Why We Fight

 

The NYT’s “Week in Review” started off badly with a stupid neocon spiel masquerading as a think piece.

 

But then I was intrigued to see this headline for the next piece: The Terrorist Mind: An Update.

 

Actually pondering why they fight? Pretty edgy stuff, especially for the NYT. I thought they were just “evil”.

 

After all, just because the fighters themselves claim to fight because the American war machine invades their land and destroys their people is no reason to take what they say seriously. We’re Americans. We’re the good guys. If we invade and destroy we must have the highest motivations.

 

“Caesar never did wrong, but with good cause”, as Shakespeare has Caesar say. Ben Jonson may have goofed on that line and called it incoherent, but he was just jealous.

 

Anyway, I was hoping to read a real essay in the MSM on the motivations of terrorists.

 

Alas, it’s just armchair psychoanalytical gobbledygook. Once again those who fight couldn’t possibly have rationally and morally comprehensible motives. Nope, it’s a “mystery of the mind”, to be analyzed as if diagnosing an exotic pathology.

 

I did find this paragraph interesting. It purports to summarize the delusional mindset of the terrorist. But it struck me as very apropos for many Americans themselves, and certainly for the “war on terror” mindset.

 

Despite the lack of a single terrorist profile, researchers have largely agreed on the risk factors for involvement. They include what Jerrold M. Post, a professor of psychiatry, political psychology and international affairs at George Washington University, calls “generational transmission” of extremist beliefs, which begins early in life; a strong sense of victimization and alienation; the belief that moral violations by the enemy justify violence in pursuit of a “higher moral condition;” the belief that the terrorists’ ethnic, religious or nationalist group is special and in danger of extinction, and that they lack the political power to effect change without violence.

  

1. “Generational transmission of extremist beliefs, which begins early in life”.

 

Yup. Believe it or not, neoliberal globalization is an extremist policy and American-style corporatist “capitalism” is an extremist ideology. And the brainwashing does indeed begin in kindergarten and often earlier. But most Americans are so brainwashed they’re incapable of comprehending this.

 

2. Victimization and alienation.

 

Americans are prone to combine arrogance and a sense of entitlement with self-righteous paranoia. So whenever they’re subject to any kind of blowback or criticism, their response is to feel victimized and alienated. Cognitive dissonance, digging in, doubling down on one’s untenable position, are part of the standard American mindset.

 

3. Responding to the enemy’s attack with claims to moral superiority.

 

As this piece itself (and pretty much everything in the MSM) demonstrates, Americans systematically deny that the terrorists’ motivations have any moral legitimacy whatsoever, while swaddling our own generally tawdry actions and motivations in a fraudulent patina of morality.

 

4. The danger of extinction.

 

Although realistically terrorism can never be anything more than a nuisance to America, our “leadership” and its media flunkies have always implicitly and sometimes explicitly claimed that they represent some kind of existential threat. This has always been an intentional Big Lie used to justify power creep and corporate looting. Far too many Americans even now still fall for this lie. It’s almost like they enjoy being the subjects of this kind of domestic establishment terrorism.

 

The correct word for this is pusillanimity, which adds to cowardice the connotation that you shouldn’t even have been particularly scared of this thing which terrifies you to the point of cowardice. Picture a housewife who leaps screaming onto a chair because she sees a spider.

 

5. Lacking power to effect change through politics instead of violence.

 

Americans by their actions have proven they don’t believe there’s a solution to their problems other than violence. Bush rejected diplomacy on principle, and while Obama has tried to talk a better game, his actions show that he agrees with Bush that ”the sword will decide” (Jeffers).

 

More generally, the solution to the problems of an unsustainable empire is to give up the empire, not to pour ever more blood into the engine where you’ve run out of oil. But that’s too political, too rational, too sane, too human. It’s therefore unamerican.

 

No, America looks committed to violence and the politics of violence, overseas and increasingly at home.

 

I suppose this NYT piece has helped shed a little light on the terrorist mind after all. 

Morality Play

The Nation‘s Katrina Vanden Heuvel recently took part in a formal debate arguing against the resolution, “Good Riddance to the Mainstream Media”.

 

Her opening statement (part of a winning effort) describes the much-tarnished but still needed qualifications of the MSM; how it is the only vehicle for consistent investigative reportage, for confronting power, exposing corruption, filing transparency lawsuits, and how the collapse of regional newspapers correlates with signs of civic degradation like lower voter turnouts. While the MSM is fatally flawed and economically unsustainable, it’s still the only thing partially fulfilling those roles. So until we can develop a replacement, we have to lament the financial decline of the MSM just as much as we deplore its ideological sellout.

 

The economic deterioration of the business is certainly dire. According to reports, as of September weekday sales of print newspapers were down 10% over the previous year’s already depleted number. Ad revenue was down 28% percent from 2008, which was itself down 16.6% from the previous year. Beleaguered papers like the San Francisco Chronicle, Dallas Morning news, NY Post, Boston Globe, and USA Today were down as much as 25.8%. The NYT’s weekday circulation went below one million for the first time since the 80s. Truly, ”the two-decade erosion in newspaper circulation is looking more like an avalanche”.

 

In a vicious circle, as they cut back on content to save money, they lose more readers. (I can offer the personal anecdote that I stopped getting the Newark Star-Ledger (down 22.7%) for that reason. The old regional and local news value wasn’t there anymore. It was becoming more like an AP wire with a few New Jersey stories tacked on. Not to mention more and more frequent delivery SNAFUs.)

 

Vanden Heuvel mentions this in her statement:

 

[W]e’ve chronicled the msm’s corporate consolidation which –through the gutting of newsrooms in quest for ever higher profit margins–contributed to the journalistic crisis we confront today.

 

I would go further and say that the ideological capture I mentioned above is not only driven by this consolidation but contributes to the erosion of the audience, as the people increasingly realize how the MSM is only the flunkey of the power elites and tells only the story according to those elites.

 

Today’s (11/11) NYT business page has a bizarre specimen: “Under attack, Fed chairman studies politics”, by Edmund Andrews (of personal financial disaster fame). 

 

You have to see the fun in something like this to leaven the rage.

 

For months, he had warned — without anyone on Capitol Hill appearing to listen — that a seemingly innocuous bill to let Congress “audit” the Fed would gravely threaten the central bank’s independence.

 

Uh oh, there’s ominous foreshadowing. “Seemingly innocuous”; if only they’d listen to our brave, lonely hero’s warnings…

 

Voters had become suspicious and unnerved by the Fed because of its trillion-dollar efforts to bail out the financial system, Mr. Frank warned. If the Fed really wanted to survive the disgruntlement in both parties, he continued, Mr. Bernanke would have to step back and let him devise a compromise.

Reluctantly, the Fed chairman agreed to reduce his own visibility on the issue and let Mr. Frank take the lead.

 

Maybe it wasn’t literally a smoke-filled room (they’re all quite PC about that nowadays). But it’s still the age-old struggle of the wise mandarins against the stupid, insolent poltroons. The people get especially obnoxious when they become “voters” in a “democracy”. Kissinger would sympathize.

