Nothing Personal
Sexual Functionalism & Promiscuous Habits in Tolstoy’s The Devil
In his essay “On the Ontological Mystery,” Gabriel Marcel identifies what he calls functionalism as a fundamental feature of modern urban life. Under the reign of functionalism, “the individual tends to appear both to himself and to others as an agglomeration of functions”; he tends to reduce himself, in other words, to something like a social or biological mechanism. Man in mass society can scarcely even see himself as a person:
Travelling on the Underground, I often wonder with a kind of dread what can be the inward reality of the life of this or that man employed on the railway —the man who opens the doors, for instance, or the one who punches the tickets. Surely everything both within him and outside him conspires to identify this man with his functions —meaning not only with his functions as a worker, as trade union member or as voter, but with his vital functions as well. The rather horrible expression “time table” perfectly describes his life.
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Michial Farmer is the author of Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction (Camden House, 2017) and the translator of Gabriel Marcel’s Thirst (Cluny, 2021). He is a contributing editor at Front Porch Republic, and his essays have appeared in Local Culture, America, and Dappled Things, among other places. He teaches high-school history in Atlanta, where he is a member of St. Jude the Apostle Catholic Church.
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