“Yes, yes,” say the proponents of magic, “but there’s still a mystery: how can all this vivid conscious experience be physical, merely and wholly physical?” (I’m assuming, with them, that we’re wholly physical beings.) This, though, is the 400-year-old mistake. In speaking of the “magical mystery show”, Humphrey and many others make a colossal and crucial assumption: the assumption that we know something about the intrinsic nature of matter that gives us reason to think that it’s surprising that it involves consciousness. We don’t. Nor is this news. Locke knew it in 1689, as did Hume in 1739. Philosopher-chemist Joseph Priestley was extremely clear about it in the 1770s. So were Eddington, Russell and Whitehead in the 1920s.One thing we do know about matter is that when you put some very common-or-garden elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, potassium, etc) together in the way in which they’re put together in brains, you get consciousness like ours – a wholly physical phenomenon. (It’s happening to you right now.) And this means that we do, after all, know something about the intrinsic nature of matter, over and above everything we know in knowing the equations of physics. Why? Because we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and consciousness is a form of matter.
philosophy
Genuine Fake
Via Ruairí, I see that a long-overdue documentary about Alan Watts is in need of funding. I’m pretty sure I can do without several nonessential expenditures this month in order to throw in my share.
Here’s a brief greatest hits compilation, of sorts, from some of his many books:
From Nature, Man and Woman:
For the point is not, in our accustomed egocentric mode of thinking, that it would be good to return to our original integrity with nature. The point is that it is simply impossible to get away from it, however vividly we may imagine we have done so. Similarly, it is impossible to experience the future and not experience the present. But trying to realize this is another attempt to experience the future. Some logician may object that this is a merely tautological statement which has no consequence, and he will be right. But we are not looking for a consequence. We are no longer saying, “So what?” to everything, as if the only importance of our present experience were in what it is leading to, as if we should constantly interrupt a dancer, saying, “Now just where are you going, and what, exactly, is the meaning of all these movements?”
The Meaning of Happiness:
We have a proverb that to travel well is better than to arrive, which comes close to the Oriental idea. Wisdom does not consist in arriving at a particular place, and no one need imagine that it is necessarily obtained by climbing a ladder whose rungs are the successive stages of psychological experience. That ladder has no end, and the entrance to enlightenment, wisdom or spiritual freedom may be found on any one of its rungs. If you discover it, it does not mean that you will not have to go on climbing the ladder; you must go on climbing just as you must go on living. But enlightenment is found by accepting fully the place where you stand now.
Talking Zen:
The notion that human sanity has a good deal to do with self-restraint has persisted for many thousands of years, and has had some very wise exponents. But it has usually had an end in view—a temporal, future end—some sort of pie in the sky. No one can really abstain, however; no one can effectively overcome the mad greed of anxiety, until he has realized that the future is a mirage which does not contain the answer to anything. The true ascetic is not forcing himself; he is just acting naturally in accordance with reality as he sees it.
The Wisdom of Insecurity:
The notion of a separate thinker, of an “I” distinct from the experience, comes from memory and from the rapidity with which thought changes. It is like whirling a burning stick to give the illusion of a continuous ring of fire. If you imagine that memory is a direct knowledge of the past rather than a present experience, you get the illusion of knowing the past and the present at the same time. This suggests that there is something in you distinct from both the past and present experiences. You reason, “I know this present experience, and it is different from that past experience. If I can compare the two, and notice that experience has changed, I must be something constant and apart.” But as a matter of fact, you cannot compare this present experience with a past experience. You can only compare it with a memory of the past, which is a part of the present experience. When you see clearly that memory is a form of present experience, it will be obvious that trying to separate yourself from this experience is as impossible as trying to make your teeth bite themselves. There is simply experience. There is not someone or something experiencing experience!
Beyond Theology:
Still more important, it is quite obvious to the canny observer that most Christians, including clergy and devout laity, do not really believe in Christianity. If they did, they would be screaming in the streets, taking daily full-page advertisements in the newspapers, and subscribing for the most hair-raising television programs every night of the week. Even Jehovah’s Witnesses are polite and genteel in their door-to-door propaganda. Nobody, save perhaps a few obscure fanatics, is really bothered by the idea that every man is constantly haunted by an angelic fiend, more imminently dangerous and malicious than the most depraved agents of the Nazis. Most people are sinners and unbelievers, and will probably go to hell. So what? Let God worry about that one!
