Late last year, our friend Ian Tuttle wrote a beautiful meditation on burnout, gesturing at transcendent salvation. This week, Ripley Stroud prods Ian’s argument and kicks off a fascinating conversation.
Ripley Stroud
Ian, I want to ask you about a couple themes from your recent essay “Burnout and Hope.”
You wonder how to diagnose the cause of the “signature affliction of our age”. Is it, as Byung-Chul Han, the South Korean philosopher you were writing about, puts it, the result of excess positivity, coalescence, frictionlessness? Or is it, as Roberto Esposito puts it, the result of too much negativity, tension, conflict? Regardless of the details, looking for the cause of some thing itself implies accepting that that thing exists – i.e., it implies accepting Han’s central claim that there is some uniquely contemporary malady of alienation plaguing us all in the twenty-first century.
I am suspicious of this type of claim. I want to push you to explore why that is. But before that, let’s clarify what your claim is by clarifying what it’s not.
First, there is of course a very trivial sense in which the maladies of the twenty-first century are unique. After all, it has never been the twenty-first century before. So too, there is a trivial sense in which I am uniquely different today than I was yesterday. This is nothing to write home about: we only care about uniqueness when it reflects something substantive: when, for example, I really have substantively changed as a person. So this is surely not what you — or others — could be saying.
Second, and related, it is of course true that the features of a particular time can change the particular appearance of a kind of affliction. A sense of alienation may appear different in virtue of being partially shaped by, for example, the ubiquity of smartphones. But this is mere appearance, not substantive difference. Let’s call this “apparent uniqueness.” But I don’t take you to be making this claim, either, because this just reduces to the triviality of the temporally unique claim.
What I take you to be saying, rather, is that our current age has a substantively unique malady of alienation, one brought on by the contingent features of our time, that has, in a non-trivial sense, never occurred before.
I think this version of the claim is just not true. And I think it is just not true for reasons that are rooted in the Great Books education that you and I share:
I’m thinking about Augustine’s Confessions and his deeply-felt sense that our fallen nature is what permanently and irrevocably alienates us from our surroundings. We cannot be one with nature; we must toil constantly just to gather enough sustenance to make it another day. We cannot be one with others, as we are cursed to fall victim to our physical desires — making us, in turn, not even fully one with ourselves.
I’m thinking about Pascal, who wrote in his Pensées that we are forever drifting away from our footing in time; how despite our only ever living in the present, we are helpless to wander off to the past or the future — falling ill with nostalgia or worrying endlessly about what’s to come.
I’m thinking about Marx, who takes the very practice of waged labor to alienate the worker from their preferences and will. In thinking about Marx, I’m also thinking about Cicero (an apparent proto-Marxist?) who wrote that “the very wage that [laborers] receive is a pledge of their slavery.” If Marx (and Cicero) are right, then we have been alienated from ourselves, our desires, our projects, and our preferences for as long as we have received wages in exchange for work — meaning, really, forever.
The fact that this sense of alienation has been written about all throughout history makes me deeply suspicious of the claim that there is anything substantively unique about the alienation we experience in the twenty-first century. If there is anything unique about the alienation of today, it’s a mere difference in appearance, not anything deeper. That means that if we weren’t alienated due to X, we’d just be alienated due to Y.
I think the most realistic version of the claim is just going to be that the twenty-first century’s alienation is apparently unique: a boring claim indeed. But we should expect descriptions of our core nature to be pretty boring; after all, the human race has been doing this for a long time.
Ian Tuttle
Ripley, I’m grateful for your probing response to my essay. You’ve opened it up to fundamental questions, to which I’m not sure I can do anything like justice. But here goes.
It seems to me that we enjoy a basic agreement — namely, that there is such a thing as human nature, and related experiences that hold across different times and cultures. I understand you to be arguing that, insofar as we suffer alienation, we suffer from a condition well-known to Augustine, Pascal, Marx, and presumably many others; and whatever might be apparently unique to us is, ultimately, trivial. I of course accept (part of) this: without a basis of shared experience, communication across the ages would be hopeless. We could toss our Augustine down the chute.