 

On one front, the Fed faces populist anger from both left-wing Democrats and right-wing Republicans about its power and secrecy.

 

Right. None of the criticism of the unaccountable, reckless, scofflaw Fed (from the Left, at least) is based on policy and democracy concerns. Gosh darn that soiled rag-wearing “populism”.

 

Mindful that Democrats now control the White House and Congress, Mr. Bernanke put up virtually no opposition to President Obama’s proposal for a new consumer agency that would take over the Fed’s authority over consumer lending issues. Similarly, he avoided a bruising turf battle by agreeing that the Fed would share responsibility with other regulators to monitor systemic financial risk.

 

This is a lie. The Fed has aggressively sought to protect and extend its turf throughout.

 

And if Bernanke didn’t know all along that Obama and Frank had his back on gutting the CFPA, so that he should just keep his mouth shut and let them handle the politics, he really is a political idiot in need of guidance.

 

Andrews goes on to describe how Bernanke protested against the Audit the Fed bill in “apocalyptic terms”, how critical Fed secrecy and autocracy are to the continued existence of civilization. It’s all the same terrorist language which has become all too familiar to us.

 

Directly contradicting what he said in the previous paragraph, Andrews also writes about how the “steely” Fed fought fiercely for its “role as undisputed overseer of financial institutions deemed ‘too big to fail’”.

 

In other words, in spite of himself Bernanke confirmed the need for the auditing bill. And for Frank to take him under his political tutelage.

 

What Mr. Bernanke insisted on, and what Mr. Frank vowed to prevent, was Congressional interference in Fed deliberations over monetary policy.

But whenever discussion got more specific, Fed officials insisted that monetary policy extended to many if not most of the Fed’s emergency credit programs.

Mr. Frank said he would “wall off” deliberations on basic monetary policy, and delay the release of information about the Fed’s financial operations to prevent traders from capitalizing on its moves.

Exactly what that means in practice remains unclear. Mr. Paul says he is delighted that his bill has gotten so far. But details matter, and Fed officials say they are quietly confident details will break their way.

 

It’s very clear what this means. They’re going to keep the Fed/Wall Street casino party going. With this puff piece Andrews is doing his part in the eternal struggle against the people’s rights and well-being.

 

Even where they weren’t self-selected ideologues in the first place, most business journalists are by now, pretty much of necessity, cheerleaders for the growth ideology, market fundamentalism, corporatist politics. The coverage becomes ever more corporate friendly, told from the point of view of the rich, right down to the most petty details and annoyances of their lives. The economy is represented as a bundle of metrics, leading indicators like “growth” and the various exchanges, which mostly measure how well antisocial parasites are collecting rents. Everyone in government, business, and MSM agrees, this is “the” economy.

 

Meanwhile the real economic measures which don’t look good (and have not since the 90s) are relegated to the ghetto of “lagging indicators”. This term still reflects the thousand-times-refuted-but-never-relinquished trickle down ideology.

 

When the lagging jobs indicator becomes too disastrous to dismiss, as it now has, with real unemployment at 17.5% and even the rigged anodyne U3 number over 10% (both of these at their highest in close to thirty years), the nabobs of positivity are left helpless. They can only gawk and stutter about how somehow the administration and Wall Street will figure out something.

 

So the MSM has been doing its best with the increasingly crappy material corporate fundamentalism hands them, and does the gratitude at least come through in the advertising rates? As I mentioned earlier, these continue to decline. Even where advertising volume is creeping back up, it’s mostly according to a cheaper ad run strategy, so MSM ad revenues are still moribund. How’s that “trickling down” for ya?

 

So all the MSM’s prostitution has availed them little. As they say, “the revolution devours its own children”.

 

What went wrong? Weren’t they serviceable villains enough?

 

Perhaps it’s not just the advertising model. Perhaps there’s a hopeful sign here. Perhaps the people are finally starting to see through this charade. Perhaps they’re coming to realize that the MSM is not telling our story, but the story of those who affilict us, and for those who afflict us, and telling it against us, in order to further hurt us.

 

Recently the NYT’s David Carr, one of Vanden Heuvel’s teammates at the debate, wrote of the malaise of the business press.

 

He discusses how, with the green shoots allegedly sprouting all over the place, the attitudes are getting bullish again. But what does this mean for the business press itself?

 

So you might expect the business press to be striking up the band and restocking the cigar cabinet. Instead, Forbes, a magazine that sells a beau idéal of capitalism, announced last week that it was cutting a quarter of its already decimated staff. The Wall Street Journal’s Boston bureau — historically a hothouse of game-changing business coverage — is being closed.

Fortune magazine had already cut back to 18 issues a year from 25 and this week will be whacking anew at staff along with other Time Inc. magazines. BusinessWeek was sold for parts to Bloomberg a few weeks ago.

So, while the business of business may be back, the business of covering it with heroic narratives and upbeat glossy spreads most certainly is not. And probably never will be.

 

Carr mentions the usual suspects, advertising, the shrinking pains of cost cutting and so on. But he ponders whether the fundamental premise has lost its mojo.

 

But it isn’t just that Cadillacs aren’t selling like they used to. It’s also that the people who made them, bought them and drove them seem far more mortal and less interesting than they did just a few years ago.

Business magazines used to relish explaining all the complex new financial instruments that Wall Street was using to pile up profits. But now it has become clear that the titans who were wielding those obscure tools had no idea what they were doing — even less an idea than the journalists in some cases.

And the fact that they needed billions and billions in taxpayer money to bail them out has left the former Masters of the Universe with all the social cachet of welfare recipients. In fact, people on welfare seem more deserving now that some of the rescued have come roaring back just in time for year-end bonuses.

 

They don’t make ‘em like they used to. If this media too has to be star-driven, like all American media, they’re facing a real problem now that Americans are finally starting to wise up.

 

It was always stupid to idolize businessmen as if they were celebrity entertainers, but as long as Americans believed they were all getting richer, and believed in the Randian myth of the rugged, self-reliant capitalist, such idolatry could provide the basis for a wide press circulation. If that readership is now evaporating as fast as it should be, this most corporate of media may be in trouble.

 

It’s not that the public has lost its appetite for stories about handsome men in three-piece suits who clink whiskey glasses at the end of a long, not-so-hard day while talking smack about their female co-workers. But “Mad Men” pretty much sates that need. The businessman as Colossus is by now a nostalgic impulse…

But if the consequences are removed from the equation and the feds are there to cushion any downside, riding the upside seems less magical. Writers and editors who cover business now know that the jig is up, that those bespoke suits are put on one leg at a time by men that seem far less Olympian than they once did….

Business coverage has been, at its heart, aspirational, a brand promise that suggests that if you clip the right articles, internalize the right rhetoric, then you too will end up as one of the shiny, happy people striding boldly across the pages of magazines with names like Fortune, Money, Fast Company and Wired. But nobody is going to read, let alone aspire to, magazines called Middled, Outsourced, Left Behind and Clobbered. It’s as if American business has lost custody of its own story….

But people could be forgiven for not believing in business, or business news, the way they used to.

