And to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with actuality, and steadfastly perseveres in a state of selfwilled impotence to renounce a self which is pared away to the last point of abstraction, and to give itself substantial existence, or, in other words, to transform its thought into being, and commit itself to absolute distinction that between thought and being. The hollow object, which it produces, now fills it, therefore, with the feeling of emptiness . . . In this transparent purity of its moments it becomes a sorrowladen ‘beautiful soul,’ as it is called; its light dims and dies within it, and it vanishes as a shapeless vapour dissolving into thin air . . .
The ‘beautiful soul,’ then, has no concrete reality; it subsists in the contradiction between its pure self and the necessity felt by this self to externalize itself and turn into something actual; it exists in the immediacy of this rooted and fixed opposition . . . Thus the ‘beautiful soul,’ being conscious of this contradiction in its unreconciled immediacy, is unhinged, disordered, and runs to madness, wastes itself in yearning, and pines away in consumption.» 6
In passing, we should note that the dialectic alternative to the «beautiful soul» is the subject’s joyful dissolution in the object. Is there a chance of salvation between these two forms of selfdestruction?
Today, the dead end of the «beautiful soul» is again proposed (not from a Marxist but from a traditionalist standpoint) by Elemire Zolla in his criticism of mass society: not only does he refute the objective situation (the combination «modern civilizationindustrial realitymass cultureelite culture» that expresses man’s situation in an industrial society), but he also proposes a total withdrawal from it by condemning all collective action and by advocating, instead, the contemplation of a tabula rasa that the social critic has himself created with his global refusal.
Zolla maintains that «thought cannot provide remedies, but must understand where things really stand,» and that «to understand does not mean to accept.» I agree with Zolla when he says that thought is not supposed to provide remedies, but he is very unclear about the true nature of this sort of understanding. In fact, it would seem that his «understanding» is very close to the nihilistic knowledge of the «beautiful soul,» which, in order to know itself, has to destroy the object in which it always risks losing itself.
According to Zolla, it is important to «understand» the object without becoming implicated in it, whereas in fact, in order to understand the object one must implicate oneself in it. The object will thus be understood not as something that must be absolutely denied but rather as something that still bears the traces of the human purpose for which it was produced. Only when the object is understood in these terms, as well as in its negative aspects, will we be free from it. Or rather, our knowledge will be the basis for a free and freeing process. But, from the very start, the object should not be perceived as hostile and extraneous, since in fact we are the object, since it is our reflection and bears our mark. To know it means to know who we are. So why should this process of knowledge be totally devoid of charity and hope?
Let me cite an example. In the first pages of his novel Cecilia, Zolla describes the physical—indeed, erotic—relationship between his heroine and her car. Driving barefoot, she feels its vibrations in all her muscles, she knows it as one knows a lover, and she responds to its elasticity and its movements with her own body. Cecilia is a perfect example of the human being who is possessed by a thing— and what is more, by an evil «thing,» since cars are later in the novel compared to «swollen ticks,» «insects bereft of the sepulchral charm of the hard shell, clumsy and sad.» To the reader, Cecilia becomes the stereotype of alienated humanity, and yet . . . to what extent is her relationship with her car alienating?
In fact, most drivers would seem to have a similar relationship with their cars. The most important condition for driving is that we use our foot not only to control the mechanism but also to keep in touch with it; through our foot, we feel the car as part of our own body, so that we know when it is time to change gear, to slow down, to idle, without having to resort to the abstract mediation of the tachometer. Only by lending our body to the car, by extending the range of our sensibility, can we use it humanly: the only way we can humanize a machine is by mechanizing ourselves.
Zolla would say that this is precisely the conclusion he was driving at—namely that alienation is so diffused that even an intellectual could not escape it; far from being simply an epiphenomenon that affects only some deranged natures, it is the symptom of the general and irreversible impoverishment of modern society. Zolla forgets that this kind of relationship (the extension of our body into the object we touch, the humanization of the object and the objectification of ourselves) has existed since the dawn of history, since one of our ancestors invented the flintstone and constructed it so that it would fit the palm of his hand, so that its vibration (during use) would be felt through the nerves of the hand and extend their sensibility, so as to eliminate all distinction between it and the hand that held it.
From the very beginning of time, the ability to extend one’s corporeality (and therefore to alter one’s own natural dimensions) has been the very condition of homo faber. To consider such a situation as a degradation of human nature implies that nature and man are not one and the same thing. It implies an inability to accept the idea that nature exists in relation to man, is defined, extended, and modified in and by man; just as man is one particular expression of nature, an active, modifying expression who distinguishes himself from his environment precisely because of his capacity to act upon it and to define it—a capacity that gives him the right to say «I.»
The only difference between Cecilia and the inventor of the flintstone lies in the complexities of their respective actions, which, otherwise, are structurally very similar. Cecilia is like the caveman who, having seized his tool, starts using it frantically, to crack the nuts he has gathered, to beat the earth on which he is kneeling, until he loses himself so entirely in his savage actions that he forgets why he seized the object in the first place (just as, at certain orgiastic moments, a drummer ceases to play the drums and is himself played by them).
There is an ante quern limit; that is, up to this limit, letting a car possess us is a sign of sanity and the only way in which we can really possess the car: to be unable to sense that there is such a limit, and that it is possible to reach it, means that we don’t understand the object and therefore destroy it. This is what the «beautiful soul» does, thereby losing itself in its own negations. There is also a post quem limit, which is where morbidity begins. And there is a way of understanding the object, the experience we have of it, and the use we make of it, which in its sheer optimism risks making us forget the presence of a limit, the constant danger of alienation.
At the opposite extreme of the beautiful soul’s refusal, we find Dewey’s philosophy.
Dewey believes in the integration of man and nature, in the realization of a perfect experience, a situation in which the individual, his action, the context in which he acts, and the instrument he uses are so fully integrated that they exude a feeling of harmony and fulfillment. Such a form of integration has all the aspects of a positive situation (and, indeed, Dewey understands it also as a perfect example of aesthetic appreciation), but it can also define a state in which total alienation is perversely accepted and appreciated.
«Every experience is the result of interaction between a live creature and some aspect of the world in which he lives. A man does something; he lifts, let us say, a stone. In consequence, he undergoes, suffers something: the weight, strain, texture of the surface of the thing lifted. The properties thus undergone determine further doing. The stone is too heavy and too angular, not solid enough; or else the properties undergone show it is fit for the use for which it is intended. The process continues until a mutual adaptation of the self and the object emerges and that particular experience comes to a close . . . The interaction of the two constitutes the total expe rience that is had, and the close which completes it is the institution of a felt harmony.»
It is easy to see how this particular notion of experience could also define, albeit in an absolutely positive way, a typical instance of alienation, such as the relationship between Cecilia and her car. The tragic suspicion that a relationship with an object may fail precisely because it succeeds too much is absent from Dewey’s philosophy.
For Dewey, an experience can fail (that is,
