The Possible Human: On the Importance of Breaking Out of the Shell of Habitual Existence
Philosophical statements, especially when they concern humans, always carry a certain abstract, speculative, and theoretical meaning. This meaning is hard to grasp for the simple reason that, even when we want to express something not visual but only intelligible, we still use words from everyday language, each of which has concrete, tangible references.
To clarify what I mean, let me use a simple example (though simple examples are risky because they require a shared intuition to be understood). The example is our position within our intellectual and cultural environment. We live immersed in words and certain cultural habits and stereotypes. We are born into this environment (I mean the Russian environment, and by “Russian” I refer not to an ethnic, but a socio-political phenomenon called Russia, which naturally includes Uzbeks, Georgians, Armenians, etc. This lecture was delivered in 1988, before the collapse of the USSR. — Ed.).
Our situation could be described as that of “leaning incompetents.” We all live by leaning on the warmth of direct human connection, mutual understanding, and mostly informal, “extralegal” relationships. The law, on the other hand, is maximally formal and lacks the humanity we expect from it. We compensate for this with a kind of amorphous, unarticulated human connection—mutual winks and understandings that always exist above and beyond any laws or formal criteria.
To put it another way: if we think in terms of heating, we warm ourselves by the contact of our human bodies, by the heat radiated from huddled-together people—while others invent central heating. We are immersed in immediate humanity and cannot break the bond of understanding. For example: “I understand that it’s not his fault; fate, life, and circumstances forced him into this role…” We compensate for the barbarism and underdevelopment of our social and civic life with mutual understanding and human warmth. Anything outside this human warmth seems to us like mediation and formal delegation of our states, which, moving away from us into the unknown, seem to lose their humanity—and we despise this, especially since we have a long so-called Russian “communal” tradition.
This is an existence that, clinging to the warmth of mutual human comfort, endlessly continues the life as it is, always thinking: “I’ll get by as long as I keep my head down and don’t detach from this human connection. Others die or suffer, not me—I’ll get by.” This is the “human, all too human” that Nietzsche and any other philosopher would say is the first thing that prevents a person from thinking, the first thing that screens them from themselves, from their real position in the world, and from their responsibilities. It is a kind of barbaric, archaic state that remains in the modern world—a world that, in essence, already excludes such amorphousness, a world that presupposes complex articulation, mediation, and formalization of social and civic life, and the presence of culture (if by culture we mean real skill and ability), and the strength to practice complexity and diversity. Complexity and diversity, as we know, cannot be fully contained within the all-encompassing human gaze that does not break apart the huddled mass of human bodies.
A good illustration of this huddled mass, where only the laws of mythological cycles and repetition are possible (unlike the laws of human history), is the film by Abdrashitov and Mindadze, “The Train Has Stopped” (The plot centers on a collision between a passenger and a freight train. The deceased engineer is made a hero, but when an investigator arrives, it turns out the accident was caused by a series of local maintenance violations—a kind of mutual cover-up. The investigator seeks the truth but receives no support from the townspeople, who prefer the myth of the heroic engineer. — Ed.). If you recall, the film depicts a well-established human world, a mutually convenient level of universal incompetence. No one in this society is truly responsible or professional. They compensate for this by mutually understanding each other. The arriving investigator refuses to accept this—and thus takes the first step, the step of thinking. Of course, thinking would also question the laws themselves, but he only takes the first step, the step of the lawman.
Now, about the engineer who stopped the train: he becomes a hero because the mutual chain of universal laziness and incompetence—and at the same time, mutual assistance—pushed him into the role of someone who supposedly heroically sacrificed his life. The symbol of heroism must be established because everyone understands that the breadwinner died, and his family must be provided for. This is clear to all the townspeople. In the end, we see a kaleidoscope of masks fused to faces, a theater of masks where the voice of reality—“What is really happening? Who is who?”—will never be heard unless the bond of the “all too human” is broken. The film visually shows the original intellectual situation: the one who dares to step out of the human connection is marked as separate. He may even be stoned. Remember, the investigator walks through a line of townspeople, all looking at him with condemnation. How else could it be? They are united in their familiar lump of human understanding and kindness, excluding the formal and cold application of the law. He may be stoned; he is marked as separate.
Without this separateness, without entering a situation where you might be stoned, the space of human thought cannot open, nor can the space of human existence—the space of homo sapiens. Therefore, when we talk about a person (and I am talking about a person now), strangely enough, the conversation must be built on abstractions that eliminate as much as possible the directly, humanly accessible things and screens. In this sense, I say that in philosophy there is no problem of “the human.” A human being, as a creature with certain naturally given properties, is not the subject or object of philosophical inquiry. The subject or object of inquiry—and at the same time the threads or “fuel rods” introduced into the reactor that allow things to happen—is always only the possible human—not some specific, actual person, but the possible human who can flash, appear, establish themselves in the space of some effort that puts them “at the limit” of themselves, where the face of death stares them in the eye.
The possible human symbolizes the ability or willingness of an individual to part with themselves as they were—familiar and dear to themselves at the moment of the event—in other words, to change themselves, because only in an altered state of consciousness can the current of reality pass through, and some whole, some reality as it is in itself, can be recreated in those states before which a person was able to change themselves, to shed the shell fused to them.
