(Wordplay with the term “Occident” (the West) and the Italian verb “uccidere,” which can be translated as “to kill” or “to murder”).
If one wanted to express with the immediate power of images the condition of the current West at the mercy of nihilism and, to put it à la Hegel, of the “fury of disappearing” (Furie des Verschwindens), there would be no more appropriate work to refer to than The Parable of the Blind (1568) by Pieter Bruegel.
As we know, Bruegel’s painting translates into images the Gospel parable (Mt 15:14) of the blind man who guides another blind man: “They are blind guides. And when one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit!” The leaderless, thoughtless, and totally short-sighted overcoming of limits and just measure, accompanied by the false myth of infinite growth and the destruction of beings in their integrity, feeds, in the time of the “night of the world,” a condition analogous to that depicted by Bruegel, in which humanity, blindly following the false idols and false guides of the society of market fanaticism—themselves blind—is rushing into the abyss. The loss of a framework of values, the forgetting of Being, the desacralization of the world, and the fury of the will to power, which empowers without limits, constitute today the heterogeneous constellation, but no less unified in its meaning, within which the decline of the West is consummated, its ruinous and blind march toward the precipice.
The interpretation of the West as the “land of the setting sun” is, in effect, a genuine literary τόπος (tópos—place) that has been deeply rooted in our civilization for some time. The East as the land of the dawn (ex oriente lux) is often contrasted with the West as a twilight condition. Even clearer than our languages, where the connection with “decline” (occasum) also occurs, is the German language, which calls the West Abendland, literally “land of the night.”
The theme, already clearly developed by Nietzsche through the mise en forme of the categories of decadence and nihilism, only became a popular leitmotiv with the publication, between 1918 and 1922, of The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, a profound study which, not without a certain dilettantism, has the double merit of transforming the question into a horizon of meaning (if not shared, certainly discussed in all latitudes) and of reflecting on the causes and modalities of this decline of our civilization. Apart from the many intrinsically problematic and unshareable aspects of Spengler’s analysis (in primis his perception of democracy itself as a symptom of decline and his superficial, if not far-fetched, analysis of socio-economic conditions), the merit of his work cannot be denied.
Every civilization, including our own, is said to be very similar to an organism, endowed with birth, development, and death, according to what Spengler himself calls the “organic logic of becoming” (organische Logik des Werdens). And Hegel, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, had already shown that, on the plane of history as the “world court” (Weltgericht) and as the temporal space for the realization of the Idea, each people and each civilization, once it has fulfilled its own mission of realizing the Spirit, hands over the baton and, like the cosmic-historical heroes, falls like an empty shell used by the “cunning of reason”: “a people cannot go through more stages, it cannot make history twice in world history.”
Hegelianly, world or universal history (Weltgeschichte) would essentially be a history of peoples, each of which offers its own specific contribution to the implementation of the universal end. More precisely, “each cosmic-historical people has been entrusted with the mission of representing a principle”; once this has been accomplished, the people in question hands over to the next the scepter of the function of temporary representative of the “World Spirit” (Weltgeist). As with heroes, each people and each civilization believes that it contributes solely to its own development when, in reality, it operates secretly, without being aware of it, on behalf of the progress of humanity as a whole, in accordance with the logic of the immanent providence of the “cunning of reason” (List der Vernunft): “the fruit becomes seed again, but seed for another people, to bring this to maturity.”
As a seismograph of the vitality and decline of civilizations, Spengler uses the conceptual pair Kultur and Zivilisation to probe the stage at which the West finds itself: if Kultur coincides with vital, spontaneous, and creative “culture,” as exemplified extrinsically by Hellenic civilization, then Zivilisation, for its part, corresponds to a refined and artificial culture, exhausted and given over to consumption. Such is, in Spengler’s view, the condition of the West, whose transition from Kultur to Zivilisation reveals the indelible traces of its ongoing decline. As already noted, Spengler’s diagnosis seems acceptable in general terms, regardless of the particular hermeneutical solutions proposed in relation to the symptoms of decadence.
What, then, is this West whose decline has long been noted? What is its essence? This is an “eternal problem,” to use the Aristotelian expression—τὸ ἀεὶ ἀπορούμενον—relating to Being (Metaphysics, 1028 b 3). The West seems, first of all, to express a movement or, more precisely, a precise moment in the trajectory of human development: it is the late phase of maturity and the decline that precedes the old age of a humanity now tired of itself and of life. The image of the West as a movement of decline seems to directly recall a heliodromic vision of history, as in its supreme form, the Hegelian vision, according to which humanity is born in the East and, after having explored the rich range of its possibilities, sets itself in the West.
