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.
nietzsche
Truth Is Like a Blanket That Always Leaves Your Feet Cold
This is the point Gray elects to miss and has elected to miss many times before. Human beings are social creatures whose sociability manifests itself in feelings of empathy and altruism. But these feelings are not always in evidence and sometimes they give way to hatred and to violence. Hatred and violence are not exceptional. History, as Gray never tires of reminding us, is strewn with the corpses of the murdered and maimed. But nor are hatred and violence the rule. And when we encounter them – sometimes, not always – our better selves are mobilised. Moreover, it is in this spirit – and not in any post-Christian attempt to take a lathe to the crooked timber of humanity – that we try to improve the lot of our species: so that Mary Turner’s descendants are not strung up and emptied of their progeny; so that orphans with tears in their unseeing eyes are taken in and given a bowl of soup; and so that our own children can have a decent education and the chance of a job at the end of it. Is this a hubristic belief in progress? The very suggestion dies on the lips.
Human beings may not develop but human institutions do. Sometimes they develop in good ways and sometimes they develop in bad ones, and whether the development is good or bad it is never irreversible. Of course such freedoms and rights and securities as we have won could all be swept away if another Hitler came to power. That is what makes the fight for justice not just worthwhile but necessary. Gray wants us to believe that this fight is no different from the one waged by Christians and communists alike. He is wrong. To seek to make things better is not the same as thinking that they can be made perfect. The problem we face – that humanity faces – is not faith in the future but indifference to it. Resource wars are already in progress and population growth is out of control. A catastrophic change in our climate, growing inequality, the prospect of a nuclearised Middle East: these problems are not on the horizon – they are upon us. In The Silence of Animals, Gray talks about the ‘current fad for evolutionary theories of society’. I don’t know what theories he means. But there is one thing I do know, or think I do: without a little ‘evolution’ or ‘progress’ in the political sphere our flawed and wonderful species is doomed.
First of all, let me just say that this article was a delight to read. Critical yet fair, it’s an engrossing overview of Gray’s recent ouevre as well as a specific review of his latest book. I wish that sort of thing didn’t deserve special mention, but there you go.
Now, then, let me suggest that, rather than seeking to make anyone “believe” anything, what Gray is doing is giving book-length exposition to the thinking of the Chinese farmer:
The situation we always live in is like the wise Chinese farmer whose horse ran off. When his neighbor came to console him the farmer said, “Who knows what’s good or bad?”
When his horse returned the next day with a herd of horses following her, the foolish neighbor came to congratulate him on his good fortune.
“Who knows what’s good or bad?” said the farmer.Then, when the farmer’s son broke his leg trying to ride one of the new horses, the foolish neighbor came to console him again.
“Who knows what’s good or bad?” said the farmer.When the army passed through, conscripting men for war, they passed over the farmer’s son because of his broken leg. When the foolish man came to congratulate the farmer that his son would be spared, again the farmer said, “Who knows what’s good or bad?”
Ad infinitum. Like waves, the events of our lives have no true essence of their own; they simply ebb and flow. If that thought depresses you, then you might just share a little more of that faith in perfectibility than you think.
People are very good at identifying specific things that need to be made “better”. Often, though, they lack broader perspective, and so the improvements they make in one area give rise to new problems in a different area, and off we go again. Like Todd Anderson in Dead Poets Society, no matter how they pull and stretch the blanket, some other part of their body is left exposed and cold. However much weight you want to give to humankind’s sociable nature, we can at least agree that humans are certainly pattern-seeking animals, and with that in mind, it’s not perverse to recognize a certain disheartening pattern in the efforts people make to control and optimize their world. No, hatred and violence are not the rule. But neither are empathy and altruism. There is no “rule”, only endless give-and-take. Perhaps that’s what Nietzsche was driving at in his conception of the Eternal Recurrence — is humanity capable of accepting such nullifying insights that make a mockery of all they hold dear? Are people capable of unhumanizing their views a little along with Robinson Jeffers?
Almost certainly not. A perspective like this inhabits a forbidding perch; the intellectual air is cold and thin. And humans in general are social enough that they will happily stick together on more hospitable terrain, continuing to dream of a blanket big enough.
That final line is the weakest point of the whole essay. The entire species, doomed? You mean every single last one of us? How likely is that? Human culture, as we understand it today, may not last much longer, but even if a mutated supervirus, an asteroid, a murderously enraged Gaia or all-out nuclear holocaust reduced humans to a few million post-apocalyptic hunter-gatherers scattered in isolated bands, the species would likely continue in some form. Even the dinosaurs are still with us in the form of birds, after all. And perhaps that thought scares us even more — even our dethronement as the dominant species on Earth wouldn’t rate a Götterdämmerung of significance. It would just be one more wave in the endless flow of history.
