Nihilism as ghost story

dy0genes writes, in response to my post on Speculative Realism, that he's made his way through Brassier's Nihil Unbound. I quite like the take on Brassier as telling us spooky stories around a campfire, and I think it's more than half-accurate.

I sort of got the sense that the author had gathered us around under the stars to tell us ghost stories. He seems to assume that we fear both the dark and the ghosts. In my case he's at least a little right, enough that I found it engaging.

As anyone who's done much looking into their online presence will note, there is a strong affinity between the SRists and a certain kind of terror- or horror-genre. A whole issue of Collapse was devoted to para-Lovecraftian themes. And in fact I think there is a strong affinity between nihilism, horror, and the kind of magic(k) that coalesces around these genres. This is a far more an impression than a judgment; but Reza Negarestani's blog & Cyclonopedia is just the most extreme evidence. Nihilism as a ghost story--scaring ourselves. Yes, I like it.

dy0genes mentions:

Brassier's discussion on Nietzsche's failed attempt to overcome nihilism. I must say I've always read Nietzsche for his critique and psychological insights rather than what he tried to build up. Part of me has always felt a little disappointed with "eternal return". It barely coheres as a mathematical idea much less as a deep foundation for a new philosophy. So I probably didn't take it seriously enough.

I think dy0genes puts his finger on one of those "two-kinds-of-people-in-the-world" taxonomies: there are readers of Nietzsche who are impressed by his moral genealogy, and others who are struck by the Eternal Return. Like most such schemes, this one has holes, but it would be interesting to look at the commentary N. has received through this lens.

For myself, I'm an Eternal Recurrence guy. I have learned more from Nietzsche than from many a thinker, and he probably shaped my Christianity more deeply than any sermon I've ever heard; but the thing in N. that grabbed me by the scruff of my neck was Eternal Return of the Same. I would say that I recognized myself absolutely in his description:

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moon-light between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!" Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?

To me, this is one of the ten or so scariest passages in world art and literature, up there with Yeats' "Second Coming," Schubert's "Der Erlkonig," and David Lynch's Lost Highway. Blanchot's book The Step Not Beyond, which is essentially a long gloss and meditation on this mad idea of Nietzsche's, threw me in my early 20's into the kind of malaise that one probably only encounters once or twice in one's life, at least inresponse to literature. It's all very well to say that Nietzsche was trying to spur the creation of the sort of will that could endure, and even rejoice in, the idea that the universe was an endless and meaningless grind:

Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine."

To me, the horror of it had nothing to do with an endless run of Auschwitzes and Killing Fields, or even with an endless replay of my own petty disappointments. It was just the insidious reduction of the universe to a diabolical machine, blindly putting the needle back in the groove--the idea that what seemed meaningful was just an inexplicable happening that would go on and on and on. No thrill or ecstasy or calm fulfillment could possibly, I felt, withstand the awful leveling that the Eternal Return implied. Human freedom and human creativity withered before it. Everything was reduced to an perpetuum mobile of causality.

If it doesn't grab you, probably all you can do is shrug and "hmmm" about it taking all kinds of people.

dy0genes goes on:

someplace [Nietzsche] said what was needed was a scientific Buddhism. Not until I read [Brassier's] critique did I realize that he was trying to do just that with the "creative" agenda he had set for himself.

The contradiction Brassier points out is that eternal return "exterminates all known values because it is the assertion of absolute eternal indifference, without even a "finale of nothingness" to punctuate the sequence or to distinguish between beginning or end." To my ear this sounds a lot like the emptiness that is neither born nor dies in Buddhist thought. It is all meaningless suffering. But Nietzsche posits an affirmative "redemption" by willing the world to be exactly what it is. Brassier goes on to point out that this affirmative act that "divides history in two" completely undermines the previous devaluation of eternal return (as it was intended to do) and makes the whole agenda very problematic. I think that's an interesting and well argued attack. But what struck me while reading this is how similar the moment of affirmation is to the sometimes repeated myth of the Buddha's enlightenment. Some Buddhists maintain that when enlightenment happened for the Buddha it actually happened to the whole world. Enlightenment was not only a personal experience but a cosmological one.

