Beyond the Present Absence

by Denis Larrivee

Frederick Wilhelmsen’s republication of Romano Guardini’s End of the Modern World marks yet another upward tug in the to and fro between efforts to proselytize a modern public with the long view and the usual tendencies to propagate an ongoing ennui, where future gazing means just the search for yet another momentary sparkle amidst the listless frolics of an unending present. Wilhelmsen’s choice is significant not just for an iconic author come to symbolize historical perspective taking, but for the symbolism of Guardini’s absence from a public whose interests have pushed beyond mere technical surfeit to personal makeovers. By reinserting this particular author into public view, there is the sense that what is negatively perceived in the current cultural progression away from self-reflection is supposed also to merit approbation for what its willful neglect will bring. Wilhelmsen’s retrieval of Guardini seems thus intended both to incur his chastisement and elicit an historical correction.

The man claimed to be intellectual father to three culturally and geopolitically diverse papal officeholders - by the holders themselves - claimed for himself just two hats, philosophy and theology, and two cultures, German and Italian. Yet neither hat named the figure, and neither culture owned the man. Sailing beyond such loyalties, Guardini took, in his little, but big opus, the long view, where hats were just instruments chiseling away patina on the momentary modernesque. True to form, Guardini's view was modern and empirical, culling facts to validate interpretations, while his insights were distinctively a-modern, selecting a-temporal lenses to correct modernity's pretensions. His originality, though, lay not in the method of magnifying, but in the normative value that their amplified images revealed. In this instrumental sense, that is, in the instrumentalization of his instruments, he was both influenced by his era yet diverged from it. With Nietzsche, he could share recognition of modernity's marking, its temporality and its objectifying - "culture is nothing more than hollowed out Christianity" - and a knowledge of how the organs of the age were pressed into its service, like science, shaped and shaping according to modernity's prevailing notions about the truly real.

Modernity’s faithless faith in the demonstrably evident and its severance from the a-temporal transcendent, for example, led him to conclude that its instrumentalization was largely the shaping of self by the subjects that had created its premises and that, then, pro-created indifference to the exemplary. This indifference to the significant gave impetus to chronology, defining epochs and exalting progress, shaping the shaper who is its object. Thus arose the peculiar contradiction, the fruit of self-exaltation that is the modus to the mundane, connoted by the trivial, the banal, and the replaceable. Guardini identified in this process the making of mass man, indistinguishable by no longer being hallowed, but rather hollowed, bereft thereby of distinctions that could claim personal significance, that make a who and not a what; a thriller to chill Chesterton's Man from Thursday.

Following along Guardini’s line, then, it is perhaps no coincidence that the peculiar form adopted by science since Descartes, and that since the Enlightenment has brandished self-emancipation and self-creation, has had a singular inability to see things not as wholes but rather as outcomes of temporal sequences. In this way, it remains always possible to gaze backward in order to value looking forward. Comte, after all, made clear that the point of empirical validation was its cumulative verification and Descartes proposed that no final end could relate a present to a future that would legitimate its arrival.

This peculiar contradiction seems in evidence again, this time driving speculation on the feasibility of brain copying. Coverage of the topic by Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers flagship op-ed journal IEEE Spectrum merely expresses what is otherwise a widely hoped for outcome of technological design, that mimicking nature will create a technological future where nature becomes obsolete. This rampant trend appears to be more than mechanically emulative, with its retinue of inspirational natural patterns, but seems also meant to embrace a future by obliterating the past, a planned obsolescence not of personally inspired and personally referenced devices, but a self-obsolescence that would make the individual the past against which the future appears brighter. Subliminal messaging in the motivational literature on ‘learning to love thinking machine’s’ and ‘can a machine be made conscious’   create normative aspirations about powers and future promise, the new era where not just the devices that serve us, but we ourselves trend upward in reconceived, remolded, re-cognized selves, an evolution by design and not by chance, propelled by the lyricism of temporal philosophies.

Lurking behind the aspirations is the introduction of a qualitatively, original paradigm, the instrumental paragon, that makes of the instrumentalizer the instrumentalized. What is noteworthy, perhaps, in this remaking of the peculiar contradiction is not just the recapitulation of the diminished creator seeking exaltation, or, in Guardini’s insightful vision, the recreating of the circumstances of ennui that bind self to a ‘material world’, but, in another insightful note, the foreclosure of upward trajectory to those seeking one.

Comte’s inspirations, it seems, assure us, positively, that our way forward, lies blissfully through our retreat. This lesson, adopted in the emulation that is subliminally dispensed, has become inscribed, virtually, in the vaunted hosts gathering in science citadels from les pais vieux e les pais jeune, as well as our eastern middle kingdom. The attempt to algorithmically siliconize our finest philosophical gestures, to immortalize our intuited thoughts, and lay them open to viewing, only to avail them later for duplication or clever permuting, could itself take a lesson from economic value. Cheap value in the common and the mundane; from the mass man to the mass brain.

But if, by looking backwards, what can our way forward be? Insights from microcircuits? Sensorially coordinated neural fields? In IBM’s cognitive era what is True North? Communing with our machine friends will likely give us insight on their normative neutralities, their materialized preferences, and, likely, their foreignness. Material bound, our past becomes instead our future, our trajectories stilled and cycling. In the neuroscientific age, perhaps no more fitting epigraph than that our purported means to purpose and grandeur also created the paragon that denied it.

What is clear, and what is perceived clearly, however, is how little the effect of material descent silences our upward urge. Bostrom’s posthumanist subject vicariously encompasses all that we wish to conform to, not just for self-exaltation, but also to join with a higher form of life, which is to say to form a union with a life form no longer mundane, trivial, or banal. What makes a world foreign is the empty absence, the hollowing divested of presence in need of filling, or escape for sanity.  Guardini's tacit insight here is the absence that is temporality, occupied, yet unfilled, frustrated in its higher search and incapable of relief from the evanescent spiritual, the legacy bequeathed but not accepted.