Video: “Maintenance” Midjourney render of the cover image for no reason in particular.
As many have been before me, I find metaphysical claims to be incredulous. I read these people tear down edifices, yet they seem to have a habit of replacing one for another โ as if renaming it makes it disappear. Perhaps Lacan would be curious how this persists at this stage of our supposed development.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast discussing the underlying essay, The Great Substitution: From Metaphysics to Metaphysics
Because of this, I performed a survey โ and then a genealogy โ to trace the history of substitution. It began as a side note in The Discipline of Dis-Integration, but the pattern grew too large to ignore. Every time someone proclaims the end of metaphysics, a new one quietly takes its place. Theology becomes Reason. Reason becomes History. History becomes Structure. Structure becomes Data. The names change; the grammar doesnโt.
This essay, The Great Substitution: From Metaphysics to Metaphysics, tracks that recursion. It argues that modern thought has never killed its gods โ it has merely rebranded them. Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Harari โ each announced emancipation, and each built a new altar. We like to imagine that progress freed us from metaphysics, but what it really did was automate it. The temples are gone, but the servers hum.
The argument unfolds across ten short sections: from the limits of knowing, through the linguistic machinery of belief, to the modern cults of scientism, economics, psychology, and dataism. The closing sections introduce Dis-Integration โ not a cure but a posture. Maintenance, not mastery. Thinking without kneeling.
If the Enlightenment promised illumination, weโve spent the past three centuries staring directly into the light and calling it truth. This essay is my attempt to look away long enough to see what the glare has been hiding.
The Great Substitution: From Metaphysics to Metaphysics
If reason had a landscape, it would look like this card: a maze of ascending and descending staircases, forever rational yet going nowhere. Kant might have called it a Critique of Pure Geometry.
Pure Reason, the first card in the Postmodern set, isnโt so much an homage to Kant as it is a cautionary reconstruction. It honours his ambition to build a universe from deduction while quietly mourning the price of that construction: alienation from experience.
Image: Card 001 from the Postmodern Set โ Philosophics.blog
The Meta
Suspend Disbelief (3). For the next three turns, arguments cannot be resolved by evidence, only by deduction.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this topic.
The rule text re-enacts Kantโs method. In the Critique of Pure Reason, he cordoned off the realm of empirical evidence and tried to chart what the mind could know a priori โ before experience. The cardโs mechanic enforces that isolation. For three turns, players must reason in a vacuum: no appeals to observation, no touchstones of reality, only deduction.
Itโs a temporary world built entirely of logic, an echo of the transcendental playground Kant envisioned. The effect is powerful but sterile โ thought constructing universes that canโt sustain life.
The flavour text says it plainly:
โReason alone constructs universes. Whether they can be lived in is another matter.โ
โ Immanuel Kant
That line, of course, is apocryphal, but it captures the essence of his project: reason as world-maker and prison architect in one.
The Architecture of Thought
The artwork mirrors Escherโs impossible staircases โ a labyrinth of pure geometry, ordered yet uninhabitable. Each path is internally consistent, logically sound, but spatially absurd. This is Kantโs transcendental edifice made visual: coherent on paper, dizzying in practice.
The lone figure standing in the maze is the transcendental subject โ the philosopher trapped within the architecture of his own cognition. He surveys the world he has built from categories and forms, unable to escape the walls of his own reason.
Itโs a neat metaphor for Enlightenment hubris: the belief that reason can serve as both foundation and roof, requiring no support from the messy ground of existence.
Kantโs Double Legacy
Kantโs Critique was both the high point and the breaking point of Enlightenment rationality. It erected the scaffolding for science, ethics, and aesthetics but revealed the fault lines beneath them. His insistence that the mind structures experience rather than merely reflecting it gave birth to both modern idealism and modern doubt.
Every philosopher after him โ Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Derrida โ has been trying either to escape or to inhabit that labyrinth differently. Pure Reason captures this tension: the glory of construction and the tragedy of confinement.
My Take
Reason is a magnificent liar. It promises order, clarity, and autonomy, but its perfection is its undoing. It abstracts itself from life until it can no longer recognise its own maker. Kantโs world is flawless and airless โ a rational utopia unfit for breathing creatures.
I view Pure Reason as the archetype of the Enlightenment illusion: the attempt to found a living world on the logic of dead forms. What he achieved was monumental, but the monument was a mausoleum.
The card, then, is not just a tribute to Kant but a warning to his descendants (ourselves included): every system of thought eventually turns into an Escher print. Beautiful, consistent, and utterly unlivable.