I don't "believe" that particular myth but I found it be an interesting parallel. It would not surprise me if Nietzsche was mindful of this parallel.

I am no Nietzsche scholar, and have not made an exhaustive study of Nietzsche's relationship to Buddhism, though this is one of the aspects of his thought that interests me. My suspicion is that it is far more interesting than the mere dismissal of "Schopenhauerian" pessimism it is usually assumed to be. In any case, Nietzsche certainly writes explicitly that he himself has divided history in two; and speaking of the murder of God, the Gay Science's madman says: "Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us---for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."

dy0genes is right, too, that the Buddha's enlightenment is sometimes spoken of as having effected the whole universe--the power of Mara, the illusion-maker, was fundamentally broken. Of course, there were other Buddhas before Gautama (according to legend); but one can say that each time realization occurs, each time the sentient mind awakes to the truth of sunyata, in a sense this awakening is felt from one side of the universe to the other.

What this reminds the Christian of, of course, is the breaking of death by the Resurrection. This is, for the Christian, only the ne plus ultra of Revelation. In his exchange of letters with Eugen Rosenstock-Hussey, Franz Rosenzweig says regarding Revelation that it and it alone makes a "real before and after" in the world.

This can be critiqued as "magical thinking," but such claims of cosmological status for personal events chime with a profoundly liturgical mode of experience. What happens under the Bo Tree, or on this hill outside Jerusalem, or here at this altar in this church, is connected to the world, and even the meaning of the world. "Mah Nishtana?" goes the Haggadah question; "Why is this night different from all other nights?" "This is the night," the Easter exultet declares, "when first you saved our fathers: you freed the people of Israel from their slavery and led them dry-shod through the sea....This is the night when Jesus Christ broke the chains of death and rose triumphant from the grave." Any sense of "commemoration" is here secondary to an immediate enactment, a recognition of a present reality that obtains here and now. In the same way, the Hopi elder who Jung met on the Southwest American pueblo declared that he was helping the sun across the sky; implicit in his worldview was the sense that if he did not perform his dance, something in the cosmos could fray.

It is a simple matter to declare such assertions denotatively false--the sun will not fail if the Hopi elder does not dance, and "this night" is not part of the same 24-hour period as a night in Palestine or Egypt two or three millenia ago (leaving aside any other problematic claims about what happened on those occasions). But one wonders if the great rabbis, the Church fathers, and the Hopi elders are such fools as this easy dismissal might assume. A Jungian rejoinder (and not just Jungian) might be that an assertion can be connotatively true while denotatively false. While I am not sure I would want to defend this claim in exactly this form, I am anxious to defend the spirit of it from being a mere last-ditch sorry attempt to preserve discredited beliefs.

"Preservation" is not what is at issue, as if concern for the holy was a kind of spiritual wildlife conservation. What is called for is not a chain of museums or national parks for those who would be tourists of the sacred, but a rediscovery of what it means to live a whole life in the way that the Hopi or the Aboriginal elder or the Christian monk could. "The glory of God," wrote St Irenaeus of Lyons, "is the human person fully alive." (Against Heresies, IV 7)

The word for the kind of connection--implicit in the worldview of the Hopi elder or the Aboriginal singer--between the sentient being and its cosmic context, is participation, often found in Greek as methexis or as metalepsis. This is a technical term I hope I will be able to unpack more fully in some future posts, but it derives (in philosophy) most anciently from Plato, and has featured prominently in Levy-Bruhl, Barfield, and (one reason I am interested in them), some of the thinkers connected with Radical Orthodoxy.

