tantaman

The Liquefaction of Being: Materialism, Technology, and the Dissolution of the Self

Published 2025-12-21

In earlier essays I traced the education system and the kind of person it produces (an employable subject for “liquid modernity”) and materialism’s effect on human psychology (depression, loneliness, anxiety). This essay tries to answer which is downstream of what and if the causes of today’s ills are a combination of both.

Related:

Introduction: The Question of Causation

What is causing the epidemic of depression, anxiety, and loneliness that defines our age? The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman gave us the term “liquid modernity” to describe our condition—a world where nothing is solid, where identity is perpetual self-construction, where relationships are investments to be optimized and abandoned. But is liquid modernity a cause or a symptom?

The thesis of this essay is that liquid modernity is downstream of a deeper metaphysical operation: the technological-materialist reduction of being to calculable, manipulable resource. The self-as-brand, the human as “flexible” labor supply, the person as standing reserve—these require a prior philosophical move. You cannot liquefy what has essence. You cannot optimize what has intrinsic worth beyond utility. You cannot “brand” what is imago Dei.

Bauman’s liquidity presupposes that the self has already been stripped of essence, telos, and transcendent anchoring. The technological mindset, as defined by Heidegger, creates the conditions for liquid modernity—not the reverse. What follows is a genealogy of this reduction, tracing the pivotal shifts in philosophy, religion, economics, and education that culminated in our present condition, followed by an examination of the counter-traditions that resist this trajectory and the formidable obstacles they face.

Part I: The Genealogy of Reduction

The Medieval Anchor

Before tracing the dissolution, we need to see what was dissolved. The pre-modern self was not autonomous raw material but participated in a hierarchical cosmos saturated with meaning. Aquinas articulates the human as suspended between matter and divine:

“Man is not a mere body, but something composed of soul and body... the soul is in the body as containing it, not as contained by it.” —Summa Theologica, I, Q. 76, Art. 3

The human was imago Dei—an icon of transcendence, not manipulable substrate. Social roles were fixed, but this fixity was underwritten by ontological participation in eternal order. The self wasn’t “made” but received—vocation as calling, not career as self-construction.

The Baconian Turn: Nature as Standing Reserve (Avant la Lettre)

The first pivotal shift occurs with Francis Bacon, who explicitly reconceives knowledge as power over nature rather than contemplative participation in it:

“Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.” —Novum Organum (1620), Aphorism III

And more starkly:

“I am come in very truth leading to you Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave.” —The Masculine Birth of Time (c. 1603)

Nature becomes resource. This is Heidegger’s Gestell in embryo—but the crucial question is: if nature is standing reserve, what prevents the human (as part of nature) from becoming standing reserve too?

Descartes: The Mathematization of Being

Descartes completes the metaphysical operation by bifurcating reality into res cogitans (thinking substance) and res extensa (extended substance). The body becomes machine; animals become automata:

“I consider the human body as a machine... My thought compares a sick man and an ill-made clock with my idea of a healthy man and a well-made clock.” —Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), Meditation VI

The material world, including the human body, becomes calculable extension. The soul retreats into a Cartesian citadel, but this very move sets up its eventual elimination—for what work is left for the soul to do in a mechanical universe?

Newton and the Clockwork Cosmos

Newton’s mechanics completes the disenchantment. God becomes the clockmaker who winds the mechanism and steps back:

“This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” —Principia Mathematica (1687), General Scholium

But note: God’s role is now architectural, not participatory. The cosmos runs by laws. This is Weber’s “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) crystallizing:

“The fate of our times is characterized above all by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’” —Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation” (1917)

The Economic Translation: Labor as Commodity

The metaphysical reduction of nature to calculable resource finds economic expression. Adam Smith, despite his moral philosophy background, describes labor as abstract, measurable input:

“Labour was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased.” —Wealth of Nations (1776), Book I, Ch. 5

Labor becomes the universal equivalent—fungible, exchangeable, liquid. Marx saw where this led:

“Labour-power, a commodity sold by the worker himself... The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things.” —Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844)

The self enters the market as a commodity. This is the infrastructural precondition for liquid modernity’s self-as-brand.

