Why ChomeTEMPORARY: contemporaneity as responsibility.
The present is the only time we are given. The past has already been; the future is not yet there. It is in the present that we place ourselves and our action. Is this enough to define us as "contemporary" men and women, or is being contemporary something different? Perhaps even better? Something that has to do with the quality of our action and the consequences of our actions on the reality of the world?
I know people who complain because their time is "unfortunately" worse than the past. They would have liked to live in another era and consequently live regretting what they have been denied. I then know others who live suspended in anticipation that this dis-graced (graceless) today will finally be followed by the future of fullness and beauty. If they could they would hibernate and thaw out in a few decades or centuries.
I know them, but I am sure that each of us can trace similar people in our circle of acquaintances. But there is more.
In fact, I believe that each of us can trace in ourselves from time to time the surfacing of this thought, this attitude toward reality. All evil and all good is already contained in us before it is contained in others. That is perhaps why we are so competent to recognize it.
This is not, it must be said, an attitude unique to our time. Philosophy and literature report countless reflections on this characteristic of the human. St. Augustine, for example, writes in the fifth century, "These are bad times, difficult times. So say men. Let us live well and the times will be good. We are the times! What we are, so are the times."
It is thus an attitude of the human, a "temptation" that is common to us all, in all times. In an age like ours in which the collapse of political and religious ideologies capable of pre-packaging a plausible "meaning" to living leaves Man's destiny to his own decision, however, this temptation becomes particularly acute and dangerous.
Its first consequence is in fact irresponsibility, our irresponsibility to reality. We call ourselves outside of it by observing it, and criticizing it, as if we were external to it, not involved in it. We even create a reality separate from the world, into which we make only ourselves or at most a small circle of people close to us fit, and that we take care of. Since, however, regardless of these "delusions," we are of the world, even our every inaction still becomes an action that we place in the world.
It is therefore no accident that our age has been called by some the "age of sad passions," an age in which the future is felt not as a promise but as a threat (Bensayag - Schmit). Many are the causes of this situation and it is not my intention to analyze them in detail.
Instead, I am interested in pointing out that among the various causes is this "saintly" (saint = separate), "disinterested spectator" attitude with which we participate in the world. The future is a threat insofar as we feel this future "other than us," and we feel it other precisely because we have excluded ourselves from it by enclosing ourselves in a completely self-referential alternative reality that we have created ad hoc to "feel" only ourselves.
The efforts we put forth in today to replicate identically the habits, patterns and experiences of the past are a way of separating ourselves from reality and tell of a distortion in our relationship with contemporaneity.
I am intimately convinced that living in the past, living by replicating the past and disregarding the present, is a way of denying the past, not celebrating it. Gustav Mahler said, "Tradition is keeping the fire alive, not worshiping the ashes."
The past is the place of our roots and the source of our knowledge. The past was alive in the men who created it with their lives. They made it, but often not "for them." Rather, I would dare say that the best things from the past always come from a creative drive, a striving toward the future, a desire to accomplish something that transcends today and oneself. To replicate the past today is therefore to make it a fetish, a dead idol. It debases us and betrays the spirit of those who bequeathed it to us so that we might make it alive in our time.
This is why living in the contemporary is so important. Living in one's own time is an act of responsibility to all Humanity, present, past and future. It is a receiving from those who have gone before us to give to those who will succeed us, having enjoyed it together with the men and women of our time.
By living in the contemporary we ferry the past and those who delivered it to us into a future that would not have been possible without us. To ferry the past is not to replicate it the same. It is instead to surpass it, being able to transcend it if necessary.
If instead, abdicating our responsibility, we reject the present and slavishly replicate the past, the future can only be a copy of what already was. And a copy is always and only a bad copy.
By Marco E. Tirelli - Senior Partner of Tirelli & Partners