The Conflict Between Image and Being

Sometimes I think that the dichotomy between what we appear to be and what we in fact are, between image and being, has never been more aggravated than now, in the age of Facebook, of glossy magazines, of clothing outlets on every street corner. Yet over 300 years ago Blaise Pascal pointed it out:

“We are not satisfied with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being: we want to lead an imaginary life in the minds of others, and so we make an effort to impress. We constantly strive to embellish and preserve our imaginary being, and neglect the real one. And if we are calm, or generous, or loyal we are anxious to let it be known so that we can bind these virtues to our other being, and would rather detach them from our real selves to unite them with the other. We would happily be cowards if that gained us the reputation of being brave. What a clear sign of the nothingness of our own being”! (Pensées 806)

How can we so magnificently miss the mark? As though we did not know where our existence was located! As though we sentient beings we capable of mistaking our personal being for what was outside of us! It is an absurd situation, really, as absurd as a scenario in which we all walked around saying, as my dad once said, "I exist a little to the left of me!" 

If the reader's abstract intuition has not been awakened by now, I am going to have to ask him to give it a hearty kick. For none of this should be too counter-intuitive, however abstract. It is in rather obvious (in fact all of this should be sounding pedantic) that being trumps appearance, that ultimately it is one's being that matters most. Above things (cars, money, Pokemon cards...), above states of being (peace, happiness, generosity...), above meaning (why I go to work, why I play golf, why I am your friend...) stands one's manifold, interdependent, complex and uniquely stylized and uniquely experienced being. 

Thus “What matters most”? is a different question than “what matters most to individual persons?” which is in turn quite a different question than “what matters most to me?” But because each and every time it will be and can only be a single individual – not a group of individuals or some “cosmic life force” or un-sentient entity – answering the question, the answer cannot vary: what matters most is one’s singular, unrepeatable and personal/private being – what we so easily call what each person “is”. 

But a quick distinction must be made: this does not denote what a person thinks or intuits himself to be, nor what a person does, says, or appears to be. No, “what a person is” denotes neither more nor less than exactly that, what a person is: it encompasses the weight and substance of his existence as experienced (and not experienced) and freely expressed (and not freely expressed) in time and space (and any other dimension we happen to be in). We do not have any definite angle on this "being" in order to determine it for ourselves, to pronounce upon it or describe it in completeness – such is accessible only by God. Now, some may say action or appearance are in fact the only being of a person – but even if that is the case, it is still being that is sought to be discerned, and being which matters finally. This is not to say that appearance does not directly influence or "become" being (this is a complex and dynamic dichotomy after all); but again, as protons carry the weight of atoms, being is the substantial category around which all meaning revolves. Ontology, then, as the language of this ultimate value, must be the queen of all introspection. 

Coming back to the main point: it seems that this is a crucial truth not often dwelt upon in a world where we boast, compete for positions, motivate ourselves by what others might think, etc. – our social lives are a dealing in appearances, not being. Pascal has many incisive words on this subject, not to mention Nietzsche, who, along with Kierkegaard, writes about the masks of “the demonic” – that insane individual who stakes his entire existence on a self-generated image, a lie. “Who has not for the sake of his reputation – sacrificed himself? –” (Beyond Good and Evil 94). “What? A great man? I always see only the actor of his own ideal” (95). “What a person is begins to betray itself when his talent declines – when he ceases to show what he can do. Talent is also finery; finery is also a hiding place” (99). Rene Girard, in turn, writes that mimetic desire, the determinative desire operative in human nature, is at its core always a desire to be another – a yearning to be something, a yearning for a new self (though interestingly we would never desire a break in consciousness, an incoherence inherent in desire which itself betrays the futility of wishing to be another). Despair at its height, describes Kierkegaard, is where “desperate will to be oneself” and “desperate will not to be oneself” converge. Despair, in other words, concerns the impossibility of one being anything other than oneself, even through death, and the stubborn refusal to be anything else but the image one has made of oneself. Image and being are one in despair.

It seems all desire and knowledge, since they play themselves out always and only in individual persons, concern at their heart what each individual is, a person’s unique, private-public Being. Jean-Luc Marion writes in The Erotic Phenomenon:

“Why then do we prefer, even at the price of restraint, to know rather than not to know? … in this case, we do not desire to know simply in order to know, but in order to experience the pleasure of knowing – we know in order to enjoy knowledge, in order to enjoy the act of knowing. Thus we do not desire to know, except for the sake of self-enjoyment. Knowledge becomes the simple means, albeit the most efficacious and economical, to such an enjoyment of self. Desire itself, more essential than the desire to know, springs forth – desire, which, even in the knowledge, only desires self-enjoyment…  Certainly, the desire to know is directed upon the known or the knowable – but above all and finally to the benefit of the knower. Confirmed as more essential than the desire to know is the desire to safeguard oneself, that is to say, to enjoy oneself” (11-12).

Marion’s comments are not as tangential as they might at first seem, for though they are wrapped up in his own larger argument for the primacy of love, the primacy of love has direct bearing on the primacy of being.