Nietzsche: The Abyss Opens

Nietzsche diagnoses what happens when the metaphysical anchor dissolves:

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?... Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” —The Gay Science (1882), §125

Without transcendent grounding, the self must create itself ex nihilo—but Nietzsche saw this as the task of the Übermensch, not the last man. The last man, instead, fills the void with comfort:

“’What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?’—so asks the Last Man, and blinks.” —Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue

The last man is the precursor of liquid modernity’s subject: endlessly consuming, endlessly adapting, incapable of commitment because nothing is worth commitment.

Heidegger: Technology as Ontology

This is where the argument finds its philosophical foundation. Heidegger argues that modern technology is not merely instrumental but constitutes a mode of revealing being:

“Enframing (Gestell) means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve (Bestand).” —”The Question Concerning Technology” (1954)

Crucially, humans themselves become standing reserve:

“The forester who, in the wood, measures the felled timber and to all appearances walks the same forest path in the same way as did his grandfather is today commanded by profit-making in the lumber industry, whether he knows it or not. He is made subordinate to the orderability of cellulose.” —Ibid.

And this is not a choice but a destiny:

“The essence of technology is by no means anything technological... Technology is a way of revealing.” —Ibid.

The human becomes what Heidegger calls Bestand—resource on call, awaiting deployment. This is the metaphysical precondition for Bauman’s liquidity: you cannot “liquefy” a soul that participates in eternal order, but you can liquefy a standing reserve.

Bauman: The Liquidation Complete

Now Bauman’s analysis appears as consequence, not cause:

“In a liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change—as they surely will.” —Liquid Love (2003)

The self becomes entrepreneurial project:

“Liquid life is a precarious life, lived under conditions of constant uncertainty... The most acute and stubborn worry is the fear of being caught napping, of failing to catch up with fast-moving events, of being left behind.” —Liquid Life (2005)

And identity becomes performance:

“If the modern ‘problem of identity’ was how to construct an identity and keep it solid and stable, the postmodern ‘problem of identity’ is primarily how to avoid fixation and keep the options open.” —From Pilgrim to Tourist (1996)

This is only possible if the self already lacks metaphysical anchoring—if it is already standing reserve awaiting optimization.

Byung-Chul Han: Self-Exploitation

Han extends this analysis to show that liquid modernity’s achievement-subject doesn’t experience external coercion but self-exploitation:

“The achievement-subject exploits itself until it burns out. In this, it develops auto-aggression that often enough escalates into the violence of self-destruction. The project is self-generating: it has made itself into the arrow, the bow, and the target.” —The Burnout Society (2010)

And crucially, linking this to the technological reduction:

“The late-modern achievement-subject does not submit to any authority. Indeed, the subject does not even know one. It is its own entrepreneur. The achievement-subject exploits itself until it burns out.” —Ibid.

The self, having become standing reserve, turns the optimizing gaze upon itself. Depression and burnout result not from oppression but from the impossibility of ever being “enough”:

“Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity... It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.” —Ibid.

Charles Taylor: The Buffered Self

Taylor provides the genealogical synthesis in A Secular Age (2007), showing how we moved from a “porous” self—permeable to spiritual forces, embedded in cosmic order—to a “buffered” self:

“The buffered self is essentially the self which is aware of the possibility of disengagement... We have moved from a world in which the place of fullness was understood as unproblematically outside or ‘beyond’ human life, to a conflicted age in which this construal is challenged by others which place it within human life.”

The buffered self is both empowered (invulnerable to enchantment, autonomous) and unmoored (cut off from transcendent sources of meaning). This buffering is the psychological correlate of the metaphysical operation: once the human is mechanism plus ghost, the ghost can be “buffered” from the cosmos, but also from meaning, connection, and purpose.

Educational Expression: Newman vs. the Modern University

This metaphysical shift expressed itself institutionally. Newman’s Idea of a University (1852) articulated education as formation:

“Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman—it is well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect... but it is something higher still to be a good man.”

Compare the contemporary university, which produces human capital:

“Higher education is increasingly viewed as a major engine of economic development... its role is to produce workers who can compete in the global economy.” —The European Higher Education Area (Bologna Declaration framework, 1999)

Education shifts from paideia (soul formation) to Bildung (self-development) to Ausbildung (skill training) to finally “human capital investment.” The student becomes standing reserve, optimizing herself for deployment.

