The Ethos of Voluptuousness – Internet, Fascism and Capitalism

Discussing the socio-cultural transformations brought about by the invention of the printing press, with its dizzying increase in the volume of books published and the amount of information put into circulation by the new invention, A. Gottlieb, in his work The Dream of Reason, wrote:

"When Ficino was born, the number of manuscript books in Europe could be numbered in the thousands, and access to these rarities was still relatively hard to come by. The volumes in libraries were often secured to their shelves with chains. But by the time Ficino died in 1499, presses were running at 200–300 sites in Europe and there were at least 10 million books in circulation. A private collector could easily own several thousand titles. Gutenberg had produced his famous bible from the first press with movable and interchangeable type in 1454 when Ficino was a young man. The result of this new technology was not only a deluge of books but the beginnings of mass literacy. Gutenberg and his fellow printers had literally freed the book from its chains.

At the start of the sixteenth century, the reading public was not only more numerous but also more diverse than it had been in the days when intellectual life was the province of the Church. The broadening horizons of Renaissance Europe and the patronage of businessmen, statesmen and wealthy ruling families had led to the formation of a more secular intelligentsia. A wide range of publications was churned out to satisfy every kind of literary appetite, from undemanding works like Aesop’s fables and Boccaccio’s steamy stories to scholarly editions of Greek mathematical works. Scientific and philosophical literature strayed away from the models that had served medieval monks and teachers and evolved new forms to meet the needs of a broader readership. Increasing numbers of works were written in vernacular languages rather than in Latin, and by the end of the sixteenth century the treatise and the essay were beginning to supplant the traditional academic format of the commentary. Modern philosophical literature–the writings of Hobbes and Descartes that are read today, for example–was just around the corner.

Aristotle and his commentators also benefited from Gutenberg’s revolution; Aristotelian works were much reprinted in the early sixteenth century and may have reached a larger audience than ever before. But it was too late. Although Aristotelianism was far from dead in many university faculties and religious institutions, history was already leaving it behind. The main impetus for what was coming to be known as the ‘new philosophy’ derived largely from Scepticism and Epicureanism, two of the old rivals of Aristotelian thinking that had been submerged for more than a millennium. Few intellectuals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries called themselves Epicureans or Sceptics. Yet it was these old Hellenistic philosophies, now widely available, that were pointing them in new directions.

Among the old works recovered in the late sixteenth century and translated into Latin were Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers, which included his biography of the first great Sceptic, Pyrrho, and books by Cicero that defended the milder form of scepticism once practised in the Athenian Academy. From such works people learned of philosophers who enigmatically and annoyingly refused to commit themselves one way or another. Such a philosophy naturally attracted some ridicule. In the 1530s, Rabelais jokily portrayed a fictitious ‘Pyrrhonian’ philosopher, Trouillogan, in his Gargantua and Pantagruel. Rabelais’ hero could not get a straight answer out of Trouillogan about whether or not he ought to get married, nor could he even find out whether this ‘philosopher’ was happily married himself:

Are you married? 

I think so. 

You were also married before you had this Wife.

It is possible.

Had you good Luck in your first Marriage? 

It is not impossible. 

How thrive you with this Second Wife of yours? 

Even as it pleaseth my Fatal Destiny. 

But what in good earnest? tell me: Do you prosper well with her? 

It is likely. 

But on, in the name of God: I vow, by the Burthen of Saint Christopher, that I had rather undertake the fetching of a Fart forth of the Belly of a dead Ass, than to draw out of you a positive and determinate Resolution.

It may have been funny when taken too far, but ancient Scepticism began to strike a sympathetic chord in the sixteenth century. There were, after all, bigger questions at issue in those days than the desirability of marriage, and a sceptical suspension of judgement did seem an appropriate response to some of them. All sorts of conventional certainties were being called into doubt by new discoveries in astronomy, geography, anatomy and other subjects. These doubts bred more doubts. With so many old ideas coming under attack, an intelligent person had to wonder how secure the new ones were. As the essayist Montaigne (1533–92) later put it: ‘Since Ptolemy was once mistaken over his basic tenets, would it not be foolish to trust what moderns are saying now?’

