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.
Nihilism #2 was devoted to a Richmond Fontaine song, how "Allison Johnson" was a perfect projection of the nihilist mind -- a mind unconscious of its own nihilism, yes; but nonetheless a beautiful expression of the essential nothingness of being.
Tonight, it's "Making It Back," the concluding song of what might be the finest Richmond Fontaine record, The Fitzgerald (2005):
3 AM and the bottles are lined up in rows on the floor again 'Summer in Siam' plays on repeat again we never get sick of it Now that I'm home again In the kitchen with you There's no one else I can talk to The lights are all covered and dim and there's nothing but a gentle ease here 'Summer in Siam' plays and you and me and our whole place, we're okay Now that I'm in your arms again
This is a beautiful love song dedicated to the joys of being flat-out drunk wasted with your wife/lover/girlfriend/partner/woman listening in the secure comfort of the low-watt light of night's end to The Pogues. It is a wonderful feeling. I have experienced it. Willy Vlautin nails it. There is no doubt about it.
But once you have given up on romance and you live alone, "Making It Back" means making do with your self. This is nihilism. Strength is all there is. The strength of the self.
The hatred you project Does nothing to protect you You leave yourself so exposed You want to open up When someone says Lighten up You find all your doors closed Get yourself a break from self rejection Try some introspection And you just might find It's not so bad and anyway At the end of the day All you have is yourself and your mind
The End of Silence (1992) was an album I listened to religiously when it was released, and I continued to listen to it throughout the 1990s. I don't know how much of its material was written prior to the murder of Rollins' buddy Joe Cole, but I always interpreted the record as a deconstruction of the tough guy "Search & Destroy" persona Rollins had assiduously developed and marketed.
I was wedded to the tough-guy myth throughout the 1990s. Street fighter, construction worker, independent scholar -- all the paperback fictions -- Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac. But the toughest tough guy is the one who takes apart the sacred idea of toughness.
Remember, it is Jacobi who coins the term "nihilism" in order to characterize Kant's critical philosophy, a system perpetually open, never able to be shut, forever overflowing with meaning produced by a striving, self-reflecting consciousness.
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.
