When last we left off, with Nihilism #6, I had mentioned that a perfectly succinct formulation of nihilism could be found in a movie, The Couselor (2013), written by Cormac McCarthy:
"You are the world you have created. And when you cease to exist, this world that you have created will also cease to exist."
But I have been thinking about this, and I should retract "perfect" as a distinction for this statement as a formulation of nihilism.
The founding father of nihilism as a school of philosophy and not just a label (Friedrich Jacobi coined the neologism, seeing it pejoratively as the Enlightenment's strange fruit) is Friedrich Nietzsche. And for Nietzsche the crowning achievement of his philosophy is the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, the idea that what we do in the here and now will replay itself infinitely.
In other words, this world that we have created will not cease to exist because our existence is forever present.
When I broke up with my last girlfriend I decided to wake up early every morning, around 3 AM, and read from Nietzsche's last work, the posthumously published The Will to Power (1901).
I needed an emetic to cure me of my debilitating addiction to romantic love. I thought at least one page a day of the sagacious bachelor who famously wrote, "You go to women? Do not forget the whip!" (Derrida wrote a book, Spurs (1979) about this line.)
I stuck with it for for a month or two before moving on to something else. But this morning I returned to The Will to Power thinking about this issue of the Eternal Return of the Same.
The last section of The Will to Power is devoted to Eternal Recurrence. This from Note #1058:
Everything becomes and recurs eternally-- escape is impossible!-- Supposing we could judge value, what follows? The idea of recurrence as a selective principle, in the service of strength (and barbarism!!).
Ripeness of man for this idea.
I always thought of the Eternal Return as a regulative concept, the palm at the end of the Western mind, a final refutation of all opposites, something that says the mental world and the physical world are one and all is possible.
Nietzsche solves the riddle of time-past and time-future, much like T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets (1943), by saying both are eternally present. There is a great deal of power to be tapped here. (Next nihilism post, an exploration of barbarism.)
BURNT NORTON
(No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')
T.S. Eliot
I
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
One of the benefits of being a bachelor is that it is possible to wake up on a Sunday morning and turn on the television unimpeded by spousal complaints and watch the French Open finals from Roland-Garros, the sporting event that -- seeing all that orange-red clay on the TV screen -- always reminds me of the high school year coming to a close and 17-year-old Mats Wilander -- a guy my age -- winning the 1982 tournament.
Normally, I would be out on the road. June is a great month to hit it early. The weather is mild and the light ample; it is possible to get in a long run before 8 AM. But I'm nursing a bad foot. So I'm studio bound. What better time to return to the topic of nihilism?
What I've been driving at in these nihilism posts is some sort of understanding, grounded in everyday experience, of what it is. A common description of nihilism is Nietzsche's "God is dead." Nietzsche, writing in the second half of the 19th century, thought that he lived during a time heralded by the "cockcrow of positivism," stage four out of six in his "History of an Error" from Twilight of the Idols (1889):
4. The true world -- unattainable? At any rate, unattained, and being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us?
(Gray morning, The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.)
Stage five moves us toward stage six, what Nietzsche called, "Noon: moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA." Stage five is a deepening of nihilism; it is a rejection of the idea of a "true" world. Stage six is the realization of nihilism; it is a rejection of the "apparent" world along with the "true" world, leaving us as merely beings in the world, what Heidegger calls Dasein, or what a Zen Buddhist calls satori.
The problem is that we've been caught up in the cockcrow of positivism stage of nihilism, with all its various democratic capitalist permutations, for the last two-hundred-plus years. The 20th century saw the rise of social democracy. And in the last 35 years that has been rolled back to its 19th century predatory antecedents in laissez-faire capitalism. God is dead but the acquisitive self is king. It is a barbarous bloodthirsty world in which we live today. Nature is under assault. The state exists to produce lies. The paradigm is fractured but keeps functioning because, apparently, we are very attached to it.
I was carrying a large cheese pizza in a takeout box up the front stoop stairs to my apartment building when one of my neighbors opened the door for me. He is a nice guy, quiet, I would guess in his 30s; he looks Udallesque, tall and exuding decency. He has lived in the building several years. I have run into him in the laundry room numerous times.
After he opened the door for me, he said something I couldn't quite make out. I think it was, "Wow! Thanks for the pizza."
"Thank you," I replied. Then I noticed that he wasn't wearing any shoes. He had on a pair of spotless, brilliant white socks, tube socks, like the ones that were so coveted when I was an adolescent athlete.
"I like your socks," I told him. Then I turned away to open my mail box.
This guy used to be a loner bachelor like myself. But for the last year, maybe more, whenever I see him he is the company of a woman. She is a big woman, stout. They are seemingly attached at the hip. I think they might even be living together. Whereas before, this guy, when he was alone, had a edge to him, a vibrancy, a formidable quality, now it is all softness and subdued tones. Which made me say to myself, "I'm sure the sex is great, but at what cost?"
