mills

A syphilitic Friedrich Nietzsche in the chapter of Ecce Homo titled “Why I am so Clever,” though I should add that this is an example of an idea -amor fati- not without its value despite the increasing dementia of its author. I came across it again while reading Wikipedia’s brief treatment of Nietzsche’s comments concerning eternal return, which related to the previous post.

That idea is probably familiar to most from Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which questions at its outset whether the lightness of an existence that vanishes irretrievably into the past is terrible or fortunate; would it better for everything that happens to happen eternally, so to speak?

It’s worth noting that physicists would dispute the assumptions these questions make about time; the great Unburying the Lead quoted Albert Einstein recently:“For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”

Update: Nick Barr noted that “the whole syphilis thing is probably untrue,” an assertion which surprised me as the last time I read Nietzsche it seemed fairly widely accepted; much of his lifelong medical trouble is explained by such a diagnosis. But Barr has scholarship on his side, and I thank him for the correction; it appears now to at least be again in dispute, and strong arguments against syphilis have been made.

Karl Popper in “What is Dialectic?” quoted by Velvet Robots. Kierkegaard obviously would have agreed, but it was Nietzsche -an aphorist more than a philosopher- who put it most concisely: “The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”

It is the immediate urge of every thinker, professional or casual, to extend his or her conclusions outward, to apply opinions to one subject and instance after another as though stamping envelopes, to build out of any impressions a world-sized worldview.

But the mind is not the world, though it may come close to containing it; and reason is not isomorphic to the laws of the universe, though almost everyone believes it is. Thus the will to a system is a lack of integrity in two senses: (1) it falsifies the nature of thought and exaggerates the power of cognition, creation, and analysis, and (2) it subordinates to reason all other categories of experience, and even the subject who experiences: this is the Existential critique of Hegel, that he crushes the human beneath the system (a critique that came long before Sartre, particularly in literature).

I love that Nietzsche considered giving in to the systematizing temptation a “lack of integrity” and that Popper wanted philosophers to be “much more modest in their claims.” Both display heroic honesty about the limits of their field, a rarity among intellectuals.

François de La Rochefoucauld. I don’t actually care for this quote, which I think is incomplete if not totally incorrect. But it reminded me of how most of us respond powerfully to aphorisms which seem to justify who we are or perform the feat of inverting what is ordinarily shameful into something about which we’re proud.

For example, in the past year I’ve seen “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know,” said by the brilliant and alcoholic suicide Ernest Hemingway, posted dozens of times. Each time, I wonder what it is that attracts us to these words: Hemingway’s genius was literary, not psychological or philosophical, and he offers no explanation of why his argument should be true (the usual ones are banal and false). It is a self-congratulatory statement, of course, coming from him, miserable as he was, and it suggests two things:

1. That if you’re unhappy it’s not because you’re shallow, selfish, materialistic, vain, prideful, phony, neurotic, psychotic, immature, delusional, addicted, conflicted, or otherwise damaged, but because you’re just too damn smart!
2. That happy people, like your grating cousins in their happy marriage or those obnoxious coworkers who never cry at their desks, are probably idiots (or liars: movies like American Beauty ensure that we see all contented souls as repressed lunatics).

I happen to disagree with Hemingway, and think it should be noted that true happiness is rare among all people; and that happiness is also a prerequisite for ethical decency in most people; and that therefore if happiness were precluded by intelligence, our wish for a better world might require that we admit that intelligence really isn’t all that valuable. I think, by the way, that this is the case, and I admire the happy.

Similar quotes abound on our Dashboards, and I don’t intend to criticize anyone who likes or posts them: I have done so myself, of course, and in any event they do occasionally contain valuable insights.

But it interests me how purely you can sometimes see the lengths to which we go to perform what Nietzsche described as the fundamental act of resentment: taking positive values and declaring them negative. Happiness is for morons, and if I have tremendous faults it must be because I’m so damn great!

On the other hand: when dying, I hope not to console myself for a life of unhappiness by saying, “Well, but I was so smart and right about everything!” Much better to look back on happy memories, kindness and joy, and not still waste time with pride about mind or body or anything else.

Jorge Luis Borges, quoted by Alphabet Pony, via Greg Brown. This is even more profound, in my view, than this earlier quote, and between the two of them I think one is given a fairly good sense of why religions of all forms (including credulous movements not explicitly supernatural in their claims) exist.

