Modernity is, among other things, the story of the collapse of meaning that is related to the gradual shriveling
up of a taken-for-granted sense of the “sacred” as a given in human experience. The word 'sacred' is still in our vocabulary, but we moderns have hardly any sense of the awe and often terror that typified the experience of it for our premodern ancestors. In any event, the
common name used to describe this story of the shriveling of meaning is 'secularization', but that word
only scratches the surface of the significance of what has happened to
us in the last five hundred years. My goal here is not to lament what we
have lost. The social conservatives are naive if they think we can
find a way to go back to an earlier form of consciousness just by
reintroducing sacred talk into our public practice. I will make an
argument elsewhere that we are moving into a post-secular era, and this
movement into the future will require the retrieval of much from the
premodern era that was jettisoned during the Modern Age. Retrieval and
nostalgia are not the same thing.
But the conservative program is essentially nostalgic, and its
strategies that focus on prayer in schools or other religious practices
in public places will not solve the problem. Such strategies derive from
a significant underestimation of how deeply secularized we have become.
Yes, surely, our public institutions and political discourse have
become profoundly secularized, but even more significant has been the
degree to which our cognitive/perceptual capacity has become secularized
as well. Secularization has affected not just our institutions and
public discourse, but also the very way we experience the world. It
affects what we see or don’t see in nature, in other people, in the
everyday world that surrounds us in our homes and workplaces. Our
public, secular language is an honest reflection of our secular
experience. Just changing the language won’t change the experience.
The cultural shift into a post-secular idiom is already underway. But
we need first to understand where we are and how we got here.
It has often been noted that we Moderns in the West have developed
what is fundamentally a mechanomorphic imagination of reality. The world
has lost its numinous quality, its ability to enchant. We see it now as
a big machine—as something interesting and complex and full of
unanswered questions about how it works, but we have a very hard time
thinking about it in terms other than as something machine-like. And in
some quarters of the culture there is serious talk about how the human
being is evolving into something evermore machinelike. We see this
reflected particularly in contemporary film. Cyborgs are everywhere.
But we moderns also believe that our mechanomorphic view of the world
is an accurate reflection of the way it really is. Any talk, for
instance, that suggests that the earth is our Mother, as has become
popular in New Age and ecological circles, seems dotty and overly
sentimental. And yet for people in an earlier age, this was their
reality. That the earth was a godlike being was as obvious to them as
the law of gravity is to us. The gods and goddesses were everywhere
inhabiting and animating the streams and forests and mountains, and the
modern sensibility finds it impossible to believe this experience of the
world was ever anything more than the product of the over-fertile
imaginations of a primitive people still living in a dreamworld. For
moderns this is the mentality of children who have not yet awakened to
the way things really are—the way the enlightened, rational modern sees
them. But maybe the truth is that moderns have fallen asleep to a world
that premoderns were awake in. We are hyper-aware of things and the
mechanics of things, but oblivious of the kind of spiritual activity
that permeates things and gives them their life.
So to say that meaning has collapsed does not of course mean that
there is no meaning; it is simply to recognize that the public world
into which we have been socialized has been stripped of any possibility
of there being sacred meanings. All that is left to us are the husks of
things, and when we look at these husks we see only their physicality,
and so our questions about them become limited to their mechanics and
how they work. And so one is left with the world as a machine, and if
one asks what this machine is for, the only answer that makes sense is
for our economic and entertainment uses. In such a world, what is there
to hope for but better bread and better circuses?
The old religious answers to that question have come to seem
incredible because the language in which they were developed was steeped
in an experience of the world in which the sacred was a part of
everyone’s common experience. If for moderns it doesn’t make sense to
talk about the spirits who animate nature, how can it make sense to talk
about the sacraments, or transubstantiation, or apparitions, or the
communion of saints? These words are labels for experiences common to
the premodern consciousness. To use such language meaningfully assumes a
kind of everyday experience of the sacred and of a sense of intimate
connection with mostly invisible worlds. In a world that moderns have
come to experience everyday as a machine, such language just doesn’t
work. It’s too much at odds with our ordinary understanding of how
things are.