But alongside this dynamic image, the slogan “the West” also invokes the figure of spatiality and, notably, that of the West as opposed to the East, and therefore, first and foremost, of Europe as a synecdoche for the West itself. The spatial figure, however, seems extremely problematic today if we consider that the Westernization of the world—another possible name for globalization as a “passage to the West” (Giacomo Marramao) universally imposed on everything and everyone—has led to a saturation of the planet by Western logic, customs, and visions, with the flagrant paradox that the Japanese lands, which geographically belong to the Far East, embody the quintessence of the West in terms of Zivilisation and ordo mentis.
Therefore, intertwining the conceptual determinations examined so far, it could be inferred that the West initially represents a Kultur and, in the later stages of its development, a Zivilisation which, having emerged in the circumscribed space of European Greek thought and Christian theology, tends to saturate the space of the world and become all inclusive, forcing all other civilizations and cultures to assimilate the Western model of life and relationships. From the conquests of Alexander the Great, which made Hellenism the first globalization ante litteram, to the voyages of conquest that ushered in the Modern Age, the West presents itself as a restless civilization, dissatisfied with its spaces and vocationally projected toward the plus ultra of conquest and assimilation of the Other.
In its multiple and prismatic self-representations, the West has conceived itself under various paradigms: sometimes as the realm of the “concept” (Begriff) and, therefore, of that rationalization which, in the opinion of Weber in The Science as a Vocation (1917), represents the fil rouge (red thread or common thread) of our civilization, from Socratic philosophy to modern capitalist rationality; sometimes as the empire of freedom and the liveliness of ways of life, according to a τόπος–tópos–that steadily accompanies, like a basso continuo, the self-indulgent representation that our civilization has presented of itself, from The Persians by Aeschylus through The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu, to, once again, Hegel and his supreme systematization of that hermeneutic scheme: the West, therefore, as the realm of freedom, as opposed to the East, the homologated and indistinct space of despotism.
From this we can also deduce the West’s eternal need for the Other, for the East, in order to define its own profile by contrast. Following in the footsteps of the Hegelian Lectures on the Philosophy of History, the West is the land where the Spirit becomes increasingly aware of itself and of freedom as its fundamental determination, gradually universalizing this principle, according to the rhythm that goes from the Hellenic world, where few were free, to the Christian and modern world, where all—as human beings—are equally free. The “Spirit of the World” (Weltgeist), which notoriously never rests, induces progress, with the modern, wearing seven-league boots; and accelerates the process of universalizing freedom following the maxim motus in fine velocior—movement is faster at the end. This dynamic can be seen most clearly again in contrast to the East, petrified in its given conditions and condemned to know nothing but the freedom of one—the despot—who, precisely for this reason, does not even make his sole and exclusive holder free, since he lacks the relationship of recognition with the Other. In Hegel’s view, in Eastern lands, characterized by open spaces and plains, the “stationary element” prevails on all fronts—from politics to society, from history to economics—(das Statarische), according to the persistent ancient Western cliché that can be traced back at least to Aeschylus’s The Persians, and which was to be emphatically revived by Machiavelli, among others, and later by Herder in his Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1791), where he compares Eastern immobility to a long “winter sleep.”
While in the East, in the grip of Asian lethargy, everything vegetates, imprisoned in a chronic paralysis that has lasted for millennia (embodied most emblematically by the horror of the caste system in which “everything is petrified in differences”), the West is distinguished by an unyielding dynamism, by an inexhaustible acceleration of the historical process that has no parallel anywhere else on the planet; and this is not only because of the French Revolution, which dismantled the old sociopolitical order, but also because of the Industrial Revolution, which in a very short time spread capitalist economic changes that reconstituted the fabric of modern society on new foundations.
The thesis that our study aims to uphold is that, without forgetting these assumptions and, even more so, what we were, we must now examine what we have become: the development of the West leads us to our present in which, paradoxically, some of the fundamental trends of our civilization are developed and fulfilled and, at the same time, precisely because of this fulfillment, they come into conflict with the very foundations of our culture. And so, if, on the one hand, today’s “Uccidente” realizes the techno-scientific vision of the entities of Cartesian modernity and thus ensures that turbo-capitalist nihilism takes up and applies a significant part of the premises and determinations of Western history and its destiny, it is also true that a difficult compatibility between Socrates and the civilization of the stock market, between Christ and the techno-scientific principle of universal usability, between the Greek λόγος –Lógos- and the barbed wire of concentration camps, the technical devices of total control and the comprehensive administration of life, or even between Greek temples and those that Jünger, in his 1932 essay on The Worker, had already identified as Werkstattlandschaften, the “workshop landscapes” of the technocapitalist order.