Nietzsche did indeed know that what was needed was a new religion, of a sort; he was attracted to and horrified by the prospect that he would be its John the Baptist. He knew that it must have some sort of relationship to Plato; he himself called it "reversed" platonism. "Scientific Buddhism" may be as good a name as any for what he would have wanted, and it is important that for him, the Eternal Return was (like "enlightenment") a kind of experience, and not just an idea. This is the matter for a good deal of reflection. But I think it worth noting that the Eternal Return, in making every moment "simultaneous" in a sense, is a kind of flattened or mechanistic cosmos but one in which one could say, in a sense "This is the night." It is a vision not of a "scientific" universe but an interpretation of the meaning of a scientific universe, a universe that preserves the denotation of "this is the night," without the connotation -- i.e., without participation.

Many would-be defenders of the sacred, many aspiring "re-enchanters," are suspicious of or resentful of science. And there is a challenge from science, but this challenge is not that science undoes the meaning of the world. Brassier is rightly impatient with the humanities' general resistance to science. I think the divide between the humanities and the sciences is a cultural rather than a spiritual rift, and will be best addressed culturally not "spiritually." (This is one reason why I consider the work of John Brockman of special significance). Indeed, from one point of view, there is nothing especially "spiritual" about the humanities.

If I agree with Brassier about anything, it is the need to overcome the allergic reaction that so many in the humanities seem to feel about science--not about particular scientific results, but about the general esprit of science. Not that I think there is nothing amiss with scientism; but the answer to this is not avoidance and retreat.

I resonate very much with Brassier's account of nihilism as opportunity, not mere impasse. But his impatient claim that "philosophers would do well to stop trying to re-enchant the world" is a view that is about as uncongenial as I can imagine to my own disposition. It is true that thinking does risk being merely ridiculous when it tries too hard to pull off something like 're-enchantment.' To some degree this ridiculousness strikes me as having something to do with Keats' disdain for poetry that "has designs upon us." I would argue that the answer to this danger of ridiculousness is finesse, not abdication. Still, for all my differences with him, I find Brassier very bracing, and I like having my opposite so clearly laid out for me, but of course the challenging thing is he's not merely my opposite. I'm certainly glad di0genes found the book worth reading. I am more inclined now to see a certain kind of fascination with nihilism as a telling of ghost stories -- a sort of Halloween of philosophers. Which does not mean, of course, that there are not some who do try to practice black magic.

cats & dogs

As always, in medias res; anyone claiming there’s another way is either a prophet or a con artist. This is a long-ish post (one of many, eventually, but the longest so far) on what the work-in-progress I’m trying to work out on this site is supposed to be progressing towards. It’ll also give a fair example of the way I think-by-composition, should anyone be remotely interested.

This blog is made up of working notes towards a book (or possibly a “blook,” if it stays online); but in a sense there are two books I’m trying to sort out here, and I am not sure they will not be fighting like cats and dogs all the way through. The “cat” is easy to write, for by definition, it is what gets written easily. It’s the stuff that comes out in white heat, though often half-baked (or less), as an idea grows and transforms and draws other ideas into its sphere. The cat is easily distracted, with a short attention-span and a tendency to pounce. It plays with ideas and loses them under the couch, and almost doesn’t care if I’m there or not. The “dog,” on the other hand, is loyal and steady, but requires much more attention. Whereas the cat will bring me, day after day, little trinkets, the dog wants to herd a whole flock of ideas in a single direction—but that takes work. This second book is like unfinished business that has sat for years in the attic or the hall closet, needing to be seen to and always taking more time than I thought once I get around to it. It’s a whole series of parts without any obvious instruction list for putting them together.

One could plausibly describe these two books as a young man’s book and an old man’s: a book being thought out only in the writing, not knowing where it is going; and a book written to set in order things in memory, conclusions—not dogmas but habits, more or less conscious—already reached. In other words, it’s a book written In the Middle of Life’s Journey.

It occurs to me that my clever dichotomy may give the false impression of a nice order. Actually, both the cat book and the dog book are disheveled things, scattered and cluttered. For in “white heat” it is possible to write in any number of styles (admittedly, not always well) according to the subject; if the cat has pounced on a scholar, it makes little scholarly pawprints everywhere; if it has pounced on poetry, its pawprints might scan or at the very least look a little lyrical. But the cat is by definition interested in what it has right now. The dog, for its part, has its work cut out for it precisely because what it has to order and shepherd is, well, what the cat dragged in, once, long ago, and forgot about. This has been very different over the years, and not infrequently from day to day.

