In an essay published in March, I discussed the fundamental contradiction of contemporary society: that we pursue means to achieve other means, with no ultimate end. Instead, our ‘end’ becomes abstracted potentiality: power, the relentless pursuit of which inherently leaves us unsatisfied in our essential need to know and be ourselves authentically. If you have found yourself drawn toward power or money as goals in themselves, defined yourself by instrumental abilities (such as intelligence or beauty), or been frustrated by an urge to capitalize on your experiences instead of enjoying them, you have, to some extent, fallen into this instrumental existence. One needn’t read that essay to understand this one, but doing so will ground the philosophical investigation here in its tangible political significance. As that essay defined and proved this contemporary mode of being, this essay concerns why we have entered such an era, and how to move past it.
I hope you’ll forgive me if I preface this undertaking with a survey of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger can seem helplessly abstract — he essentially devoted himself to describing water to fish — but his concepts turn out to be relevant and meaningful, especially to this project, when one correlates them to their own emotional experience.
Heidegger explains that there are ‘beings,’ or things in the world, and separately, ‘being’: consider the difference between objects in a room, and the light that illuminates all of them. There is also ‘nothing,’ that which is not being, but which is necessary for it, as darkness to light. In characteristic thickheadedness, the world of science tries to ignore being and nothing of which it struggles to speak; it can describe only beings.
We confront being and nothing instead through emotion: the fundamental mood of angst [‘anxiety’, but not in the traditional sense]. Angst, the ultimate terror of the nothingness beneath everything, is one of the less pleasant sensations one can experience. The world becomes uncanny, unhomelike [unheimlich], beings lose the meaning they get through being. I find myself floating in the void, with only ‘Dasein’ left to hold onto. Dasein is my human being, unique from other modes of being because humans as beings have a relationship to it, I concern myself with my being (whether other beings also do is an uninteresting question of epistemology). I can avoid authentically experiencing Dasein by immersing myself in routine and conformity, but when I confront the nothing, I must ask, “Why do I have this identity and not another?” “Why are good things good and bad things bad?” “Why do I and the world exist?” — to engage Dasein is to ask these questions.
Innate things around are beings, too. Especially important is ‘equipment,’ which one uses to achieve an end. Just as I don’t always directly engage Dasein, I don’t always acknowledge the being of equipment — in fact, the more seamlessly I use it, the less visible it becomes. Consider a blind person who, once completely accustomed to using a cane, perceives not it but through it. There is an inverse relationship between the effectiveness of equipment (or of any means to an end) and the degree to which we acknowledge its being.
This leads us to ‘enframing’ [Gestell], the definitive way we relate to the modern world.
When I enframe the world, I understand it as supply to be ordered at my beck and call, and demand that it make its potential utility available to me. In other words, I see the world around me (including people) as a bank of potential means, or in Heideggerian speech ‘standing-reserve’ [Bestand]. I am enframing when I see a forest as a quantity of potential lumber, or a new acquaintance as a prospective source of social capital.
Heidegger proposes a history of the interplay between these concepts which is in at least a few respects incomplete and wrong. That’s OK, we knew already that we could only trust Heidegger so much. Using these concepts, I will construct a brief history of self-consciousness that will both elucidate them and indicate the next stage of being.
First, we approached the world: there it was, and there were we. Emotions arose: “I want the world to be X, but it is Y” — thus, as a self-consciousness, one is different from the world: an individual. In the world but separate from it, what will one do but pursue that desire? One acts on their basic impulse to eat, reproduce, and so on. This is an effort to take something out of the world to fill oneself, a relationship of negativity.
To relate to the world negatively was, in the premodern historical moment, difficult. Even the pursuit of basic necessities incurred steep resistance — it was because of this resistance that we acknowledged the world’s being. For example, Plains Native Americans honored the buffalo that they hunted. We turned to nymphs and gods to explain the mysterious physical world, and used the physical world to explain them in turn (i.e., there is lightning because of Zeus, and this current lightning demonstrates Zeus is angry). We assigned nature a personality, and tended to assume that justice, sacredness, and beauty reigned from beneath an opaque surface; its impenetrability became an enchanting beyond. Although we all pursued the roughly same desires, we distinguished ourselves through labor: the basket weaver worked on their basket from beginning to end, and developed a personal relationship with their product; their work expressed their particularity. Our negative relationship with the world turned into its opposite, as our limitations created meaning.
We never could have resisted the fruit of knowledge for long. In our pursuit of satisfying our immediate desires, we became increasingly effective at understanding and using the world. We created Newtonian physics, industrial machines, and dramatically reduced the resistance to achieving our aims. For the first time, our immediate desires became pretty much satisfied — now what? Our identity is our emotions about the world, so what do we do when everyone can satisfy their basic desires? Industrial-era labor becomes specialized and impersonal; each worker performs a small step in a larger process from which they are alienated. To distinguish ourselves, and to have something to work toward (the necessary activity to have an identity at all), we need some higher end. But we no longer rely on blind tradition to command our conduct, as we can judge the consequences of our actions for ourselves. We can no longer explain physical phenomena through mysticism or gods, nor the other way around. The beyond is reached, and life disenchanted: no inherent sacredness, no personality, only atoms (it is irrelevant for our purposes whether God actually exists, he is silent in nature). Premodern societies had answers to the aforementioned fundamental questions, but those answers slipped through our fingers just as we were ready to act on them. The negative relationship, by succeeding in its aims, self-destructs.
This is why existentialism arose in the 19th Century, directly in the wake of the industrial revolution. Kierkegaard’s generation was the first to see inside Pandora’s box, to directly interrogate the essence of being. He asked that question, “why,” and received that answer, nothing. At once, oblivion was everywhere.