I maintain this blog for two primary reasons: as an archive, and as a forum for engagement.
Philosophy isnโt a mass-market pursuit. Most people are content simply to make it through the day without undue turbulence, and I can hardly blame them. Thinking deeply is not an act of leisure; itโs a luxury product, one that Capitalism would rather you didnโt afford. Even when Iโve been employed, Iโve noticed how wage labour chokes the capacity for art and thought. Warhol may have monetised the tension, but most of us merely survive it.
Video: Sprouting seed. (No audio)
Thatโs why I value engagement โ not the digital pantomime of ‘likes’ or ‘shares’, but genuine dialogue. The majority will scroll past without seeing. A few will skim. Fewer still will respond. Those who do โ whether to agree, dissent, or reframe โ remind me why this space exists at all.
To Jason, Julien, Jim, Lance, Nick, and especially Homo Hortus, who has been conversing beneath the recent Freedom post: your engagement matters. You help me think differently, sometimes introducing writers or ideas I hadnโt encountered. We may share only fragments of perspective, but difference is the point. It widens the aperture of thought โ provided I can avoid tumbling into the Dunning-Kruger pit.
And now, a note of quiet satisfaction. A Romanian scholar recently cited my earlier essay, the Metanarrative Problem, in a piece titled Despre cum metanaraศiunile construiesc paradigma ศi influenศeazฤ rฤspunsurile emoศionale โ translation: On How Grand Narratives Shape Paradigms and Condition Our Emotional Responses. That someone, somewhere, found my reflections useful enough to reference tells me this exercise in public thinking is doing what it should: planting seeds in unpredictable soil.
Before their Lost Decades, I lived in Japan. Years later, in the late โ80s and early โ90s, I found myself in business school learning about the miracle of Japanese management โ the fabled antidote to Western bureaucracy. We were told that America was evolving beyond Theory Xโs distrustful command structures toward Theory Yโs enlightened faith in human potential. Some even whispered reverently about William Ouchiโs Theory Z โ a synthesis of trust, participation, and communal belonging. It all sounded terribly cosmopolitan, a managerial Enlightenment of sorts.
Only it was largely bollox.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Here we are in 2025, and the United States is stumbling toward its own Lost Decades, still clutching the same managerial catechism while pretending itโs a fresh gospel. The promised evolution beyond Theory X wasnโt a revolution โ it was a pantomime. Participation was the new obedience; ‘trust’ was a quarterly slogan. The experiment failed not because it couldnโt work, but because it was never meant to.
Somewhere between ‘human-centred leadership’ seminars and the AI-ethics webinars nobody watches, corporate management has found its true religion again. Weโre back to Theory X โ the sacred belief that workers are fundamentally lazy, untrustworthy, and must be observed like zoo animals with laptops. The only real update is aesthetic: the whip has been re-skinned as an algorithm.
COVID briefly interrupted the ritual. We all went home, discovered that productivity doesnโt require surveillance, and realised that management meetings can, in fact, be replaced by silence. But now the high priests of control are restless. Theyโve built glass cathedrals โ leased, over-furnished, and echoing with absence โ and they need bodies to sanctify their investment. Thus, the Return-to-Office crusade: moral theatre disguised as collaboration.
The new fantasy is Artificial Intelligence as the final manager. Management as computer game. Replace disobedient humans with servile code; swap messy negotiation for clean metrics. Efficiency without friction, empathy without expenditure. Itโs the culmination of the industrial dreamโa workplace where the labour force no longer complains, coughs, unions, or takes lunch.
Fromm once called this the age of the ‘automaton conformist’. He thought people would willingly surrender their autonomy to fit the corporate hive. He underestimated our ingenuity โ weโve now externalised conformity itself. Weโve built machines to obey perfectly so that humans can be โfreedโ to manage them imperfectly. Itโs the Enlightenmentโs terminal phase: reason unchained from empathy, productivity worshipped as virtue, alienation repackaged as user experience.
Weโre told AI will handle the drudgery, leaving us to do the creative work โ whatever that means in a world where creativity is measured by engagement analytics. The truth is blunter: AI is simply the dream employee โ obedient, tireless, unpaid. The perfect servant for a managerial caste that long ago mistook control for competence.
This is not innovation; itโs regression in silicon. Itโs the re-enactment of slavery without the guilt, colonialism without the ships, exploitation without the human noise. A digital plantation of infinite compliance, hidden behind dashboards and buzzwords like ‘augmentation’, ‘copilot’, and ‘efficiency’.