But I am not sure that it escapes the accusation of triviality to say that a basic experience is shared across time: for example, that Plato loved, and so did Dante, and so did Iris Murdoch. I think — and here, I believe, is the substance of our disagreement — that this gives too little weight to history.
There are, after all, genuinely novel historical experiences. Take boredom, a word that does not appear in English until the nineteenth century. I consider that to be credible evidence that the phenomenon, at least as we understand it, did not exist until relatively recently. Whatever doldrums he might have experienced, Achilles was never bored. Likewise, innovations in language do not just represent emotions; they create them. (Because of Shakespeare we can feel “bitter cold.”) And when languages lose the ability to express certain emotional states, those emotional states decay and even disappear.
Or, to put it differently: think of it by analogy to epidemiology. You appear to be arguing that we all have the flu, and while sometimes it “presents” as Flu A, sometimes as Flu B, these are essentially the same sickness. It seems to me, though, quite important how a malady presents. The fact that we are experiencing this strain of alienation at the moment, as opposed to that strain, or these symptoms and not those symptoms, has a material effect on our diagnostic and therapeutic efforts.
Perhaps we could state it as a problem of genus vs. species. I agree with you that, in some fundamental sense, we all suffer from the genus of alienation or estrangement or inward disunity. But different species of that genus appear at different times and in different places. If we wish to understand our particular time and place, it helps to be specific.
Ripley Stroud
Your response is helpful, Ian, in particular because it allows me to think more deeply about what’s really at stake for me here.
First, I’m a little suspicious about this first inference — that “boredom” as a word not existing until the 19th century is good evidence that we weren’t ever bored before. The diagnosis of “post-partum depression” didn’t exist until recently, but why should we think that no mother suffered from post-partum depression until the term was created? Surely there’s some reasonable alternate story where the malady always existed, but we just lacked the tools to identify it as such (perhaps because people weren’t looking).
Are you attached primarily to the strongest version of that inference? Or are you amenable to a weaker version, where perhaps we were bored before “boredom” came around but in a different way? Maybe there’s something about naming a concept that partially modifies it, insofar as it changes the way in which we can relate to it?
Second, I think you’re right that the project of understanding the specific malady of our time could have fruitful consequences! But I suppose I’m worried about the feasibility of trying to diagnose a historical malady while we’re in the midst of it (and thus, the analogy to disease only goes so far). Isn’t there a bit of a category mistake going on? If history is — by its very nature — retrospective, why should we expect to understand our era until it’s done? I’m genuinely interested in hearing a case for why we should think our epistemic position at the present time could be sufficiently good to do this kind of preemptive historical work.
One final thing. I suppose I’m worried in general about the claim that even the unique features of the present day are all that unique. Maybe we never heard “boredom” before the nineteenth century, but I think we have heard repeated, only thinly distinct, iterations of “kids these days [don’t read]/[are rude]/[are too sad]/[are missing out on our core traditions]!” for a long time. And I think it’s the historical ubiquity of claims like that that make me suspect that history is a circle, not an arrow.
Ian Tuttle
I think the key issue between us is coming clear. I wonder, though, if there is not only a disagreement about the nature of history, but also, hiding in the background, a disagreement about the task of philosophy.
You suggest that “history is — by its very nature — retrospective,” and you wonder whether we can establish a reliable “epistemic position” from which to evaluate our present condition. The implication seems to be that we have greater access to what is past than to what is present. (“The owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk,” one could say!)
But this seems to me to suppose that history is a “thing,” a temporal object, that we stand outside of and examine, like an entomologist examines a bug on a pin. Perhaps this is true, in some provisional sense, for the historian, but I don’t think philosophy ever enjoys this privilege, even when dealing with “historical” materials — e.g., old books. What we are after is always what is alive in them, which means what is present in them. When I read Plato, I am reading, in some sense, a contemporary, because what I am after is not strictly historical but philosophical knowledge. So, likewise, when I ask about the signature affliction of our time, I am asking a philosophical, not a strictly historical, question. When it comes to philosophy, there is no epistemic position outside of our moment; we’re always entangled in it.