In angst, two and two are four and five at once, all things are pulled apart. Again and again, the bedrock of reality shatters and is replaced in vain; we plummet, like rebels of heaven, into the abyss. Confronted with the emptiness beneath everything, what is most agonizing is the fact that everything exists, and through its revealed counterconcept, we can understand what that means.
‘Existence is suffering,’ indeed; the essence of Dasein is the helpless tension between our essential wanting of answers and the eternal lack of response, only guttural horror that this is being and this is what it always will be. I am reminded of Edvard Munch’s inspiration for the Scream: “There was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjörd and the city — my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling… I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.”
The instrumental existence is one with means but not ends. In other words, it is where humanity asks itself ‘how’ to achieve things, but not ‘why.’ ‘Why’ is where the angst arises. In recoil from it, we surrender our authentic experience of Dasein. We engage with immediate desires and with calculative power optimization, but not beauty, virtue, or the sacred. As we do not really recognize our being, neither do we recognize the world’s; instead, we enframe it, recommitting ourselves to negativity. The first act of those divine insurgents, upon being cast into hell, was to construct the golden palace of Pandemonium. Like them, we find solace in meaningless effort, scale to no purpose other than itself.
I criticized this instrumental mode of being at length in my prior essay, but now we can understand its most fundamental failures. Because our identities are abstract means, we define ourselves based on abilities, and define our abilities by our aptitude relative to others. For example, one is only smart insofar as one is smarter than most people. So, if one defines oneself as a ‘smart’ person, to meet someone smarter is fundamentally devastating; it is as if you are less of a person. The instrumental existence does not merely necessitate competition; it is competition.
In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the point at which self-consciousness successfully satisfies its desires (such as by eating an apple) becomes a sort of tragedy: it can only know itself through its desires toward the world, so what will it do if it is satiated and the world is negated? Self-consciousness realizes it needs an independent being (by contrast to the dependent apple, which it too easily negated) to recognize it: another self-consciousness. From this follows the master-slave dialectic, in which each contender hopes to force the other to recognize his existence and self-consciousness. Even the winner of this struggle loses, as, by subjecting the loser and refusing to recognize him, he invalidates the recognition he would gain through victory. In the technological world, by trying to consume and use the world and others, we fail in that core goal to know and be ourselves. Again, we see the self-destructiveness of negativity.
Contemporary society is trying to reconcile these failures. The previous essay’s example of strip mall architecture demonstrates how architects try to use symbolic aesthetics in place of real beauty. DEI initiatives are an admirable attempt at abstract, bureaucratic virtue. And it’s notable that the performative reader reads Dostoyevsky, instead of just consuming the most popular media. These are all attempts to engage with or refer to higher ends, but they go about it in the wrong manner. They approach it rationally, they use symbols to decide their course of action, and still try to gain instrumental value. We are not really moved by the equitable hiring practices of a megacorporation, or the beauty of any new building. Rational, symbol-logic cannot save us: one experiences anxiety, and therefore also Dasein, through emotion. But even in this failed synthesis, we see humankind’s motivation to escape instrumentality.
And we can succeed, but not on our current trajectory or through an impossible reversion. I, too, have a primitivist impulse. But the dialectic can only move forward.
It is often said that modern technology is akin to magic. Yet despite its spectacular power, modern technology does not feel ‘magical,’ it feels sterile as soon as the novelty wears off. This is a matter of enframing; we think of it merely as a way to turn the world into standing-reserve, and as standing-reserve itself. What if we revered technology, like we revere magic in storybooks, or like Plains Indians honored buffalo? Heidegger prescribed that we use technology to reveal the being, the essence, of the world around us. He understood technology to share this fundamental power with art, and advised that both be used to celebrate the world, to make it meaningful. But how?
Heidegger told us to “hold ourselves out into the nothing.” We must embrace angst; only through it can we appreciate the vivid beauty of being. In the abyss we can see ourselves: the horror of our finitude shatters routine and reveals the futility of enframing and power-searching, leaving only one’s core, authentic self. Further, the fact that we are horrified by the lack of certain qualities inherent to the universe reaffirms our love for those very qualities. We invented a personality to nature, and assumed it had inherent qualities of sacredness, justice, beauty, and so on, because we wanted it to be so. By returning to angst, we can rediscover these higher ends, which were lost but lying within us the whole time.
If you have a nostalgic vision of a sacred world, beautiful and meaningful, actualize it. If the universe does not adhere to your understanding of the good, enforce it. If there is no omniscience to recognize you, authentically show yourself to others. As the master-slave dialectic demonstrates, that can only be achieved if we, in turn, recognize others. This recognition is the heart of the matter. We want to see the world (especially other people) not as empty but meaningful, not as standing-reserve but endowed with being, not as mere means but as an end in itself. The equilibrium of our negative relationship with the world is broken; we are now empowered to totally conquer and negate, but we must choose not to. In other words, the dialectic will only resolve when we surrender ourselves to that peculiar relationship, love. I might be accused of cliché, but I find that the most poignant answers are those that sit right under our noses until we realize that everything has been pointing to them all along. This and the previous essay have been devoted to analyzing what it means to love, they have done so by describing its opposite.
That which is most difficult about love — self-sacrificial action toward something outside us — is exactly what makes it meaningful. It is a positive relationship in which we empty ourselves out to fill the world, but the world in turn fills us, providing the ends that give us our identity, the recognition that affirms our being, the sacredness and beauty that we yearn for. This is what we have been looking for: the creation of the beyond from within. Only through love can we sublate the absurd, find ourselves, find ourselves at home in the world.
Featured Image Source: Smart History