Faced with a profusion of new theories, a few defeatists claimed to reject all attempts to understand the world. One anti-intellectual diatribe published in 1526 went so far as to pronounce knowledge ‘the very pestilence, that putteth all mankind to ruine and hath made us subjecte to so many kindes of sinne’. Better, wrote the author, ‘to be Idiotes, and knowe nothinge’ than to have one’s head filled with pernicious ideas. But although such thoroughgoing scepticism was an understandable reaction to the plethora of ‘knowledge’ then on offer, it was a hard philosophy to stick to and nobody really did stick to it. (Even the author of this polemic later found all sorts of doctrines he could believe in.) It was more usual and more plausible to employ the weapons of Scepticism in a strictly limited way. Sceptical arguments were generally used to undermine outdated or overambitious claims to knowledge, not to attack all intellectual activity".

It is always an interesting and relevant thing to note – in this case, through this short but incisive excerpt – that some of the extremely current problems of modernity, such as the deafening and paralyzing profusion of information that is, at times, contradictory, at others difficult or of limited significance, so that it appears as "noise" or, rather, as a simple disturbance of communication channels, were already felt in the most primitive moments of the dawn of modernity. Thus, we see, as the author emphasized, that a very common and typical reaction to this situation of excess is its own negation through the self-affirmation of the individual's limitations, that is, the somewhat paradoxical transformation of the nausea and the cognitive and epistemological vertigo, which can only exist as a subjective phenomenon understood within the bonds of a given culture, into a fateful and absolute principle, an uncertainty that transcends the very principle of uncertainty. Now, this supreme subjectivation of the individual and of his limited, strictly phenomenal sensibility, which, being so supreme, ceases to be a simple subjectivation and becomes, perhaps bizarrely, an objectivization of subjectivity, is the very root of one of the most important pillars of modernity, which is Cartesian thought. Descartes objectivized his subjectivity, and in doing so he founded, in a certain way, modernity. Could he have affirmed his first certainty (cogito ergo sum) except above the abyss of this profound crisis and the even more supreme and first uncertainty that is subjectivity without ballasts, that is, the affirmation of a subjectivity that turns against all established knowledge and the edifying force of tradition? Clearly not. Both modernity and Cartesian thought suffer from the same problem: they stand above an abyss and they do not perfectly understand its nature.

This abyss is the true cogito ergo sum of modernity, its indelible first principle. Individual vertigo and nausea, above all when they arise in response to the chaos that is the outside world, are the most definitive sign that modernity is advancing rapidly, its unavoidable omen. The chaotic destruction of the objective parameters of tradition, through the incomprehensible and unpalatable excess brought about by the sudden advance of the productive forces, generating, therefore, a staggering flood of new ideas, new productions, new sensibilities, new trends, new cultures, always ends up transforming the individual itself into the supreme arbiter and enthroning their individual sensibility, conferring upon it the role of ultimate guide and the only light to illuminate the hostile darkness that is the deformed culture in its axiological near-schizophrenia. Thus, the same phenomenon that served as the basis for Descartes' thought reverberates throughout the modern period, its echo becoming ever louder and more triumphant as one hears the repetition of the "cogito ergo sum" hidden in things.

The truth is that, however much Descartes could frame the objectivized self-affirmation of his own subjectivity as a triumph of reason, this process of objectivization of subjectivity, as it has unfolded socio-historically since then, has meant the opposite, a negation of rationality and an elevation of the individual's appetitive forces – which is perfectly natural, since the rational element which was expressed in Descartes is nothing but a façade that hides the true meaning of this process of ever-increasing elevation and consecration of subjectivity over time. The triumph of the individual, with their subjectivity, over the external and objective forces of society, with its totalizing customs and its cold and demanding logic, could represent nothing other than a liberation of the subject from the tyranny of "practical reason", to use Kant's term, which also ends up being their liberation from the shackles of all truly independent reason, insomuch as the triumph of individual subjectivity and sensibility, in their socially disoriented affirmation of being, quickly becomes confused with an affirmation of the will that recognizes no external limits.

