Why You Should Never Wish Happy New Year to a Nietzschean

 

 

I. 

 

I don't know the origin of the zen fascist insistence on wishing everyone a happy new year, but I suspect it's rooted in the 18th-century, which is why in 1794 the Archange de la Terreur - Louis de Saint-Just - was able to proclaim: Le bonheur est une idée neuve en Europe ... [1]

 

Such a new idea of happiness - one concerned with individual fulfilment in the here and now and realised in material form, rather than a deferred condition of soul which awaits the blessed in heaven - had already become an inalienable right of citizens in the United States.

 

Whether Jefferson was inspired by the English empiricist John Locke - or by the French philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau - is debatable. But, either way, the pursuit of happiness was declared a self-evidently good thing that all Americans should uphold and practice [2].        

 

It might also be noted that 1776 was the year that Jeremy Bentham famously wrote that ensuring the greatest happiness of the greatest number was the mark of a truly moral and just society [3].   

 

 

II. 

 

So what's the problem?

 

Well, the problem for those who take Nietzsche seriously, is that this positing of happiness in its modern form as the ultimate aim of human existence makes one contemptible. 

 

That is to say, one becomes the kind of person who only seeks their own pleasure and safety, avoiding all danger, difficulty, or struggle; one becomes one of those letzter Menschen that Zarathustra speaks of [4].    

 

Nietzsche wants his readers to see that suffering and, yes, even unhappiness, play an important role in life and culture; that greatness is, in fact, more often than not born of pain and sorrow. This is why his philosophy is a form of tragic pessimism.

 

And this is why it's kind of insulting to wish a Nietzschean happy new year ... [5] [6] 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Louis de Saint-Just made this remark in a speech to the National Convention entitled Sur le mode d'exécution du décret contre les ennemis de la Révolution (3 March 3, 1794) - only four months before he went to the guillotine, aged 26, along with his friend and fellow revolutionary Robespierre.  

[2] The famous line written by Thomas Jefferson in the 1776 Declaration of Independence reads: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

 

[3] This phrase - often wrongly attributed to J. S. Mill - can be found in the Preface to Bentham's A Fragment on Government (1776). 

[4] See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'Zarathustra's Prologue', 5.

 

[5] Similarly, one should refrain from wishing happy new year to a devotee of Larry David; or, at any rate, be aware that there's a cut off after which it's no longer appropriate to do so. See episode 1 of season 10 of Curb Your Enthusiasm, entitled 'Happy New Year' (dir. Jeff Schaffer): click here.

 

[6] Having said that, see the post published on 1 Jan 2016 entitled 'Sanctus Januarius' for a Nietzschean new year's message: click here. 

Black is Not Beautiful: Black is Sublime (A Note on Race and Aesthetics)

 

Zanele Muholi Self-Portrait (2016) from the series 

Somnyama Ngonyama ('Hail The Dark Lioness')

The Cooper Gallery

 

 

I. 

 

Racism is often ugly and yet, interestingly, it is clearly related to the question of aesthetics and what constitutes the beautiful (and thus, by transcendental implication, the good and the true; a linkage that Nietzsche describes as philosophically shameful). 

 

I suppose we can trace this back to the Age of Enlightement, when, as Sander Gilman notes, the relation of blackness to questions of representation and perception was at the heart of the debate concerning artistic value and aesthetic judgement [1]. 

 

For whilst black was certainly not seen as beautiful by Kant and company, it was impossible to conceive of the latter without also formulating ideas about the former and so blackness came to serve as the ideal counterpoint not only to beauty, but morality and reason. 

 

In brief, race - and by extension racism - was at the heart of aesthetic theory in the modern period. Artists, philosophers, and scientists all wanted to know if there was an innate reason for the usually negative response to blackness, or whether this was acquired socially and culturally. 

 

Which is why a curious case concerning a 13-year-old boy with impaired vision became central to this debate ...

 

 

II. 

 

According to Gilman's account, after operating on the child and restoring his sight, Dr. William Cheselden was keen to observe and report on his young patient's response to colours (of which he previously had only a vague idea). 

 

Whilst the boy found all the bright colours pleasing - particularly red, which he thought the most beautiful - black made him feel distinctly uneasy, although eventually this feeling passed. However, when, some months later, he encountered a black woman for the first time, the child was, according to Cheselden, struck with great horror at the sight: Mama, look! It's a negro! I'm frightened!

 

Commenting on this case, Simon Gikandi writes:       

 

"The conclusion here was that since the boy had not seen a black woman before, and had certainly not acquired the ability to associate blackness with ugliness through his culture and instruction, his terror was immediate and intuitive. Located on the level of physiology, that is, the eyes' immediate association of blackness with values not acquired through social association, the Cheselden experiment would be used to counter Locke's view that the association between darkness and fear was acquired through association. In its overpowering negativity, blackness was accorded an immanent value." [2]

 

Of course, whether that's a legitimate conclusion to draw is, of course, debatable; though it's one that Edmund Burke was happy to reinforce. Referring directly to the Cheselden study in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Burke argued that terror was innately associated with darkness and that blackness instinctively triggered a feeling of horror independent of any learnt associations:

 

"Blackness terrifies us not simply because we have been taught to fear it, Burke claimed, but because the fear of darkness has a physiological source: it causes tension in the muscles of the eye and this, in turn, generates the terror; it is precisely because of its innate capacity to produce terror that blackness functions as the source of the sublime." [3] 

Again, whilst I'm not sure how valid Burke's claim is - particularly the physiological explanation in terms of eye-strain - it's certainly an interesting proposition to say the least; one which rationalises (and thus legitimises) white racism as a natural response and which posits dark bodies as frightening yet, at the same time, awe-inspiring.

 

We continue to see this played out within Western culture even now; not least of all within the pornographic imagination wherein blackness is both fetishised as desirable, but also portrayed as something powerfully threatening to white masculinity and the socio-sexual order. 

Notes

 

[1] Sander L. Gilman, 'The Figure of the Black in German Aesthetic Theory', Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 8, No. 4, (1975), pp. 373–391. To access on JSTOR, go to www.jstor.org/stable/2737769

 

[2]  Simon Gikandi, 'Race and the Idea of the Aesthetic', Michigan Quarterley Review, Vol. XL, Issue 2, (Spring, 2001). To read online click here. 

      Locke's views on the nature of darkness etc. can be found expressed in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689-1691). 

[3] Ibid.