Six funerals and a baptism

Marcello Veneziani

How can we describe the era we are living in in a concise way? It is not the balance of the news events that have occurred in the past year but the vision of the world that can be drawn by observing the crests and abysses of our era, the processes that are emerging, the fruits and the debris. If we wanted to represent our era in an iconic picture that almost seems like the title of a film, we could say: six funerals and a baptism . The six funerals have been ongoing for some time, previously they were only domestic announcements or for a select few, almost in private form; then they became public, until they became epochal mass phenomena.

To represent them in an overall view, let's say that their arc goes from the announcement of the death of God, which Friedrich Nietzsche first dared to make, to the announcement of the death of man, which Michel Foucault made in years closer to us. The two philosophers were often attributed some responsibility in the alleged deicide and hominicide: in reality the two were heralds of a catastrophe rather than authors. Foucault in Words and Things, followed in Nietzsche's footsteps and observed that the death of God and the last man who would kill him are closely linked: "it is he who must now answer for his own finitude". And he added, in conclusion of his work, “Man is an invention whose recent date is easily shown by the archeology of our thought. And perhaps the end is near." The French philosopher saw the end of man as an erasure, "like a face of sand on the edge of the sea". But between the two funeral announcements, four other funerals were celebrated: to history, to nature, to thought and to art, or rather to the four areas relating to humanism, to its relationship with the world and with the sacred, with memory and with future, with good and beauty, with culture and tradition.

The loss of historical memory and amnesia towards our past is clear for all to see ; on the other hand, the elevation of a portion of the recent past, called Nazi-fascism, to eternal and absolute evil, confirms the radical dehistoricization underway. The demons remain, not the facts, not the memory, not the past, although selected in the importance of the events. End of the story.

Less conspicuous, if not disguised in the opposite guise of a false naturalism, is the funeral of nature, that is, of the world that precedes our will, the world that we did not build but was before us and was once called created; natural rights, natural limits, the nature of the sexes, the natural family are denied. In the era in which everything is organic, and the main concern is the environment, the salvation of the planet, nature is rejected and replaced with the artificial, the prosthesis, the voluntary, desires.

Declarations of the death of philosophy, the irrelevance of thought, and its defeat compared to technoscience and its results have been circulating for some time. The announcement of God's end seemed like the triumph of philosophy, that is, of autonomous and sovereign human thought; instead the loss of one was then the loss of the other, with faith even philosophy ended. Even art survives only by staging a permanent funeral for the art known over the centuries, every new art is a death certificate of art, every avant-garde, announcement and representation marks a decomposition, an unmooring, a dissolution of figures, bodies and landscapes .

The first traces of those funeral announcements were found in Hegelian thought; but they became a common horizon only recently, through progressive, and therefore regressive, forms of iconoclasm and transgression, nihilism and uprooting. Goods have replaced intangible goods and social ties, technology has replaced culture and the real meaning of things, the economy has replaced the emptiness of being with the fullness of having, even virtual. Desires have supplanted reality and its representation.

The six funerals are accompanied by a baptism: the birth of the android, or the artificial intelligence that takes the place of man and those six worlds; surpasses the robot and takes on the tasks that were human. The possibility of modifying the world, Gunther Anders already noted half a century ago in Men Without a World, has surpassed imagination and on this "discrepancy" which Anders elsewhere defines as "Promethean difference" (Man is antiquated is from 1956) there is it is all our defeat: the growing power to change the world is combined with the decreasing wisdom of knowing it. Technology advances, culture retreats. The advent of the android is worrying because at the same time the human is moving backwards; rather than enhancing it, it makes it superfluous.

Those six funerals weigh on the advent of the android, of his artificial intelligence, provisionally called transhuman or posthuman or cyberman (which Roberto Pecchioli describes well in the recent Transhuman Man. The end of humanity, ed. Arianna).

We did not use the current expression of death of God, of man, of history, of art, of thought and of nature but we spoke of funerals, or rather of announcement, representation, perception and supposition of their disappearance. This does not exclude the possibility that it is a declaration of presumed, unascertained death; of a funeral rite "in absentia", in the absence of the interested party.

The real question of our era can therefore move into an investigation: where has God hidden himself, and man, and all the other related areas? And how is it possible to find them again, or reawaken them, bring them back to life, not in the sense of resurrecting them but of bringing them back into our lives, readmitting them into our living horizon, and with them rediscover our humanity. What we can say, meanwhile, is that those who believed they could get rid of God to find man made a mistake in their calculations because they also lost man; whoever thought he was getting rid of the past to meet the future made a mistake because he also got rid of the future; whoever thought of getting rid of thought or art, or nature, to live in technoscience and its products, in the end lost his world and his humanity. Everything is connected, the world is a connection. A crown of beads, like that of the rosary: ​​if you remove the first bead, then all the others fall away, until you lose the thread of existence.

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