Gargantua possessed the body of the entire Middle Ages. The body of Hamlet, the first man of the new time, is a convention, and modern man is no longer a man, but a social network, a virtual phantom. But is it bad?
In my opinion, Gargantua, which was mentioned in the seed to our discussion, had the body of the entire Middle Ages, with all the bodily bells and whistles. This gigantic Rabelaisian body had ears almost the size of a donkey, the gigantic stomach of a whale and the appetite of a cannibal, and finally, he had weighty genitals dressed in a codpiece. But the intellect of this giant was the size of a pinhead, and this was the harmony of asymmetry, the guarantee of peace of mind.
The soul of such a body was Homeric laughter.
How is it to be critically assessed?
No way, you just need to take it into account.
The body of Hamlet compared to Gargantua is almost a convention. It shrank to the size of Elsinore, but the size of the moral grid increased dramatically, which Hamlet threw at Denmark, giving her a deadly definition: all of Denmark is a prison. It is no longer necessary to talk about the prince’s appetite, it is known, for example, what disgust he had for the drinking bouts of the new king Claudius and with what sarcasm he commented on the rule to mark each cup of wine drunk by the king with a volley from a cannon. There is no reason to talk about the stomach of the prince and his appetite, as well as about the presence of a bodily bottom, most likely Hamlet is a virgin.
He is the first man of the New Age.
The soul of such a corporality is a kind of conscience.
These births can be compared with the plague.
Hamlet infects everyone he touches with a sense of reflection. Until the bitter reproaches of her son, Queen Gertrude sincerely did not understand, did not know, did not know, did not feel, did not think that her hasty marriage to the brother of the late king was insulting. The memorial pie went to the wedding feast, exclaims the prince. Lord, the astonished queen cries out, you turned my eyes into my soul! This reversal of lynching was an absolute novelty at that time. As you know, Gertrude could not stand the earthquake of lynching, and Ophelia was the first to die from the plague of conscience. She simply went crazy from reflection, which she picked up from Hamlet, like a bad disease of the New Age.
Laugh? The former Rabelaisian laughter in Elsinore became the laughter of the grave-digger over Yorick’s skull: that jester once, by the way, poured a whole bottle of Rhenish on my head!
How to evaluate it? Is the plague of conscience bad? I do not think. And here we also need to move away from evaluation, and accept existential changes as a given.
Today the body has ceased to exist altogether.
Read more:
- Easy run of being
Modern man is a social network, a virtual phantom, even virtual sex was born. It is no longer human. But is it bad? I do not see any critical problems for existence in this, there is only the novelty of human existence. Contacts have grown thousands of times, you have become the sum of friends on Facebook, that is, the number of Hamlet, who threw a moral net on the world, has grown to a billion.
I repeat, I do not see this as a destructive problem for identity.
My personal transition from writing with a pen and ink in a notebook, to a fountain pen, then to a ballpoint pen, then to a typewriter, and finally to a computer, did not change the nature of my utterance in any way.
Yes, I lost my handwriting, but I never forgot how to write.
That is why the message that “we return to the feeling of our own body” seems to me more therapeutic advice, private, than essential and global. I’m afraid that we are generally waiting for parting with our own body in the usual classical form; already now, a young man in the subway with a tablet, headphones on his head, talking on two smartphones, seems to be a Martian. There will be more and more of these fastenings to the body, one day they will be equal in value to the physical body, and then … And then the avatar will appear, already sung by Cameron in the film of the same name. Honestly, moving the hero from a paraplegic wheelchair into the body of a mighty young extraterrestrial cat and her victorious jumps through a hostile alien forest, I devoured my eyes with childish delight.
The fear of metamorphoses is, of course, understandable; similar horror was caused at the beginning of the XNUMXth century by the first jalopies and forecasts that as many as one hundred or even two hundred motorists would soon appear in Europe!
Has the number of phobias and psychosomatic trauma increased in a person who has become the newest body consisting of the sum of social networks?
I think it has remained fundamentally the same.
But don’t misunderstand me, I’m not denying the practice of psychotherapy, it’s certainly useful for any particular person who has his head in the clouds to come down to earth. I’m talking about the theory… Neither the increase in the body to the size of Facebook, nor its desired contraction to the “living of corporality” does not affect a person’s belonging to primates and his ontology.