Ataraxia (Notes on the Ethics of Pleasure with Reference to the Work of Epicurus and Nietzsche)

Serenity Now - Print by D. Waechter 

DWaechterArt / etsy.com

I. Serenity Now

Ataraxia is an ancient Greek term [ἀταραξία] that refers to an accomplished state of equanimity in which the body is free from pain and the mind is free from any anxiety or distress. 

To achieve this highly valued state of serenity was a desideratum among several schools of philosophy. Sceptics and Stoics alike cherished the concept of ataraxia; as did the followers of Epicurus - and it's the role of ataraxia within the latter's thinking that I wish to discuss here.


II. Two Types of Pleasure

For Epicurus, ataraxia was a crucial component of the good life. It had, therefore, ethical significance as well as psychic import. And the good life? Well, as everybody knows, for Epicurus this is a life that promises happiness. Thus, for Epicureans, ataraxia is understood in relation to a concept of pleasure, which they thought of as either kinetic in nature, or katastematic.

Kinetic pleasure is pleasure that results from an instinctive action and satisfies a need or provides some form of relief; such as eating a bacon double cheeseburger, for example, or engaging in an act of masturbation. The joy that these things produce - which is as much (if not more) mental as it is physical in character - is kinetic.

The problem with such joy is that it's unstable or temporary in character. Thus it's soon followed by new discomfort; one feels a bit sick after eating the bacon double cheeseburger, for example, or perhaps full of guilt after succumbing to a shameful sexual fantasy.    

Katastematic pleasure, on the other hand, was regarded as superior by Epicurus because, once achieved, it was stable and enduring and involved the complete absence of any physical suffering or mental anguish. Those who lived free of the former were said to be a in a state of aponia [ἀπονία], whilst those who lived free of the latter were said to be in a state of ataraxia.

To be free from all pain and to experience uninterrupted pleasure was the key to happiness for Epicurus and thus, as said previously, it had great ethical import. For whilst Christ would later preach Be good and you will be happy, Epicurus understood that this was putting the cart before the horse.

Thus, for this reason if no other, the eudaemonic philosophy of Epicurus is superior to the mistaken moralising of Jesus. Certainly Nietzsche - who would later develop his own joyful wisdom - thought so.


III. Nietzsche and Epicurus

Perhaps not surprisingly, Nietzsche has his own unique take on Epicurus. He agrees that happiness is likely to result in ethical behaviour, but, for Nietzsche, what makes happy is not ataraxia (the absence of any inner turmoil), but the feeling of power [Machtgefühl]. And that's saying something quite different to Epicurus who conceived of power in purely negative terms.

Further, Nietzsche isn't buying into the idea that pleasure can ever be stable and enduring, or the future rendered pain-free. As a tragic philosopher, Nietzsche needs to hold on to a notion of suffering. One of his fundamental insights is that without sickness, violence, and chaos to shake us out of our all-too-human complacency we can never realise our potential as individuals and as a species.

And so whilst he acknowledges that Epicurean happiness is certainly worth struggling for and hard-won, he insists it remains precarious and is ultimately inseparable from the disturbances and discomforts that it seeks to eliminate. The sea of existence may look calm and have sunlight sparkling on its surface, but there's always for Nietzsche a storm over the horizon and monsters of the deep to contend with ...

Note: For an excellent discussion of many of the ideas above, including the influence of Epicurus on Nietzsche's mid-period writings, see Keith Ansell-Person, Nietzsche's Search for Philosophy, (Bloomsbury, 2018). Chapter 6: 'On Nietzsche's Search for Happiness and Joy', is particularly relevant, pp. 135-50. 

See also: Epicurus, The Art of Happiness, ed. and trans. George K. Strodach, (Penguin Books, 2013). 

Note: for a sister post to this one on the garden of Epicurus, click here. 

Ian Bogost: Play Anything (2016) - A Review (Part 3: Chapters 5-7)

Dr. Ian Bogost: bogost.com 

I have to admit, four chapters and 120 pages in, I'm a bit bored with this book by Bogost. The assertiveness and the repetitiveness I can deal with, but I have real trouble with the folksy Americanism of the writing style and the overly-familiar - overly-familial - character of the book. It's certainly not philosophy as I conceive of it. However, as Magnus Magnusson used to say, I've started so I'll finish ... 

Ch. 5: From Restraint to Constraint

Is abstaining from a material modern lifestyle really the answer to the paradox of choice?

It's an interesting question. But as much as I approve of a certain degree of asceticism, I don't think the answer is yes. And neither does Bogost, for whom restraint is a type of fashionable narcissism that only leads to irony - and irony, as we have seen, is Bogost's great bugbear.

Further, as a strategy for living better, restraint also connects to the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the values that lie at the foundations of the global economy (Bogost seems to take it as a given that both these things are highly suspect). Ultimately, he says, the feeling of any restraint results in "a terrible sensation" [130] and can even prove fatal (don't tell that to my friends in the BDSM community for whom orgasm denial is so delightful). 

What then? The answer, says Bogost, is to accept the world's constraints, rather than attempt to impose your own restraint upon it. Embracing constraint doesn't mean embracing asceticism (which is an expression of anxiety): "Rather, it means inventing or adopting a given situation as a playground in which further exploration is possible." [143]

In other words, for Bogost, there's a very real and important connection between constraint and creativity. He writes:

"Artists and designers have long known that creativity does not arise from pure, unfettered freedom. Little is more paralyzing than the blank canvas or the blank page. At the same time, the creative process is not driven by restraint either; one does not paint a painting or write a novel or form a sculpture or code an app by resisting the temptation to do something else. Rather, one does so by embracing the particularity of a form and working within its boundaries, within its constraints." [146]

But it's important to realise that Bogost is using the term creativity in a rather special (philosophical) sense derived from Whitehead. For Whitehead, creativity refers to a process (inherent to the universe) of generating novelty or newness; i.e. it's a fundamental feature of existence and not something unfolding exclusively within the sphere of human subjectivity and experience.

