The Pilgrim Way Has Led to the Abyss

By in nietzsche, religion No Comments

Giles Fraser:

In the early years of Nietzsche studies, it was assumed that because the Nazis were drawn to his ideas, then Nietzsche himself must have been some sort of fellow traveller. He wasn’t. But part of the reason that fascists found his views so congenial is that he emphasised the concept of will and power over truth. If truth is simply a mobile army of metaphors — rather than something out there, fixed, waiting to be discovered — then what counts as truth is established through power and assertion, not dispassionate observation or careful listening. We used to call it lying. But for Nietzsche, the truth is what I assert it to be. Here, then, is where Donald Trump or Boris Johnson intersect with the woke Left. For all their superficial antipathy, they share a very similar metaphysical space.

…At the present moment, this philosophical position is supporting a kind of Left-wing run. But it won’t always do so. And when Nietzsche renews his conjugation with the Right, we may well descend even further into antipathy and madness. When truth with a capital T dies, all we have left is the struggle for dominance.

Might is right. Which is why, as the culture wars deepen, you will find me in church, on my knees, before my dead God. A dead God who, Nietzsche would be disappointed to hear, refuses to die.

A quibble: Nietzsche wasn’t “emphasizing the concept of will and power over truth” so much as he was suggesting that a world of “will and power” was an unintended consequence of the Christian West’s centuries-long pursuit of truth. It wasn’t a simple either/or question for him, as a couple passages from Beyond Good and Evil show:

Indeed, what forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of “true” and “false”? Is it not sufficient to assume degrees of apparentness, and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance – different “values”, to use the language of painters? Why couldn’t the world that concerns us – be a fiction? And if somebody asked, “But to a fiction, surely there belongs an author?” – couldn’t one answer simply: why? Doesn’t this “belongs” perhaps belong to the fiction, too?

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Nobody is very likely to consider an argument true merely because it makes people happy or virtuous….happiness and virtue are no arguments. But people like to forget — even sober spirits — that making unhappy and evil are no counter-arguments. Something might be true while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree.  Indeed, it might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of a spirit should be measured by how much of the “truth” one could still barely endure — or, to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified. But there is no doubt that the evil and unhappy are more favored when it comes to the discovery of certain parts of truth, and that the probability of their success here is greater — not to speak of the evil who are happy, a species the moralists bury in silence.

The early church fathers taught that reason was a gift from God and the means by which we could progressively increase our understanding of scripture and revelation. In an almost-Hegelian twist, reason ended up undermining itself. And thesis begat antithesis, and antithesis begat…whatever revaluation of all values we’re living through now. We pursued truth out into space and found it difficult to believe in our cosmic importance any longer. We pursued truth through the natural world and found ourselves face-to-face with our own animal origins and nature. We pursued truth into the subatomic realm and found reality to be weirder than we’d ever imagined. Like a magnifying glass focusing the sun’s rays, our pursuit of truth burnt away the fragile webs of social fictions that connected us.

Was it to meet such grinning evidence we left our richly odored ignorance? Was the triumphant answer to be this? The Pilgrim Way has led to the abyss. — Auden, “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio”

What if the truth is that Christianity is just one more religion among countless others? What if truth with a capital-T has always been dependent upon who had the power to assert it and successfully defend it against challengers? What if Fraser is simply caught in the same snare as the rest of us, asserting a preferred fiction over an unpalatable truth? He’s not answering the question so much as begging it.

That Day of Tears and Mourning

By in books, music No Comments

Thirty years before, when Leopold Mozart saw what his son was capable of, he determined to show the world what he declared a miracle of God, thereby to turn the world to thoughts of God’s miracles, also thereby to profit from this one. Now Leopold’s son was dead at not quite thirty-six years old, having surpassed nearly all men in his art and on the brink of surpassing himself in unimaginable ways. He had been named Theophilus, “beloved of God.” But it turns out that the gods do not care. They do not care. The gods, nature, whatever it was that made Mozart, had indifferently created a miracle, and indifferently let it be erased long before its time. Ah, that day of tears and mourning!

