by Pedro Blas González (July 2025)
Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is ‘no exit’; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology to find again the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years.—Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
More than life, or simply more life, is a resplendent thought that cries out for transcendence and the sacred in human existence.[1]
Yet, we must recognize that the bloated and virulent positivism that is the foundation of late postmodernism does not allow for the cultivation of personalism in human life. That is, the necessity of the human person to nurture the inner life is anathema to late postmodern values.[2]
As a consequence, the predominant form of human life in late postmodernity is that of hollow man, a gutted scarecrow entity that lacks the capacity to even frighten itself through its inability to respect danger. This empty entity cannot attain personhood, given that it does not respect the structure and essence of human reality—not ideology and the political realm—as being the seat of resistance to the human person.
Personhood implies an undeniable metaphysical and existential complexity that defines man, which nature lacks. Even to cite the differences between personhood and nature points to man as a metaphysical being. The negation of the latter implies that hollow, late postmodern man cannot scale the hierarchy of values. Lacking the capacity to distinguish between higher values and negative forces that pose as values, but that are merely the negation of values, late postmodern man has become morally/spiritually atrophied, existing as a biological entity that is incapable of cultivating an inner life. Needless to say, this condition affects all aspects of human life.
Late postmodern man is a one-dimensional zoological entity that embraces the body as mere temporary matter; conceiving man as being no different than other forms of matter that perish. This desultory biological life—for it never ascends to the level of self-reflective existence—is incapable of cultivating self-knowledge. That eliminates the possibility of attaining that alleged reactionary notion, best known to former generations, as self-actualization.
Existential self-respect is an alien condition that late postmodern man does not suspect it lacks. Our gutted, late postmodern form of biological human life—it is hoped—will be stringently judged as a nihilistic and hedonistic scourge by future generations, who will blame the depravity of their world on late postmodern nihilism.
A caricature of itself, late postmodern man garners the seeds of self-destruction, boasting with pride, like no other embodiment of Homo sapiens in the past. Late postmodern man is an unprecedented form of human life.
Post-Humanity Ignores Life as a Series of Caveats
This brings up the question: is late-postmodernism the initial stage of a post-human stage of human history?
Late postmodern man does not suspect that the desire for more than life is a saving grace; the leveler of carnal unhappiness. Grace, when understood in the Catholic sense of the word, is a condition that enables man to cultivate the inner life. Catholics understand grace as a gift from God that enable man to realize that it is a supernatural being. Grace is man’s participation in the divine, a condition that can only be attained by cultivating the inner life. The inner life acts as a buffer between the self and the objective conditions that life, truth, and human reality put man through.
However, we cannot ignore that the cultivation of inner life comes with undeniable caveats, warnings about human reality that man must respect. What is human existence if not a series of caveats, like small waves that compound to become existential tsunamis? Two of these caveats are a sense of gravitas about life and death; another is dignitas, which is one of the staples of personhood.
Lacking a sense of inner life, the cornerstone of a healthy, well-grounded self, disqualifies late-postmodern man from the necessity to cultivate self-reflection. The absence of an inner life makes man a slave of mere biological life. Bare-bones biological life sets in play life conditions that destroy man’s sense of seriousness and dignity. Lacking the latter two human qualities, gutted late postmodern man blindly vacillates between a moral/spiritual abyss, and fencing off the often brutal physical conditions that material reality imposes on man from the outside.
As a response to abysmal, biological dead-end, and meaningless life, a string of self-serving psychological mechanisms are enacted in all aspects of late postmodern life, whether moral, spiritual, economic, cultural, and ideological, that aim to assuage the assault of human reality on the psyche. This is futile. This gives gutted late postmodern man the illusion—but only, that, a vague impression—of barely getting past today, life becoming a dysfunctional pastiche of disconnected moments and experiences that lack rhyme and reason. This is one reason why late postmodern man’s only option is live as a political animal. Turning all aspects of human life political is late postmodern man’s substitution for its lack of dignitas and gravitas.
