The Horrific Intoxicant of Omnipossibility by Kenneth Smith   

1. Previsions of The Abyss

During the 19th century, a limited but intense residual comprehension ⁠— a true philosophical and moral counterculture ⁠— persisted in those premodern ethoi that had once determined the cast of Western culture. Modern culture as it has mutated and consolidated its peculiar ideological logic has more and more perfectly asphyxiated those alternative worldviews and their schemes of principles. But ⁠— drawing two centuries ago on still vital lifelines to the past ⁠— Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Kafka could capture the significance of the modern cultural formations from the standpoint of those Hellenic, Judaic and Christian systems of the meanings then being choked off. In each philosophy's criticism of modern ideology, ⁠omnipossibility⁠, the definitive modern intoxication with ⁠licentious⁠ or ⁠abstract freedom⁠, became an acutely important issue:

(1) Hegel developed for the subjectivist deformations of spirit a ⁠diagnostic⁠ analogous to the periodic table of the elements, a ⁠panchromatic spectrum⁠ of the stratified moods of subjective activity (⁠Gestalten⁠). He recognized that modern culture had mired itself in fixated delusions about its own actuality: Our cultural atmosphere is a miasma of cloying perspectivisms or ideologies to which modern mentalities are prey precisely because of their abstractedness and self-obtuseness, what he termed ⁠Verstand⁠ or the facile manipulation of already-given or fossilized thoughtforms. By this very plethora of polluting -⁠isms⁠ moderns are disrelated to the actual principles that drive individual rationality and make social order coherent. Moderns are victimized by their own ⁠abstracta⁠, by the sovereign cogency of their simplistic self-concept of autonomous and self-defining ⁠Ego⁠. Inherently, moderns lack any idea of how civilized culture first arose out of myth and soulish community; or of how they themselves evolved from children to adults; or of how the higher-order, abstractive intellectual functions were gradually extruded from the intuitive. Moderns, for ideological reasons, cannot grasp the ⁠rootedness⁠ of self-conscious Ego in its own more natural psyche, or the dependence of both of these ⁠— the conscious and the subliminal dimensions ⁠— upon the superliminal powers of organizing Spirit. The ⁠self-abstractednes⁠ of self-conscious Ego expresses itself in its hybristic disconnectedness from its environing world, from Nature no less than from Spirit. Hegel's insights about the ultimate character of Spirit remain overwhelmingly uncomprehended two centuries later: It develops not by severing itself from what is more primordial but by ⁠superimposing⁠ its ⁠Aufhebungen⁠ or higher forms as pervasive, transformative principles and spiritual Truth consists not in any of the precious idiotisms of Ego but in a grasp of the ⁠whole organismic cosmos⁠ that Spirit has generated, the array of mutating civilizational and perspectival forms. For lack of such superordinate intelligence modern egos feel licensed to indulge their myopic self-interests; the less philosophic comprehension they cultivate, the more perfect their sense of apparent ⁠omnipossibility⁠, their license to do and think as they will.

