The humanist tradition rests on an idea of the “human animal” that Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s classic Oration on Human Dignity highlighted with exemplary elegance. This view – already questioned by Machiavelli, and re-elaborated by great Italian thinkers through the centuries (Tommaso Campanella, Giordano Bruno, and Giambattista Vico, among others) – reemerges in twentieth-century philosophical anthropology: human animals have an indeterminate nature, and cultures shape it.
Around 1960, there is an outburst of essays and reflections on ‘the crisis of culture’, both by some pupils of Martin Heidegger (Hannah Arendt, Günther Anders, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Herbert Marcuse), and by some members of the Frankfurt School (first of all, Theodor W. Adorno). In the same year, Jacques Lacan tackles in his seminar Freud’s essay on Civilization and its Discontents. Just four years later, in 1964, Susan Sontag gives a new picture of culture in her Notes on Camp.
The openness to the world, the potentiality or virtuality highlighted as the ‘human condition’ by most of these authors, is not only a resource for human creativity. Our flexibility as humans is limited, our creativity can be put at the service of aggressive and deadly drives, our indeterminacy can become prey to new forms of exploitation. Today’s culture seems to oscillate between a desperate attempt at control, and a desperate desire to loose control. If nostalgia for a more balanced life of culture would be vain, culture cannot smoothen or hide its dark side, becoming pure entertainment. The price to pay would be a painful ‘return of the repressed’.
