Plainness, Sancho, for all affectation is bad (Llaneza, Sancho, que toda afectación es mala).

– Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes addresses perennial concerns about human nature and reality, the snare of confusing appearance with reality, man’s quest for love, and reflections on life and death with a timeless, melancholic embrace of beauty. Cervantes makes the passage of time and man’s often overzealous regard for the world a picaresque, devil-may-care, animated puppet theater. This is true of his shorter Novelas Ejemplares (Exemplary Novels); Don Quixote displays Cervantes’ philosophical and literary perspicuity and acumen.

Don Quixote makes life the protagonist. The affirmation of life is truly Don Quixote’s quest. The venerable knight-errant seeks more than life from his life. He is a man who does not want to squander the time that he is allotted to live, thus concocts a plan that aims to squeeze from life nectar that is sweeter than life itself.

Granted, the affirmation of life and the quest to demand more than life from the immediacy of lived experience can at times exhaust itself in disappointment and disenchantment. That is a risk that people who seek more than life from life must recognize and appropriate. Don Quixote is cognizant of this.

To embrace more than life, Alonso Quijano, a homely man who is enamored of reading and learning, especially books of chivalry, must transform himself into Don Quixote, the “ingenious hidalgo from La Mancha.” 

Quijano becomes aware that his life has become the object of heightened thought and reflection, something he had never considered before. Don Quixote turns the novelty and exploration of the La Mancha region of Spain into an existential justification of life. It is a significant detail of Cervantes’ literary masterpiece that Quijano is a man close to fifty years of age and not a budding young romantic, though the author informs readers that he is “of a robust constitution.” 

Don Quixote’s strong will—his robust Spanish constitution and temperament—is the fuel that animates his trek through the dusty open plains of La Mancha. His mature age has prepared Don Quixote for a life-plan that, while it may appear idealistic to readers, equips the knight-errant-to-be with the wisdom of lived experience and knowledge of the human condition that carries him and Sancho Panza through their seemingly endless array of thorny situations. Don Quixote’s wisdom, which is strengthened by Sancho’s quick wit and proverbs, which become more pronounced as the novel develops, enables both men to return home.

Alonso Quijano, who is soon to transform himself into Don Quixote, plans to do battle with the scoundrels that bring unhappiness to righteous people, right the “wrongs” of the world, and other contingencies that the region of La Mancha throws at him. 

La Mancha symbolizes the world for the venerable knight-errant. Don Quixote’s exploration of the arid plateau that is Spain’s La Mancha region unites Cervantes’ love of books and reading and the life of the mind with the author’s worldly experience. We cannot forget that Miguel de Cervantes was a worldly man. As Cervantes writes, “He who reads much and travels much, sees much and knows much (“El que lee mucho y anda mucho, ve mucho y sabe mucho”). 

Don Quixote exemplifies Cervantes’ awe and wonder. The Spanish author embraces the immediacy and translucence that is human existence, a sentiment that William Blake puts on display in Auguries of Innocence: “To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour.” The reflective Don Quixote devises a life plan, an existential concept that many subsequent Spanish thinkers explore, including Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset. 

To want more than life from life is equivalent to desiring a justification for life; Don Quixote is marred by the tension between life, as lived experience, and our capacity for self-reflection. We must not confuse the capacity for existential self-reflection with mere reason. Reason alone does not satiate Don Quixote’s attitude toward life. Reason does not assuage the existential inquietude that Don Quixote desires to satisfy. 

Fighting windmills and seeking an imaginary romance with a girl who lives nearby, Aldonza Lorenzo, whom the knight-errant names Dulcinea del Toboso, fuels Don Quixote’s passion. Fighting windmills and assuaging Dulcinea’s unrequited love only make up a few items of Don Quixote’s animated prospectus of what it means for him to live his life as a waking dream. 

Life as dream, that is, reality as suspended animation that courageous and imaginative people can discern, is a major theme in Don Quixote. We encounter this theme in other Spanish writers and thinkers, including Lope de Vega, Baltasar Gracián, Calderon de La Barca, and in Spain’s most gifted romantic poets. While Don Quixote is a poetic and lyrical novel about life as illusion, it is also a playful work that is prescient about the human condition. 

Cervantes was a worldly man who lost the use of his left hand in 1571 in the Battle of Lepanto, was imprisoned by pirates in Algiers from 1575 to 1580, and worked as a commissary for the Spanish Armada between 1587 and 1588.

Miguel de Cervantes had as full a life as any writer or thinker can accommodate, live through, and retain the necessary vitality and mental clarity to commit to paper. Cervantes’ quest to joust with life makes his Spanish temperament shine through the literary conventions he developed, including his penchant for telling stories within stories and for turning the author into a participant in the action of the novel.

Cervantes was a writer, poet, and thinker. This is perhaps the most astounding aspect of his writing and life that befuddles readers and biographers alike, especially in late postmodernism, when “specialization” has such chic appeal for pampered, would-be writers and thinkers. The lyrical quality of Don Quixote highlights Cervantes’ poetic temperament as a novelist.

Being a writer and a practical man of the world, Cervantes exploits the vagaries and intricacies of life and thought. Though this is not an enviable task that most writers care to cultivate. As a thinker, Cervantes is a stoic Catholic. Setting his sight on the life of the soul, the Spanish author treats the here-and-now with guarded, even comical, disinterest. This makes him patient and perspicuous about the ways of the world and man. Though idealistic in life and love, Don Quixote does not suffer fools, as far as his relationship with other people is concerned. Don Quixote is savvy about what to expect from people.

When Don Quixote sets out to right the wrongs of the world, he takes with him a loyal farmer who lives nearby. His name is Sancho Panza. Don Quixote convinces the pudgy man that “panza” means belly in Spanish, and he should go with him because together they will live a life of adventure. Sancho Panza becomes convinced that he should accompany Don Quixote after the knight-errant promises his future companion and squire-to-be that Sancho Panza will come into the possession of an island of which he will be governor: “In the meanwhile Don Quixote was bringing his powers of persuasion to bear upon a farmer who lived near by, a good man—if this title may be applied to one who is poor—but with very few wits in his head.”

Besides becoming Don Quixote’s loyal companion, Sancho Panza is a central witness to Don Quixote’s exploits. It is Sancho Panza who keeps Don Quixote from falling into greater and graver dangers. Sancho Panza, who is supposed to be Don Quixote’s apprentice in the ways of life and the world, his sounding board for the knight errant’s timeless and life-affirming proverbs, turns out to be a quick understudy. In the second half of the novel, it is Sancho Panza who advises Don Quixote with his elaborate and witty proverbs. Don Quixote is so impressed with Sancho Panza’s witticisms that he tells his squire to use his proverbs sparingly.

Don Quixote’s deathbed scene is one of the most profound and perspicuous life-as-dream dialogues that literature has ever attained. Through Don Quixote, the knight-errant, readers glimpse life with the clarity that the passage of time brings to the lives of poets, thoughtful thinkers, and other seers. Not the least of these is Sancho Panza, who delivers timeless wisdom to Don Quixote about the meaning of human existence.

Pedro Blas González is a professor of philosophy at Barry University.

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Annihilation (Anéantir)

Reviewed by Pedro Blas González.

France in 2027 is the setting of Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, Annihilation (Anéantir). France is morally, socially, and politically coming apart at the seams; meaninglessness has become the staple of dysfunctional lives. The French author delivers readers into the entrails of life-numbing nihilism in late postmodernity. 

Paul, the main character, is an advisor to the Minister of Finance. Prudence, his wife, is a Department of the Treasury official. Their loveless, stale marriage is a microcosm of the inanity of late postmodern life. 

The author explores the acerbic nihilism, godlessness, rampant terrorism, and sexual aberration of life in late postmodernity, and these are only a select few of the dominant themes in this author’s novels. Houellebecq surprises his most virulent critics and detractors by turning his attention to the redemptive value of Catholic morality and values.

Because Houellebecq’s characters, at best, represent moral and spiritual dysfunctionality and, at worst, full-blown caustic vulgarity, Annihilation turns a new page in his writing—pardon the pun.

Paul’s Catholic sister and her husband are both contented, well-adjusted people. Yet the rest of the characters form a latter-day menagerie of morally and spiritually stunted personages incapable of self-reflection—a cross-section and slice of life in late postmodern nihilism, the author suggests. While reading Houellebecq, one finds oneself asking: “When have I met some of these people before?”

Houellebecq’s plot, the interaction of the characters with each other, thorny situations, and contingencies to be worked out in the novel drive a hard-hitting critique of dysfunctional societies and our throwaway, late postmodern milieu. Houellebecq begs the question: Does late postmodern relativism pretend it can sustain itself without imploding? 

Judging by his interviews and previous novels, Houellebecq proposes that in the degenerate, late postmodern world, it is harder than most people suspect for most people to be happy and experience well-grounded lives unless a moral and spiritual renewal takes place. 

However, Houellebecq offers a caveat against hopelessness. Beginning in the second half of the novel, after a vast portion of the plot mechanism has become manifest, Houellebecq introduces readers to the revamped possibilities for human life that love offers. The author does not mean the platitudinous affectation and ideological virtue signaling of wokeness. Instead, Houellebecq explores sacrifice and grace in the Catholic faith and life-long commitment to another person.

Paul’s personal world is in disarray. His marriage is a facade, his father has a debilitating stroke, and he finds himself embroiled in his boss’s presidential campaign, the Minister of Finance. Part of Paul’s job is to uncover the perpetrators of cyberterrorism, which is inspired by devil worship. Houellebecq intimates that this aspect of the plot serves to call attention to the seemingly demonic forces that late postmodernism has unleashed. 

Slowly, Paul becomes jaded by the meaninglessness and purposelessness that he encounters in the world. He begins to seek redemption—salvation, dare I say—by turning his back on a dysfunctional late postmodern world fueled by corrupting innocence, beauty, and good will. This is when Paul begins to rekindle his relationship with his sister; she acts as a sober force in his groggy existential crisis.

New readers of Houellebecq might find Annihilation representative of the world outside their door. Does the novel speak loudest to the private world of nihilists? Readers will decide. 

On the other hand, return readers of Houellebecq will applaud the poignant descriptive ability of a novelist who is not afraid to call a spade a spade. Houellebecq is a writer and public intellectual, not a woke academic sociologist. 

For Houellebecq, a rose is still a rose no matter the ideological mania for name-changing that virtue-signaling affectation foments. Like the Spanish writer and public intellectual Juan Manuel de Prada, Houellebecq believes writers should work to dethrone ideology from postmodernity.

Pedro Blas González is a professor of philosophy at Barry University.

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The Twilight World: A Novel

Reviewed by Pedro Blas González.

Hiroo Onoda was a Japanese Imperial Army soldier who did not accept that Japan surrendered on September 2, 1945, thus bringing World War II to an end. Instead, Onoda lived in Lubang Island in the Philippines until he was forced out from hiding on March 9, 1974. 

As a teenager in the 1970s, I remember hearing about a Japanese soldier that never surrendered. I wondered how something like that can happen in a world replete with newspapers and television. What kind of headstrong man would sacrifice his life in that manner?

In the novel The Twilight World, German film director and writer Werner Herzog tells the unlikely tale. Herzog is best known for directing enigmatic feature films: Aguirre, the Wrath of God; Nosferatu the Vampyre; Fitzcarraldo, and many other short and documentary films.

In this novel, Herzog takes on Onoda’s deeply complex story. After leaving the jungle, Onoda was hailed as a hero who defended the honor of Japan’s Imperial Army. This is true. Yet, Onoda and three other soldiers that accompanied him for a portion of his time in the jungle are alleged to have killed over thirty soldiers and civilians.