About the only thing these two books have in common, one might say, is their starting point.

My starting-place is the same as that of all philosophy: astonishment. Wonder. Yes, this; but also an incorrigible itch to make this wonder articulate. Wonder is named as the beginning of philosophy by Aristotle, who adds in the Metaphysics [1.2 982b] that “the lover of myths is also in a way a philosopher, since myths are made up of wonders.” Aristotle is a man not in most respects much like my cat—neither my cat-book, nor my actual cat, which freezes or leaps in unfeigned astonishment at every twitching leaf. But then, Aristotle calls wonder the beginning of philosophy, not the whole thing. Articulation—that’s the dog-book—is also essential. Astonishment by itself is, I am tempted to say, a noble response, even a grace; no genuine philosophizing is possible without it. But not every moment of wonder turns into the thoughtful perplexity that is philosophy. Feeling bafflement is perfectly compatible with being satisfied with it, or merely stumped; but if either of these are one’s first response, no articulation occurs.

And one can see why. This articulation is a struggle. Take the old question: Why is there something rather than nothing? If you have never felt the radical, dumbfounding wonder behind this question, it is unlikely that having someone describe it to you will make it seem like a diverting topic for an afternoon reverie. If you have felt it, you will understand how maddeningly difficult it is even to put it into words. To me it feels like trying to find a good fingerhold on the Great Wall of China in order to lift it up and look underneath, while standing on top of the wall. To ask “why is there anything?” is in a way to be asking for a spot outside of everything to be the explanation. And yet, the question will not go away, no matter how often one hears explained, patiently, that it arises because of a kind of grammatical mistake. Indeed, Wittgenstein says of this wonder that anything at all exists, that it cannot be coherently phrased in the form of a question, “nor is there any answer to it;” indeed, “all we can say about it can a priori be only nonsense.” But Wittgenstein, who may plausibly be held to have started the “it's a grammatical mistake” sort of approach with these kinds of remarks, also called the urge to formulate these questions, to “run up against the limits of language” as he called it, “a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply,” and added that “I would not for my life ridicule it.”

Every effort to ask “The Question of Being” is a rushing or an infiltration of these borders. (T.S. Eliot called this sort of thing “raids on the inarticulate;” but I think “raids” is a bit strong for the style of my own attempts, which are more like reconnaissance missions). Ken Wilber boils down all such attempts to two kinds. Wilber opens Sex, Ecology, Spirituality with the disarming sentence, “It is flat-out strange that something—that anything—is happening at all.” There are, he suggests, two responses to this realization: either one can believe it is purely fortuitous—a response Wilber calls the philosophy of Oops—or one can hazard something other, as has always been asserted by the great spiritual traditions. One might contend that even this hazarding is bound to either include this “something else” in the everything that is “happening” (and so risk an infinite regression), or not (and so beg the question). Why not just stay with Oops? And yet there is a good deal of difference between arriving at Oops at the end, as Quentin Meillassoux does in After Finitude, and starting out with it, remaining with it and being satisfied with it.

You see what has been going on here, as the dog and the cat stalk each other warily. Names or issues or phrases are getting dropped in here as if they are part of some assumed common knowledge and not what they are, the flotsam of my own idiosyncratic itinerary through the library and life. This is going to happen all the time, so we’d better figure out what to do. My own preference is not to be talked down to, even at the risk of being presented with information I might not immediately understand. Do you really want the explanatory clause, “Quentin Meillassoux is a contemporary French philosopher,” here? Yes, it’s a blog, for the time being, so I can include links, which are less obtrusive (though potentially more distracting); but are they any less condescending? If you knew Meillassoux’s name already, you are or yawning or rolling your eyes. If you didn’t—well, did I think you didn’t know how to find out?