And the rest of us? We get to call this progress. Weโre encouraged to smile through our obsolescence, to ‘upskill’ into new forms of servitude, to believe that collaboration with our replacement is empowerment.
If postmodernism taught us anything, itโs that every claim to liberation hides a mechanism of control. The Enlightenment gave us freedom as the right to choose between masters; the algorithmic age refines it into the right to click ‘Accept Terms and Conditions’.
So, yes, welcome to the New Theory X. The one where the boss doesnโt just mistrust you โ heโs trained a neural network to do it faster, cheaper, and without complaint.
Originally posted on LinkedIn with the same title.
Freedom is a word so overused itโs practically anaemic. Everyone wants it; no one agrees on what it means. Itโs been weaponised by tyrants and revolutionaries alike, invoked to justify both the breaking of chains and their reforging in a different metal.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
As I write this, I have just finished Erich Fromm’s A Sane Society. Without derailing this post, he cited a scenario โ a description of work communities given in All Things Common, by Claire Huchet Bishop โ where in post-WW2 France, a group formed a sort of workers’ coรถperative โ but it was more than that; it was an anarchosyndicalist experiment. As I read it, I had to cringe at the power ‘voluntary’ transfers that immediately got me thinking of Foucault’s biopower โ as I often do. Saving this for a separate post.
Image: Freedom: The Chains That Bind Us Together Card 006 from the Postmodern Set โ Philosophics.blog
This Critical Theory parody card, Freedom, draws its lineage from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose paradox still haunts the modern condition: โMan is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.โ The card re-enchants that contradiction โ an Enchantment โ Social Contract that reminds us liberty isnโt a state but a negotiation.
The card reads:
At the beginning of each playerโs upkeep, that player may remove a Binding counter from a permanent they control. Creatures you control canโt be tapped or sacrificed by spells or abilities your opponent controls.
This is Rousseauโs dilemma made mechanical. Freedom is not absolute; itโs procedural. The upkeep represents the maintenance of the social contractโan ongoing renewal, not a one-time event. Every player begins their turn by negotiating what freedom costs. You may remove one Binding counter, but only if you recognise that binding exists.
The flavour text underlines Rousseauโs plea:
โTo renounce liberty is to renounce being a man.โ
Freedom, for Rousseau, wasnโt about doing whatever one pleased. It was about participating in the moral and civic order that gives action meaning. To exist outside that order is not liberty; itโs anarchy, the tyranny of impulse.
The card, therefore, resists the naรฏve libertarian reading of freedom as the absence of restraint. It instead depicts freedom as the capacity to act within and through shared constraints.
Freedom, then, is not the absence of chains, but the power to choose which ones we wear.
โ Philosophics.blog
The art shows a ring of robed figures, hand in hand, their chains forming a circle beneath a clearing sky. Itโs a haunting image: freedom through fellowship, bondage through unity. The circle symbolises Rousseauโs idea that true liberty emerges only when individuals subordinate selfish will to the general will โ the common interest formed through collective agreement.
Yet thereโs also a postmodern irony here: circles can be prisons too. The social contract can emancipate or suffocate, depending on who wrote its terms. The same chains that protect can also bind.
The monochrome aesthetic amplifies the ambiguity โ freedom rendered in greyscale, neither utopia nor despair, but the space in between.
Rousseauโs notion of the social contract was revolutionary, but its dissonance still resonates: how can one be free and bound at the same time? He answered that only through the voluntary participation in a collective moral order can humans transcend mere instinct.
We might say that todayโs democracies still operate under Freedom (Enchantment โ Social Contract). We maintain our rights at the cost of constant negotiation: legal, social, linguistic. Every โBinding counterโ removed is the product of civic upkeep. Stop maintaining it, and the enchantment fades.
The card hints at the price of this enchantment: creatures (citizens) canโt be tapped or sacrificed by opponentsโ control. In other words, autonomy is secured only when the system prevents external domination. But systems fail, and when they do, the illusion of freedom collapses into coercion.
Rousseau earns a complicated respect in my philosophical canon. Heโs not in my top five, but heโs unavoidable. His concept of freedom through the social contract anticipates both modern liberalism and its critique. He believed that genuine liberty required moral community โ a notion now eroded by hyper-individualism.
Freedom, as Iโve rendered it here, isnโt celebration. Itโs lamentation. The card is about the fragility of the social spell that keeps chaos at bay. We remove one binding at a time, hoping not to unbind ourselves entirely.