Noam Sayin’
On Friday we posted an excerpt from an interview in which linguist Noam Chomsky (something of a political celebrity himself) excoriates Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, along with Lacan’s superstar disciple, Slovenian theorist Slavoj Žižek, for using intentionally obscure and inflated language to pull the wool over their admirers’ eyes and make trivial “theories” seem profound. He calls Lacan a “total charlatan.”
Yep. As the pop star Neecha sang, “Those who know they are profound strive for clarity; those who would like to appear profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.” And there was also the philosophy collective, Depeche Mode, whose seminal paper on the political use of language, “Words Are Very Unnecessary: They Can Only Do Harm,” is still influential today.
People like Karen Armstrong have said that religious fundamentalism is a wholly modern movement, not a premodern one, born as a result of feeling threatened by the advance of science and technology. In essence, once fundamentalists accepted the challenge to prove the literal truth of their mythic stories, rather than be content with them as allegories, they stepped onto a playing field they were woefully unprepared for. I recently read someone — I forget who — saying something similar about postmodernism and critical theory. Much of modern science is extremely specialized and incomprehensible to a lay reader. So, in a misguided attempt to compete with science and retain the humanities’ relevance, postmodernism tried to incorporate similar jargon and specialization. But as Chomsky has said before on this topic, the difference is that if he wants to get a layman’s understanding of the latest theories in physics, he can find someone capable of explaining it to him on a level he can understand. With theory, the bafflegab is the point, and it can’t be stripped away without leaving banality standing there, naked and embarrassed.
How Much Reverence Has a Noble Man for His Enemies!
I read Pascal Bruckner’s essay last week, but the one line that really stuck with me, despite being somewhat tangential to the broader theme, was this one:
There are useful enemies that make you fertile and sterile enemies that wear you out.
I like that formulation. I like the way it limns the subtle concept of an intellectual sparring partner who brings out the best in you through integral opposition while keeping you from slipping into the easy tendency toward moralistic tunnel vision, where winning the argument and trouncing the enemy at any cost becomes the goal. Maybe that’s not so remarkable an attitude among scientists, say, but I find it to be rare in general culture. There are a handful of people I describe as favorites “to think with” — they manage to enlighten even as they provoke; they pull off the difficult trick of balancing stunningly original insight with clear, almost obvious, expression.
Useful enemies don’t have to be individuals, of course; they might be general concepts or themes. One theme I’ve been circling around for the past year or so is the superficial progressive obsession with achieving racial/sexual demographic parity in artsy fields. Well-meaning folks, I’m sure. Nothing more than guilt-ridden honkies looking for a simple, clearly visible metric to reassure themselves that they aren’t accidentally contributing to someone’s oppression. Their vapid “activism” is the sociopolitical equivalent of feng shui — rearranging society’s demographic furniture in order to, like, free up the inequitable energy flow and create good vibes of social justice. But though I mock them, I’m glad for the time I spent taking their arguments seriously and engaging with what they said instead of dismissing them after a cursory glance. In the spirit of Nietzsche’s rules, they were the stones against which I sharpened my own thoughts: why would I resent them for that?
That theme could easily become a sterile enemy, though, if I let it. It could just be something I routinely return to in order to reenact the same old drama, with nothing new to say, both of us going through the predictable motions in a dysfunctional relationship. Especially on the social web, I feel, there’s a phenomenon where one has to perform one’s dislike, even when there’s no point to it. It’s not enough to quietly ignore people or websites that waste my time; I have to announce my ignoring in a passive-aggressive stage whisper to someone else. I see people in forums and on Twitter doing that all the time: seeking attention in a symbiotic relationship with someone they profess to be bored or sickened by. It’s like watching kids who think they’re cleverly disguising their flirting by punching each other and calling names, only it’s pathetic instead of cute. I’ve noted this unhealthy dynamic a couple times recently, and it motivates me to pay closer attention, to be sensitive to when it’s time to add a period and turn the page.
He Who Writes in Blood and Aphorisms Does Not Want to be Read, He Wants to be Learned by Heart
In the midst of another paint-by-numbers essay lamenting the baleful influence of digital media upon our reading and thinking, this part stood out to me:
As Nicholas Carr (2013) thoughtfully points out, Friedrich Nietzsche is an example worth considering. When Nietzsche started to compose on the typewriter rather than by hand due to poor eyesight, it changed the way he wrote philosophy. His prose changed from arguments to aphorisms, thoughts to puns, and rhetoric to telegram style. If we significantly change how we write, it significantly changes what we write. If we significantly change how we read, it significantly changes what we read.