— Jan Swafford, Mozart: The Reign of Love

I got this book for Christmas last year and have only just finished it. I don’t think I’ve ever taken so long to finish a book. Partly, that’s due to having to pause throughout and listen to the compositions being described. Mainly, though, this is one of those books that’s made for luxuriating in. Swafford is a great storyteller, and Mozart is always an antidote to the mean and sickly minds of the everyday world. Highly recommended.

Three to Five Hundred Words

By in books, lin yutang, writing No Comments

The literature of China as a whole presents us with a desert of short poems and short essays, seemingly interminable for one who does not appreciate them, and yet as full of variety and inexhaustible beauty as a wild landscape itself.  We have only essayists and letter-writers who try to put their feeling of life in a short note or an essay of three to five hundred words, usually much shorter than the school composition of an American schoolboy. In these casual writings, letters, diaries, literary notes and regular essays, one finds here a brief comment on the vicissitudes of fortune, there a record of some woman who committed suicide in a neighboring village, or of an enjoyable spring party, or a feast in the snow, or boating on a moonlit night, or an evening spent in a temple with a thunderstorm raging outside, generally including the remarks made during the conversation that made the occasion memorable. We find a host of essayists who are at the same time poets, and poets who are at the same time essayists, writing never more than five or seven hundred words, in which a whole philosophy of life is really expressed by a single line.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

“Read any good books lately?”

One of the young personal trainers hailed me as I entered the gym. He had learned through the grapevine that I was something of a reader, and he wanted to tell me about this counterfactual history series he’d been enjoying. He then mentioned that he used to write short stories when he was “a kid” (he’s all of twenty-four now), but had lost both the skill and the inclination, in his estimation. Well, I said, waving a hand around our environment, it’s not much different than here — it’s mostly perspiration. You have to show up and put in your reps. I suggested that, to get back in the swing of it, he should sit down and blatantly try to imitate some of his favorite writers. More than likely, I said, you won’t be able to do it, but after wrestling with it for a while, you’ll start to discover more of your own voice in the process.

He seemed to think this was some of the greatest advice he’d ever heard. He swore he was going to start doing exactly that. I’m now mentally preparing for him to eventually put two and two together and ask, “Hey, how did you come up with that idea? Are you a writer too? What do you like to write?” What would I tell him? I could say I keep a blog, but you know, I really hate the word “blog.” It sounds like it should describe an involuntary bodily function, or something gross like that. Familiar essays? I don’t really write at enough length to qualify. I guess I’d say, “You know what bonsai sculpture is, right? Well, instead of trees, I do that with essays. I take potential essays and prune them down to around three-to-five hundred words. I call it bonsai minimalism.”

Incidentally, I have decided that my mission here is to convince all of my readers to pick up a copy of Lin Yutang’s book The Importance of Living. His other books may earn you extra credit, but that’s the main one. There is a dearth of Yutang citations among all the neighboring blogs, so I aim to set that right. The quotations will continue until you finally give in. Resistance is futile.

Can’t Think Big, Can’t Think Past One or Two

By in books, foolosophy, santutthi, work, Ω 7 Comments

I had a friend, an intelligent and very learned man, who gave no hint of having been in the least troubled by time. He was a university teacher, who taught well but scarcely bothered to publish. After his retirement from teaching, the one mild pressure in his life, meeting with his classes, was removed. He rose, read the daily press with a mordant eye, watched one of the morning television talk shows with his second cup of coffee, drew a bit, read some, taught himself (slowly) the rudiments of Chinese, wrote comic letters, looked up French words, considered etymologies of English ones, gave delight to his friends, took pleasure in his food and drink, and thus lived out his days until a benevolent (or so it seems in retrospect) heart attack took him out of what seemed a not very taxing game. It seems rather pointless to say of him “May he rest in peace,” since, as near as I can determine, he pretty much lived in peace. I’m not sure he owned a watch. Not a man, clearly, on a schedule.

Did he, I have often wondered, have any doubts? Had he got the most out of himself? In suppressing ambition, did he not also kill a certain kind of joy—that very genuine joy connected with achievement? He left no children. His friends, those who have not already died, grow old. His memory will fairly soon be extinguished. He was too clever a man not to have thought about all this. He lived, if not all that intensely, still almost entirely in the now. He met all his obligations, not least among them giving pleasure to his friends, though apparently he never felt that he owed any obligations to the future. Was he more or less intelligent than I in eschewing the notion of a schedule?