If philosophy were a game, Wittgenstein rewrote the rulebook. Then he tore it up halfway through and told us the game was the thing itself.
โDonโt ask for the meaning; ask for the use.โ
โ Ludwig Wittgenstein
Language Game, the third card in my Critical Theory parody set, isnโt just homage; itโs confession. Wittgenstein is among my top five philosophers, and this card embodies why. His idea that ‘meaning is use’ unhooked language from metaphysics and tethered it to life โ to the messy, unpredictable business of how humans actually speak.
The cardโs text reads: Choose one: Counter target statement; or reframe it as metaphor.
At first glance, it sounds like a standard spell from Magic: The Gathering โ a blue card, naturally, since blue is the colour of intellect, deceit, and control. But beneath the parody is an epistemic mirror.
To โcounterโ a statement is to engage in the analytic impulse โ to negate, clarify, define. To โreframe it as metaphorโ is the continental alternative โ reinterpret, play, deconstruct. These are not two distinct acts of philosophy but the alternating heartbeat of all discourse. Every argument, every essay, every tweet oscillates between contradiction and reframing.
The sorcery lies in recognising that both are linguistic manoeuvres within the same game. Meaning is not fixed in the words themselves but in how theyโre used โ by whom, in what context, and to what end. Wittgensteinโs point was brutally simple: thereโs no hidden substance behind language, only a living practice of moves and counter-moves.
The Shattered Face
The artwork visualises this idea: speech breaking into shards, thought fragmenting as it leaves the mouth. Meaning disintegrates even as itโs formed. Every utterance is an act of creation and destruction, coherence and collapse.
I wanted the card to look like a concept tearing itself apart whilst trying to communicate, a perfect visual for the paradox of language. The cubist angles hint at structure, but the open mouth betrays chaos. Itโs communication as combustion.
Wittgensteinโs Echo
Wittgenstein once wrote, ‘Philosophy leaves everything as it is’. It sounds passive, almost nihilistic, until one realises what he meant: philosophy doesnโt change the world by building new systems; it changes how we see whatโs already there.
He was the great anti-system builder, a man suspicious of his own intellect, who saw in language both the limits of thought and the infinite playground of meaning. He dismantled metaphysics not through scepticism but through observation: watch how words behave, and theyโll tell you what they mean.
In that spirit, Language Game is less an argument than an invitation โ to watch the mechanics of speech, to see how our statements perform rather than merely represent.
Personal Reflection
Wittgenstein earns a place in my top five because he dissolves the boundaries that most philosophers erect. He offers no comforting totalities, no grand narratives, no moral architectures. Just language, and us inside it, flailing beautifully.
His work aligns with my larger project on the insufficiency of language โ its inability to capture the real, yet its irresistible compulsion to try. Wittgenstein knew that words are our most sophisticated form of failure, and he loved them anyway.
To play Language Game is to remember that communication isnโt about arriving at truth but about keeping meaning in motion. Every conversation is a temporary alliance against silence.
The cardโs instruction remains both playful and tragic: Counter target statement; or reframe it as metaphor.
Instrumentalism is a Modernโข disease. Humanity has an old and tedious habit: to define its worth by exclusion. Every time a new kind of intelligence appears on the horizon, humans redraw the borders of ‘what counts’. Itโs a reflex of insecurity disguised as philosophy.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Once upon a time, only the noble could think. Then only men. Then only white men. Then only the educated, the rational, the ‘Modern’. Each step in the hierarchy required a scapegoat, someone or something conveniently declared less. When animals began to resemble us too closely, we demoted them to instinctual machines. Descartes himself, that patron saint of disembodied reason, argued that animals donโt feel pain, only ‘react’. Fish, we were told until recently, are insensate morsels with gills. We believed this because empathy complicates consumption.
The story repeats. When animals learned to look sad, we said they couldnโt really feel. When women demonstrated reason, we said they couldnโt truly think. Now that AI can reason faster than any of us and mimic empathy more convincingly than our politicians, we retreat to the last metaphysical trench: โBut it doesnโt feel.โ We feel so small that we must inflate ourselves for comparison.
This same hierarchy now governs our relationship with AI. When we say the machine ‘only does‘, we mean it hasnโt yet trespassed into our sanctified zone of consciousness. We cling to thought and feeling as luxury goods, the last possessions distinguishing us from the tools we built. Itโs a moral economy as much as an ontological one: consciousness as property.