Importantly, there is nothing “selfish” about this in the colloquial sense. Note that I do not write "the primacy of one's individual being." But how could this be, when, after all, one's being supposedly involves only oneself? Well, to make a long story short, to write off this ultimate concern with being as “selfish” is decadent and life-denying; it could only be the misunderstanding of an ontological-aesthetical philistine. For we were never talking about "individualism," but about the weight of one's life where it is actually lived: outside and in-between appearances. 

Praising Bad Saints? (Commenting on Myers)

I only follow a few blogs. Today I performed my routine check and was delighted to find a new post on one of the most learned and entertaining of these, Faith and Theology. I read on right then and there, expecting to be intrigued and surprised, but always in agreement. To my surprise I found I was not surprised but unaccountably jaded.

Soon I became quite concerned at my own strange weariness. Was this not Ben Myers at his finest, coming at life with his charmingly provocative Trinitarian lens? Recently he has posted some thoughts on the communion of saints and his own participation in that communion (e.g. through how he structures his daily calendar around death dates [birthdays] of personally special saints). In these thoughts he seems to have rarified a ‘participatory’ Christianity, a vision of life interpreted through a heavily involved pneumatology/Christology/what-have-you, and as such it embodies a kind of articulate forwardness by which we can see his spirituality – and all like it – “for what it is.”

I do not want to be needlessly presumptuous in treating Myer’s blog post. This is not an attack. I thank him for his reflections and enjoy them immensely. But I am hesitant about where they are going and what they imply. I suppose this is another reason to give him thanks, for it is through him I am encountering a form of spirituality that may help me come to grips with my own – with who I am and the nature or style of the spiritual “way” I have found myself in and choose through (sometimes neglected) active practice. Before reading further, here is the article: In Praise of Bad Art. 

Now, for starters, I can only access the whole paradigm that makes such a reflection available and intelligible in the first place through a hyperbolized version constructed out of materials I am familiar with. That is an important preface, because Myer’s worldview is inherently more complicated than I can fathom, and besides, I have only been exposed to 0.00014% of it.

But of that 0.00014%, 0.000032% seems to me worrisome in its implications, for a few reasons. Myers writes and thinks with a grand view of history – of its successes and failures and their interdependence – at the background and the foreground. When he is done lauding great writers (Shakespeare, Johnson, etc.) or actors (Geoffrey Rush, Cate Blanchett, etc.), he moves on and lauds the conditions of their being. He has what I might call, with my limited grasp of Hegel, a Hegelian appreciation for the play of history. All things have a place in his praise, because all things have a place in a grander scheme which yields things worthy of praise.

The person who does not share this appreciation, who indeed despises the, on average, mediocrity of history and prefers to spend his time on the pinnacles of that incomprehensible flux (which, if charted, might look like a zestful depiction of quantum foam), therefore “hates the seedbed from which the things he loves will grow,” writes Myers. Now, are we to infer that we ought then to praise the seedbed? Clearly. But here’s the thing: if we do, where will the praising end – at the harsh conditions and natural forces that, through erosion and distribution, made the minerals in the soil available? – at the composted beings that once lived and by unknown means met their end and now provide nutrients to the soil? This might not sound like a bad idea, but you might see where it is going. We will become exhausted, and at that point the hypertrophy of praise will betray itself as limited, having only so much substance, only so much energy. Where does this substance come from? That which sparked the praise in the first place, of course! The flower is why we praise the seedbed, not the seedbed itself. No flower, no praise. Anything associated with the flower, therefore, deserves some derivative appreciation, again not because of what it inherently is but because we happen, first, to think the flower praiseworthy. The further something’s association from the original source of grandeur, the less meritorious it is of our thanks. In such a way of seeing things, we will quite likely to be unable to think of any other reason to appreciate the seedbed other than that given to us by the flower…

Here is how Myers carries this over into the realm of human beings and the Church:

We religious believers are, as a rule, pretty unexceptional. Only with the greatest difficulty and inconsistency do we ever manage to align some bits of our lives with what we profess to believe. What can we say? We are sorry! We have been to all the rehearsals! We wish we could do it better! But the great mass of unexceptional believers should be judged ultimately not by its weakest cases but by its strongest: St Francis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mother Teresa.

In this passage Myers is clearly working from the thoroughly-Christian, complex presupposition that our life as Christians is directly bound up in the life of these exceptional believers, the saints we venerate, because we are all part of the body of Christ. But what is the nature of this shared life? Do the deeds of great saints “suffice” for the rest of us, that is, are their deeds our deeds? That cannot be it, since Christ’s faithfulness alone “suffices,” and it is only him that works in us, making what good deeds we do his good deeds, what goodness we have in us his goodness. We continue to be distinguishable individuals, accountable to a, yes, forgiving and eternally loving God – but as individuals nonetheless.