And so we arrive, therefore, at the logic of the market that prevails today and dominates all our cultural life: understanding it as a supreme objectivization of the subjective. Already the homo economicus has reduced reason to a mere tool, a simple slave to his appetite. Faced with the gigantic profusion of products and consumables, all that matters is to know what we desire, from which we can easily decide what to consume. There are no longer transcendental values: increasingly reality is reduced to the desire to consume, to consumption and the production of consumables. The logic of the market, consequently, is not, as has been stated, a logic of individual liberation, but the logic of the enslavement of the individual relatively to their appetite, the destruction of everything that exists outside of appetite and the appetitive universe, subjectively or objectively, and, by extension, the annihilation of objectivity itself, the erasure of objective reality. It is the supreme alienation of the human being because it represents the suppression of the activity of the highest parts of their soul.

It is an insurmountable dialectical counterposition: without the individual, with their subjectivity, there is no external reality, with its objectivity, and without the latter there is no former. It is necessary to understand that the "annihilation" of the external world promoted by the development of productive forces in capitalism is, therefore, nothing less than an abolition of the individual themself, the transformation of individuality and subjectivity into a standard criterion – therefore, into a common and indistinct substratum. True individuation, true subjectivity, increasingly disappear as apparent subjectivity and apparent individuation appear more and more as the measure of external reality. A clear example of this can be seen in fascist aesthetics: insofar as it seeks to diminish the importance of the individual in relation to the whole through the promotion of a subjective aesthetic effect (which, therefore, highlights the impression of the individual's subjectivity, while placing the external world as subject to this impression, as the result of this impression), fascist art destroys external reality itself and transforms internal, subjective, individualized and individuated – but externally standardized – reality into the measure of external reality, into the very image of external reality. In fact, the entire imagistic-ideological essence of fascism consists in this, in taking advantage of the voluptuous desire of the subject who has lost their connection with transcendental ethical-judicative parameters, due to the elimination of the external world, to seduce them through the offer of a new external reality that is their own transfigured inner reality.

When, in 1526, the author of the "anti-intellectual diatribe" cited by Gottlieb launched his attacks against intelligence, speculative activity and science, he was responding to the same kind of crisis of thought that, centuries later, would lead the Nazis and Fascists to turn against intellectuals and the progressive forces of science. The crisis of the external world, with the resulting overaffirmation of the individual, of individuality, of individuation, of subjectivity, always ends up turning against the individual themself because the feeling of disorientation caused by the absence of external reality is intolerable, and on the internet this dynamic, this phenomenon – or set of phenomena – makes itself present in an evident way. The attitude of the man who has witnessed the destruction of the external world, and who now finds only within himself the guiding criteria of reason and practical activity – what I call, in short, the "ethos of voluptuousness" –, is the most defining and fundamental characteristic of the web user, for it is this prevailing stance that establishes eccentric taste and subjective particularism as the measures of what is produced and disseminated in terms of culture. It is by elevating the individual, in their apparent freedom, to the ultimate decisory criterion that all the "irrationality" of the internet emerges. With its typically "schizophrenic" culture, the net gives expression to an advanced stage of destruction of external reality, and the impulse that should follow is an impulse of restitution of this external reality. What will happen? That is the mystery. Nobody knows.

Greco-Ludicism or Towards a Pedagogical Culture of Video Games

According to tradition, Aristotle used to give his lectures while walking through the gardens of the Lyceum. There is evidence, in fact, that this peripatetic teaching technique was common, at least in a limited way, in ancient Greek society. It should never be forgotten that the ancient "schools", being in no way educational institutions in the formal, modern sense of the term, were, in fact, rather associations of wise men and scholars who united not only due to common interests, but also to share a common social life, including by participating in regular communal meals, establishing reciprocal friendships and even marital and family ties between the relatives of the different members. It would be strange, therefore, to completely discredit what tradition has bequeathed to us about Aristotle's peripatetic custom, since in ancient pedagogy there was not yet a methodologically imposed separation of the body relative to the intellect. Indeed, the ancients understood very well that the body shares the moods of the soul and vice versa, and therefore understood that the modern pedagogical technique, which requires the student to sit for hours and hours while listening to the (often sterile) lecture of the teacher, is counterintuitive. They sensed that, in order to promote a state of mind suitable for learning, it was necessary to promote a bodily state equally suitable for this, and, verily, the activity of walking stimulates the physiological operations of the body, which in turn stimulate the intellectual operations of the mind. Throughout history countless were the individuals who have judged that the best way to think deeply about a given topic was by walking, and it would be totally absurd to think that the ancients ignored this. In the hodiernal school, on the contrary, the body is discouraged and, consequently, so is the mind. The student frequently sleeps during classes.

