The Uncontrollability of the World
Hartmut Rosa and James Wagner
The driving force in modern life is the desire to make the world controllable. Yet a fully moldable world is a lifeless one. According to Rosa, our society feels empty because have lost resonance: transcendent encounters with objects that elude our control. Strip the world of transcendance and you end up stripping it of meaning.
Yet it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world – only then do we feel touched, moved and alive. A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered, would be a dead world.