Herzog’s novel ventures to answer the puzzle of Onoda’s character and his thirty years on Lubang. In 1997, while in Japan, Herzog met Onoda. A short epigram appears on the first page of the book: “What was important to the author was something other than accuracy, some essence he thought he glimpsed when he encountered the protagonist of his story.” The most captivating aspect of Herzog’s novel is the ‘essence’ of this nonconformist soldier. Hiroo Onoda died in Tokyo, on January 16, 2014, at the age of 91.

Part of Onoda’s success in remaining pro-active, as he imagined that he was still defending territory of the Japanese Imperial Army that was due to return to the island, was his ability to use the jungle to move stealthily to avoid his perceived enemies.

Unwavered by oppressive heat and humidity, monsoon rains, leeches, vicious mosquitoes, malaria, and the constant need to find food and shelter, Onoda kept to his singular purpose: to defend the island until the Imperial army returned. That was his assignment, and it became his mission.

The protagonist places wet leaves on his legs and green twigs on his body. He learns to imitate animal behavior, their defensive manners. Onoda became a champion of guerilla warfare. He believed that “Every human being on this island is my enemy.” Herzog describes Onoda as a man with a wiry body, lively eyes, and circumspect movements. Onoda’s ordered world and choreographed movements remind us of characters and mise en scène in Jean-Pierre Melville films.  

Herzog mesmerizes the reader with descriptions of the passage of time. He alerts us to time’s relative nature, especially as the lack of interaction with other people and awareness of human events slow down time for Onoda in the jungle. 

Beginning right before the end of Onoda’s time on the island, the novel tells Onoda’s story in retrospect. This gives the novel a certain coherence because the protagonist, who is proud of having survived one-hundred-eleven ambushes, encounters a young Japanese civilian, Norio Suzuki, who is camped in the jungle. Onoda believes the twenty-two-year-old man to be an American agent. The two men begin a conversation; Onoda holds the man prisoner. This is how the story unravels in earnest.

Onoda is told about the historical and human events that have unfolded since he took refuge in the thick jungle: Japan’s surrender in September 1945, the atomic bomb, the Korean War, and men landing on the moon. Onoda believes none of this. There is also Onoda’s discussion of what he perceives to be jet bombers cruising high above the jungle. He reasons that the airplanes are flying too high to be propeller powered. In 1971, Onoda finds a newspaper in the jungle. He is perplexed as to why the newspaper has more advertisement than copy.

Herzog’s tale explores the surreal quality of a modern-day Robinson Crusoe-like story of a man who has lived in what appears to be a dream world. The author suggests that human reality is broader than the human events that transpire in any generation, and which many people may be oblivious of. What is reality for Onoda? The Twilight World is a lyrical tale of human life—one man’s existence —and the passage of time, for: “The jungle does not recognize time.” This, then, is the “essence” of The Twilight World.  

The jungle is a metaphor for life and death, for as the narrator explains, “everything in the jungle is at pains to strangle everything else in the battle for sunlight.” The ocean is the same in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, where “everything kills everything else.” The narrator offers the reader many clues of Onoda’s psychical state of being and perspective regarding his alleged enemies.

The Twilight World is truly a meditation on timelessness. Onoda’s sense of time appears to re-emerge, when a small airplane circles low above the jungle, a man saying out of a loudspeaker, “this is your brother, Toshi.” Immediately, Onoda is transported to a time of family and youth. Adherence to the facts in a strict manner is not the point of this or any novel. The minutiae of Onoda’s saga must be filled by the reader’s imagination.

Toward the end of the novel the narrator ruminates on the nature of time. The present, he tells us, is fleeting because Onoda must keep busy cultivating his “invisibility.” The future, which is a not-yet, a longing and ambition, consumes the protagonist through his anticipation and fear of being captured.

Jorge Luis Borges’s notion that writers write between the lines, and that readers should learn to read by using the imagination, is an apt description of Herzog’s novel. 

Herzog’s poignant sense of the interplay of appearance and reality, and time and eternity make The Twilight World a reflection on the essence of man and the passage of time. Is Onoda’s life fulfilled, justified by his adherence to “saving face” and honor? Is his life wasted? Did Onoda’s thirty years in the jungle, fighting a phantom battle, make him a Quixote-like dreamer who fights windmills in the jungle?

Pedro Blas González is a professor of philosophy at Barry University.

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Interventions 2020

Reviewed by Pedro Blas González.

What makes Michel Houellebecq a singular writer for today is his understanding of postmodern man’s existential boredom and inability to cope with life on its own terms. One of the chapters in Interventions 2020, a book of essays and interviews that appeared in English in 2022, is appropriately titled, “A remedy for the exhaustion of being.”

Houellebecq is the consummate chronicler of postmodernism’s collapse of Western values. If Derrida, Foucault and other chic purveyors of nihilism made a name for themselves by “deconstructing,” that is, annihilating objectivity, Houellebecq is the street sweeper who picks up the refuse after the party.

Interventions 2020 is quintessential Houellebecq, a writer in the vein of Celine, a spokesman for common sense who exposes the debilitating effect that nihilism, as a form of public policy, has on meaning and purpose in private life.

One of Houellebecq’s strengths as a writer is his recognition that meaninglessness and banality—both staples of nihilism—have always affected individuals. Individuals have always had to deal their cards when challenged by life, other people, and society. This is hardly new. The difference between nihilism as a private response to life’s contingencies and its sinister manifestation as public policy, Houellebecq aptly points out, is that the latter demands that nihilism become institutionalized. The latter is the white elephant in the room of postmodernity.

The normalization of nihilism is the backbone of deconstructionism, albeit its attendant values include hatred for Christianity, capitalism, and the nuclear family. While remaining an idiosyncratic personal attitude toward life, nihilism could never become a weapon against life itself. This merely remains a personal concern. How, then, did nihilism acquire its destructive power over entire societies? The normalization of nihilism has been achieved because free will has been turned into a burden.

In his novels Houellebecq enables his characters to explore nihilism, while readers are left to make up their mind about the outcome. Literary creation allows for the presentation of a large array of topics and themes. Readers accept this as a literary convention, regardless of whether they embrace the values of any character. 

Interventions 2020 presents Houellebecq’s disgust with nihilism and leftism in a direct manner. His interviews are philosophically insightful and unapologetic. The essays in this collection explore his chosen topics in a tone worthy of Montaigne, that is, as a thinker that explores the themes of his essays as if talking aloud.

Houellebecq’s essays in Interventions 2020 fill the void created by academic philosophy by providing readers with thoughtful reflection on real-world themes that demand attention. He has much to say about Descartes, Comte, scientism, and God. Houellebecq’s philosophical reflection is not encumbered by the straitjacket and hypocrisy of radical ideology. For instance, in “Soil Cutting” the author argues that August Comte’s dream of a positive age levels any possibility of existential contemplation, leaving man with self-consuming nihilistic scientism as a religion of the here-and-now: “And what will lead them, given their awareness that, as individuals, they are transient beings, to be satisfied with their participation in this fetish of theory?  Who, in the final analysis, can be interested in a religion that does not preserve them from death?” 

Houellebecq conceives postmodern life as a trap, a dead-end proposition that can no longer be sustained. The author of the novels The Elementary Particles and Platform, among others, ponders the question: what should be the corrective to postmodern nihilism?

Readers of Houellebecq will notice a marked difference between Interventions 2020, a book that makes light of the author’s volatile literary trajectory fraught with attacks from critics and legal proceedings leveled at him by French leftists, and his novels. Interventions 2020 is the work of a world-weary mature author. 

While reflecting on his novels with the perspective that the passage of time affords any writer, Houellebecq remains a steadfast exponent of writers and thinkers to express themselves freely in open societies. He laments the disappearance of the free press as much as the death of personal communion, if not communication between people: “The gradual crumbling of creativity in the arts is thus just another face of the very contemporary fact that conversation is now impossible.” 

Two significant differences that readers of Houellebecq will find in this enjoyable book are his new-found positive attitude toward the Catholic faith and his conviction that postmodern existence is a tragic, gutted affair with meaninglessness that can no longer be sustained. 

Interventions 2020 shows us the face of a conservative Michel Houellebecq. This stage of Houellebecq’s development as a writer and thinker will confuse his detractors, for they will ask, “what about the nihilistic themes he entertains in his novels, the death of God, suicide, and depression?” He answers that he is not a proponent of the fashionable trends that hedonists and nihilism promote, only a chronicler and interpreter of an age that has exhausted itself with self-destruction, and which must be re-invented if it is to survive.

Pedro Blas González is a professor of philosophy at Barry University.

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By Pedro Blas González

Beginning in the early twentieth century, Bolshevism’s incessant propaganda and disinformation campaigns have made it next to impossible, even for thoughtful persons, to separate appearance from reality and truth from deception. In order for Bolshevism’s ploy that “a lie repeated over and over becomes truth” and Lenin’s “the Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them” to gain traction, Marxist artifice had to be repackaged and sold to Western intellectuals.

How did Bolshevism’s sinister form of deception eventually come to rule postmodern man? There are several reasons. For one, the rate of technological development in the twentieth century enabled Bolshevism to turn time-proven despotism into a state-controlled machinery of censorship and murder. Bolshevism harnessed developing technologies and used these to advance its brave new world of psychological terror and state-driven violence.

Technological development is a natural offspring of man’s sense of awe and wonder, imagination and ingenuity. From the Pre-Socratics to Plato and Aristotle, philosophers have reflected on the question of innovation and what constitutes material progress. The problem is that technological development confronts man with a fundamental paradox: while awe and wonder can result in new technological discoveries, these subsequently often serve to stymie imagination and spiritual development through complacency. The kind of idleness that complacency ushers is labeled a capitalist bourgeois value by Bolshevism.

Human history demonstrates that progress comes in temporal spirals of advancement, setbacks, and retraction, not linear progress. This is why Parmenides refers to truth (alētheia, ἀλήθεια) as revealing/unrevealing. For ancient Greek philosophers, alētheia uncovers the structure of human reality, making it the opposite of illusion. In other words, knowledge does not come from idleness, but from proactive engagement with human reality. This is a difficult task that requires discipline and patience, for truth, Parmenides informs us, does not prostitute itself to the highest bidder. Yet the manipulation of truth is profitable for social-political movements that aim to reduce human reality to appearance. This is a stratagem that eradicates man’s ability to embrace reality as resistance to the will, and the attainment of truth the reward of taking the road less traveled.

Socrates realized that reason presents thinkers with understanding of human reality as revelation. As the end result of reflection, the terms of revelation are not dictated by the thinker. Instead, reason delivers the thinker to understanding, regardless of how unsavory the findings. Dialectical progression—in the form of thesis-antithesis-synthesis—is one of the mechanisms of truth that demand cognitive appropriation of the structure of reality. Plato, along with other ancient Greek philosophers, discovered that essence manifests itself as form. To uncover essence requires cohesion between thought and human reality. This entails that thinkers should respect the essential and objective (formal) architectonic of human reality.

Instead of sincere appropriation of human reality, Marxist dialectics, which is in effect a vile sophistry, violates and deforms reality through manipulating the adherence of reason to reality. The correlation that reason can come to have with reality demonstrates that man’s encounter with moral and spiritual essences creates well-adjusted individuals.

Marxist dialectical materialism ignores man’s metaphysical and existential grasp of qualitative phenomenon. Rather, Marxists sell dialectical materialism as wordy, smart-sounding talk about class warfare as their theoretical vehicle for social-political power. In actuality, dialectical materialism is a modern and postmodern form of sophism that defames and vulgarizes human reality for social-political gain. Marxism’s power over anguished people who cannot accept human reality on its own terms is rooted in Marxism’s declaration of war on reality. Sophism always disguises itself in the appearance of smartness, which in itself is another manner of cultivating appearances.

