Un-Utopianism?

A professor of mine told a story in class: he once went on an antidepressant to cure anxiety which completely eliminated his libido. He said, though, that it was actually kind of good: it made him pursue things in a kind of "un-utopian" way. He could get everything done, he could enjoy moments of peace, because his life wasn't oriented around saving the world or achieving bliss. Everything mattered about as much as it mattered, and no more.

(There's a great, sort of similar This American Life episode about losing all testosterone. Apparently when one walks down the street with no testosterone in one's bloodstream, one looks at every object-- no matter what-- and thinks to oneself: "This is beautiful.")

Well, so this appeals to me deeply. It dates back, I think, to my seriously depressed period. ("Dysphoric" rather than "anhedonic": it hurt to think.) I would always think to myself, I spent a whole year thinking to myself: "All I want is to feel okay. Not amazing, I don't want anything good to happen-- I just want to feel okay. To wake up one morning and say, well, I guess this is fine." And then occasionally it did happen, and it was great. Like a long sickness has lifted, and things you hadn't even realized were pain stop hurting. I've maybe had this suspicion ever since that this is the way to live.

Lacan, I think, agrees with this-- and like my professor links it to the libido. Life is a long struggle for an imaginary utopia, life feels like a continuous disaster because every little thing has bliss at stake in it, and yet nothing offers bliss-- so that the more you get the more disappointed you'll be, so that you live your life staying at a distance from what would prove to you that nothing will ever make you happy. Lacan's critique of Aristotelian physics and ethics turns on this: they promise a copulatory unity that we will never find. Lacanian psychoanalysis is essentially and profoundly tragic.

One response to this, I think, is the comic in, say, Beckett or Kafka-- where one rises above oneself to gain a breath of fresh air, where one says that after all one's petty endeavors are not the end of the world, and the very fact that one can't help seeing them that way provokes laughter. This is different from my professor's escape into ordinariness because it depends on the weight that ordinariness eliminates; someone with my professor's unlibidinal attitude wouldn't take himself seriously enough to be funny, and so wouldn't be fun to mock. Laughter is the feeling of the weight falling from your shoulders, but of course you're human and you pick it back up.

I think this opposition-- Lacan vs. Beckett, the permanent disaster and the little creature who creates it-- is one Nietzsche tries to transcend.

Postmodernism as Nihilism

Obviously not the way idiots mean “nihilism.” I mean Nietzschean nihilism.

Nietzsche says that science is not the enemy of the ascetic ideal but its highest form:

“All science (and not just astronomy, about whose humbling and destructive effects Kant made a noteworthy confession, “it destroys my importance”. . .)—all science, natural as well as unnatural—the name I give to the self-criticism of knowledge—is nowadays keen to talk human beings out of the respect they used to have for themselves, as if the latter were nothing more than a bizarre arrogance about themselves. In this matter we could even say science has its own pride, its characteristically acrid form of stoical ataraxia, in maintaining this labouriously attained self-contempt for human beings as their ultimate, most serious demand for self-respect (and, in fact, that’s justified, for the one who despises is still one person who “has not forgotten respect” . . .).” (Genealogy of Morals III:25, http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/genealogy3.htm )

A certain kind of science, then, is a form of nihilism: the kind that refuses man a place at the center of the Universe, refuses the distinction between man and animal, not only refuses the idea that truth could provide salvation but seeks in truth the most thorough and exacting disproof of salvation, of the very possibility of salvation.

Neither hard science nor soft science has achieved this form of asceticism in our time. If physics and biology have done more than any other fields of knowledge to destroy the idea that man deserves any particular consideration from God, both have refused the ascetic implications of their role: physics sustains the belief that it will read the words in which God wrote the Universe and that this will vindicate us as a species, while biology remains tied to the alleviation of suffering. The soft sciences in their snide amusement at our illusions of autonomy come closer, but they remain merely cynical.

