Melissa Mohr comes right out with it on the title page of her history of swearing, though the dust-jacket chastely presents the book as Holy Sh*t. Her argument is straightforward. It is that there are two main sources of bad language. One is the holy, which encompasses making oaths in the name of God or parts of his body, such as ‘by God’s wounds’, which later became ‘zounds’, and which George Farquhar in 1699 describes being comically gentrified into ‘zauns’. The other is the shit, which encompasses taboo bodily activities from buggery and beyond to the child’s favourite ‘poo’. In different periods, she argues, either the holy or the shit is the prime source of obscenity.
…She also speculates that future swear words will probably come from some of the milder taboo areas in modern life, such as death and disability. Should we be quite so cheery about swearing or its future? Swear words and oaths often gain their expletive force from the circumstances in which they are uttered. The badness of saying ‘whore’ or ‘God’s wounds’ or ‘bastard’ depends on who you say it to and why – as Queen Elizabeth I’s lord deputy in Ireland Sir John Perrot discovered when his secretary told on him for saying ‘God’s wounds, this it is to serve a base bastard pissing kitchen woman.’ Oaths can carry their potential to hurt or shock into normal conversation, which is why they can be used simply as intensifiers. Maybe we should just say ‘what the hell’ (or the expletive of our choice) and let this happen, because it does happen and will happen. But it isn’t simply prudish to reflect on the dangers of being foul. Many of us now liberally sprinkle our language with words that show we have a liberal attitude to sex and to bodily functions. But words grounded in racial difference (‘pikey’, ‘yid’, ‘paki’) are generally regarded as toxic. The offensive force of those words crucially depends on who says them to whom. Terms of racial and sexual abuse can and do work their way out of their nasty little corners despite the efforts of the law and social propriety to contain them. They are the most likely sources of future bad language.
books
There Are Many Copies Around, But This, My Man, Is the Original
For we are all insulted by
The mere suggestion that we die
Each moment and that each great I
Is but a process in a process
Within a field that never closes…— W.H. Auden
The wisdom part consists of the recognition that everything is impermanent (annica), that I am among the impermanent things (anatman or no-self; annata, Pali), that everything that happens is caused to happen by prior events and processes and will yield other events and processes (dependent origination), and that if you try to find where things bottom out, you will be led, Zen-like, to find that they don’t bottom out, analytic deconstruction never comes to an end (sunyata, emptiness). Buddhist wisdom says that everything is becoming. What there is, and all there is, are events and processes. Things and substances insofar as they exist at all are simply slow-moving events and processes. Compare: many scientists think that glass is a slow-moving liquid.
As you’ve no doubt noticed, the telling reference to liquid betrays the panta rheist origins of this so-called Buddhist wisdom. You see this a lot in other derivative philosophies as well.
Life Was a Goat-Dance
Nietzsche I feel was often acting out the wisdom of Christ, facing the whole world angrily, as if he had found the moneychangers in the temple. Indeed he loved to hate all ‘counterfeiters’. He also hated intellectual corruption, manipulation and lies; he abhorred pettiness, meanness, envy and vengefulness; he loathed mediocrity. Though he could be defensive, blunt, obsessive, and quick to take offense, Nietzsche combined a high, austere intellect with a boundless religious need and a striking sweetness of heart. He was endlessly self-questioning and self-critical.
…The retreat into mind and solitude magnified every common perception Nietzsche had of the foolishness of life, the incongruous judgments, the misunderstandings, the sheer intellectual impurity of the whole martyrous thing, and what came out on the page was laughing contempt and chuckling malice. Wasn’t it clear the world was all dressed up with lies and tricks, nothing but tromperie, all its order fake and deceptive? It would take an idealist to fight it, and an ascetic to withdraw from it.
…Nietzsche turned to color and music because of the absence of a suitable response to the death of God. Color replaced sense and meaning. Color and music were what life had to offer. They were the original tragic vision. Life was a goat-dance performed to the accompaniment of pan-pipes. The actors wore masks and walked on stilts. All life was like that, a ‘serious joke’, or ought to be seen as such; yet most people took it with a seriousness Nietzsche could only laugh at; seriousness which was without foundation and sapped energy. That energy might be better directed into celebrating the rite of existence.
What Nietzsche feared was the growth of a civilization in which individuals lacked the strength to convert the fear and the threat of the irrational into a force for positive living. What he wanted to see was joyous human self-affirmation despite and in the face of an absence of absolute values and fixed answers.