This Is It:
But the Westerner who is attracted by Zen and who would understand it deeply must have one indispensable qualification: he must understand his own culture so thoroughly that he is no longer swayed by its premises unconsciously. He must really have come to terms with the Lord God Jehovah and with his Hebrew-Christian conscience so that he can take it or leave it without fear or rebellion. He must be free of the itch to justify himself. Lacking this, his Zen will either be “beat” or “square”, either a revolt from the culture and social order or a new form of stuffiness and respectability. For Zen is above all the liberation of the mind from conventional thought, and this is something utterly different from rebellion against convention, on the one hand, or adapting foreign conventions, on the other.
The Two Hands of God:
What this means for practical action is that we accept the standards of logic and morals, not exactly with reservations, but with a certain humor. We will try to keep them, knowing that we shall not altogether succeed. We shall commit ourselves to positions and promises as best we may, knowing always that there must be a hintergedanke—a thought far in the back of the mind which, like crossed fingers, gives us an “out” when pressed too far. We shall realize that behind our devotion to duty there is always a strong element of self-admiration, and that even in the most passionate love of others there is inevitably the aspect of personal gratification.
Not a Prisoner, I’m a Free Man
How about some more Owen Flanagan?
To decide whether the scientific image spells death for free will, we need to know what conception of free will is being discussed. There are two main conceptions of free will. One is the libertarian view, which is relatively new and Western. The other is older and can be found in ancient Greek and Eastern texts (I see it in Confucius, Buddha, Aristotle). The first conception cannot be fused with the scientific image; the latter conception can. So let it return.The view that won’t work is stated by Descartes this way: “[T]he will is so free in its nature, that it can never be constrained….And the whole action of the soul consists in this, that solely because it desires something, it causes a little gland to which it is closely united to move in a way requisite to produce the effect which relates to this desire.”…No one has ever explained how any animal, or any natural being, could possess a part—an extremely important part, “the will”—that is not subject to causal principles but nonetheless produces astounding effects.…We can make peace between the scientific and manifest images in the following way: Accept that (as best we can tell) everything that happens has a set of causes that make it as it is; then proceed to distinguish the voluntary and involuntary, the free and the unfree, in terms of the kinds of causation or causes that distinguish them.Aristotle championed the voluntary-involuntary distinction long before there was a conflict between the Cartesian image of mind and agency and the scientific image. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle drew the involuntary-voluntary distinction this way: “What is involuntary is what is forced or is caused by ignorance. What is voluntary seems to be what has its origins in the agent himself when he knows the particulars that the action consists in.” What Aristotle had in mind was something like this: An action is involuntary if it results from some sort of compulsion against which effort and thinking are impotent, or if the agent in no way knows or grasps what he is doing.Voluntary action involves the agent’s knowing what action he is performing, and acting from reasons and desires that are his own. How is this possible? It is possible if I am conscious and if my consciousness has some causal efficacy. And it does. Mother Nature put me in conscious touch with some of my most salient desires, hopes and expectations. When I see what I want and/or need and judge it to be choiceworthy, I adjust some circuitry (thanks to how I am designed, what I have learned, etc.) to do what gets me what I want. These actions are voluntary. We call actions “voluntary” when we think about means and ends and act in accordance with our thinking (or could have).…[Dewey’s] answer was that the myth of a completely self-initiating ego, an unmoved but self-moving will, was simply a fiction motivated by our ignorance of the causes of human behavior. He saw no need for the notion of a metaphysically unrestrained will or of an independent ego as a prime mover itself unmoved in order to have a robust conception of free agency. For there to be agency, we need the person (or the ego) as a cause, possibly even the proximate cause of what we do. But the person (or the ego) may serve as the proximate cause of action and still himself be part of the causal nexus. Indeed, a person, in virtue of being a natural creature (an animal), must be part of the causal nexus.…Spinoza diagnosed the source of the libertarian illusion this way: “Men believe that they are free, precisely because they are conscious of their volitions and desires; yet concerning the causes that have determined them to desire and will they have not the faintest idea, because they are ignorant of them.”
Eyes of Confusion Looking for a String
The moral of these philosophical biographies is therefore neither simple nor uniformly edifying. For anyone hoping for happiness, or political wisdom, or salvation, philosophical self-examination seems in practice to have led to self-doubt as often as self-trust, to misery as often as joy, to reckless public acts as often as prudent political conduct, and to moments of self-inflicted torment as often as moments of saving grace.