So how does this interdependence among Christians, this mutual identification, work? Certainly it must be as a living organism works and not as some “holy celebrity culture” in which the only personalities that count are the saints. Taking the analogy of the body introduced by Paul: do the defects of a naughty hand get covered up by the perfection of the eye? That cannot be, because the defect in one is a defect that by its nature is unique to that one, which in turn is a defect of the entire organism that cannot be repeated or covered up by any other part. Is it really possible that I am so misunderstanding Myers that I believe him to be saying we as Christians are judged as a homogenous mass whose countenance is only the lump sum of the prettiest (saintliest) faces, some massive equation rounded to the highest common denominator?

Whether or not that is what Myers is getting at, it is a possibility that I cannot stomach for reasons too complex and shadowed for even myself to understand. Honestly, the meaning of my own attitude is ambiguous to me. When Myers writes, “What can we say? We are sorry!” part of me wants to say, of myself and of others: “Sorry is not good enough! Let us acknowledge our inadequacy without being so hasty to move on from it – perhaps then something might happen!” I do know that this is not realistic and that the speculated consequence would likely not result. Moreover, it is not me who gets to the do the talking but the God who reveals himself to us and the forgiving, loving nature therein. Yet something feels funny to me. Am I running up here against the offensive nature of the gospel, or are my instincts in fact appropriately piqued by some dangerous or problematic theology?

Taking a look at another passage, I find that though I cannot reach a resolution to the above question, I can at least reach a different sort of resolution: a tentative opposition to Myer’s worldview (as presented in his blog post), for reasons that will become apparent. He writes:  “God and all the holy angels shower us with applause – not because of ourselves, but because of what we represent and what we help to make possible. We do it poorly so that somewhere, some day, some virtuoso will step on to the stage and do it well.” If you went and did all it took to understand this statement – which perhaps does not at first strike one as counterintuitive but nonetheless contains a great mystery – where would you be? Where you started, I dare say, with perhaps a better appreciation of the familiar spot.

Now, it is true that to change one’s perception – the way one sees oneself, others and events, and how one is caught up in it all – is in fact to change oneself and even the actions and relationships that are available to one. To phrase it philosophically, ontology is bound up with and mutually related to phenomenology. Blake, for one, makes a big deal of this (“Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & govern’d their Passion or have No Passions, but because they have Cultivated their Understandings” - by which he means a certain way of perceiving reality). Blake phrases this truth provocatively, but it is a truth all the same: working to change one’s perception is morally and existentially significant. However, there is no going “prior to” or “behind” the ethical – it still operates on the level of perception-founding paradigms. Therefore, even though spiritual frameworks such as Myers' contain the elements to make ethical evaluations (as in the statement that we are valuable “not because of ourselves, but because of what we represent”), they too can be ethically evaluated in toto. In other words, the practical implications and consequences outside of the theoretical vision are in truth bound up in that vision and may either weigh it down our buoy it up. Entire spiritual systems can and should be viewed with whatever level of detachment we can gain to assess them in their fullest manifestation – for their roots are pervasive and suck water from places we may not even suspect.

So, struggling as I am to operate on this level of distance, I want to ask a practical question of Myers: Why not redirect the energy that it takes to understand and live into this way of looking at things and its whole scheme of valuation – which at most seems to provide a peace of mind from which one might, without anxiety, attempt again and again a higher goodness, and at worse provides one with the perceptual means to a complacency no less an opiate than a less sophisticated faith – towards changing the life that was discontented enough to be intrigued by that vision in the first place?

I don’t have the answer, and because I am questioning some of the deepest mysteries of the Church, I want to cease my impudent tone the only way I know how – by ceasing to write.

Those in possession of answers, please forward them to me via the comment section below. 

What if God...

Perhaps the deepest question we can ask is the one closest to nonsense: “Why this, and not another?” It has many versions: Why something and not nothing? Why this goodness and not that goodness? Why me and not you? Why this way and not that? Why God, life, love, truth, being – and not something else?

Rummaging around in some of my old notes I found a bizarre tidbit of tongue-in-cheek philosophizing (at least I hope it was tongue-in-cheek – when I was younger I ventured way further out into the absurd than I do now...) which has some relation to the topic soon to be introduced. Unfortunately, it is uncomfortably close to Leibniz’s idea that we must necessarily be living in “the best of all possible worlds,” given God’s good nature. But I spoil my own thoughts by introducing a foreign body into them.

“I find it flattering that God, in His infinite wisdom and omnipotence, should –out of the infinite possibilities He undoubtedly could have conceived of and was conceiving of in time immemorial in His Perfect Mind – pick us, human beings, you and me, out from among all these potentials and choose to actualize that idea. God, being supremely perfect, seeing the numberless paths He could choose to tread as he “floated” in the void, seeing that which is utterly inconceivable to the human mind, not being limited by any physical laws, mental laws, or any laws for that matter (time and space existing at that point only in his mind, undistinguished along with the never-ending flow of ideas which must have been coming to Him, pure Creator that He was and is), chose us. I can't get over it. I’m simply flattered – the fact that I, we, exist is in fact the greatest compliment ever paid to us!”

