What Was I Thinking? (2 June)

Images used for posts published on this date 

in 2014, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2020, and 2023

 

 

Sometimes - especially those times when, like today, I'm still busy working on an 8000-word essay, the structuring and now even the style and content of which is giving me a real headache, it's convenient to be able to look back and see what one was thinking on this date in years gone by, rather than produce all-new material.

 

And so, let's time travel and reminisce ...

 

 

The Museum of Failed Products 

 

I always thought this post published in 2014 concerning the fact that the vast majority of new consumer products - just like the vast majority of species - are destined to fail, was an amusing if somewhat poignant post, concluding as it does that just as the marketplace can do without yoghurt shampoo or breakfast cola, so too can the universe do without us. 

 

 

Breast Ironing 

 

In June 2015, I wrote about the attempt to suppress the growth of healthy breast tissue in pubescent girls by using hard and often heated objects to literally flatten any signs of such development. Usually, this moral shaping of the flesh is carried out in the name of Love; i.e., it's a bad act performed with good intentions - just like the equally disgusting practice of FGM. 

 

Unfortunately, thanks to mass immigration and multiculturalism we now have both these things in the UK.  

 

 

Cabaret: Divine Decadence and Fascinating Fascism

 

Skip a couple of years forward, to 2017, and I was back in Berlin of the 1920s and early '30s ...

 

For many people, Cabaret (1972) - dir. Bob Fosse and starring Liza Minnelli and Sally Bowles - is a near-perfect film musical; one that appears to starkly contrast the divine decadence of Berlin during the Weimar Republic with the fascinating fascism of Hitler's Third Reich, but which actually demonstrates how the two share the same cultural foundations and possess similar aesthetico-sexual concerns to do with questions of gender, style and performativity. 

 

For ultimately, if life is a cabaret old chum, then politics is just another form of show business and - as Jean Genet once wrote - even fascism can be considered theatre. 

 

Or, as Susan Sontag writes in her famous 1975 essay, there's a disturbing (almost symbiotic) relationship between the world of the cabaret and that of the concentration camp; the seduction is beauty ... the aim is ecstasy ... the fantasy is death.  

In Praise of Denial

 

Skip forward another 24 months to 2019, and I discussed my favourite line from Shakespeare - I know thee not, old man ... (Henry IV Part 2, Act 5 scene 5) - arguing that the need to deny our elders, our loved ones, our teachers, our leaders, and, ultimately, ourselves, is an absolutely crucial requirement in the process of becoming what one is.

 

Why? Because too much love and loyalty to another, or to the past, can be deadly and anyone who wishes to live and fulfil their own destiny has to offer a seemingly cruel denial of someone or something at sometime or other, regardless of the consequences or the pain caused. 

 

We deny and must deny, says Nietzsche, because something in us wants to live and affirm itself.

 

 

Schopenhauer and the Sea Turtles

 

 

2 June 2020: what was I thinking? 

 

Apparently, about German philosophers and marine reptiles ...

 

For Schopenhauer, life is a manifestation of a hungry will; concerned only with its own continuation. Thus, we witness innumerable species - including sea turtles, wild dogs, and tigers - caught up in an endless feeding frenzy in order to survive and reproduce others of their kind. 

 

Life is thus not only absurd, it is often atrociously cruel and grotesquely violent. And those who imagine that the earth would be some kind of peaceful paradise if only mankind were to stop interfering or vanish altogether, are very much mistaken. 

Sometimes, Better a Dead Mountain Lion Than a Live Dog 

Finally, last year, a post about German born, New York based artist and Wunderfrau Heide Hatry and her latest muse and family member; a stuffed puma called Luna - proving that the author of Ecclesiastes who insisted better a living dog than a dead lion was not always right. 

 

For sometimes, as Ms. Hatry knows, it is the deceased who have something vital to teach us. Which is why her long fascination with corpses has often resulted in work of great insight and macabre beauty. 

 

 

Fragmented Remarks on Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life - Part 2: The Return of the 70s

Joy Division (L-R: Peter Hook / Ian Curtis / Bernard Sumner / Stephen Morris) 

 

 "Were they fallen angels or ordinary blokes?"

 

 

Any piece of writing entitled 'The Return of the 70s' is guaranteed to excite my interest; particularly one that understands 1979-80 to be a threshold moment when one world gave way to another. 

 

But, as is so often the case, expectations are rarely met and part of my frustration with Mr Fisher's work comes out of disappointment. It's not that he fails to deliver insightful commentary (and retrospective judgement) on the decade, more that his points of reference are so very different from mine; the books of John le Carré and David Peace, for example, are almost entirely unfamiliar to me [a]. 

 

Thus, here, I shall discuss only what Fisher says about post-punk favourites Joy Division and the grotesque figure of Jimmy Savile [b].  

 

 

I. 

Fisher opens his exploration of the 70s with the following statement: "If Joy Division matter now more than ever, it's because they capture the depressed spirit of our times." [c] 

 

Fisher wants (and probably expects) his readers to agree that: 

 

(i) pop groups in general have (socio-cultural and/or philosophical) significance ...

 

(ii) Joy Division in particular have growing (socio-cultural and/or philosophical) import ...

 

(iii) a state of despondent melancholia defines the Geist der Zeiten in which he was writing [d] ...

 

(iv) this depressed spirit can magically be captured (embodied and expressed) by a group of musicians (which essentially returns us to the first point).    

 

The problem is, I'm not sure I do agree with all (or even any) of these points. 

 

But let's say, for arguments sake, that, like Hegel, we accept the notion that there's a virtual agency determining the ideas and beliefs of a given epoch and that art reflects the culture of the era in which it is created (not least because artists are themselves a product of their time). 

 

That might be an argument for why art matters, but it still doesn't mean Joy Division are - or ever were - as important as Fisher insists; "more than a pop group, more than entertainment" [53].