In addition to fostering a beneficial and simultaneous stimulation of body and mind, the peripatetic teaching technique also benefits from the "cinematic" effect of the fusion of the sonically communicated narrative with the alternation and succession of images promoted by the changes in perspective during the walk. Certainly, when enjoying the teacher's classes during the stroll through the Lyceum, the students had the impression that, besides taking part in an activity that was interesting, stimulating and pleasant in itself, in which the lecture was almost an extra component, the very set of stimuli that their mind and body, in a high state of synchronicity, received formed a moving, convincing and memorable experience that could easily be remembered precisely because it shares the mimetic characteristics that make cinema, opera and the theater artistic mediums so immediately recollectable, that is, the singular power of their images, their particularly strong imagistic character insofar as it expresses reality in motion and the very reality of movement.

Contemporary pedagogical "lectureism" therefore imposes an artificial distance between educator and student that is not only physical, as manifested by the number of meters separating the teacher, lecturing behind their desk, from the student sitting at the back of the room, but also mental and even spiritual. The hierarchy of age, social classes and academic titles creates a grotesque and extremely unpleasant abyss between the two groups of participants in the teaching-learning process owing to the fact that it is fundamentally anti-democratic, conservative (in a petty sense of the word) and inhibitory to full human development. Imagine, on the contrary, how accessible a mind as brilliant as Aristotle's would have been as the philosopher strolled through the gardens of the Lyceum, with his apprentices and associates following him at a distance as small as a few centimeters. Indeed, ancient pedagogy, whether peripatetic or not, possessed an attractive subjectivity that has completely disappeared in modern, conventional pedagogy, a way of preserving and stimulating the human element in teaching that has been contemporarily replaced by the bureaucratic automatism of scholastic processes regulated by agendas, precise time measurements, selection and admission processes, spatial and temporal distances, the freezing of - and almost total disregard for - the body etc. Precisely one of the things that ancient philosophers criticized (and rightly so) in their sophistic counterparts was, similarly, their "lectureism" motivated primarily by money. Foreshadowing a similar custom in the modern academic world, the admission fees for their lectures varied according to the financial capacity of the target audience, so that less comprehensive or more basic versions of the same class existed for less affluent audiences and vice versa. Pedagogical "lectureism" has always been recognized as an insufficient technique for true and thorough teaching. In fact, the very idea of ​​teaching, in a very distinct way, has always been totally identified with the ideas of dialogue and dialectics.

In this sense, it is worth seriously considering the capacity of video games not only to promote an environment conducive to dialectical activity, since the freedom of the game allows the learner a more intense creative activity and more daring in their actions, but also, by introducing the player into a ludic environment in which certain tasks or, at least, possibilities are established, to foster the organic union of thought and practice (the horizontal articulation) between the different participants in the pedagogical process. Undoubtedly, although it does not allow for the same excitement and stimulation of the body as is possible through physical activity, the electronic game allows participation in regular shared activities, enabling a recuperation of the democratic, communal, worldly, practical, dialectical, consistent, coherent and even familiar and domestic character of ancient "academic" pedagogy. The recreation and reproduction of a kind of Platonic Academy or Aristotelian Lyceum is entirely possible through the computer and the simulated reality that transpires in it, and the key concept to understanding how this would be possible is the idea of ​​"roleplay".

Undoubtedly, video games already have many educational applications today, especially because, by means of the fluidity and plasticity of programming, it is possible to create ludic systems that articulate different tasks, challenges and routines that, through repeated and constant practice, establish and reinforce processual learning in a formal and controlled environment that exists in the "real world", but, to recover a kind of teaching that resembles that which existed in the old "academies" and institutions of the classical world, it is necessary to go beyond the classroom environment (where, sometimes, games are used as pedagogical support objects) and completely liberate the ludic dimension of the electronic game from its vertical-institutional restriction. Thus, by subverting the passive and receptive logic of the traditional classroom in relation to the student, by their own creative activity, made possible by the horizontal, inventive, unsystematic and mutable reality of the experience (free from vertical constraints) of electronic games, exactly as it is felt when a child, in their free time, plays a video game outside of school, they spontaneously develop a relevant capacity that naturally translates to the "real world", once it is realized in the simulacrum. In other words, far more important than instilling in students the knowledge of the processes to be employed, or familiarizing them with systematic sets of tasks to be performed, is developing their creative capacity for innovation, something that can only be done when we grant them an autonomy and responsibility that the vertical and alienating experience of typical school teaching makes impossible.