He bought a typewriter in 1882. That was the year The Gay Science was published, a book many scholars feel to be the first expression of his “mature” philosophy. The following year saw the publication of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which I might describe as a book-length epic poem/irreligious parable. Over the next few years, Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals, neither of which can be said to consist primarily of aphorisms, puns, or telegram-style terseness, completed this roughly-agreed-upon phase of his career where his most important ideas were developed to their fullest potential. Two of his most aphoristic works, Human, All Too Human and (my personal favorite) Daybreak, were published before his supposedly fateful encounter with the typewriter, the former’s consciously-chosen style owing more to the French writers he admired than any crude technological determinism.
Funny enough, a different sort of determinism — physiological — has also been suggested as responsible for his change of style. While rebutting that notion, Steven Michels stresses that however the aphorism might have first appeared in his style, Nietzsche quickly recognized the value it held for his philosophical project, which was a conscious rejection of the style of ponderous thought and argument that had traditionally dominated philosophy, and used it as a tool to that end:
Certainly illness played a role in Nietzsche’s brief bouts of creativity. But his aphorisms started much earlier than his chronic illnesses; many of his later books are less aphoristic, and his literary masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is anything but aphoristic. Nietzsche’s philosophising had more to do with the change in his philosophy than physiology. His aphoristic turn marked a turn in his intellectual development, to be sure, but it also allowed for a great advance in his philosophy, in presentation if not in development. His philosophy was limited by conventional forms, such as the treatise and the essay, and the aphorism allowed him to break from that. Although it was initially involuntary or subconscious, Nietzsche soon understood what this change of style allowed him to do philosophically, and he embraced it.
Oh, and about that typewriter:
Unfortunately Nietzsche wasn’t totally satisfied with his purchase and never really mastered the use of the instrument. Until now, many people have tried to understand why Nietzsche did not make more use of it, and a number of theories have been suggested such as that it was an outdated and poor model, that it was possible to write only upper case letters, etc. Today we can say for certain that all this is only speculation without foundation.
The writing ball was a solidly constructed instrument, made by hand and equipped with all the features one would expect of a modern typewriter.
You can now read the details about the Nietzsche writing ball in a book, “Nietzches Schreibkigel”, by Dieter Eberwein, vice-president of the International Rasmus Malling-Hansen Society, published by “Typoscript Verlag”. In it, Eberwein tells the true story about Nietzche’s writing ball based upon thorough investigation and restoration of the damaged machine.
Friedrich Nietszche was not aware that his trouble in using the machine was caused by damage to it during transportation to Genoa in Italy, where he lived at the time. And when he turned to a mechanic who had no typewriter repair skills, the mechanic managed to damage the writing ball even more. In his book, Dieter Eberwein presents all the typescripts Nietzsche ever wrote on his machine (about 60) and reveals the true story concerning the damages. Nietzsche also did not know how to change the direction of the colour ribbon, so that he had to ask the mechanic to help him each time the ribbon was out.
The Superstition of Those Afraid of the Water
When I think of Leon Wieseltier, I usually picture him with Brian Leiter’s spitballs dotting the side of his face and neck, and though his relationship with Isaiah Berlin makes me wish I could be favorably disposed toward him, this sort of thing makes it tough:
I don’t call myself a journalist and I can’t call myself a professor, so the only professional term to which I answer happily is “intellectual.” And I think it is a very honourable term and I am happy with it. The Springsteen thing was written against a kind of journalistic complaisance. And to be wicked. I think that it is very important to give people an example of irreverence. We live in a culture of worthless praise.
It seems that in an age of blogging and online journalism everything is either solipsistic back-patting or pure vitriol.
Or it’s talk radio. And I have to say that there is not one blog, out of the eight million that must exist, that I read. The thing about blogging is that it is either someone’s first thoughts—which we know by definition are never their best thoughts—so that’s not interesting, or as time goes by they simply repeat themselves. Moreover there isn’t a lot you can say about anything consequential in 300 words. I write the back page of the magazine and I always wish it was three times as long as it is.
“I don’t read any of those modern-day penny dreadfuls. Now stand back as I proceed to tell you all about them.” Snort. For a fellow who’s so concerned about scientism infringing on the humanities’ jurisdiction, he doesn’t seem to have any problem dictating the form “serious” writing must take to meet his standards. However, as I’m sure he’s consolingly heard a few times in his life, length isn’t everything.