(2) To Marx modernity signifies the fatal ascendancy of the idea-system of ⁠exchange-value⁠, the abstractivist code of mentality implicit in the regime of money and capital. Money primarily buys apparent ⁠freedom⁠ for its proprietor (exemption from natural needs and wants) and ⁠power⁠ over others via ⁠their⁠ needs and wants (i.e., their unfreedom); in actuality it is money's ⁠own⁠ freedom and power that are fostered, since it gradually ceases to be an instrument of individual will or purpose and consolidates its own authoritative logic as a posthuman regime of purely abstractivist principles. As capital, money enforces this system of redefined freedom and power by the way it aligns human willing and reason with its formal laws of ⁠quantified value⁠ and their fundamentally anesthetic orientation (negating the mentality or worldview of ⁠use-value⁠, i.e. the dominion of our concrete intuitive needs and concerns, such as nourishment, community, education, health, political expression, culture, legal rights, etc., all of which become satellites of the regime of profit and "self-interests"). Ecocidal policies are the least among the contranatural thrusts of the theology of exchange-value; the unseen subjective repercussions of this system of domination are its most vicious effects, as more and more of human nature and intelligence are reduced to commodified and commercialized assets, utter means to the end of the master-means, money. Ultimately in its hall of mirrors, the banausic-mechanical culture of exchange-value ⁠— not truly plutocracy but ⁠chremocracy⁠, because indeed, even the wealthy are ruled by the logic of money ⁠— generates nothing but ⁠more means⁠, no ends, values, norms, transcendent insights, obligations, ethics. Of course, nothing is sacred to such a world-view; sacrality is just one more value a nihilistic system knows how to subjugate to the omnipotent rule of things, means and means-minded functionaries. Like other human concerns, values persist only in the form of rhetoric, temporarily obligatory and effective forms of mendacity for controlling the Many. For as long as it works and remains cheaper, rhetoric is preferable to police power for imposing the regime of plutocratic omnipossibility, which ⁠— in its senile phases ⁠— cultivates more and more licentious or science-fictional or megalomaniacal schemes for extorting ever-more prodigious profits, ultimately aiming at a monopoly of wealth.

(3) To Kierkegaard omnipossibility signified the rise of an arrested form of personality-development, the esthetic or isolationist ⁠pure Ego⁠ that for the sake of its own abstraction or emancipation from natural order must distance itself from all needs and wants, from the social-moral presence of others and the higher impulses of spirit or divinity. Such an Ego-driven personality lives for the sake of perfecting its "freedom" as an all-sided sphere of absolute or abstracted possibilities, a ⁠subjective/subjunctive⁠ domain in which Ego is God. Had Kierkegaard seen the evolution of the virtual worlds of modern media, of movies, television, escapist popular fiction, the Internet, sports, gambling, lives structured around fantasy or self-delusion, not to mention recreational or addictive pharmaceuticals and routine mood-modulation by nicotine and caffeine, he might well be stunned by the scientized application of human ingenuity to the ⁠mass- industry of self-evasion⁠. This domain has not grown for nothing since Flaubert's Emma Bovary. It is the most graphic example of a market catering to a compulsive, definitively modern demand, the visceral ⁠self-repellency⁠ of the personality-type Kierkegaard portrayed as the esthetic. At the same time the ⁠content⁠ of modern media seems to be a universe or cornucopia of willful choices, the ⁠form⁠ of those media betrays sheer dependency or desperate need, pathos, habituation, a thoroughly entrained ⁠false consciousness⁠ constitutionally incapable of grasping its own reality and the demonisms that have supplanted culture and values in the life of the modern psyche. Omnipossibility is a delusion, as in Hegel, a ⁠hypertrophy of Ego⁠ that cannot name the rupturing truth that would liberate moderns from its grip.