— Joseph Epstein, “Time on My Hands, Me in My Arms,” With My Trousers Rolled: Familiar Essays 

My gym is looking to hire a new overnight cleaning service. They already have a few interviews set up, but they posted a notice at the front just in case any of the clientele might know a guy, etc. I’ve been pestering the Lady of the House ever since. This is my dream! Working a night shift by myself? Cleaning? In the gym, where I assume my membership might even be comped? Come on, I said, let’s sell the business and get back to the simple life!

I’m kidding, but on the square. If I were financially set for life, that is precisely the sort of work I’d do. The Lady is fascinated with business qua business; I’m not. I’m just a draft horse. (Thankfully, she keeps her Napoleonesque urges under control, so I don’t fear becoming another Boxer.) I can work as hard as anyone, but I have absolutely no interest in CEO-level stuff. Just give me my menial task and let me get to work, preferably while listening to music, ideally without any personal interaction at all.

Me and my friends sell ourselves
Short but feel very well
We feel fine, ah, we feel fine
Small stakes ensure you the minimum blues
But you don’t feel taken and you don’t feel abused
Small stakes tell you that there’s nothing can do
Can’t think big, can’t think past one or two

— Spoon, “Small Stakes”

Sounds to me like Epstein’s Epicurean friend had it all figured out.

Mean and Sickly Minds

By in foolosophy, montaigne No Comments

Leaving the maelstrom for a while is also useful for setting life in a useful context. That useful context: that most of the people who work in journalism and in politics are lunatics — myself included. I spent a lovely two weeks with my family swimming, going out to eat, taking boat rides, visiting amusement parks and museums, playing golf, watching movies, hanging out at the beach, chatting about sports, and then I came back to The Internet and was told almost immediately that the United States was on the edge of a civil war. This is absolute nonsense, and if you meet anyone who tells you this in the wild, you should kindly ask them to log off and go spend some time in physical America, where people disagree profoundly on some pretty important questions but simply do not talk or think in the way that people do on social media or on cable news or on the opinion pages of our major newspapers.

— Charles C.W. Cooke, “Just Log Off”

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As our mind is strengthened by communication with vigorous and orderly minds, so it is impossible to say how much it loses and degenerates by our continual association and frequentation with mean and sickly minds. There is no contagion that spreads like that one. I know by enough experience how much it is worth by yard. I love to argue and discuss, but in a small group and for my own sake. For to serve as a spectacle to the great and make a competitive parade of one’s wit and chatter is an occupation that I find very unbecoming to a man of honor.

— Montaigne, “On the Art of Conversation”

Back Seats

By in ohferfucksake, who's žižoomin' who? No Comments

Those who obstinately oppose the most widely-held opinions more often do so because of pride than lack of intelligence. They find the best places in the right set already taken, and they do not want back seats.

— La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

Steven Poole:

The long-term Zizek observer already knows that one doesn’t exactly ‘read a new book’ by him so much as tune in again to the ceaselessly babbling stream of his comic-philosophical free association. And so it is here: the bracing mash-up of his beloved Hegel with Marx, perverse yet enjoyably plausible interpretations of Hollywood movies and disquisitions on contemporary politics and culture wars.

There is also the usual amount of Lacanian theory, which to some might seem like a version of Scientology for continental philosophers, a sort of intellectual Ponzi scheme in which adepts prove their belonging via the repetition of absurdities, though the psychoanalytic framework more generally does issue in pungent diagnoses of modern sacred cows. ‘Does the predominant ecological discourse,’ he asks, ‘not address us as a priori guilty, indebted to Mother Nature, under the constant pressure of the ecological superego?’

In any case, Zizek’s value as a thinker and gadfly lies precisely in his refusal to submit to boring (another favourite word) empiricism and his joy in insulting the left as well as the right.

No matter how often I witness presumably-intelligent people attempt to pan nuggets of wisdom from the stream-of-consciousness-ramblings of this ridiculous charlatan, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.