Bolshevism turned the idea of human progress on its head. Instead of the quest to alleviate the ravages of disease, backbreaking labor, and man’s quest for leisure, through moral/spiritual and cultural enlightenment, Bolshevism’s rancorous use of dialectical calisthenics consumes man’s capacity for contentment by converting the human person into a perverter of human reality for ideological reasons. Marxism paves the road to social-political and economic damnation through the fabrication of the one-party state.

Positivism in the Twentieth Century

The twentieth century proved to be a time in human history when positivism harvested the human psyche to turn it on itself. Positivism, in its many variants, is the hallmark of philosophical materialism, which promotes the objectification of man through the extinction of metaphysical and religious sensibility. Positivism’s anti-metaphysical stance aims to annihilate man’s ability to uncover qualitative essence: the foundation of man’s lived-experience and wellbeing. An anti-metaphysical age is what Auguste Comte, the father of positivism, refers to as the final stage of “the law of three stages.” Comte argues that the final stage of human history is the positive stage.

The detrimental effect that positivism has had on the human person beginning, say, in 1900, is unprecedented. Positivism attempts to forge a world that is ruled by the many offshoots of philosophical materialism: biologism, physicalism, and scientism, to name a few. Whatever form positivism takes, whether in morals, cultural, or social-political, the result is always reductionism. In order to achieve its quest for reductionism of human existence to a base material process, positivism must first impair man’s metaphysical sensibility, including the cultivation of beauty, moral values, and religious beliefs. Indolence and the lure of material comfort, Comte understood, would do the bidding for positivism. Comte was confident that a positive age would eventually annihilate man’s reminiscence of the past, individually and collectively.

Only by erasing man’s sense of self, his sense of history, which is the essence of the human person, can hollow man come to embrace the atomistic demands of a sterile positive age. One way to achieve this unprecedented deleterious milestone in human history is through the coerced forgetfulness that is the badge of collectivism.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Bible of Bolshevism for a Postmodern Age

Arguably, no other book has better explained Bolshevism’s newfangled techniques of psychological terror, social-political oppression, and subterfuge than Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell was a keen observer of the human psyche and how it can be easily manipulated for political power by savvy radical opportunists. By the time Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949, Orwell had witnessed at least half a century of Marxist insurrections, social-political machination, and disinformation campaigns that targeted man’s ability to make sense of baleful human reality. Orwell understood the totalitarian impulse—to use Jean-François Revel’s phrase—dating back to Marx and Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Bakunin’s prediction that the goal of communism was to become a one-party totalitarian state over the proletariat, and not of the proletariat. Orwell makes it clear in Nineteen Eighty-Four that the latter is Big Brother’s sole purpose.

Re-reading Nineteen Eighty-Four after many years of having read it, I am more astonished today than ever before of the anthropological sophistication and complexity of this masterful work. I marvel at the idea that several generations ago high school students were assigned the book as required reading and were expected to understand the intricate pathology of totalitarian social-political terror. Lamentably, not only are books like Nineteen Eighty-Four censored today in universities, students lack the historical and social-political astuteness and the historical acumen to comprehend the real-world horror of Bolshevik, and more recently Maoist, totalitarianism.

Besides being beautifully written, Nineteen Eighty-Four takes discerning readers on a claustrophobic tour of the loss of liberty in a sadistic society that is governed by tyrannical psychopaths.

Nineteen Eighty-Four has given the world memorable words and phrases—the overused and little understood Big Brother, along with Newspeak (the opposite of Oldspeak and Oldthink), Crimethink (thoughtcrime), which is related to Thinkpol (Thought Police), and Doublethink.

The purpose of the politically expedient and sinister reworking of everyday language is political control through the destruction of thought. Annihilation of independent thought is the aim of Bolshevism. In Nineteen Eighty-Four people are conditioned through re-education campaigns that create the thoughtless automatons of Big Brother’s well-oiled collectivism. The narrator reminds us, “But the special function of certain Newspeak words, of which Oldthink was one, was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them.”

Restructuring common language to reflect the violence that totalitarianism does to man’s perception of reality, through the austerity and banality of Newspeak, is consistent with Comte’s positive age.

Nineteen Eighty-Four has an Appendix entitled “The Principles of Newspeak.” It is not a common practice for novels to have an appendix. The appendix augments some of the terms that Orwell emphasizes. Including an appendix adds a touch of literary acuteness, yet it is not a gratuitous literary convention. The in-depth, essayistic nature of the appendix suggests that the author had more to say about the collectivist nightmare that is Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell did not want to bog down the novel with what may seem to some readers as superfluous explanation.

The appendix explains the three different vocabularies that the residents of the demonic world in Nineteen Eighty-Four must learn to navigate, as a matter of life and death.

The A vocabulary includes words about everyday life, like eating, drinking, and working. The B vocabulary has been constructed for the sole purpose of control through social-political power, which is the heart and soul of Nineteen Eighty Four’s Bolshevism. The B vocabulary necessitates that readers first understand the aims of Big Brother and the masterminds behind the dystopian world that is Nineteen Eighty-Four. Examples of these words include goodthink, a word that means political orthodoxy, and bellyfeel, which denotes blind acceptance of Big Brother’s mandates. Winston is told by his torturers that he is a non-person:

We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.

The C vocabulary is reserved for scientific and technological terms. It is significant that the C vocabulary is stripped of “undesirable meanings.” Presumably, Big Brother views science as an activity performed by automatons, robotic entities that do not feel the need to place science in perspective by subjecting it to moral or metaphysical analysis. The latter results, not in science, but blind and weaponized scientism.

The three vocabularies are structured to fine tune the human psyche to accept state censorship. Another word for this is conditioning through re-education. However, people still need to maneuver through daily life, even in a brutal and draconian totalitarian state. Given this reality, the three vocabularies remind citizens in Nineteen Eighty-Four that, while remaining busy with the aspects of daily life that the three vocabularies mandate, their psyche must not deviate from the restricted confines of government directives. The three vocabularies corral human life into abiding by Big Brother’s severe control, creating the illusion that reality is fully contained within the scope of the three vocabularies.

Mass coercion through the regulation of language, Orwell observes, equates to mind control over self-identity, memories, history, and an individual’s past. This is one of the tenants of psychological terror and oppression. Orwell offers readers poignant examples of social-political oppression and the human psyche.

Despotism’s New Clothes

Bolshevism transformed despotism into a bold, intellectualized form of totalitarianism that man had never witnessed. Bolshevism took advantage of technological advancements in firearms, aviation, and other forms of transportation and coupled this with the explosion of new media in the West that could be used to launch disinformation campaigns. This altered despotism into systematic physical and psychological terror that solidifies its quest for social-political power through intellectual and rationalized deformation of reality.

Dating back to Adam Weishaupt, the Comte de Mirabeau, Marx, and Lenin, revolutionary messianism has packaged the limitless perfection of man as the long-awaited utopia that is just around the corner. But not quite yet.… First comes the eradication of the individual, independent thinkers, and the classical liberal embrace of liberty that stands in the way.

Bolshevism understands that appearance and reality can be made interchangeable and malleable, depending on the purpose of its newfangled despotism’s quest for social-political control: A readily becomes B, and B becomes A on demand. This is dialectical materialism in action.

From Marx’s pact with the devil, that human reality must be made to serve the interest of its deformers, Bolshevism saw untold possibilities for social-political power. Before Bolshevism can be sold as a messianic Shangri-la, human reality must be turned into the enemy of the people. This is one reason why after the rise and execution of Bolshevik despotism, in its many guises dating back to 1900, this form of totalitarianism has become the darling of leftist elitism, of the liberal bourgeoisie, circa 2022.

The Heuristic Lessons of Nineteen Eighty-Four

Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four not only became a reality in the twentieth century, but has become the dominant form of oppression in liberal Western democracies. In our time, self-possessed elitist despots have taken advantage of developments in electronic media to propagate Bolshevism’s quest for social-political power. While despotism is a regrettable aspect of human beings, Bolshevism has become ingrained in the psyche of adherents of the here-and-now through coercion and disinformation campaigns.

Questions abound as to why Western liberal democracies have not only ignored Bolshevism’s crimes against humanity, but have embraced this form of rationalized murder and psychological terror: Thomas Pynchon, in his foreword to Nineteen Eighty-Four, tells us that “Orwell was amused at those of his colleagues on the Left who lived in terror of being termed bourgeois.” One answer to this is that the novel is downplayed by leftist Western intellectuals because it goes against the grain of their proposed sophomoric utopia that trades liberty for alleged security from human reality.

Lamentably, one way to lessen the impact of a work like Nineteen Eighty-Four is to over-intellectualize the novel. The latter technique effectively turns real-world events into the abstract and theoretical fetish of university seminars and conferences.

Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, Warning to the West, and many other works, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, spell out the horrors of Bolshevism and its threat to liberal democracies. In addition to Solzhenitsyn, Camus’s The Rebel, Milosz’s The Captive Mind, and Jorge Edwards’s Persona Non Grata (1973), winner of the Cervantes Prize, showcase the real-world terror of Bolshevism.

Orwell presented readers with a vivid picture of Bolshevism up to the time of the novel’s publication. He effectively extrapolated Bolshevism’s ability to deform human reality in the miasma of social-political confusion and ignorance that postmodernity ushered.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is as much about Winston Smith’s zest for freedom and Big Brother’s sadistic social-political control as it is about erasing the past, gaslighting personal memories, and the censure of language in order to rule over a sheepish, brutally oppressed populace: “Winston could not even remember at what date the party itself had come into existence. He did not believe he had ever heard the word Ingsoc before 1960, but it was possible that in its Oldspeak form—‘English socialism,’ that is to say—it had been current earlier. Everything melted into mist.” 

Pedro Blas González is a professor of philosophy at Barry University.

Scientism, Science, and Technology

Scientism is not science but an ideology that reduces man’s hope and aspiration to the scientific method. Scientism promises postmodern man an alarming sense of control over the here-and-now. Scientism, along with postmodern moral relativism and decay, has profoundly debilitated the human sense for transcendence and the ontological mystery.

Consequently, the sterility that robs the human capacity to embrace ontological mystery makes it next to impossible to contemplate and cultivate transcendent values. In the absence of transcendent values, one becomes paralyzed by not knowing what to believe, and more importantly, and one loses the vital convictions that guide us through the demands made on us by life.

Science properly understood concerns itself with uncovering the constants of nature. This has given a glimpse of the inner workings of the universe, like gravity. In the field of medicine, science has undoubtedly advanced beyond the wildest expectations of ancient man. Today, we believe that science has indeed uncovered many constants of nature that pertain to the human body. Let us accept this as a truism for the time being, if only out of convenience.

Knowledge, as science understands this, is understanding of objective reality. Science demands that the object of knowledge it seeks be tangible and stable. This is a reasonable demand, for it means that scientific knowledge is the reward that reality offers the scientist at the culmination of a rigorous search. As a result, technological knowledge serves as the fulcrum by which man utilizes his expertise. Thus, technological knowledge is employed in the service of invention and industrialization. That is, science—physics to be exact—responds to real-world conditions through knowledge of classical mechanics, and more recently, quantum mechanics.

On the other hand, reflective knowledge is knowledge as alētheia: truth that is uncovered proactively. Truth plays a central part in man’s existential engagement with reality because truth keeps humanity from becoming self-consumed by subjectivism and conditioned by objectification. However, truth is not relative. Instead, truth demands objectivity from those who seek it. Ancient Greek philosophers, especially Parmenides, were correct in arguing that truth only manifests itself at the end of a committed search that joins awe and wonder with humility.

