Trapped in the flow of time

Michelstaedter has been one of the few geniuses in human history who attempted to come to the very core of human suffering; to detect its true aetiology, and cure it once and for all. Born in Gorizia – currently at the Italian-Slovenian border – in the well-to-do Jewish family of Alberto Michelstaedter, the director of an insurance company and bibliomaniac, and Emma Luzzato, member of another prominent Jewish family, Carlo has been a victim of the fin de siècle nausea which afflicted in an even more pronounced manner the then collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire (Bini 1992, 28-29). To the fundamental question of why humans are suffering, Michelstaedter gave an answer very similar to the one bequeathed by the best philosophical – and religious – traditions of the East, the West, and his native Italy specifically:

“But man wants from other things in a future time what he lacks in himself: the possession of his own self,¹ and as he wants and is busied so with the future he escapes himself in every present. Thus does he move differently from the things different from him, as he is different from his own self, continuing in time. What he wants is given within him, and wanting life he distances himself from himself: he does not know what he wants. … for he does not have himself as long as an irreducible, obscure hunger for life lives within him” (Michelstaedter 2004, 11).

Being human actually means being subject to that irreducible, obscure hunger for life. A human is the animal that never stops desiring. The very moment it would stop, its life would have automatically come to an end. Here lies the fundamental contradiction of human life, according to Michelstaedter. Life is de facto a motion in time, a perpetual sense of discontent which must be satisfied at any price, but which, strangely enough, can never be fully satisfied: “Because at no point is the will satisfied, each thing destroys itself in coming into being and in passing away: πάντα ῥεῖ, ‘everything flows,’ so that it transforms itself without respite in varied desiring” (Michelstaedter 2004, 15).

Life is de facto a motion in time, a perpetual sense of discontent which must be satisfied at any price… 

Human beings are condemned to strive for possessing themselves without ever being able to achieve it; were they ever to achieve it even for a single moment, their life would have to stop immediately. Schopenhauer had already shown that all life amounts to is will, and that this will is by definition insatiable: “For Schopenhauer, as for Leopardi, will is what constitutes the essence of human life. Will presents itself as a constant tension, as a search for what man lacks” (Bini 1992, 8). But insofar as human life’s conditio sine qua non is that constant lack of everything, it is also necessarily deduced that the tragedy of human beings is their entrapment in the …