Friday, March 10, 2006
(7:30 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Friday Afternoon Confessional: The End of Man
I confess that reading books from before the advent of "inclusive language" has made me nostalgic for the generic use of the word "man." No other word seems to be able to take its place, not exactly. "Humanity" doesn't work because it sounds like an abstract quality ("humannness"), and "humankind" is not much better in that regard. Many of the foreign students whose papers I sometimes edit have used the word "human" where "man" would normally be, but that's obviously not going to work. "Humans," too -- inadequate because plural, and besides, it sounds like one is speaking from the perspective of extraterrestrial visitors: "Surrender, humans!" No, none of those captures either the singularity or the concreteness of the word "man." "Man" implies not some generic quality of "humanness" that happens to have been expressed in some more or less arbitrary way -- no, it indicates this history, the world as it has actually happened. It has echoes for me of Paul's use of "Adam" and "Christ" to describe the two ways of counting humanity as one -- and notice here that I'm still using the terms I implicitly reject.I confess that the term "man" is not my own, not something that I can use with a straight face. That's why it's nostalgia: "What would it have been like to live in a world when one could refer to 'the history of man' without scare quotes?" I'm sure that in the books I am reading, which come from the 1960s and 1970s, they might not realize it yet, but even they can no longer use the term "man" without scare quotes -- and not just because feminism happened. It probably has something to do with losing empires, with having a whole generation mowed down in the trenches, with seeing the heartland of the intellect overrun by insanity. "Man is dead -- it is we who have killed him." Or else: "For as in Adam all die...."
But still -- how odd, that the intellectual culture of the 1960s and 70s is so nostalgic for me. In part, it's simply a factor of the books in the Davison Public Library. So much optimism that an intellectual culture of some quality could be transmitted to the masses. Some kind of break seems to have occurred since then -- too easy to blame the culture wars, though. I confess that I don't really know. Not really.
I confess that sometimes I feel like I'm running fumes, on these scattered remarks that I've read somewhere, these suggestions gleaned from the tacky prefaces to books I never ended up reading, the kind of thing that a particular reviewer in The New Yorker seems to have.... Wait! That's it! It's the evacuation of the "middle brow"! Like in philosophy -- we have Deepak Chopra or else Gilles Deleuze. Where, I ask you, is our generation's Albert Camus? What will replace existentialism as our philosophy for people who don't really have time for philosophy?
It's probably the exception rather than the rule -- the aftermath of the GI Bill. Now we're getting back to normal, a national culture that has to do with nothing but politics, politics in the most idiotic sense of the term ("Democrat" and "Republican" as the only ontological categories). I'll confess that I'm not helping. All I talk about is "national issues," as opposed to "local" ones. But in terms of intellectual culture -- what would it be like if people took more seriously the idea of keeping up with authors in their region? Chicago alone would provide more material than one could possibly keep up with -- but let's say a city the size of Milwaukee or Baltimore. There you would have a critical mass of people who could actually produce quality work. The problem would be convincing people that a local audience is "worth it." I confess that I wouldn't be willing to work my ass off just so that I could be well-known in Chicago.
I confess that this hasn't been a normal confessional.
I confess that the comment thread to this post is amazing.