I found myself thinking, as I read his book, about this gap between theory and practice and wondering if maybe the problem is in the folly of ever thinking that the raging floodwaters of life can be tamed and neatly channeled by rational principles in the first place. Socrates/Plato was wrong about many things; what if the idea of intellectual consistency being a prize virtue is another? What if the attempt to define people by unbending logical principles is just as misguided and doomed to failure as the search for some mysterious essence called the soul to define them by? What if the True, the Good, and the Beautiful do not necessarily harmonically converge?
Imagine my chagrin, a few paragraphs later, to find Rousseau, one of my least favorite philosophers, forcing me to grudgingly tip my hat to him:
When Montaigne tried, and failed, to emulate the stoic composure of Seneca, and chose instead to describe himself as he really was in his Essays, he was finally able to step outside the tradition of moral perfectionism that had linked the philosophical ideals of Socrates and Plato to those articulated by Seneca and Augustine. And when Rousseau subsequently, and even more spectacularly, proved unable to live up consistently to his own daunting standard of virtuous conduct, he was unafraid to draw one possible conclusion: “You want people always to be consistent”—the classical idea of rational unity. “I doubt that is possible for man; but what is possible for him is always to be true: that is what I mean to try to be.”
In Your Eyes
For here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.
– Rilke
I’ve never found Descartes terribly interesting, but I read something last night that I liked: in a letter to his friend Marin Mersenne, he mentioned having begun trying to live his life under the motto, “To live well, you must live unseen.” Of course, having seen the persecution of Galileo and the burning at the stake of more than a few philosophers and heretics, he could have very well meant that to live at all, you must avoid the wrathful attention of the Church. But still, my thought was wow, how very Taoist of him!
The people of the world excitedly run about as if they were going to miss the yearly, royal, sacrificial feast, or as if they were going to be the last one to climb a high tower on a beautiful spring day.
I alone remain quiet and indifferent.
I anchor my being to that which existed before Heaven and Earth were formed.
I alone am innocent and unknowing, like a newborn babe.
Unoccupied by worldly cares, I move forward to nowhere.
The people of the world have more than enough.
I alone appear to have nothing.
The people of the world appear shrewd and wise.
I alone look foolish.
I like to be forgotten by the world and left alone.
It also occurred to me that his motto was a much more succinct way of saying what I was trying to get at in this post. Being “seen” can be a description of the ways in which our identities are fixed and reinforced in the sight of others. For people who think of philosophy not as scholarly hair-splitting over the ultimate nature of things, but as the search for how to live well, how to best pursue truth and integrity, the weight and pressure of other people’s attention can be a hindrance, trapping us in egotistic responses to their expectations.
Death Will Seem Surreal Soon in the Sunshine Afternoon
I’ve mentioned before how I’m sort of lukewarm on Stoicism as a philosophy, but I always liked Epictetus’ advice that “In the very act of kissing a child, we should silently reflect on the possibility that she will die tomorrow.” Not because it will somehow make it easier when death finally comes, but because living with that acute awareness of how fragile and unpredictable life can be makes it easier to truly appreciate what you have when you have it.
I was at the doctor’s for my yearly checkup today. As I was leaving, the receptionist asked when he wanted to see me back.
“Next year.”
“Okay, would you like to go ahead and make that appointment now?”
“Uhh… um, yeah, sure.”
I hesitated for a moment because I suddenly had the odd thought that it seemed awfully cocksure to make an appointment that far in advance. Who knows whether we’ll all still be alive by then? Car accidents, aneurysms, defective heart valves, suicide, various terminal illnesses, a meteor strike — there’s an awful lot of ways for even the youngest and healthiest of us to go when you stop to think about it. If you ask me, prognostications should be limited to a week ahead, maybe two if you’re feeling brave. After that, they should be appended by, “…assuming we’re still alive then, that is.” It would only be honest.
I didn’t share my musings with her. She didn’t look like someone who would appreciate a disquisition on ancient philosophies. Besides, the phone was ringing.
Yeah, that’s the thing Epictetus forgot to mention — cultivating such a fey sensibility can turn even routine small talk into a ripe opportunity for awkward embarrassment.
Kant’s Joke
Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the whole world, that the whole world was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in favor of popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people.