Regrettably, many people today confuse scientism with science. For such people, scientism serves as an umbrella that promises to cover all aspects of human reality. This creates the false impression that the fruits of science and technology can substitute for existential reflection, which is rooted in free will. On the contrary, scientism dehumanizes personhood because it makes human life, which is experienced as concrete and differentiated existence, impersonal. Because scientism has no jurisdiction over human freedom, only over matter and technology, its response to human existence is formulaic.

Scientism operates outside the realm of objective science. Yet our contemporary world has conceded much to scientism. What is lost in this exchange of human freedom for alleged worldly security is no less than the capacity for self-reflection. Postmodernity has relegated self-reflection to the altar of the scientific method. Self-reflection enables existential, not just material, self-knowledge. On the other hand, scientific knowledge seeks functionality and control over matter. The danger in confusing these two modes of apprehending the self and the world respectively is that of reducing human subjectivity to matter. Science investigates physical reality through experimentation. Yet, people who possess religious convictions and who are moved by the ontological mystery, incorporate science into their lives without contradiction. They recognize the limitations of science in regard to human affairs. In this way, the reflective person can delineate between the scope of science and faith.

Again, the problem is that scientism is the intrusion of pseudo-science into areas that do not concern science. Scientism has the effect of destroying, or at best, anesthetizing subjectivity. This culminates in the illusion that what matters most is the creation of an impersonal “we.” The Russian philosopher, Nicolas Berdyaev, explains this in the following manner: “Nowadays the spirit is breaking away from bond to the organic life of the flesh. Freedom is based not on nature (natural law), but on spirit. Ours is a trying and difficult period, one in which the joy of living seems to be diminished.”

The allure of the sensual can be intoxicating. The exaggerated embrace of sensuality, the here-and-now as an end in itself, leads to a moral/spiritual dead-end, for why concern ourselves with virtue, if momentary existence is all that matters? Why, instead, not allow ourselves to be swept along by the pleasures we encounter in the sensual world? While this attitude may seem frivolous and trivial to some, others view it as natural, given a phobia of existential self-reflection—what they perceive to be the burden of free will. This cynical attitude is the opposite of self-reflection, which aims at proactive action in human existence.

Existential Reflection

What is at stake in postmodernity is the capacity to cultivate human existence inspired by contemplation of the non-rational. It is reflective knowledge, not scientific know-how that is felt at a lived, existential level. Because it addresses man’s existential concerns at a pre-intellectual level, reflective knowledge existed long before the advent of science. Reflective knowledge is personal because it is engulfed by personhood, unlike scientific knowledge, which is methodological. This characteristic of reflective knowledge means that man, as differentiated being, has an obligation to cultivate his existential condition. This must be done for practical reasons, which ultimately include experiencing contentment. This is one reason why it is a mistake to attempt to appropriate the existence of God through science. Man does not possess a science of the human person, much less God.

The scientific method is not equipped to grapple with questions of meaning and purpose. When humanity gives away existential freedom—the responsibility to cultivate essence as a person—the result is a flesh and blood automaton. Ironically, this view of the person-as-automaton is (mis)understood to be a summit of existences, because of this supposed scientific and alleged technological prowess. This type of culture has embraced the flawed presupposition that because science has uncovered some constants of nature, it will eventually possess infinite first principles of human reality.

The gulf that exists between science and existential concerns in the twenty-first century has given birth to hollow, technologically inebriated people incapable of cultivating self-reflection. Western society in particular has entered the stage of human history that August Comte, the father of positivism, saw as an anti-metaphysical age. Let us keep in mind that, considered from a vital-existential perspective, first principles cannot be divested from the cohesion that these principles communicate to human existence.

As an existential being, the human person ought to appropriate first principles that have direct bearing and impact on vital life. In every search for knowledge, whether scientific or philosophical, the motivation is the same: to uncover principles that bring cohesion to human experience, and thus, existence. Ignoring first principles that act in the service of existential longing, our contemporary, technologized world has instead turned to the vagaries of scientism. The irony is that in a time of impactful scientific, technological and medical discoveries, existential atrophy is commonplace.

First principles must be amplified by existential wisdom in order to keep them relevant to human existence. The uncovering of first principles can make human experience well-rounded. In seeking first principles that act to highlight meaning and purpose in human experience, man uncovers patterns and foundational symmetry in what otherwise appear to be disorganized experiences.

God

If God is the absolute, then humanity is part of that totality. If God enables humanity to perceive Being, then reflective, spiritual existence must become attuned to transcendence, not timely social-political aspects of the here-and-now.

One response to this paradox is that the marriage of Being and becoming is best understood when the efficacy of Being is measured in terms of man’s existential inner dimension. Unfortunately, this is the syndrome of “keeping the score,” when virtue is forced to take a defensive stance. Another way to articulate this is that virtuous people do not take sensual existence for granted, given that sensual experience is framed by existential reflection. There is great tension placed on virtuous people by sensual reality to remain consistent in their convictions. It is existential reflection that best captures God’s being as the absolute, not the study of matter.

If Aristotle is correct that God’s activity is to think, the human capacity for self-reflection and self-knowledge are its greatest attributes. We must also keep in mind that man’s existential inner dimension is merely one component of personhood, albeit a fundamental one. This suggests that existence in the flesh is subject to the many stresses of contingency. To be in the world—to exist, period—ought to be the greatest concern. To be in the world means to be forced to fend for one’s existential salvation.

It is not difficult to realize that human strife is a struggle to keep from becoming objectified by the world. Refusal to cultivate existential longing entails the deterioration of our existential capacity for self-knowledge. This is why it is important to draw a distinction between the world as matter and man’s existential sphere.

Let us briefly consider the plight of man in pre-history, who practiced hunting and gathering in order to survive. The cultivation of agriculture, farming, and the domestication of animals were improvements over the unpredictability of nomadic man’s practice of hunting and gathering. Hunter-gatherers could ill afford to take a day off, as it were. This is why labor for the sake of survival does not objectify people. On the contrary, physical labor serves to complement man’s existential dimension. Physical labor in pre-history, as continues to be the case today, is an indispensable condition of natural man. The basic tools available in pre-history continue to play a pivotal role in modern life.

Humanity’s existential condition is a testament to our quest to seek coherence in history. In the middle of this great chaos—as history appears to be at times—each human person remains an existential being. Endowed with free will, our existential condition acts as an operating manual of sorts that leads us to reflection on the ontological mystery. In addition, the desire to comprehend the passage of time and our crusade for transcendence remain existential longings. This is where Death-of-God theology and New Age Christianity both go profoundly wrong.

For instance, it should not come as a surprise to anyone that converting Jesus Christ into a man among men trivializes the Trinity. More importantly, this places Christianity on the same plane as historical, cult movements. Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, is conceived by secular thought as belonging in the same company as Egyptian Pharaohs and Mayan kings. By debunking Jesus’s claim to be the son of God, Jesus becomes demythologized. The focus of postmodern atheistic reductionism is fueled by what it considers to be the banality of the existence of God, because human life itself is allegedly meaningless and purposeless.

According to the Spanish philosopher Baltasar Gracian, the true measure of genius is how people embrace their life as lived-existence. Traditionally, nonbelievers have rarely bothered to attack the religious convictions of believers. They did not waste time in cultivating the angry fervor that we witness in postmodernity’s militant opposition to the existence of God. For this reason, nonbelievers can be placed in two categories: 1) Militant radical ideologues, and 2) Casual nonbelievers.

Postmodernity’s aversion to God is a fine example of what Nietzsche has in mind when he writes in The Gay Science that “God is dead.” The death of God, as Nietzsche suggests, does not just apply to the God of Christians, but also that of the philosophers. One of the characteristics typically attributed to God is benevolence. The other two characteristics of God are omnipotence and omniscience. Today, God’s benevolence, like other metaphysical and epistemological questions concerning God, has taken on an anthropological self-loathing slant that is unprecedented in human history. This comes as the result of the triumph of all-engulfing cynicism.

As the twenty-first century enters its third decade, it has become apparent that humanity today is paralyzed by cynicism. Benevolence makes sense as one of God’s characteristics because it addresses the question of Being. Many children marvel at the existence of the natural world. Children are awed by the fact that there is a universe. They wonder about the unimaginable complexity that the nature of reality exhibits—that there exists something rather than nothing. The latter is a rational concern of human beings. Why is this? The reality of being excites the human capacity for reflection. Particularly relevant to this form of reflection is the idea that nothingness is a troublesome, paradoxical concept. The important thing to keep in mind is that Being, that is, the essence of all that there is or can be, is a greater value than nothingness. This is what people in more reflective times referred to as the big picture.

What happens to the question of Being, when God is banished from postmodern man’s consciousness? Even if our modern world tried to suppress reflection about God, Being still continues to exist. People who continue to announce the death of God, in order to proclaim humanity radically free from the burden of free will, view God as a detriment to their alleged utopian human perfection.

Human perfection is a totalitarian elixir for radical ideologues. This concept is molded to fit the demands of a vast ongoing number of social/political engineering projects. With God out of the picture, people who are burdened by this metaphysical constant of human reflection, they allege, can enjoy a life of radical emancipation. For postmodern thinkers, and other denizens of intellectual chic, free will and God are a burden. 

Pedro Blas González is a professor of philosophy at Barry University.

Ancestry and Time

From what primordial field comes the seed that breathes life into me? I ponder about the thoughts and aspirations of my ancestors. In order to keep life in perspective, we must reflect about things that once were and are no longer, and those that one day will cease to be.

When we frame questions in this manner today, we risk making ourselves the object of ridicule, for existential concerns are anathema to a positivistic age. Such questions run counter to the dominant scientism of our milieu. The vulnerability that existential concerns bring to thoughtful persons today must not be overlooked, for how we address these concerns depends on human sensibility and temperament. This raises questions about the essence of human nature and man’s appropriation of the human condition and reality. Rilke offers an enlightening perspective on this universal concern in Letters to a Young Poet:

Surely it is possible that we shall gradually learn to recognize that what we call fate emerges from human beings; it does not enter into them from the outside. It is only because so many did not absorb their destinies while they lived in them, did not transform them into themselves, that they did not recognize what emerged from them. Their fate was so strange to them that in their confused fright they believed it must just now have entered into them. For they swore never before to have found anything similar within themselves.

In an inspired paragraph, the great poet breaks through the objectifying nature of time. This intuitive pronouncement is not meant to be science. Yet it is irrefutable vision, for to couple time and memories with clarity and foresight captures the immediacy of human existence. If we are diligent, we discover that time solidifies truth.

We arrive at Elysium with every act of self-knowledge. Time, we learn, is the only permanent solution to human squabbles. Existence gathers the fruits of experience by appropriating its eventual ripening into understanding; thought is impotent if it cannot make sense of analogy and generalization as synthesis, for man’s role as homo faber is to make a viable future for itself from personal vision. However, the latter cannot flourish in the absence of an autonomous will. Yet how many people suspect this?

Self-awareness sutures the gap between life as immediacy and the future as possibility. To seize this truth is to comprehend that eternity is apprehended by intuition, which orients life to a fruitful outcome. Some seize upon the essence of form in its totality, while others appear to capture it in fragments, like a surrealist collage, a metaphysical pastiche. Man remains a mystery to himself.

Time trickles in an ever-increasing flood. However, we do not experience the flood. Finality in human affairs is sprinkled upon us in a steady stream of subtle, yet often ponderous forms. To grasp the symmetrical nature of form is a triumph over objectification. This is the essence of transcendence, for how can we clamor for transient victories, if we are never guaranteed a final conquest? Instead, we hear the whisper of time shadowing us.

Properly speaking, the past and future leave us with the intimacy of being. Time passes, people perish, and human reality is reflected in the patina it attains through time.

The idea of nevermore makes us world-weary, dispirited. We come to all last things armed with a disquieting desire for more, our palette awed by the sweetness of things we can no longer embrace—once they are taken from us. What remains for self-aware mortals is the surreal realization that time is like a moving sidewalk that drops us off along the way.

