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What Is Modernity?—A Sketch

Trevor Malkinson
Modernity. What is it? It’s a complex question, but it’s something we need to figure out if we’re
ever going to evolve beyond its limitations. Cause we’re caught up in it, it floats all around us, so
close as to be almost unrecognizable. It’s more than just a time period, or a particular
geographical happening. It’s something grander and more strange than that, irreducible to
singular coordinates. It’s the story of human growth, with its continual changes in form and
meaning. And it’s a story of acceleration.

Part 1- Evoluntionary Beginnings

“The very word ‘modern’—which has a surprisingly long history—suggests the beginning of a
battle, a bit of arrogance, a cry of rebellion, a gesture of rejection (even destruction) of what is
past”. – Robert C. Solomon, A Short History of Philosophy

“[In Hegel’s analysis of] the dialectic of Greek comedy, we find a thought that continually
reappears in Hegelianism: man is the truth of the divine, but each time he reduces the divine to
himself, he loses himself. By itself finite, it is human, all too human”. – Jean Hyppolite, Genesis
and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

In the works of the 13th century Florentine painter Giotto, we can witness an example what some
postmodern thinkers have called an ‘event’—an eruption into time of the new. In Giotto’s
frescoes we see the emergence of a hallmark feature of what will come to be called modern
consciousness—a descending of the plane of authority from on high, down into the individual.
“Giotto makes his figures more vividly credible because he wishes to feel more intensely the
human drama in which they are involved…Giotto was, above all, interested in humanity: he
sympathized with human beings and his figures, by their very solidity, remain on earth” (1). In
those solid, earthbound figures of Giotto, we spot a movement away from the otherworldly
authority typical of the monumental mythic civilizations of the Neolithic era. The Homo sapiens
now trembled forth to rule itself.

This development had, of course, begun much earlier. The first surge of this new individual
identity, this descended seat of authority, had occurred in the axial period of the ancient world.
The philosopher Robert C. Solomon speaks to the widespread birth of this new mode of being:
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Somewhere between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE, a remarkable development was
occurring in a number of far-flung places around the globe. In areas north, south, and east of the
Mediterranean, in China, India, and areas in between, ingenious thinkers began to challenge and
go beyond the established religious beliefs, mythologies, and folklore of their societies. Their
thought became more abstract. Their questions became more probing. Their answers became
more ambitious, more speculative, more outrageous…They attracted students and disciples.
They formed schools, cults and great religions. All at once they seemed to be
everywhere…These small groups of curious and sometimes curmudgeonly philosophers called
into question the popular explanations of nature in terms of whims of gods and goddesses. They
were sages, wise men, confident of their own intelligence, critical of popular opinion, persuasive
to those who followed them…They were no longer satisfied by familiar myth and stories. (2)

However, it’s true that evolution meanders, and this new consciousness was born into societies,
civilizations, and a period of history in which it wouldn’t yet come to rule the minds of the
majority, not yet be able to organize the social sphere around its own emergent principles. That
would have to wait until just after Giotto’s time, in Renaissance Europe and the Enlightenment.

For now the self-governing ‘light of reason’ would have to survive empires, imperial
domination, barbarism, collapse and the so-called Dark Ages, before it could have a chance to
create the world in its own image.

But the seeds were planted, and the texts of that axial period would travel their own dangerous
and circuitous routes to the lands and minds of medieval Europe. Plato’s thought would survive
in the works of the North African St. Augustine. The works of Aristotle would pass through the
Islamic world, where they would contribute to the Islamic Renaissance, and then on into the
hands of Albert Magnus and his pupil, St. Thomas Aquinas. The geometry of Pythagoras and
Euclid would find its way to Copernicus. The time would then come for this earth shaking
human development to further awaken, and finally step into its own world shaping moment.

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But before we follow the twisting trails of that story, I must lay down some of the key beams and
struts that underlie this unfolding drama. We must first ask—how can we understand this type of
radical shift in human thinking, in human awareness, in civilization? I suggest that the key way
to see this movement is through the lens of evolution.

Human beings are evolving just like everything else in the cosmos, and this includes human
consciousness. What do I mean here by the word consciousness? I’m using the word
consciousness to mean the way that human beings experience and interpret (and by extension,
organize) their world (3). An owl, a worm, and a butterfly all experience the same reality in
unique ways. There’s something that it is like to be an owl. Certain things show up to owl
consciousness, while other things, like the moons of Jupiter, do not. The same is true for human
beings. Homo erectus, out there on the African savannah several million years ago, wasn’t aware
of the earth’s orbit, nor discussing multiple universe theory. These potentials of human
consciousness emerged much later. In fact, the very notion of evolution itself, that I’m
employing here, is only a recent discovery of the modern period. And now we can use this
understanding of evolution to look back upon human history and the human condition, and
understand and interpret it in a whole new way.

For those who follow philosophy, what I'm presenting here could be seen as a sort of
evolutionary Kantianism. Kant argued that we filter and interpret reality through the
‘spectacles’ of our sense perception, and that this was regulated by categories of thought that
were fixed for all time. I would agree with Kant in part—there are indeed structures of
consciousness that guide, organize and order our experience, but these change over time, and in
accordance with the environment they're always engaged with.

