Andreessen vs. Augustine

Marc Andreessen, one of the most influential venture capitalists in the country, recently said in an interview that he has “zero” introspection, or as little as possible. “Move forward. Go.” He associates introspection with dwelling in the past, with getting stuck, with the guilt-ridden therapeutics of the last century. Great builders, on his telling, did not wake up thinking about themselves. They got up and built. For a certain kind of American reader, especially one exhausted by the pathologies of our therapeutic culture, this is going to sound not only plausible but bracing. 

The popular phrase, “You can just do things,” responds to the sort of malaise or paralysis Andreessen is criticizing here. From deep ecology to trans- and post-humanism, our age is suspicious of the human being. That suspicion extends especially to human action. Perhaps we are intimidated by the powers we wield through modern technology; perhaps we are superconscious of the evils human beings have perpetrated; perhaps we are sick of ourselves and the burdens and responsibilities we shoulder through action.

But what Andreessen says is also confused, or at least incomplete, in a revealing way. He is right that there is a kind of inwardness that leaves a man trapped inside himself, forever ruminating, criticizing, second-guessing, hampered in action. But he also assumes that reflecting on what is deepest in man is mostly a liability. He seems not to know that there is an older and much more serious account of interiority, one that has very little to do with therapy, still less with self-absorption. In that older account, the turn inward is part of man’s return to reality. 

The problem is not simply Freud or 1920s Vienna, but rather the Cartesian habit of treating inwardness as a self-enclosed domain, a sealed chamber in which the individual encounters only his own thoughts. Once interiority is described this way, it is not hard to become impatient with it. It assumes that we are somehow cut off from the world: the res cogitans over here, with the res extensa over there. Why spend too much time there? Why not get on with life, which, after all, involves the self in contact with the external world in easy and even delightful ways?  

But that is not how Augustine understands the matter, and Augustine remains the great doctor of the inner life in the Christian tradition. For him, the movement inward is never a movement into a private psychological theater. The soul does not attend to itself in order to find there the absolute certainty it craves, or to ruminate over its own past. It turns inward because man cannot be reduced to what is outward and visible, and because the soul, if it is to know itself truly, must recover the order in which it stands. Augustine’s movement from exterior things to interior things is also a movement upward: toward what is above man—namely, God. The inward turn, in other words, does not terminate in the self, but in the uncreated light above the self that created it, and by which light alone man is capable of judging his actions. The mind knows itself only within a larger order of being, and finally in relation to God, who is more intimate to man than man is to himself. Augustine’s inwardness is theological at least as much as it is psychological.

That is why it is also moral and ascetical. The deepest difficulty is not that man has an inner life and gets lost in it. The difficulty is that sin disorders attention. We become submerged in lower things. We do not know ourselves well because we do not want to see clearly. That sort of clarity would confront us with our own sins and require purification. Knowing the mind as it is is hard work. It requires discipline and grace. The problem with modern introspection is not that it goes inward, or even, in its therapeutic turn, that it dwells on the past. It is that it often goes inward without any account of what man is, what he is for, and what would count as seeing himself truthfully. 

Once that distinction is in view, Andreessen’s own posture begins to look less hard-headed than evasive. Perhaps he is unwilling to subject his own actions to any kind of transcendent evaluation. A man can certainly get stuck in the past. He can brood uselessly. He can ruminate and thereby exacerbate his own traumas. But he can also refuse interiority because he does not want judgment or accountability. He can remain in motion because motion keeps harder questions at bay. In such a case, “move forward” is not so much a strength as a counsel to avoid responsibility.

One of the recurring temptations of the tech world is to think functionally about man. If something produces results, then the important work has been done. Interiority begins to look indulgent or decadent. But this is a very thin account of the human person. Man is not only an actor in the world. He is also a creature who must judge, repent, remember, and order his loves. Action severed from that order is not freedom; it becomes directionless drift.

What Andreessen senses, and what many of his listeners will sense with him, is that our culture has made a mess of the interior life and, often, has become self-hating and suspicious of humans and their capacity for agency. But the answer is not to focus less on the soul, or to be less aware of what we are or how we stand with respect to eternity; it is to recover a better understanding of the interior life. The alternative to bad introspection is not permanent outwardness, living life flowing from one project to the next without asking questions about where we are going or the value of what we have done. It is truthful self-knowledge. And that kind of knowledge, because it places man again before God, is one of the conditions of good, fully human action in the world.

Left image by JD Lasica, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.