(4) To Nietzsche modern nihilism completes the parabolic arc designed by Christianity as a religious psychology ⁠— more aptly, otherworldly metapsychology ⁠— weaning conscience and will away from the authority of Nature or ⁠Physis⁠. Christianity's vilification of the natural, worldly and human decisively divorced Western society from the kind of value-or-philosophy-based culture the ancients had deemed simple sanity. Under the Gospel, humans succumbed to the spell of a cult determined to make them fall out of love with the entire finite world: Nothing in it was worth having or doing, worthy of the energy or sacrifices of the will. For all worldly goods decay and pall, and only spiritual goods perdure in Eternity. Not for nothing did early Christianity generate a counterpart-Gnosticism whose God was radically alien to this entire world; both religions were marked by a profound sense that human soul was just not fit for this world and vice versa. Religion became a program for ⁠disaffiliating⁠ human souls from culture as well as from nature and history, abstracting inner or essential personality ("soul") from all its worldly contexts. It mattered little that such abstraction was suicidal; suicide was what was desired, ⁠dying away from the world⁠ to quench the miseries of an intolerable and unfathomable way of life. "We would rather will the Void than be void of will," wrote Nietzsche, that is, will must act and the abstract ⁠formal processes of will⁠ would sooner sacrifice all that is of concrete human value than disobey the manias of the Will to Power, a compulsive pursuit of ever-more stringent regimens of moral order. As Christian asceticism demanded renunciation of the most urgent natural cravings, so modern scientism and technocracy have further cut the umbilicum between man and the domain of nature, tradition, intuition, values, culture and indeed ⁠the human⁠ altogether: Moderns are invited to step over the threshold into an ⁠absolutely artificial⁠ dimension, a fantasy-universe responsive not just to their insatiable lucre but also to their darkest appetites. Just as Christianity waged moral war against ancient aristocratism, so modern scientism and democratism also struggle to keep the culture-forming exceptional few from following their own inner bent of character. Democratist order imposes a perverse regime of Kantian ⁠moral isonomy⁠ (equalization of power or neutralization of authority, the abolition of any superordinate or subordinate relations among moral wills), thus ultimately an order of ⁠homogenization⁠ or ⁠uniformitarianism⁠. By its scientism, its capitalism, rationalism and majoritarianism, modern culture is battling against what is modally incompatible with its whole system of ideas: True exceptionalism, genius, aristocratism, authoritative-transcendent reason and freedom. The classical political impulse of moral "domination" (⁠authority⁠, mastery by which superior or acutely competent perspectives direct those inferior or less competent in rationality) is frustrated by this artificial, irrationalist "rationalist" world-order and expresses itself via authoritarian mass-controls that are not expressions of authority at all ("authority" and "authoritarianism" being contraries, as moderns cannot comprehend). Rather than effecting libertarian political cultures, modern egocentric will instead spawns totalitarian systems that take up the slack of the aspectival, incompetent, impotent or ⁠abstract⁠ wills. Moderns resent domination at the ⁠retail⁠ level, person to person, but are gladly, addictively, saturated with it at the ⁠wholesale⁠ level, via institutions, peer-pressures, anonymous ideologies and media. In slavish mass-society the uncritical and witless Many, desperate for any sense of purpose, eagerly enlist in whatever exploitative programs their overlords have designed to enhance their own omnipossibility: Wars, crusades, enterprises, parties, whatever.

(5) As a religious moralist Dostoevsky was engrossed in the phenomenon of amoralized "hyperrational" will, the Kantian paradigm of autonomous conscience accountable only to its own self-ordained self-concept. The direct practical implication of this ethic of autonomy was that one might do anything one could ⁠convince oneself⁠ was right, anything for which one could not reproach oneself. The premodern concept of conscience as implicated in a subliminal regime of natural law, like the Christian concept of conscience as directly exposed to divine ordination, was thus being tested by a novel ⁠religiously and morally evacuated⁠ rationalism that gave each individual ⁠sole proprietorship⁠ over his own conscience. Dostoevsky puts such an experiment into the mind of ⁠Crime and Punishment's⁠ Raskolnikov, an impoverished and desperate student living in what was then the most perfectly artificial and geometric city in the world ⁠— St. Petersburg, an entirely dictated and designed metropolis with not avenues but "prospects" that vanish at infinity, laid out on a precisely rectilinear grid. On the one hand there are Raskolnikov's need for money and the despicability of the old moneylender; but on the other stands his experimentalist fascination with his own meta-moral self-discipline, his subjective stringency in repressing twinges of ⁠merely sentimental⁠ guilt. With sufficient self-control, one can quell the treasonous self-testimony of one's own conscience and rationalize anything whatsoever as a "moral" option. To Kantian ethics morality must be an "internal function" of rational will within itself, and a purely rational will is most perfectly purged of extrinsic factors such as conventional morality, religious belief, etc. Some sort of rational responsibility may indeed result when Kantian concepts are taken up by aristic or value-driven individuals, but all the elements of Kant's argument are transfigured in their meaning when digested into mentalities that think in merely mechanical, rule-governed or sophistical ways (⁠banausoi⁠) or those whose true motive is their appetite for self-gratification (⁠douloi⁠). So different are these classical character-types from one another that Kantian ethics turns around from being a rigorous scheme of duties into being ⁠a warrant for licentious nihilism⁠ or ⁠rationalization for criminality⁠ when transposed from one type to the others.