 

I mean, don't get me wrong, I like Joy Division and even have a well-worn copy of their debut studio album Unknown Pleasures (Factory Records, 1979) in my record collection. But they're not the Beatles, or the Sex Pistols, when it comes to capturing (and transforming) the spirit of the times or channelling the future. 

 

These two groups - and perhaps only these two - were (to adopt and extend a term coined by Foucault) founders of discursivity (changing forever the way we think, speak, act, dress, etc.).

 

 

II. 

 

Fisher continues his piece on Joy Division by declaring them to be "the most Schopenhauerian of rock groups" [59]. 

 

By which one might assume he was simply referring to the fact that although they failed to have much success during their time as a band (1976-1980), they have exerted a wide-reaching influence ever since. But actually, Fisher means something much more interesting:

 

"What makes Joy Division so Schopenhauerian is the disjunction between [Ian] Curtis's detachment and the urgency of the music, its implacable drive standing in for the dumb insatiability of the life-Will [...] not experienced by the depressive as some redemptive positivity, but as the ultimate horror ..." [60]

 

Fisher expands on this:

 

"Joy Division followed Schopenhauer through the curtain of Maya [...] and dared to examine the hideous machineries that produce the world-as-appearance. What did they see there? Only what all depressives, all mystics, always see: the obscene undead twitching of the Will as it seeks to maintain the illusion that this object, the one it is fixated upon NOW [...] will satisfy it in a way that all other objects thus far have failed to do." [60] 

 

Joy Division see through things; they know - far more radically than the Rolling Stones - that there's never any satisfaction; that the true Schopenhaurien moments are those "in which you achieve your goals, perhaps realise your long-cherished heart's desire - and feel cheated, empty [...] voided [61].

 

This existential revelation - that we don't really want or need what we thought we most desperately wanted or needed and that even our most urgent desires "are only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road" [61] - is central to what Fisher calls depressive ontology.

 

 

III. 

The great debate over Joy Division, says Fisher, is this: "Were they fallen angels or ordinary blokes?" [63]

 

Alert to the blackmail of the either/or, Fisher doesn't take the Deleuzian option of neither/nor, but nor, like Bartleby, does he simply prefer not to say. Rather, he suggests we should hold on to both options; "the Joy Division of Pure Art, and the Joy Division who were 'just a laff'" [63]. 

 

In other words, we should be a little bit of a romantic aesthete and a little bit of a lumpen empiricist, insisting like the latter on the need to root the band's songs "back in the quotidian at its least elevated and [...] least serious" [63]. 

 

Fisher's reason for wanting to hold on to both versions of Joy Division is surprising (and moving): 

 

"For if the truth of Joy Division is that they were Lads, then Joy Division must also be the truth of Laddism. And so it would appear: beneath all the red-nosed downer-fuelled jollity of the past two decades, mental illness has increased some 70% amongst adolescents. Suicide remains one of the most common sources of death for young males." [63] [e]

 

 

IV. 

 

We'll never know what Mark Fisher would have made of Steve Coogan's portrayal of Jimmy Savile in the four-part TV drama The Reckoning (2023), though I suspect he would have found it as problematic as Michael Sheen's portrayal of Brian Clough in The Damned United (2009) and for pretty much the same reasons:

 

"The problem with Sheen's now well established approach to historical characters is that it deprives the film's world of any autonomous reality - everything is indexed to a reality external to the film, judged only by how well it matches our already existing image of the character, whether that be Clough, Kenneth Williams, Blair or Frost." [87]

 

An actor with "more courage and presence than Sheen might have reached beyond physical appearances to reach a truth [...] not accessible via the TV footage" [87]. 

 

As I say - and without wanting to put words into Fisher's dead mouth -  I suspect he would also condemn Coogan for simply offering an impression of Savile; perfectly competant as far as "mannerisms and verbal tics" [87] go, but "devoid of any of the tortured inner life" [87] that might have made Savile a more complex and more interesting character (although, arguably, what was so terrifying about Savile was his emptiness; the fact that there was a complete moral vacuum where one might have expected to find at least the remnants of a soul).

 

 

V.       

 

Fisher makes the intriguing suggestion that Jimmy Savile may have struck a deal with the Devil:

 

"You'll get to live out your life with your reputation intact [...], but a year after your death, it will all be destroyed. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will survive. Your headstone will be dismantled. The penthouse in which you lived will be demolished. Your name will become synonymous with evil." [88]

 

Although he was a professed Catholic, I think Savile would have happily struck such a bargain. 

 

In fact, one suspects that the thought of the truth finally being revealed after his death would have delighted him. For it confirms the fact that he got away with everything and made fools of everyone, including politicians, members of the royal family, and even Pope John Paul II, who awarded him a knighthood in 1990.   

 

People say Savile was hiding in plain sight, but, actually, it was more a case of no one really daring to look, or, if they did look, then they refused to believe the evidence of their own eyes. It was only in 2012 that the obscene truth began to leak out, "like a build-up of effluent that could no longer be contained" [88] - first seeping, then surging.  

By the end of that year, says Fisher, "the 70s was returning, no longer as some bittersweet nostalgia trip, but as trauma" [89] as  the world of light (entertainment) transformed into "the darkest horror" [90]. Not only did we have to accept the truth about Savile, we also had to reconsider our affection for Gary Glitter and even, in 2014, Rolf Harris [f]. 

Parents used to think they had to lock up their children when the Rolling Stones or the Sex Pistols came to town, but it was actually Jake the Peg (diddle-iddle-iddle-um) and uncle Jimmy they really should've kept an eye on (as it 'appens).   