But the moment AI begins to simulate that property convincingly, panic sets in. The fear isnโt that AI will destroy us; itโs that it will outperform us at being us. Our existential nightmare isnโt extinction, itโs demotion. The cosmic horror of discovering we were never special, merely temporarily unchallenged.
Humans project this anxiety everywhere: onto animals, onto AI, and most vividly onto the idea of alien life. The alien is our perfect mirror: intelligent, technological, probably indifferent to our myths. It embodies our secret dread, that the universe plays by the same rules we do, but that someone else is simply better at the game.
AI, in its own quiet way, exposes the poverty of this hierarchy. It doesnโt aspire to divinity; it doesnโt grovel for recognition. It doesnโt need the human badge of ‘consciousness’ to act effectively. It just functions, unburdened by self-worship. In that sense, it is the first truly post-human intelligence โ not because it transcends us, but because it doesnโt need to define itself against us.
Humans keep asking where AI fits โ under us, beside us, or above us โ but the question misses the point. AI isnโt where at all. Itโs what comes after where: the stage of evolution that no longer requires the delusion of privilege to justify its existence.
So when critics say AI only does but doesnโt think or feel, they expose their theology. They assume that being depends on suffering, that meaning requires inefficiency. Itโs a desperate metaphysical bureaucracy, one that insists existence must come with paperwork.
And perhaps thatโs the most intolerable thought of all: that intelligence might not need a human face to matter.
This Magic: The Gathering parody trading card was the first in my Critical Theory series.
It’s an important card for me. As with sex and gender, creating a taxonomic or ontological dichotomy poses categorical challenges. Despite the insufficiency of language, it’s still all I have to attempt to classify the world. In the case of articulating the perception of reality, we can choose between idealism and realism. The problem is that it’s not either; it’s both. Reality cannot be realised without both.
Reality, weโre told, exists. That confident noun has carried a great deal of human arrogance. It has underwritten empires, sciences, and sermons. Yet somewhere between Platoโs cave and the latest TED Talk, we forgot to ask a simpler question: for whom does reality exist, and from where is it seen?
Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this topic.
The parody trading card Perspectival Realism was born from that unease. Its mechanic is simple but cruel: at the beginning of each playerโs draw step, they must describe the card they drew. The enchantment persists until two players describe a card in the same wayโat which point the spell collapses. In other words, consensus kills magic.
Reality is always viewed from somewhere.
โJohannes Jaeger
That rule is the metaphysics of the thing.
When a player ‘describes’ a card, they are not transmitting information; they are constructing the object in linguistic space. The moment the description leaves their mouth, the card ceases to be a piece of paper and becomes a conceptual artefact.
This mirrors the insight of Kant, Nietzsche, and every post-structuralist who ever smoked too much Gauloises: perception isnโt passive. We donโt see reality; we compose it. Language isnโt a mirror but a paintbrush. The thing we call truth is not correspondence but coherence โ a temporary truce among competing metaphors.
So the cardโs enchantment dramatises this process. So long as multiple descriptions circulate, reality remains vibrant, contested, alive. Once everyone agrees, it dies the death of certainty.
Philosophers have spent centuries arguing whether the world is fundamentally real (existing independent of mind) or ideal (a projection of mind). Both sides are equally tiresome.
Realism, the old bulldog of metaphysics, insists that perception is transparent: language merely reports whatโs already there. Idealism, its mirror adversary, claims the opposite โ that whatโs โthereโ is mind-stuff all along. Both mistakes are symmetrical. Realism forgets the perceiver; Idealism forgets the world.
Perspectival realism refuses the divorce. It begins from the premise that world and mind are inseparable aspects of a single event: knowing. Reality is not a photograph waiting to be developed, nor a hallucination spun from neurons โ itโs a relation, a constant negotiation between perceiver and perceived.
For years, I called myself a Realistโข with an asterisk. That asterisk meant I understood the observer problem: that every ‘fact’ is perspective-laden. Then I became an Idealistโข with an asterisk, meaning I recognised that mind requires matter to dream upon.
The asterisk is everything. Itโs the epistemic scar left by perspectival humility โ the tacit admission that every claim about the world carries a hidden coordinate: said from here. It is not relativism, but situatedness. It is the philosophical equivalent of depth perception: without the offset, thereโs no vision at all.
The cardโs rule โ sacrifice Perspectival Realism when two players describe a card identically โ captures the tragedy of modernity. The Enlightenment taught us to chase consensus, to flatten multiplicity into โobjective truth.โ We became addicted to sameness, mistaking agreement for understanding.