If a recovery is under way, most Average Joes are not buying in or benefiting so far. On Friday, the Commerce Department said consumer spending actually dropped in September, the first time it had gone down in five months, and the Dow buckled 2.5 percent at the end of trading last week. Consumers clearly lack confidence in the recovery, and, by extension, the people who are supposed to make it happen. And doubt doesn’t sell magazines.

 

In The Joyful Science Nietzsche made an interesting remark on the rise of socialism. He knew little about economics or politics (and cared less) but thought he could descry a spiritual and aesthetic factor.

 

Soldiers and leaders still have far better relationships with each other than workers and employers. So far at least, culture that rests on a military basis still towers above all so-called industrial culture: the latter in its present shape is altogether the most vulgar form of existence yet. Here one is at the mercy of brute need; one has to live and has to sell oneself, but one despises those who exploit this need and buy the worker. Oddly, submission to powerful, frightening, even terrible persons, like tyrants and generals, is not experienced as nearly so painful as is this submission to unknown and uninteresting persons, which is what all the luminaries of industry are.

What the workers see in the employer is usually only a cunning, bloodsucking dog of a man who speculates on all misery; and the employer’s name, shape, manner, and reputation are a matter of complete indifference to them. The manufacturers and entrepreneurs of business have been too deficient in all those forms and signs of nobility that alone make a person interesting. If the nobility of birth showed in their eyes and gestures, there might not be any socialism of the masses. For at bottom the masses are willing to submit to slavery of any kind, if only the higher-ups constantly legitimize themselves as higher, as born to command – by having noble manners. The most common man feels that nobility cannot be improvised and that one has to honor in it the fruit of long periods of time.

But the lack of higher manners and the notorious vulgarity of manufacturers with their ruddy, fat hands give him the idea that it is only accident and luck that have elevated one person above another. Well then, he reasons: let us try accident and luck! Let us throw the dice! And thus socialism is born.

 

While that may fall short of Marxian rigor, I think there is some truth to it. The people have always sought to find ways to idolize and romanticize their socioeconomic “betters”, if only to rationalize their own failure to rise up and assert themselves. But if the faltering business press is a different kind of leading indicator, perhaps this idolatry is no longer tenable, and a different sort of rational process is commencing.

 

Arendt, in Origins of Totalitarianism, described an interesting historical moment similar to our own.

 

The historian is in most such cases confronted with a very complex historical situation where he is almost at liberty, and that means at a loss, to isolate one factor as “the spirit of the time”. There are, however, a few helpful general rules. Foremost among them for our purpose is Tocqueville’s great discovery (in L’Ancien Regime et la Revolution) of the motives for the violent hatred felt by the French masses for the aristocracy at the outbreak of the Revolution – an outbreak which stimulated Burke to remark that the revolution was more concerned with “the condition of a gentleman” than with the institution of a king.

According to Tocqueville, the French people hated aristocrats about to lose their power more than it had ever hated them before, precisely because their rapid loss of real power was not accompanied by any appreciable decline in their fortunes. As long as the aristocracy held vast powers of jurisdiction, they were not only tolerated but respected. When noblemen lost their privileges, among others the privilege to exploit and oppress, the people felt them to be parasites, without any real function in the rule of the country. In other words, neither oppression nor exploitation as such is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated.

 

Substitute the lost belief in the economic and social function of Wall Street and the rackets, which we now know to be 100% fraudulent, destructive, and parasitic, for the lost political prerogatives of the Ancien Regime, and we have the same dynamic. Tremendous, and utterly worthless, and purely malevolent, wealth concentration.

 

Lucretius felt the change of the world in his time, the great republic riding to the height

Whence every road leads downward; Plato in his time watched Athens

Dance the down path. The future is a misted landscape, no man sees clearly, but at cyclic turns

There is a change felt in the rhythm of events, as when an exhausted horse

Falters and recovers, then the rhythm of the running hoofbeats is changed: he will run miles yet,

But he must fall….

 

Robinson Jeffers, Prescription of Painful Ends

Robinson Jeffers: “Apology For Bad Dreams”

In my post on Nietzsche and Science I mentioned Robinson Jeffers’ poem “Apology For Bad Dreams”. In this post I want to offer some thoughts and impressions from this poem.

 

Jeffers was intimately familiar with the concept of the Dionysian, though I don’t recall his using that term for it. The Dionysian, as formulated by Nietzsche, is an idea, a vista, and a moral vision. It’s a union of philosophy and poetry which captures the beauty and terror of history in one philosophical moment. It’s the idea of affirming all that is terrible in life rather than denying it, rather than cursing the world on account of it. Of maintaining good will, integrity, and even good cheer as we fight our way through the troubles which beset us, not by having “faith” in some divine plan or justice which will set it all right, but by affirming the necessity of the whole.

 

This doesn’t mean failing to take the action we must take, it means seeing our action as well as one beauteous part of the logical whole, even if other parts seem ugly from our point of view.

 

Perhaps we need this today more than ever. Today is the age where “Nihilism stands at the door” (N, The Will to Power, section 1). God is dead, and ideology’s attempts to replace it have only accelerated the horror. Between mass religion and totalitarian science (with mass politics always some smothering combination of these) the human soul is crushed. All now serve the corporation, and underlying that the vicious monetizing filth.

 

Mass democracy has utterly failed, has been drowned in the poison of corporate totalitarianism.

 

Will the collapse of the pseudo-civilization based on fossil fuel and exponential debt offer any way toward redemption?

 

At any rate, the one idea which can offer hope to lead us through the conflagrations and the darknesses of our midnights is the Dionysian resolve. The humanism this always offers us is our will to creativity. This is what Nietzsche called sublimation.

 

N recalled that his very first “philosophical trifle”, written when he was around 13, tackled the ancient question of theodicy. Even at that age he went right for the jugular and gave the only answer integrity can possibly give: if god is omnipotent, then all evil is his own evil. And why would god want evil in the world? N revisited the question in Zarathustra, “On the Afterworldly”:

 

The work of a suffering and tortured god, the world then seemed to me. A dream the world then seemed to me, and the fiction of a god: colored smoke before the eyes of a dissatisfied deity. Good and evil and joy and pain and I and you – colored smoke before creative eyes. The creator wanted to look away from himself; so he created the world.

It’s drunken joy for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and to lose himself. Drunken joy and loss of self the world once seemed to me. This world, eternally imperfect, the image of an eternal contradiction, an imperfect image – a drunken joy for its imperfect creator: thus the world once appeared to me.

Thus I too once cast my delusion beyond man, like all the afterworldly.

 

The essence of the Dionysian world view is to bring this artist’s affirmation and will back to the human, back to the worldly. We can still create, as thinkers, as artists, as activists, without denying this world in the process, whether it be as religious or as secular utopians, “drunken” either way. There’s a great German word, aufheben, beloved of German philosophers, which combines the meanings of do away with, carry along with you, and preserve. It means to acknowledge and remember even as you transcend and overcome.