Because late-postmodern man has opted out of any moral, religious, and traditional renditions of human existence that have, from time immemorial, served as guideposts, signaling direction in life and a life-plan, what is left is to fill life, not with more than life existential joy, but instead with deep-seated resentment.
Why Resentment?
While science and technology have improved man’s material condition, this has created the false expectation that material progress can extend into modifying the human condition. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is one demonic effect of late postmodern man’s lack of an inner life.
Having been promised that the blows of reality on human life would become tamed, assuaged through science and technology, late postmodern man has instead become disillusioned, at best, and arrogantly cynical at worst, about life. Hollow late postmodern man is resentful of the ‘fixed’, that is, objective structure of creation.
How can an entire milieu become dissatisfied with life and living? There are many undeniable indicators of this. A blatant example is the degenerate nature of the arts. From cinema, to literature and art, the predominant forms of expression that these take are corrosive degeneration of man and creation. In philosophical terms, we can say with certainty, that late postmodernism has a fetish for destruction, death, and non-being, as opposed to being as a great good, as Saint Augustine argues.
Resentment does not have to take the form of envy and jealousy, both which are addressed to other people. Resentment can be directed at society, life and God, as is the case with late postmodern man. One reason for this is existential ennui. Late postmodern man is morally/spiritually exhausted, bored beyond redemption.
Turning away from the cultivation, reflection on transcendence, the divine and sublime, late postmodern man has painted itself into a vacuous morally/spiritual corner. This opens an apparent world of possibilities to explore carnal pleasure. Because physical delights are like a machine that requires constant oiling, late postmodern man becomes the slave of materiality.
Late postmodernism promotes anti-life; life affirmation being relegated to alleged reactionary fairy tales. Self-loathing is present in all aspects of late postmodernity, though this is disguised as affected philanthropy and the quest for an alleged better world. These are some of the self-possessed and ingratiating ‘values’ that late postmodern man promotes, though, it does so tongue-in-cheek to fill the hours of what otherwise is life that still must be lived.
While well-grounded existence requires self-reflection that acts as a buffer between our unchecked desires and wants, and objective reality, late postmodern man opts for nihilism, which promises emancipation from oppressive objective values. One consequence of this is the intoxicating grasp that hedonism and narcissism have over the contemporary world.
While late postmodern nihilism is unsustainable, and only a timely corrective can keep man from annihilating itself in a post human age, it is a staple of nihilism that it eventually becomes normalized in order to safeguard itself.
Can the quest for more than life triumph in what is already a post human age? That remains an open question. Luckily, because more than life is the quest for the divine and transcendence, it also has a built-in instinctual desire for survival that places the hierarchy of values and being over destruction and nothingness.
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[1] The idea more than life appears in many of my writings, most recently in “Cervantes and the Brilliance of Don Quijote,” New English Review, May 2025.
[2] My conception of late postmodernism has appeared in many of my writings. While the word postmodernism and postmodernity are terms primarily used to describe aspects of art, architecture, and culture—a state of development in human history—my idea of late-postmodernism, a novel idea that I propose, describes a moral/spiritual and existential condition that, while unprecedented in human history, serves as the definitive form of nihilism, hedonism, and despotism that aims to destroy the achievements and hierarchy of values that is responsible for the creation and upkeep civilization. Late-postmodernism, I content throughout my writings, is unsustainable given that it goes against the values responsible for creating Western civilization.
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Pedro Blas González is Professor of Philosophy in Florida. He earned his doctoral degree in Philosophy at DePaul University in 1995. Dr. González has published extensively on leading Spanish philosophers, such as Ortega y Gasset and Unamuno. His books have included Unamuno: A Lyrical Essay, Ortega’s ‘Revolt of the Masses’ and the Triumph of the New Man, Fragments: Essays in Subjectivity, Individuality and Autonomy and Human Existence as Radical Reality: Ortega’s Philosophy of Subjectivity. He also published a translation and introduction of José Ortega y Gasset’s last work to appear in English, “Medio siglo de Filosofia” (1951) in Philosophy Today Vol. 42 Issue 2 (Summer 1998). His most recent book is Philosophical Perspective on Cinema.
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