– Nietzsche
Complex logic and leaden, plodding prose do indeed combine to make Kant a grueling chore to read. But if I may quote from Philipp Blom’s book one last time, he again manages to succinctly summarize a difficult philosopher:
In this model of history, Immanuel Kant fulfilled a similar function for the eighteenth century as René Descartes had for the seventeenth: His grand metaphysical investigation left open a door through which God could be introduced back into philosophy. Kant argued that our senses determine how the world appears to us, and that we may never be able to perceive things as they really are, the “things in themselves.” But instead of accepting that we cannot know anything beyond our perception and that it makes no sense to talk of things we cannot know, he conjectured a purely essential, spiritual reality that is inaccessible to human understanding, a reality in which we might imagine a deity beyond the grasp of the senses. One can read Kant safely without compromising one’s religious beliefs, which can always be safely tucked away among the “things in themselves.”
The Room Behind the Shop
Sarah Bakewell, reviewing James Miller’s Examined Lives (another book in my “to read” stack):
Yet his entire book conveys a sense that the genuinely philosophical examination of a life can still lead us somewhere radically different from other kinds of reflection. At the end of his chapter on Descartes, Miller cites the 20th-century phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, whom he identifies as the major exception to the rule that places most post-Cartesian thinkers on one side or the other of the personal/impersonal divide. Apropos of Descartes, Husserl wrote, “Anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must ‘once in his life’ withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting.”It is an extraordinary thing to do: a project that remains “quite personal,” as Husserl admitted, yet that reaches in to seize the whole world and redesign it from the very foundation. Perhaps this is what still distinguishes the philosophical life: that “once in a lifetime” convulsion, in which one reinvents reality around oneself. It is a project doomed to fail, and compromises will always be made. But what, in life, could be more interesting?
This reminded me of a passage from one of Nietzsche’s letters that I liked:
Now I am engaged in shaking off what does not belong to me, be it people, friend or foe, habits, conveniences, books. I shall live in solitude for years until, as a philosopher of life, fully matured and finished, I allow myself to (and then, perhaps, must) go again amongst men.
A little less directly, it also called to mind something from Bakewell’s book about Montaigne:
We should have wife, children, goods, and above all health, if we can; but we must not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness depends on them. We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. Here our ordinary conversation must be between us and ourselves, and so private that no outside association or communication can find a place; here we must talk and laugh without wife, without children, without possessions, without retinue and servants, so that, when the time comes to lose them, it will be nothing new to us to do without them.
The phrase about the “back shop” or “room behind the shop” as it is sometimes translated – the arrière boutique – appears again and again in books about Montaigne, but it is rarely kept within its context. He is not writing about a selfish, introverted withdrawal from family life so much as from the need to protect yourself from the pain that would come if you lost that family. Montaigne sought detachment and retreat so that he could not be too badly hurt, but in doing so he also discovered that having such a retreat helped him establish his “real liberty,” the space he needed to think and look inward.
Whether it’s having some sort of private space available for periodic retreats, or having one particular, intense period of withdrawal and reflection, I like the general theme here. I often feel a strong urge to retreat into a cocoon, only reemerging when I’ve shaken off everything that doesn’t belong to me, all the habits and ties that formed when I was younger and more impressionable. I want to subject my entire life to a severe audit, consciously choosing as much as I can while letting go of all the aimless orbits I more or less unthinkingly happened into.