The West is in decline—or has already declined—but for reasons and with effects different from those suggested by Spengler. Attempting, at a glance, to illustrate in an impressionistic way the interpretation we intend to offer of the current decline of the West, we believe that this must be related to the advent and the logic of the development and deepening of modern “Technocapitalism”; an expression with which, as we clarify in our study La notte del mondo. Marx, Heidegger e il tecnocapitalismo (2019), we refer to the “system” (Gestell, in Heideggerian terms) founded on the binomial Capitalism and Technology, as it emerged with the epiphany of the modern and as it has developed throughout the course of the Neuzeit (Modern Age), until it has culminated in today’s omnipresent domination of a Technology and a Capitalism that have subsumed under themselves the totality of the real and the symbolic, transforming every entity—including, needless to say, human life—into a “fund” (Bestand) available for the nihilistic and self-referential doing of the unlimited self-empowering will to power. The different, and certainly mutually irreducible, considerations on technology by Heidegger and Severino, and on capitalism by Marx and Gramsci can, if brought into fruitful interaction, provide a combined hermeneutical framework for deciphering the decline of the West and the nihilism connected to the technical system and the commodity form. Intertwining the grammars of Nietzsche with those of Marx and Heidegger, “God is dead” (Gott ist tot!) when the global market and the technical apparatus saturate the world of life, causing the firmament to collapse and provoking the devaluation of values, the forgetting of Being, and the integral commodification of entities qua talis.
The thesis we intend to defend is that the decline of the West and the complete unfolding of nihilism, in both the Nietzschean (the devaluation of all values) and Heideggerian (the condition in which Being is no longer nothing) senses, must be placed in connection with modern technocapitalism and with the history of its development and its present fulfillment, in a context in which—with the supreme domination of the market and the valorization of value as a figure coessential to the will to power—all the foundational values of our civilization evaporate and vanish, and at the same time, Being is completely forgotten in favor of the reduction of entities to mere background that is available and manipulable, exploitable and calculable, organizable and reproducible according to the fury of excessive growth and the unlimited valorization of value.
It is in accordance with this hermeneutic perspective that we propose to call the West in its phase of decline and at the mercy of rampant nihilism “Uccident;” the term “Uccident” is not just a linguistic variatio or literary divertissement, but allows us to express in the clearest and most radical way the technomorphic and pantoclastic essence of the current Western civilization—or, rather, “uccidental”—making its profile even more clearly visible, which is already contained, at least in part, in the expression “Occident” itself and its direct allusion to occasum. Understood in this way, Uccident could be interpreted as the hyperbolic extrinsication of the West itself and its tendency toward decadence; a tendency that today finds its own maximum locus revelationis in the culture of nothingness that, in all latitudes, seems hegemonic in our civilization subsumed under the illogical logic of technocapitalism and its specific nihilism. The violation of everything inviolable, the demolition of every foundation, the desacralization of every figure of the sacred, and the annihilation of the eternal thus become the core prerogatives of the Uccident.
The death drive and exterminatory tendency of the Uccident are evident today in almost all areas: especially in relation to the entity as a whole, if we consider that, at the height of the forgetting of Being, every entity is exploited, manipulated, consumed, and destroyed in the name of the self-referential and nihilistic valorization of value and the unlimited self-empowerment of the technocapitalist system. With the syntax of Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, this determines “the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the massification of man, the predominance of mediocrity,” that is: the de-divinization and desacralization of the world, reduced to pure scientifically calculable and technically manipulable res extensa; the devastation of the ecosystem, exploited and annihilated in the name of valorization; the standardization and dehumanization of human beings, reduced to commodities among commodities and ultimately to be manipulated without measure (this is how the phenomenon of transhumanism should be understood); and, finally, the predominance of conformism and mediocrity characteristic of an era—our own—in which everyone calculates and no one thinks, and everything has a price but no longer has any value.
The techno-scientific conception of the entity, supported by the forgetting of Being, entails the possibility for man, himself governed by the Gestell, to manipulate and ultimately destroy any entity with a view to universal usability: the formula “uccid-ent” helps to understand this process, the culmination of ontological nihilism and Seinsvergessenheit (forgetting of Being). Not only the environment and animal life, but also human life itself escapes this dynamic: in the unfolding of global technocapitalist power, life itself is desacralized and degraded, mortified and despised, reduced to a mere appendage of the Gestell.
