Faculdade Jesuíta de Filosofia e Teologia Belo Horizonte, BRAZIL.
(Dedicated gratefully to Wolfgang Giegerich, in concordia discors.)
The rule of accelerated movement, change, impermanence, hinders all these constitutive acts of thought. There is no more the required temporal conditions for truly intelligere (to understand, equivalent to intus legere, to read inwardly, to reach the interiority of a phenomenon),but only the increasingly faster and external stimulation by the flow of information. The objective restlessness and speed of the world find their perfect correspondence in the floating nature of consciousness when wholly immersed in the technological dynamisms. As a result, this consciousness deprived of the minimal stability of the past, of memoria, enraptured by the frenetic kind of movement peculiar to our age, simply cannot reflect, cannot think in the traditional sense of the word. The remaining reflexivity is only a logically obsolete private remnant from the superseded previous form of soul as subjectivity, and can be used in the cultivation of a hobby, for instance by those who are inclined to think psychologically in a world in which psychology with soul (or soul as psychology) has become obsolete (just like one can enjoy flying in balloons in the age of spatial aircrafts). “Human nature” or “essence” was the referent for “true self”—so that one could define self-consciousness or subjectivity as the form of “human essence.” But in the technological contemporary mode of being-in-the-world, which conjugates the transformation of nature into mere raw material to be disposed of by the technological activity, the obsolescence of the category of “essence,” and the increasing (or almost complete) technical fabrication of the human environment (technique invading even the realm of human relations), the “true self” loses its grounding reference: from now on, everything is fabricated, including the self. The basis of the new self is to be found not anymore inside oneself, but in the varied and nevertheless calculated possibilities prescribed by the market.
(Dedicated gratefully to Wolfgang Giegerich, in concordia discors.)
The rule of accelerated movement, change, impermanence, hinders all these constitutive acts of thought. There is no more the required temporal conditions for truly intelligere (to understand, equivalent to intus legere, to read inwardly, to reach the interiority of a phenomenon),but only the increasingly faster and external stimulation by the flow of information. The objective restlessness and speed of the world find their perfect correspondence in the floating nature of consciousness when wholly immersed in the technological dynamisms. As a result, this consciousness deprived of the minimal stability of the past, of memoria, enraptured by the frenetic kind of movement peculiar to our age, simply cannot reflect, cannot think in the traditional sense of the word. The remaining reflexivity is only a logically obsolete private remnant from the superseded previous form of soul as subjectivity, and can be used in the cultivation of a hobby, for instance by those who are inclined to think psychologically in a world in which psychology with soul (or soul as psychology) has become obsolete (just like one can enjoy flying in balloons in the age of spatial aircrafts). “Human nature” or “essence” was the referent for “true self”—so that one could define self-consciousness or subjectivity as the form of “human essence.” But in the technological contemporary mode of being-in-the-world, which conjugates the transformation of nature into mere raw material to be disposed of by the technological activity, the obsolescence of the category of “essence,” and the increasing (or almost complete) technical fabrication of the human environment (technique invading even the realm of human relations), the “true self” loses its grounding reference: from now on, everything is fabricated, including the self. The basis of the new self is to be found not anymore inside oneself, but in the varied and nevertheless calculated possibilities prescribed by the market.
The end of man in the modern form of consciousness, Marco Heleno Barreto