In the past century, philosophy has mostly abandoned the effort to account for this complexity, and so has the data-driven age that has blossomed in its wake. We’ve become masters of conformity, empirical evidence and science. We read the books of Pascal, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and the other thinkers of the abyss, if we ever do, in the way we look at ancient coins: as curiosa, interesting remnants from times past, not as something that can feed us today. They have no value when it comes to helping us make better sense of ourselves.

It’s as though we have become more Cartesian than Descartes; we refuse to have anything to do with that which is not exceedingly clear and distinct; if something defies the usual explanations and seems mysterious, then it “smacks of religion.” If a problem unsettles us, but it’s not solvable in strictly linguistic, logical or empirical terms, we deem it a “false problem” and move on. Today, it is considered unrigorous and unprofitable to talk of matters of the human heart — that obscure little thing that, more than logic or arguments, makes people act and live and die.

The main reason we don’t engage with the abyss, however, is not necessarily mental laziness. Most of the time, it is sheer fear. For, as Nietzsche warned, if you look intently into an abyss, the abyss will start looking back. Dostoevsky — socialist, political prisoner, addicted gambler, epileptic, reactionary thinker and visionary artist — did plenty abyss-gazing and his testimony is overwhelming. It is clear “to the point of obviousness,” he confesses in “A Writer’s Diary,” that “evil lies deeper in human beings than our socialist-physicians suppose; that no social structure will eliminate evil; that the human soul will remain as it has always been; that abnormality and sin arise from that soul itself; and, finally, that the laws of the human soul are still so little known, so obscure to science, so undefined, and so mysterious, that there are not and cannot be either physicians or final judges.”

When the hyper-rationalist model fails, it fails spectacularly. In the American election, reason gave way to fear, resentment, hate and spite. For the most part, “rational agency” was nowhere to be found. What seemed to drive the support for Trump was darker and more complicated — the heart. And what makes this event particularly significant is not necessarily its political aspect (though that’s serious enough), but the fact that we find ourselves so poorly equipped to comprehend it. Thanks to the clumsy way in which we’ve been imagining ourselves, we are unprepared to digest it. Rarely has a failure of imagination been more humiliating.

Dealing with the human abyss used to be the province of religion, but ever since God died we haven’t really been able to find a good replacement. (Not that there are any serious candidates.) Yet if we are to remain human ignoring the problem, looking elsewhere, is not an option. The humanities can reinvent themselves only to the extent that they will be able to chart, as adequately as humanly possible, the full depth of the human abyss. Unless we will find a way to account for the whole human subject, without self-flattery and self-delusion, we will move in circles, unable to overcome the blinding hyper-rationalism under which we currently slave.