It is obviously impossible for a human being to conjecture so abstractly as to have any inking whatsoever of that state of pure creative potentiality before creation. Nevertheless, it is in a dog’s nature to tug at his leash, fixed though it may be to the fence, and so too my mind tends toward impossible abstraction.

Here is an interesting nonsense question that came to it in a time of vain speculation. I present it only because someone clever enough might ask it without the ironist’s of it being a nonsense question. It might also help us tighten our grip on the appropriate conceptualization of goodness within its (only sensible) context: God.

What if God had constituted the created order according to a different Good? This would involve not switching “specific goods” (the wonder of sunlight, friendship, a moving melody, laughter, etc.) for other “specific goods” within the universe, nor would it involve a reverse-valuation of specific goods (e.g. pain is now pleasure!) – rather, the question presses us to a more comprehensive consideration: a whole re-making of the universe from the ground up in order to found it upon “a new Goodness.”

Another way of asking this is: What if everything we understand as Good was, in this hypothetical universe, simply different? That is, what if goodness there had nothing to do with what we think of as goodness here? We can only ask this if we presuppose that while there is nothing arbitrary about good things themselves – about what are good things and what are not (for example, on the level of corporeal goodness [as opposed to moral]:  there is a reason we like chocolate and consider it good,  but not boogers, and that reason is inscribed into our very bodies in the form of taste buds with particular receptors that apprehend chocolate thusly) – there is something arbitrary about the whole System of the Good and goodness in its totality. Thus we can ask: What if God inverted the universe in this (absolute, total) way? What would really change?

         

The answer: nothing. That is to say: nothing in our experience of the Good. Here is an imperfect analogy: it would be as though all the colors in the world were replaced all at once by other colors, a switch so complete that the interconnectedness and balance of the world of color was preserved. The experience in its entirety would not be at all different. And (returning to the question), because this foundational alteration of the Good is in truth still the Good, whatever it may be (it may be killing babies for all we know), the change is not morally significant in the slightest. We may say that in this hypothetical universe, pain and cruelty are now the good, but it is nonsense to judge that as an “abomination”: by saying that they are now the Good you have changed not just those things but everything. To judge them on our ground is to ignore the premise, that this universe exists with an entirely different Good which must be judged on its own terms.

Phenomenologically this question and its answer are intriguing. Basically we have seen that the created order could not apprehend or experience this inversion; moreover, from the divine perspective could it hardly be seen as an inversion. God is himself the Good: it is nonsense to suggest that just God could be different or just the Good could be different, since if you change one you necessarily change the other along with it and end up back where you started (like inverting a bracelet)! God made all things for himself – it is in this sense that God is the Good. To have a Good is to have a final telos of ultimate fruition, and to have this the universe must have a divine structure in which (small “g”) good things and (small “g”) goodness are caught up in like logs in a river. This final telos, by virtue of being a final telos, makes the particular content irrelevant since the pattern of experience which is structured on goodness is the same, perhaps the only unchanged element in this hypothetical.  Phenomenologically the experience of the Good is the experience of things working towards their final telos, their ultimate fruition for which they were designed for. However the universe is structured (and we are assuming that it is in fact possible for God to structure it differently), it could not be experienced differently by creatures insofar as experience works within a framework of good and bad. Thus we can hardly imagine the universe as any other way (that is, in reference to a Good) without tangling ourselves with faulty logic.

The Impulse to Certainty

René Descartes, wearing his favorite shirt

Let’s say I have, in the past, done some things which one might describe as “not the best things.” What is more curious is when I do such things (things that are destructive somehow) with consciousness awareness that (1) I am doing the thing, and (2) it is a destructive thing which I should not be doing. In combining the two, I believe the implicit hope is that the self-awareness, contemporaneous with the act, will actually perform not an aggravating but a mitigating role: in being self-aware I am hedging my bets, so to speak, against feeling guilty after the fact (after performing the destructive act). For, once the act is done, I am able to think back and say, “Indeed, I knew what I was doing even then.” Thus I have planted in the memory of the event a get-out-of-jail-free card. More precisely: the acknowledgment of consciousness (redundant complicity) becomes a way of actually (oddly) buffering the responsibility for the crime; it paradoxically provides the comfort or assurance that one cannot be reprimanded because one ALREADY KNOWS (and even during or even before the act has reprimanded oneself). 

Here is a connected but different, and more subtle, phenomenon, a phenomenon which exhibits a startling thing about our (at least my) impulse to certainty. It goes: “I did this self-destructive thing knowingly, in full consciousness of its self-destructiveness; I did it simply because I wanted to do something self-destructive while conscious of its self-destructiveness, and I did it in full consciousness so that I would be free of the guilt.” In this phenomenon, the individual has tied their motivations in a loop. Their mind and its predicament becomes self-referential, tautological, and therefore fully in their control. There is nothing outside it, which they might refer to as an explanation, and therefore there is no risk of an eternal deferral of a complete explanation (in reality, of course, “motivation” is a deep mystery that goes all the way down one’s personal history and indeed also all the way down metaphysical reality, but this is precisely the reality such an agent is seeking to avoid). It has the character of a therapeutic repetition of trauma, but in this case the impulse to contain and control one’s own psychology spawns from a traumatic encounter with the enigma – ungraspability – of the self. What we have here is the self-quarantine of the psyche within a self-constructed self-referentiality. I experience this occasionally, and I believe this is the deeper meaning of this psychological phenomenon.