(6) Beneath the facade of modern rationality masking our laws, institutions, hierarchies of bureaucracy and business, etc., Kafka discovered an utterly heteronomous capitulation of isolated, radically ⁠self-uncertain⁠ individuals to the power and authority of monumental systems that dwarf their human inmates like the colossi of Egypt. Hegel recognized the modern state had become an "earthly God," its immensity of power and wealth and the obscurity and remoteness of its ultimate authority giving it the brute superhumanity to reduce humans to nothing. Most within bureaucratized society have become profoundly intimidated subjects: Regardless of their formal legal or political status, they are inwardly ⁠slaves⁠ whose servility or eagerness to obey so exceeds their feeble comprehension that they would gladly comply if only they knew with what. ⁠The Trial⁠ describes Joseph K.'s ideologically improvident sense of self-confidence and self-righteousness. Naively determined to stand up for his rights, he is a vestigial individual in the post-individualist culture of modern order. As someone accused he knows not of what, he is ensnared in legal procedures that are vertiginous, abysmal and capricious: Behind the austere and august workings of the Law are the quirks of individual judges and anonymous, inaccessible and utterly venal manipulators of the great mechanisms. Like a great artificial man, Hobbes' Leviathan made graphic, the Law executes as if they were rigorously rational and impartial criteria the arbitrary whimsies of the most powerful, nameless ones. Modern bureaucracy magnifies particular acts of willful subjectivity into dispensations of divine omnipotence, it endows ⁠strategically positioned⁠ figures with omnipossibility. In Kafka's time the apparatus of the Law was quaint and antiquarian, far from modernly utilitarian and efficient; and the mentalities behind it seemed petty and childishly senile, so abstracted from the real human world as to be inept to imagine what that great apparatus could truly be made to do. In Kafka's age the great Leviathan of the Law still lay in the hands of myopic-idiotic homunculi, its totalitarian potential yet undiscovered. Its very scale of resources and internal coordination make the Law a perfect device for totalitarianizing society, the same resources that enforce a regime of justice guaranteeing the unexceptionable rule of injustice, programmatic terror and the monoculture of the state party. In two enigmatic aphorisms Kafka drew the delusions of grandeur and the pathos as well of modern culture: ⁠"He was permitted to attain the Archimedean east and standpoint, but only on their condition that he use it against himself "⁠; and ⁠"We are digging the pit of Babel."⁠ By his ambitious political-legal organizations moderns have not elevated themselves to any closer to Godhood at all, but merely dehumanized themselves all the more perfectly into insects, creating for those-to-come unthinkable and abysmal dilemmas of infinite pathos under a regime of horrific omnipossibility.