Which got me thinking further, about the Hippies and that period in the early 1970s when the music became so heavy and bloated with hero worship, the ascension of Led Zeppelin's "cock rock" or "ass rock." Most of the Hippies left behind their aspirations to transform society and settled for sex, drugs and rock'n'roll -- right at the time of the Powell Memo counter-revolution.
The moral of the front-door encounter with my Udallesque neighbor is don't settle for sex. Something of which the Hippies -- the Punks, too -- should have been mindful. I hope my neighbor gets his mojo back.
I had picked up the large cheese at my neighbor pizza parlor. Right as I was ordering the mayor of the Emerald City blew in with his entourage for a quick slice. It was like something out of the movies. You had all these young men in ties and button-up shirts and several other men in dark blazers with round lapel pins signifying that they were part of the security detail. And then there was the mayor sheepishly greeting well-wishers. He lives in the neighborhood.
We are so used to these campus shooting gun deaths that they hardly register anymore (Jill Lepore's "Battleground America," though over two-years old, is still a great place for an overview of the mass-shooting epidemic in American culture). Brutality is the hallmark of our age.
I began these nihilism posts, even though it was in the form of "The Colt 45 Chronicle," by mentioning Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. McCarthy's latest exploration of nihilism is the The Counselor (2013), a movie directed by the great Ridley Scott. It is a film devoted to the savagery and wealth-worship that rules the present age. The final scene has Cameron Diaz's character delivering a prediction that, "The slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining." I think that is about right. Then at the end of the trailer below you will find the perfectly succinct formulation of nihilism from the Rubén Blades character:
"You are the world you have created. And when you cease to exist, this world that you have created will also cease to exist."
Dark as dusk near midday with the rain pouring down. Earlier this morning out on run, most if not all passersby geared up with Seahawks hats and jerseys, I suddenly became concerned about the emotional impact a loss this afternoon would have on the collective psyche of the city. We are attached by heart and hip to this football team -- to Marshawn Lynch and Richard Sherman and Russell Wilson and Golden Tate and Earl Thomas. Our suffering will be immense if they falter.
Speaking of suffering, I dropped a table on the top of my foot the other day setting up for a safety training at the local. It hurt so much I entertained the thought that it might be broken. The monkey mind starts chattering away, and you have to apply the higher mind. The higher mind was saying, "Look, simmer down. If the foot had a break, I wouldn't be walking. Plus, it would be swollen so much it would hurt to be wearing a shoe." But the monkey mind keeps on chattering, "You don't know that! There are a lot of bones in the foot. And it'll probably swell up tonight. Why not at least go get an X-ray?"
I stopped off at the grocery store last night to get my shopping done for the coming work week. When I got home I noticed that my computer was powered down. Unusual. I always leave my computer on; I let it go into sleep mode. When I tried to boot it up I had difficulty. After a long while it did start up, but I could not access my accounting software -- Quicken -- nor my iTunes. I ignored it. Then before going to bed I decided to restart the computer, which it would not do, staying perpetually in "Shutting down . . ." mode.
I went to bed and left the computer running like that. Around 1 AM I was awoken by a young man-young woman dispute taking place on the street below. The guy was repeating this torrent of words punctuated by the word, "Now!" I could not make out the others words in the torrent. Just the cadence ending with "Now!" Over and over again he repeated it like some kind of black-magic incantation.
I took the opportunity, being up at 1:30 AM, to try to reboot my PC, which was still stuck on the "Shutting down . . ." screen. This time it would not boot. I tried to remember how to access the BIOS screen and the process I went through a couple of months back when I have was having problems, but I was groggy and couldn't remember much.
Finally, after going to my filing cabinet and determining after a halfhearted search that I hadn't saved the instructions to boot to the BIOS screen, I decided to power down the computer one more time and just let it sit all night trying to boot.
By the time I got back to bed, I heard another voice down on the street. Apparently a resident of my apartment building, a guy my age maybe a little older from the first floor who I didn't recognize, was not so tolerant of the ongoing dark arts lovers' street quarrel. He had gone to the street in his rain gear and intervened. He was telling the guy to leave the young woman alone. I guess the young guy had grabbed the young lady. So the young guy and the rain-geared neighbored argued, with the neighbor yelling to a woman -- (his girlfriend? his wife?) who must have been at the window of their apartment -- to phone the police. I was about to get dressed and go down, debating the wisdom of adding my voice to the drama, when I saw the young woman take off down the street, and then shortly thereafter another young man came up from out of nowhere in a black t-shirt and took the aggressive young man by the arm and led him away.
And with that quiet returned. And lo and behold! In the meantime my PC had booted. I went back to bed and slept soundly.
The letter below, from more than a quarter-century ago, is addressed to my father, with whom I have a good relationship to this day. I visit him twice a year at his Solano County home, and we run a road race together.