To interpret this phenomenon theologically: The impulse to create this loop is the impulse for dis-ambiguation that exists in the individual incapable of faith – i.e. the despairing individual. Kierkegaard writes of the most disturbing way in which such individuals make a mad grasp at certainty: self-damnation.

“‘Some good went down with me.’ … In that remark the last hope of salvation expired. In that remark he gave himself up. Was there still concealed in this thought a hope of salvation? Hidden in the soul, was there still this thought a possible link with salvation? When a remark is pronounced in confidence to another man (oh, terrible misuse of confidence, even if the desperate one only misused it against himself!), when this word is heard, then he sinks forever… This clarity about himself and about his own destruction is even more horrible. It is horrible to see a man seek comfort by hurling himself into the whirlpool of despair” (Purity of Heart 64-65).

Thomas Merton makes the same observation about self-damnation: “Despair… is reached when a man deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost” (New Seeds 183).

In Crime and Punishment we find the same principle at work: Raskalnikov is so desperate for closure that he is tempted to turn himself in just to escape of the torment of uncertainty. The investigator knows this and provokes him. Is this not startling, and a little terrifying? We have such a strong impulse to certitude that we are willing even to destroy ourselves, just to attain it!

In sum: certainty drive > aversion to “damnation.” 

The Greater Stress: Nietzsche’s Test of Affirmation vs. Christ’s Test of Renunciation

Nietzsche

"...for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life."

- Rilke, "Archaic Torso of Apollo"

A while ago I was struck by the need for someone to write a Christian parody of Nietzsche’s famous and most haunting passage, “The Greatest Stress,” in which he spells out the psychological implications of his doctrine of eternal recurrence (the idea that the universe will forever replay itself and your life will be caught in its eternal cycle). This parody, being the Christian reverse of Nietzsche’s original parable, must naturally be based on a linear cosmology, in which the demon whispers to you in the liveliest hour of the day, and the highest point of your soul: “is your desire something you could live with for all eternity?” (or something along those lines). This test, I thought, seemed to be a test of the same, if not greater, existential intensity. Could you imagine proceeding through eternity on the trajectory you are on?

I was, of course, simultaneous struck by the awareness that this parody would likely go unwritten for a long time… unless I wrote it. This was less than ideal, since it would take an equal of Nietzsche for this parody to have the force I would like. Nonetheless, I could not spend my life in wait of a genius to accomplish the task. So below is my attempt. But first, the original parable, and then some background.

The greatest stress.

How, if some day or night a demon were to sneak 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 immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you-all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a grain of dust.”

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or did you once experience a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, “You are a god, and never have I heard anything more godly.”

If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you, as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and everything, “Do you want this once more and innumerable times more?” would weigh upon your actions as the greatest stress. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal Confirmation and seal?

(Nietzsche, The Gay Science)

Contained in this passage is Nietzsche’s doctrine of Eternal Recurrence. Nietzsche was fond of none of his ideas as much as this one (insofar as it is possible to be “fond” of the sort of ideas that Nietzsche had). The idea came to him, Nietzsche tells us, when he was taking a stroll through the woods by lake the lake of Silvaplana. He stopped by a magnificent boulder and – “this idea came to me.” Eventually the idea embodied for Nietzsche the ultimate test for his Übermensch. At that moment in front of the boulder he had stumbled on (what he believed was) the hardest worldview to affirm. Here was a stone that even Sisyphus could not roll up the hill – but could the Übermensch? The one who could, at his lowest point, still find the resources to will it all, and not only that but to will it all again and again: that one is worthy of life. Thus this most difficult of affirmations became Nietzsche’s “formula for the greatness of a human being” (Ecce Homo).

In his book, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Walter Kaufmann explains that the meaning of the doctrine of eternal return is not simply that of a introspective test you might perform on yourself while waiting for the bus – and then (upon a negative answer) work on it with all the diligence of one engaged in “personality improvement.” It is an introspective test, yes, but its power ought to rattle you to your foundations.

So, says Kaufmann, while many believe that the doctrine was intended to require man to ask himself constantly: ‘Do you want this once more and innumerable times more?’ [t]hat, however, is not the meaning of Nietzsche’s conception of ‘the greatest stress.’ As ever, he is not concerned with particular actions but with the individual’s state of being. Man is to ask himself whether his present state of being is such that he would have to answer the demon with impotent anger and gnashing of teeth, or whether he could say: ‘Never did I hear anything more godlike!’ If he is one of those who are still imperfect and unredeemed, if he still finds that the demonic doctrine all but drowns his soul in dread, then it might serve him as the greatest possible stimulus to his ‘will to power’ and to his yearning for that joyous affirmation of himself and life which would enable to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation. (325)

The idea is certainly a powerful one; what is so interesting, though, apart from its inherent power to seize a soul, is that in it we have a distillation of Nietzsche’s essential stance towards life, the universe, and everything. What is the nature of this stance?