We often contemplate the meaning of time and the infinite by invoking the imagination. Childhood ideas of traveling through time ad infinitum eventually fizzle, giving way to the complexity and contradictions presented by objective reality. As adults, our thoughts about time become stagnant, until they eventually fade away. This is because existential life abides by immediate reality—moments held together by an uncertain succession. This form of life is a creative act, for we project our immediacy forward to the future and retain relevant portions of it as memories: the past. Man experiences and savors time privately. The future is a projection of objective worldly events-to-be and existential valuation. Nothing more.

On the other hand, the past is a vital aspect of human existence, existentially and historically. The past grounds the individual in life as lived experience and future possibility. This is the case because we are slow to capture the meaning and joy of immediacy, by which time we have already amassed a past.

At an existential level, the past teases us by drawing attention to the future. This is because the past expands exponentially. Eventually, all that grows old will have collected more of a past than it is allotted a future. Again, we must not ignore the present. When I mention that the past becomes the future, this does not necessitate an immediate shift between the two poles. The pole that signifies the essence of life—if we are to remain practical—is the present. The present is not the retention of a previous reality, nor is it a projection of a future one. Instead, the present is reality proper.

The past serves as collected experience, and no longer life as possibility. Yet we cannot grasp the meaning of passing time—fleeting existence is more fitting—and not entertain the notion of a time to come.

Failure to reflect on experience is detrimental to well-being. This is the case because experience alone teaches us nothing. The very notion of “having an experience” is already suggestive of subjective agency. The events that make up experience are objective and readily verifiable: the World Trade towers collapsing at the hands of terrorists; the death of a public figure. Such events are verifiable even though they affect people in different ways. But human experiences are different for everyone insofar as they are also qualitative in make-up.

Experience is not so confounding as not to submit itself to a clear explanation. The realist perspective will do. Because we are essentially at the mercy of experience, that is, as receptors of experience, we often come to view ourselves as its target. This is an oversimplification, for experiences do not pre-exist in a vacuum that we walk into. Experiences take place in time. Given that experiences happen to individuals, we can assert that they are embraced by a subject who is equivalent to my-life.

Regardless of how we appropriate human reality, we cannot ignore that human experience is only possible for differentiated consciousness. Here we arrive at the question of sensibility and temperament. Bergson is correct to argue, as did Socrates before him, that intuition often affords us a negative interpretation of experience—that is, the course of action not to take.

Intuition is essential to all genuine philosophizing. Self-reflection procures our physical well-being in a world that, given its physical laws, offers us a barrage of resistance. Resistance defines human existence. On the other hand, man is not solely a physical being. Experiences occur to us as my-life, while they become organized and meaningful through the essence of my nature as a person. The plight of man’s essence to keep from becoming objectified by physical laws is the struggle for individuation and autonomy.

The Intimacy of Being

If the past is “lived” once again through memories, anecdotes, pictures, and old letters—what we call nostalgia—this is ample proof that the present signifies the vitality of life. The present as lived-existence is the supreme existential category that lies at the center of human life.

The present necessitates a sense of having-to-do, as the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset suggests. Here we encounter another paradox: that which is nearest to us remains the most transparent. The present is often lived in a fog that keeps us from understanding what is occurring in our lives. This is characteristic of the transparency of human existence.

In effect, the present rarely displays any form at all. Unpredictable forces often dominate man. In order to bring cohesion to the present, man must have a life plan. Ironically, the course of action that we take in the present must pay homage to the past and be mindful of the future. Irony ought not to be taken lightly in human life. Is this what Nietzsche means?

Ultimately, man finds nothing but what he himself has imported into them: the finding is called science, the importing—art, religion, love, pride. Even if this should be a piece of childishness, one should carry on with both and be well disposed toward both—some should find; others—we others!—should import!

Time rules human existence, and time’s best disguise is stealth. We take pride in the five senses, yet lack the ability to know what transparent human reality means for us.

Some people argue that we capture the essence of time in our ability to fashion tasks, celebrate a birthday, or reflect on the changing seasons. Others suggest the impossibility of the former because time is formless. In either case, atomic conceptions of time as objective—“the arrow of time,” and so on—cannot be denied. Socrates drank the hemlock that saw the culmination of his life in 399 B.C.; Caesar was murdered on March 15, 44 B.C. and Vesuvius’s most violent eruption to date occurred in 79 A.D. The validity and truth of these events is not in doubt.

The present is human reality, as we know it. At a given point in becoming self-aware of our essence, if not our relationship to space and time, we find ourselves, being. Martin Heidegger’s notion of human facticity and Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s discovery of the objective world as the not-I, quickly come to mind. These are strange-sounding concepts that often intimidate some readers, though they ought not to.

Man is an existential being. The “I” that I encounter as myself is an existential proto first-man. However, should we assume that mankind is a conglomeration of being that is not differentiated, as philosophical materialism asserts? Positivism is the dominant view today. Postmodern social/political institutions seek to destroy the integrity of human auto-rule. This is the myopic predicament of intellectually bankrupt postmodern philosophical anthropology.

The destruction of the self has taken many routes to deliver man to the crisis of postmodernity. This is evidenced by a humanity that seeks refuge in institutions, public opinion, or the cloak of statism. In postmodernity, man no longer tolerates the alleged burden that “I” am to myself. Postmodern man is clan-oriented. This human clan—the greatest self-conscious collective experiment in human history—is construed as an amorphous entity that pretends to exist as an ontological symbiosis. In other words, man must be discouraged from confronting alone the import of St. John of the Cross’s formidable phrase—the dark night of the soul. The latter necessitates free will and auto-rule.

The Past and the Destruction of Memory

Ignorance of the past blinds postmodern man into embracing avoidable banalities and destructive aberrations. This is because the past serves as a point of reference that enables man to develop a sense of place: tradition.

Children discover time on their own terms. As adults, we must learn to recognize the human condition from the perspective of a proto first-man. Yet postmodernity has created an elaborate system of re-education through collective social/political mythologies that dominate our lives from cradle to coffin. Postmodern life feeds man elaborate falsehoods, while denying the instinct to seek objective truth. Those who conceive of existence as proto first-man have never fared worse.

Ancestry, which can be understood as the existential recognition of converging lines of lineage, not so much in their biological ties as in their temporal importance, enables the child to ground itself in the reality of the self prior to its engagement with the world-at-large. This serves as a time-proven mechanism that shuns the easy and sensual vagaries of the objective world. It also makes the self durable in fending off the objectification that worldly life exerts over man. Self-reflection enables us to embrace the realm of things, people, and man’s interaction with the world.

Resistance is the order of reality for man. This should hardly surprise us. We witness resistance in the animal world through the physical laws that act as the constants of nature. Man does not encounter these laws as primarily physical or objective, rather as existential. That is, their effect is not the same in a being capable of self-awareness as it is on a falling boulder. To deny this vital distinction is tantamount to irresponsible theorizing. Hence, how best to handle the incessant process of objectification ought to be our greatest concern.

We are delivered into the world through a chain of command, let us say, that dictates to a great degree our ability to locate our essence in the scheme of things. This is truly a practical matter. It is a moot point to suggest that our essence is determined by biology and circumstance.

Our decisions determine the trajectory of our lives and destiny. Fortunately, human reality is more objective than we care to admit. What we “see” and ignore reveals our penchant for untruth in our quest to defend the indefensible. Erasmus is correct that man loves folly. My concern with ancestry is simpler than it appears at first glance. Ancestry is not sociological but ontological. I live within my skin by the sheer necessity of belonging to a series of ontological decisions on the part of my forebears that culminate in my being. I encounter being not as a great conglomerate of things, out there in reality—but embedded in the essence of the self.

Ancestry and tradition are ontological categories given their direct connection to ourselves that link us historically and conceptually to the past. This entails that my existential condition is not exercised in a vacuum, dissociated from tradition, which serves as its ground and interpreter.

We ground ourself in the present by turning inward—existentially, not by becoming sequestered by the empirical forces active in physical reality. Yet the cultivation of interiority does not preclude our need to partake in the world.

The present teaches us nothing that we do not first seek to know. This is so because the present of the world, as a series of objective atomic units of time, is often confused with the present that I necessarily must live as “I.” While the two intersect, it is a mistake to collapse one into the other. The present that we refer to as today, the verifiable date and time, is empirical. Empirical reality makes the objective-present blind to past and future. This resembles the metaphysical constitution of a Leibnizian windowless monad.

It is the existentially lived qualities of time that make man’s cosmic existence meaningful. Inanimate observers of time—if these existed—would only convey knowledge of an eternal present, much like time for a very young child. Because objective time and lived-time exist as concurrent does not suggest that time is equally acquiesced existentially.

Rather than allowing us to cultivate respect for the passage of time, the pace of postmodern life removes us from ourselves. To be swept along by currents and events that we cannot control fosters the illusion of perpetual motion, and few things are more immediately gratifying for postmodern man than the illusion of constant motion. Alleged stagnation is anathema to postmodern man’s quest for pleasure.

The dissolution of the self in the events of the world signals a form of alleged freedom that has become intoxicating for postmodern man. I am not referring to work, for work forges diligence and self-respect. The problem of postmodern life is the antithesis of work: make-work leisure.

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the increase of mechanisms, when leisure was no longer viewed as the opposite of work. Today leisure, which can be referred to as a condition when we are in communion with ourselves, has proven to be a frightening proposition for most. Postmodern man’s destruction of leisure snaps the link between past and future. Technology and scientism foment ever-innovative ways to kill time. Formerly, leisure meant not having an objective task to perform. Today, we ask ourselves—what should I be doing?

If leisure signifies stagnation in postmodernity, and we must fill every waking hour with activity, it is easy to explain why the future is “always upon us.” This is a condition when objective time arrives before its time, as it were. Absent from the former equation is the realization that I have become older, and am thus running out of lived-time.

The idea of man sharing a collective future has much appeal for ideologues. Yet this is far from an accurate description of the nature of man, and contributes nothing to man’s lived-time, for lived-time is transparent, and as such, must be embraced by differentiated persons. Lived-time is discreet, yet firm, and as sincere as it is reserved. Like a bartender, time passes us the bill in the end. Our inebriation with the activities of the world is an indication of our level of attunement with ourselves as existential time keepers.

The Future

The future is a force exerted on human existence as negation. The promise of tomorrow negates itself as more of the future becomes the past. As children, this promise is infinite. For children, the future has no decipherable form. As we get older, the future attains an identifiable form as present. The form that the future takes for different individuals corresponds to man’s capacity for self-reflection.

It is a great disservice to postmodern man that we cannot conceive of time unless it is cloaked in the self-conscious language of make-work leisure. Existential reflection once served as a guidepost to the destiny that we can fathom. Today, we are content to allow public opinion to dictate our thoughts and emotions—destroy our sense of self. This has come about through the politicization of all aspects of human existence. The future demands coherent reflection on our part, just as the present requires action. However, we ought not to confuse sober respect for the present with ideological anxiety over the state of the future. This is a fine example of existential myopia: an underdeveloped existential sense for life.

A conception of time as make-work leisure can be described as man’s fear of human mortality. Or, perhaps it is just a case of banality and superficiality. Man has been known to go to great extremes to ignore the order of time. This is the case because man vacillates as to what it means to live a well-grounded life.

Reflection about time makes us revert to the question of ancestry and the trajectory that our lives have taken in order to deliver us to our present condition. This is why time can be conceived in at least two ways: Time as objective reality and how it informs existential, differentiated consciousness. The former is the concern of physicists and philosophers of science, people who embrace this concern as scientific investigation. The latter is a confrontation with the order of human existence as existential concern.