Kant was just describing one particular pair of spectacles, not surprisingly, the ones he happened
to have on at the time (4). Our knowledge of the world, as for the owl, is indeed mediated as
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Kant saw, but the tools of our human mediation—the concepts, categories and values that we
use to make sense of our world and ourselves—develop. They evolve within a social context and
change in response to the internal and external problem generating life conditions of our time
(5).

Joseph Campbell was someone who recognized these fundamental shifts in human
consciousness. In a discussion of the modern worldview, he begins by first citing a passage from
the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955):

“What I am saying is simply that life has a reality that is neither goodness nor meritoriousness,
but pure and simple reality in the degree that it is genuine, that each man feels, thinks, and does
what he and only he, in the most individual sense, must feel, think, and do”. After which
Campbell poignantly comments, “Such a statement could never have been made in [ancient]
Sumer. It would have been simply meaningless” (6). He then goes on to tell how in ancient
Sumer the entire court of the King were buried alive with him when he died, in a mythological
“priestly play” that gave order and meaning to the social system.

This was, obviously, a completely different time from ours now, a wholly different operating
system in which the individual was still radically subsumed into the workings of the whole. But
this is also exactly what needed to happen at that time in human evolution. That’s where we were
at, that was what was needed to control the beastly passions, to provide both social and cosmic
meaning, and to help diverse groups of peoples come together into massive new societies. That’s
how we understood the order of things, and we organized accordingly. But at some point,
somewhere down the (r)evolutionary road, a spark within said enough, and it strode forth to ride
alone, free, with the torch of liberty in heart and hand. But we haven’t always liked this new
emergent freedom, this shift in our way of being. We sometimes couldn’t withstand the
alienations, agitations and disintegrations that it wrought. And the episodic flight of the
individual back to the whole in modern times has resulted in some of the most grotesque mass
social experiments the world has ever known.
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However, before exploring the layers of that story, let’s first lay down one more crucial pillar of
this evolution bound drama, for it’s important to stress that human evolution has been a long,
slow, painful process of our differentiating out from total embeddedness in nature. For many
millions of years, Homo sapiens and their ancestors lived instinctually, just another part of the
natural processes within which they were subsumed. And this was no love story either; this was
no blissful Eden, living as we were at the behest of the powerful drives of nature. For as the
Marquis de Sade knew, and in contrast to the Romantics of his time, “Nature averse to crime? I
tell you that nature lives and breathes by it, hungers at all her pores for bloodshed, yearns with all
her heart for the furtherance of cruelty” (7). The powers of supernovas and beyond live within
nature, ghastly explosive yearnings of creation and obliteration that helped forge and form the
exquisite contours of the cosmos we live in. These powers still live in our chests, haunt our
dreams, and spur our courage forward, always threatening to wrest us back under.

Carl Jung recognized all this when he wrote: “Primitives are afraid of uncontrolled emotions,
because consciousness breaks down under them and gives way to possession. All man’s strivings

have therefore been directed towards the consolidation of consciousness. This was the purpose of
rite and dogma; they were dams and walls to keep back the dangers of the unconscious, the
‘perils of the soul’. Primitive rites consist accordingly in the exorcizing of spirits, the lifting of
spells, the averting of the evil omen, propitiation, and the production of sympathetic magic of
helpful occurrences” (8). Modernity has its own dams against the unconscious too, but the mad
primal waters have often found their way through.

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As human evolution has unfolded through the ages, we’ve become more and more consciously
self-aware as we’ve become more and more disembedded from nature. This unique creature is
captured nicely in Martin Heidegger’s famous definition of the human as Dasein (literally,
‘being-there’), the “existent entity whose very Being is an issue for it”. Which basically means,
as humans we know that we exist, we’re conscious of the very fact of existence, and this
is now fundamental to what it means to be human. We’re the strange creatures that recognize
we’re here, that are startled at the very fact that there’s something and not nothing.

But this comes at a price. The increasing self-consciousness that we have gained from our
increasing independence from nature has brought with it an increasing fear of death, a new and
profound experience of terror, of the void, of a back-door nothingness that threatens to swallow
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the trembling new individual. “The fact of death plays a major role in our internal experience; it
haunts as does nothing else; it rumbles continuously under the surface; it is a dark, unsettling
presence at the rim of consciousness…The terror of death is ubiquitous and of such magnitude
that a considerable portion of one’s energy is consumed in the denial of death—our filling time,
our addiction to diversions, our unfaltering belief in the myth of progress, our drive to get ahead,
our yearning for lasting fame” (9). So says existential psychologist Irving Yalom, and it’s worth
considering when it comes to deciphering the trials and travails, the glories and the horrors, of
modernity. It’s hard to truly make sense of the modern obsession with endless growth, with
restless accumulation, with expansion and the desire for more, if we don’t fully recognize this
death fear that rumbles away under its uncertain surface. Modernity is on the run.

