Human Natures: Aristoi in Modernity Week 05

What can all this mean as a manifestation of the inner shape of personality and human essence in our time? The whole world of culture of course is something man does to himself—draws out of himself, aims toward, obeys implicitly as his own intimate voice to himself, and is thus fulfilled by regardless of how he is penalized or self-alienated by it. Culture is the domain of artifice man originates and grows out of his own human impulses, the realm of fabricated, spun “nature” over which he plays God; as little as he comprehends and controls his own obscure self, that much more will he be tyrannized by totalitarian and excoriating forms of culture. He lives in the bed he made: the logic of culture, no matter how perverse or pathological, is the unfolding of a people’s character, its inward self-fatedness. From Heraclitus through Hegel and Nietzsche, the sense that character is fate—that we can only become what we already implicitly are—has been the grim gospel of our most penetrating philosophers. Moderns, who illustrate this fatalism and self-desolation more perfectly than any other era, are, also by the logic of that fatalism, less willing to confront those ultimate philosophical truths—to see what their order means.