But they didn't. And so Savile went on abusing his victims; young and old, male and female, dead or alive. Fisher provides a political explanation why this was so:

"At the time when Savile was abusing, the victims were faced, not with Jimmy Savile the monster, Jimmy Savile the prolific abuser of children, but with Jimmy Savile, Knight Commader of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of Saint Gregory the Great. When we ask how Savile got away with it all, we must remember this. Naturally, fear played a part in keeping Savile's victims quiet. [...] But we also need to take seriously the way that power can warp the experience of reality itself. Abuse by the powerful induces a cognitive dissonance in the vulnerable - this can't possibly be happening." [94-95] 

 

Fisher (brilliantly) concludes his piece on Savile:

 

"The powerful trade on the idea that abuse and corruption used to happen, but not any more. Abuse and cover-up can be admitted, but only on condition that they are confined to the past. That was then, things are different now ..." [95]

Notes

 

[a] I have watched the film adaptation of Peace's 2006 novel The Damned Utd (2006) and I enjoyed it. Fisher, on the other hand, hates it; arguing that the film lacks all the bite and Gnostic mythography of the book and that in the hands of the film's director (Tom Hooper) and writer (Peter Morgan) the story is reduced into just another off-the-shelf cliché-ridden narrative. 

      Fisher also criticises Michael Sheen's performance (as Brian Clough) as campy and based on a popular image and pre-existing idea of the character, lacking depth or inner life. I will pick up on this in section IV of this post, when discussing Steve Coogan's portrayal of Jimmy Saville in the TV drama The Reckoning (2023). 

      See Fisher's piece '"Can the World Be as Sad as It Seems?": David Peace and His Adapters', in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (Zero Books, 2022), pp. 80-87. His remarks on The Damned Utd are on pp. 85-87.  

 

[b] British readers will of course know who Jimmy Savile was (and what he was). But for anyone who is unfamiliar with the name ... 

      Sir James Wilson Vincent Savile OBE KCSG (1926-2011) was an English media personality and DJ. He hosted the long-running BBC TV shows Top of the Pops and Jim'll Fix It. During his lifetime, Savile was well known (and much-loved, although Fisher denies this) for his eccentric image and charitable work. After his death, however, hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse made against him were investigated, leading the police to conclude that he had been a predatory and prolific sex offender (such allegations made during his lifetime were dismissed and accusers ignored or disbelieved). 

      As a result of the ensuing scandal, some of the honours that Savile was awarded during his career were posthumously revoked and his television appearances - including episodes of Top of the Pops that he presented - are no longer repeated. As Fisher notes: "Now, condemnation is not enough: all traces of his existence must be removed [...] as if he were some medieval devil [...]" Ghosts of My Life, p. 94. 

 

[c] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life ... p. 50. Future page references to this second edition of Fisher's book will be given directly in the text.   

[d] Fisher's piece on Joy Division was adapted from a post on his k-punk blog dated 9 Jan 2005. It was published in its final form in Ghosts of My Life in 2014. 

[e] Joy Division's vocalist and lyricist Ian Curtis, who suffered from epilepsy and depression, committed suicide, aged 23, in May 1980. Writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who also suffered from depression, committed suicide, aged 48, in January 2017. As a friend of mine remarked upon hearing of the latter's death (perhaps a little cruelly): K-punk is kaput.  

[f] Glitter's status as a glam rock idol was irredeemably tarnished after he was imprisoned for downloading child pornography in 1999, convicted of child sexual abuse in 2006, and found guilty of a series of sexual offences (including attempted rape) in 2015. All round entertainer Rolf Harris, popular throughout the '60s, '70s, and 1980s, was convicted in 2014 of having sexually assaulted four underage girls. 

 

Part 1 of this post on Lost Futures can be read by clicking here.   

Part 3 of this post - on hauntology - can be read by clicking here. 

 

A Brief Note on the Psychology of Philosophy

I think, therefore I'm ill

 

I. 

 

After a recent 6/20 presentation [1], someone in the audience surprised me by saying that she didn't really wish to address the philosophical aspects of the subject (mourning), as whenever she started to think about such ideas they made her feel unwell. 

 

This raises a question that the London-based writer Sam Woolfe discussed in an interesting blog post a couple of years back: Can Philosophy Harm Your Mental Health? [2]

 

Obviously, the answer is yes - what would be the point of it otherwise? However, I'd like here to briefly pick up on Woolfe's work on the relationship between psychological traits (if they exist) and philosophical beliefs (if that isn't an oxymoron). 

 

 

II.  

 

Although I'm wary of turning philosophy into just another all too human discipline rooted in the personality and biography of the practitioner, I have to acknowledge that Nietzsche would often do this in an attempt to expose the prejudices of philosophers and demonstrate how rationality is a peculiar abberation that has grown out of unreason (i.e., the unconscious forces, flows, fears, and desires of the body) [3].  

 

However, to conclude that philosophy is simply the attempt to turn the universe into a home for man by ascribing moral logic to it via an exploration of one's own temperament - as the neo-Platonic philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch concludes - is, ironically, too depressing a thought. 

 

Ultimately, I think Ray Brassier is right to argue that philosophy should do more than simply further human conceit and that its nihilistic destiny is to acknowledge the fact that thinking has interests that do not coincide with the feelings of the philosopher (nor, indeed, with his life and wellbeing) [4]. Whilst it might be fun, therefore, to look for correlations between psychological traits and philosophical beliefs, there's more important work to be done by those courageous (or perhaps crazy) enough to do it. 

 

 

III.

 

Having said that, like Woolfe, I found it interesting to discover from the work of David Yaden and Derek Anderson [5] that those who, like me, subscribe to a model of hard determinism tend to rank higher on the depression/anxiety index [6]

 

I've certainly been feeling fed up lately and perhaps that is due (in part at least) to my philosophical pessimism. However, I'd rather be down in the dumps but intellectually honest, than happy and full of false hope as a result of only reading optimistic authors who pangloss over the tragic character of existence. 

 

And, who knows, just as one can eventually transform suffering into a form of passion via which one discovers bliss, perhaps we might also transform the darkest depression and profoundest pessimism into a form of fröhliche Wissenschaft. As Woolfe notes, "it is certainly possible and consistent to live a happy, joyful, and meaningful life while taking philosophical pessimism seriously".

 

So, my advice is keep reading Schopenhauer and Cioran, invent new reasons to live each day and, when stuck in a hole, just keep digging and discover for yourself whether there's any truth in the China syndrome. 