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The birth of modernity usually gets pinned on the work of some groundbreaking figure, like
Descartes, Newton or Galileo, but the fact is that it was a slow drawn out process that built
momentum over a long period of time, and in many diverse corners. The humanism that's
rightly seen as such a big part of the European Renaissance spirit, and such a direct rejection of
traditional Christian authority, actually developed within Christianity itself (10). And as early as
1115 AD, in a text addressing questions of natural science, we can hear Abelard of Bath already
throwing the pro light of reason smack down: “It is difficult for me to talk with you about
animals: for I have learned from my Arabian masters under the guidance of reason; you,
however, captivated by the appearance of authority, follow your halter. Since what else should
authority be called than a halter? For just as brutes are led where one wills by a halter, so the
authority of past writers leads not a few of you into danger, held and bound as you are by bestial
credulity” (11). Ouch! But each new awakening, each new victory of an independent esprit,
found itself in the midst of an ever strengthening counter-reaction from the powers of the
Church. “The guardians of the authority of Rome and Scripture were seized with a passion of
anxiety that released throughout the Christian world a reign of terror matched in history only by
the liquidations of the modern tyrant states” (12). The traditional world would not go quietly.

Descartes’ calm rational texts betray the fact that he lived during some of the most brutal and
vicious religious wars ever seen, wars fought over competing religious beliefs, such as the Thirty
Years War. The social philosopher Grotius tells of his experience of the 17th century:
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“Throughout the Christian world I observed a lack of restraint in relation to war, such as even
barbarous races should be ashamed of…It is as if, in accordance with a general decree, frenzy
had openly let loose for committing all crimes” (13).