One More Outnumbered
The social form of the biological defense mechanism of mimicry is the ability to blend in with crowds, to adopt the manners and mores of social groups, to mimic conventional moral or social values. Such cleverness obviously has a high degree of survival value. Sometimes Nietzsche has been thought to contradict himself by arguing that the weaker or the unfit survive and reproduce while the fit and the stronger tend to perish. But there is no contradiction here at all. Independent, self-directed, intelligent, perceptive, creative, and solitary individuals who are able to go against the grain of the majority are stronger, fitter types of human beings individually. But they are no match for cooperative, dependent, uncreative, sociable majorities. Exceptional individuals who are, in the strict sense of the word, “unpopular” have “the majority against them.” This is more or less the point that Emerson made when he quoted with approval de Boufflers’ observation that the majority “have the advantage of number…It is of no use for us to make war with them; we shall not weaken them; they will always be the masters.” Of course, a cultural world in which the majority are the masters is looked upon by Emerson, to say nothing of Nietzsche, as a deplorable state of affairs.
He Wrote the Book of Love
Religious contextualizing aside, it is clear that a new ideal of romantic love had emerged. What made it new was that it portrayed love as an affair of the heart at the core of which is service to the beloved. In Europe, before this time, love, especially between husband and wife, tended to be thought of as a practical arrangement. While there may have been no precedent for the new ideal, either in pagan or Christian sources, there is a source: twelfth-century troubadours, especially William of Poitiers, who expressed in his love poems that the lover’s happiness is dependent on that of the beloved and that service to the beloved is an important component of a meaningful life.
Philosophers, Saints and Artists
At the same time, however, it was perfectly clear that Nietzsche looked to art, religion and philosophy — and not to race — to elevate man above the beasts, and some men above the mass of mankind.
Though Nietzsche may shock us with his elitist and warrior language, the Übermenschen near to his heart are his aesthetic comrades, “philosophers, saints, and artists.” The unspoken but always present thesis is this: It is in the romantic practice of artistic creativity that modern excellence can be achieved and in an exquisite sense of personal taste and experience that it is realized.
The Centrality of the Contest
Neither one side nor the other in these pairs of extremes is correctly designated by itself as “Nietzschean” or as the core of Nietzsche’s thought. This is not to say that in the contest of extremes that forms Nietzsche’s thought one side does not gain the upper hand. It is, however, to insist upon the centrality of the contest that holds these rival and extreme opinions together and the fundamental assumptions about human beings and the cosmos that generate it.
Two things are necessary, therefore to social growth: a living sense of community and ‘degenerate’ natures which help it to evolve. And they are of equal value: “Only when there is securely founded and guaranteed long duration is a steady evolution and ennobling inoculation at all possible.” And what guarantees such steady evolution is that the majority of souls remain fettered spirits, since “all states and orderings within society — classes, marriage, education, law — derive their force and endurance solely from the faith the fettered spirits have in them.” So what Nietzsche will later call “the herd” is a vital necessity. The fettered spirit must always remain the rule, the free spirit the exception.
Don’t Like the Drugs but the Drugs Like Me
That may be good public relations, but it is bad public education. We also argue that it is fundamentally bad science. The brain-disease model of addiction is not a trivial rebranding of an age-old human problem. It plays to the assumption that if biological roots can be identified, then a person has a “disease.” And being afflicted means that the person cannot choose, control his or her life, or be held accountable. Now introduce brain imaging, which seems to serve up visual proof that addiction is a brain disease. But neurobiology is not destiny: The disruptions in neural mechanisms associated with addiction do constrain a person’s capacity for choice, but they do not destroy it. What’s more, training the spotlight too intently on the workings of the addicted brain leaves the addicted person in the shadows, distracting clinicians, policy makers, and sometimes patients themselves from other powerful psychological and environmental forces that exert strong influence on them.
…The brain-disease narrative misappropriates language better used to describe such conditions as multiple sclerosis or schizophrenia — afflictions of the brain that are neither brought on by the sufferer nor modifiable by the desire to be well. It offers false hope that an addict’s condition is completely amenable to a medical cure (much as pneumonia is to antibiotics). Finally, as we’ll see, it threatens to obscure the vast role of personal agency in perpetuating the cycle of use and relapse.
Music Is Like Our Prayer; It Helps You Reach Somewhere
Nietzsche thinks that music allows us to face the tragedy of human existence, not so much in the sense of a diversion but as a means of “speaking” about life. There are things that can be “said” musically — or perhaps sung — that cannot be said philosophically.