The first two decades of the twenty-first century find man asphyxiated by objective time. Instead, man’s conception of time ought to enhance our ability to forge existential reflection on life. Either we intuit the essence of time or we do not. Intuition makes life less transparent and consequently more reflective.

Perhaps human life in the future will find itself with no other alternative but to shun ideology, especially as this has proven utterly destructive to man’s existential well-being. It is difficult, though, to predict where the impetus for this will originate.

Reflection on ancestry goes beyond questions of anthropology or biology. This is a question of metaphysics. Henri Bergson explains classical metaphysics this way:

If there exists a means of possessing a reality absolutely, instead of knowing it relatively, of placing oneself within it instead of adopting points of view toward it, of having the intuition of it instead of making the analysis of it, in short, of grasping it over and above all expression, translation, or symbolical representation, metaphysics is that very means.

Yet in postmodernity metaphysics is under assault. Undoubtedly, postmodernity will be seen by future generations as an asphyxiating positivistic age.  

Pedro Blas González is a professor of philosophy at Barry University.

Improvisation as Metaphor

Musicians often talk about there being no wrong notes, only notes that they do not intend to play. This is particularly true in jazz. At least in jazz, this serves as the impetus to structure improvisation.

If we pay attention to the vital energy displayed by improvisers, only then can we appreciate the freedom that music can convey. Said in a different way, improvisation requires vital intensity to flourish. I find it interesting that the “spaces” that inform the nature of the diatonic notes, also allow for the free exploration of what are considered “outside” notes.

Outside notes, which are essentially chromatic—from the Greek chroma, meaning intensity of color—are to the essence of philosophical reflection what improvisation is to jazz musicians. This spirited claim is not difficult to see if one operates from the inside of these two disciplines. It is worth remembering the saying that one can break the rules only when one knows them. Thus, it is not difficult to compare genuine philosophical vocation to musical improvisation.

The desire to improvise, either in philosophy or jazz, does not spring from a quest to break any rules. Instead, improvisation is the result of vocation and vision. When reflecting on vocation in music and philosophy, we ought not to lose sight that vocation serves as the impetus to create in the first place.

Postmodernism can be characterized as an age of incessant and pointless talk. In many respects, jazz musicians play at playing. This is equally true for philosophical vocation. Rather than joining the ranks of the chattering classes, philosophical vocation retracts itself. This is one way to keep philosophical reflection vital. Self-respect and integrity have a prize.

While musical terminology and technique have validity at an academic (not to say perhaps pedantic) level, music affects us at an emotional level, or not at all. Similarly, composing music takes place at an emotional level. What the composer sees in the mind’s eye or hears in the inner ear never becomes the topic of criticism, as this takes the volatile form of public scrutiny. The latter is particularly true in postmodernism; postmodern life is characterized by an excess of rhythm at the expense of lyricism.

Chromatic notes, those intruders from the outside, as they have been referred to, some critics have referenced as inflections of diatonic notes. This may be true in some respects, but is also an admission that music, much as life itself, is an open-ended enterprise that is embraced according to our capacity for individuality.

We cannot deny that there are objective structures that rule over human life. Birth, growth, and death are examples of pertinent truths that can never become theoretical. These structures help guide us through life. When we recognize objective structures and values, as Gabriel Marcel argues, we enable reason to capture the essence of objective truth. This is the function of reason. Improvisation in music is much the same. While improvisation attempts to create, or revamp musical structures, it cannot do so if it does not pay respect to existing structures. Structure serves as the foundation, the root, let us say, that allows us a starting point.

The musician brings to music a personal intensity and characteristic tone color that springs from vocation. Hence, the freedom of musicians to discard playing certain notes does not entail the rejection of structure. This is not a rejection of objectivity and structure.

Improvisation maintains a healthy and mutual respect for structure in music. This relationship is comparable to pilots who may push the performance envelope, but who understand the principles of flight and the capability of a given aircraft. It is not a cliché to say that we only break rules we know well, without painting ourselves into an indiscreet corner. This is a measure of prudence.

Chromaticism in jazz serves as a kind of cement that solidifies the entire range of the music played. When expressed in vital terms, chromaticism is a fundamental aspect of human experience. While chromaticism is a musical term, I do not intend to stretch its literal sense in these pages. Suffice it to say that chromaticism in music is like existential lyricism in personal life. When we strip life of this lyricism, we end up with mere biology, for imagination has much to contribute to the art of living. People compare impressions of life. This is one way to recognize objective structures. The word chromaticism should not intimidate us. It is used here as the catalyst to recognize broader truths. We can transcribe this word to allude to will, intuition, and vital energy. For too long, we have caked the essence of man with colossal, make-work layers of artificial ingredients that obfuscate essence.

Individual existence—what is essentially a lived sense for life—has from time immemorial ruled over differentiated existence. The self-reflecting person possesses an undeniable primacy over life, especially when the latter is felt in concrete, existential terms. Filling the objective spaces that affect our lives with existential meaning is the responsibility of self-respecting persons. This may even be considered as the purpose of human existence.

We guide ourselves by internal principles that—if we are lucky—dictate the rhythm, melody, and tempo of existence by giving each life an undeniable sense of differentiation. Much as we have tried, we cannot establish a science of man. What we possess is science that studies the human body.

Faced with what often appear to be disorganized and cacophonous experiences, we are called to provide a coherent score that conceives human existence as a unified whole. Self-aware, I spar with the world and the passage of time. Man can be defined as a biological being that is capable of self-knowledge. This is the purpose of reflection and understanding: service to life.

To untrained ears, the chromatic nuances of a piece of music may sound disagreeable or haphazard. Needless to say, this is not what the musician hears. Given that our sense for life is a form of existential improvisation, we realize that human existence is an open-ended affair. Lacking a manual for life, we guide ourselves by the objective structures available to us. Yet this is only the beginning of finding our way through human reality, for structure enables us to recognize interaction between objective reality and subjective existence.

Instruments are played by individuals and are incapable of making music. This sounds odd, even paradoxical. However, the sound of an instrument is colored by the essence of the musician. Instructors teach musical notation, melody, harmony, and keeping time. Hence, musical values. The last ingredient discovered is the musicianship of the student.

A Vital Sense for Life

Discovery of the vital structure of life is much the same as vocation for music. This comparison is not a stretch. What we measure in cultural and social-political terms is the interaction of man with objective reality. This essential condition is ignored by many sociologists today.

Postmodern man regards life as static, often as a series of disconnected experiences. These experiences, some people assume, come about randomly and are as quickly forgotten. This signals a form of impotence of the will for many people. But this is like saying that music composes itself or that musical notation is the equivalent of a score. What is missing here is imagination. We solo through life, improvising along the way as best as we are capable. Whether this is noticed depends on the capacity of those who surround us to achieve the same.

We cannot do away with structure and pretend that we are still improvising. Improvisation without structure is merely relativism. This is a condition that improvisers must accept. This is Thoreau’s notion of listening to the drummer within. The sense for life is an intuition that carries us through the essences that inform the objective world. Like musicians straining the limits of a given note, human existence is an example of existential improvisation par excellence.

The absence of sensibility to recognize qualitative nuance sinks man to the level of automata.

Neither solitary nor necessarily lonely, as individuals we are called upon to undertake a unique journey that can only be conveyed to others who possess the same sense for life. Some people fool themselves into believing that the creation of colossal social-political structures forge personhood.

Postmodern life is replete with examples that negate the sense for life. Some of these are tragic, others merely comical. Either way, this negation clouds our view of the objective structures that underpin human reality.

Take, for instance, the rhythm of contemporary life. In some respects, man has never been freer than today. I suppose we can compare the rhythm of human life—what Ortega y Gasset called “the height of the times”—with the degree of danger found in an animal’s environment. The force of this comparison is maintained as an analogous metaphor. While the animal encounters mortal danger, we cannot easily verify that danger is ever internalized as existential concern.

The rhythm and speed at which differentiated life moves can be adjusted depending on individual temperament. Perhaps it is the vacuous values that dictate postmodern man’s temperament that is the culprit of the speed at which life moves today. Without getting into unnecessary sociological wrangling, we can verify that man’s temperament embraces the rhythm of life it is best suited for.

We talk about man’s flexible nature, our resilience, and our ability to deal with difficulties. If we accept this as a fair characterization of man, then we should have little difficulty embracing the reality of primal freedom. A flexible being is also a free being.

However, primal freedom must take into account life as strife. The first principle of existential freedom is that freedom is actually quite costly. While freedom rings loud in popular parlance, a closer look at this basic human quality is not what it appears. Freedom is paradoxical because it enables us to recognize human limitation.

One cannot be free and ignore the inherent difficulties involved in this central aspect of human existence. The greater level of engagement one has with oneself—in the form of self-knowledge—the greater will be our sense for life.

When we connect the rhythm of life to primal freedom, we discover that our understanding of rhythm is two-fold. There is the rhythm of life that is the natural condition of man in the universe: We are born, we live, and our realization that all things naturally move into their dissolution. Physicists refer to this as the law of entropy. This natural rhythm is what best resembles the animal world. At an atomic, vegetative, or unconscious level, this rhythm underlies the processes that inform material reality.

When we fail to recognize the inherent difference between self-aware beings and others that are merely conscious, we end up by muddling the purpose and essence of self-knowledge. Because ours is an age bent on epistemological destruction through radical skepticism, we have devised clever ways to reduce human existence to biology. This is a paradox, because we are willing to dismiss the existential capability that fuels epistemology, in the first place. Postmodern man has substituted axiological reality with epistemological arrogance.

The way that life unfolds for man displays a profound correlation to our ability to perceive the nature of human reality. Let us take into consideration that man’s capacity for self-awareness dislodges man existentially from his material surroundings. We are also capable of converting our lived understanding of passing time into an account of personal mortality. Because of this realization, we are free to choose how best to utilize time, though we cannot adequately describes the existential process by which man comes to the realization of himself as a cosmic being in time

Today, we are in dire danger of losing ourselves existentially, the result of leveling human existence to social-political categories. If we have learned anything from the twentieth century, it is that politicization destroys man’s capacity for self-reflection. Postmodernity’s undermining of human ambition and man’s need for fulfillment has created a dangerous inversion, whereby those who are capable and willing to engage their lives existentially—this includes morally and spiritually—are marginalized by the mongers of radical politicization. This is the aegis of a dysfunctional relativism that proclaims the death of the hierarchy of values. This social experiment ends by destroying civil society.

It is true that people live life in many forms. However, many dominant forms of postmodern life are a self-serving negation of man’s capacity for truth. It is less strenuous to engage the external world than to cultivate and nurture our capacity for self-knowledge. The latter carries little chic appeal today.

Postmodern man’s predicament is paradoxical. Man has the ability for self-reflection, while destroying objective structures that can guide us in this search. This is a question of authenticity. While this topic has been addressed formidably by Heidegger, Ortega y Gasset, Lavelle, and Marcel, to name a few, this vital aspect of human existence must be appropriated by subsequent generations. Today, we embrace forms of lives that take boisterous pride in being disingenuous and inauthentic. This demonstrates how far the pendulum has shifted in postmodern man’s acceptance of nihilism. 

Pedro Blas González is a professor of philosophy at Barry University.

Of the many ways that we can exist as persons, happiness directs our glance inward, toward the essence of our individual being. This is the discovery of personhood as interiority. The ultimate form of happiness—joy—signals our participation in being.

The capacity to experience happiness is a dominant human trait. We can even think of this capacity for self-reflection as being divine in inspiration. No doubt, our ability to be happy plays a major role in our behavior. Few of us reflect on the fact that whether we are happy or not determines a large portion of our daily decision-making. Consider the inestimable sociopolitical cost of unhappiness. Humans who are unhappy often embrace destructive behavior against themselves or others. Most importantly, the worldview of unhappy people is often ruled by forms of self-loathing, which, more often than not, finds expression in the social and political arenas.