This is an important context to remember as we try to understand what the modern worldview
was immediately pushing off against, what problems it was struggling to transcend and
overcome. Descartes wasn't just having a good time as he sat in his pajamas by his bed, thinking
about the properties of candle wax and the possibilities of an evil deceiver. In his Quest for
Certainty, he was trying to place authority within the inner domain of the individual subject, and
to safeguard it with new and universal methods that needed no external validation. The
foundations that Descartes sought were needed to stabilize a war torn European continent.

~~~~~

The great minds of the European Enlightenment wanted to change society. They wanted to
challenge religion and to protest corrupt forms of political power. And they wielded a
constellation of new values and methods that they thought would bring about the radical reforms
they sought. In Beethoven's Fidelio, the victims of injustice climb out of their dungeons and sing
a great hymn to the new goddess Liberty: “O happiness to see the light”, they say, “to feel the air
and be once more alive. Our prison was a tomb. O freedom, freedom come to us again”. Yes, it
was the dawn of a new and glorious day. The new (European, property-owning) man would be
self-directed, self-reliant, earning one’s wealth and status not through aristocratic privilege or by
divine right, but through hard work and individual achievement. Finally, humans would break
free of the cruel bonds of superstition and unassailable tradition.
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D’alembert and his fellow philosophes were going to “lift the darkness that fell with the
Christian triumph over the virtues of classical antiquity” (14). Emancipation, light and progress
would be won using the new tools of rationality and scientific inquiry. Rationality—ratio, which
literally means “to reckon” and “to calculate”—was a powerful new capacity of thought that
enabled the world to be analyzed, pulled apart into its constituent parts, and understood through
new methods of measuring and quantification. This rationality is characterized by dis-integrative
methods, a dividing, sectoring way of thinking that sub-divides the whole into parts that can be
understood in isolation. It's also capable of abstraction, which is a powerfully seductive way of
distancing the thinking mind from the cunning pulls and impulses of those worrisome primitive
emotions. Rationality and science together, it was thought, would unravel the ‘mechanisms’ of
nature and finally unshackle and release humankind from her cruel bondage; nature would “now
be harnessed by the hand of rational humanity” for the happiness and pleasure of all (15).

It was believed by the thinkers of the Enlightenment that these methods, which Newtonian
science had proven to be so successful, could be applied to all aspects of life and society. It was
thought that the replacement of irrational and oppressive legal, economic and social systems by
the rule of reason, “would rescue men from political and moral injustice and misery and set them
on the path of wisdom, happiness and virtue” (16). The new sphere of rational commerce was
seen as a leading example of the Enlightenment value of tolerance, a place where, as Voltaire
famously put it, “The Jew, the Mohammedan and the Christian deal with one another as if they
were from the same religion, and reserve the name “infidel” for those who go bankrupt” (17).

The magic ruling power of thrones and crowns would now be replaced by self-interested
“rational acts of consent”. This individual liberalism was an explosive new value, and societies
would be organized around this new ideal; a market economy would be central to this vision.
The modern nation state would come into being to organize and order this new autonomous,
competition driven society of free individuals. Diderot praised America for “offering all the
inhabitants of Europe an asylum against fanaticism and tyranny” (18). Thomas Jefferson, for his
part, had a portrait of John Locke, Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon painted for his library,
calling them “the three greatest men that ever lived, without exception” (19).
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This was also the age of heroic materialism, and this powerful motive force was soon wed to
new sources of energy and speed—the steam engine, etc—the fruits of the liberated sciences.
The industrial revolution exploded into action, and with it a “great romance of construction”
(20). This eruption of construction was led by self-confident men “for whom nothing was
impossible”, the types of men who built the railways over England (21). Even the poet Walt
Whitman sang excitedly about what he saw taking shape all around him: “Shapes of factories,
arsenals, foundries, markets; Shapes of the two-headed tracks of railroads; Shapes of the sleepers
of bridges, vast frameworks, girders, arches” (22). It was an intoxicating and invigorating time to
be sure, but this vast upheaval built in the name of light, liberty, and progress, soon started to
groan under its own colossal weight. If this period of modernity was characterized by excitement
and adventure, it was equally filled with turbulence, gross exploitation, and a fierce destruction
of the past, where, as Karl Marx put it, “all that is solid melts into the air” (23). Artists in various
countries had already begun depicting the factory as the entrance to the Gates of Hell, setting
their critical sights on the ‘dark satanic mills’ at the heart of this new maelstrom. In fact,
“opposition to the central ideas of the French Enlightenment, and of its allies and disciples in
other European countries, is as old as the movement itself” (24). However, as the wasteland of
modernity grew ever stronger, so did the force of its opposition. Eventually, after two brutal
World Wars and the rise and fall of the Fascist reaction to modernity, some would come to reject
the values of modernity all together, defiantly calling themselves post-modern.

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Part 2- Something to which we are Condemned?

“Even until very recently the ‘modern’ has generally been the source of enormously inflated
hopes. In recent years we have become much more aware of the costs and the burdens associated
with modernity. Postmodernity in this sense could be characterized as the growing awareness
that the ‘modern’ is something to which we are condemned”.
- Lloyd Spencer, The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism

“The modern world, compelled forward by the imperative of continuous growth, is a juggernaut
with no reverse gear…Its chronic malady—ecological stress caused by economic success—is
now irreversible and, like all social addictions, will not be given up without a possibly lethal
trauma…Every postmodern treaty put in its path is rolled over as if it were a mere bump in the
road”. – Charles Jencks, Critical Modernism: Where is Post-modernism Going?

A robust critical tradition has grown up alongside the hulking rush of the modern world. The
complaints are many, the problems legion. Some critics have been concerned with how new,
hard to see forms of authority came to operate within modernity. The new dominant institution—
the Nation State—became increasingly centralized, bureaucratic, and rationalized, driven by
efficiency and the mean/ends thinking needed to accomplish that goal. It became increasingly