These critics of modern civilization understood that the culture of our era has precipitated a wholesale war against the traditional finite terms of human existence and their organizing, infinite principles as well. The ⁠human condition⁠, ⁠human nature⁠ and the ⁠bounding or defining principles⁠ that once set our existence and potential in place within a more comprehensive scheme of significance, are now volatilized as issues that for ideological reasons can make no sense to us any longer. Moderns have accepted a Faustian bet with Mephistopheles ⁠against their own human constraints⁠: They stake everything on the presumption nothing in their lives has such overwhelming meaning or value that they cannot dissociate or alienate themselves from it. They have bought the distinctively modern ⁠freedom of infinitude⁠ or radical nihilism ⁠— ⁠abstraction from all actuality and concreteness⁠ ⁠— at a price that their modern ideological universe does not even permit them to articulate. What have they forsaken for a world of nothing but illusions and delusions? Nothing but other illusions and delusions, they are assured: The hoary beliefs or self-deceptions of predecessors, despised uncomprehendingly as "ancient" and "medieval." What has evaporated from this modernized world? Only values, truth, critical and creative intelligence, connoisseurial insight, philosophical substance and drive, a form of rationality that grounds our conscience in ultimates and other norms that have become to moderns nothing but vacuous rhetoric. The core-concept of ancient culture was the principle of ⁠Physis⁠, the obscure self-unfolding logic of nature busily converting its potentiality into actuality, even in the form of human character and historical culture. For those subtle enough to grasp it, this principle was thoroughly intuitive and concrete, designed to foster philosophical-moral insights in those exceptional characters determined to triumph over biopsychic determinism. The core-concept of medieval culture was the principle of ⁠Spiritus⁠, the contranatural power to bring the world and its arrangements into existence ⁠ex nihilo⁠: Although its idea was essentially abstract or metaphysical, Spirit's remarkable creativity out of nothing is concretely illustrated in reduced or diminished form by a living being, namely man, who imagines God's authority over nature in the form of his own moral will and conscience, breaking the chain of natural determinism by his free decisions. But the core-concept of modern culture is thoroughly abstract and ⁠a priori⁠, a novel premise about what it means to be free: One need ⁠know nothing⁠ about one's drives and delusions, one need ⁠forsake none⁠ of the natural appetites that have one in their grip, one need ⁠exercise no⁠ hard-won mastery over one's irrational self. Modernity's yoke is light indeed. For modernity the essence of human being lies in willfulness, a natural talent for merely "doing what one wants": Where ancient culture saw the need for profound training to perfect the ⁠arete⁠ or excellence of reason, will and the competence to value appropriately, modern culture assumes we are already born with the energy to will. Neither culture, education nor self-comprehension is essential as a precondition for being able to will freely: Freedom is simply arbitrariness, the ⁠spontaneous assertion⁠ of the will. We need not weed out the will's impulses or compulsions, need not purge it of its natural self-obscurity; it is ⁠adequate to its concept⁠ as arbitrary will just as it is, in its primitive or infantile state. Premodern cultures took a transcendent measure or Norm as a defining self-concept into which humans need to grow; modern culture regards all acculturation, education, intellectualization, moralization, etc. as inessential and superfluous. Modern culture everywhere gives its ⁠imprimatur⁠ to moronism and idiotism, even in academia, politics and corporate authority. It is a culture that a priori ⁠— and by no accident ⁠— has no concept what culture ought to be.

Our educational drop-outs, addicts, slackers, philistines, etc. understand the normative import of modern culture much more keenly than their parents, teachers, employers and other authority-figures. As the modern era goes on, what resists education, maturation and enlightenment and makes the work of teachers and parents harder and harder is not a merely ⁠natural⁠ state of human psyche: it is the ⁠acculturated self-comprehension⁠ of youths that makes them so contemptuous of culture. This is itself the work ⁠of a⁠ culture, the core logic of modern norms. Moderns do not tend toward barbarism by innate character alone but become barbarized by design, victims of the ideological miasma or subjectivist pollution of a system of humanly dysfunctional culture that subserves alien or abstractivist purposes: Youth's attitudes are the seepage of that culture, its contamination of younger and younger psyches, as "youth culture" makes children more and more susceptible to its amoralizing revolution in "sophistication." The reasons why most people were by nature unfree in the character-based political culture of ancient Greece have not been metaphysically revoked; they remain more determinative than ever. The reason modernity supposes that all are "free" is that this is for moderns an ⁠a priori truth⁠, intrinsic to the very idea of arbitrary will. But such freedom as is implicit in the idea of arbitrary will is meaningless, an abstract, effete freedom utterly void of the developed or cultured power to govern itself, to exclude external influences, to comprehend its own essential character or nature; it is a merely ⁠imaginary freedom⁠, equally valid for the drug addict with a needle in his eye, the teenage crack-whore, the willful 2-year-old, the witless newspaper reader shopping for opinions or bargains and the opportunist Wall Street arbitrageur.

