVRÀ esso stesso se ’l faccia; perchè ove avvenga, che chi fa le cose, esso stesso le narri, ivi non può essere più certa l’Istoria” (Principj di Scienza Nuova [1744], “Of the Method,” par. 9).

[7] Vico, Principj di Scienza Nuova (1744), Introduction, par. 1.

[8] The “irony” at hand is eclipsed by a society that shuns death as a mere-shadow of its own progress.  See pp. 93-94 of Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, transl. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1968 [1955]: 83-110.

[9] Vico, Principj di Scienza Nuova (1744), “Of the Elements,” 9-10: “9.  Men who do not know the true of things, provide themselves and limit themselves to the certain; for, not having the power to satisfy the intellect with science, at least the will may rest upon conscience.  10.  Philosophy contemplates Reason, whence comes the science of the true: Philology observes the Authority of Human Choice, whence comes the Conscience of the Certain” (IX. Gli uomini, che non sanno il vero delle cose, proccurano d’attenersi al certo; perchè non potendo soddisfare l’intelletto con la scienza, almeno la volontà riposi sulla coscienza.  X. La Filosofia contempla la Ragione, onde viene la scienza del vero: la Filologia osserva l’Autorità dell’Umano Arbitrio, onde viene la Coscienza del Certo).  In our world, we produce certainties to make up for our lack of knowledge.  On the other hand, we acquire knowledge by contemplating the reason of authoritative certainties.  As we see the reason of the certain within the mind (whence Vico’s “contempla”), we illuminate our certainties, or clarify authority.  What is the reason for the sake of which we provide certainties for ourselves?  Why do we poetize?  Not merely to flee ignorance, but to rise out of it in the mirror of our clarified certainties—of certainties adopted as mirrors.

[10] Vico, Principj di Scienza Nuova (1744), “Conclusion of the Work.”

[11] See my “Unmasking Limbo: Reading Inferno IV as Key to Dante’s Comedy” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, 40.2: 199-219.

[12] See my “Leo Strauss as Poet (A True Story)” in VoegelinView, Jan. 18, 2022.

[13] See George Bataille, “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice” (transl. Jonathan Strauss), Yale French Studies, 78 (1990): 9-28.  Originally published as “Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice,” Deucalion, 5 (1955): 21-43.

[14] See Jacob Klein, “On the Nature of Nature,” in Lectures and Essays, Annapolis, Maryland: St. John’s College Press, 1985: 219-39.

[15] See Jerrold J. Katz, The Underlying Reality of Language and its Philosophical Import, New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

[16] Axel Rüth, “Representing Wonder in Medieval Miracle Narratives,” MLN, 126.4, September 2011 (French Issue Supplement): S89-S114.  Rüth does little justice to the “intent” of medieval Christian theologians, whom Rüth reads as upholding “miracles” effectively as means to consolidate religious authority.  On a more charitable reading, Christianity’s miracula are mirabilia in which the divine is paradigmatically at work.  See also Thomas Storck, “Nature or Natures or Natural Laws?  Some Comments on C. S. Lewis’s Use of the Concept of Nature in Miracles, A Preliminary Study,” 77-91.

[17] See p. 169 of Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939), in Illuminations, op. cit., 155-200.  Love at last sight is love coinciding with death (the great Romantic theme so vividly characterized by Thomas Mann in his Death in Venice) and that is generally “spared, rather than denied, fulfillment” (170).  On Mann’s Death in Venice as consummate testimony of modern man’s failure to discern and live out the proper relation between the permanent problems of love (eros) and death (thanatos), see Eva Brann, “‘Death in Venice’: The Problem of Romantic Reaction,” at https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2019/06/death-in-venice-thomas-mann-eva-brann-90.html.  Brann’s article was originally delivered in 1971 as a lecture subsequently published under the title of “The Venetian Phaedrus,” in The St. John’s Review, 24.2 (July 1972): 1-9.