Sometimes expressing off-putting arrogance is a necessary sacrifice for getting your point across. The “age of the hollowed-out bodies” as a title for anything belongs to a particular species of feelings-towards life. Namely, a form of self-righteous posture from a self-designated analyst or a physician who diagnoses people around him with a particular disease with an undertone that he himself is managing to stay healthy.
The hollowed-out body as a state of being has become somewhat prevalent in modern society. I am referring to the state of the lack of vocation. Vocation, not in the sense of having a career and pursuing material pleasures, but rather as a form of preoccupation that nourishes your soul.
German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk, in his essay “Rules for the Human Park,” states that theory-building or theorizing as such takes its root from the emergence of houses with windows. Ancients conceived contemplation and thinking as a form of looking out of the window. In this Heidegerrian remark, Sloterdijk stresses the necessity of leisure for coming up with an idea worth pursuing.
Following the neolithic revolution, when hunter-gatherers adopted a more sedentary life, as they mastered both the domestication of wild and self-domestication, villages and small-town systems came into being. Natufians, who emerged somewhere between 12.000BC to 8.000BC were one of the first people to adopt sedentary life and construct small villages.
The Natufian village found at the Eynan site (Mallaha) is generally composed of 50 circular pit houses that were dug a few feet into the ground. As a result, half of the walls were made of earth, while the other half consisted of stone. One interesting aspect of these houses is that they could only be accessed from the roofs (note that it was not actually a traditional roof but rather what we now perceive as an entrance door). Consequently, there were no windows or streets in these dwellings.
The best model that illustrates such a system is the one found in Souther Anatolia — Çatalhöyük settlement dating from 7500 BC to 6400 BC. Again, the rectangular houses that you see were only accessible from the roof. The absence of streets, main squares, institutional buildings, and so on and so forth points to the lack of social stratification.
A typical house was composed of two rooms dedicated to crafting and cooking. One included a hearth and oven whose smoke would escape from the opening in the roof. Those rooms were plastered and meticulously taken care of. As archeologists claim they could not find much rubbish in them. It seems that the tradition of keeping your house clean was pretty strong. However, the lack of windows and somewhat suffocating in-between space points to the absence of theory-building as in looking out from the window. After all the word theory comes from the Greek “theorein” meaning “to look at”. Consider that lack of streets also points to the absence of “contemplative strolls”. The idea of a mind-wanderer like Thales of Miletus (The first official philosopher) who takes strolls and contemplates has a house that he can return to, a house in the modern sense.
Relevant to contemplation, what differentiates the lifestyle of an upper-class citizen of modern society, from the commoner of Çatalhöyük is that he gets to inherit privilege and outsource a number of everyday activities to someone else, hence saving the mental energy necessary for theorizing. The lack of theory-building in those settlements is directly connected with the absence of churches and palaces, as such social stratification comes forward with the advent of writing that sets up a yawning gap between the ones who can read and hence “look at” things and the ones who don’t.
Diogenes often catching our attention symbolizes the necessary sacrifice one needs to take in order to follow a contemplative lifestyle. Living in a barrel, asking strangers for food, refusing to take alms, or pursuing a luxurious lifestyle does not signify indifference to the “economy”, but rather on the contrary points to the utmost significance of an economical lifestyle. Economical in the sense of saving time for what Hannah Arendt calls “vita contemplativa”.
As simple as it sounds, there is no such thing as a hard-working intellectual or an artist. This is not to say that someone who pursues a career or chases material security and luxury can not appreciate a work of art or read philosophy. Rather, the point here is that the “creative force” requires mental energy and leisure, which if drained by day jobs or other forms of activities will never be channeled into a cultural or scientific achievement.
As cultural critic, John David Ebert, rightly remarks, there is no morality when it comes to creating works of art and philosophy. The responsibility of being financially independent, working your way up to material security, being a hard-working person with long-term goals, not trying to find shortcuts, and so on and so forth would never provide the necessary means for a creative genius to come up with something significant. In other words, creative work and a “devil-may-care” attitude are inseparable.
Let’s look at particular examples. Arthur Schopenhauer, the great German philosopher was born to a wealthy patrician family and inherited his father’s assets, which he invested in government bonds and earned a pretty good living, without having a regular job. Schopenhauer had a life of leisure, where he would never worry about sustenance. From his teenage years, he had the pleasure of traveling with his parents on business tours in France, Switzerland, Austria, Britain, etc. His mother Johanna had a famous salon where local members of the aristocracy and elite would visit. And one of those was none other than the greatest German poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who Schopenhauer surely admired.
Apart from authoring one of the greatest epic poems, “Faust,” Goethe was also a politician, scientist, and theater director. Like Schopenhauer, he was born into a wealthy family, as his father Johann Casper Goethe was a rich German royal councilor and jurist. From an early age, he had the privilege of receiving private tutoring in Latin, Greek, dancing, drawing, fencing, and various high-cultural subjects. In 1776, he was appointed as a Duke’s privy councilor in Weimar, which further granted him the privilege of having free time for contemplative thought.