 

For even if Woolfe is right to conclude that some philosophical ideas - such as antinatalism, solipsism, or existential absurdism - may contribute to or worsen poor mental health [7], so what? I sometimes think better madness (or at least a few sleepless nights) than the bourgeois model of sanity (or common sense) we are expected to preserve. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See the TTA Events page for an abstract to the talk 'In Praise of Mourning' (presented at Christian Michel's 6/20 Club, on 6 July 2023): click here.  

 

[2] Sam Woolfe, 'Can Philosophy Harm Your Mental Health?' on samwoolfe.com

      Whilst I'm not sure we'd agree on all that much, I admire the fact that Woolfe has maintained a blog since 2012 (the same year that Torpedo the Ark began) and that he describes himself as a writer with "a penchant for complex and challenging subjects that involve a multitude of perspectives".  

 

[3] See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886). In §6 of the first chapter of this work - 'On the Prejudices of Philosophers' - he famously writes: 

      

"It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir [...]" 

      

I am using R. J. Hollingdale's translation of this work (Penguin Books, 1990).  

 

[4] Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), xi. 

 

[5] See David B. Yaden and Derek E. Anderson, 'The psychology of philosophy: Associating philosophical views with psychological traits in professional philosophers', Philosophical Psychology, Vol. 34, Issue 5 (Taylor & Francis, 2021), pp. 721-755. DOI: 10.1080/09515089.2021.1915972

[6] As Woolfe points out, for those who wish to posit a link between determinism and mental illness, it makes sense that a lack of belief in free will can be associated with depression, given that the latter is often characterised by feelings of hopelessness and helplessness.

 

[7] What Woolfe actually says is this: 

 

"I would not go so far as to say that reading or studying philosophy is likely to be the major defining cause of a mental disorder. But I am open to the possibility that some philosophical ideas - and philosophising itself - may contribute to, worsen, or vindicate poor mental health." 

 

The fact that he adds the idea of vindication is certainly striking and something readers might like to consider for themselves.

More Philosophy on the Catwalk (With Reference to the Case of Andrea Sachs and her Cerulean Blue Sweater)

 

Anne Hathaway as Andrea Sachs and Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly

The Devil Wears Prada (dir. David Frankel, 2006)

 

 

When writing about fashion, it's important to do so with reference to politics and philosophy; to show, for example, how the sartorial expression of identity is never purely an individual matter. 

 

For as Miranda Priestly so memorably instructs a smirking Andrea, no one pulls on a lumpy blue sweater as a matter of personal preference [1]. 

 

That's not to argue that the way we look is determined and regulated in the minutest detail by the fashion industry, or that human beings lack a certain degree of free will.

 

But it is to indicate how those who say they don't care about the dictates of fashion are never truly exempt from the latter and that, to paraphrase Schopenhauer, whilst we are free to wear whatever we want, we are not free to choose what we want [2].

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm referring to the scene in The Devil Wears Prada in which Miranda Priestly (editor of a hugely influential fashion magazine) instructs her fledgling assistant Andrea Sachs (a college graduate who aspires to be a serious journalist) on how her unstylish dress sense doesn't reveal that she is above (or outside of) the world of fashion. 

      In fact, quite the opposite; it exposes her as an unwitting fashion victim, naive about the importance of design. Objecting to Andy's use of the word stuff to describe (and dismiss) fashionable clothes, Miranda launches into a devastating monologue:

 

"Oh, okay. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select, I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue. It's not turquiose, it's not lapis. It's actually cerulean. You're also blithely unaware of the fact that, in 2002, Oscar de La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns, and then I think it was Yves St. Laurent [...] who showed cerulean military jackets [...] 

      And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores, and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry, when in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room, from a pile of 'stuff'."   

 

      - From the original screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna. To watch how the scene plays out on screen, click here. 

 

[2] See chapter 5 of Schopenhauer's 1839 essay Über die Freiheit des menschlichen Willens, trans. into English as 'On the Freedom of the Will', by Christopher Janaway, in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2009), where he argues that whilst man always does what he wills, he does so necessarily. 

Aujourd'hui, Maman est morte

Last photo of my mother on her 96th birthday 

(10 July 2022)

 

 

My mother died today. Unlike Meursault, however, I'm pretty certain of that. 

 

Because today also happens to be my birthday and I'm accepting her death as a kind of final gift: a chance to live again and re-enter the world from the same woman who bore me sixty years ago. 

 

Funny how, at such a time, one thinks of a short French novel published 80-odd years ago (L'Étranger) and of a fictional character indifferent in the face of death, or, perhaps more precisely, accepting of la tendre indifférence (or absurdity) of the universe in which life unfolds and then quickly closes.    

And funny how one also (rather shamefully) recalls the words written by Schopenhauer following the death of a Putzfrau to whom he had been paying a monthly sum by court order after an altercation in which she was injured: Obit anus, abit onus ('The old woman dies, the burden is lifted').

But mostly I just remember the final lovely smile my mother gave me as she found the strength to say my name one last time.

For a follow up post to this one, please click here. 

Feed the World

New sign erected at a local equestrian centre; the exclamation mark 

detracting from the politness of the request. 

(Image: SA/2022)

 

 

I. 

 

What has the world come to when you can't feed the local ducks some breadcrumbs, or give the horses that live nearby some sugar lumps? 

 

How are children going to learn to care for animals and understand they have a duty towards them if they can't physically interact, but simply observe from a distance or from behind a barbed wire fence? 

 

 

II. 

 

I'm aware of the argument that feeding the ducks bread - something that has been enjoyed by young and old alike for generations - may have negative health implications for the birds and, apparently, pollute the water causing excess algae growth.

 

But I'm not convinced they'll live happier (or longer) lives by relying exclusively on natural food sources that they have to find for themselves. 

 

For it seems to me that every creature appreciates a treat now and then, or enjoys a free meal. And it also seems to me that birds, squirrels, horses, and even sticky-bun loving elephants at the zoo, all benefit from friendly interaction with human beings as much as we do with them.   