The Causal Architecture

The trajectory is now clear. Liquid modernity is downstream of the technological-materialist reduction. The causal architecture:

  1. Metaphysical shift: The cosmos is disenchanted; matter becomes calculable extension (Descartes, Newton, Bacon)

  2. Ontological consequence: Being is revealed as standing reserve; nature (including human nature) awaits ordering and optimization (Heidegger’s Gestell)

  3. Economic infrastructure: Labor becomes commodity; the self enters the market (Smith, Marx)

  4. Religious/meaning collapse: Transcendent anchoring dissolves; the void must be filled by self-creation (Nietzsche)

  5. Sociological expression: Solid modernity’s institutions dissolve into liquid modernity’s flux; the self becomes project (Bauman)

  6. Psychological result: The achievement-subject, unable to ever be “enough,” exhausts itself in endless self-optimization (Han)

Materialism is foundational; liquid modernity is epiphenomenal. The depression, anxiety, and loneliness epidemic is what happens when a being structured for participation in transcendent order is told it is merely clever matter—and then commanded to optimize itself indefinitely in a marketplace of selves where nothing is ever settled, nothing is ever enough, and no achievement provides rest.

Heidegger ends his technology essay with a gesture toward art and poetry as possible counterweights to Gestell. But his diagnosis remains:

“The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already affected man in his essence.”

The threat isn’t the machines. It’s what we had to become to build them—and what we continue to become as we deploy the same optimizing, enframing gaze upon ourselves.

Part II: The Locks

If the genealogy above is correct, can the trajectory be reversed? Or are there structural features of reality itself that make this reduction inevitable? Several interlocking mechanisms—call them “locks”—seem to foreclose alternatives.

The Competitive Lock: Can Tribes Afford Souls?

Any society that treats its members as ends-in-themselves may be outcompeted by one that treats them as means. The Spartans beat the Athenians. The industrialized nations colonized the contemplative ones. The nations that mobilized total war defeated those with scruples.

This is essentially the argument from survival pressure: selection favors whatever maximizes competitive advantage, including the instrumental reduction of persons:

“War is the father of all and king of all; and some he shows as gods, others as men, some he makes slaves, others free.” —Heraclitus, Fragment 53

And Thucydides’ Athenians at Melos:

“The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” —History of the Peloponnesian War, V.89

If competitive dynamics govern history, any counter-tradition that softens a society’s instrumental edge will be selected against.

The Linguistic Lock: Can English Name the Spirit?

Heidegger argued that German had unique philosophical capacities—its ability to nominalize verbs (das Sein, das Dasein, das Ereignis) allows it to think being as event rather than thing:

“Language is the house of Being. In its home human beings dwell.” —Letter on Humanism (1947)

English may be particularly impoverished. Its analytic structure, its lack of grammatical mood for subjunctive and irrealis, its tendency toward nominalization of processes into things, its commercial and empiricist heritage—all may constrain what can be thought in it.

Consider the untranslatables that English flattens:

English renders ānanda as “bliss” and we imagine a pleasant feeling. We translate aletheia as “truth” and imagine correct propositions.

But Wittgenstein offers a paradox:

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” —Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 7

Yet the Tractatus itself points beyond itself—the mystical cannot be said but can be shown. And in his later work:

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” —Tractatus, 5.6

Perhaps the spiritual can never be adequately named in any language, and the attempt to name it is itself the problem. The apophatic traditions make exactly this argument.

The Objectivity Lock: Inadmissible Evidence

Internal states cannot be named and thus are inadmissible in the life of discourse and policy. This is the scientistic reduction: only third-person, publicly verifiable, quantifiable data counts as knowledge. First-person experience is “merely subjective”—noise to be eliminated, not signal to be interpreted.

William James fought this in his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902):

“The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part... For the moment, what we attend to is reality... My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

James tried to make first-person data scientifically admissible through careful phenomenological description. But the victory went to behaviorism and then cognitivism, which treat consciousness as either irrelevant or as computation.

Husserl’s phenomenology attempted to recover the Lebenswelt (lifeworld) from scientific abstraction:

“The life-world, for us who wakingly live in it, is always already there, existing in advance for us, the ‘ground’ of all praxis, whether theoretical or extratheoretical.” —The Crisis of European Sciences (1936)

And Merleau-Ponty extended this to the body:

“The body is our general medium for having a world.” —Phenomenology of Perception (1945)

But phenomenology remained academic philosophy—it did not reshape policy or economics. The objectivity lock held.