…Since language is always metaphorical — and so never delivers to us the “thing itself” — music is all the more significant. For Nietzsche (like the German Romantics) thinks it has a directness that is unlike language. When Nietzsche contrasts the value to the words of a lyrical poem (and thus the images it conjures up) to the music to which it is set, he makes it clear that music has a revelatory power that language and its images simply cannot have: “Confronted with the supreme revelations of music, we feel, willy-nilly, the crudeness of all imagery and of every emotion that might be adduced by way of an analogy. Thus Beethoven’s last quartets put to shame everything visual and the whole realm of empirical reality.” So music has a significant edge over words. Of course, whatever it is that music conveys cannot be conveyed by words. So, at a certain point, we are — by definition — unable to “describe” exactly what it is that music says. If it could be put into words, we wouldn’t need music.
…Nietzsche is convinced —as were the ancient Greeks — that words sung in rhythm had a special effect upon one that simply was not matched by the bare spoken word.
A Certain Muteness in Existence
[F]or Nietzsche nihilism is rooted in the attempt to ground and secure one’s being, to master it in a way that excludes boredom, suffering and tragedy. But this grasp for mastery is self-defeating, for in the end it leaves one with nothing: unable to acknowledge the reality of this world of suffering, one puts one’s faith in something beyond the real (for instance God or Truth), in what for Nietzsche literally is nothing.
…Affirmation, as Nietzsche’s response to nihilism, is not a kind of salvation in the sense of a solution or justification of the difficulties and pain of human existence. Nietzsche imagined an affirmation that eschews the need for promises of paradise or purity, certainty and security — or even more mundane promises of “improvement” or “progress.” For him, the problem of affirmation becomes the problem of how we affirm a life without the hope that the negative — evil and suffering — will slowly wither away to nothing. To affirm life only in the hope that we are able to end suffering — or to affirm life only from the perspective of that goal (“it was difficult, but it was worth it”) — is not to affirm this life.
Nietzsche thinks, therefore, that we must embrace a certain meaninglessness, a certain muteness in existence, instead of wishing it or thinking it away with “solutions” such as God or Truth; nihilism, he contends, can be a “divine way of thinking.” But such divine nihilism must be contrasted with the exhausted, life-hating nihilism of the Western tradition. As he explored the nihilism of modernity and imagined a joy that transcends the rational ego-centered consciousness, Nietzsche’s thinking recovered certain religious concepts and practices.
The Flow Below
As the play of images on the surface of consciousness is translated into the sounds of words, concepts are formed by abstraction from individual images and are then used to construct a framework by means of which the dynamic manifold of experience can be controlled and made secure. This construction — which Nietzsche characterizes in magnificent imagery of pyramids, Roman columbaria, spiders’ webs, and bee hives — comes to stand on a foundation of “running water,” over the unstoppable flux of life. Experiential stability is achieved by virtue of ignoring the flow below:
Only by forgetting that primitive world of metaphor, only through the solidification and rigidification of a primordial mass of images streaming forth from the primal faculty of human phantasy in a fiery fluidity…and only through the human being’s forgetting himself as an artistically creating subject does he live with any peace, security and consistency.
This is the first full formulation of Nietzsche’s radical conception of the phantastic relation of the human self to the world, which will remain at the core of his mature thought. The world of everyday experience is a construct imposed by conceptualization upon an underlying flux of imagery.
With this in mind, it seems clear that Nietzsche is best understood as the John the Baptist of panta rheism then, wouldn’t you agree?
Origin of the Theses
Nietzsche’s best-known attempt to break the hold that a philosophical or moral picture might have over us is genealogy. At least, genealogy can be liberating in this way if such a genealogy can show us that practices and norms could have been very much otherwise, that some assumption or norm we take for granted as inevitable and unavoidable in fact has a contingent, quite avoidable origin, and an origin considerably more complicated than any notion of “rational commitments” or “reflective endorsement” or “faith in revelation” or the like would allow.
Misopogonism
“Facial hair for the past century has been thought to reflect a suspicious streak of individuality and defiance,” says Christopher Oldstone-Moore, a history lecturer at Ohio’s Wright State University.
…”There’s a long history in our civilisation of anxiety about facial hair, and hair in general, as being unhygienic: hairs will fall into the chocolate and soil the food,” says Oldstone-Moore.