concerned with governing its new ‘public’ with various disciplinary practices of control and
management. The nation state also became a new center of large-scale warfare and imperial
domination; “Eurocentrism” and the colonial conquests that it justified quickly crushed the
newfound Enlightenment value of equality. The Enlightenment thinkers had been excited by the
equality explicit in the universality of reason: as Kant so passionately put it, “‘Have the courage
to use your own reason!’—that is the motto of the Enlightenment” (25). One of the central
doctrines of the Enlightenment was “that human nature was fundamentally the same in all times
and places; that local and historical variations were unimportant…That there were universal
human goals; that a logically connected structure of laws and generalizations susceptible of
demonstration and verification could be constructed, and would replace superstition, ignorance
and above all, the lies of rulers” (26). But the colonialists would hide their voracious appetites
behind this mask of universalism, claiming to be bringing modernity and progress to the
conquered peoples of the distant continents. The truth was generally much starker—slavery,
slaughter, exploitation and resource theft were the real ruling behaviors of the day (27).
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The Enlightenment devotion to abstract universal principles can be starkly seen in modernist
architecture. The cold, lifeless conformity of its so-called ‘International Style', "reject[ed] the
diversity of history and geography, and the specific needs of particular human activities, in favor
of universal, timeless principles” (28). These drab, inert buildings—devoid of all context and
relation to community—still mar cities across the world today. The critic Lewis Mumford
described Mies van der Rohe’s buildings as, “elegant monuments to nothingness, having no
relation to site, climate, insulation, function, or internal activity…[They are] the apotheosis of
the compulsive, bureaucratic spirit” (29). Generally speaking, the modern disregard for diversity
and tradition has been the flashpoint for a lot of negative reaction in the postmodern era, taking
on both progressive and fundamentalist forms. The modern retreat into the safe and sleek
certainties of the rational mind started to choke off life; but Life would break through the dams,
seeking to diversify and mutate once more.

The critique of the global homogenizing forces of modernity (what one sociologist recently
called the ‘McDonaldization of Society’) is rather well known in our time. It helped spark the
Slow Food movement in Italy in the 1980s for instance, when a McDonalds fast food franchise
was placed too close to the Spanish Steps. But this voice has been a vocal and sustained
countercurrent to Enlightenment principles from the very beginning, and has taken on many
conservative forms too. Edmund Burke (1729-1797) provided a famous onslaught against the
purveyors of the French Revolution, arguing that their utilitarian view of society as simply an
aggregation of free individuals was “blind and deaf to the unanalyzable relationships that make a
family, a tribe, a nation, a movement, [or] any association of human beings [hold] together”. A
quest for mutual advantage would never be enough to bind together a society—a true human
community must be based on “mutual love, loyalty, common history, emotion and outlook” (30).
Justus Moser (1720-1794) argued that there was “a ‘local reason’ for this or that institution that
is not and cannot be universal” (31). Several postmodern thinkers have substantially extended
this demand for difference, plurality, cultural diversity, and local custom.

Lurking behind all these problems of modernity was a rationality gone awry and the raw power
to which it was eventually harnessed. In its quest for certainty and autonomy, in its attempt to
provide a dam against the irrational violence born of religious belief, Cartesian-style rationality
slid towards disembodiment. It cut itself off from the emotions, the body and from spirit, and
moreover, it championed this dissociative method as the only valid way to attain knowledge.
“Descartes exalted a capacity for formal rationality and logical calculation as the supremely
‘mental’ thing in human nature, at the expense of emotional experience, which [for Descartes]
was a regrettable by-product of our bodily natures” (32). A once jewel-like power thus reified its
own emergent capacities as the sole universal method for understanding reality, becoming in the
process increasingly instrumental, calculating and objectifying in its operations; it also became
symbiotic with new centers of political power, which utilized its immense capacities for
administration, prediction and control. Experts, specialists, and compartmentalized thinking
started to rule the day; linear, mechanistic causality was central to this governing framework, and
humans and their societies were subjected to the crude simplicity of this view of life. The
interdependency and complexity of many social and ecological problems was and still is, simply
invisible to this operating system.

And this all took place in post ‘Death of God’ exile. The assault on traditional authority by
modern rational consciousness—from David Hume to Sigmund Freud—slowly deflated and
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defeated the hold of religion in a great number of increasingly secular lives. If God existed at all
it was now a Deistic God, who wound up the universe and set it running, only to remain
permanently outside of immanence and time. The universe was seen as mechanical and
meaningless. Mammon and the commodity became the new surrogate sources of purpose in the
modern West. As Erich Fromm put it, “Ours is the greatest social experiment ever made to solve
the question whether pleasure (as a passive effect in contrast to the affective effect, well-being
and joy) can be a satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. For the first time in
history the satisfaction of the pleasure drive is not only the privilege of a minority but is possible
for more than half the population. In the industrial countries the experiment has already
answered the question in the negative” (33). The new human being and its liberated
independence were now terrifyingly alone in both the cosmos and culture, condemned to
freedom, and increasingly mired in what the theologian Paul Tillich called the ‘Age of Anxiety’.
The solution for many was distracted consumption within the culture of the mass society, and life
became filled with the perpetual chasing of unexamined desires. But to the eyes of the
sociologist Max Weber, his contemporaries were nothing but “specialists without spirit,

sensualists without heart; and this nullity is caught in the delusion that it has achieved a level of
development never before attained by mankind” (34). Nietzsche disparaged that becoming
mediocre was the new morality of the time. It was perhaps the Trappist monk Thomas Merton
that captured the spirit of this whole epoch best, when he wrote: “The secular world depends
upon the things it needs to divert itself and escape from its own nothingness. It depends on the
creation and multiplication of artificial needs, which it then pretends to ‘satisfy’. Hence the
secular world is a world that pretends to exalt man’s liberty, but in which man is in fact enslaved