 

So the Dionysian thinker and activist affirms this world even as he strives to change it. A similar concept is that of the renaissance, literally “rebirth”, which combines the best senses of restoration and revolution, while “revolution”, in its original 18th century political sense, meant a “revolving back” to restore the natural order of things. It did not mean to turn things upside down, but to set them back right side up. Marx’s philosophy was “revolutionary” in exactly this sense, seeking to turn the Hegelian philosophy, including its reactionary political end state, “right side up”.

 

Well, that was a short musing on some of the places we can go with this idea. But now to Robinson Jeffers. “Apology for Bad Dreams” is his most passionate statement of his artistic credo (his apologia, that is, explanation – “apology” here doesn’t mean saying “I’m sorry” for anything), his idea of art as a way to sublimate one’s own imperfections and deal with the horrors of the world. To try to combine one’s personal tragedy and the greater tragedies of existence into a contribution, however small, to the beauty of the universe.

 

(I couldn’t find this poem entire online; it’s not yet in the public domain, evidently. But any good pre-war anthology will have it. I’ll be reproducing much of it as I go along.)

 

I.

 

In the purple light, heavy with redwood, the slopes drop seaward,

Headlong convexities of forest, drawn in together to the steep ravine. Below, on the sea-cliff,

A lonely clearing; a little field of corn by the streamside; a roof under spared trees. Then the ocean

Like a great stone someone has cut to a sharp edge and polished to shining. Beyond it, the fountain

And furnace of incredible light shining up from the sunk sun….

 

The beauty and immensity, which includes the little cornfield and house. The people should be beautiful as well.

 

…In the little clearing a woman

Is punishing a horse; she had tied the halter to a sapling at the edge of the wood, but when the great whip

Clung to the flanks the creature kicked so hard she feared he would snap the halter; she called from the house

The young man her son; who fetched a chain tie-rope, they working together

Noosed the small rusty links round the horse’s tongue

And tied him by the swollen tongue to the tree.

Seen from this height they are shrunk to insect size.

Out of all human relation….

….You can see the whip fall on the flanks,

The gesture of the arm. You cannot see the face of the woman.

 

They are the petty, the mean, the ugly. What’s far worse than true, stark evil, is everyday, swarming meanness and ugliness.

 

The enormous light beats up out of the west across the cloudbars of the trade-wind. The ocean

Darkens, the high clouds brighten, the hills darken together. Unbridled and unbelievable beauty

Covers the evening world…not covers, grows apparent out of it, as Venus down there grows out

From the lit sky. What said the prophet? “I create good: and I create evil: I am the Lord.”

 

It’s an image of petty human cruelty amid the vastness of uncivilization, indifferent, unconscious nature, the broken rocks and sea,  the grandeur, beauty, and immensity, Earth’s expression of infinity. The most radical contrast.

 

This is life, reality, but as related in a poem, also an image, a phantom. It offers the metaphor of “the Lord”. This is perhaps the idea of unconscious nature but also, as it becomes conscious, the poet himself. This tableau is a creation of the artist god, creating victims. This becomes more explicit later on.

 

II.

 

This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places,

(The quiet ones ask for quieter suffering: but here the granite cliff the gaunt cypresses crown

Demands what victim? The dikes of red lava and black what Titan? The hills like pointed flames

Beyond Soberanes, the terrible peaks of the bare hills under the sun, what immolation?)

This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places: and like the passionate spirit of humanity

Pain for its bread: God’s, many victims’, the painful deaths, the horrible transfigurements…

 

The cold, infinite beauty seems to imply the greatest pains, evils, tragedies. We sense historical infinity, what can metaphorically be called the demand for victims. With this anthropomorphic thought we confront ourselves amid nature. In this personified world beauty and tragedy go hand in hand, but is this an immutable condition of intelligent life? Of life in general? (Unless we’re mystics, we know there’s no such thing as “tragedy” except in our minds, so it’s a condition of intelligent life. But could we ever imagine a place, a universe, where life existed but this wasn’t so? Beauty without tragedy? Or, no beauty and therefore no tragedy? Some seem to want this.)

 

At any rate, this much is true of the human condition, it demands “pain for its bread”, it demands the tragedy itself. It’s redolent of Wagner’s Liebestod, love-through-death.

 

…I said in my heart,

“Better invent than suffer: imagine victims

Lest your own flesh be chosen the agonist, or you

Martyr some creature to the beauty of the place.” And I said,

“Burn sacrifices once a year to magic

Horror away from the house, this little house here

You have built over the ocean with your own hands

Beside the standing boulders: for what are we,

The beast that walks upright, with speaking lips

And little hair, to think that we should always be fed,

Sheltered, intact, and self-controlled? We sooner more liable

Than the other animals….”

 

But we can sublimate this demand, we can eat the bread of art. This is the sacrifice through sublimation. Most of all the creator of art sacrifices of himself in this way through creation rather than through destruction, of himself or others. (Too bad capitalistic “creative destruction” isn’t like this.)

 

That’s why humanity created art: not audience catharsis, but the sublimation of human greatness.

 

And Jeffers even wonder if perhaps (through what – some notion of karma?) this can help avoid victimization from without as well. At any rate, to help achieve freedom from fear, a psychological reality.

 

“….Pain and terror, the insanities of desire; not accidents but essential,

And crowd up from the core:” I imagined victims for those wolves, I made them phantoms to follow,

They have hunted the phantoms and missed the house. It is not good to forget over what gulfs the spirit

Of the beauty of humanity, the petal of a lost flower blown seaward by the night-wind, floats to its quietness.

 

It’s no joke, although civilization tries to make it so, or reduce it to a nuisance. Man’s unrest, the evils and pain, are essential to him. We must create victims, or else be murderers and cannibals. We’re always close to the edge, “pain and terror are essential”. The creator’s mission is most critical, for this grapples with the core of the human tragedy. The Dionysian mission, the exuberant will to face even the most evil, fearful truths with courage and affirmation, to transform all the tremblings of fear to vibrations of life.

 

III.

 

Verse three pictures primeval man amid the shoreline boulders, a creator of gods and art as he first generates the fire.

 

Here the granite flanks are scarred with ancient fire, the ghosts of the tribe

Crouch in the nights beside the ghost of a fire…..

….These have paid something for the future

Luck of the country, while we living keep old griefs in memory: though God’s

Envy is not a likely fountain of ruin, to forget evils calls down

Sudden reminders from the cloud: remembered deaths be our redeemers;

Imagined victims our salvation……

 

We must not ”forget evils”, but rather “keep old griefs in memory” (but not necessarily as those griefs). The primeval tribesmen (we imagine them as ghosts, “by the ghost of a fire”) did their part, and we must remember in order to do our part.

 

Perhaps it’s all superstition. Perhaps, although our intellect and reason have grown, we’re still at our core immature and mystical, still on some level primeval, still the ghosts of the primal fire. The phantoms we create suspend the ghosts, are suspensions of the ghost, a living thread which connects us retrospectively with that primal night, circling the flame. 

 

This memory faculty and creative forgetting brings me back to Nietzsche and his second essay in Genealogy of Morals, and the posts I started writing about that essay. (A series I’ll be continuing soon.)

