The sun: To build or not to build?

The gold of the sun is free for everyone

In Barcelona, the summer heat gets trapped between the mountains and the sea. I find myself adrift a slumberous ocean. Once there was a destination to reach. But the maps have melted. I put the compass down. I close my eyes. Siesta time.

Perhaps the most famous association between the sun and indolence concerns a meeting between Diogenes the Cynic and Alexander the Great. Diogenes was famous for living without possessions. He scorned convention, masturbated in public, heckled Socrates, criticised social manners, proclaimed an eternal war against falsehood. Alexander was the archetypal conqueror, the structure builder, the emperor and materialist, the Terror of the Earth. The encounter was bound to spark controversy.

Plutarch’s version of the story goes that Alexander sought Diogenes in the Craneum, just outside the city of Corinth. Diogenes, who was lounging in the sun, stirred a bit when he saw Alexander’s entourage approach, fixed his gaze on the great king. Alexander greeted him cordially and asked him if there was anything he could do for him. Yes, the philosopher replied, you can get out of my sun. Diogenes cared nothing for the treasures of the world.

Later Alexander would remark, if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes. Diogenes’ insistence on having and doing nothing represented a freedom and a state of being unavailable to Alexander, whose life revolved around the treacherous labyrinths of power and violent acquisition. 

Diogenes’s rejection of artifice is reflected in the word cynic, which comes from the Greek word for dog. As dogs enjoy a simple, unaffected live, uncomplicated by hierarchy or convention, so humanity must unlearn the devious rules that have been cast over them like a net. Diogenes lounging in the sun and ridiculing the great conqueror is a potent symbol of a man casting off the net, of rejecting artifice and illusory advantages, of sticking his fingers up at power.

I wrote a poem to celebrate the encounter:

The sun begins to strike again,
Having lain dormant all the winter.
My flat, four stories up, 
Is prone to hoard the warmth:
Those impersonal coins of spring
That made Diogenes a king,
Who asked the Great Impostor, Alexander,
To step aside and let him bathe
And give the dog his day;
For day was all he could receive;
The rest, superfluous,
Pretending to have purpose
Amid the artifice.

For him there was only one thing
Among the tortured mazes of mankind;
Just this: simplicity of sun.
Awake, dear spirit, he says, 
And show me song along 
The winding waterways of day,
The hiccupped thought, the burbling mind.

Now from my balcony the same old sun,
A different life that rises 
With the breeze. I am, if not at ease,
Then suitably detached. 
The self of yesterday is nothing but a dream,
So poorly scripted, contradictory,
Playing the fool and sage by turns.
All disappears, and I am left with this:
A metre of sunshine,
Enough to warm the face
And let no darkness touch the mind. 

Perhaps the history of philosophy can be reduced to a hypothetical conversation between the structure builder, Plato, and the artifice destroyer, Diogenes. In The Republic, Plato posits that the problems of existence can be resolved by building better socio-political structures.  Diogenes seems to maintain that no human structure can ever improve our most basic condition. Instead of reaching for the heavens, mankind is better off examining the earth. Behaving like a dog is ultimately more fulfilling than striving for unattainable perfection.

Diogenes the Dog

Nietzsche is a kind of modern Diogenes. He was a man who denounced what he perceived as a hypocritical bourgeois morality in favour of a naked, animal essence, however amoral or dangerous the inclinations of the latter may prove to be. Immanuel Kant, on the other hand, represents a more positive attitude towards the capacity of reason to improve the world and understand the self.

In our own times, modernism, with its diverse manifestos and Ezra Pound’s enduring mantra make it new, recalls a Platonic builder’s optimism. Postmodernism, with its tendencies to critique, deconstruct, and satirise any formal attempts at meaning, implies a darker, more nihilistic Diogenes.

Our current epoch, tentatively named metamodernism by some, is the third instalment in the modernism series, and can be loosely described as a synthesis of the Platonic optimism and the Diogenes objection. It seeks a more cautious form of construction that takes into account the critiques of postmodernism but tries to move beyond them.

Marcel Theroux’s recent novel, The Secret Books, is a good example of the spirit of metamodernism. The book recounts the travails of a Russian spy who writes a false gospel to exonerate the Jews from the charge of Christ killing. Set in the 1920s and 1930s, the noble aim of the false gospel was to counter the widespread anti-Semitism of those times. No matter if the story was false. Most, if not all, human stories are false to some degree. Even our cherished scientific understandings may become redundant in time as Einstein’s theory of relativity made the Newtonian view of the universe redundant.

As Theroux points out, what the world needs is not necessarily truer stories, but better stories, stories that help us become the best versions of ourselves without being hypocritical, ponderous or overtly didactic.

In Notes on Metamodernism, cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker asserted that the 2000s were characterised by the return of typically modern positions that did not forfeit the postmodern mind-sets of the 1980s and 1990s. The metamodern sensibility “can be conceived of as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism”, characteristic of cultural responses to recent global events such as climate change, the financial crisis, political instability, and the digital revolution. “Transformationism” and “Vitalism” - the twin pillars of Mercurius Magazine - probably feed into this debate somewhere, though it might be excessive to figure out exactly where. Creativity tends to refuse neat boxes. There must also be room for Diogenes the Dog, the individual who seeks truth outside the group.

I personally sympathise with the mind-sets of both Diogenes and Plato. I wonder if that makes me a metamodernist? I believe in the power of progressive law-making to improve societies and reduce our capacity for injustice. I also believe in the benefits of simple pleasures, of spending a moment sitting in the sun, doing and thinking nothing.

In the context of a world in crisis, building a more just world feels more urgent than ever. However, even if our age were one of universal peace and prosperity, we would still need to embark on spiritual quests. Some basic form of literature and art will never go out of fashion. As Pascal remarks, all of humanity's problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. We are born imperfect. We create our own heavens and our own hells. Escaping the repressive structures of the day can be just as important as imperfectly striving to build better ones.