1. All sorrows can be borne if part of a story, a narrative that transcends any given catastrophe (and doesn’t this idea echo the much-reblogged Nietzsche quote about a “strong enough why” enabling the survival of any “how”?).
2. Love is problematized by the fallibility of the human world (and doesn’t this remind one of Gauntlet’s excellent de Botton quote concerning the end of our romanticism about what’s possible in marriage?).

Nothing in our world can be infallible, so if one is to escape Borges’ quandary one must have a god -or an object of love and trust- specifically not of this world; whether this god is created or creator is not relevant to this discussion. Anything not of this world is by its nature unimpeachable by truth claims of this world (although of course texts and mythical assertions and histories are impeachable). It is also unsupportable by truth claims of this world, incidentally.

Any story which can absorb all sorrows must be a story which includes the whole of the world and encloses it within something larger, something integrative. It must be able to narratize -to assemble into a broadly meaningful myth- the loss of a dog, the death of a child, the genocide of a people.

Religions are those systems which attempt, however successfully or unsuccessfully, to accomplish these tasks: to unfold stories into which your private tragedies and joys, and those of larger human groups, may be written as part of a narrative with sufficient scope to make them bearable, and to provide an infallible purposive deity in whom you can believe, whatever the phenomena of the natural and human worlds.

In our era, many other credulous movements have attempted to do the same with a lesser reliance on the supernatural, but equivalent use of myth and the aura of infallibility. What makes religion more durable is its explicit exemption from natural inquiry; whereas few Christians mind that there is no trace of the miraculous in our world, it is problematic for Marxists that some of the iron-laws of history predicted by their founder have not come to fruition (yet!).

I know I said I’d not mention this again, but I was struck by the synchronicity of these quotes.

Friedrich Nietzsche. When I tell people that Nietzsche and Kierkegaard share more than you might think (and with Wittgenstein, too), it is their anti-Hegelianism that I am recalling. Intellectualizing, as in the post below (which is both true and bullshit), relies on systematization of thought; systematization is falsification inasmuch as it reduces the individual to an iteration of theory.

I dislike the “will to a system,” the construction of subordinating frameworks of theory and values which subsume the individual beneath logical forms. Systems of thought are alienating and dry because they ignore us, our hope and pain and love and fear and courage. This is why novels are better than books of philosophy, in my view.

George Steiner, via New English Review. Matt Langer has posted many excellent quotes recently, too many to reblog. Regarding the above: one needs only investigate the catastrophic domestic and romantic lives of Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche to substantiate the thesis.

(Note: my own pitiful domestic and romantic life has less to do with philosophy as an “unworldly, abstruse, often egomaniacal obsession” than with ordinary weirdness. However, the fact that “the body is an enemy to absolute logic or metaphysical speculation” is indeed related to what an awkward male I can be).

Nietzsche

“Nietzsche said that if a human being put his ear to the heart chamber of the world and heard the roar of existence, the ‘innumerable shouts of pleasure and woe,’ he would surely break into pieces.  But a newspaper, pumping its inky current of despair, might serve as well…” ~ James Wood, from Holiday in Hellmouth: God may be dead, but the question of why he permits suffering lives on, New York Magazine.

Thank you, Sir.  I was glad to come across Wood’s article, in light of my recent ponderings on acts of God and unsustainable empathy. I’ve been thinking about this with respect to the coverage of the Myanmar cyclone, the China earthquake, embassy and suicide bombings, the Tokyo stabbings and other tragedies that have received recent widespread circulation. Will the incessant influx of bad news will soon break all the survivors into pieces?

I was talking to someone about this the other day, and they mentioned World War I. The death toll for that Great War was inconceivably higher than it is for the current war in Iraq, yet the media outlets varied significantly.  How did the survivors cope?  Is the answer to be determinedly ignorant?

(via bunnynico)

Ernest Becker once referred to the necessary “partializing” of our perception and consciousness that occurs as we leave early childhood: we strangle our innate awe and limitless imagination, which is spontaneous and uncontrollable, because otherwise we could never navigate the world.

There is a critical partialization of empathy, as well: if you stop and reflect on the sum of suffering in the world, and on suffering’s intransigence, empathetic collapse and despair is all but inevitable. From that broken position, not only can you not live, but you can’t even help. The partializing of empathy, which takes the form of “not thinking about” the horrors of the world, is often criticized as narcissism in the West, as indifference; but there are anthropological limits to our empathy. This world is too large; the scale of horror is too great.

What a beautiful quote.