(Hey, didn’t you hear him say it’s important to give people an example of irreverence? I mean, if he’s already got all these haughty preconceptions about blogging, I might as well play to type.)
Personally, I prefer as with poetry, so too with prose: study your subject silently, choose your angle carefully, and then illuminate it with a flash of insight, a striking turn of phrase. Or, as a fellow who knew a thing or two about expressing profound thoughts in aphoristic form put it:
For I approach deep problems like cold baths: quickly into them and quickly out again. That one does not get to the depths that way, not deep enough down, is the superstition of those afraid of the water, the enemies of cold water; they speak without experience. The freezing cold makes one swift.
And to ask this incidentally: does a matter necessarily remain misunderstood and unfathomed merely because it has been touched only in flight, glanced at, in a flash? Is it absolutely imperative that one settles down on it? That one has brooded over it as over an egg? Diu noctuque incubando, as Newton said of himself? At least there are truths that are singularly shy and ticklish and cannot be caught except suddenly — that must be surprised or left alone.
There certainly are plenty of blogs that are nothing but tribal vitriol and status competition, but unlike Twitter, there are no inherent constraints on the form a blog takes. It can be anything from an online diary to a space for long-form essays, and like the essay, its adaptable, mongrel nature likely bodes well for its longevity.
Art Is a Lie That Makes Us Realize Truth
I’ve been returning to Richard Marshall’s cool essay on Nietzsche and Beckett over the past week, trying to absorb all the good bits. Here’s some of them:
Leiter’s Nietzsche writes only to the poet artist. Leiter considers Nietzsche rare in being someone not looking for a universal readership. His philosophy of art is like Stendhal’s in that it states that art promotes arousal. When discussing the figures who exemplify best what he is discussing it is Goethe, Beethoven and himself who Nietzsche cites. Nietzsche was addressing the artistic genius. His concern was not directly political or social or moral – although he did think that without the spectacle of the artistic genius civilizations would decline – his concern was to save the artist from our ascetic planet where morality and bourgeois conventions threatened to crush artistic wonders. Nietzsche is arguing for an exceptionalism for the likes of Beethoven and Goethe (and Nietzsche) in order that art and the artist could thrive. It is a philosophy of artistic bohemian hedonism. I argue that Beckett is a supreme exemplar.
…Remember that Nietzsche’s spectacularly illiberal elitism and anti-morality was about preserving the artistic genius from restrictions that would obliterate their ability to fulfil their role. The elitism is not about aristocratic breeding, wealth, intelligence or any of the usual suspects. He is wholly concerned with art genius. Nietzsche examples of the overman are Goethe and Beethoven (and Nietzsche too). He thought that without the artist, we would be deprived of the spectacle of artistic genius and deprived of such as these, we would deprive ourselves of the source in life of aesthetic pleasure.
…For Nietzsche the terrible truth is existential, moral and finally epistemic. We know little. What we do know science delivers and it fails to sustain our illusions about our selves, such as freewill. Most of our cherished beliefs are illusory. To know what others really think of oneself would make you clinically depressed. That much of what we cherish, including our moral beliefs, are lies and falsehoods, coupled with the idea that the truth is unbearable, is a core of the Niezschean philosophy.
…Nietzsche writes: ‘The truly serious task of art …[is] to save the eye from gazing into the horrors of night and to deliver the subject by the healing balm of illusion from the spasms of the agitations of the will’. Art is a protection and remedy to the tragic insight of our existential situation.
What Sacred Games Shall We Have to Invent?
When Friedrich Nietzsche, who had fully absorbed the implications of Darwinian evolution, announced that “God is dead,” he was not merely addressing orthodox religion. He was telling moderns that there was no meaning or direction to be found in nature or history at all. He was telling them that Georg W. F. Hegel, Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and Karl Marx were victims of the residual influence of the idea of Providence, that their visions of an unfolding historical necessity were delusions. The thing that really mattered in the long run about Charles Darwin wasn’t the impact of “we are descended from monkeys” on reactionaries; it was the impact of “we are a meaningless accident” on progressives. Think of the tone in Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, and Theodor Adorno, the stoic willingness to face up to irredeemable loss and make the best of it. Think of the ferocious absolutism of twentieth century totalitarian regimes. These represent opposing but characteristic moods, and both were responses to a condition of utter abandonment and a consequent shift of the burden of responsibility for human practices to human beings.