This is where the inventive and liberating profundity of "roleplay" comes into play, its capacity to transpose the subjectivity of individuals and, in doing so, to salute them with an expansion of their noetic horizons that is both pleasurable and challenging. Make-believe is the best form of teaching because, after the matter-of-factly lived experience that, in its capacity to guide the individual, forces, through firsthand experience, the development of certain skills, it is the best approximation of this same lived experience, and the virtual reality of electronic games can greatly assist in the reproduction of this experience. For this, however, it is necessary to liberate, to some extent, the student from the teacher's tutelage and allow the very reality of the simulation, with its dynamics that approximate simulated reality (the object, rather than the subject, of simulation), to guide the student and teach what it has to teach through the concrete reality of experience. Thus, the teacher becomes a mere companion during the pedagogical process, an agent whose stature is almost equal to that of the student, because both place themselves below lived experience which, in the concreteness of the simulated reproduction of reality, becomes the true master, the true sage to whom both teacher and student bow their heads.

This elevation of simulation to the level of ultimate teacher and master offers great teaching potential that is already being exploited, for example, when airplane pilots train in flight simulations. But here the learning aspect, however much it obliges the subject to a certain creative activity and confers them autonomy, is limited to the apprehension of a specific technique or to the reproduction of what is fundamentally a set of techniques and technical skills. The capacity of the electronic game to transform itself into the true master and the true matrix of teaching, as life itself is, always has been, and always will be, falls far short of its full potential. To conclude by repeating the essential points: the Greeks knew that the great teacher of life is none other than life itself, and that all the teachers and instructors in the world are nothing more than companions and facilitators who try to clarify for us those messages and teachings that the great master, dispensing and indicating in her typically obscure and impenetrable language, merely implies and never explicitly states in a completely clear way; that the teaching-learning process occurs on both a bodily and a mental level, one being dependent on the other and vice versa; that true teaching – that is, preparation for the attainment of wisdom and virtue, as can be inferred, for example, from fragment number 65 of Democritus: "one must practice, not learning much, but thinking much" – cannot be taught in a classroom or through lectures, but rather must be learned through dialogue and dialectics, which can only exist and fully develop in the horizontal and permissive context of a spontaneous, informal reality that is not characterized by any type of arbitrary or institutional noetic control, and which bows its head before the teacher that is life, with its wisdom and mysterious ways.

(More or Less) Complete List of my Works

To make navigation easier (and also to draw attention to some cool things I've made), I'm adding here a more or less complete list of my works. Only works that I consider good enough to be read or played will be included. I'm also providing a brief description of each one below its entry.

I. Visual Novels:

My Last War (2026)

A 2-hour long experimental visual novel that aims to be a kind of modern version of a philosophical dialogue. It should, therefore, be read in the same way one reads a Platonic dialogue. Any literary criticism that one might wish to make of it that cannot, to some extent, be justly raised against the Socratic dialogues of antiquity is not worthy of being taken seriously and completely misses the point.

The Calculator (2026)

An adaptation of the first short story from my very small collection of three short stories.

II. Short Stories:

Três Contos/Three Short Stories (2019, translated into English in 2026)

A very small collection of short stories, all of which are intellectually significant in some way. The stories presented here deal with themes such as ethics, madness, science, philosophy, adultery, war etc.

III. Non-fiction:

A Filosofia na Obra de Machado de Assis (2024)

A long essay in which I discuss the role of philosophy in the work of Machado de Assis.

The Metaphysics of the Simulacrum: Essays on Digital and Contemporary Culture (2026)

A small book containing five short essays in which I discuss digital and contemporary culture, preceded by a brief foreword and a preface. These essays were previously hosted here, but now they're part of a single publication.

Greco-Ludicism or Towards a Pedagogical Culture of Video Games (2026)

A short article in which I criticize contemporary conservative pedagogy and demonstrate the usefulness of video games in the teaching-learning process.

The Ethos of Voluptuousness – Internet, Fascism and Capitalism (2026)

A short article in which I discuss what I have called the "ethos of voluptuousness" and trace its origin to the dawn of modernity.