Happiness can be experienced as momentous and temporary. It can also inform our lives in a lasting way in the form of joy. This is because joy is a state of being human. This means that we literally encounter ourselves, our being as the persons whom we are, in being happy. Of course, we exist in several ways throughout our lives—as children, adults, and as elderly, among others. Yet fundamental to all human activities is our realization of the self as always being embedded in the world. Thus, joy is a form of being that recognizes the centrality of the self to the reality of the world.

The state of being happy allows us to reflect on what it means to be who we are as individuals. This lightness displays man’s harmony with existence, especially in lieu of being in the world. I often compare the airy lightness that we feel when we are happy with the adagio movement of a symphony. We can think of joy as an existential form of harmony that alerts us to the symmetry of the fullness of being. When reflecting on joy, the adagio from Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez and Bach’s “Air on a G String” often come to mind.

Perhaps happiness is more representative of personhood than even intelligence, in its ability to distinguish us from animals. No doubt, human beings possess the capacity to understand the vitality that makes us who we are as individuals. Aside from our biological make-up, human beings are also dominated by a lived-vitality that can be understood as the desire for self-knowledge. Our lived vitality, what we like to refer to as character, is also indicative of our existential fingerprint on creation. Unlike our physical fingerprints, our character is not reducible to mere biology.

Self-knowledge is a foundational form of our understanding of the world around us. Self-knowledge exists as intuition of the human person—from the inside out. Thus, the highest form of knowledge a human can possess is that of oneself as an ontological entity. We know ourselves existentially. While philosophical materialism reduces our capacity for happiness to something that is physical in nature—that is, as a function of the brain, this still leaves us with the odd realization of having to express emotions whose origin is not physical stimuli. What we encounter when we reflect on the reality of our lives is our lived-essence as individual souls. Circa 2018, we still possess no scientific explanation of what it means to be a differentiated individual. Moreover, we certainly have no idea why we should come into existence in the first place. Existentially speaking, happiness, tragedy, misery, and life itself, only happen to individual persons.

In other words, while it is fruitful to discuss happiness with others, in private conversations or in round-table type arrangements, ultimately what we are discussing in those instances is the intellectualized articulation of a vital state of being. This is so, because when we attempt to communicate our state of happiness through language, we always fall short of the inwardly felt reality of the latter. The last word in happiness belongs to our experiencing it as a lived emotion, not words.

In writing about happiness, I am aware that the best that can be achieved here is a commentary on this basic human reality. I do not pretend to offer a textbook account of joy or happiness. Who can? Worthwhile commentary on the nature of happiness must reflect vital and existential existence. Happiness must be lived, and therefore, felt as a lived experience. This makes abstract and theoretical commentaries on happiness pointless. Commentary on happiness can offer us very little by way of a moral or spiritual return, for talking about happiness does not make people happy.

Writing that is not done in the form of, say, a memoir on the actual experience of happiness merely comes across as an intellectual curiosity. There is a marked difference in writing that explores its subject as a theoretical abstraction, and exploratory, autobiographical essays. Only the latter reflects the lived-world of the author, with all the color, trials, and tribulations that make life a vital and existential reality.

This is one reason why academic writing on happiness will always be theoretically sterile. How many people will benefit from such an enterprise? Reading academic textbooks on philosophy, one quickly realizes that the subjects in question are not people of flesh and blood, but some theoretical cardboard “agents” that do not exist. This is one reason given by José Ortega y Gasset for not reading academic journals. These agents are actually comical fabrications of people who apparently have too much time on their hands. It is hard to imagine Socrates, Boethius, or Thomas More, for example, paying much attention to theoretical agents, and not their own fate, as they prepared to die.

After reading academic philosophy for a long time, one comes to feel embarrassed for its inanity. Apparently, the ridiculous and laughable nature of such analytical inquiry is lost on both academic philosophers and the publishers profiting from such make-work fodder. What is the point of dragging philosophical reflection through a maze of laboratories, where persons who are endowed with free will are turned into deterministic, conditioned rat-specimens? These works may build academic careers, but rarely are they reflections on living and the attendant aspects of vital reality.

Instead, I propose a kind of adventure of philosophical discovery that attempts to identify the importance of joy and happiness to productive living. Genuine reflection on happiness must come about through what I will refer to as fullness of being, which is encountered in vital symmetry. The fullness of being is manifested in vital-life, especially those forms that are ruled by a self-regulating, virtuous symmetry. It is hard to communicate the value of happiness and joy to other people if we do not experience it as a lived reality. This is why happiness is a truly curious and paradoxical human emotion.

Placing happiness and its importance to human existence under the scope of medical materialism, biologism, physicalism, and so forth, is an aberration that ranks high on the list of human follies. The latter materialist renditions of man are content to view happiness as a mere function or epiphenomenon—an offshoot—of the brain. Yet happiness is not a function of the body. Instead, happiness is a manner of being human, one that embraces the entirety of personhood. Reducing happiness to brain function is a fine example of how science is often at odds with lived existence.

In Man and People, the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset writes about the differences between biological life and biographical existence. While the former is obvious, the latter signifies an existential category that lies outside the realm of science. We do not experience the interior reality of our lives by being convinced by abstractions, but through the essence of personhood. This is one reason why we can say that joy and happiness are interrelated modes of being. Science, we ought not to forget, is the study of matter, not of persons as existential entities. Whenever science tries to offer an account of human reality, it does so by taking inventory of the material realm. The problem is that human existence makes itself known as lived-experience of ourselves. Sentient people intuit the reality of their lives more readily than they do the objective world. Human existence resists being reduced to mere quantifiable phenomena. Why then our current insistence in reducing man to our alleged component parts? Reason may recognize a state of happiness in oneself or another, but it cannot reproduce vital happiness on demand. This is part of what Pascal means by “the heart has its own reasons.”

We must be vigilant in our approach regarding the nature and meaning of happiness. It is one thing to be happy and another to pay it lip service. The former is the stuff of vital reality, while the latter is better suited for public consumption. The former is what some people feel, while the latter fuels a cottage industry. How can our culture isolate happiness and bottle it for popular consumption? This is all too convenient and facile. The matter becomes complicated because, while science has nothing to offer in reflection on joy and happiness, psychobabble serves as a useful reminder of the intellectual and cultural inanity to which idle reasoning can lead.

Gifted essayists and thinkers have written about happiness in a spirited lyricism that complements this human emotion. Yet few who write about happiness are under the impression that happiness can be attained through the stroke of a pen or the clicking of keys. Even so, exploratory essays are more conducive to reflection on this vital aspect of human life than alleged studies or abstract theories.

It is a curiosity that many people who write about happiness today do so to refute the idea that happiness is attainable. This is consistent with our postmodern self-loathing. It should appear obvious to naysayers that, if happiness is unattainable in daily life, it is pointless to explain it away through theory. Happy people can’t be persuaded into believing that happiness is an illusion through the citation of a nauseating array of logical deductions or case studies. Yet as obvious as this truism may appear, Western culture and education have been taken hostage by those who relish the latter abuse of reason.

Human existence is governed by existential categories. One of these categories, which is not encountered as a thing among things in the world, is free will. The rhythm of a thoughtful essay flows, much as life, through unpredictable waters. This is why writers like Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, and Pascal speak to readers across the centuries. People express their joy or happiness in unpredictable ways, precisely because these are not scientific categories that can be isolated and catalogued. It is useful to be reminded of this frequently. This is also why there can be no science or case studies that accurately predict the trajectory of happy lives, or the human capacity for attaining happiness.

We must also recognize that because human behavior is fickle, formulas that aim to capture the essence of happiness will always be ineffective. Of course, this does not mean that there are no rational, sensible, or reasonable rules that we ought to follow that can lead to happiness. On the contrary, the basic principles that rule over human existence, as we have encountered these for millennia, can be counted on as guides for human felicity with no less regularity than we understand the phases of the moon.

Many miserable lives have been built through caprice. It is not difficult to see how many people actually do battle with life. Ironically, few of these people understand the conditions that make them unhappy. This is a worst-case scenario of the transparency of life. The philosopher Gabriel Marcel has the following to say in The Philosophy of Existentialism about our neglect of the human person as an ontological mystery:

Rather than to begin with abstract definitions and dialectical arguments which may be discouraging at the outset, I should like to start with a sort of global and intuitive characterization of the man in whom the sense of the ontological—the sense of being—is lacking, or, so to speak more correctly, of the man who has lost the awareness of this sense. Generally speaking, modern man is in this condition: if ontological demands worry him at all, it is only dully, as an obscure impulse.

Our differentiated existential condition makes every person responsible for uncovering objective universal principles that inform human existence. Failure to realize that human existence is regulated by time-proven principles often takes a toll on our lives. We can model some aspects of our lives, whether professional, moral, or spiritual, on the good examples set by exemplary people. However, we must be ready to tackle reality on its own terms, in our own existence. This means taking stock of our circumstances.

Every person encounters and responds to life’s demands according to our inherent capacity. In other words, we are equal to our lives. Every person is responsible for cultivating vital symmetry, harmony with life. Ortega y Gasset is correct to argue that we are our circumstances, and if we don’t save them, we cannot save ourselves. Our circumstances, according to Ortega, include the fundamental reality that is our incarnate life. Man’s ontological condition is measured as reality vis-à-vis the individual as a person. We do not encounter our life as one more thing in a universe of inanimate objects. This suggests that human existence, what is experienced as an existential reality, must embrace free will. This is one of the initial demands that a happy life makes of itself.

People who embrace spiritual autonomy exercise free will in order to tackle the demands of daily existence. This enables us to recognize that there are things that remain out of their control. Part of what it means to experience human existence as a differentiated person is the acceptance of mystery in human existence. In other words, the exercise of free will also means knowing when we do not possess knowledge or control over something. This realization keeps us humble and honest, in addition to keeping us from becoming cynical about things that may not be in our power to comprehend. Two aspects of the human condition that will always remain out of our control are luck and irony.

Among other ways, we can understand the human will to be a psycho-physical component of the person. Will is the capacity of autonomous persons to come to terms with the strife they must face in order to live as incarnate souls—and prosper. Again, we must make choices—some trivial, others deadly serious. We cannot evade having to make choices, for even the consideration of evasion is already a choice. Luck can be thought of as a timing mechanism of events that take place in our life. Luck may be fortuitous or otherwise. On a purely material level, where events are said to depend on each other through cause and effect, it is almost impossible to establish the existence of luck. However, what is ordinarily considered cause and effect—contingency—nevertheless affects people of flesh and blood. Human beings often internalize events that science will dismiss as explainable. Because it is out of our control, luck enters our life without warning. On the other hand, timing in life does not necessarily need to convey a sense of good or ill fortune. The timing of events in our life, one way or another, can be dictated by the choices we make. We are often the unsuspecting recipients, for good or ill, of other people’s free will.

Embedded in this multi-layered existential condition is our ability to experience happiness. We cannot will ourselves to be happy. This would be presumptuous on our part. Human happiness, as I have already alluded to, is a diffuse emotion. It cannot be coerced. Happiness is often experienced as a singular joy that we can experience without much ado. Happiness or its antithesis–unhappiness—often come about as the result of our outlook on life, the purpose and meaning of our lives, and our spiritual and emotional stability, in addition to the choices we make.

We must also keep in mind that self-conscious discussion about happiness tends to aggravate our unhappiness. One cannot grasp with the mind what is not felt vitally. The former is an academic exercise, while the latter remains the stuff of vital existence. Much can be said about the harm that psychoanalysis has done to the human psyche in the twentieth century. Self-help gurus and the self-indulgent industry they have created operate on the principle that everyone ought to be happy. The latter is one of many platitudes that our age embraces. Ours is perhaps the only time in recorded history when everyone is promised a happy life, regardless of our attention to the duty we owe ourselves to practice prudence.  