The Highest Good and the Courage to Face Reality
The ancients had a strange formula. I’ll introduce it, but first, let me clarify something. You know that the human image is fixed in philosophical abstractions in three things: the highest good, beauty, and truth. Old Greek abstractions, or abstract truths… In the situation I described, using the film as an example, people are not truly people because they are hypnotized by what appears to them as “the good.” Philosophy says: there is a highest good that stands beyond the “human, all too human.” Hence the term “highest good.” I introduce an element of philosophical language: here, “highest good” does not define any specific object or declare it higher than others. It is not said what exactly is highest. Any concreteness or resolution in a particular object is eliminated here. The highest good is an abstraction, possessing the property of all philosophical abstractions, which require that nothing be defined by content. For example, duty—duty never “is,” it is never defined by content. Duty is what happens as duty at this moment, here and now. It is never derived from any general definitions.
The same applies to the good. Here’s your good: the widow and children of the deceased breadwinner must be fed and provided for, and for this, you can play the hero symbol. But the “hero symbol” is an objective statement; it asserts that something in the world happened in such and such a way: “Truly, this person is a hero!” However, for the sake of human good, we agreed to a lie, to live in illusion, in a mirage. This wouldn’t be so bad—truth itself has no privilege—but the trouble is, it does have one privilege. Lies will endlessly repeat as the same misfortunes. If we do not accept the mortal limit of human existence (and the human image in philosophy is unthinkable without its connection to the symbol of death), then we endlessly chew the same unchewed piece. The same events will always happen to us, and we will always have the same inability to act, which is easy to imagine if you picture being eternally condemned to chew the same piece. This is a true picture of hell! By the way, Russian philosopher Evgeny Trubetskoy, in his book “The Meaning of Life,” captured this trait very subtly. He said: “Hell is never dying.” People die once and for all a true death—but there is also a death where you die forever and can never die. That is hell, that is hellish torment. This is vividly symbolized, for example, in Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”
In crossing this line, the philosophical statement I wanted to mention appears. I have already spoken about the concept of the highest good, which is, of course, a symbol, not a concept, since the concept of the “highest good,” as Kant would say, has no intuition on which it could be resolved; that is, no specific object can be substituted for it. This highest good, lying beyond the visible connection of human goods, is formulated in the ancient saying: “Let the world perish, but let justice be done!” Or: “Let justice be done, even if the world perishes!” This does not mean the triumph of cold, inhuman legal formalism for which everything in the world can be sacrificed. That would be our interpretation if we followed the logic and images suggested by everyday language. In reality, this statement simply affirms and upholds justice. No specific law can be invented that would be completely just and achieve its goal. If the goal of a law were justice in particular cases, it would be impossible to point to such a law, because every law is subject to criticism, every law overlooks something, and all specific cases of law enforcement fall short of the law’s own formula and cast doubt on the formula itself. However, philosophy requires us to understand: the goal of law is the law itself, not concrete justice in particular cases; that is, to exert the influence of any law, everywhere and always, we must use means that keep the law itself “suspended” above us. This state of “suspension,” never fully attainable in pure justice, is the desired state—and it excludes our attachment to the world we have fused with and consider universal and final. Without the ability to look beyond this world, there is neither highest good nor beauty for a person.
The Russian Tendency Toward Mysticism and Escapism
Here’s a well-known phenomenon: the Russian person is indifferent to the content of what they do. Why? One reason is a pre-Christian, pagan mysticism that has invaded Christian terms and is characteristic of Russian culture. This is the eternal postponement of things “until tomorrow,” contradicting the definition of being (as it is said: it never was and never will be, but is now). But we disagree; we are never what we are now. For example, I may be doing something bad right now, but I have a higher consciousness that it’s necessary, that it couldn’t be otherwise, and in principle, I am not what I am now, but what I will be later—at some mystical point. Russians are prone to mystifying their homeland. The “mystical body of Russia” is something intangible, invisible, which calls everyone to itself and thus allows them to slip past the things right in front of their noses. Instead of loving the person next to you, we love humanity, which is located at that mystical point. As a result, we love no one. We can always be pulled by a string, and we obey. Contrary to what Dostoevsky said—that we are both Spaniards and French; some kind of universal humanity supposedly sits within us—in reality, it does not. The classic Russian, being a wonderful Spaniard, can one day disappear from Madrid, be pulled by a string from Moscow, and do something that destroys the Madrid he supposedly loved… He didn’t love it! Because he never coincides with what is real and what is now. He is always transcended in favor of some future!
Connecting to the Present and the Need for Long-Term Thinking
How does all this relate to the present? Should we think we can now solve problems related to our so-called bureaucracy and other issues? No, these problems exist on the scale of centuries. Only by restoring the broken threads of these centuries and reviving the tradition of long-term thinking can we understand the human problems before us and the image of the person who has now emerged in Russian spaces—in whom, for example, I would sooner recognize a mix of rhinoceros and locust than a human face. How did all this arise? Again, it can only be understood by placing oneself in the field of long-acting forces, a certain spirit of history, and finding there, in the distant structures of Russian history, what broke, what was left undone and uncovered by eschatological passion, or was done by people not driven by eschatological passion—the most essential passion in a person, which tells them that the greatest ambition is to be fulfilled, to arrive once and for all, and not to live in the bad repetition of myth or mythic existence, which is a prehistorical existence!