The horror of the loss of individuality by people and desperate attempts to find themselves in the overwhelming personality of society have been the central plot of culture since the beginning of the 20th century. These thoughts are heard by all major thinkers, they are repeated by music and cinema of mass culture, literature and painting of elite culture. Finally, marketing operates with them, promising a person a chance to express themselves and find themselves through the consumption of goods and services. This noble motivation and, by and large, fair criticism did not avoid a fundamental delusion, namely, the submission to the ancient archetype of expulsion from paradise, the temptation to present the situation as if everything were different and better before. However, freedom and individuality have always been in short supply, and there can be no talk of any mass loss of individuality for the simple reason that it is impossible to lose whatwhich I never had. A person is not born as an individual - on the contrary, he is born as a biological unit (governed by natural algorithms) and a sociocultural unit (governed by sociocultural algorithms and their main sources: politics, economics, religion, tradition). Individuality, personality is not a given, but a task, and there is no need to fall into the illusion that it is harder to fulfill it in today's world than before.
The painting by the Belgian artist Rene Magritte "The Son of Man" (1964) with its inherent laconic conceptual painting not only brings us face to face with this problem, but also points to its causes, thereby outlining the ways of salvation.
In the picture we see a lonely gentleman, dressed in a formal suit and bowler hat. His face is obscured by an apple. Two obvious details are important here. First, the costume itself. He is nothing more than a standardized social role, a set of algorithms of behavior and thinking, values and aspirations, uncritically assimilated by him from the external environment. This is his work and the function performed in society, his religious and political convictions, class prejudices formed by propaganda and advertising of desire, a heap of “culture” picked up along the way and a few sins.
Second, the apple is important. It prevents us from seeing the face of a gentleman in a bowler hat (in truth, this face simply does not exist), it also prevents him from seeing himself if he suddenly decides to stand in front of the mirror. The biblical allusion in the title of the picture leaves no doubt about the allegorical meaning of the apple - it is an apple from the Garden of Eden, the reason for the fall of the first people, just like the reason for the fall of today's people. The meaning of the Fall is concentrated in an act of spontaneous, thoughtless and externally imposed desire (remember the temptation of the serpent). The act of the fall of Adam and Eve was not caused by a conscious and deliberate goal-setting, no, they were manipulated from outside. Moreover, they got what they didn't even need and moved away from their true needs rather from boredom, caprice and inner weakness,rather than out of real need.
The apple offered to Adam and Eve is offered every day to every person and is compulsively pushed by political, economic and subcultural agents of influence, speculating on his basic instincts. Often, in the form of a bitten logo for Apple and other brands, ideologies and subcultural identities that obscure where the face could be. However, where the forces driving a person are supplied from the outside, from a mass conveyor, facelessness is inevitable.
A man in a bowler hat is a cross-cutting subject of many of Magritte's paintings and his visiting card is a subhuman, half-individual, since his being ("suit") and his aspirations ("apple") is a projection of the external environment, he is one of the streaming image of stamped holograms, tragically unaware of their own tautological nature.
In order to find himself, the "son of man" needs to take two obvious steps.
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Step one: take off the suit, trample the bowler hat
According to the biblical myth, a person expelled from paradise was ashamed of his nakedness and began to wear clothes, that is, within the framework of our interpretation, a suffocating “costume” of blindly performed sociocultural roles. Magritte's "son of man" must regain its original purity, throw off the clothes sewn for him and appear naked, such as he is in himself. This act merges with the greatest imperative in the history of human thought, the words inscribed on the wall of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: "Know thyself." A gentleman in a bowler hat needs to peel off multiple layers from himself like an onion and discover what he wants when no one whispers in his ear, understand where he will go when no one will lead him on a leash and shake this tempting apple in front of his face. For this, he must independently investigate the conditions of his happiness and unhappiness,study the strengths and weaknesses, laws and mechanics of their own soul and body - and build their existence experimentally, based on the answers received.
Step two: throw away the apple
Lacking his own goals, a person is captive to desires - both of others and (much less often, of course) of his own. But the satisfaction of desires is not able to make us whoever it is, since it does not provide either growth or healthy saturation, and besides, it is fraught with a sense of guilt and emptiness. The fundamental difference between desire and goal, as these concepts are understood here, is that desires, even when they are genuine, are focused on short-term logic - the satisfaction of the need here and now, often happening to the detriment of our higher interests. Purpose, on the contrary, comes from the perception of our life in a wide and long-term context. And if it relies on self-knowledge, it realizes our highest interests and needs, and not momentary whims. Only goals have a creative potential, and only real creativity (and work on oneself is a fundamental form of creativity) can make a person out of a person, and not a 3D hologram. If the "son of man" wants this, he will throw away the sinful apple (you can first bite it) and follow his inner guidelines. The main and most difficult thing is not to confuse your own and someone else's, even the most gifted and astute representatives of the human race rarely succeeded.
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It should be emphasized here that the interpretation of a work of art does not aim at accurately reproducing the original idea of the author (which in most cases is still impossible) and reading his innermost thoughts, which is what differs from a scientific commentary, a school abstract and other genres. Magritte himself commented on his picture through the same prism of the problem of impersonality, but without such details and placing emphasis in a somewhat different way. It is important to add, finally, that he painted it as a self-portrait, a kind of self-criticism, turning into sociocultural satire.
© Oleg Tsendrovsky