by the things on which he depends…. In secular society man is subject to his ever-increasing
needs, to his restlessness, his dissatisfaction, his anxiety, and his fear, but above all to the guilt
which reproaches him for infidelity to his own inner truth. To escape this guilt, he plunges
further into falsity” (35).

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Part 3: Eros, Thanatos and the Faustian Bargain of Modernity

“For the modern world and its leaders, the model of Late Capitalism is accepted as an article of
faith. Its tenets of controlled competition have been elevated to a religion; its oligopolies and
multinationals accepted as the order of things; its World Bank and IMF as its missionary arms,
and global modernization as its First Commandment”. – Charles Jencks, Critical Modernism:
Where is Post-modernism Going?
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“There are ideas, and ways of thinking, with the seeds of life in them, and there are others,
perhaps deep in our minds, with the seeds of a general death. Our measure of success in
recognizing these kinds, and in naming them making possible their common recognition, may be
literally the measure of our future”. – Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950

The original story of the character Faust, who sells his soul to Satan, was written in 15th century
Europe and has been re-told in many different versions since. In each telling of the tale Faust
wants something different in exchange from the devil—sex, money, fame, and so on. However,
in Goethe’s 18th century classic rendition, it’s now modern man making the fateful bargain and
this time he wants something rather different: “development and unending growth” (36).

In its final manifestation, this desire of Faust’s is externalized onto the world where he’s driven
to build and transform his physical surroundings for the future benefit of humanity. “He pits all
his powers against nature and society; he strives to change not only his own life but everyone
else’s as well. Now he finds a way to act effectively against the feudal and patriarchal world: to
construct a radically new social environment that will empty the old world out or break it down”
(37).
It’s not, however, profit and money making that Faust desires; Goethe’s text is no anti-capitalist
diatribe; his point is far subtler than that. Faust is propelled by a desire to conquer nature and
to transform the earth in the long-term service of humanity. “It is the sound of shovels that
vivifies him…it is amid the noise of construction that he declares himself most fully alive” (38).
The tragedy of the story is in the blind fury with which this drive is so passionately heeded, and
the sheer numbers of people that are sacrificed under the colossal wheels of its long-range vision.
“The distinctive environment that formed the stage for Faust’s last act—the immense
construction site, stretching out boundlessly in every direction, constantly changing and forcing
characters in the foreground themselves to change—has become the stage for world history in
our time. Faust the Developer, still only marginal in Goethe’s world, would be completely at
home in our own” (39).

How can we make sense of this ceaseless striving for growth that has been at the heart of
modernity, and further, the violence and brutal destruction that it has often left in its wake? A
possible key text for understanding this is Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. In it
Freud employs a pair of terms, Eros and the Death Drive (or Thanatos), which he sees as the twin
drives of both human beings and the cosmos as a whole. Eros is the force in the universe that
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brings individual parts together into ever greater and greater units of integration and complexity
(or ‘complication’ as Freud termed it).

Freud argues that, “Civilization is a process under the influence of Eros, whose purpose is to
combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into
one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros
is precisely this” (40). The death drive is the drive inherent in the cosmos that tends towards
separating, disintegration and dissolution. For Freud, human beings often deal with this inner
disintegrating disturbance by projecting it outwards onto the world. Thus, for Freud, Thanatos is
the source of human aggression and destruction. And for the later Freud, “the drive to subjugate
our surroundings is a version of the death drive” (41).

But the relationship between Eros and Thanatos is a complicated one, as only a handful of
philosophers have recognized. For it’s the perturbing agitating force of Thanatos that spurs and
opens up Eros into further and further growth. Eros is thus the sublimation of the powerful
destructive forces of Thanatos up and into creative emergence. As Freud says, Eros and Thanatos
“never appear in isolation from each other, but are alloyed with each other in varying and very
different proportions and so become unrecognizable to our judgment” (42). Or as the philosopher
Gilles Deleuze has put it: “Destruction, and the negative at work in destruction, always manifests
itself as the other face of construction or unification… Beyond Eros we encounter Thanatos;
beyond the ground, the abyss of the groundless; beyond the repetition that links, the repetition
that erases and destroys. It is hardly surprising that Freud’s writings should be so complex” (43).

Every system has three possibilities when it comes to responding to the disturbance of Thanatos:
it can succumb to system dissolution; it can cling to its current organization in a fierce
15

conservatism, and/or externalize the pressure outward in acts of aggression; or it can release into
trans-formation and higher order levels of complexity. It’s crucial for modern civilization to
accept that it will never evolve beyond this disturbing ‘dark side’ of our makeup—no matter how
successfully we think we have banished it—for it’s the very engine of our own creative
evolution. If we don’t admit to and accept the constant presence of Thanatos we’ll continue to
suffer the ravages of its untamed release, which has been such a devastating feature of the
modern era.

As Terry Eagleton points out, “history is dependent upon powers that are perpetually capable of
sinking it without a trace…In the forging of civilizations, the death drive is harnessed to soberly
functional ends, growing strategic and astute; but it continues to betray a delight in power and
destruction for their own sake, which continually threatens to undermine those ends…
Civilization must pay homage to its other, not least because there is a sense in which it lives off
it.” (44)

*********
The emergence of a distinct, self-aware human consciousness in the modern era is a powerful
and remarkable achievement in the evolutionary unfolding of Eros. So why has there been so
much turmoil and ruin in this very same period? In a word—separation. At the same time that
the new individual human being was living within increasingly individualistic societies, it was
given a new view of the universe as a meaningless machine. We were thus no longer connected
to anything external to ourselves in any truly meaningful way. As Bertrand Russell so bravely
put the new cosmic nihilism: “Man is the product of causes which had no provision of the end
they were achieving; his origin, growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the