My criteria for the good reader are those enumerated by Nabokov: “The reader should have an imagination. The reader should have a memory. The reader should have a dictionary. The reader should have some artistic sense.” A pencil and paper might also help. I am going to assume, too, that my reader can use a library, or at least an internet search engine. The reader I hope for is curious enough to look into whatever isn’t immediately made clear—and suspicious enough to look closer at what seems made a little too clear. The reader I hope for will be patient with what might seem like the boring parts, or will give herself permission to skip about and come back, and won’t take umbrage at the author’s apparent assumption that it’s worth hanging in there. For my part, I will attempt to fill in what I think will be helpful, and yes, I put in the links, as I attempt to learn how to ride this curious new media. This inevitably involves treading on some toes, because I will be moving about from discipline to discipline, in what I hope is a responsible way, and this means that one audience might be all too familiar with what is brand-spankin’-new to others.

Brand-spankin’-new, and familiar: this is what everything is all the time. Look at these words.

L o o k a t t h e s e w o r d s.

What is involved when you read this sentence is so astoundingly complex and so familiar that a full account is probably impossible. Perfectly arbitrary (by some criteria) arrangements of dark against a lighter background are scanned by the eye. How much does “scanned by the eye” already presuppose? The mechanism of the eye, the manner in which the photons of light trigger neuroelectric signals in the brain, the translation of these into (sub-aural) sounds, all of this is a synaesthetic miracle. These sounds, these inky squiggles, these arrangements of pixels on a back-lit screen, mean something. The ramifications of this one act are enough to fill a book, an encyclopedia, a library. It took millions of years of evolution, and a relatively brief but quite complex coda of human history, to attain the well-formed eye, the capacious brain, and the language-system that enable this reading. We so take this for granted that “take for granted” is too weak or loaded a phrase. It is not possible for us not to take it for granted. To not take it for granted would actually be to change who we are.

Now my point here is not to swerve off (yet!) into a tour of the history of language, writing, and culture, or the evolution, biology, and physics of perception, cognition, and reading. (Patience, gentle reader). My point is that every moment of our experience involves these unexamined ramifications before and behind. The dance (the clumsy dance) I make between expertise and bluff here is the dance we make all the time. The artist who presents what we “already know” in a new way, who estranges the familiar, and the scientist who attempts to explain something puzzling in terms of what we can regard as established, are both engaged in this dialectic, and each presupposes something of the other. Everything we think we already know is charged through and through with the unacknowledged, the unplumbed, the unguessable; under our feet, the soles of our shoes; under the shoes, the pavement; under the pavement, the ants. The ants on the surface of the earth, the earth hanging in the void of the heavens, the heavens nowhere-because-everywhere. Where do these things come from? And how is it that any of them are at all? This strange question—“why is there anything at all?”—or rather, the wonder motivating this inadequate formulation of a question, turns out to be simply the continuous perplexity behind all the others, the always-present strangeness of the taken-for-granted. Every time an apparent digression sideswipes us here, it is always a sign that the strangeness of things is clearing its throat, asking politely (or perhaps not) for our kind attention.

This is the family quarrel of my cat- and dog-books. What is diverting and new squares off with what is assumed and established. The boringly familiar is re-lit with wonder; the astonishing and unforeseen comes forward to greet us and make acquaintance, speaking a language we can understand. Every moment of our lives is “the middle of life’s journey.” Every instance opens onto an infinite number of possible paths, and this infinitude of questions that can be asked is itself always a signal of the even more mysterious unaskable question, fumblingly expressed as Why is there anything at all?

The discipline of philosophy is to keep this question open, to never get bored with it. The technique of philosophy is to ask as many of the other questions as possible in concert with each other, always opening them back upon this fundamental question. The aim of philosophy is to cultivate the understanding of the answer; an answer which, note, is just as nonsensical as the question, and can only transpire in one as an experience and not a sentence, but which, I want to say, casts a sort of image in language which, as close as I can come, is something like this:

I don’t know, but it is good that there is.

First post; Nth sailing

"Do you wish me, Cebes," said he, "to give you an account of the way in which I have conducted my second voyage...?"

