On Christian Materialism, Today
In hoc sumus sapientes, quod naturam optimam ducem, tamquam deum, sequimur eique paremus...Quid enim est aliud, gigantum modo bellare cum diis, nisi naturae repugnare? (Cicero, De Senectute)
In a passage of his Zibaldone dated February 4, 1821, Giacomo Leopardi examines “our” tendency to identify soul with something altogether immaterial. Having accepted the notion that our soul or spirit (psyche/spiritus) is altogether abstracted outside of matter, we moderns end up dismissing the very notion of soul.
The proper context of Leopardi’s discussion pertains on the one hand to the spiritual crisis of modern man and on the other to the prospect of our recovering a sense of the providential inherence of the spiritual in the material, which is to say of life in the inanimate, or of mind in matter.
Leaping to 1827, we find Leopardi inviting us to transcend the spiritualist/materialist dychotomy by discerning in metaphysical terms a reality at work at the very heart of what we commonly refer to as matter:
Thinking matter is considered a paradox. One starts from the persuasion that it is impossible and for this, many great spirits, such as Bayle, in considering this problem, have not been capable of making up their minds over what is called and had previously always appeared to them as an enormous absurdity. Things would go differently if the philosopher considered as a paradox that matter does not think; if he started from the principle that denying to matter the faculty of thinking is a philosophical trick. But now, precisely thus should the will of men be disposed towards this problem, assuming that it is a fact that matter thinks: a fact because we think; and we do not know, we are not conscious of being, we cannot be conscious of or conceive anything other than matter. A fact because we see that the modifications of thought depend totally from sensations, from our physical state; that our will corresponds entirely to the various aspects and the variations of our body; a fact because we sense thought corporeally: each of us senses that thought is not in his arm or in his leg; he senses that he thinks with a material part of himself, that is with his brain, but he senses that he sees with his eyes and that he touches with his hands. If the question were thus to be reconsidered, as it should be, from this side—where he who denies that there is thought in matter denies a fact, contrasts evidence and sustains at the very least an extravagant paradox; where he who believes that matter thinks not only does not advance any strange, researched or hidden thesis, but puts forward something obvious, what is dictated by nature, or the most natural and most obvious proposition that there could be in this matter—then the conclusions of men on that point would perhaps differ from what they are; and the profound spiritualist philosophers of our times and those bygone would have found or would find much less abstruseness and absurdity in materialism. (Zibaldone, Sept. 18, 1827)
The foregoing quotation should be read in the light of a discussion dating back to Dec. 9-15 1820, where Leopardi indicates that his “system is not grounded in Christianity, but accords with it,” stating further: “everything that has been said thus far supposes essentially the real truth of Christianity […] Christianity helps my system fill its necessary gaps in things that our reasoning does not reach; and moreover it supports it precisely”.1 Leopardi then concludes that, given modern reason’s alienation from nature, “the greatest possible happiness in this life is found in the state of true and pure Christianity”.
What would happen if modern man were to forsake Christianity? He would inevitably turn to suicide as a fatality. This conclusion carries the weight of natural necessity. For man not being “nourished by anything other than religion or than illusions,”
once religion and illusions are taken away radically, every man, even every child who begins exercising the faculty of reasoning (since children above all are those who do not live of anything other than illusions) would infallibly kill himself by his own hand, and our race would be left extinct at its inception by congenital and substantial necessity.
Our illusions are as natural as roots are to plants so the more we alienate ourselves from our illusions, the more we alienate ourselves from life itself, which we begin seeing egoistically as our worst enemy—an enemy we are thereupon compelled to exorcise through suicide.2 Hence the importance of our opposing “the progresses of an immoderate drive to civilization and of an unlimited loss of nature” (i progressi di un incivilimento snaturato, e di un snaturamento senza limiti—August 18-20, 1820). “Falling short of our turning back [se non torneremo indietro], our descendants will leave this example to their own heirs, if they will have any” (ibid.). Our society will have reached a radical breakpoint with nature—which is life itself—condemning itself as a whole to self-destruction, or to the use of power—today embodied most strikingly by technology—as path to universal collective suicide.3
This fatality is especially manifest in youth, who are naturally prone to live of illusions that “no reasonableness, study philosophy, precocious maturity of thought, etc.” could ever conquer; nor would the young find any consolation for their loss of happy illusions in religion, reason, or anything other than death itself (Nov. 10, 1820).