 

That’s the key to the kind of memory we need, the kind of debt we owe. Meanwhile Jeffers recalls his own tragic creation from an earlier poem, a small attempt of his to help redeem humanity, all we have suffered, through art.

 

….white as the half-moon at midnight

Someone flamelike passed me, saying, “I am Tamar Cauldwell, I have my desire,”

Then the voice of the sea returned, when she had gone by, the stars to their towers…..

 

IV.

 

Now we come to J’s theology and theodicy (meaning his Dionysian mythology).

 

He brays humanity in a mortar to bring the savor

From the bruised root: a man having bad dreams, who invents victims, is only the ape of that God.

He washes it out with tears and many waters, calcines it with fire in the red crucible,

Deforms it, makes it horrible to itself: the spirit flies out and stands naked, he sees the spirit,

He takes it in the naked ecstasy; it breaks in his hand, the atom is broken, the power that massed it

Cries to the power that moves the stars, “I have come home to myself, behold me.

I bruised myself in the flint mortar and burnt me

In the red shell, I tortured myself, I flew forth,

Stood naked of myself and broke me in fragments,

And here am I moving the stars that are me.”

 

Man’s creation of god, and through this god’s of man, and of the sublimation of the will to power, art, thought, invention, striving, dreaming, “bad dreaming”….

 

I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason

For fire and change and torture and the old returnings.

He being sufficient might be still. I think they admit no reason; they are the ways of my love.

 

We can forget the Judeo-Christian moralizations. The idea of god is to give us an ideal to strive toward, and through whom to understand our ambitions and sufferings and tell them to ourselves. God as the reflection of man, god the ultimate artist, and god as man’s greatest work of art.

 

God as the artistic torturer of man: The most horrible and majestic thought of all, this be the key to theodicy. And man as the artist, and the creator of his own victims. This is the key to peace on earth.

 

Then we reach capitulation at the end, acknowledgement that humanity is a jumble of “power, passion, craft”. There’s nothing metaphysical inside, no god outside; our thoughts, our theology, our science, just “measures of phenomena” (description, not explanation), and our best measure of it all is simply aesthetic.

 

We only need sufficient understanding, just enough, and then the will to create a new world.

 

Unmeasured power, incredible passion, enormous craft: no thought apparent but burns darkly

Smothered with its own smoke in the human brain-vault: no thought outside: a certain measure in phenomena:

The fountains of the boiling stars, the flowers on the foreland, the ever-returning roses of dawn. 

Nietzsche and Science (Scientism 3 of 5)

This post will trace the development of Nietzsche’s ideas on science and its relation to the human condition. I’m writing about this both because I think it’s intrinsically interesting (and helps me clarify my own ideas on both N and science) and because I believe that more than any other thinker N has analyzed our predicament and can help us find our way through the maze.

 

In particular for our purposes today, N was rare among great modern thinkers in considering science as such to be problematic. It was N’s way to be ambivalent toward almost everything important, and as we know today this ambivalence should have been modern man’s default from the outset. Instead, to our misfortune, the opposite – uncritical enthusiasm, triumphalism, progress dogma, political and technological conformism – has been the norm.

 

Now we confront the great resultant energetic, environmental, and spiritual crises which inevitably followed. To Peak Oil, resource depletion, climate change, biodiversity eradication, and land monopoly we can add spiritual desolation.

 

Whether or not humanity survives will depend in large part on reassessing all this.

 

Texts for the works cited in this piece can be found here, except for On the Genealogy of Morals which will be found here.

 

I’ll use the following abbreviations:

 

BT: The Birth of Tragedy, 1886 preface

HH: Human, All Too Human

GS: The Gay Science

Z: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

BGE: Beyond Good and Evil

GM: On the Genealogy of Morals

TI: Twilight of the Idols

WP: The Will to Power (posthumously edited notes)

 

1. The basic dilemma of science: As Nietzsche came to see it retrospectively, the questing intellect was his core concern right from his first book, BT (1872), even though in that book he wrote mostly about art.

 

The question, as reframed in his 1886 preface, was Why should the ancient Greeks, the most healthy and vibrant people ever, have “needed tragedy” [BT 1]? Greek tragedy expressed the ruthless will to look fate directly in the eye, without flinching from all of its most frightening and horrible aspects. It was something which could induce pessimism. Why should the exuberant Greeks have embraced something so pessimistic? Could it have been precisely the “overfullness” of their spirit, a surplus of health and exuberance, which drove them to confront and affirm even the most terrible aspects of life? Was this a “pessimism of strength”? This is the core of what by 1886 N called the Dionysian. (In the 1872 BT the term ”Dionysian” was used differently, to signify tempestuous, chaotic release of passion, while “Apollonian” meant calm, restrained spiritual expression; N’s eventual concept of the Dionysian was a synthesis of the two, passion under control, and was counterpoised to ”the Crucified”, the Christian drive to eradicate passion completely.)

 

By contrast, what must have changed in the Greeks that they lost their strong, pessimistic will to confront the tragic, and instead embraced anodyne Socratic equations of rationality with virtue and happiness? Why did this new rational outlook accompany an ever more attenuated spiritual and artistic life? Was this a symptom of spiritual exhaustion, of decadence? The pessimism of strength seemed dead and replaced by a picayune urge to comfort oneself. And what was the significance of the development of science in all this?

 

That of which tragedy died, the Socratism of morality, the dialectics, frugality, and cheerfulness of the theoretical man – might not this very Socratism be a sign of decline, of weariness, of infection, of an anarchical dissolution of the instincts? And the “Greek cheerfulness” of the later Greeks – merely the afterglow of the sunset? The Epicureans’ resolve against pessimism – a mere precaution of the afflicted? And science itself, our science – what is the significance of all science, viewed as a symptom of life? For what – worse yet, toward what - all science? Is the resolve to be so scientific about everything perhaps a fear of, an escape from, pessimism? A subtle last resort against – truth? Morally speaking, a sort of cowardice and falseness? Amorally speaking, a ruse? [BT 1]

 

So we have the question posed. Has scientism been a symptom of man’s spiritual decadence, as he lost the will to the pessimism of strength, the vibrant outlook of tragic pessimism? This question became more pressing with the twin and interlinked developments of modern times: the total erosion of Western religious faith, and the domination of technology. Today science really can make a bid to supersede religion and become the new religion.

 

At the end of this post I’ll return with N to the hopes for a revitalization of the pessimism of strength. First we have to explore the downward paths of anodyne rationalism and its paradoxical culmination in the abnegation of Christian morality.

 

Before this we confront a pivotal question: can science and reason justify themselves?

 

2. In post 1 I explored Nietzsche’s flirtation with the self-justification of science in HH. As I said there, he kept exploring this issue, eventually rejecting the bootstraps position and, in GS 344 (1885), giving his definitive answer:

 

To make it possible for this discipline to begin, must there not be some prior conviction - even one that is so commanding and unconditional that it sacrifices all other convictons to itself? We see that science also rests on a faith. The question whether truth is needed must not only have been affirmed in advance, but affirmed to such a degree that the principle, the faith, the conviction finds expression: “Nothing is needed more than truth.”