This paragraph isn’t really representative of the larger essay; I just thought it was an elegant encapsulation of all the light and heat surrounding that famous phrase. Still, calling humanity a “meaningless accident” seems a bit like an overcorrection — an accident typically implies a regrettable deviation from purpose. If human existence, with all its myriad wonders and joys, is an accident, then what must the implied purpose be? It could only be pointlessness, nothingness, entropy. As I’ve said often, nihilism is a last-gasp attempt to find universal meaning by inverting the concept when all other options have failed. If meaning and value can’t be grounded in something eternal, then nothing ever has any meaning at all. (It’s the same logical error that says, if you can’t get an absolute perfect score on a test, fuck it, might as well turn in a blank page and get a zero.) God’s brittle skeleton gets propped up on the throne out of desperation.
It seems just as accurate, without being quite so bitterly spiteful, to say that humans aren’t guaranteed anything. We weren’t guaranteed to come into existence as a species. We’re not guaranteed to keep molding our world to our satisfaction. We’re not guaranteed to figure out the answers to any questions or problems we can conceive of. And we’re not guaranteed to exist indefinitely. Nonetheless, we’re here, and what we do matters to us. Let that be good enough.
In Between Demotic and Altiloquent
But texts, blogs, emails and Facebook posts are infecting other kinds of writing, and mostly for the good. They are making journalism, books and business communications more conversational.
Social media offer a pretty good model for how to write. First, the writers mostly keep it short. People on Twitter often omit “I”, “the” and “a”, which are usually wastes of space anyway. Vocabulary tends to be casual: bloggers say “but” instead of “however”. They don’t claim a false omniscience, but proclaim their subjectivity. And the writing is usually unpolished, barely edited. That’s a great strength.
…George Orwell in 1944 lamented the divide between wordy, stilted written English, and much livelier speech. “Spoken English is full of slang,” he wrote, “it is abbreviated wherever possible, and people of all social classes treat its grammar and syntax in a slovenly way.” His ideal was writing that sounded like speech. We’re getting there at last.
That article from Wired that I linked to last week said something similar, that texting is the most efficient form of communication ever invented. Well, I know this is a heretical thing to say to a culture obsessed with business and technology, but have you ever considered the possibility that efficiency isn’t the fucking be-all, end-all of human activity? That not everything is automatically improved by making it faster and simpler? That dancing is more than simply a convoluted means of getting from one point on the floor to another? That music is more than just an easy way to light up the nucleus accumbens? That writing is more than a delivery system for communicating facts? Nietzsche, whose prose style I greedily wish I could better approximate, explained to an acquaintance why some things deserved to be expressed in a style other than the vernacular:
When one writes a book and thus steps into the public light, that is always a significant act deserving of a certain solemnity, so that one has to put aside everyday language. You have a good example in Catholicism, toward which, as you perhaps know, I am not exactly friendly, but this does not prevent me from recognizing the great worldly wisdom with which Rome has been conducting its business over the ages. Why does Rome still have the Mass read in Latin? To give the solemn act, veiled in mystery, a special solemnity even externally. But that must not be at the expense of clarity or intelligibility. If thoughts were thereby hidden, if the real meaning became hard to understand, that would of course be false, that would no longer be solemn, that would be foolish.
That’s always resonated with me. Solemnity without sacrificing clarity or intelligibility. I agree with the perception of Nietzsche as a philosopher who wrote like a poet. His ideas were earthy enough, but they were so often presented in such unexpected, vivid images! In fact, if there’s one thing that particularly annoys me about my own writing, it’s that it’s too often plain, straightforward and unadorned. I’m not saying I want to become Henry James or James Joyce, but I would like to aim higher than colloquial standards.
If I Quit My Hobby, Then What Would I Do?
What is our work on this earth? Is it a career, profession, busyness pursued for gain, idleness pursued for leisure? Is anyone obliged to pursue anything more than the work of the soul in discovering itself, in harmonizing itself (to God, to Nature, to the universe, to the planet)? Whatever form of work one has, that work must always be the work of enlightenment, or, to use a more modern diction, that of consciousness. What we do to buy food and pay rent is not work but social necessity. That which we do to enrich the soul is our work. Let us pursue it diligently.
Yes, let’s. This reminds me of Bruce Ellis Benson’s excellent book Pious Nietzsche, from which I’ll present one of many equally worthy paragraphs:
To affirm the music of life —to practice music — is to cultivate one’s creative vitality (which Nietzsche often calls the “will to power”). This rather broad conception of “practicing music” may seem strange to us (since we today define “music” in a relatively narrow sense), but it would have been perfectly sensible to Nietzsche, who would have had the ancient Greek sense of mousikê in mind. Practicing music for the ancient Greeks was much more than “playing” or “listening” to music. Indeed, as we will see, it also included any art that developed oneself or cultivated one’s soul.