Pedro Blas González is a professor of philosophy at Barry University.

PEDRO BLAS GONZÁLEZ

The American philosopher Eric Hoffer (1902–1983) is a rare thinker. Hoffer is a philosopher in the classic sense of the word—he sought life-affirming answers to vital concerns. Rhetoric, radical skepticism, intellectual posturing, and calisthenics, Hoffer asserted, defeat the essence of philosophical reflection. This is the case because philosophy is a vital activity that acts as a tool that props man up to purpose, meaning, and truth.

There is much of the stoic in Hoffer, a man known as the “Longshoreman Philosopher.” His work embodies that indispensable quality that informs the thought of all great thinkers: acumen for natural psychology that is guided by observation and perspicuity.

Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer is one of several insightful and important works that trace the trajectory of radical ideology of true believers in the bloody twentieth century. The book is an uncommon psychological and moral exposition of the Marxist/Soviet-inspired new man, which was touted by Western intellectuals as the future of Western democracies. What makes Hoffer’s thought unique is that he did not consider himself an intellectual. Instead, he was an autodidact who was a voracious reader and tireless scholar. A few introductory comments about The True Believer in relation to other seminal works of the same orientation seem appropriate.

The True Believer was published in 1951. While it is Hoffer’s first book, it is also the mature thought of a thinker who, by the time of the book’s publication, had spent several decades working alongside other men in difficult jobs. Hoffer was a consummate observer of people’s thoughts, emotions, and actions. His lucidness separates Hoffer’s work from the bloated abstractionism of the majority of twentieth-century intellectuals. Writing in clear sentences that do not over-intellectualize his chosen topics, Hoffer offers his readers stark realism concerning human nature. Lest we forget, observation of our surroundings is an essential tool of thoughtful and sincere philosophers.

The True Believer is a book of philosophy that concentrates on the crisis of individuality and autonomy vis-à-vis mass society during the mid-twentieth century. Few cultural commentators and historians of ideas have caught on to the fact that Hoffer is a philosopher who writes about the nature of work from the perspective of the working man. We must be careful not to confuse labor with work. What is noble about Hoffer’s reflections on work is that he does not offer a radicalized or rendition of the working man. Hoffer does not romanticize the worker as does Marxism, the Frankfurt School, and Herbert Marcuse (a Marxist intellectual who was a contemporary of Hoffer).

Other notable twentieth-century works that expose Marxism’s exploitation of the working man for its totalitarian agenda include Malcolm Muggeridge’s work, especially after his disheartening return from the Soviet Union; the latter part of Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s seminal Revolt of the Masses (translated into English in 1960); and Albert Camus’s insightful analysis of revolutionary nihilism and tyrannical Marxist governments and institutions in The Rebel: An Essay of Man in Revolt (L’Homme révolté). Of equal importance is Czeslaw Milosz’s 1953 portrayal of the communist mind in The Captive Mind. Another masterful work that analyzes nihilism and its effect on personal autonomy in mass society is Gabriel Marcel’s 1962 Man Against Mass Society. Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the Westand The Gulag Archipelago dissect the shifty rhetoric of dialectical materialism. Solzhenitsyn’s work scandalized the utopian, albeit murderous aspirations of Marxists.

At the time of its publication, The True Believer made great strides in making sense of fashionable social and political trends in the twentieth century. The book took on the intellectual establishment, which in turn attacked Hoffer as an unwashed, working-man fraud who knew nothing about highbrow Marxist theory. Yet Hoffer’s book is not a work of social/political philosophy, as some commentators have imagined. The genius of Hoffer’s thought is its detailed and measured account of man’s metaphysical and existential nature, how depending on man’s moral makeup and spiritual fulfillment, people come to interpret human reality.

Hoffer’s “True believers” are inseparable from Ortega y Gasset’s characterization of “mass man” as a resentful loafer, one who does not care to cultivate higher values, but who also keeps others from doing so. Irreverence for free will, Hoffer argues, is the dominant trait of true believers, people who embrace what Jean-François Revel calls the totalitarian impulse. Hoffer claims that “It is the true believer’s ability to ‘shut his eyes and stop his ears’ to facts that do not deserve to be either seen or heard which is the source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy.”

Aword of caution in writing about Hoffer’s work is necessary. It is the belief of this writer that in order to truly do justice to Hoffer’s philosophical insight, two ingredients are necessary. First, one must try to understand the astounding achievements of this hard-working, dedicated autodidact. Hoffer was a worker, not an intellectual who writes about workers. This situates him in a very small minority of writers who write about work. The twentieth century was dominated by thinkers and writers—intellectuals—who romanticized the plight of workers. Hoffer did not place garlands around the necks of the men he worked with. He knew their strong and weak points as people of flesh and blood, not ideological abstractions. Stated in simple terms, Hoffer realized that for practical reasons, work is a testament to free will, especially given that an idle existence not only bodes badly for man, but is also an aberration of the modern world.

Secondly, to think along with an independent thinker who did not embrace the self-indulgent pseudo-values of many intellectuals of his time, merits respect for Hoffer. We should not over-analyze Hoffer’s work, as we tend to do everything in our present cultural milieu. Such an approach will damage the simple lines of progression and insightful outcome of Hoffer’s thought into the human person. Thoughtful commentators best illuminate a past thinker’s work by demonstrating its relevance to today’s reading audience.

Hoffer’s thought is highlighted by several dominant and recurring themes: the astounding rate of change in the twentieth century, the loss of individual responsibility, and the proliferation of mass movements. The unifying theme in Hoffer’s work is postmodern man’s inability—or lack of desire—to confront existential freedom. Freedom, Hoffer reminds us, is a heavy burden to bear “unless a man has the talents to make something of himself.”

If the aforementioned crisis is symptomatic of a morally and spiritually diseased age, the major culprit, Hoffer contends, is nihilism brought on by self-consciousness. Hoffer was one of the first thinkers to identify this malaise that consumes our age and explore how the nihilistic malaise came to influence all aspects of twentieth-century life.

Hoffer offers poignant examples the ways nihilism’s moral cancer chokes our age by exploring the makeup of true believers. His insight into the pathology of their mindset is his greatest contribution to twentieth-century thought. Hoffer contends that true believers are self-absorbed people. He writes: “The tendency to look for all causes outside ourselves persists even when it is clear that our state of being is the product of personal qualities such as ability, character, appearance, health, and so on.” Hoffer agrees with Thoreau that “If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even … he forthwith sets about reforming—the world.” True believers, Hoffer tells us, find meaning and purpose in life by embracing popular causes and by becoming willing participants in groupthink.

Hoffer values instead the solitary life of nonconformists. He argues that life itself should be the primary concern of sincere people. As a thinker who reflected in order to become well grounded in human reality, he showed little tolerance for the cynical and fashionable “all is political” slogan of the 1960s.

It is important to realize that Hoffer’s analysis of true believers is not isolated to mass movements. Hoffer predicted that the life of Western man would eventually come to be dominated by the easy values of nihilism. In other words, he recognized that the mantra of a positivistic age entails the politicization of all aspects of life. The radical ideological program of true believers would come to dominate all aspects of postmodern life, making it a homogenized zombie colony. Hoffer was well aware of the social-political program of cultural Marxism after World War II. He understood that the fanaticism of true believers would eventually engulf the lives of people who voluntarily give up their autonomy by shunning free will.

A self-conscious society, Hoffer contends, creates a devastating loss of innocence. Innocence foments good will. In turn, this safeguards human aspirations about life and other people. The opposite of innocence, at least as this plays out in our self-possessed age, is cynicism.

This is a particularly relevant aspect of Hoffer’s work because his firsthand observations do not spring from “case studies.” Hoffer came to know human reality by living among the people he wrote about. His immersion in the reality of work and the people who perform it allowed Hoffer to check his idealism. In the process, he discovered that a self-conscious age leaves no stone unturned; no form of imagination can be left standing. A self-conscious age politicizes culture, vital life, friendship, love, language, beauty, religious belief, art, and sex ad nauseam.

In a self-conscious age thought reaches such a low-water mark that it eventually has nothing to offer autonomous people, for thought no longer contributes to the sphere of the individual. Under such conditions, what passes muster as thought is merely conditioned groupthink. Hoffer’s thought is a reaction to the aberrant world that he witnessed. He feared that aberration in postmodernity would be championed as the new norm.

In many respects, Eric Hoffer is a symbol of a type of man and thinker that can no longer be replicated today. His critical ability for philosophical reflection is not something that he took from teachers and other intellectuals. This is verified by his limited formal education. This may also explain why his intellect and ability to decipher destructive social trends were never contaminated by fashionable theories and radical ideology. By refuting the claims of the latter, Hoffer was able to keep his thought rooted in and dependent on truth, as this informs the life of independent thinkers.

Because Hoffer was not a radical—an alleged committed intellectual—he did not embrace the many forms of hypocrisy and dishonesty that are so prevalent among intellectuals. As a nonconformist and independent thinker, Hoffer’s thought is not the result of having to accommodate the demands of radical ideology.

Hoffer’s ability to decipher the moral makeup of radicalized twentieth-century intellectuals is truly insightful. He recognized these intellectuals as being nonchalant about logic and reason. He was horrified by their reluctance to accept common sense. This is because true believers replace facts, statistics, economics, and irrefutable time-proven history with irrational and politicized passions. In contradistinction to self-absorbed intellectuals, Hoffer enables the reader to witness how philosophical reflection engenders the art of self-reflection and self-knowledge.

Hoffer’s stoicism has much to teach us about thoughtful people. His horse sense refused to give in to fashionable mendacity. Also, because Hoffer embraced physical work from an early age, his ability to make sense of essential categories of human reality remained rooted. His genius for pointing out the essences that determine our understanding of reality is that of a man who showed tremendous respect for the redeeming nature of work. Hoffer shares Wyndham Lewis’s idea that too much schooling actually can do serious harm to a person’s ability to distinguish between appearance and truth, fantasy and reality. Hoffer thought this also applied to many intellectuals during his time.

Hoffer showed little patience for the social and political mayhem emerging from the hippie era. He had instead a profound understanding that reality has very little to do with our utopian claims. His work also has much to teach us today about the demise of the hierarchy of values and subsequent destruction of our most sacred institutions. It is ironic that in a time of dissolution like the 1960s, Hoffer was one of the few American thinkers who remained a genuinely free spirit.

Hoffer’s thought does not employ neologisms and unnecessary technical terms. The driving concern of his thought is man’s loss of existential autonomy—what philosophers like Ortega y Gasset and Camus have called authenticity. Hoffer’s genius is showcased in his treatment of concepts like individuality, authenticity, and autonomy. For him these are not mere words to be toyed with but fundamental human values. Hoffer took ideas that during his time had already taken on a modish, debased appeal and rooted them to vital life. It is in this regard that one can refer to Hoffer as a philosopher of the lived experience.

Being a thinker concerned with questions relating to vital life during the positivistic twentieth century had major drawbacks. Because Hoffer embraced a philosophy of commonsense values that addressed everyday life, the radicalized academic establishment has dismissed him. Hoffer’s major crime, as it is easy to see today, is that he tried to wrest control of moral values away from nihilistic intellectuals. By safeguarding basic truths and values—ideas that enable man to flourish in daily life—from becoming the domain of fashionable theories, Hoffer was made persona non grata by radical ideologues and opportunistic intellectuals. Yet while being shunned by radicalized academics, Hoffer enjoyed tremendous success among his readers in the general public. 

Pedro Blas González is a professor of philosophy at Barry University.