 

The root of this is not even the utilitarian will not to let oneself be deceived, since we cannot know the practical extent to which truth is more useful than deception. No, the root is the moral will against deception, of others or of ourselves.

 

Thus the question “Why science” leads back to the moral problem: Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are “not moral”? Those who are truthful in the ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history; and insofar as they affirm this “other world” – must they not by that same token negate this world, our world?..

It is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests – even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire from the flame that was lit by a faith thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine. – But what if this should become more and more incredible, if nothing should prove to be divine anymore unless it were error, blindness, the lie – if God himself were to prove to be our most enduring lie?

 

This is the underlying, true justification for science, a moral justification, the idealization of “truth”, which originated in Christian theology. The will to truth means the will to another world. “Will to truth” has the same source as belief in god. And now that god is dead, what about will to truth?

 

Thus we see the religious basis of the “moral” faith in science, the faith always cited by apologists for the real-world corporate activity of technicians.

 

(And in turn, scientism seeks to extend this faith and this apologia to the instrumentalist corporate practice itself. Science in the abstract, ”pure science”, is morally justified. Then “applied science”, science as the sociopathic tool of corporate power, and the practice of technicians as a self-driving nihilistic process, are piggybacked on this original truth morality. Thus we have the ideology of scientism.)

 

N continued to explore this question for the rest of his life but did not change his answer. His assessment in GM essay III, section 24 (1887) is the same. These “men of knowledge”, these “philosophers and scholars”, the “last idealists of knowledge in whom alone the intellectual conscience dwells and is incarnate today…They are far from being free spirits: for they still have faith in truth.“

 

N regarded this as a manifestation of the “ascetic ideal”, the will to negation of diversity in experience and passion, again an outgrowth of religiosity. The idealists are not free spirits because they remain bound by faith in truth. They are fanatics about it.

 

That which constrains these men, this unconditional will to truth, is faith in the ascetic ideal itself, even as an unconscious imperative – it is the faith in a metaphysical value, the absolute value of truth, sanctioned and guaranteed by this ideal alone (it stands or falls with this ideal)…. 

….A philosophy, a “faith”, must always be there first of all, so that science can acquire from it a direction, a meaning, a limit, a right to exist. 

Science itself henceforth requires justification (which is not to say there is any such justification). Consider on this question both the earliest and most recent philosophers: they are all oblivious of how much the will to truth itself first requires justification; here there is a lacuna in every philosophy – how did this come about? Because the ascetic ideal has hitherto dominated all philosophy, because the truth was posited as being, as God, as the highest court of appeal – because truth was not permitted to be a problem at all. Is this “permitted” understood? – From the moment faith in the God of the ascetic ideal is denied, a new problem arises: that of the value of truth.

The will to truth requires a critique – let us thus define our own task – the value of truth must for once be experimentally called into question. 

 

Just as the Judeo-Christian morality, as an absolute, taken for granted, stands or falls with belief in the Judeo-Christian god, so does the value of truth, and the pursuit which stems from it, science.

 

Scientism has attempted to elide this “lacuna” and substitute itself for the missing god. But in the same way that the fossil fuel civilization cannot continue to run as it has without cheap, plentiful fossil fuels, and no cornucopian technological dreams will change that, so the Christian civilization, including its scientistic/technocratic manifestation, cannot continue as it has without the religious faith which built it, and no synthesized cult of scientism/technocracy can change that.

 

As N said, truly free human beings must experimentally call it all into question. Peak Oil shall afford this opportunity.

 

Some other sections pertinent on this point:

 

BT 2: We must confront “the problem of science itself, science considered for the first time as problematic, as questionable….to look at science in the perspective of the artist, but at art in that of life.”

 

TI (1888)”The Problem of Socrates” 10: “When one finds it necessary to turn reason into a tyrant, the danger cannot be slight that something else will play the tyrant.”

 

WP: 424 (on forms of scientific hypocrisy, denying the underlying presumptions), 440 (on how scientific training can either help one resist sloppy faith concepts, or on the contrary render one more susceptible)

 

Here we stand at the inherent nature of science/rationalism/scholarship. We have the highest respect for it in itself. But where does it lead? There can be no question: the pursuit of knowledge leads to our trying to fabricate something beyond knowledge. As human beings we cannot do any differently. The question is whether this fabrication is decadent or sublimatory.

 

We’ll first have to head further downward before we can ascend.

 

3. Science, which is supposed to embody not just technical but spiritual progress, has perhaps on the contrary been one of humanity’s refuges from life, once the pessimism of strength began to erode. Perhaps “progress” itself, the progress cult, far from representing a greater capacity to grapple with the knots of being, has instead really been an escapist cult.

 

In GM III:23 Nietzsche asked, has science been able to posit its own goal to replace the ascetic ideal?

 

They tell me it is not lacking, it has not merely waged a long and successful fight against this ideal, it has already conquered this ideal in all important respects: all of modern science is supposed to bear witness to that – modern science which, as a genuine philosophy of reality, clearly believes in itself alone, clearly possesses the courage for itself and the will to itself, and has up to now survived well enough without God, the beyond, and the virtues of denial. Such noisy agitators’ chatter, however, does not impress me…..the abyss of the scientific conscience does not speak through them – for today the scientific conscience is an abyss – the word “science” in the mouths of such trumpeters is simply an indecency and a piece of impudence. The truth is the opposite of what is asserted here: science today has no belief in itself, let alone an ideal above it – and where it still inspires passion, love, ardor, and suffering at all, it is not the opposite of the ascetic ideal but rather the latest and noblest form of it.

 

Contrary to the pretensions of scientism, science has not imposed itself upon civilization as a self-generated, confident ideal, but has only furtively recycled the dregs of the old religious faith, albeit on a nobler intellectual level.

 

And for many of its practitioners it does not even do that: 

 

..But that one works rigorously in the sciences and that there are contented workers does not prove that science as a whole possesses a goal, a will, an ideal, or the passion of a great faith. The opposite is the case, to repeat: where it is not the latest expression of the ascetic ideal – and the exceptions [those who truly do find a self-justifying creative ideal in science itself] are too rare, noble, and atypical to refute the general proposition – science today is a hiding place for every kind of discontent, disbelief, gnawing worm, bad conscience – it is the unrest of the lack of ideals, the suffering from the lack of any great love, the discontent in the face of involuntary contentment.

Oh, what does science not conceal today? How much, at any rate, is it meant to conceal! The proficiency of our finest scholars, their heedless industry, their heads smoking day and night, their very craftsmanship – how often the real meaning of all this lies in the desire to keep something hidden from oneself! Science as a means of self-narcosis: do you have experience of that?

…sufferers who refuse to admit to themselves what they are, drugged and heedless men who fear only one thing: regaining consciousness.

 

This kind of cubicle-dweller is familiar enough nowadays, though like so much else of Nietzsche’s prescience, it wasn’t understood in his own time.

 

But the technocratic ideology allows those cubicle-dwellers and rat-racers and treadmill-walkers in the “sciences” to comfort themselves that they work on behalf of some grand ideal rather than as the same old corporate cog.