Is it irony that modernity has seized upon the very factor as its supposed world-principle (Ego, conscious self-will) that is in truth so far from omnipotent or authoritative that it is instead ⁠impotent⁠ by reason of its abstractedness? Is modern culture not philosophically incompetent to grasp what a ⁠principle⁠ must be, must be able to do? Is it significant that that culture in its most acute self-delusion has apotheosized something as almighty which is indeed abysmally ⁠pathetic⁠, without authority over itself, without command or direction? To be abstracted and abstractive means ultimately to be ⁠facile⁠, trapped in lubricious illusions and cheap presumptions, incompetent to master and carry out the ⁠concrete tasks⁠ of thinking, evaluating, seeing what is what, mastering and disciplining one's own biases and perspectives. When these more muscular abilities fail, then one's prophylactic wits are wholly septic, exposed to every ideological, conformist and totalitarianizing influence. In the absence of culture, criteria and values there is nothing that may not compel belief: Nothing so absurd, vicious, delusional, mendacious or self-deceptive that a significant mass of people will not find it clear and convincing, as "⁠music to their ears⁠." Omnipossibility is by no means a natural "description" of "the human condition" or "human nature" in its metaphysical status. It symptomatizes a specific, historically evolved culture for which a particular nexus of illusions has yielded a great and consuming delusion: Supposing the abstractable and self-sufficient essence of man to be will, and the true character of will to be radical arbitrariness; and supposing such ⁠abstracta⁠ to be untouched by any natural need to be cultured and fed by values, then modern mentality archetypally imagines that human beings are what they are ⁠in vacuo⁠. A vacuum is very much to the point. The essence of modern will, as imagined by Pico and ideologized by Sartre, is ⁠pure doing⁠, or differently expressed, an activity without a nature or essence supporting it: Its "being" is truly ⁠nothingness⁠, a negation of all defining or law-dictating conditions outside its own self. These flourishes of Sartre are alas sheer rhetoric, "sweet nothings" designed to captivate the gullible modern intellect in its very poverty of self-clarifying concepts. That moderns ⁠appear⁠ to themselves to have no nature only speaks to the issue of the specific kind of nature they do have, which is, a profoundly ⁠self-unreflective⁠ character, obtuse and inarticulate about its own subjective processes and tendencies. Modernity's world-order is extravertive, materialist and spectatorial because its very premises have selected for slavish and materialist (doulic and banausic) mentalities who are grievously destitute in all the factors requisite to nourish self-understanding. In antiquity there was a domain of culture and politics reserved for the exceptional forms of activity (⁠praxis⁠) that strove to ignite and give form to self-wondering or philosophy. In modernity nothing corresponds any longer to such striving after self-clarity: Even our universities are conceived as mere laboratories for "research" into objective matters, and our cultural media are glutted with entertainment or disinformation.

The modern fetish for metamorphosis or proteanism ⁠— ⁠fluent, streaming⁠ modes of life ⁠— ineluctably entails dissolution of all enduring or traditional forms. Modernity has acclimatized itself thus to a pathological ⁠fluxus quo⁠ in which families, schools, religions, literature, all find themselves failing at a necessarily futile task: Trying to transmit or hand over (⁠tradere⁠) the subtler normative insights that once made culture and autonomous or individualized personality possible. Modern culture invades even the simplest minds to induce them to "know better," to dismiss a priori everything that is not ⁠au courant⁠. In ancient society culture tried to achieve an island of stability for what most deserved preservation from the torrent of natural and historical change, what was too valuable to perish; in modernity, culture itself conspires to ⁠shred⁠ all that much faster the norms and principles of any mode of mentality ⁠— culture, philosophy, conscience, intelligence ⁠— that would resist and pass judgment on its vicious, ⁠artificially accelerated⁠ flux.