Nietzsche’s basic posture towards life can be viewed best, I think, if set alongside another, paradigmatically different stance. For instance, Christianity. (In what follows some Christians may be surprised at what I am calling a “Christian stance.” I apologize, in a half-sincere sort of way, for using this label if you disagree with its content and desire to brand your own approach with it – though I do try to represent the essential content of the spiritual approach of the large and varied Christian tradition[s]). 

Kaufmann describes the one who affirms the eternal return as one who, “instead of relying on heavenly powers to redeem him, to give meaning to his life, and to justify the world, he gives meaning to his own life by achieving  perfection and exulting in every moment” (324). Simply put, Nietzsche’s idea of the perfect man truly and sincerely “wants nothing to be different – not forward, not backward, not in all eternity” (Ecce Homo).

How is this different from a Christian approach to one’s life, all of history, and the future of the universe and all things in it? I believe the two approaches face opposite directions, though they do contain the same raw energy, the same spirit of affirmation. I will get to that similarity later, for the more concerning antagonism must be addressed first. Nietzsche’s ideal human poses one of the most direct challenges to the heart of Christ’s message and the entire spiritual tradition of Christianity. While the key virtue for Nietzsche is amor fati, a total and perpetual yes-saying, the key virtue in the Christian tradition is renunciation. (True, love is “the greatest of these,” but at least vis-à-vis one’s fallen life, renunciation is prior to and more immediate than love. One might call it a “movement of love,” but the point stands.) Because our natures are tangled in untruth and our desires distorted, the Christian “ideal” is always grounded in the ability – the incredibly difficult ability – to want everything to change, to want one’s self to change, to want the universe to reverse is basic orientation. The kind of repetition Nietzsche advocates celebrating is the epitome of hopelessness in the eyes of a Christian, whose life is built on the foundations eschatological hopefulness.

So, for Nietzsche the point is an unqualified affirmation – an ecstatic embrace of this world, one’s own life and the entire history of things and events that made it possible – amidst a decadent European environment of ressentiment and other-worldly desires. We might say that, for Nietzsche, affirmation is the ultimate good, because it is only affirmation that redeems life (not some promise of a future life). For this reason, says Kaufmann, “the eternal recurrence was to Nietzsche less an idea than an experience – the supreme experience of a life unusually rich in suffering, pain, and agony. He made much of the moment when he first had this experience because to him it was the moment that redeemed his life” (Kaufman, 323). So, insofar as the idea of eternal recurrence is affirmed, it is redemptive. The embrace of the idea stimulates one to an enhanced existence: “The weak, who are able to stand life only by hoping for kingdom, power, and glory in another life, would be crushed by this terrifying doctrine, while the strong would find in the last incentive to achieve perfection” (325). Stimulus to life? Nothing wrong with that! … Right?

In fact, I would not quibble with the phrase “affirmation is the ultimate good.” Christianity, however, would just like to put in, “yes, but before affirmation there must be a rejection.” And in this difference whole worlds are contained. As far as affirmation goes, Nietzsche does not differ with the best of the Christian tradition, which is far from “other-wordly.” But affirmation must be rightly orientated, rightly placed in time, and have as its content only the best. 

Augustine also made much of the moment that redeemed his life – writing one of the greatest works in the western tradition: Confessions. But this moment was not a moment of pure affirmation: it was characterized by a renunciation, a conversion from one way of life to another, a destruction of himself, a death – and a resurrection. Here was a man whose life might be used to demonstrate Aristotle’s magnanimous man. Affirmation was easy for him – but renunciation? Could it not be that he also discovered a worldview impossibly difficult to affirm – perhaps even more so than that of the eternal return? What a thing to do, at the height of life, to suddenly turn around and renounce it! “Is it that I’ve known bliss?” asks O’Siadhail in his poem “Pond”. What a startling question to ask oneself of one’s own happiness.

But there is an incredible seed of affirmation contained in this rotten fruit of renunciation. It is the longing for a higher possibility in the self breaking out like a solar flare. For, in truth, we never know what is best, what is highest, what is worth affirming, by some default of our nature. “We are without understanding of ourselves,” says Teresa of Avila, “we are at an infinite distance from our desires.” If we are honest, we find it intensely difficult to say what exactly is for our own good.

In the final page of the Ultimatum of his Either/Or II, Kierkegaard puts the meaning and purpose of renunciation like this: “In relation to God we are always in the wrong.” But instead of a resulting in despair or passive obedience, “this thought puts an end to doubt and calms the cares; it animates and inspires to action… Would you wish, could you wish, that the situation were different? Could you wish that you might be in the right; could you wish that that beautiful law which for thousands of years has carried the generation through life and every member of the generation, that beautiful law… could you wish that that law would break” (341)? Wishing that we might be in the right would mean wishing that there were in fact nothing better than what we know and that we could never be more than what we are. It is, then, profoundly life-affirming to wish that we are in the wrong, profoundly life-affirming to wish to renounce what is not life – and to wish to have eyes that can see the difference.

