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.
