#kennethsmith

Banausoi seem to have a wholly pragmatic orientation toward the world and have contempt for any kind of idealism or idea-governed mentality. Banausoi cannot see the difference therefore between aristic principled or value-driven behavior and doulic infantilism or self-indulgence: all non-banausic mentality is damned as equally imprudent or delusionary. The materialist worldview of the banausoi is ultimately a kind of ideology, of course, one that was first articulated by the predatory sophists who revealed over generations more and more starkly what it would mean for a human order of Nomos to be stripped of its morality, conscience, values, norms, etc. Given the banausoi-dominated modern capitalism and the doulic consumerism in which it aims to format all human subjects, aristoi find themselves as a rule riven between two equally characterologically alienating life-paths: either excel at profiteering (including of course techno-innovation and the management of attitudes and illusions) or else take the softer, easier path into epicurean self-gratification as a consumer of some sort. The banausic worldview in modernity has grown more blatantly and crassly nihilistic as a virtual "religion" that is however devoid of ultimate meanings and purposes: its materialism demands the sacrifice of family, self-cultivation, community and collegiality, a piratical disregard for all humanity at large and posterity in general. Like modern art or modern music or modern academicism, modern corporatism or finance offers a fundamentally humanly blasted prospect of sheer abstractivism, a life of nothing but symbolic gratification, the achievement of "high reputation" in other people's eyes who happen all to be playing the same official games of power and profit. Likewise the doulic worldview in modernity also has its inherently self-conflictive or self-disintegrative tendencies: for those who do not try to exercise bourgeois or banausic acuity in cultivating the most profitable talents or resources, the life of consumerism quickly degenerates into accommodations to low quality and high indebtedness. Unless one happens to be a trust-fund baby, consumerist idiotism has to retain some anchor in the economic reality-principle of laboring and earning. And the system is profoundly biased against individual self-contentment or psychological stasis: a "high standard of living" as theorists have noted really signifies a very accelerated rate of disillusionment with the things one acquires.

Modern ego is everywhere by definition perfectly contented with what it is, in principle it refuses to respect any perspective or principles higher than its own self. No, nothing in modernity has the potential to oblige individuals to learn to assume zealously the responsibilities of self-shaping or self-forming. Modernity in truth is geared utterly to idiotize or isolate individuals by means of and for the sake of the indulgence of their appetitive gratifications, which is a regimen for slavishness and continued dependency on a prosthetic system of metabolism (the market, including its vitally important means of escapism).

Man is everywhere such a self-deluding creature, his sciences and his dogmatics are such rancid lies—and his virtues stink worst of all—that he needs constantly and from every conceivable angle to be reminded of his tragic liabilities, his eternal genius for self-ruin. The millennial truth about human nature is the finitude of all our knowing, the tentativeness and viscousness of our certainties, the blindness in us to which we are blinder than blind but that is our very Hound of Hell. There is only one ultimate story about man, and the Greeks grasped its essence well: we will learn about ourselves only in retrospect—we will have it no other way. The more powers we arrogate to ourselves through the advance of technology and of organized macro-economy and macro-government, the more prodigious and systemic is the self-doom we are able to connive.

Moderns have no self-active and consciously self-responsible relation to the web of meanings any longer; our blithe and perfunctory preconditioning for thinking is carried out inadvertently, by artificial and organizationally imperative ideologies, not by anything that deserves to be called "culture." Modernity has truly made any tentatively philosophic mind into an exotic bird, the last of its species calling out futilely into the wasteland. You can travel hundreds and hundreds of miles in any direction in the US without encountering a single individual who even has an inkling of what it might mean to be cultured, to be a virtuosic and limber master of the domain of ideas, values, language. The "century of the common man" has been in truth the epoch of the cultural, philosophical and political pauper, the miasma of self-uncomprehending pathos among those indebted utterly to others for every word that occurs to them. In the complicity of cultureless banausoi with cultureless douloi, simplism rules; obviousness is God. The modern mind is like a spark plug tweaked so it can hardly leap across any size gap at all. Aristic intelligence is metaphorizing, audaciously equating disparate topics that never occurred to most humans as in any way relatable. A culture such as antiquity's or 18th- and 19th-century Europe's that aimed to subtilize and "sublate" (aufheben) humans is reduced to the dust of desert-reliquaries.

When I reached the last segment--on Kafka's TRIAL--of the last course I taught on EXISTENTIALISM, I began by reflecting on the untoward implications, the sinister implications, of Bacon's saying that knowledge is power. What kind of a society will that ultimately devolve into, other than one with a vast caste of peon-ignoranti? Everyone is put on a need-to-know basis, and no one qualifies. Officialdom reaches out and, for reasons you have no right to demand and possibly could not even comprehend, selects you as the bone of contention in a juridical proceeding...for no better reason than perhaps your attitude, your aristocratic, autonomous, Kantian attitude, Mr. K.