“Rabbinic Judaism invested significance in the body which in the other formations [Christian and Jewish] was invested in the soul. That is, for rabbinic Jews, the human being was defined as a body – animated, to be sure, by a soul – while for Hellenistic Jews (such as Philo) and (at least many Greek-speaking) Christians (such as Paul) these essence of human being is a soul housed in a body” (Boyarin, 1993, 5).
This difference, to me, is the essence of how we look at existence as a whole, and what kind of world view we shape and shapes us. Sadly, I don't think that we even have a "world view" (Weltanschaung) today. Thanks to Twitter, Facebook and other social media, life has devolved into a hodge podge of catch phrases that oscillate from one extreme to the other.
Thanks to the fact that we have politicized everything relating to human existence, we have lost the sights and sounds of the metaphysics. How can we expect to enter into a deeper meaning of life, if we are constantly living according to what Twitter feed feeds us? It may be feeding us but it's certainly not nourishing us.
To be sure, social media has its place. It can be used for sharing information, sometimes even knowledge, and you may even have occasionally a good conversation with others. But to expect an existential answer is to expect an improbability.
Some don't even have enough awareness to know that they are living half-lives, zombies going from one click to the next. For those, I don't know what to say: maybe you're just a zombie troll and there is no hope for you. An optimist in me tends to refuse that option.
Writers, pundits, critics - all say that to speak like this is to be nostalgic about the past because we are idealizing it. Not at all. I am merely looking at the facts. Statistically, and how people choose to reveal themselves on the social media, tells us that they do not know the difference between sacred and profane, soul and body, body and mind. I would even settle for some mind/body dualism in a conversation if people knew that such question even exists.
Digitization and politicization of everything, which should not be digitized and politicized, has made this world into a place that lacks joy and wonder. Lacking such vision means that we are incapable of seeing the other person face to face, and that incapability leads to a lack of insight. If there is no insight, there is no discernment, and if there is no discernment, then there is no action.
That is why, despite the illusion that everything is moving so fast, it's not moving at all. We are just holograms of our potential selves, displaying the stilted animation of our bodies without minds, and certainly without souls.
This is why, as a society, we have such strange view of sex as well. It has nothing to do with eros. It is, I would posit, even worse than anything Victorians imagined because sexual experience (whether excessive, hedonistic, or loving) is found in a non-erotic static. Today's sex is a white padded cell - a sterile room of one's own in which the other is not recognized at all.
We are left with loud voices that are not connected to bodies, with meaningless chatter masquerading as profound expressions, with crassness masquerading as intellectual prowess. It takes courage to be still and to embrace the silence.
If being free means anything to us, then we will make the first step on the path to the Unknown because the Unknown is more known to us than we might assume. But we have to be prepared to let go of any expectations and attachments that have politicized and digitized our existence. Otherwise, we will remain in an illusion, a pretense of real life, and not only will we not know the deeper meaning of our existence but also we will have no idea what politics really is or how digital world can truly be used.
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