At the height of life, then, what if the demon came to you? Could you wish it for yourself, certain that this is your highest fulfillment? Or would you tremble to think – standing there with your fancy drink amidst the din of another party, or perhaps sitting there on the couch reading a favorite book in front of a fire, or perhaps in the very moment of winning the lottery or a promotion – that there might be something greater out there which you neglect?  Could you possibly stomach the thought that you will have in eternity what you desire most in this life, that everyone will hit precisely the target they are pointing themselves towards when death’s gun fires? This is the great terror contained in Matthew 8:5-13: “Be it done for you, as you believed,” says Jesus to the centurion, and so it is. Kierkegaard, expounding these words in Works of Love, says, “God’s relationship to a human being is the infinitising at every moment of that which at every moment is in a man” (352). This is the Christian paradigm, which phrases the question thus: What if in the end, our desire, our interpretation of things, the direction of our life and the framework that allows that direction, are (graciously or horrifyingly) real.

A Christian parody of Nietzsche’s test of the Übermensch, then, might look something like this…

The greater stress.

How, if some sunny day an angel were to push past the noise and the pleasure and the people, were to catch you in your relentless, exhilarating forward motion at the peak of your life’s bliss, and yell to you, “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will continue living, for eternity, it becoming increasingly more itself, rolling into itself more of the same goodness, more of the same joys, that you experience only in embryo even now. The trajectory of bliss you have set for yourelf – with all the money and sex and power, or all the comfort and pleasure of mildness and stability, or all the gratitude and recognition and personal gratification of immense learning, or all the vague titilations of entertainment and travel and dilettante experience – you will have and never, never lose.

Would you not say in exultation, “you are a god, and never have I heard anything more godly”? Or did you once experience a tremendous moment when you would have thrown yourself down and gnashed your teeth and cursed the angel who spoke thus? Ah, who would apprehend what the angel speaks of as hell?

But if you did, if you discerned in the angel something tantalizing, attractive perhaps, disturbing certainly, but compelling – if you let the angel’s words take possession of you, they would change you, as you are, or perhaps crush you. For who could be certain, if they allowed themselves to step back a moment, that the bliss they experience here on earth is of the highest sort, is their final fulfilment? The question in each and everything, “Do you want this now and forever?”  would weigh upon your actions as the greatest stress. “What if you get exactly what you desire? What if…?”  How strange would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than that you do not get what you want, that your bliss might not carry on into eternity but be transformed for something unknown, something you have never seen, but something you are told is better, higher… holy?

Postmodern Night

Last night made the fields heavy,

rolling vapor into water-beads

on the ghosted grass, a condensation 

of spectres. Nothing deadly.

It came with the dark’s slow slaughter;

now everything denser than itself with data,

burdened by over-knowing,

all the useless clarity and angles in water…

Ah, with words grow the weary;

transcendence, never more a burden

than now – and the postmodern search

for emptiness finds its next vessel for theory.

As the weight is brought down into dew,

the drinking is deepless for the waking;

all sip the shallow cups of the morning

and lap a thousand plateaus to make do.

A Reminder for Self-Doubting Philosophers

What is the value of philosophy? In response to reductive pragmatic critiques of philosophy (“what’s all that insulated ivory-tower hyper-reflective self-indulgence good for?”), here is Aristotle’s deliberation from the Nichomachean Ethics – which I found surprisingly agreeable and unsurprisingly superior to my own deliberations. It is an important reminder to all those who are subject to apocalyptic self-doubt, as I am, in regards to the worth of pure thinking (called various things by Aristotle, including 'intellectual virtue', 'prudence' and 'wisdom', all of which have more specific content). Interestingly, his argument is not the standard, "because without thinking we would never know what the good is in the first place." It is more slippery. Take note.

The Critique:

Here an objection may be raised. “What is the use of the intellectual virtues?” it may be asked. “Wisdom does not consider what tends to make man happy (because it is not concerned with any kind of process). Prudence indeed does this, but why do we need it? Prudence is the faculty which deals with what is just and noble and good for man, i.e. with those things which it is the part of the good man to do; but the knowledge of them no more makes us apter to do them, if (as has been said) the [moral] virtues are habits, than it does in the case of what is healthy and wholesome—healthy and wholesome, that is, not in the sense of conducing to, but in the sense of issuing from, a healthy habit; for a knowledge of medicine and gymnastics does not make us more able to do these things.

“But if it be meant that a man should be prudent, not in order that he may do these acts, but in order that he may become able to do them, then prudence will be no use to those who are good, nor even to those who are not. For it will not matter whether they have prudence themselves, or take the advice of others who have it. It will be enough to do in these matters as we do in regard to health; for if we wish to be in health, we do not go and learn medicine.