A while ago I undertook to put together perhaps the only book I have it in me to write. This is an effort to demonstrate why and how I read philosophy vis-a-vis myth, poetry vis-a-vis religion, politics vis-a-vis scholarship, science vis-a-vis history, and all of the above via love. I expect it will be perhaps equal parts exegesis, thought-experiment, lyric, reconstruction, proposal, and jeremiad.

Some of my friends have seen a few of my efforts before now, and if the responses I've received are any indication, readers are likely to consider the work dense, meandering, a trifle obscure, and looooonnnnnng. I am not sure how much of this can be helped. I doubt I can honestly rein in my digressive nature without doing real violence to the shape of the thought; and if that sounds like special pleading, well, so be it. Tracing the “hidden roads that go from poem to poem” is how Harold Bloom described the object of literary criticism. My conviction—which may merely make a virtue of a disposition—is that philosophy takes the secret paths that go from world to world (in the sense in which Wittgenstein wrote, “the world of the happy is quite another from that of the unhappy”). Philosophy maps ways among the worlds of the Dadaist ensemble, the biochemist’s Petri dish, the psychoanalyst’s couch, and the stock exchange trading floor. It finds a wormhole between the silence of an undiscovered vein of silver ore, and the unheard roar and crackle of a solar flare; a route between the chemical panic in a fish caught by a sea anemone, and the exhausted hope of a death camp inmate at the approach of the liberating army. Thought is the medium in which philosophy charts these passages, which means it maps them by traversing them; and this can mean a mélange of styles, a shuttling betwixt rigor and risk, and some hairpin apparent changes of subject.

This is not always easy to follow, and I can tell you it isn’t always easy to write. But a few generous people, resisting the temptation to throw up their hands, have graciously asked me (admittedly, less eagerly than Cebes) to explain my explanation. For myself, I know that my worst excesses always arise when I write in the “abstract,” to no one in particular, or to some “general reader.” I have always found my best results, in terms of accessibility, manageable length, and readable style, when writing to a specific person in the context of living inquiry.

Hence this series of Open Letters on Philosophical Praxis. While I propose to work through some established points in a more-or-less established order, my hope is to preserve something of the real-time circumstance of actual encounter by genuinely responding to comments (assuming there are any). This is not a conceit on my part; I am convinced that the best, perhaps the only, philosophy happens when there is a real dialogue between engaged persons. I trust that in this conviction I remain a faithful Platonist. This means that intelligent inquiry and critique in good faith is both welcome and solicited. As is always the case, challenge helps me better than does mere acquiescence; though I aim to persuade, my writing is a form of spiritual discipline, an ongoing cultivation of the Socratic spirit of the examined life, above all in myself. I hope to make plausible the claim that philosophy remains viable as such a spiritual discipline (not an academic “subject,” though it is not cut off from scholarship), in open—speculative and critical—dialogue with the spiritual traditions of the world. Moreover, I hold that this encounter can be seen in the history of these traditions; it needs to be nurtured in our current cultural moment, and offers us real promises in the trajectories we can glimpse ahead of us.

Point of clarification: I'm not posing as an online instructor, and have no pretensions of being a great thinker. I am “only a scholar,” as Leo Strauss (a much greater scholar) wrote, and an “independent” one at that; a generalist who is not ashamed to trespass, with no credentials other than twenty-five years of reading philosophy (literature, history, science, religion...), thinking hard, seeking out good fellow-students, trying to be honest, and praying (all this in between musical gigs, phases of political activism and quietism, travels, love affairs, and playing with children). To lead the examined life, one must live. That’s about all I can offer if asked for my certifications, except that I was once a licensed Emergency Medical Tech.

I hope that out of this experiment will emerge a series of posts that can serve as an exposition, however wayward, of what I think is at stake in philosophy today as always. I anticipate that the result will be idiosyncratic, uneven, and difficult. My hope is it will be worth the difficulty. If I did not fear being misunderstood, I would say, worth the danger.