And so as the sense for the sacred as a common experience diminished
during the modern era, so did meaning. Surely people find ways to give
their lives meaning; but these meanings have no robust transcendent
reference or validation. Meaning as something given from out there has
progressively diminished over the last five hundred years. Meaning has
become more and more what we make it. We live in a Potemkin village of
"public" meanings, for what lies behind them is simply the void.
Meaning is not "given" out there; meaning is what we project into the
world from within. This is now a commonplace idea with which every
Freshman in college is familiar. It's at the heart of what
conservatives object to when they talk about moral relativism. But
conservatives do not offer a way forward; their only answer is to look
backward with nostalgia to a time when things were less "relative," when
what was given by tradition was accepted without question.
This is why, in my opinion, Nietzsche is the eye of the needle
through which any way forward must pass. He didn’t persuade the culture
that human existence was essentially
absurd. He simply saw with greater clarity than most others what had
happened in the West, and drew out the logical consequences. I see him
much as I described Gregory House in my Purgatorio
Man post several weeks ago. He strips us of our illusions, and
requires that if we are to move forward honestly we must do so on terms
that are chosen in freedom, not given by tradition.
His absurdist metaphysical narrative is an articulation of our era's
dark night of the soul, a dark night through which we must all pass if
we are to mature spiritually. The mother's milk of tradition is no
longer proferred. We have to stand on our own. Nietzsche's was such an
attempt to walk in freedom–a failed attempt, but a noble one
nevertheless. His is not by any means the last word, but it is a word
that must be heard and absorbed if we are to find an honest way forward.
Nietzsche was nauseated by the modern experience and by the kind of
soulless human being it was creating. A part of him was the nostalgic
conservative classics scholar who wanted things to go back to the way
they were in a Golden Age. But for him the world of public given
meaning as it had been defined by the Christian West no longer made
sense. And so now humans had two choices that led to false
consciousness: either to continue in religious beliefs that simply could
not be held by anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty; or to
revert to Last-Man, bread-and-and-circus meanings.
He thought both were forms of slavishness insofar as they were
founded on a fundamental gesture of the soul toward unfreedom. He
recognized that there are no possibilities for transcendence within the
closed circle of the world as he felt any intellectually honest person
had to see it. But he insisted that even in a world that was
metaphysically meaningless, the human being nevertheless had to find a
way to aspire to be something “more.” The human being is hardwired for
transcendence, whether we like it or not. But toward what does that
transcending point?
He saw as his philosophical task to find a way to affirm that in a
world where nothing is given to him—in a world where all a human being
has is his own freedom and will and the inner resources of his soul—to
achieve nobility by self-overcoming. If there is no transcendence out
there, then transcendence is something that one must find within. And
so “self-transcending” becomes its own goal. There is no heaven or
future afterlife reward of any sort. The human being’s dignity and
nobility lie in his refusal of such fantasies and in refusing to
surrender to any meanings except those of his own making. Such a human
being he called the uebermensch, translated sometimes as the ‘superman’,
but more accurately as the ‘overman’. But really what he meant was the
‘overcoming man’.
I think Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the problem was essentially correct;
and his solution, while it had a tremendous cultural impact during the
twentieth century for good and ill, points to a truth about human nature
and human aspiration that is only part of the story. The human being
is truly an “overcoming man,” and I would agree with Nietzsche and his
disciple Sartre that the deepest dignity of the human being lies in his
unconditional freedom, and I would agree that the assertion of this
freedom is at the heart of what makes the human being in his thinking
and in his willing the remarkable and unique creature that he is. But
the human being is in fact so much more. And the absurdist narrative
central to the Nietzschean metaphysics is not the only one in which such
an affirmation of radical human freedom is possible. There is also a
Christian possibility.
[Ed. This is a repost of "Modernity & the Loss of Soul" from December 2005. Check "Philosphers, Artists, Saints,"
"The
Twilight of the Secular,"and "Getting
Beyond the Secular" for three other essays I've written on
Neitzschean themes.]
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