outcome of accidental collocations of atoms…All the noonday brightness of human genius, are
destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system” (45). Going it alone, we now found
ourselves uncontrollably wracked by the terror of the void, by the fear and trembling of our cold
isolation, and we strove furiously to avoid feeling the truth of this alienation. We had become
human, all too human.

And yet Thanatos would just not leave us alone, as we weren’t destined to serve only ourselves,
but a larger picture, a deeper more cosmic narrative; Thy will be done, on
earth as it is in Heaven. As the philosopher Hegel knew, “man comes to
himself in the end when he sees himself as the vehicle for the larger
Spirit” (46). But when the Faustian bargain for growth and
development is put in the service of only our own individual separate-
self desires, we get mired in an endless chase that the Buddha
called dukkha, or suffering (47). We end up inevitably in the realm of the
hungry ghosts, always starving for more, trying vainly to fill the infinite
emptiness exposed by separation. Unable to withstand the force of
the inner pressure (Thanatos) demanding that we open up—that we
move from our current evolutionary moment of individualism back
toward a re-integration with the broader whole(s) of culture, earth and cosmos—many have
turned to diversion, addiction, and excess in order to dispel the inner torment and be freed of this
unsettling power. Massive amounts of energy has also been expelled outward into the business of
profit making, endless accumulation, and bold personal ambition. Reason and order have often
given way to disorder and chaos. “Reason can restrain our disruptive desires only by drawing its
16

own energies from them, fuelling itself from this turbulent source…Being too aloof from those
powers, it will fail to shape and inform them from within, and so will allow them to run riot”
(48). Modernity has been convinced that it is a vehicle for Eros, bringing progress and prosperity
to all through its spectacular growth and development; this is the ideological mask it has proudly
worn. However, its emphasis on the individual and its devotion to a strict rationality have left it
vulnerable to a fierce Thanatos, a profound and destructive nihilism that is eating at it from
within. More and more, disintegration and demise have come to rule the day as the refusal to
answer the evolutionary call continues (49). Eros is struggling to maintain a hold on the human
story.

Fortunately we seem to be waking up from this ever-increasing nightmare. We’re opening up

once again to powers and spheres greater than our own individual selves, and this is spurred on
in part by the post-modern sciences, which are providing us with a very different picture of the
cosmos. As Charles Jencks puts it, “Today we have a new metanarrative, coming from the post-
modern sciences of complexity and the new cosmology, the idea of cosmogenesis, the story of
the developing universe, the notion that the evolving universe is a single, creative, unfolding
event that includes life and us in its narrative, one that locates culture in space and time” (50).
Perhaps we’re now getting ready to once again collaborate with Eros, to move from the modern
dominion over nature, to stewardship and dance. Maybe the prodigal sons and daughters of
modernity are about to return home, unique radiant individuals, ready to be in accord and of
service to the greater whole of which they are an integral part.

********
“Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they
would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence
comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety. And it is
to be expected that the other of the two ‘Heavenly Powers’, eternal Eros, will make an effort to
assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary. But who can foresee with
what success and with what result?”– Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

Endnotes

[1] Clark, Kenneth. Civilization. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1969. p.85.

[2] Solomon, Robert C. A Short History of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press,
1996. p.1.

[3] What I have presented here is in line with the following statement- “I am using the word
17

“consciousness” to refer to the phenomenon of being conscious, not to the neural events that
make this first-person experience possible”. Wallace, B. Allen. The Taboo of Subjectivity:
Toward a New Science of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. p.6.

[4] “Habermas offers two broad criticisms of Kant. First, Kant begins his transcendental inquiry
already knowing what knowledge is. As such he smuggles into his argument a form of “first
philosophy”. The prototypes for knowledge are provided by Newtonian physics and Euclidean
geometry…Rather than openly reflecting upon competing claimants to the status of knowledge,
Kant legitimizes a single, historically dominant, form…The history of the subject is lost and the
“bourgeois subject” is rendered as a given…Habermas continues to seek transcendental
conditions, but searches for them at a deeper level than did Kant: at a level that makes possible
both knowledge as a diverse, historical unfolding human achievement, and a humanity that
realizes itself, coming to consciousness of itself, in history”. Edgar, Andrew. The Philosophy of
Habermas. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005. p.62-63.

[5] “The emergence of new structures of consciousness can be explained with reference to the
developmental logic of the pattern of previous structures and to an impulse given by problem
generating events”. Habermas, Jurgen. “History and Evolution”. Telos 39 (1979): p.31.

Also: “Isaiah Berlin has often repeated in his writings that Hegel showed with considerable
imaginative genius that the history of thought and culture is a changing pattern of liberating ideas
which form general attitudes and outlooks, which then eventually grow old and antiquated; their
inadequacy to the texture of the lived experience of self-conscious men becomes increasingly
apparent until finally they come to be felt as a constricting straightjacket which must be broken
at all costs; new, emancipating conceptions emerge, which form new, more satisfying general
outlooks, and these, in their turn, gradually grow into prison-houses of the spirit…Berlin holds a
quasi-Hegelian view of history as an intelligible process of intellectual growth and self-
correction- a collective learning-process [that] changes and grows through time”. Hausheer,
Roger. “Introduction”. Berlin, Isaiah. Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas. New
York: Viking Press, 1980. p.l.

[6] Campbell, Joseph. Creative Mythology: The Masks of God. US: Penguin Books, 1968. p.576.

[7] De Sade quoted in: Clark, Kenneth. Civilization. London: British Broadcasting Corporation,
1969. p.274.

[8] Jung quoted in: Tacey, David. How to Read: Jung. New York: Routledge, 2003. p.94.

[9] Yalom, Irving. “Death, Anxiety, Psychotherapy”. The Irving Yalom Reader. USA: Basic
Books, 1998. p.183-192.

Also: “Heidegger believed that there are two fundamental modes of existing in the world: (1) a
state of forgetfulness of being or (2) a state of mindfulness of being. When one lives in a state of
forgetfulness of being, one lives in the world of things and immerses oneself in the everyday
diversions of life. One is “leveled down”, absorbed in “idle chatter”, lost in the “they”…In the