In college I was a Kantian, but one who was seduced by Hegel's revision of Kant, that noumenal knowledge was possible. At the time my father and I shared the Hegelian seduction, this Beatnik idea, as expressed by Dean Moriarity in On the Road, that "we know time." (I was also, as you can see, heavily influenced by Paul Virilio.)
Now I am a Kantian of the type expressed by Jacobi when he said that the rationalism of Kant's critical philosophy ends in nihilism; he thereby coined the term. I do think we can know time, but I don't think that offers any liberation from the idea that the unknowable, systemically, always remains unknown.
Nihilism is the province of fathers and sons. It is no coincidence that nihilism was first popularized in an 1862 novel by Ivan Turgenev which was translated into English with the title Fathers and Sons. The great Cormac McCarthy's last two novels -- No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006) -- both enormously successful critically and commercially, explore this connection between nihilism and fathers and sons. Nothing says it better than the Sheriff's dream at the end of No Country for Old Men, delivered by Tommy Lee Jones who played Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in the 2007 movie version of the novel:
Autumn 1988
Well Dad, I tell you, I forgot the exact point of this correspondence. Did it have something to do with the car? I remember the bike(s) and the missing box information, but that's it. So anyway, I bought a Casio watch today. I was getting sick and tired of the gold dandy that uncle Boo-guy gave me; it made for a left hand (because of the wedding band) that was a little too ostentatious for my palate; and you had to wind it regularly, making life run five-minutes fast or days slow. The digits on the Casio don't leave any room for doubt, and the unostentatious black speaks to my heart. But this shift raises an important question: the shift -- my personal shift -- from circular time to linear time. The old conception of time, the circular one, was something I definitely had to live under for a spell, and it did me an unquantifiable sum of good. But I always had the itch to return to linear tine, and today I did. If I start to notice those ill effects I have come to attribute to the Casio scheme of things, I'm going to have to go back to the gold dandy, at least for a couple days a week.
[Weeks passed] Ashley is doing just fine. Midterms are i.n about a week. And thank goodness for the A's. I've almost given up on the 49ers. They don't televise the games out here very often, though I did enjoy the early season 4th-quarter conquest of the pompous Giants.
[Weeks passed] Well, needless to say, I'm back to the 49ers now. The World Series left me shattered for a while. Everyone needs their salvation. So I'm back to my old status of blood and guts for the red and gold. The squeaky stallion is gonna make at least one more gallop on the Western trail, to the land of Hegel, champion of the Occident. Hegel's schtick was that we know time, and by me that's just about the hippest, most optimistic thing a person can come to; so I don't shy away from all the bad raps he gets as a rigid Trinitarian dialectician Prussian apologist. His core, heartfelt insight was that the noumena, the unknowable element in our world, is a product of time, and is revealed through time. Hey, that's okay. Because of you and mom and whatever you two we're going through, I got a taste of the Sixties explosion and a heap of the Seventies confusion. I did the Eighties myself. But knowing time is a dangerous thing. It's what Nietzsche talked about in THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY; it's the opiate of looking backwards, of resting on one's rotten laurels (what the old Christmas tree looks like on the first day of spring). Knowing time always has got to be coupled with a philosophy of speed, of shooting forward and taking on the accidental; otherwise, there isn't anything to ruminate historically about. In Hegel's scheme, the accidental (what he calls Nature) steps up, transmogrifies, evolves through the dialectic into the rational (Geist, spirit). So the accidental is essential fuel for the old thinking machine.
I send along a picture of one of my hearts, which you know well.
Rick Remender's imagination is rich, febrile.I was introduced to Remender by reading Punisher during the "Dark Reign" and "Franken-Castle" storylines. Remender has an edge. Now he's working on the radical, new Captain America run -- a Kirby homage set in the phantasmagoric Dimension Z. Check out this page from Captain America #2, penciled by John Romita Jr. and inked by Klaus Janson; it's obviously influenced by Cormac McCarthy's dystopian The Road. The scanned page that follows it is from Remender's Secret Avengers #35 where he's been exploring the idea of the domination of biological life by artificial life; the art is by Matteo Scalera.
Reading "The Planetary Emergency" by John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark in the current Monthly Review the consensus is that irreversible climate change sets in with a rise in temperature of 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), which corresponds to one trillion cumulative metric tons of carbon emissions. We're going to hit the one trillion metric ton mark in 2043. Three decades.
The answer? We've got to stop growing. But capitalism is based on growth, on constantly increasing consumption, on the American ideal of every Chinese family owning a car or two and eating meat three times a day. So get ready to rumble. Conflict is coming our way, either in the form of dealing with the catastrophic effects of climate change (imagine being a character in Cormac McCarthy's The Road) or in the many politically necessary battles required to radically change the status quo. It's more than likely that we'll be dealing with both at the same time.