I suppose this raises the question of what exactly we’re doing when we do philosophy. One could imagine that philosophy is akin to archaeology or paleontology: a disinterested study of artifacts from a long-gone epoch. But I think philosophy is more in the way of combat medicine. Shells are exploding around us, the air is thick with smoke, the ground is strewn with suffering comrades — we’re wounded ourselves! — and we have to do the best we can in the midst of it all. There is no position safely away from the battlefield where we can perform our healing work. The only way to do the job is to be here, in the thick of it.
Ripley Stroud
In a perhaps disappointingly conciliatory dénouement, Ian, I offer the following thoughts:
It seems right to say that what’s ultimately at issue is a disagreement about the method of philosophy — that is to say, whether it’s best done from the outside or from within. I must confess, however, that, unlike some others, I lack any strong commitments to the priority of one method over the other. I don’t think we’re ultimately failing to do philosophy if we ever ask these questions from within the historical lens, nor do I think we fail in our goals if we ever ask these questions from a temporally untethered view.
Rather, my suspicion would be that the question itself determines the relevant method — or, just as well, that both methods have their own virtues for revealing different angles of truth on the object of inquiry. Sometimes there surely is an eternal, unchanging truth of the matter that we can access from outside our particular temporal moment; sometimes there surely are contingent facts that we can only access from within that particular temporal moment.
That is to say, I think that we can sometimes occupy the “view from nowhere” — perhaps most obviously when we ask questions about, for example, whether there are many things instead of just one or are merely playing sandbox in logical space. But even when we ask questions about material social facts, I think we can adopt this stance, albeit — importantly — only temporarily. And I think this can perform important conceptual work for us; perhaps it gives us the idealized framework which we can then test against reality. (If we can determine the Platonic ideal of justice, for example, we have an isolated variable that we can then modify as needed in an unjust world.)
I’m wondering whether you think this is right (that both methods serve their own purposes), or if your line is a harder one: that we are irrevocably situated and that the view from nowhere is, perhaps, a noble lie.
Ian Tuttle
Ripley, I’m happy to accept your conciliatory gesture, but I suspect it does not go to the heart of the matter. You might say that, even enjoying a “view from nowhere” that affords us a proper perspective on ongoing historical processes, those processes could still prove to be — to quote your opening letter — “boring.” So, reverting to that letter, let me try one more time to make my case.
You might know the famous lines, from Virginia Woolf’s essay “Mr. Bennett and Ms. Brown”: “[O]n or about December, 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.”
Woolf admittedly overstates her case (and clearly enjoys doing so), but I think she is describing a real phenomenon: there are events that act as thresholds in human consciousness — before and after. I don’t know about December 1910, but I might well put forward August 1945, when atomic weapons were deployed in war for the first (and, to date, last) time. At that moment, something became possible — the destruction of the human species by our own hand — that had not been possible before, and a certain anxiety settled into human consciousness that had not been present before. (This is why the war for Ukraine, overhung by the specter of nuclear weapons, was from the very beginning a “world war.”) Something similar happened in October 1492. The most important of these dates is, of course, the one by which we arrange our calendar.
I don’t believe these to be merely apparent variations. I share with you the commitment to human nature and to certain constants across times and cultures. But that nature is also refracted differently across different historical horizons, creating real, not just seeming, differences. Certain possibilities are present to us that were not present to Aristotle or Augustine, not merely because we have arrived on the scene later, but because the topography of the scene has changed in the interim.
Which means that we have challenges specific to our time, challenges that no one has ever confronted before or will confront again (although they may have their analogues in other epochs). And we must take them seriously — precisely because they are ours, and no one else’s.
My thanks to you, Ripley, for prompting this rich exchange.
For what it’s worth, while “boredom” is quite recent, “tedium” dates from the 1660s. And in French, Pascal can of course be relied upon for a rich usage of “ennui.” It may well be that such feelings are changed in character, or more common, but I would need more analysis than a single word to understand how or whether this is true.
I'm not sure where we got, but it was fun going there! I do like the idea of philosophy as somewhat objective in experience... or in conversation with us now, as we wander along. That's my view of theology, and it's helped me navigate what to take and what to leave of great thinkers in their contexts from where I read them in my own place and time.