Christianity itself never flourished by replacing illusions with naked truth—which is to say, with nothing at all—but old illusions, already destroyed by a “philosophy of apathy,” with greater ones in which nature found itself if not vindicated in full, at least partially through faith whence Christians’ hope, or expectation of eternal life (Nov. 17, 1820). What Christianity offers us is, of course, a promise of truth and of eternal life, and key to that promise is the evangelical vision of the personified inherence of the divine in the human, which is to say of mind in matter (where these are conceived by men or relatively to “the world of nations”).
Today, however, where the Christian promise is obscured by the sophistications of a science mechanistically abstracted from nature or life, our only salvation comes through utter “forgetfulness and a material pasture to illusions” (la dimenticanza, e un pascolo materiale alle illusioni—ibid.). Where the level of abstraction from nature is absolute, or where poetry is utterly dead, submerged as it is beneath the despotism of the machine, there are only two possible outcomes for us: either collective suicide or our debasement to a state of ignorance wherein we are as sheep nourished by altogether material or physical illusions devoid of all reflection. Yet, could the technological Leviathan’s attempt to administrate such illusions to feed our brutish ignorance perhaps succeed, in the long run? In order to serve as effective counterbalance to our alienation from nature, our ignorance or forgetfulness must extend to the machine itself and so to all technological mediation—disregarding entirely any utilitarian considerations that might otherwise persuade us of the unqualified necessity of technology as medium for our everyday life.
Insofar as the egoism or self-love (not unlike Nietzsche’s “will to power”) embodied portentously by technology “prefers death to the cognition of its own vacuity” (preferisce la morte alla cognizione del proprio niente—§71, Jan. 8, 1820), as technologically-mediated self-love becomes the supreme imperative of our age, man is today supremely driven to kill himself (ad uccidersi). For while “the love of life is love of one’s own good,” “now [life] no longer appearing as a good” (ibid.) we no longer love, but hate life itself, preferring in its stead a virtual reality of our making and so ultimately death masked utopianly, if not as eternal life, at least as a functional alternative to mortal life, a place in which we can pretend that the shift of the present into the past is really the continuous streaming of the present out of the past. Yet, technology’s promise of salvation in a life devoid of life—as in the existence of zombies—fuels, rather than arrest a generalized drive to suicide.
Existing beyond life, the egoist merely relegates to his technological provider the power to kill, or rather “cancel” the egoist. In effect, the egoist who has delivered his life to technology thereby reducing himself to a zombie or the apathetic ghost of a man, is now completely indifferent to the prospect of technology killing him. By serving technology, the egoist is effectively already dead so that he can be clinically and inconsequentially deleted, as an anonymous digital file from a computer’s hard-drive.
The world having become a cinematographic production for us, the prospect of universal annihilation must leave us intimately indifferent, even as we might adopt an air of dismay for choreographic or aesthetic purposes. What is real for us having been emptied of all humanity, or man having been entirely transplanted from nature into a machine as supreme medium of safety, death is no longer a problem for us. Nothing is either to be feared or discovered in death; for in our current mode of existence all that counts is our existence’s extension. The only real problem for us is a technical problem (how is lifeless existence replicated most productively?); indeed all problems, not least of them the human one, must be problems for which technology alone can provide a solution.
The Cartesian ego has found his Mecca, purged by his machines of any res extensa or quantifiable matter. He rises as the unique source of all quality, sustained in his ephemeral constitution onto a stage of mechanical repetition producing “cinematographically” the illusion of movement out of stillness. Not altogether unlike Pontius Pilate passing before Jesus, we have met stillness and found it sterile, meaningless, souless; and upon it we have set out to build a new illusion, albeit one fit for machines alone now left to produce a final solution to that mystery which Leopardi dared to call man.
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1 The things out of reasoning’s reaches pertain to the origins (§416-17) or mystery (§342) of man.
2 “The entire world today being armed with egoism, everyone has to avail himself of the same weapon; even the most virtuous and magnanimous, if they want to do something” (Zibaldone, Feb. 4, 1821).
3 On suicide among the ancients, see Zibaldone, Jan. 10, 1821: in antiquity people committed suicide where their singular illusions were thwarted and not because they saw life itself as meaningless. Their suicides were based “heroically” on illusions.
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