The Dust of Exploded Beliefs May Make a Fine Sunset (Slight Return)
Let’s make the village a concept and do this again. Rosalie is an agnostic. She has heard the argument that no one can prove a negative and believes it. Then she wanders into a café and reads a big book on doubt as she waits out the rain. Now she knows that the term agnosticism was invented only a hundred years ago by Thomas Henry Huxley, and has no intellectual pedigree to speak of. Huxley made it up having read about Skepticism, which is a philosophically robust proposition that asks how we can know anything at all, given the limitations of our minds and our tiny, animal perspective. Skepticism is thousands of years old and has been brilliantly explored in every age. Agnosticism is the logic of Skepticism applied to only one question, the question of whether one particular people’s imagined idea of the supernatural actually exists.To be sensible, either you are a Skeptic about all things, which allows you to be a profoundly interesting thinker but does not allow you to claim to know anything about the world; or you are a rationalist, which means you gather evidence, try to minimize your cultural bias, and make conclusions. If you make your decisions by rationalism, you can certainly say that an idea is not to be considered as at all valid if it has no evidence to argue for it being true. In Skepticism I have to allow that possibly all of life is happening in the dream of a cosmic elephant; in rationalism, I do not. It is philosophical nonsense to take Skepticism and apply it to one belief. In rationalism, it is possible to rule on the validity of a conjecture that has no evidence.Huxley made up agnosticism because he wanted to leave room for people to be atheists but still keep a line of hope. But that is massively wrong-headed. When people confront the truth they get used to it and see that it is not so bad. So there is no afterlife. Big deal. Life is enough. When you are dead, you are so dead that nothing should matter to you about it. When you are alive, you’re alive. Every moment is so huge, there is so much of it, and we take in so little of it. You want more life at the end? You’re hardly using the life you have now. None of us are. We already have more than we can handle. Your job is to try to know the present and the past, to expand into the now, in part by knowing what was.Some people get on a plane to change where they are but you can transform your surroundings as well as your inner world with just a touch of new knowing.
It may be fated that my love for Jennifer Michael Hecht remain unrequited, but that’s okay. As long as she keeps offering up words like these to me, I can pretend she loves me too. Sigh…
Seriously, I wish more people could write about history and ideas in such an invigorating way. Doubt: A History and The Happiness Myth are two of the most fun books I’ve ever read. Philosophical stories of history as told by a caffeinated poet.
I Have No Need of That Hypothesis
Spinoza was a great man and a wonderfully subversive thinker, but religious/philosophical arguments framed in mathematical terminology don’t exactly make for gripping reading. So I’m just going to quote extensively from Philipp Blom’s book here, as it contains a great summary of his thinking:
Choosing a mathematically inspired way of constructing his argument, with numbered definitions, axioms and propositions, Spinoza argued that only a single substance could exist, a substance infinitely modified to create the world in all its variety. In his Ethics, he states that “God, or substance, consisting of infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality, necessarily exists,” coming to the conclusion that “besides God, no substance can be granted or conceived.” So far, so good for the theologian, who could appreciate that a series of strict definitions and logical conclusions had led Spinoza to proving the necessity of God’s existence.
Spinoza followed Descartes and the Scholastic tradition in defining God as necessarily existing, but he contradicted Cartesian dualism by saying that nothing could exist outside or independently of God, so, by implication, there could not be two realms of the world, mind and matter, but only one single substance of divine origin, infinitely moderated into material and mental phenomena. This not only reversed Descartes’ rescue of theology, but also paved the way for the eighteenth-century materialists, who would argue that the mind is a mere function of the body, not an independent entity.
But Spinoza’s logical rigor had even more troubling implications for theology, particularly, and notoriously, in chapter VI of his Tractatus, in which he wrote about miracles. God, Spinoza held, exists by necessity, is substance, and is perfect. His will is the law of the universe, and his perfection means that the world as such is perfect, since no imperfection can come out of perfection without rendering the originator imperfect. It is therefore impossible that God could will anything to be less than perfect without perverting the very nature of his being. If humans do not perceive the world as perfect—if they point to death, putrefacation and suffering as evident imperfections—it is only because these things are not understandable to them as they are to God. Things may seem imperfect from a person’s limited perspective, but they are necessarily perfect in the eyes of God, who created them as expressions of his own perfection.
From this seemingly abstract and pious analysis, Spinoza drew a scandalous conclusion: Stories of divine miracles, he wrote, must be born out of ignorance or even conscious deception but cannot possibly be used to infer the existence of God. God’s perfection means that the laws of nature must themselves be perfect, too, and it would be impossible for God to intervene in the course of natural events, because any alteration of the course of the universe would mean introducing imperfection, which is incompatible with God’s own perfection. The laws of nature—that is, God’s laws—cannot be contravened, even by God himself.
Here the circle of Spinoza’s virtuoso argument closes. He makes out God to be a being so perfect, so moral, and so necessary that this being could not possibly intervene in the course of nature—indeed, can no longer act at all. Miracles are nothing but misunderstood natural occurrences, he argues. The laws of the universe are synonymous with God’s will and intelligence; God himself becomes a metaphor for necessity, for natural laws.