The same goes for artists. Anselm Kiefer - a modern concept artist who has constructed a whole micro-city of metaphysical artifacts in Barjac, France. He transformed the derelict silk factory into an open art museum, where you can enjoy experiencing artworks ranging from lead airplanes, and discarded giant copper books to heavenly palaces and underground tunnels that he designed. Kiefer is also a mind-wanderer and explorer, who has the privilege of spending time in libraries, seeping through books from different genres so that he can be inspired to create works of art. Kiefer then, in 2017 was ranked one of the richest individuals in Germany, according to Manager Magazin publication.
Michelangelo and Davinci lived off of being financed by the church and obviously enjoyed royal patronage, which ensured them the fruit of free mental energy. Hence the prestigious, luminous aura of the Sistine Chapel that you can now enjoy. As a matter of fact, having a patron was an indispensable prerequisite for an artist in the Renaissance period. For instance, Albrecht Dürer, another great German artist was born into a wealthy family, where his father was a successful goldsmith.
Nietzsche, as he recounts in his autobiographical book “Ecce Homo,” had his revelation of the third book of Zarathustra when he was ascending the heights of the French coastal town Eze. Before that, he lived in a quiet chamber high above the Piazza that overlooked Rome, where first thoughts about Zarathustra flashed into his mind. Nietzsche lived on welfare, taking a pension from Basel and spending his time traveling in Italy, France and taking strolls in the Swiss Alps, where he was again inspired by a “mighty pyramidal stone” and consequently came up with an idea of eternal recurrence. Clearly, he showed little concern for the financial support provided by his friends and his reliance on the university pension.
Now, surely I am not advancing a social-constructivist fairy tale about how environmental accommodation and the right circumstances are all it takes to be a successful person. Obviously, as is the case in competitive bodybuilding you need to have the both, right stuff (inherent biological privilege) and steroids (necessary means). John Ebert claims that even having a day job that allows you to sit at a desk and read is not sufficient. Franz Kafka and T.S Elliot fit this situation, albeit in both cases you can compile their works in one slender volume.
Baruch Spinoza, for instance, who belongs to the generation of Dutch patron-less thinkers, can be considered as a counter-example to this trend. He, after all, made his living by giving private lessons and grinding lenses. However, make no mistake about it, not only Spinoza made a normal living with such a day job, but his actual creative outburst began in 1670 when he moved to Hague and lived on a pension. Then he produced his magnum opus — “Ethics” and “Tractatus Politicus”.
Nevertheless, what inspired me to write this down is this morbid “American” fantasy of earning huge sums of money and then dedicating your life to higher cultural matters. Well, that’s a myth and a very pervasive one. Not only this is not possible, but it leaves people spiritually empty and void. A person can flex all he wants how much he earns, but when you are in your 50s without having read Shakespeare's Hamlet or any other classical work of such weight, you represent a homeless, shelless non-being, with an absent cultural center. And that’s not a bug, but a feature of contemporary society.
You might ask, why should everyone or anyone be bothered about such matters? And you are right, they should not. An instinct that motivates this message is inherently socialistic. The latter here does not denote a leftist attitude, but rather the way, German philosopher, Oswald Spengler, employs this concept. According to Spengler, socialism is an instinct of a world improver, who tries to impose his world conception and transform others based on his model of truth. This universalistic tendency (known as projection) is an incurable disease of very particular people. However, in this case, there are two aspects that worry me.
The first, as I have said regards artistically and intellectually motivated people who think that if they don’t come from rich families, can pursue their dreams in the distant future when they won’t have to worry about sustenance. There are two problems with this “American” business attitude. First, it is unrealistic because day jobs and the pursuit of money drain you, leaving you unable to produce anything culturally significant. Secondly, if you are truly in love with your passion, there is pretty much zero chance of showing that amount of conscientiousness and conformism to delay its realization in the distant future. Modigliani, for instance, had to survive a literal hunger every single day. But, like Diogenes, he would do anything to paint, a “devil-may-care” attitude again. Same with Honoré de Balzac. Hence, you won’t achieve anything in the “right way.” Either you find a way, a shortcut, some form of assistance or you won’t realize your artistic and intellectual dreams. Scary and pessimistic as it sounds, I don’t recall many hard-working entrepreneurs who after becoming rich, all of a sudden started producing significant philosophical or artistic works.
The second problem, then points to the large-scale soullessness of modern society. And here, we are not talking about the absence or waning number of people who are capable of producing anything significant, but rather the shrinking of people who can appreciate high culture. In other words, most people around don’t have much going on in their lives and that is a dark, scary reality. A new boyfriend, a new job, some scandal, maybe a boxing match, a sexual experience, or something empty of that sort. Even the creative elite, responsible for generating art and science are being drained and submerged in fruitless hedonism. No wonder why the commoners are being disillusioned with the wealthy minority. The prevailing popularity of conspiracies about how some wealthy elite wants to change the whole world to their liking has nothing to do with ignorance or stupidity. What on earth are we expecting, when no one produces anything of worth? The rich and elite always had the power that they have now, it's just they had to offer something that would cool off the commoner and produce a sense of reverential awe.
Age of the hollowed-out bodies then describes people who are “a”cultural, which is tantamount to being a nobody. Same way person who feeds on junk food can never be healthy, people whose psyches are no longer shaped by classics are hollow.
“Did you hear about the upcoming fight between Diaz and some other idiot?”
Aha, yeah…