It's wrong to stifle the instinct of generosity and the will to share; particularly when this is said to be done for the recipient's own benefit. 

 

I suspect that the same kind of mean-spirited people who put up signs saying do not feed in relation to animals, also insist it's harmful to give money to the poor; such handouts only risk trapping them in a lifestyle of dependency.

 

We would do well to remember the words of Schopenhauer on this question: 

 

Kindness towards animals is so intimately associated with goodness of character, that it may be asserted with confidence that those who are mean to birds and beasts will also lack compassion and generosity for their fellow human beings.  

 

Ultimately, by feeding the animals you nourish your own soul.  

The Rich Can Buy Soap: Why I Find Shepard Fairey's Hope Poster Problematic

Shepard Fairey in front of his portrait of Barack Obama before its installation 

at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. in 2009

Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

 

 

I. 

 

Someone has emailed:

 

'I was intrigued - and, if I'm honest, slightly irritated - by the fact that after praising Shepard Fairey's Hope poster as a work of art and defending his right to have transformed the original photo by Mannie Garcia on the grounds of fair use, you couldn't resist adding a line in a footnote to the effect that, actually, you didn't much care for the piece after all; branding it as an all-too-blatant example of political propaganda. Would you care to elaborate on this remark?' [1]

Well, although I hadn't planned on saying anything further about Fairey's work, I've decided to take this opportunity to do so, since I was asked in a such a sincere spirit of both intrigue and irritation ...

 

 

II. 

 

Just to be clear from the outset: I'm not suggesting that art should (or could) be pure in some manner or untainted by politics. And lots of great works are explicitly political; Picasso's Guernica (1937) would be an obvious example of such.

 

But I do feel a little uncomfortable when an artist produces a work that is endorsed by a presidential campaign team and which is, in effect, a piece of political advertising that doesn't only promote Barack Obama's candidacy, but attempts to fob us off with the untenable - and treacherous - ideal of hope.

 

One is reminded of something that D. H. Lawrence wrote about advertisements; no matter how clever, how beautiful, or how seductive their use of language and imagery, one can never quite forget they disguise a sharp hook with which to catch the consumer [2]. 

 

I'm not denying, therefore, that Fairey's Obama portrait is a genuine work of art that brings forth a number of powerful reactions, but I don't like feeling that I'm having my reactions pre-determined and manipulated - particularly when Fairey is doing so in a manner that suggests he is attempting to spiritualise politics and sell us not only his version of the American Dream, but inspire mankind with a promise of redemption.  

 

My main problem is not with the instantly iconic image of Barack Obama, heavily stylised by Fairey and displaying many features that belong to his distinctive aesthetic, it's with the slogan HOPE plastered across the bottom in capital letters [3]. 

 

As a pessimistic philosopher, I obviously have problems with this sentimental and morally optimistic ideal of hope. I never expect (nor particularly desire) positive outcomes; I certainly don't pray for such. 

 

Like Schopenhauer, I regard hope as a pernicious delusion or a folly of the heart that undermines the individual's appreciation of probability; like Nietzsche, I suspect the gods enjoy the spectacle of human suffering and so provide hope as a way of prolonging such (it is arguably, therefore, the most evil of all evils). 

I'm glad to see that, by 2015, Shepard Fairey was expressing his disappointment with President Obama and his administration, having lost a good deal of hope as evidence of increased military drone use and domestic surveillance came to light [4].

 

But one wonders just what Fairey - a self-confessed sex pistol - was thinking of back in 2008 by pledging his support of Obama so openly and promoting a theological virtue; had he forgotten the great slogan of punk: No Future ...? [5] 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The writer is referring to a post of 4 Feb 2022 entitled 'Notes on Fair Use With Reference to the Case of Shepard Fairey and the Obama Hope Poster' - click here.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 238. I comment further on the poetry and politics of modern advertising with reference to this essay by Lawrence (as well as Roland Barthes's take on the subject in Mythologies) in a post that can be accessed by clicking here. 

[3] Originally, the poster featured the word progress, but the Obama campaign team expressed concerns about the connotations of this idea and advised that the key terms that they were promoting were hope and change.  

[4] See the interview with Fairey by Matt Patches in Esquire (May 28, 2015): click here. 

 

[5] No Future was the original title of 'God Save the Queen', by the Sex Pistols, and the phrase is repeated throughout the song. One might also remind Fairey of something that Sartre once said: 'Voting is not a political act. It's an act of resignation.' Thus one should never vote for anyone or anything, only against.   

The Study of Myth is an Occupation for Imbeciles

Pop art prints by Amazon

I.

It's always worth remembering to whom Nietzsche dedicated the first edition of Human, All Too Human (1878): it wasn't Schopenhauer and it wasn't Wagner; it was Voltaire. 

And whilst there are very few references to Voltaire in Nietzsche's writings after this date, he always remained well-disposed towards this giant of the Enlightenment, describing him in Ecce Homo (1888) as a grand seigneur of the spirit in whom he sees a crucial aspect of himself.   

II.

Perhaps even more surprising than the dedication in Human, All Too Human to Voltaire was the inclusion of a passage - in lieu of a preface - taken from Descartes's Discourse on Method (1637) in praise of reason. 

All of which indicates that it's lazy and mistaken to characterise Nietzsche as an irrationalist, as many of his opponents (and, indeed, many of his supporters) have done. He wasn't - even if there are many passages in his work that lend themselves to an irrationalist interpretation.

Nor, having realised the error of his ways in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), was Nietzsche a mythologist.

