STILL, Life

At a time of inhumanity - perhaps greater, more destructive, and speedier in its effects than ever before - it is well to consider the basics once more. We live in a world of algorithms that reduce all humanness to the function of generalizable rules and to the bodiless. This gives us a toxic combination of seemingly invulnerable being and thoughtless instantaneity.

What does being human mean at its most irreducible? What do AI and algorithms not have? Being human entails the connection of bodies, organic life experienced through time, duration from helpless babyhood to helpless old age with a few decades of seeming empowerment in between.

Chardin’s still life (which I like to think of as “Still, Life”) takes us to these foundational aspects of being human. The body thrives on a loaf of bread, fruit, light, the relation of objects—an object or a very relation that holds beauty—and above all the relation between the seeing artist wielding his brush through time and what is seen. The human engaged in making.

I like to imagine that Menschsein means just this: to experience light and its lack, to feel relation as the body does, to engage in the making that fosters civilization.

Freud held out only minimal hope for Menschlichkeit or civilization: that the life force might triumph over our destructive inclinations. The second to last sentence of Civilization and Its Discontents culminates in the hope that “eternal Eros” will make an assertive effort in the struggle with his “equally immortal adversary.” In 1931, with the threat of Nazism closer, Freud added the more pessimistic end to his essay: the success of that struggle was now hardly clear. Our own historic moment echoes that fear. As Kafka quipped, “There is hope! But not for us.”

To counter the pessimistic greats, I take succor in Chardin, ever modest in his humble yet somehow transcendent subjects. Being human is a matter of the everyday: the dailiness of objects, of the relations between them, sometimes of children. And of the hand making. Still, life.

Lisa Appignanesi OBE is a prize-winning writer, novelist, and cultural commentator. She was President of English PEN, Chair of the Freud Museum London, and until 2020 Chair of the Royal Society of Literature of which she is now a vice-president. She is a Visiting Professor at King’s College London. Her non-fiction books include Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love (2018), Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness (2014), All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (2011), the prize-winning Mad Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 (2008); Freud’s Women (1992/2005, with John Forrester); a biographical portrait of Simone de Beauvoir (2005), amongst others. She is also the author of an acclaimed family memoir, Losing the Dead (1999) and nine novels, including The Memory Man (2004, which won a Holocaust Fiction Prize) and Paris Requiem (2001/2014).