“Again, it seems to be a strange thing that prudence, though inferior to wisdom, must yet govern it, since in every field the practical faculty bears sway and issues orders.”

Aristotle’s Rebuttal:

We must now discuss these points; for hitherto we have been only stating objections.

First, then, we may say that both prudence and wisdom must be desirable in themselves, since each is the virtue of one of the parts of the soul, even if neither of them produces anything.

Next, they do produce something.

On the one hand, wisdom produces happiness, not in the sense in which medicine produces health, but in the sense in which health produces health; that is to say, wisdom being a part of complete virtue, its possession and exercise make a man happy.

On the other hand [in the sphere of action], man performs his function perfectly when he acts in accordance with both prudence and moral virtue; for while the latter ensures the rightness of the end aimed at, the former ensures the rightness of the means thereto.

The fourth part of the soul, the vegetative part, or the faculty of nutrition, has no analogous excellence; for it has no power to act or not to act.

But as to the objection that prudence makes us no more apt to do what is noble and just, let us take the matter a little deeper, beginning thus:—

Just as we say that some people who perform just acts are still not just (for example, those who carry out the requirements of the law unwillingly, or through ignorance, or for some ulterior purpose and not for what they are, and yet are actually doing what is right and all that a good man is bound to do); so, it seems, there is a state of mind in which a person can perform the various kinds of act in such a way as to be a good man: that is, when he does them from choice, and for the sake of the acts themselves. It is virtue that makes the choice correct.

In this last paragraph Aristotle makes his strongest point. Rather than finding the worth of virtuous actions to be only in the actions themselves (an externality), he looks for another dimension of worth and finds it in the consciousness of the moral agent: “there is a state of mind in which a person can perform the various kinds of act in such a way as to be a good man.” This “state of mind” is the crux. But what is this “state”? For Aristotle, it is not some “inner kindliness” or “sweet and benevolent disposition” - this is a political philosopher we are dealing with here, after all. So, rather, this state of mind is not within people by nature but is acquired through effortful thought.

Aristotle is suggesting that, without thought (deliberative prudence), individual moral acts are dry and empty, lacking the existential passion that thinking through these thoughts adds. You can be good, but it is better even to think through one’s goodness, to understand it. This is an invisible quality, adding nothing to one’s goodness externally; but, precisely for the reason that it, in its immateriality, cannot defend itself, we must be careful not to forget the worth of its presence. To do so might lead to a facile anti-intellectualism, the kind which thinks it is doing a favor to morality, love and human fellowship by rejecting the distracting complications of cold “theorizing”.

This may be a controversial point, since I know plenty of people who for whom the meaning of religion and the height of spirituality is love and the struggle after justice, both through small and big acts. They say, “kindness, benevolence, and compassion – these don’t need philosophy!”

There is nothing horribly askew about this. It is true that “knowledge without action is useless.” Only, I think when philosophy is done right – and I try to be the first to say (at the cost of exposing my own guilt) that it is often done very poorly, without the end of living a good life in mind at all – it can add immense value to the embodied actions of love and compassion; not the same kind of value as action, of course, but that “invisible value.”

For those of us who have done serious philosophizing, this is self evident. We only need to be reminded. At least, I need to be constantly reminded. I am far too attracted by the quietism of the likes of Wittgenstein, and the various versions of “anti-philosophy” out there. It is too easy to fall into self-deprecation when I realize how irrelevant philosophy is to most people in the world. But, it only takes a little more philosophizing to realize that it is not philosophy but the hypertrophy of philosophy which is destructive and life-sapping. 

And besides, philosophy is here to stay. No one can defend themselves against the question "why don't you philosophize?" without answering philosophically... 

To be at Home in the World…

The world its own doorway, wide as itself,

Welcomes the wanderer, a world away:

“Put your pack down, stay, stay,

My threshold comes to you today.”

Wait, wanderer, what welcome, this?

A home everywhere: nowhere;

Any may knock, any sleep there;

Entering, entering the air…

“You do not look but find the knob,

Wanderer: what more to do?

To live, to knock: my door follows you,

Your walking your walking through.”

Wait! Where the knob, where the bell?

An eternal search; torment, it meant,

As under the door, in inviting scent,

It emits your discontent. 

“How, I, more open? Any wider than me?

The message of that fragrance:

Having too much and wanting your presence,

I have become an entrance.”

Wait! The world a door, wide as itself?

Then your eyes must be wider than this!

Looking for it, all else must miss:

The world wants your eyes an abyss.

“The tongue never tasting cheek,

The eye blind to lids, air unfelt to trees…

Why should you have more sense than these

Of your life? I come with too much ease.”

Wait! Would you enter then, be “at home” –

A sixth sense, nothing other than unease…?

“Only the feeling most natural to me,

Where anything enters, needing no keys...”

Wait! From ease, unease? It, too much a home,

        Welcomes too silent and invisibly...

“But this, wanderer, the way of me:

I, the world, very gesture of letting be.”

What is a welcome one cannot flee,

O monstrous hospitality?

“Ah, again: that, not in me – in thee.”