The Power Lock: A Cosmic Law?

Does the concentration of power follow a cosmic law? Power concentrates because it can. Those who have power use it to acquire more. Positive feedback loops are everywhere: wealth generates wealth, influence generates influence, violence defeats non-violence.

Pareto observed that wealth distribution follows a power law across all societies—roughly 20% hold 80% of resources. This appears to be attractor dynamics, not cultural choice.

Machiavelli articulated the logic of virtù as the capacity to seize and hold fortuna:

“It is better to be impetuous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and if you wish to dominate her you must beat and batter her.” —The Prince (1532), Ch. XXV

And Foucault showed that power is not merely repressive but productive—it creates the very subjects who then exercise and transmit it:

“Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.” —The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976)

If power produces the selves that perpetuate it, escape seems impossible.

The Self Lock: Atomism as Premise

The Cartesian-Lockean self is an atom—a monad, self-contained, defined by its interior and separated by its skin from a world of other atoms. This atomism is presupposed by liberalism, by market economics, by the social contract tradition.

“Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself.” —Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689), Ch. V

The self is property—self-ownership. But this definition makes relationship external to identity. I am me first; I have relationships second. This ontology forecloses the relational alternatives that might anchor meaning differently.

Part III: Counter-Traditions

Despite these locks, counter-traditions exist that resist the technological-materialist reduction. Whether they can do more than preserve individual freedom within the machine remains the open question.

Gravity and Grace: Simone Weil

Weil distinguishes between gravity (the automatic, mechanical, downward pull toward force and domination) and grace (the supernatural counter-movement):

“All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.” —Gravity and Grace (1947)

And on the nature of force:

“Force is that x that turns anybody subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.” —The Iliad, or the Poem of Force (1939)

Weil’s argument is that force always destroys the one who wields it as much as the one subjected to it. It cannot be wielded without becoming its instrument. This suggests the competitive lock may be self-undermining—but on what timescale? Sparta is a memory; Athens echoes still. The Soviet attempt at total mobilization collapsed from within. Nazi Germany’s thousand-year reich lasted twelve years. Perhaps pure instrumentalization is locally optimal but globally unstable.

The Ethical Interruption: Emmanuel Levinas

Levinas argued that the encounter with the Other’s face interrupts the totalizing logic of power:

“The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation.” —Totality and Infinity (1961)

The face commands: “Thou shalt not kill.” This command is not derived from power—it precedes and exceeds power. It is the ethical as first philosophy. But can this be operationalized? Or is it only available as individual sainthood while the gears of power grind on?

Relational Ontologies

Against the atomist self, several traditions offer genuinely relational alternatives:

Ubuntu (African philosophy):

“Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu“—A person is a person through other persons.

This is not merely a moral claim but an ontological one. The self is constituted by its relationships. To be cut off is not merely to be lonely but to be less real.

Confucian relationalism: The Confucian self is defined by its roles (wulun—the five relationships). There is no “self” apart from being a child, sibling, spouse, parent, citizen:

“The superior man seeks to develop the admirable qualities of others, not their bad qualities.” —Confucius, Analerta XII.16

Buddhist anatta (no-self):

“In the seen, there is only the seen. In the heard, there is only the heard. In the sensed, there is only the sensed. In the cognized, there is only the cognized. This, Bahiya, is how you should train yourself.” —Udana 1.10

If there is no substantial self, the liquefaction problem dissolves differently—not by anchoring in transcendence but by recognizing that what is being liquefied was always illusory.

Martin Buber’s I-Thou:

“All actual life is encounter... When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things.” —I and Thou (1923)

Buber distinguishes I-Thou (genuine encounter, mutual presence) from I-It (instrumental relation). The modern world is the triumph of I-It. But moments of I-Thou remain possible, and in them, the atomist ontology breaks down.

Yet none of these relational ontologies prevented their host societies from being conquered or absorbed by atomist ones. Ubuntu did not protect Africa from colonization. Confucianism did not protect China from the Opium Wars. Buddhism did not protect Tibet.

The Apophatic Escape

Perhaps the deepest counter-tradition is the apophatic—the mystical via negativa that refuses to name the divine at all, and thereby escapes the trap of linguistic reduction.