Even in the case of firemen, the waters are muddy. “The mask argument is in part a tool to be used for a larger argument, which is it’s just not uniform, it’s not respectable, it’s not proper, for disciplined professional men to have facial hair. That’s the bottom line.”
Currently reading Mark Forsyth’s The Horologicon, where I happened upon this passage:
Slavery has been abolished but shavery survives. This latter is rather a shame, as it lessens the need for all of the technical beard words, of which there are many. They all involve the Greek root pogo, which is pronounced in exactly the same way as the stick (although the two are etymologically unrelated). So there’s pogonology (the study of beards), pogonate (having a beard), pogoniasis (a beard on a lady), and pogonotomy (shaving). As we live in an essentially misopogonistic society of beard-haters, most men must start the day by taking a razor from the pogonion or tip of the chin up to the philtrum, which is the name for the little groove between your nose and your upper lip. Then you have to work carefully to avoid a neckbeard, which the Victorians called a Newgate fringe. Newgate was the name of a London prison where people were hanged. So a Newgate fringe was meant to resemble the rope that was slipped around the felon’s neck before he took the plunge into eternity.
Two lessons here, then. One, Forsyth is an immensely entertaining writer, and I have greatly enjoyed his books. Two, the next time you see someone using “neckbeard” as a synonym for a virginal, basement-dwelling loser, you may confidently accuse them of classism before instructing them to check their shaveowner’s privilege.
Matter Thinks and Feels
A profound contradiction, of which he was well aware, informs Leopardi’s philosophy. Although he saw in the will-to-truth the primary cause of the nihilism that he believed was drawing modern civilisation into its vortex, Leopardi fully embraced reason, logic, science and this will-to-truth. He followed the truth wherever it led him, refusing to shy away from its conclusions or to seek refuge in mystifications and self-deceiving consolations.
Leopardi’s open-eyed, disabused thinking led him ultimately to a monistic view of reality. All that exists is matter, he concluded, and whatever the tradition calls mind, soul or spirit is only in effect matter. Yet Leopardi’s concept of matter was so original, heterogeneous and self-expansive as to have little in common with the inert matter of the dualists who believe that mind is one thing, matter another. Late in the Zibaldone he declares that everything points to the conclusion “that matter can think, that matter thinks and feels”. Like many of the other thoughts that make the Zibaldone an ongoing conversation with the future, Leopardi’s inspirited concept of matter is one that calls on us to take it up and give it new life in our own time.
I’d never heard of Leopardi before reading this fascinating review, and while I hate to think of having missed out on something I might have enjoyed, there’s also a childlike delight to be had in the continued existence of hidden surprises. How many similar intellectual companions do I have yet to encounter?
They Wander in the Dark Because They Prefer Lightning to Light
Radical ideas furnished an entertaining social pastime for the aristocracy, but neither they nor anyone else discerned that all of France’s institutions as well as its social fabric would face a devastating assault. When he finished compiling a list of the grievances contained in the Caheirs de doléances (the 60,000 pamphlets written in response to the king’s request for comments on the state of the nation), Tocqueville was thunderstruck. “I realize with a kind of terror that what is being demanded,” he wrote with stupefaction, “is the simultaneous and systematic abolition of all the laws and customs of the country. I see that it will be a question of one of the most dangerous revolutions that ever took place in the world.”
And yet the proponents of this radical change, who would be its unwitting future victims, had no notion of the violence that would accompany such a total and sudden transformation of French society. They naïvely thought that the whole process could be carried out through “reason” alone.
Live Unnoticed
We learn about it from Plutarch, who tells us that Epicurus was famous for the maxim “live unnoticed”…To “live unnoticed” means to live a completely private life, with no involvement, beyond what might be obligatory for all citizens, in the public life of one’s community or country, and also with no ambitions for making a mark in any other public realm — in any of the arts or professions, for example.
…It seems obvious that the more exposed one’s life is to the attentions of the public, and, in general, to those of any wide circle of nonintimates, the more one risks one runs of potential harmful interference from them. The general run of people are more inclined to envy and ingratitude than honoring honest good service, or simply reciprocating favors…
Thus for Epicurus the default position is to live a life of devotion to one’s private affairs, letting public and political interests take care of themselves, or rather letting them get taken care of by those foolish enough to go in for such things. The hope is that by keeping out of the limelight one can live happily, in peace and quiet, surrounded, and both protected and advanced in one’s pursuit of pleasure, by one’s family, and by a circle of intimate, like-minded friends.