other state, the state of mindfulness of being, one marvels not about the way things are but that
18

they are. To be in this mode means to be continually aware of being”. Ibid, p. 185.

[10] Solomon, Robert C. A Short History of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press,
1996. p.176.

[11] Abelard of Bath quoted in: Campbell, Joseph. Creative Mythology: The Masks of God. US:
Penguin Books, 1968. p.589.

[12] Campbell, Joseph. Creative Mythology: The Masks of God. US: Penguin Books, 1968.
p.594.

[13] Grotius quoted in: Solomon, Robert C. A Short History of Philosophy. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996. p.311.

Also: “In the seventeenth century, with all its outpourings of genius in art and science, there were
still senseless persecutions and brutal wars waged with unparalleled cruelty”. Clark,
Kenneth. Civilization. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1969. p.245.

[14] Kramnick, Isaac. “Introduction”. The Enlightenment Reader. New York: Penguin Books,
1995. p. ix.

[15] Ibid, xix.

[16] Berlin, Isaiah. “The Counter Enlightenment”. Against the Current: Essays in the History of
Ideas. New York: Viking Press, 1980. p.2.

[17] Voltaire quoted in: Muller, Jerry Z. The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western
Thought. New York: Anchor Books, 2003. p.29.

[18] Diderot quoted in: Kramnick, Isaac. “Introduction”. The Enlightenment Reader. New York:
Penguin Books, 1995. p. xvii.

[19] Ibid, p. ix.

[20] Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts in the Air: The Experience of Modernity. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. p.30.

[21] Clark, Kenneth. Civilization. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1969. p.330.

[22] Whitman quoted in: Ibid, p.334.

[23] Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Pocket Books, 1964.
p.63

[24] Berlin, Isaiah. “The Counter Enlightenment”. Against the Current: Essays in the History of
Ideas. New York: Viking Press, 1980. p.1.
19

[25] Kant, Immanuel. “What is Enlightenment?”. The Enlightenment Reader. New York:
Penguin Books, 1995. p. 1.

[26] Berlin, Isaiah. “The Counter Enlightenment”. Against the Current: Essays in the History of
Ideas. New York: Viking Press, 1980. p.1.

[27] “The colonial powers justified their assumption of authority and the distribution of roles to
persons from the “metropolitan” country by a combination of arguments: racist arguments about
the cultural inferiority and inadequacy of the local populations; and self-justifying arguments
about the “civilizing” role the colonial administration was playing… The pan-European world,
dominating the world-system economically and politically, defined itself as the heart, the
culmination of a civilizational process which it traced back to Europe’s presumed roots in
Antiquity”. Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2004. p.56, 66.

[28] Toulmin, Stephen. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1990. p.156.

[29] Mumford quoted in: Jenks, Charles. Critical Modernism: Where is Post-modernism
Going? Great Britain: Wiley-Academy, 2007. p.30.

Also: “After the First World War, architecture took a fresh direction, turning away from the lush
and decorative, the historical and the emotional; the resulting revolt against ornament and local
color (or color of any kind) is one leading mark of what became the central movement in
“modernist” architecture, which culminated in the buildings and writings of Mies van der
Rohe…Mies abhorred local color. Instead he looked for universal principles of design, equally
appropriate to all geographical locations. This was not just a technical choice. His wish for
“universality” was the explicit expression of a Platonist point of view…These principles defined
the central structure of a building, not in functional, but in structural (geometrical) terms…Mies’
ideas were not just universal but abstract, like the universal ideas at the base of Descartes’
philosophy. His program for architecture produced buildings whose technical mark was
mathematical clarity and precision, but which could be used for a dozen purposes, and were
equally at home (or out of place) in any city or country”. Toulmin, Stephen. Cosmopolis: The
Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. p.155-156.

[30] Berlin, Isaiah. “The Counter Enlightenment”. Against the Current: Essays in the History of
Ideas. New York: Viking Press, 1980. p.13.

[31] Ibid, p.13.

[32] Toulmin, Stephen. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1990. p.148. Toulmin continues: “From Wordsworth or Goethe on, romantic
poets and novelists tilted the other way: human life that is ruled by calculative reason alone is
scarcely worth living”. Ibid, p.148.

Also: “At the heart of much European philosophy in the last hundred years lies the thought that
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the true order of the world is systematic: not only susceptible to rational analysis, but exhausted
by it”. Zwicky, Jan. Lyric Philosophy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. p. 12.

And: “Galileo and Bacon’s new science reassured the early moderns of the power of thought,
and the norms of “universal self-consciousness” came to be identified with those imposed by the
requirements purely of reason itself. The application of reason to human affairs, though, proved
less successful, since putting traditional norms under the microscope of rational criticism only
served to dissolve not only them but also their early modern successors”. Pinkard, Terry.
“Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic: an overview”. The Cambridge Companion to German
Idealism. UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. p.167.

[33] Fromm, Erich. To Be or To Have. US: Harper and Row, 1976. p.x

[34] Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Scribner, 1930. p. 181-83.

[35] Merton, Thomas. The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. US: Harper Collins,
2003. p.52.

[36] Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts in the Air: The Experience of Modernity. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. p.40.

[37] Ibid, p.61.

[38] Ibid, p.65.

[39] Ibid, p.75. Also: “The process of development that the creative spirits of the nineteenth
century conceived as a great human adventure has become in our own era a life-and-death
necessity for every nation and every social system in the world. As a result, development
authorities everywhere have accumulated powers that are enormous, uncontrolled and all too
lethal”. Ibid, p.75.

[40] Freud, Sigmund. Civilizations and Its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton and Company,
1961. p.82.

Also: “In Freud’s vision, Eros, present in every cell of living substance, has as its aim the
unification and integration of all cells, and beyond that, in the service of civilization, the
integration of smaller units into the unity of mankind. Freud discovered nonsexual love”.
Fromm, Erich. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. US: Fawcett Crest, 1973. p.493.

[41] Eagleton, Terry. Holy Terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. p.11.

[42] Freud, Sigmund. Civilizations and Its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton and Company,
1961. p.78.

[43] Deleuze, Gilles. Masochism. New York: Zone Books, 1991. p.114.

[44] Eagleton, Terry. Holy Terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. p.10,15.