Listening to music isn’t just entertainment for me; it’s a way of harmonizing myself, as mentioned above. It’s a way of tuning jangled thoughts and turbulent emotions, gaining inspiration, and facilitating restoration. Same goes for writing. What I do here is more like what Buddhists call their “practice”, or what Benson in his book calls askêsis, a spiritual discipline. I’m not persuading anybody or expressing anything important. The goal is merely to become incrementally better at turning vivid perception into clear expression, possibly becoming a mousikos one day.
Are You Threatening Me?
Well, somebody seems to be all eaten up with ressentiment:
“To be incapable of taking one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long—that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget (a good example of this in modem times is Mirabeau, who had no memory for insults and vile actions done him and was unable to forgive simply because he—forgot). Such a man shakes off with a single shrug many vermin that eat deep into others; here alone genuine ‘love of one’s enemies’ is possible—supposing it to be possible at all on earth. How much reverence has a noble man for his enemies!”
Armida’s Garden
One day the wanderer slammed a door behind himself, stopped in his tracks, and wept. Then he said: “This penchant and passion for what is true, real, non-apparent, certain — how it aggravates me! Why does this gloomy and restless fellow keep following and driving me? I want to rest, but he will not allow it. How much there is that seduces me to tarry! Everywhere Armida’s gardens beckon me; everywhere I must keep tearing my heart away and experience new bitternesses. I must raise my feet again and again, weary and wounded though they be; and because I must go on, I often look back in wrath at the most beautiful things that could not hold me — because they could not hold me.”
— Nietzsche
I divide the writers, artists, philosophers, and critics engaged in this effort into two camps. The first I call the “reasonable” camp. These writers recognize that no actual artistic object can retain its freshness after repeated experiences. Critics from Viktor Shklovsky to Michael Fried see in the continual innovation of musical, literary, and visual forms an attempt to counter the effect of time on experience. Once we become accustomed to Cézanne’s way of arresting our senses, we move on to Picasso. After Joyce’s verbal explosions, we take up Beckett’s minimalism.
Not just any new object will do the work of pleasurably extending intense perception. The object needs to be balanced between familiarity and novelty; the new thing must give the mind some foothold in the known, otherwise we just tune it out as noise. And the history of art—with each new artist taking up and transforming the forms of the old—provides a perfectly reasonable process for delivering time-slowing artifacts poised between old and new.
Very reasonable—but the true heirs of Augustine and Keats adopt the unreasonable approach. The reasonable writers respect the temporal constraints of perception. They transfer the desire to enhance life through art from the individual work to the historical succession of forms. The unreasonable writers, those who want the impossible—writers from Thomas De Quincey through Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov, and John Ashbery—seek the creation of a work that will permanently arrest perception at the moment of the first encounter. The simple logic of children and utopians drives them. We want to stop time. Only through the persistence of the intense perception of the same object can we be assured that our ancient ambition has been achieved.
I know the feeling well from listening to music. There’s a certain hypnotic magic that accompanies a favorite song for a little while, inspiring a euphoric sense that surely, this time, the feeling is too perfect to ever fade. I should know; I’ve felt that way thousands of times. And each time, even as rationality and memory are patiently trying to claim otherwise, part of me finds it impossible to resist the desire to believe it. No, no! The melody, the rhythm, the poetry, they’re perfect! This is revealed musical truth here! I’ll never let familiarity breed contempt!
All my beautiful friends have all gone away
Like the waves
They flow and ebb and die— The Cult, “Revolution”
Like I said: thousands of times. That pattern, itself, is what’s eternal. And to me, there’s a comfort in that. I wouldn’t really want it to be different. As a panta rheist, how could it be otherwise? Ebb and flow are both necessary parts of the same cycle. But each time we outlast or outgrow something we’ve loved, it defines the borders of our separateness all the more sharply, feeling like death and mourning in miniature. I do feel like there’s probably some sort of primal desire in humankind to submerge oneself in something greater, something all-encompassing, where we could shrug free of the burden of our own responsibilities and sense of existential isolation. Clune’s “unreasonables” are those who feel that burden more strongly.
I yearn to belong to something, to be contained
in an all-embracing mind that sees me
as a single thing.
I yearn to be held
in the great hands of your heart —
oh let them take me now.— Rilke
For Me, They Were Steps
For me, they were steps, I have climbed up upon them – therefore I had to pass over them. But they thought I wanted to settle down on them.