If, in this dubious work, he asserted that "without myth all culture loses its healthy and natural creative power" [1], by 1876 he understood that the conditions no longer existed for myth to function in this way; not least because its narratives were no longer considered to have any significant truth content:    

"If an epoch has thought beyond the realm of myths, a breach has occurred which fundamentally alters a society's relationship to myths. Their value dwindles and is perhaps replaced by aesthetic value. However, myths considered from an aesthetic point of view cannot maintain the impact required to consolidate a 'cultural movement' into a state of unity." [2]

Safranski continues:

"Nietzsche grew aware that [...] eras of the past could be conjured up in the mind, but that their renaissance could be enacted only at the cost of self-deception. A modern mythical consciousness is hollow; it represents systematized insincerity." [3]

It becomes, in other words, a will to aesthetic self-enchantment; or, in a word, Wagnerian. And Nietzsche had already begun to recognise what lay behind this word even before the shock and disappointment he experienced at Bayreuth in 1876, where he saw for himself how even supposedly sacred art rests on cheap scenery and costumes.

Whereas Nietzsche had once shared Wagner's goal of overcoming modernity and bringing about a rebirth of tragedy from out of the spirit of music, he now regarded this as an impossible - and undesirable - fantasy; an attempt to lie one's way into madness.

From 1876 on, Nietzsche refuses to employ philosophy to "nullify reason and dream his way into an aesthetic myth" [4]. And from this date on, he agreed with Voltaire that l'étude du mythe est une occupation pour les imbéciles ...

Notes

[1] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, ed. Michael Tanner, trans. Shaun Whiteside, (Penguin Books, 1993), p. 109. 

[2] Rüdiger Safranski, Nietzsche, trans. Shelley Frisch, (Granta Books, 2002), p. 140.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., p. 141. 

This post is a revised extract from 'On the Abuses and Disadvantages of Mythology for Life: A Timely Meditation', in Stephen Alexander, Visions of Excess and Other Essays, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), pp. 219-253.  

For a related post (also extracted from the above essay) on myth and literary criticism, click here.

Schopenhauer and the Sea Turtles

An Indonesian sea turtle and a 19th century German philosopher

As everyone knows, Schopenhauer thought the world a manifestation not of God, but of will. And by will he meant a blind impulse or force which is not only not divine in origin, but might best be characterised as demonic.

And life? Well, life too, according to Schopenhauer, is a manifestation of a hungry will, concerned only with its own continuation. Thus, we witness innumerable species and individual organisms caught up in an endless feeding frenzy in order to survive and reproduce others of their kind. 

In order to convey the pointless horror of this scenario, Schopenhauer famously tells the tale of an explorer in Indonesia who comes across an immense area littered with bones. At first, he thought it an ancient battlefield, but soon realised that what he had discovered were, in fact, the skeletons of large sea turtles that had come ashore in order to lay their eggs.

Unfortunately, in so doing the turtles frequently fall prey to wild dogs "which combine their efforts to tip them onto their backs, tear off the lower carapace and the small scales on their bellies, and devour them alive".

Not that the dogs get to enjoy their meal in peace for very long: for often a tiger will be attracted to the scene and will then prey on them in turn. This scene, an incessant struggle full of prolonged suffering and violence, repeatedly played out across millennia, will only end, says Schopenhauer, when "the crust of the planet again bursts open".

It is not only absurd, it is atrocious. And yet it is this way that the will - expressed as a will to life - objectifies itself.

As Michel Houellebecq amusingly suggests, this passage from The World as Will and Representation should be dedicated to those animal lovers and ecologists who imagine that the earth would be some kind of paradise if only mankind were to stop interfering or vanish altogether.

See:

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, ed. and trans Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway, (Cambridge University Press, 2010). The lines quoted are found in Vol. 2, Ch. 28.

Michel Houellebecq, In the Presence of Schopenhauer, trans. Andrew Brown, (Polity Press, 2020), Ch. 3, pp. 32-33. For Houellebecq, Schopenhauer's passage on the turtles is "one of those that can provoke a stupefaction, a final coming to awareness, like a lightning crystallization of the scattered feelings left in us by the experience of life ..." 
 

Notes

Without even addressing Schopenhauer's metaphysical philosophy, he was wrong on at least one point in the above. For whilst wild dogs may still feed on sea turtles, there are no longer any tigers on Java to worry about; they became extinct in the 1970s. It didn't require the end of the world, therefore, to break this feeding cycle, simply an expansion of rice-growing humanity: the population increasing from 28 million at the beginning of the 20th century, to 85 million by 1975. Ancient forest, meanwhile, which still covered a quarter of the island in the 1930s, had by this date shrunk to just 8% and existed only in small patches, unsuitable to sustain a tiger population. 

Portrait of Schopenhauer by Ludwig Sigismund Ruhl (c.1815).

In the Presence of Michel Houellebecq in the Presence of Schopenhauer

Front cover of the Polity Press edition (2020)

designed by Adam Renvoize

I.

The fact that Michel Houellebecq loves Schopenhauer and that the latter has had a profound and enduring influence on the former's own work reinforces my view that French literature and theory is almost wholly dependent upon a reading (and often radical interpretation) of German philosophy.

That's not a criticism, or an attempt to denigrate the suppleness and courtly charm of French writing, just an observable fact. Certainly, as Michel Onfray has demonstrated, the whole of Houellebecq's oeuvre can be understood in terms first set out in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung two centuries ago, a text described by Houellebecq as "the most important book in the world" [2].

As Agathe Novak-Lechevalier notes:

"In both cases, suffering is taken for granted, and there is the same pessimism, the same conception of style, and even the same central  emphasis on compassion as the general basis for ethics; we also find the same salvific character of aesthetic contemplation, and the same impossibility of 'being at home' in the world." [xii]

Although I've never been quite as passionate about Schopenhauer as Houellebecq, I accept that "even if you ultimately find yourself in disagreement with him, you cannot fail to be deeply grateful to him" [4-5].

But then, as a Nietzschean, I would say that; for although Nietzsche stages a decisive break from Schopenhauer, it remains, nevertheless a break from Schopenhauer and not from Hegel or Schelling, for example. Schopenhauer, as Nick Land says, provides Nietzsche - and those who come after him, including Freud - with a philosophical tap-root.