 

BGE (1886) 204-208 provides a more detailed dossier on the modern scholar, “solid man of science”, specialist, “scientific average man”, “objective spirit”, “ideal scholar”, “selfless man”, the weak and degenerate form of skeptic, the weakling interpretation of Hamlet; these are all contrasted with the true creative philosopher, the stronger, harder skepticism, the pessimism of strength. (I’ll get to this contrast at the end of this post.)

 

204: The scientist affects superiority over the philosopher – either because philosophy hasn’t found the final answers yet, or out of disillusionment with some particular philosopher, or because often philosophy itself has abdicated. (Transposed to conformity vs. activism, these are all familiar in the politics of today.)

 

206: The scientist is not self-reliant or noble, spiritually or intellectually. (We can add, economically.) We see the “Jesuitism of mediocrity…which seeks to break every bent bow or, preferably, to unbend it.”

Bent bow – the uncommon man, the free spirit.

Break it – what religion or totalitarianism would seek to do.

“Unbend” it – “reason”, liberalism, scientism.

 

207: “Objective spirit” – weak, threadbare, may have good will but the flesh is weak. Today’s scholars are like this.

 

208: Same for today’s “skeptics”, for example the celebrity atheists. To still believe in something, to still possess the will to power, is terrifying to them. This spiritual sickness goes hand in hand with overcivilization, while it diminishes where original “barbarism” peeks through once again.

 

Some other sections:

 

Z Book IV (1884) “The Leech” presents as one of its characters the “conscientious in spirit”, the nook scholar seeking security, a fanatic about puny truths. He believes in science (“On Science”, book IV) as sublimated fear. (He’s not being referred to as a leech; rather when Zarathustra comes upon him he finds the man contemplating a leech on his arm. The leech is a metaphor for his obsession with blood-sucking petty truths.) 

 

TI “Problem of Socrates” 9: Socrates was the “synthetic product”, the extreme version, of Athens’ spiritual malaise. The instincts were in anarchy. Hyper-rationalism was the escape.

10: Hyper-rationalism: the only defense. One is too weak for one’s own instincts.

11: The cure was really another form of the disease. “To have to fight the instincts is the formula of decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct.”

 

WP 68, 71, 95 (middle part), 424 (false objectivity)

 

So we have the scientific mindset and practice as a symptom of decadence. And this can be leading down to the doldrum.

 

4. At BT 5 Nietzsche asks, “What, seen in the perspective of life, is the significance of morality?” In the original BT he wrote that art is the truly meaningful activity of life and is opposed to the moral world view. The pessimism of strength is something beyond good and evil. Morality is demoted to the realm of aesthetics – not just appearance as such, but as lies. Christianity, the radical opposite of this, would moralize everything including aesthetics.

 

Where does science stand in this perspective (in spite of its claims to stand outside)? As we have seen, science arises out of the moral world view. It carries the same water that religion used to, but is better at concealing this so it appears, not even as appearance let alone a lie, but as self-evident and self-supporting truth, when in fact it had surreptitiously asserted the “will to truth” as moral dogma.

 

If scientism could achieve the domination it seeks, it would place an immobilizing clamp upon freedom of the spirit as religion once sought to do and often succeeded. This is because any moral dogma, from the most irrational theology to the most allegedly rational will to truth, is a smothering of the soul. All dogma must be critiqued, questioned, the subject of irreverence. This is the proper task for philosophy which, in its most intrepid, most creative form, is the quintessentially human activity, the daily hunting ground for the free spirit.

 

This is what N came to believe, as he overcame his original worship of art. He came to realize that both art, as an aspect of the world of appearance, and science, an aspect of morality and appearance, are only among the imperfect modes of spiritual expression. Science still conceals its moral basis. Art is extramoral, but still dogmatizes about appearance. Both viewpoints are incomplete at best.

 

Can all of this lead us somewhere better?

 

Cf. also WP 442-443

 

5. I mentioned earlier how the moral need underlying the quest for knowledge leads us inevitably to seek to create something beyond knowledge. This has been the source of religions and ideologies and has contributed to art.

 

In BT 6 Nietzsche describes his own misguided attempt in the 1872 text to find a new ideal and goal precisely in the wallowing decadence of 19th century romantic pessimism, as exemplified in Schopenhauer and Wagner, when these in fact represented the antithesis of the pessimism of strength, what he later came to call the Dionysian.

 

Nor shall we find it in science:

 

No! Don’t come to me with science when I ask for the natural antagonist of the ascetic ideal, when I demand: “where is the opposing will expressing the opposing ideal?” Science is not nearly self-reliant enough to be that; it first requires in every respect an ideal of value, a value-creating power, in the service of which it could believe in itself – it never creates values. Its relation to the ascetic ideal is by no means essentially antagonistic; it might even be said to represent the driving force in the latter’s inner development. It opposes and fights, on closer inspection, not the ideal itself but only its exteriors, its guise and masquerade, its temporary dogmatic hardening and stiffening, and by denying what is exoteric in this ideal, it liberates what life is in it. This pair, science and the ascetic ideal, both rest on the same foundation – I have already indicated it: on the same overestimation of truth (more exactly: on the same belief that truth is inestimable and cannot be criticized). Therefore they are necessarily allies, so that if they are to be fought they can only be fought and called in question together. A depreciation of the ascetic ideal unavoidably involves a depreciation of science: one must keep one’s eyes and ears open to this fact. [GM III:25]

 

Science cannot create values, but can only serve as a pre-existing value, or else serve instrumentalism and nihilism. As ascetic ideals, science and religion both are based on the fanatical belief in “truth”. To fight one you must fight all.

 

The section goes on to say that physiologically, science and reason are exalted where life and the will to power are in decline. That science has destroyed man’s theologically-derived sense of self-importance has not at all harmed the ascetic ideal. On the contrary, the will to truth as ascetic ideal in the form of rationalism and scientism has thrived. Channeled into nihilism, and with Kant’s delineations of the limits of knowledge, transcendentalists everywhere have been liberated again. Knowing the limits of knowledge, they now feel free to start making stuff up wherever knowledge ends.

 

Since Copernicus, man seems to have gotten himself onto an inclined plane – now he is slipping faster and faster away from the center into – what? Into nothingness? Into a penetrating sense of his nothingness? Very well! Hasn’t this been the straightest route to – the old ideal?

 

All science has the effect of ”dissuading man from his former respect for himself”, his religious certainty. But does it modestly remain content with this diminution, an admission of the unknown? No – it seeks a new transcendentalism precisely here:

 

Who could hold it against the agnostics if, as votaries of the unknown and mysterious as such, they now worship the question mark itself as God? Presuming that everything man “knows” does not merely fail to satisfy his desires but rather contradicts them and produces a sense of horror, what a divine way out to have the right to seek the responsibility for this not in “desire” but in “knowledge”!

“There is no knowledge: consequently – there is a God”: what an elegant syllogism! What a triumph for the ascetic ideal!