This is a crucial point. Many interpreters have made Spinoza out to be a pantheist, who sees God’s will, love and Providence in every leaf of grass and every dewdrop, but this is a fundamental misunderstanding. As his contemporary followers and enemies immediately understood, Spinoza’s God is nothing but a particular way of referring to the laws governing the physical world, the only world. One might praise the absolute perfection of this God, but it is soon revealed that no entity, no Creator, no loving or angry Father, no God who saves and punishes is designated by that name. There is only impersonal necessity in a material world; there is no one left to pray to. Spinoza had done nothing less than praise God out of existence.
Who Is More Godless Than I, That I May Delight in His Instruction?
Even today, the public discussion about moral and political issues is no longer framed in an explicitly religious context, but the change in terminology only conceals the all-pervasive influence of the unexamined theological ideas underlying it. Our vocabulary has changed, of course: We no longer speak about the soul but about the psyche; we have exchanged original sin for inherited, psychological guilt. But the cultural soil on which these ideas flourish has remained the same, and all too often our worldview is inherently religious without our even realizing it.…Christianity is the religion of the suffering God. Christ was made flesh and had to die, to be tortured to death, thus allowing God the Creator to forgive humanity for its wickedness. Holbach and Diderot wrote all there is to be written about the perversity of this argument, but even the most irreligious of Westerners still believe in the positive, transformative value of suffering. We have all internalized the Romantic stereotype of the solitary, suffering genius (a figure almost singlehandedly invented by Rousseau in his Confessions). We love stories in which people triumph over adversity, in which they are almost crushed by wickedness or misfortune, only to emerge again, to be resurrected. This kind of story is found in many cultures, but not in all. The ancient Greeks attached no moral value to suffering. After journeying around the Mediterranean for twenty years and surviving many dangers, Homer’s Odysseus is older—but not a wiser or better man.
I’m liking this book a lot already. The desire to root out “unexamined theological ideas” underlying supposedly non-religious principles, at least for examination if not eradication, has been one of my own personal little missions. Souls, afterlives, moral significance permeating the universe, a teleological progression to existence, apocalyptic/utopian thinking, and so many other manifestations of an essentially religious frame of mind are very common even among people who complacently pride themselves on not taking direct orders from preachers and holy books.
Whoever Fights Monsters Should See to It That in the Process He Does Not Become a Monster
HNN:
Ideas have consequences, contorted ideas all the more so. Unfortunately, Nietzsche’s rhetorical proclivities for metaphorical enigma and hyperbole have been exploited as potential sources of inspiration for egregious acts of terror, most recently in Arizona. Ideas, and Nietzsche’s specifically, must be situated in both their proper intellectual and historical context to be properly understood.It would be outrageously insensitive to suggest that a more nuanced interpretation of Nietzsche would have prevented Jared Loughner from pulling the trigger on January 8. Clearly, as we have learned from recent revelations of Loughner’s writings and ideas, he was, as Zane Gutierrez attested to, mentally deranged. To incriminate Nietzsche, though, would be anachronistic and based on a specious understanding of his philosophy. In a world of media communications defined by sound bites and a concomitant lack of context, historians have a responsibility to the public to provide the necessary context, the full picture, the long view, whatever one chooses to call it, to promote a more informed and productive public discourse.
Like I said the other day, I’m cheered by the fact that everything I’ve seen written so far has resisted the still-too-common tendency to trot out the same old myths about Nietzsche being some sort of social Darwinist who glorified physical violence over others as a means of proving one’s mastery. But something that still makes me laugh about that is the fact that the first time I ever recall seeing Nietzsche’s name was in a Dean Koontz novel that I read when I was maybe fourteen. I don’t remember the name of it (and I’m too lazy to look it up), but the plot was based on a pair of friends who bond over, among other things, a misinterpretation of Nietzsche and become a sort of serial-killing tag team in order to prove their superhumanity. The detective who cracks the case, speaking for Koontz, laments how often Nietzsche gets misunderstood by such types. If a pulp novelist in the mid-80s knew that much…
And He Who Is Not a Bird Should Not Make His Nest Above the Abyss
What is nihilism?It’s the feeling that nothing in the world matters any more than anything else. Nietzsche’s analysis was that people once found meaning in their belief in the Judeo-Christian God, but that in the post-medieval world belief wasn’t sufficient anymore to give people the sense that things really mattered. The basic philosophical issue underlying the book, then, is: how are you supposed to live your life in order to make it possible that things matter again?Is nihilism an intellectual problem, or an emotional one?Some people really suffer from the feeling that nothing seems to matter any more than anything else. David Foster Wallace called it a ‘stomach-level sadness.’ I think that’s a pretty good description of it.