— Nietzsche
Pyrrhonian skeptics are those who adopt a certain practice with a nod to Pyrrho of Elis, a Greek figure of the mid-fourth to mid-third century BCE, who actually left no writings but with whom the practice is said to have originated. Our best knowledge of this variety of skepticism in fact comes from a second century CE physician named Sextus Empiricus. What makes the Pyrrhonists unique among other sorts of skeptics is that on all speculative, “philosophical” questions, they suspend judgment. This ephectic attitude is in fact the hallmark of Pyrrhonism. From their point of view, other skeptics turn out to be nothing more than negative dogmatists. And that’s a crucial observation, because it’s what gives the Pyrrhonist his claim to being a real skeptic – a word that originally means “inquirer.” If I’ve suspended judgment on an issue, it makes sense for me to continue investigating. If, on the hand, I’ve made up my mind that, say, there is no God or that values don’t exist or that knowledge is impossible, then I’ve closed off that avenue of investigation and come to rest with a position I have to defend no less vigorously than my dogmatic opponents.
A Pyrrhonian skeptic, then, is essentially someone with a peculiar talent for countering any argument with an opposing argument. It’s crucial to see that the Pyrrhonist is not a stubborn sort of person, unwilling to be convinced; it just happens to be devilishly hard to convince him, such is his talent for opposing one argument to another. In the face of his keen awareness of arguments on both sides of every issue, he suspends judgment, and a state of well-being — psychological equanimity – is said to follow this suspension “like a shadow follows a body.” And this is the end at which Pyrrhonian skepticism aims: psychological well-being and health.
The aim of these thinkers (or, more precisely, these practitioners) was not to advance theories, but was instead to cure, where they could, what they called the “conceit and rashness” of dogmatic philosophers. I read Nietzsche’s perennial concern with health as expressing fundamentally the same aim.
3:AM: So is it through the lens of Pyrrho that we should understand Nietzsche’s attitude to knowledge and truth?
JB: I do. And I think the metaphor of a “lens” is particularly helpful here. I want to be clear about the nature of the relationship between the Pyrrhonists and Nietzsche, because I think that philosophers often aren’t perspicuous enough about the nature of historical “influence.” I’ve in fact deliberately avoided, or at least have highly qualified, the claim that Nietzsche is “influenced” by Pyrrho or by Sextus. You won’t find in Nietzsche’s published work any reference at all to Sextus Empiricus, and you’ll find only a couple of allusions to Pyrrho himself. And Nietzsche certainly doesn’t identify himself as a Pyrrhonist. My own view is that if we really take the time to familiarise ourselves with this variety of skepticism, if we come to appreciate its motivations and recognize the moves standardly made by Pyrrhonian skeptics, then we cannot fail to see these motivations and many of the same moves in Nietzsche’s writing, and we’ll come to see Nietzsche’s work in a new light, one in which it becomes less opaque, more coherent, and even more subtle and interesting. So the best description of my interpretation of Nietzsche would be that I read him on the model of Greek skepticism.
Very interesting interview, as is often the case on 3:AM. Her book also looks interesting, but it’s also currently going for a steep fifty bucks on Amazon. Of course, I’m sure that wouldn’t present any problems for one of my fabulously wealthy readers possessed by the generous spirit of the season, nudge nudge hint hint.
…adding, Dave Maier has more.
Lowbrow Nobility
I’m an academic, I defend high culture, but I think we must also propose other, different paths. Given the disorientation of the contemporary world, what we have to do is restore people’s dignity and faith in action. Not just faith in the knowledge and the enjoyment of great works. High culture helps create an individual, but so does the fact that individuals are actors who construct their own world. Teaching must not stand still or fly in the face of television and the like. Teaching has to provide the tools for individuals to become creators, not just of art or literature but of everything. High culture, humanism, must work alongside other ways, but if we take it to be the central one we will have problems. In the society of entertainment, it’s more difficult for the masses to participate in this cultural ferment. For people without the necessary education, reading Ulysses today is difficult – though not impossible. We can live, and live well, in a dignified manner, without knowing the classics.
We are in agreement on our diagnosis of the society of the spectacle originating with the collapse of aesthetic hierarchies. But here we have to step back a little and observe that the society of the spectacle is not the only culprit. It began with the highest culture: the avant-garde. It’s there that the real attack occurs against academic art, the “beautiful”. Duchamp was not part of the society of the spectacle, yet he was the one who opened the door to the idea that we could put anything in an exhibition and that it would be called “art”. The seeds of the collapse of aesthetics and high culture are within high culture itself.
