The turn introduced by the Renaissance was probably inevitable historically: the Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, having become an intolerable despotic repression of man’s physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. But then we recoiled from the spirit and embraced all that is material, excessively and incommensurately. The humanistic way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself our guide, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man, nor did it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. It started modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshiping man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtle and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any higher meaning (Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart, Commencement Address At Harvard, June 8, 1978)

Notes

a) “Everything beyond physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtle and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention”.. Compare Plato’s description of the giants in the gigantomachia: they “drag everything down to earth out of heaven and the unseen, literally grasping rocks and trees in their hands, for they lay hold upon every stock and stone and strenuously affirm that real existence belongs only to that which can be handled and offers resistance to the touch. They define reality as the same thing as body, and as soon as one of the opposite party asserts that anything without a body is real, they are utterly contemptuous and will not listen to another word.” (Sophist 246)

b) Solzhenitsyn says that the West “embraced all that is material, excessively and incommensurately“. Gigantically, we might say.

c) Solzhenitsyn uses the terms ‘way of thinking’ and ‘world’ as inherently and fundamentally plural. Earlier in A World Split Apart he says, for example, “that these worlds are not evolving toward each other and that neither one can be transformed into the other without violence.” In the passage above, he refers to “The humanistic way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself our guide”. This guiding ‘way of thinking’ replaced the opposite way of the Middle Ages which had seen the “repression of man’s physical nature in favor of the spiritual one”. World is always one world among other possible worlds; a way of thinking is always one possible way among other possible ways.

d) Solzhenitsyn uses the word “turn” here to describe a peculiar action whereby one fundamental determination of world and thought is refused in favor of another. Where the Middle Ages had seen “repression of man’s physical nature in favor of the spiritual one”, the Renaissance “recoiled from the spirit and embraced all that is material”. Heidegger also uses the term ‘turn’ (ie, Kehre) to describe this eigentümliche action at origin which defines human being in two ways. First, only humans witness the gigantomachia and know the freedom of according, always and everywhere, with one of its shapes. Second, through such according with one of the shapes in the agonistic struggle of the gigantomachia, human beings define the nature of their thought and world.

e) If worlds and ways of thought are inherently plural, the place of their transformation must be between worlds and between ways of thought. This is what Eliot terms “World not world” and why he follows San Juan in recommending “Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought”.

f) This “place” between worlds and between ways of thought is Beckett’s “the space of the door“:
unheard footfalls only sound
till at last halt for good, absent for good from self and other
then no sound
then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither
unspeakable home (Neither)

The World Split Apart segments continue here.