From childhood up until the threshold of maturity my education proceeded under the threat of an intellectual terrorism that passed for the touchstone of “our” European culture. Hardly less formidable than the theologians and scholiasts of the Middle Ages, philosophers and thinkers—however pertinent or important they were deemed to be—punctuated and exacted a ransom of obligatory reference all along the highways and byways of thought.
Descartes, Kant, Spinoza, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Bakunin, Freud, Groddeck, Reich served us as firebombs to hurl into the thick of debates with a sense of provocation that barely concealed our wish to rout adversaries whom we judged despicable.
In complete ignorance of Adorno, Bloch and Benjamin, the hairsplitters of a Marxism rehashed by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin or Mao confronted one another using the leading imbeciles of the day—the Sartres, de Beauvoirs and their ilk—as sticks with which to beat one another. This absurd donnybrook over political dogma raged on as the free-for-all of politico-philosophical inquisitors continued with desperate zeal to anathematize all modish “deviationist” interpretations of Marxism.
Once all this charlatanism—at once laughable and bloodthirsty (think of Stalin’s trials or the Chinese Cultural Revolution)—had run its course, the doctrinal references ceased being wielded like sledgehammers. The intellectual arrogance of “Marx tells us …” “Freud argues that ….” and “Nietzsche shows that …” no longer produced anything but mockery.
True, there was good reason to celebrate the demolition of personages on pedestals we were supposed to venerate or scorn. Implicitly invited now, at last, to think for ourselves, were we going to discover the existential soil in which the real questions grow before being uprooted and perverted in the vast and useless realms of abstraction?
Plunging into the great world library and drawing from it, on our own initiative, the elements of human consciousness so needful for every life—was this not a way to rediscover the pleasure of learning and teaching, a pleasure at long last unburdened of the will to power that had been smothering it?
The demise of master thinkers would surely open up a vast domain to exploration by living thought. We had every opportunity now to leave the beaten paths of cultural abstraction.
Alas, the unleashing of speculation has turned the tabula rasa on which we wanted to build a new society, a new civilization, into an arid and filthy place, perfectly unfit for our hoped-for banqueting. We had expected unending festivity; what befell was full-blown devastation.
Spurred on by the totalitarian rule of money, the era of nothing, of nihilism, was upon us. A game of chess stage-managed by an idiot. No more up or down, or left and right. Everything was carried off in a maelstrom of profit sweeping all life away.
The dilapidation of the planet and the deliberate elimination of species is the true face of nothingness. Wherever profit’s great reaper goes, the grass never grows again. The dictatorship of finance makes no claim to leave those who dream of sowing and fertility with anything but the sterile outrage of despair.
Religions, ideologies and beliefs have slowly been emptied of their content by a single religion, a single ideology, a single belief, namely the omnipotence of money.
The supremacy of the Spirit has not survived the rout of divine supremacy. When the gods were first torn from their pedestals and thrown to the ground, their fragments served to underpin ideologies, some of which rose to the level of genuine secular religions. But then these grand ideologies crumbled in their turn and lost all the sanctity they had filched from the churches.
All that remains today is empty thought, self-sufficient in the sense that it is detached from life. Whatever substance it is filled with, it remains empty, for its sole justification is its function: the removal of consciousness from a proxy existence rendered all the more inauthentic because it is enhanced by illusions.
The running warfare of the young generations against cultural leaders which shaped our commitments was co-opted by the commodity system in order to exalt philistinism and jettison literature, history, philosophy, the teaching of ancient Greek and everything that did not conform to the injunction “Get rich!”
The schools abandoned their vocation to impart knowledge in favor of providing their students with the weapons needed to master the market system and engage in the loathsome struggle for survival in which individuals are judged according to the likelihood of their success or failure.
Admittedly, market-based civilization has always given priority to exchange value, to the logic of money. Money smeared blood and excrement over everything it touched, but at least its appropriation allowed one to survive. The acquisition of goods provided a perverse consolation amid the woes of a joyless existence. But now that the frenzy for profit is destroying the planet and all life, money is slowly but surely heading toward its own negation. Its devaluation is no longer a rare accidental occurrence but rather the sign of its ongoing self-destruction.
Crony capitalism has its own hired intellectuals. They envisage the abolition of culture because of its high cost, because it does not serve the market and is liable to encourage the passion for knowledge that invariably tends to expose the lies of power. Obscurantism suits business.
At the same time, however, there are other intellectuals who oppose the kind of obscurantist populism that promotes a culture of mediocrity and is based on the vilest of prejudices. These are partisans of an elitist culture which must be paid for and which is restricted to the well-to-do, a culture stripped of all sinew that lies mummy-like in the sarcophagus of the spectacle.
We have strictly no use for a conflict reminiscent of Rabelais’s absurd and bilious character Picrochole, always spoiling for a fight, which pits an anticultural culture against a commercial one for which knowledge is nothing but an alibi for profit. Populism and elitism alike foster ignorance. And ignorance is ever the servant of tyranny.
I want knowledge in its diversity to be accessible to all. Transcending culture means preserving it as a legacy of universal knowledge, while destroying it as a separate sphere, an ideology, a tool of power.
Let us restore full rein to the curiosity that is so alive in childhood and that would remain alive were it not diverted and corrupted by the predatory tendencies of ordinary life. For a start, let us guarantee free access to education and learning, to all conservatories and academic institutions, to reading, museums, exhibitions, concerts, operas, public lectures, conferences of experts and scholars. Let everyone share their knowledge freely so that the pleasure of learning can fuel the pleasure of teaching.
Everything should be begun again from scratch so that joy in living can see off dreary survival—such is the sine qua non of any genuine human progress. The top priority. Think of it when the day of self-managed societies comes!