Obiter Scripta, no. 124

By in alan watts, obiter scripta, technology No Comments

Some people predict that it’s only a matter of time until our ordinary telephones disappear and are replaced by individual devices about the size of a pocket watch—one side will have a TV screen and speaker; the other will entail a set of buttons you can use to activate various functions or dial world information for any given individual. And if that person doesn’t answer, it will mean that they are dead. Under such circumstances, absolutely no one can get lost anymore.

—Alan Watts, Just So: Money, Materialism, and the Ineffable, Intelligent Universe

I had noticed over the last few weeks that my phone seemed to be slow to receive emails, and I was having problems getting texts to go through to certain people. I didn’t think much of it, because a smartphone is little more than an mp3 player to me. Today, though, I rebooted it and promptly received five voicemails and a couple texts that had apparently been in limbo for who knows how long. I know full well that various corporate and political actors would love to eliminate the possibility of true “private time,” and that the little surveillance devices we all carry around make it easier for them to do so, but it still pleases me to see how, for no particular reason, things just sometimes stop working as expected, introducing just that little bit of unpredictability into events again.

Educate the Filipinx

By in juxtapositions, ohferfucksake, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

That there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died.

— Source: General James Rusling, “Interview with President William McKinley,” The Christian Advocate 22 January 1903, 17.

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In 1901, Woodrow Wilson wrote in defense of the annexation of the Philippines: “The East is to be opened and transformed, whether we will or no; the standards of the West are to be imposed upon it; nations and peoples which have stood still the centuries through are to be quickened and to be made part of the universal world of commerce and of ideas which has so steadily been a-making by the advance of European power from age to age.”

— John B. Judis

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Filipinos slammed the comic-book convention Comic-Con International on social media last week when it referred to a group of Filipino content creators as “Filipinx.”

“The Filipinx Voices in Pop Culture was a fun and educational all Filipinx panel discussing Filipinx influences behind your favorite media,” Comic-Con tweeted on Thursday, using the alternative gender-neutral ethnic term preferred by some gender identity activists to refer to people from the Philippines. Comic-Con’s use of the term drew immediate backlash from users, including Filipinos.

“I’d rather be called a racial slur than Filipinx” one user wrote.

“Please stop trying to impose weird western gender ideology onto people who never wanted it or asked for it in the first place” another said.

— Robert Schmad

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If history is any guide, this burst of moral enthusiasm will pass. It will leave its marks on Western history; some virtuous, but most risible and excessive. And when future historians look back on our time, they will do so with condescension and pity. They will be navigating their own moral panics, of course. But they will also be confident in their own accumulated wisdom—enough, at least, to look upon us with embarrassment and to thank the stars for their own enlightened age. And the cycle explored in this book will begin again.

We can only hope that there will be someone around then to write about how truly awful we all were.

— Noah Rothman, The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun

Querulous Insects

By in books, foolosophy, juxtapositions No Comments

In the woods about my garden and familiar precincts lurk the fears of life; all threaten me, some I may escape, of others I am the destined and devoted victim. Sooner or later—and yet in any case how soon!—I shall fall, as I have seen others fall, touched by an unseen hand.

But I do not think of these Terrors often, though I seem to hear them sometimes moving in the thickets. It is the little transitory worries that bite and annoy me, querulous insects, born of the moment, and perishing with the day.

— Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms

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April 9 — “If only something would happen?” Something being the revelation that transfigures existence; works a miraculous presto-chango upon the mundane mortal world — turning the toads and cockroaches back into handsome fairy princes, the Clark Kents into Superman — that calls unexpectedly up on the phone and says: “Your name has just been picked from a hat, like a rabbit, and we are giving you a million dollars,” — or that announces in a sudden telegram: “Congratulations! Lady Rockefeller has just died and left you several estates and an enchanted source of continual private income.” But instead, day after day, there are hardboiled eggs instead of frog legs for breakfast, and doubts and worries buzz and sting like the evils in Pandora’s box.

— Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962

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Our imaginations are captivated by fears and fantasies, monsters and superheroes, agonies and ecstasies, but our day-to-day living mostly presents us with gnats and houseflies. How patiently do we put up with them?

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