El ocaso de Occidente. Revised English presentation

We find ourselves in an age of profound problematicity —so much so that it has become commonplace to describe our time as one of crisis. The central question that arises here concerns the encompassing meaning of this term, “crisis”: how it is to be diagnosed, what its sense is, and how its various expressions are to be understood. This book seeks to respond to that question. Its central thesis affirms that we are undergoing a crisis of spirit that runs through the entire subterranean layer of culture, from which socio-political pathologies of civilization emerge on the surface.

The book is conceived as the second part of Ser errático. Una ontología crítica de la sociedad (Erratic Being. A Critical Ontology of Society, Madrid, Trotta, 2009), in which the author sought to position his work within the contemporary philosophical network. The categories developed there are now applied to an analysis of the trajectory of Western civilization, and it is therefore necessary to recall their essential features. Erratic being is, for the author, the fundamental character of being itself and, consequently, of the human condition. Human existence is conceived as a tension between the “centricity” of dwelling and the “excentricity” of estrangement from any given abode. Erraticity names the tension between belonging to a concrete world of meaning (centricity), on the one hand, and estrangement from that very belonging, on the other —an estrangement that generates a continuous self-transcendence within habitation (ex-centricity). In this sense, the term bears no pejorative meaning (wandering aimlessly), but rather a heightened and affirmative one: the human contains an excess that compels it to expand and intensify its richness of life.

In El ocaso de Occidente [The Twilight of the West] this centric–excentric tension of the human condition is applied to the analysis of collective civilizational life. To examine what a civilization is and how it creatively engenders itself becomes the condition of possibility for a critique of Western civilization and for bringing its present twilight to light. The fundamental thesis here defines civilization as a self-creative becoming with two inseparable faces —the obverse and reverse of the same movement. “Culture” constitutes the deep and invisible face, traversed by a mode of being, a worldview, and a collective modus operandi. It is a becoming directed immanently toward its own poietic self-generation. This sphere becomes embodied in the other face —the socio-political world— acquiring institutional form. Culture and socio-political world thus relate as intensive depth and material, spatio-temporal actualization. In their conjunction, the tension of erratic being is put into operation. Culture is excentric, tending toward excess and exuberance, whereas its socio-political incarnation is always centric: it temporally and spatially limits that excess within an “epochal zone,” providing concrete margins and a provisional equilibrium. The civilizational flux thus reveals itself as self-generative: cultural excentricity overflows socio-political centricity, continuously forcing it to expand and to respond to greater demands of creativity. The first part of the book is devoted to this characterization of the being of civilization, and here precise analyses emerge.

Civilization is outlined within the framework of a materialist and autopoietic topology. The author seeks to show that civilizational being is self-creative physis, traversed by an unruly source of rules —a gestating, inventive, and “wild” being.

Culture is rooted in nature, grafted onto it: it is a hybrid, a cultural physis. It is therefore not merely a “second nature,” artificially forged or separated from the first. In this sense, the book revisits the separation between nature and culture that has intensified from the beginning of modernity to the present day. That our civilization is now confronting an ecological challenge of such magnitude —one capable of placing life on the planet itself at risk— is not accidental. Human culture has progressively detached itself from its natural substratum to the point of losing the self-creative capacity it receives from it. Nature, as noted, is self-generative and self-forming. The entire first part of the book is thus devoted to demonstrating that nature is physis and that human culture is rooted within it. Cultural physis forms an interweaving of nature and the socio-cultural world. The rupture of this interweaving constitutes a powerful source of contemporary civilizational pathologies. These reflections shape a genetic topology, developed especially in the second chapter.

It is in the second part that, on the basis of this conception of civilizational being, contemporary “pathologies of civilization” are scrutinized. In pursuing this task, the text undertakes several lines of inquiry. The “crisis of spirit” is characterized in terms of cultural agenesis —a depletion of its self-generative impulse— which the author explains through the insertion of blind mechanisms into the cultural magma and the concomitant autonomization of the socio-political dimension, now subject to mechanisms detached from human intervention: inertial forces of capital, functionalist rationalization, and the calculating spirit (Mathesis Universalis). Civilizational illness appears as the concrete expression of this cultural agenesis. It consists in an immanent counter-genesis, or auto-devouring genesis, whereby in the current state of civilization every creative process tends to turn against itself. Sáez offers examples of such pathological phenomena, ranging from the individual’s enclosure within a soulless subjectivity to the closure of the socio-political collective within a thanatological dynamism.

To confront this civilizational twilight, the author ultimately proposes an ethics of lucidity, centered on the necessity of breaking the vicious circle of autophagy through a renewed, vivifying estrangement before the world. At this point, he glimpses signs of dawn in possible contemporary processes —such as the renewal of a pro-Baroque orientation in praxis and a desirable reappropriation of the powers that dwell within the tragic spirit.