Pseudo-Dionysius:

“We make assertions and denials of what is next to it, but never of it, for it is both beyond every assertion... and beyond every denial.” —Mystical Theology (c. 500 CE)

Meister Eckhart:

“I pray God to rid me of God.” —Sermon 52

The Cloud of Unknowing:

“By love He can be gotten and holden, but by thought never.” —Anonymous, 14th century

This tradition suggests that the problem is precisely the demand for articulation—for making the spiritual sayable and therefore administrable. The apophatic resists by remaining in silence. But can silence be a counter-politics? Or only a personal refuge?

The Perennial Philosophy

Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy (1945) synthesized the mystical traditions and concluded that there is a common core of wisdom available in every culture:

“The divine Ground of all existence is a spiritual Absolute, ineffable in terms of discursive thought, but susceptible of being directly experienced and realized by the human being.”

But he was explicit that this is available only to individuals, and that social transformation is unlikely:

“The nature of society at any given moment is determined by the nature of the individuals composing it, and individuals will continue to remain selfish and bellicose so long as they fail to transcend themselves through enlightenment and ethical practice.”

Modern Counter-Movements

Within modernity itself, several thinkers have articulated paths forward:

Ivan Illich argued that modern institutions are counterproductive—they defeat their own stated purposes:

“The institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery.” —Deschooling Society (1971)

His solution: conviviality—tools that enhance personal freedom and relationship rather than requiring expert-managed systems:

“I choose the term ‘conviviality’ to designate the opposite of industrial productivity... A convivial society would be the result of social arrangements that guarantee for each member the most ample and free access to the tools of the community.” —Tools for Conviviality (1973)

Wendell Berry has articulated a localist, agrarian counter-tradition:

“The only thing we have to preserve nature with is culture; the only thing we have to preserve wildness with is domesticity... What I am suggesting is that if we want to preserve wilderness, we will have to find practical and cultural ways to want to.” —Home Economics (1987)

Iain McGilchrist offers a neurological reformulation: the left hemisphere (analytic, reductive, instrumental) has colonized the right (contextual, relational, meaning-perceiving):

“The left hemisphere’s world is a virtual world... it is comprehensive only in the sense that it is all-encompassing, that it does not reach out to the real world... The right hemisphere has the ability to see the whole before the parts... to see what is new.” —The Master and His Emissary (2009)

McGilchrist suggests that the recovery of meaning requires the restoration of hemispheric balance—but how this is achieved socially rather than individually remains unclear.

Conclusion: The Tragic View

The honest synthesis is something like this:

The trajectory is probably not escapable at the level of civilizational competition. Any society that fully instantiated a relational, non-instrumental, enchanted worldview would likely be conquered or absorbed by one that did not. The laws of power are not absolute, but they are strong.

But the trajectory may be self-terminating. A civilization that reduces all being to standing reserve eventually exhausts its substrate—ecological collapse, psychological burnout, demographic implosion, meaning starvation. We may be witnessing this now. What emerges from the collapse is unknowable.

Individuals can find freedom within the machine, but this freedom is always despite the structure, not because of it. The counter-traditions offer paths, but they require what Weil called “decreation”—the willingness to not compete, not optimize, not accumulate. This is available to persons. It is probably not available to nations.

The definition of self may be the deepest lock. As long as we conceive ourselves as atoms-with-interests, the logic of accumulation and competition follows necessarily. The relational ontologies offer genuine alternatives, but they have not demonstrated competitive viability.

Language may be a necessary constraint but not a sufficient one. English is probably worse than Sanskrit or Greek for articulating the spiritual, but Sanskrit-speakers were not saved by their vocabulary.

The deepest question remains: Is there a cosmic law of power?

Perhaps. But the mystics of every tradition report an encounter with something that exceeds the game—call it grace, tao, sunyata, brahman, the Ungrund. In those encounters, the laws of gravity are suspended. Not overcome by greater force, but irrelevant—like asking whether silence is louder than noise.

Whether that encounter can ever be more than individual exception—whether it can interrupt the civilizational gears—remains the open question. The evidence is not encouraging. But the possibility is not foreclosed.

Weil offers the final word:

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”

Real good—the interruption of gravity by grace—cannot be systematized. It can only happen, person by person, in the void created by attention. Perhaps that is enough. Perhaps it is all that was ever available.