In the end, the society of the spectacle hasn’t changed aesthetic hierarchies much. What has it done? Modern twentieth-century society has created something unheard of in history: an “art of the masses”. Take cinema for example. A film is a work aimed at everyone, regardless of their cultural baggage; you don’t have to have read the classics to appreciate it. The cinema hasn’t changed aesthetics; it’s created something different. It has created an art of entertainment that can give us mediocre pieces of work but magnificent things too. Increasingly, average movies, works that are neither great art nor bad, produce emotions and make people think.
The entire debate between Gilles Lipovetsky and Mario Vargas Llosa is interesting, but this part in particular makes me think of something Brian Leiter was struck by in reading Nietzsche, the suggestion that true “greatness” is impossible in democratic, egalitarian circumstances where altruistic concerns tend to trump the extremely self-centered drives and passions so often found in profoundly creative people.
Caught Within Their Own Unraveling
For Marcus (Aurelius) lived a grand contradiction: an emperor reduced by wisdom to one skeptical of duty and purpose, to its inner vitality and beneficence. He was reduced to fideism (echoed centuries later by another fideist, Montaigne), wherein duty is followed not because it is good but because ethics consists in the necessity to carry out our duty, as if the carrying out alone was ethics, even when the duty is not intrinsically good and could no longer engender faith. Indeed, duty in this sense was Rome itself for Marcus, necessary to defend and maintain even when he no longer believed in its efficacy.
Duty and purpose are dubious worldly enterprises. Yet Stoicism is the philosophy resonating with the perception of failure, attracting intelligent Romans caught within their own unraveling, both of their person and their world.
This reminds me of something from John Ralston Saul:
But it is virtually impossible to maintain healthy scepticism when power is in your hands. To do so would require living in a state of constant personal conflict between belief in your public responsibilities and self-doubt over your ability to discharge them.
And something else from Nietzsche:
Dionysian man shares this affect with Hamlet: both have seen into the very essence of things, they have understood, and are repelled by, the thought of action, since no action of theirs can change anything of the eternal essence of things, and they consider it absurd, or even shameful, to be expected to be able to generate order in a world of chaos. Understanding destroys action, and action depends on a veil of illusion.
Trash and Treasure
Reading is, at its core, a leisure activity. We gain knowledge, joy, catharsis and empathy from reading. And yet when reading, a solitary pursuit, becomes interactive—when we talk about it with one another—it is suddenly fraught with anxiety and guilt. Everyone is in the same boat, minus the perhaps imaginary spectre of a few maddeningly well-read people. But if we’re all together in our anxiety, why do we torment ourselves and one another? Guilt is rarely a productive emotion; it is more immobilizing than motivating.
What do you mean “we,” paleface? Maybe you should just go ahead and straight-up read Fifty Shades of Grey if you want to, rather than outsource your BDSM needs to the collective opinion of your book club. I mean, one of us must be doing this reading thing all wrong, because I’m not well-read by any cultural sophisticate’s standard, yet I get nothing but pure, unmitigated joy from reading and talking about what I’ve read. Hearing others talk about books I haven’t read yet doesn’t give me an inferiority complex, it only rouses my ravenous appetite:
“Oh, my greed! There is no selflessness in my soul but only an all-coveting self that would like to appropriate many individuals as so many additional pairs and eyes and hands – a self that would like to bring back the whole past, too, and that will not lose anything that it could possibly possess. Oh, my greed is a flame! Oh, that I might be reborn in a hundred beings!” – Whoever does not know this sigh from firsthand experience does not know the passion of the search for knowledge.
Here’s a slightly amusing anecdote about the intersection of reading, character and status anxiety, though. I used to read a lot of comics when I was a kid. Not comic books, which I was never really into, just book-length compilations of newspaper comic strips, which my mom would get me when we went to the store. Beetle Bailey, Hagar the Horrible, Wizard of Id, stuff like that. My dad hated seeing me with those. Thought they were going to rot my brain. If he happened to be in a crabby mood, and if I happened to leave too many of them lying around throughout the house, he would occasionally gather up any he saw and throw them out in the trash. I’d go fish them out later when his attention was elsewhere, grumbling over the injustice of it all as I hid them more carefully in my room.
He also used to give me extra homework, sometimes during the summer. I guess he was trying to instill a strong work ethic in me as well as stave off the brain-rotting I was inflicting on myself. A few times, he assigned me the task of finding fifty new vocabulary words from my reading to look up and define.
You can guess where this is going, right? Yes, I took great subversive delight in finding the bulk of those words from those very comics which I’d rescued from the garbage. To this day, I remember that I learned the word “vindictive” from a Broom Hilda strip.