Itching for the Infinite

“Further examples abound, but suffice to say, at least as far as these prominent modern thinkers were concerned, epicureanism for the masses does seem to denote something quite real.”

Editor’s note: All of the italicized words within quotations constitute the original emphasis intended by the quoted author.

If we look beyond everyday reversals in fashion trends, discursive fads, and the like, beyond even the rise and fall of entire political regimes, cultures, and religions, a bird’s-eye view of world history reveals only a few fundamentally distinct epochs which, as far as their overall profiles are concerned, can be delineated with remarkable precision. At the highest level, real historical change always involves a radical reorientation of human being-in-the-world such as only seldom occurs.

At least three major orientations can be discerned. In regard to the earliest—often referred to as prehistory—any conception we may have of human activity at this stage barely surpasses the merely speculative. Holistically, prehistorical humans may be said to have been in thrall to Nature in the ancient sense of phusis, as that which spontaneously wells up without much extrinsic involvement. Prehistory as such is the realm of storied time, the earliest recorded glimpses of which are available only through mythology. After prehistory comes antiquity, broadly conceived—which is really history as we tend to understand it, up to and including the Middle Ages and roughly coterminous with agricultural modes of development. In this second phase of world history, we encounter a welter of more or less sophisticated management stratagems, all devised to facilitate “the reign of man over man,” or what Karl Marx calls “relations of personal dependence”—those, to be sure, that have evolved beyond the “entirely spontaneous” (as in prehistory).

History proper is followed by an age with a distinctively post-historical flavoring. Post-history itself, however, is merely postulated as a virtual terminus of what is more commonly called modernity, the period we still inhabit today (pace postmodernists of various persuasions). The way Marx tells it, modernity coincides with the emergence of civil society, in which “the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes.” In civil society, “personal independence founded on objective dependence” becomes the dominant social form—the form of the isolated individual or the social atom—such that “the social connection between persons is transformed into a social relation between things.” This “great form” is enabled by “a system of general social metabolism,” a “general exchange of activities and products, which has become a vital condition for each individual.” Compared to what came before, the modern age has an unmistakably insatiable quality to it. Modern man “strives not to remain something he has become, but is [always] in the absolute movement of becoming.” “The modern,” in short, “gives no satisfaction; or, where it appears satisfied with itself, it is vulgar.” In fact, having forfeited even the pretense of “satisfaction,” “the modern” often amounts to a protracted exercise in deliberate disorientation, as it proactively oversells the radical indeterminacy of human existence from its own “limited standpoint”—namely, that of civil society.