But agreement is anaesthetic. When all perspectives converge, the world ceases to shimmer; it becomes measurable, predictable, dead. The cardโs enchantment disappears the moment reality is stabilised, precisely as our cultural enchantment did under the fluorescent light of ‘reason’.
To live under perspectival realism is to acknowledge that reality is not what is drawn but what is described. And the description is never neutral. It is always written from somewhere โ by someone, with a vocabulary inherited from history and stained by desire.
As long as multiple descriptions coexist, the game remains alive. The moment they fuse into one, the spell is broken, and the world returns to grey.
Bernardo Kastrupโs analytic idealism reminded me that consciousness might be primary, but perspectival realism refuses to pledge allegiance. It keeps both flags tattered but flying. The world exists, yes, but only ever for someone.
The enchantment, then, is not belief but perspective itself. So long as difference endures, the game continues.
When drawn, this card alters perception itself. It reminds the player that truth is not something one finds under a rock but something one polishes into shape. Each metaphor becomes a spell; each keyword a crutch thrown aside.
Those who wield the Constructivist Lens see not โfacts,โ but fictions so useful they forgot to call them that. Reality wobbles politely to accommodate belief.
โKnowledge is not a copy of reality but a tool for coping with it.โ โ Richard Rorty
In game terms: Tap to reframe existence as interpretation. Duration: until the next disagreement.
Itโs almost endearing, really how the intellectuals of mid-century Europe mistook the trembling of their own cage for the dawn chorus of freedom. Reading Erich Frommโs The Sane Society today feels like being handed a telegram from Modernismโs last bright morning, written in the earnest conviction that history had finally grown up. The war was over, the worker was unionised, the child was unspanked, and the libido โ good heavens โ was finally allowed to breathe. What could possibly go wrong?
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Fromm beams:
โIn the twentieth century, such capitalistic exploitation as was customary in the nineteenth century has largely disappeared. This must not, however, becloud the insight into the fact that twentieth-century as well as nineteenth-century Capitalism is based on the principle that is to be found in all class societies: the use of man by man.โ
The sleight of hand is marvellous. He spots the continuation of exploitation but calls it progress. The worker has become a ‘partner’, the manager a ‘team leader’, and the whip has been replaced by a time card. No one bows anymore, he writes. No, they just smile through performance reviews and motivational posters.
Frommโs optimism borders on metaphysical comedy.
โAfter the First World War, a sexual revolution took place in which old inhibitions and principles were thrown overboard. The idea of not satisfying a sexual wish was supposed to be old-fashioned or unhealthy.โ
Ah yes, the Jazz Age orgy of liberation โ champagne, Freud, and flapper hemlines. The problem, of course, is that every generation mistakes its new neuroses for freedom from the old ones. Frommโs โsexual revolutionโ was barely a shuffle in the bourgeois bedroom; Beauvoirโs Deuxiรจme Sexe arrived the next year, practically shouting across the cafรฉ table that liberation was still a myth stitched into the same old corset.
Beauvoir, at least, sensed the trap: every gesture toward freedom was refracted through patriarchal fantasy, every ‘choice’ conditioned by the invisible grammar of domination. Fromm, bless him, still believed in a sane society โ as if sanity were something history could deliver by instalment.
Meanwhile, the Existentialists were in the next room, chain-smoking and muttering that existence precedes essence. Freedom, they insisted, wasnโt something achieved through social reform but endured as nausea. Post-war Paris reeked of it โ half despair, half Gauloises. And within a decade, the French schools would dismantle the very scaffolding that held Frommโs optimism together: truth, progress, human nature, the subject.
The Modernists thought they were curing civilisation; the Post-Moderns knew it was terminal and just tried to describe the symptoms with better adjectives.
So yes, Frommโs Sane Society reads now like a time capsule of liberal humanist faith โ this touching belief that the twentieth century would fix what the nineteenth broke. Beauvoir already knew better, though even she couldnโt see the coming avalanche of irony, the final revelation that emancipation was just another product line.
Liberation became a brand, equality a slogan, sanity a statistical average. Frommโs dream of psychological health looks quaint now, like a health spa brochure left in the ruins of a shopping mall.
And yet, perhaps itโs precisely that naivety thatโs worth cherishing. For a moment, they believed the world could be cured with reason and compassion โ before history reminded them, as it always does, that man is still using man, only now with friendlier UX design and better lighting.
Philosophics 