 

We should remember this when scientists, politicians, and corporatists try to “philosophize” about the spiritual justifications for spending billions on particle colliders or space travel. To the extent that anyone believes the exalted but hazy rhetoric, it is precisely this worship of the question mark, and the billions are spent to construct a temple to it.

 

But haven’t we really had enough of monumental religion by now?

 

A more artistic personification of the fabrication-beyond-knowledge occurs in Z book IV in the character of the Magician, who sings a song of conscious deception, of the “ascetic of the spirit”, the disillusioned seeker after truth as an ideal, as a way to greatness, who finally succumbs to nihilism. (Earlier Zarathustra had predicted the coming of the ascetics of the spirit, arising out of the disillusioned poets. Here with the Magician we see a devolution of poet -> ape of the poet ideal (failed poet). Soon -> commissar. Thus we see the downside risk of art as well in our spiritual crisis.)

 

Two supplementary sections are WP 95 (the latter part on Kant) and 457 (truth as a weapon; martyrdom; science becomes fanatical).

 

And then I already discussed N’s own proto-scientism at HH 22, 24, 25 (1878) in part one of these science posts.

 

So in these ways N described the ineradicable urge to go beyond knowledge, the ways of abdication of intellectual integrity, of spiritual decadence.

 

But is there a fabrication which leads upward? What is the upside risk of art and science, as we mingle them in order to begin our quest to create new values?

 

6. WP 466: “It is not the victory of science that distinguishes our nineteenth century, but the victory of the scientific method over science.”

 

Art, in which precisely the lie is sanctified and the will to deception has a good conscience, is much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science: this was instinctively sensed by Plato, the greatest enemy of art Europe has yet produced. Plato versus Homer: that is the complete, the genuine antagonism – there the sincerest advocate of the “beyond”, the great slanderer of life; here the instinctive deifier, the golden nature. To place himself in the service of the ascetic ideal is therefore the most distinctive corruption of an artist that is at all possible. [GM III:25]

 

With all these conceptions the steady and laborious process of science, which will one day celebrate its greatest triumph with a history of the genesis of thought, will in the end decisively have done; for the outcome of this history may well be the conclusion: That which we now call the world is the outcome of a host of errors and fantasies which have gradually arisen and grown entwined with one another in the course of the overall evolution of the organic being, and are now inherited by us as the accumulated treasure of the entire past – as treasure, for the value of our humanity depends upon it. Rigorous science is capable of detaching us from this ideational world only to a limited extent – and more is certainly not to be desired – as it is incapable of making any essential inroad into the power of habits of feeling acquired in primeval times: but it can, gradually and step by step, illuminate the history of the genesis of this world as idea – and, for brief periods at any rate, lift us up out of the entire proceeding. Perhaps we shall then realize that the ding an sich [thing in itself] is worthy of Homeric laughter: that it appeared to be so much, indeed everything, and is actually empty, that is to say empty of significance. [HH 16]

 

While that last selection is from the proto-scientistic part 1 of HH, except for the “limited extent” and the “brief periods”, where he would later deny any such extent or period, that’s vintage Nietzsche.

 

7. And now at long last we come to the best part, the hope for spiritual renaissance and ascent from the great crisis of the age. We began our visit with Nietzsche (BT 1) by witnessing the confrontation of the Dionysian pessimism of strength as embodied in the ancient Greeks and Greek tragedy, with the Socratism of the instincts, hyper-rationality, science itself, the escape from pessimism, and from there to scientism, technophilia, and the cult of technology-will-save-us.

 

To be lifted out of the labyrinth we need a new value. If we are to use the world-historical opportunity offered by Peak Oil, our business must be to create new values. Nothing less than this is the mission of the free, creative human spirit. From here all of N’s philosophy opens up in a spectacular vista, and there are an infinite variety of paths we can take.

 

But to finish up for today I’ll conclude the thread of the pessimism of strength.

 

BT 4 presents us with the essence of the Dionysian:

 

The question of the Greek’s relation to pain, his degree of sensitivity, is basic: did this relation remain constant? Or did it change radically? The question is whether his ever stronger craving for beauty, for festivals, pleasures, new cults was rooted in some deficiency, melancholy, privation, pain? Supposing this was true – and Pericles (or Thucydides) suggests as much in the great funeral oration – how should we then have to explain the origin of the opposite craving, which developed earlier in time, the craving for the ugly; the good, severe will of the older Greeks to pessimism, to the tragic myth, to the image of everything underlying existence that is frightful, evil, a riddle, destructive, fatal? What, then, would be the origin of tragedy? Perhaps joy, strength, overflowing health, overgreat fullness? And what, then is the significance, physiologically speaking, of that madness out of which tragic and comic art developed – the Dionysian madness? Is madness perhaps not necessarily the symptom of degeneration, decline, and the final stage of culture? Are there perhaps – a question for psychiatrists – neuroses of health? of the youth and youthfulness of a people?…

Should the Greeks, precisely in the abundance of their youth, have had the will to the tragic and have been pessimists?

 

This may sound remote from our concerns of today, even irresponsible. But the age seethes with energy which has nowhere to go, and it will, one way or another, find a way to strike as lightning.

 

Just as Peak Oilers, deep environmentalists, and other reformers who appreciate the critical pivot of these years strive to frame the options of meeting the challenge in a rational, ordered way, or driving off a cliff, so we who concern ourselves with the spirit must ponder the same stark option.

 

Robinson Jeffers, my favorite poet, a tragic pessimist with the first-hand acquaintance of the 20th century nightmare which Nietzsche, happily for him, could only forecast as the weatherman he was, wrote a poem on the subject, Apology For Bad Dreams, which better explains what I’m getting at here. I’ll soon write a post discussing this poem.

 

Earlier I referred to BGE 208, its description of the feckless type of modern “skeptic”, who is really a skeptic simply because he is too weak and cowardly to believe in anything and fight for it. I referred to the misinterpretation, all too common, of Hamlet as such a weakling.

 

But a counter example is at hand. In the very next section, BGE 209, N offers up a description of Frederick the Great: a stronger, virile skepticism, a real life embodiment of the true Hamlet as he was and would have been had he lived, the pessimism of strength incarnate. (Note how the description has everything to do with Frederick’s character and nothing to do with his military achievements. It also describes Frederick as exemplary of the 18th century “German spirit and its critical and historical mistrust.” We’re talking about the intellect and scholarship. That’s how it always was with N, though he’s often slandered as having been some sort of militarist. No; as this typical example shows, Nietzsche cared about character, mind, and spirit, never temporal moving and shaking.)

 

Meanwhile there grew up in his son that more dangerous and harder new type of skepticism…This skepticism despises and nevertheless seizes; it undermines and takes possession; it does not believe but does not lose itself in the process; it gives the spirit dangerous freedom, but it is severe on the heart….a new concept of the German spirit crystallized gradually in spite of all romanticism in music and philosophy, and the inclination to virile skepticism became a decisive trait, now, for example, as an intrepid eye, now as the courage of hardness and analysis, as the tough will to undertake dangerous journeys of exploration and spiritualized North Pole expeditions under desolate and dangerous skies.