What, then, becomes of Nietzsche’s diagnosis? You know my answer already: it is in modern philosophy, in “postmodernism” broadly conceived, that we find the truly ascetic spirit at work. We hear it announced that God is dead and truth impossible, that the projects which have animated philosophy and politics for millennia are futile—as though these were words of liberation! To be sure, in the mouth of a superficial free-thinker like Rorty they are: one is free at last from the obligations of philosophy and the call of politics, from intellectual conscience and critical thought. But elsewhere, one hears something else entirely: critique of “metaphysics” as critique of the pretension to truth, of the arrogance which would call man the rational animal. Critique of “metanarrative” and “utopianism” as critique of the very possibility of happiness. This note is obvious, to be sure, in the American epigones of postmodernism—the autocritique of masculinity and Western thought, because our autocritique is what’s best in us—but it exists in a much higher and more thought form in Foucault and, above all, Lacan. Postmodern philosophy prides itself simply on refusing to delude itself, and on nothing else.

Well, as the man says, perhaps they have not forgotten how to respect. But one ought to remember that it should be a bridge.

Seductions

I have been reading the middle of the third essay of The Genealogy of Morals-- the part about the ascetic ideal and philosophy, which is almost an elegy and which has always seemed to me one of the warmest, sweetest things Nietzsche wrote. The really lovely things come later (and by the way, I can't believe I occasionally still treat my will to poverty as a virtue when it is so much better than that), but this passage has always stuck with me:

"For let’s not underestimate the fact that Schopenhauer, who in fact treated sexuality as a personal enemy (including its instrument, woman, this “instrumentum diaboli”), needed enemies in order to maintain his good spirits, that he loved grim, caustic, black-green words, that he got angry for the sake of getting passionately angry, that he would have become ill, would have become a pessimist (—and he wasn’t a pessimist, no matter how much he wanted to be one) without his enemies, without Hegel, woman, sensuousness, and the whole will for existence, for continuing on. Had that not been the case, Schopenhauer would not have kept going—on that we can wager. He would have run off. But his enemies held him securely; his enemies seduced him back to existence again and again."

What stuck with me the first time around was how very different people are from each other-- that someone could need his enemies most, when my enemies thus far have been so much worse than useless to me. What strikes me now is the idea of being seduced to existence, again and again. How very different a question this is from that of happiness! And how much more important, really... I've known for a long time that one cannot understand how people lead their lives in terms of happiness, and for a somewhat shorter time that happiness is in fact one of those gluey, amorphous concepts which stick to everything but penetrate nothing. This, though: what is it that you keep coming back for? I've been seeing weakness and stupidity in habit, where I should have seen compulsion, and so I've been slandering good reasons to wake up.

I'm glad to be from a generation wise enough not to be earnest when there's nothing worth being earnest about. I read about the '60s and shudder: so much time, intelligence, youth, wasted on false problems and false politics just because they were too hungry to wait. My generation is a great deal more suspicious-- which is to say, ironical. Earnestness is for action, and for this reason it is fundamentally and incurably stupid. (Indignation is the same; I wonder if my fastidiousness about assigning blame is simply the logical conclusion of an intellectual conscience which sees indignation as a kind of drunkenness.) Irony, as a suspicion, a pause, even an indefinite pause before action-- the ironic is absent from his act even as he performs it, and so one should not be fooled by the occasional outbursts of apparent politics in my generation-- irony is intrinsically intelligent. Our historical moment is one of creative and subtle mistrust, of a skepticism too fastidious to be general-- not sarcasm, certainly not cynicism, but irony.

History is not over, and this moment will not last forever; perhaps it is already ending. Our will to the unconditional has fasted too long and grows hungry. We are not at the end, and for that we should be grateful. But we find ourselves able to pause, to think, to refuse to act and to pause even in our acts-- to grow wiser. And for that, too, I am grateful.

Zeitgeist IA

I guess the people I'm talking about are a lot like the "English psychologists" from The Genealogy of Morals.