The Post-Materialist Man

Modernity has long been defined by materialism. Yet contrary to what the critics of modernity think, we now live in a post-materialist age. Taken to its ultimate consequences, materialism has become its opposite: when everything is viewed as “matter,” the human subject starts conceiving itself as a kind of pure and immaterial identity that has the cosmic function of freely determining all things. I don’t think it is possible to understand transhumanism and transgenderism, as anthropological phenomena, without understanding the demiurgic post-materialism that lies in its very foundation.

Post-materialist anthropology is based on a radical distancing between the human subject and all phenomena around it, including (and above anything else) its own body. The human body is no longer viewed as an inherent aspect of human nature, but as an Other, an externality that has no essential link with the self. According to this point of view, man is nothing but a dematerialized self dressed in meat suits. It goes without saying that the alienation caused by this detachment from the embodied existence is a great cause of suffering, and people who suffer from this cannot be blamed. On the contrary, we must sympathize with them and welcome them with love.

This alienating tendency has accelerated with the internet. The idea of a virtual identity naturally extended into everyday life. It would be surprising if the fact that we spend many hours on a virtual world didn’t dematerialize us even a little bit for the rest of the day. The fact that we bring the habits of our virtual experiences into our everyday lives is quite clear: as we customize our avatars and create modified images of ourselves with AI tools, we so customize our real bodies with rhinoplasties, facial harmonizations, silicone prosthetics, hormones, hair dyes, and so on. The body is like clay in the potter’s hands, and there are no limits for its modification. The Human Ken Doll is the paradigm of post-materialist age; Baudrillard’s enfant-prothèse is now omnipresent. The negation of the differences between human and non-human, an inevitable consequence of this post-materialism, has culminated in total indifference. We are all men-prosthesis, androgens, cyborgs, demiurges. Our cyborg demiurgy reveals a radical indifference.

Those who are familiarized with the history of religions will quickly recognize the gnostic roots of this post-materialism. This is not a doctrinal gnosticism, even less a doctrine that is an offspring of a given religion such as Christianity. It is actually a mode of being in the world, one that is not restricted to the limits of a particular confession and has no uniform doctrinal expression.

We see post-materialism behind a great variety of phenomena, and it isn’t evident if they are ideologically connected at all. It is clearly seen on the liberal left and their defense of trangenderism, but also in the cult of the body and plastic surgeries, that permeates the culture and society at large. This cult, which at first seems to be an expression of the old materialism, reveals its true face when we examine it more closely: the human body, considered in its actual state, is not that relevant for this cult; only its potential is celebrated. It is like a marble stone that needs to be carved, the clay that serves the potter’s craft. The driving force of this cult is not the body itself, but its modification. As there are no limits to this modification process, the body is seen as pure potentiality. The pure indeterminacy of the body corresponds to an absolute capacity for determination on the part of the agent who acts over it, and this agent, in its turn, is not seen as a corporeal being, but as the post-materialist demiurge.

We can recognize this phenomenon also (and mainly) in the New Age/occultist and traditionalist groups. It isn’t rare to find followers of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon completely detached from their own bodies with countless metaphysical justifications for their alienation. The self-identification with the “Supreme Ātma,” instead of affording the flourishing of new dimensions of their own being, dehumanizes them without giving anything in return. Indeed, that which seems to be a “self-identification with the Ātma” is often just a blasphemy: we project on the source of reality the limitations that are proper to our concrete individuality. The only way for the “I am the Ātma” refrain not to be a blasphemy is for this “I” to be absolutely free from the conditioning of our individuality. 

The truth is that when we use the word “I” we mean precisely some conditioned reality; unless, of course, we are saints and God has permitted us to experience directly His own identity — and that’s not the case of the traditionalists I know, for sure. This “traditional” dehumanization is, thus, a parody of sanctity that often brings forth those who René Guénon himself called awliyā ash-Shaytān (Satan’s saints).

The belief in reincarnation itself (in its Kardecist formulation), which is widespread in Brazil, has the post-materialist anthropology as its root. The body is seen by the reincarnationists as a kind of garment that can be changed after death. According to this conception, there is no essential link between the “spirit” and the body.

It is quite clear that the Christological consequences of this belief are terrible. The Incarnation, according to this perspective, would be nothing more than an accident in relation to the Word, and the body of Christ would be one of many manifestations of Him. In short, the Son would be essentially a dehumanized Word, and this cannot coincide in any way with orthodox Christology.

We are our bodies. This sentence certainly offends the sensibility of many metaphysicians, and this is not entirely without reason. In fact, our being is not reducible to corporality. It is, therefore, correct to say that, although we are our bodies, we are not just bodies. We are not just bodies, and, nevertheless, we are our bodies. The fact that we find in ourselves something that transcends the corporeal dimension shouldn’t lead us to a renunciation of the body, it should rather lead us to a reconquer of our embodied existence. The separation of the body from its ontological foundation can only be two things: a mere abstraction or a cadaver. As post-materialism kills the body by means of its abstraction, it is also a cadaverism. The living body is certainly more than a body.

One of the inconveniences of abstract thought is the confusion between a logical distinction and a real separation. Weight and length are logically distinct, but one couldn’t find a weight that has no relation to an extensive object. In reality itself, i.e. in rem, weight and length are concretely united. The same confusion occurs when we consider the reality of a being such as man. We find in it, for example, the distinction between body and soul; yet, this distinction, which permits us to treat these two aspects very easily, doesn’t reflect a real separation of the two. The error of separating things that are united in reality corresponds to death. This dissection operated by human reason entombs us alive, and this is not a spiritual death like that of the Christian monks, but rather its parody.

Based on what I just said, we can view the post-materialist phenomena as a protest of the body against human reason, which threatens it with death. It is not surprising at all that this protest has taken an irrational shape, nor is it surprising that in this very gesture the body translucently reveals its causa mortis. The man-prosthesis is the son of dissection. Its condition of possibility is an undue separation between body and soul. Losing its body, the man-prosthesis has also lost its soul. He cannot accept his soul anymore, because to affirm it implies to accept an essentialism with which he cannot live without stop being a man-prosthesis. Anti-essentialism is the condition of his existence. Without the anti-essential bread, the body-prosthesis cannot sustain itself. The price of eating this bread is the loss of the soul, and that’s why the body of flesh is so important. It is necessary to prepare our stomachs with the essential bread so that someday (who knows?) we may digest the Superessential Bread. Empty sacks can’t stand upright.

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