It's surprising, therefore, and a little disappointing, to find Houellebecq confessing his hostility for Nietzsche: "I found his philosophy immoral and repulsive, but his intellectual power impressed me. I would have liked to destroy Nietzscheanism, to tear it down to its very foundations, but I did not know how to do so; intellectually, I was floored." [2]

Eventually, Houellebecq finds someone to take him beyond both his nemesis Nietzsche and his hero Schopenhauer - Auguste Comte; "gradually, with a kind of disappointed enthusiasm, I became a positivist" [3-4]. Which is, perhaps, something that happens to us all when we leave childhood behind, and wake up ...

II.

Having said that, Houellebecq admits that he rarely reads Comte; and never with that simple, immediate pleasure he gets from Schopenhauer. He also attempts to demonstrate, via a selection of favourite passages, "why Schopenhauer's intellectual attitude remains [...] a model for any future philosopher" [4].

Of course, Schopenhauer has long been a favourite amongst artists and writers (a fact which has often undermined his status amongst philosophers). For Schopenhauer dares to speak about those things many philosophers think either unknowable or unworthy of serious reflection; such as love, for example.

What's more, he does so - as Houellebecq reminds us - from an aesthetic perspective, thereby entering the field of "novelists, musicians and sculptors" [12]. Schopenhauer knows how to look at things attentively, allowing his entire consciousness be filled with 'the peaceful contemplation of a directly present natural object' - which is in itself something of an art (and the origin of all art, according to Houellebecq).

The artist, in other words, isn't simply one who makes things; he's one who loses himself in things. In other words, contemplation is the key and the artist "is always someone who might just as well do nothing but immerse himself contentedly in the world and in the vague daydream associated with it" [16].

The essential difference, argues Houellebecq, between the poet and the non-poet, is that the former "alone among grown-up men, retains a faculty of pure perception which is usually only met in childhood, madness, or in the subject matter of dreams" [17]. This form of intuition, born of contemplation that is free from all conscious thought or desire, is central to Schopenhauer's philosophy and is "as far removed from classicism as from romanticism" [24].

That may or may not be true, but the question is how far does Houellebecq buy into this neo-Buddhist bullshit? One might have assumed his later reading of Comte would have alerted him to the constant danger of falling back into metaphysics (including such an artisten metaphysik as Schopenhauer's, ever reliant upon metaphors borrowed from the world of theatre).

Perhaps if Houellebecq had (re-)examined Nietzsche's break with Schopenhauer (and, indeed, Nietzsche's rejection of his own early work, still written under the spell of the latter and of Wagner), he'd have produced a more interesting study than the one given us in this abandoned commentary - conceived primarily as a homage - from 2005, which remained unpublished until 2017 and probably would never have seen the light of day were it not written by (arguably) France's greatest living novelist.   

Ultimately, as Novak-Lechevalier rightly says, the book is valuable not for what it tells us about Schopenhauer, but for what it tells us about Houellebecq and his concerns:

"Little by little, the analysis emancipates itself from the letter of the [Schopenhauerian] text, and what we find is the outline of an investigation into the problems posed by splatter films and the representation of pornography in art, a criticism of the philosophies of the absurd, and, a little further on, a reflection on the emergence of urban poetry, the transformations of twentieth-century art, and the 'tragedy of banality' which 'remains to be written'." [xiii]

Thus, in this way, the book is an intensely personal exercise that reveals a number of distinctly Houellebecquian obsessions.


See: Michel Houellebecq, In the Presence of Schopenhauer, Preface by Agathe Novak-Lechevalier, trans. Andrew Brown, (Polity Press, 2020). All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.

Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude is a form of malicious mirth that takes cruel delight in another's misfortune, failure, or humiliation. Nietzsche describes this complex emotional response as all too human, in contrast to Schopenhauer who assigns it a diabolical origin. Either way, there's no exact English term for it; I've never heard anyone use epicaricacy.

However, this isn't to say that the English, for all their talk of fair play and siding with the underdog, don't also take pleasure in seeing others - particularly successful individuals from a humble origin - lose out or be brought back down to earth with a bump, in order to remind them of who they were and who they essentially remain.

In other words, schadenfreude has an unpleasant moral component wrapped inside its apparent immorality. We laugh and jeer and sneer at others in order to teach them a lesson; schadenfreude is a form of judgement and punishment; i.e. morally corrective justice.

And it's for that reason - rather than the cruelty as such - that I don't like it: torpedo the ark means (amongst other things) to have done with judgement. Further, one's own natural indifference to how others fare means that I never really experience schadenfreude any more than its opposite, compassion or, keeping things in German, Mitgefühl.* I might not feel your pain or suffering - but I won't laugh at it either. 

So - just to be clear on this - I don't have a moral objection to schadenfreude; rather I object to it as a form of moralism. And perhaps also as a form of faint-heartedness and bourgeois compromise. For whilst observing others suffer may well have a tonic effect on the soul of man, as Nietzsche suggests, it's making others suffer which is where the true festival of cruelty begins ...  

*It might be noted that this indifference also extends towards my own welfare or fate. Partly this is punk nihilism and partly it's informed by the ethics of Stoicism. There are also elements of Sade, Masoch, Lawrence and Larry David mixed up in there too (apathy, coldness, insouciance, and the curbing of enthusiasm). None of this says anything whatsoever about my own sense of self-esteem.           

See: Tiffany Watt Smith, Schadenfreude: the Joy of Another’s Misfortune, (Profile Books / Wellcome Collection, 2018). See also her article in The Guardian entitled 'The secret joys of schadenfreude' (14 Oct 2018): click here. 

Thanks to Simon Solomon for provoking this post.

All of My Life is All I'll Give You: Un/Holy Reflections on the Case of St. Nietzsche (A Guest Post by Símón Solomon)

Nietzsche Icon from Ryan Haecker's 
blog Transhuman Traditionalism 

I.

'How is negation of the will possible? How is the saint possible? This really seems to have been the question that started Schopenhauer off and made him into a philosopher.'

- Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil, §47 

In concert with these Kantian-looking questions, Nietzsche conjoins his taskmaster in tragic aesthetics, so that, guilty by association, Schopenhauer's questions become Nietzsche's questions too. That they are also two questions he collapses into one yields, in effect, a pseudo-singularity that differs from itself. To insert ourselves between them, to read Nietzsche against himself by insisting on their analytical separability, we must therefore ask:

(i) What if sainthood were not only the personification of the will's renunciation?

(ii) What if martyrdom were something other, something stranger, than the instincts' resentful atrophy?

(iii) Might the saint even be that inculpable being, incorruptibly defenceless, who is innervated by a god?


II.

'Up to now the most powerful people have still bowed reverently before the saint, as the riddle of self-conquest and of intentional final sacrifice. Why did they bow? In him they sensed - and, so to speak, behind the question mark of his fragile and lamentable appearance - the superior strength which wished to test itself in such a victory, the fortitude of the will, in which they knew how to recognise and honour their own fortitude and pleasure in mastery once more.'

- Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil, §51

In this exemplary aphorism, Nietzsche bears witness to the figure of the saint as a kind of limit-figure, in which the ascetic ideal - the nadir of the slavish revolt against which he stockpiles his anti-Christian dynamite - folds back upon itself into a mystical spectacle of the will to power. We might think here of Jung's crucial insight that les extrêmes se touchent; an observation that further demands Nietzsche be received as the ground-breaking psychologist he claimed himself to be, presenting as he is an early object lesson in the psychodynamics of projection. 'They were honouring something in themselves', he discerns, 'when they venerated the saint'.

Or, as Zarathustra declared, 'You want to create the world before which you can kneel: this is your ultimate hope and intoxication'.

Just as Rudolf Otto identified terror and fascination as the two drivers of religious awe, such overmastered reverence conceals, on Nietzsche’s diagnosis, a diabolical distrust: a hermeneutics of suspicion avant la lettre freudienne. What the men of power learned from this 'monster of denial' and unnatural contrarian was thus a new kind of dread, a new fear of power's self-overcoming.

In other words, they encountered in the saint a kind of fiend or force field, an unsurpassable adversary, atrociously empowered by 'a burning eye in a body half destroyed' [Human All Too Human, §141]. The will now bore a power that brought them, the non-saints, to a standstill. If the saint was a question mark, as Nietzsche tells us, whom they felt compelled to question, its crook sent back no echo.

In Tears and Saints, the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran offers the stirring speculation that 'Nietzsche’s greatest merit is that he knew how to defend himself from saintliness. What would have become of him had he let loose his natural impulses? He would have been a Pascal with all the saints’ madnesses.'

Of course, a wholly undefended Nietzsche would still have been Nietzsche, but for Cioran a Pascal-pacified Nietzsche, the Pascal Nietzsche envisioned as 'profound, wounded and monstrous' [Beyond Good And Evil, §45] and who antedated Wagner alongside Schopenhauer as one half of the four couples who did not refuse him, the sacrificer, in his 'descent into Hades' [Human All Too Human II, §408].


III.

As to the demono-maniacal Nietzsche's infamous sign-off in Ecce Homo, 'Dionysus against the Crucified', was what defeated him what also broke his youthful Lieblingsdichter, the mad poet Hölderlin: the monotheistic cult of the Cross plunging into the imperishable circus of the Greeks that revolved around it eternally? The image of the Bacchic Jesus, the horned Christ, is a demonic thought, truly beyond good and evil.

Nietzsche may not have been a Christian, or, perhaps, was a kind of mortified Christian - 'a man whom the grace of God has not touched’ as Eric Voegelin described him - but nor was he simply a nostalgic pagan, a satyr of the wine-god: the god of ecstatic dissonance, of wine, women and tears.

As Rouven J. Steeves has noted, Nietzsche was not unambiguously 'against' Christianity, or laying siege to the Nazarene with the sorcery of Greek ecstasy. Rather, as something 'even more primordial', his agon channelled the free spirit of Luther via Pascal, mingled with his self-styled Dionysus as a creative principle of life, to become a kind of Jobian Prometheus - an anti-ass, a world-historical beast, a fire-breathing Anti-Christ.

'Dionysus against the Crucified' signals, we suggest, a kind of divine double-crossing, an impossible authorship: a Dionysus crucified; the dying Christ dionyised. The German gegen, however can also signify 'towards': Dionysus towards the Crucified. And toward the end, Nietzsche signed himself as the Crucified One ...

In the German language, weinen and wein, tears and wine, share a common root. Drinking and dying are given together for those who dare to speak with a forked tongue, before they are driven mad. Here is the close of Nietzsche’s pious and tormented 1863 schoolboy poem, 'Before the Crucifix'.


On the floor lay a coin,
corroded and minted
with the devil’s hand and blow,
what it costs eternally, in heaven and on earth,
the soul hanging on the cross,
and, sunk deep in sin and lust,
thinking itself holy
that must yet be damned.


Author's Notes

E. M. Cioran, Tears and Saints, trans. I. Zarifopol-Johnston, (University of Chicago Press, 1998). 

E. Cyblulska, 'Nietzsche Contra God: A Battle Within', Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, vol. 16 (1-2 October, 2016), pp. 1–12 (online).

C. Kerényi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, trans. R. Manheim, (Princeton University Press, 1976).

R. J. Steeves, 'Dionysus versus the Crucified: Nietzsche and Voegelin and the Search for a Truthful Order', in Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition, ed. L. Trepanier and S. F. McGuire (University of Missouri, 2011), pp. 108-136.

E. Voegelin, 'Nietzsche and Pascal', Nietzsche-Studien, vol. 25(1), pp.128-171. 


Editor's Notes

Símón Solomon is a poet, translator, critic and tutor. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and serves as a managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He blogs at (and can be contacted via) simonsolomon.ink

Símón appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm.

To read a sibling post by Stephen Alexander, on why it's preferable to have horns rather than a halo, click here.