“Being human is an art, says Rob Riemen (The art of being human. Four studies. Taurus, 2023). It is not science. If it were science, we would have accepted definitions, confirmed theories, univocal answers, protocols, and manuals for life” (p. 14). As an art, becoming human has a lot of wisdom, experience, successes, and failures. It is not, of course, going through life at random, but it has a lot of what Saint Paul asserted when he points out that “now we see as in a mirror, blurred; then we will see face to face” (1 Cor. 13, 12). Therefore, even though we have spent centuries trying to know who human beings are, in this subject we are still magician’s apprentices. Riemen joins these attempts to illuminate the human condition.
In this book, our author offers new insights into what is the leitmotif of his and the Nexus Institute’s writings: cultivating nobility of spirit. There are four studies that he presents. In the first of them, he offers his reflections regarding a letter he receives from Mexico. A group of university students ask him to reflect on the foundations of human existence. For this purpose, he meditates on who our educators and trainers have been. He turns to his family history and concludes that “being human is an art that begins with the blessing of the memory of the love they gave you” (p. 75). And, indeed, it is a blessing, a gift, a gift to have lived in a community of love. A gift that was alien, for example, to Albert Camus, who, remembering his childhood, notes: “We did not know how to love. Poor childhood. Life without love (not without joys). The mother is not a source of love. From then on, the longest thing in the world is to learn to love. (Carnet 3, p. 271).” Camus’s confession that, since I read it many years ago, still haunts my head and heart.
In the second study, Weber, Kahler, Musil, Mann, united by the desire to understand their time, to save reason and human beings from the monsters created by trivialized reason. Our time is not free from loss, either. Riemen identifies the vain promises of certain pseudocultures. One of them accentuates kitsch, “which wants to make us believe in a life that always has to be fashionable and pleasant, fun, fast-paced, sexy, easy. Another pseudoculture is pragmatics, that of science and technology, which wants us to believe that only what can be empirically verified and calculated can be true. Social networks and algorithms that try to colonize the human mind to return us to Plato’s cave” (pp. 164-165). These and other pseudocultures lead to spiritual emptiness and despair. A situation that can lead to vital cynicism and existential nihilism without horizon or hope.
The third study, Riemen dedicates to bravery and compassion, staging Émile Zola’s inner restlessness when he publishes – against all odds – his I accuse in defense of the jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus, unjustly accused of high treason. Examples of characters like Zola “manage that the sinister forces that always inhabit our souls are defeated by a civilizational ideal in which truth and justice are universal moral values and liberating forces capable of giving us all the humanistic spiritual formation that we need” (p. 203). The fourth study highlights the figure of the Russian writer Mijaíl Bulgákov and his novel The Master and Margarita, “a story in the tradition of the legend of Faust (…). A brilliant evocation of the Apocalypse of Saint John” (p. 230).
Four studies, the same purpose: to show convincing lifestyles that teach us the art of being human.