But the uccidental drive is also evident in relations with other civilizations, in the form of a technical imperialism that, de facto, coincides with the dynamics of capitalist globalization as the imposition of the technocapitalist model on the entire planet. The leadership and planning of this process are identified with American civilization, so that globalization and Americanization of the world are dialectically inverted into each other and could equally be expressed by the term “Anglobalization.” Globalization, understood in this way, coincides with that nihilistic impulse by virtue of which the liberal-Atlanticist and global-financial “Uccidente” “uccide” (‘kills’) and annihilates other civilizations and, more generally, the pluriversum of cultures that inhabit the planet, all of which will be equally considered illegitimate in their difference from the “uccidental” paradigm.
The essence of today’s “Uccident” is manifested in its self-destructive nihilism, but also in the “fury of disappearing” that our civilization has been zealously applying to itself for some time now, cutting off its own cultural, value, identity, and traditional roots, making a “tabula rasa” of itself and its own historical event. The Western drive of technonihilism is thus revealed as “oikophobia” (Roger Scruton), that is, as an idiosyncrasy against the οἶκος–oikos–that is, against one’s own “home” and one’s own historical belonging. In this sense, the practice of cancel culture – the highest phase of technonihilism—represents nothing other than this movement, intrinsically nihilistic movement of oikophobic cancellation of one’s own roots; so that the very expression that expresses this tendency—cancel culture—should be translated, rather than with the usual formula “culture of cancellation,” with the more precise and penetrating expression “cancellation of culture” in all its determinations.
Taking these fundamental determinations into account, it is necessary to review the decline of the West and, in turn, outline possible routes to escape from the Cave—the Platonic mission of philosophy as a practice of truth and liberation—and to rectify the course. Under this approach, as far as the “therapeutic” and practical part is concerned, our analysis will not follow in the footsteps of Spengler, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.
As far as the Spenglerian perspective is concerned, The Decline of the West seems to resolve itself in a gloomy and resigned fatalism rooted in the category of inevitability: for Spengler, in fact, every civilization, and therefore ours as well, is necessarily determined by the set of possibilities available to it from the beginning of its development, finding its very foundation in the necessity of destiny.
As for Nietzsche, the assumption of the Tod Gottes (death of God) and the advent of nihilism as the foundations of a possible rebirth for Supermen “faithful to the earth” and capable of reprogramming the “table of values” on new bases, leads to a mere utopia, a chimerical desideratum refuted by the effective reality that shows us, au contraire, how the death of God and the integral epiphany of nihilism also bring with them the successive death of man and an identical threat to all forms of life, as predicted in the novels of Dostoevsky (from Crime and Punishment to The Demons).
As for Heidegger—and later also Severino—his perspective of critical denunciation of the errancy connected to the civilization of Technology leads without solution to the dogma of fatalism and the aesthetics of inaction: to recognize that now “only a God can still save us” is to admit the disqualification of all redemptive praxis, which is itself redirected, on the other hand, under the domination of technically administered doing. In this sense, Heideggerian dogmatism—which returns, mutatis mutandis, also in the fatalism of the apparently opposite “negative dialectic” of Adorno—lends itself to being easily reabsorbed by the ideological discourse of the Uccidente and by its theorem of ne varietur (from the program of there is no alternative to the proclamation of the End of History): the radical critique of Technocapitalism as manifested in Heidegger and Severino, in Adorno and Galimberti, while recognizing the practical immutability of the system, thus ends up being dialectically inverted into its ideological glorification, if one considers that the system itself, although subjected to overwhelming disqualifications, is in fact reconfirmed in its fateful immutability and irremediable imperfection.
More plausible, then, seems the dialectical scheme opened up by Marx and further developed by the heterogeneous constellation of his disciples: from Gramsci to Bloch, from Lukács to Marcuse, authors who are undoubtedly different from one another, but united by the perspective according to which the capitalist West is and, at the same time, has a destiny, which is susceptible to transformation through the conscious action of an organized subjectivity. The difference between the technique of Heidegger and Severino, and the capitalism of Marx and Heidegger, rests above all on this delicate point: in short, Capitalism coincides with a Technique that is not unchangeable, but practically transformable, therefore not with an inescapable destiny in the manner of the Weberian “iron cage,” but with a specific historical figure, set in motion by the objectifications of the Spirit and, as such, transcendable by new and higher objectifications of the same. Understood in this way, technocapitalism can be freely interpreted in the manner of Plato’s gloomy cave, from which it is possible to escape once it has been understood in its contradictory nature and mobilized in the name of ennobling ulterior motives and daydreams of greater freedoms.
Courtesy: Posmodernia.
Featured: The Parable of the Blind, by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1568).