I don’t know; isn’t the inability to find enjoyment in anything better described simply as “depression”? Nihilism does seem to me like a primarily intellectual problem, where people know what they love and enjoy but suffer from not being able to justify it. Our Greek and Christian intellectual heritage teaches us that contingent things are worthless, that only timelessness and permanence are worth grasping for, and since nothing but abstract ideas can ever come close to meeting such criteria, anyone who looks for them in the everyday world is going to have to reckon eventually with how to fully embrace things despite their contingency, or else continue to suffer. If I may quote that passage from Steven Ozment again:
The belief that momentary feelings of unity or visions of perfection can survive permanently into everyday life this side of eternity is the ante-room of nihilism and fascism. Such beliefs give rise to ahistorical fantasies, which can never materialize beyond the notion. To the extent that they are relentlessly pursued, they progressively crush the moments of solace that precious moments of grace can in fact convey. Historically such fantasies have spawned generations of cynics, misanthropes and failed revolutionaries who, having glimpsed resolution, cannot forgive the grinding years of imperfect life that still must be lived.
I know when I was young, dumb, and full of existentialism, grappling with the idea of meaning in a godless universe, the feeling of despair I’d get was similar to the vertigo I’d feel when my fear of heights was triggered — even when I knew perfectly well I was safe from any danger of falling, even when I was only looking up at a tall object rather than being high off the ground myself, I couldn’t reconcile that awareness with the optical illusion that had me so terrified. Nihilism, to me, is a similar sort of illusion. Even when your feet are firmly planted on the ground of everyday experience, secure in the meaning to be found there, you’re tormented by an irrational fear of falling anyway.
…I’m adding this section in several hours after having originally posted this, having just seen this article. It’s depressing to see that people like Jared Loughner still read Nietzsche and take away the lesson that they need to violently impose their will on everyone else, but at least decades of scholarship have made it so that an elegant explanation of why he’s so ridiculously wrong to do so presents itself immediately afterward. Thank you, Matt Feeney, I couldn’t agree more:
Nietzsche, oddly, has suffered a similar fate. Because of his assault on religion and rationalist metaphysics, and because of the hints of anarchy in his assorted visions of the future (e.g., “the transvaluation of all values”), he’s taken as the West’s über-nihilist. But he saw himself as the scourge of European nihilism, and possibly also its remedy. Nietzsche saw nihilism as a disease, which grows from, in Alexander Nehamas’ words, “the assumption that if some single standard is not good for everyone and all time, then no standard is good for anyone at any time.” It presents itself as mindless hedonism and flaccid spirit, but also as fanaticism.So does that make Nietzsche and Jared Lee Loughner philosophical brethren after all, joined in the same fanatical fight against nihilism? In a word, no, and Loughner’s pathological fixation on the meaning of words is the giveaway. One way of looking at Nietzsche’s project is that he set out to teach himself and his readers to love the world in its imperfection and multiplicity, for itself. This is behind his assaults on religion, liberal idealism, and utilitarian systems of social organization. He saw these as different ways of effacing or annihilating the world as it is. It is behind his infamous doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence—in which he embraces the “most abysmal thought,” that the given world, and not the idealizing stories we tell of it, is all there is, and he will affirm this reality even if it recurs eternally.Jared Loughner’s despair that everything is unreal and words have no meaning amounts to hatred of the world (a mania of moralism and narcissism) for its failure to resemble the words we apply to it. Faced with a choice between real people and some stupid abstraction about words, themselves mere abstractions, Loughner killed the people to defend the abstraction. This, then, really is a kind of nihilism, only not the kind that people think Nietzsche was guilty of. It’s the kind of nihilism that Nietzsche was trying to warn us about, and help us overcome.
Consider the Sillies
I found that Jacoby essay via Jenny White:
I propose instead that we do what we can to prepare for that long life, and then we annihilate time.I’m not the first to think of this, although I’d gladly snatch credit from the Zen masters. Live in the moment: A sentiment overripe from use, but how many of us have actually tried it when wagging fingers insist that as responsible people we should worry about the future as well as prepare for it. The timeline is unforgiving, as we are expected to atone for our pasts as well. Adulthood is an extended act of penance (thrice-weekly gym and no cookies), and old age is your comeuppance for all those unrepented acts of wantonness. Time is society’s dream of your life. It doesn’t have to be your life.
