Solzhenitsyn and True Home

I finally got my hands on the Solzhenitsyn Reader, and am struck by his “postmodern” sensibilities (some background here and here on this term and the passing of, perhaps, the greatest writer of the blood-drenched 20th Century). The theme of his life, work, and struggle was the futility and destructiveness of attempts to overcome nature through action as directed by the thoughts of status-seeking, sinful humans. Postmodernism need not be foundationless, a celebration of endless self-creation from nothingness. It can be a sentiment of limits, something conducive to the humbling of hubris, and a realistic acknowledgement of the boundary of human understanding. This was Solzhenitsyn. There is much about being and self, he thought, that will always elude comprehension and control, even as it is possible to know enough to live well. An arbitrary character of human authority and the freedom from all standards aside from will are “hypermodern,” whose intention is not to understand nature but to guide transformative action in accordance with desire. In his famous commencement address, he stated the societal pursuit of a “destructive and irresponsible freedom” has been granted boundless space. Modern society has little defense against the “abyss” of human decadence. Our impulse for “self-creation” is a caricature. He calls us to “live in the light of the truth,” which I think means the truth about human purpose and our limitations. We must be conscientiously responsible – human reason exists not to transform reality but to understand and to come to terms with it. Solzhenitsyn wanted a return to “realism,” but not one confused with the possibility of comprehensiveness (which only rests with God). The project of transforming the human person into the autonomous individual or the collective is unrealistic. We can recognize the limits of being an individual or a member of an artificial collective because we remain more than those. The world created to make ourselves fully at home turns out to have made human beings less at home than ever. Here is his easy to state but much harder to accomplish lesson: the dehumanizing aspects of value relativism and unrestrained “freedom” as a high virtue can be countered, first, by an epistemological modesty.