I agree. I think. I guess I just want to make sure that when we invoke Zen wisdom and say “Live in the moment”, we understand that this means grasping that our ideas of the future and the past are both projections of this moment as well. We never actually exist in either the future or the past. When the future gets here, however you define it, it will be experienced as “now”, just as the past was. So “living in the moment” doesn’t mean, pace the Grass Roots, to just live on impulse and refuse to think about anything but satisfying immediate desires, nor does it mean, as certain deranged cult leaders would have you believe, that God will provide if you just have faith; unless, of course, you share said cult leader’s belief that the world is due to end in a fiery apocalypse any minute now, in which case, all right, then.
We can’t help but live in this moment. The hard part is simply realizing that.
The Ghost in the Machine
io9:
Fruit flies and other simple organisms might seem like they’re creatures of instinct, governed by a set of basically predictable stimuli and responses. But fruit flies actually have free will. Depending on what your definition of free will is.Leaving philosophy aside, we know humans have free will because we’re able to evaluate a set of different options and make a conscious decision as to which of them we’re going to choose. But for animals, we can’t ask them how they go about making decisions, so figuring out whether they possess free will in a biological sense is much trickier.
I don’t know about you, but I think I could present at least some examples of people who appear to be “creatures of instinct, governed by a set of basically predictable stimuli and responses.”
But yeah, I’ve always thought the supposed distinction between free will and determinism is such a misleading way to frame the issue. We humans are able to visualize a set of options (within certain constraints) and choose between them because the type of brain we have allows for that sort of abstract thought. Other mammals have that ability to lesser degrees, so I’m not surprised that other animals might also have some ability to intelligently react to new situations. It’s a difference more of degree than kind.
Thoughts are the Shadows of Our Feelings
You may have noticed that I like to make a game of seeing how often I can apply a quotation from Nietzsche to whatever topic I’m writing about. Honestly, when I started this blog with that amusing idea in mind, I thought it might be a little more of a challenge! But evidently, he had something to say about damn near everything, and lately, the Internet just keeps teeing up one opportunity after another. Well, who am I to refuse these gifts?
It used to be thought for the longest time, going back for thousands of years of philosophical investigation, that people think of why a certain behavior might be wrong. They think of all the rational reasons, all the things they can come up with, they go through all the pros and cons, and then arrive at the judgment, and say, “Behavior X is either wrong, or very wrong, or not so wrong, it’s fine”, and so on. So it used to be thought that people think long and hard, and then figure out the answer.Now it turns out that actually this does not seem to be the case because first of all, people don’t always think that much, and many thought processes are not really conscious, but rather, they happen outside of consciousness. Many thoughts just happen incidentally, and people aren’t even aware of them. Therefore, instead of all these sophisticated thoughts and reasons, accidental factors enter the picture such as feelings and intuitions, for example, a sense of, “Well, I just have an intuition that this is the case”, and such factors can be much more powerful than rational thought. For morality this idea first became popular in 2001 when Jonathan Haidt published his paper on the social intuitionist model, which has been a really influential idea.
First became popular in 2001? Would you believe 1881-1888?
• They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic (as opposed to the mystics of every rank, who are more honest and doltish – and talk of “inspiration”); while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed, a kind of “inspiration” – most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract – that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact. They are all advocates who resent that name, and for the most part even wily spokesmen for their prejudices which they baptize “truths” – and very far from having the courage of conscience that admits this, precisely this, to itself; very far from having the good taste of the courage which also lets this be known, whether to warn an enemy or friend, or, from exuberance, to mock itself.• Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier, and simpler.• …so “being conscious” is not in any decisive sense the opposite of what is instinctive: most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts.• ‘Once I have said I will do a thing, I do it’ – this mode of thinking counts a sign of possessing character. How many actions have been done, not because they were chosen as the most rational, but because when they occurred to us, they in some way tickled our vanity and ambition, so that we stuck with them and blindly carried them out! In this way they increase our belief in our own character and our good conscience, and thus in general our strength; while the choice of the most rational course keeps alive skepticism towards us and to this extent a feeling of weakness.