To mistakenly think man is central to the process of creativity, rather than peripheral, is what Bogost calls the fallacy of creativity. In the end, we don't speak, write, or sing the world - it speaks, writes, and sings us. Art emerges from a negotiation between the artist and a set of material conditions that impose certain limits. Graham Harman regards this as the culminating insight of Bogost's book and he might well be right; though, to be fair, it's found in Whitehead - as Bogost acknowledges - and we also find it in Heidegger, who famously declared Die Sprache spricht and that man is the poem of being (not the author).

The artist's job, then, is not to express his own desires, ideas, or fantasies. It is rather to allow the gods and demons to enter from behind and below; Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!, as Lawrence puts it.

Ch. 6: The Pleasure of Limits

Bogost picks up on this idea of inspiration in the context of ancient Greek poetry and the Muses. For the Greeks, of course, poetry was a worldly rather than a personal activity; one that was tied to a long cultural tradition, to myth, and to the divine. What he really wants to stress, however, is how structured it was - almost unimaginably so, for those raised into the idea of free verse in which almost any text "with unusual white space and line breaks" [158] qualifies as poetry. Bogost notes:

"A sonnet is not a poem even though it has to spill language across fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, but because it does. It takes the surplus of language and offers a rationale for structuring a portion of it in a particular way." [161]

I suppose that's true. But I'd still rather read one of the great modernist poets than Shakespeare. And besides, free verse - if it's any good - isn't really free in the way implied by Bogost. Other than idealists who believe in an individual's right to total freedom of expression and the dissolution of all form, all structure, all rule, etc. no one in their right mind thinks art is anything other than a discipline.

There might be pleasure in transgressing limits - be they aesthetic, moral, or physical in nature - but this is still, of course, a pleasure reliant upon limits. This isn't to say we should therefore fetishise limitations and constraints or regard rules as written in stone (though some do), it's simply to acknowledge that they're necessary.

Indeed, they're not only necessary, but ontologically crucial. For as Bogost points out: "A thing is not only what it appears to be, but it is also the conditions and situations [i.e. the constraints] that make it possible for it to be what it is." [174]

Or, put another way: "Limits aren't limitations, not absolute ones. They're just the stuff out of which stuff is made." [203]     


Ch. 7: The Opposite of Happiness

"Fun is the opposite of happiness" [216], says Bogost. For fun "doesn't produce joy as its emotional output, but tenderness instead" [217].

And so we arrive at a quasi-Lawrentian conclusion; playful encounters with another being - whether it's human, animal, vegetable, or artificial in nature - result in affection and warmth and sympathy. The German's have a word for this: Mitleid.

Thus, OOO - as an ethic or art of living - rests on the presumption that the essence of morality can be defined in terms of purely selfless actions that ask for and expect nothing in return. Nietzsche, of course, was highly critical of this; he'd regard it as laughably naïve, lacking as it does any appreciation of man's ethical complexity and the fact that there are multiple forces at work within every urge and every action.

Ultimately, if Bogost wishes to save his work from falling into warm soft fuzziness, then he needs to spend a little less time watching babies sleep and either subject it himself to a little coldness and cruelty, or find an editor who will read it with steely intelligence and a sharp pencil.   

Notes

Ian Bogost, Play Anything, (Basic Books, 2016). All page numbers given in square brackets refer to this hardback edition. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Song of a Man Who Has Come Through', The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013). 

To read Part 1 of this review - Notes on a Preface - click here.

To read Part 2 of this review - Chapters 1-4 - click here. 

Ian Bogost: Play Anything (2016) - A Review (Part 2: Chapters 1-4)

Basic Books (2016)

Ch. 1: Everywhere, Playgrounds

For someone keen to live in the world and not inside his own head - an admirable goal, that every post-Lawrentian must surely approve of - Bogost thinks and writes a lot about himself, his young daughter, and his lawn. He justifies this, however, by crediting his child with showing him how to transform the boredom and misery of everyday life into fun and the grass with teaching him to work with the world on its own terms.

Not that fun is Bogost's ultimate goal; that would be meaning. For whilst he wants to find novelty in familiar situations - his definition of fun - mostly he longs for meaningful experience. And that, he suggests, involves an immersive realism that counters the pervasive irony of today. Once we discover not only what things do and how they work, but what they "obviously and truly are" [9], then we'll be better able to thrive and flourish in an ultimately indifferent universe.       

I have to say, I like this idea of not retreating further and further into the self and of replacing mindfulness with worldfulness. But, on the other hand, I have problems with his definition of irony as a method for keeping reality at bay that is born of a fear of the world and the world's "incompatibility with our own desires" [10].

That's certainly not how I understand irony. It allows perspective on the world by creating a certain pathos of distance, that's true. But irony is born of sophisticated critical intelligence, not fear, and it's irony that allows us not only to gain perspective but, ultimately, make distinctions and give value to things within - to use another Nietzschean phrase - an order of rank.

I know that the OOO authors like their notion of a flat (democratic) ontology in which all things are equally things. But that doesn't mean that all things are equal. Or - come to that - that we can play anything.

For contrary to what Bogost asserts, I believe there are things "impervious to manipulation" [12] by human beings. He wants to meet the world, "more than halfway" [20], but it's still simply so he can make it ready-to-hand as Heidegger would say: "Living playfully isn't about you, it turns out. It's about everything else, and what you manage to do with it." [26]     

Ch. 2: Ironoia, the Mistrust of Things

Bogost develops his critique of irony, which he describes as a "prevailing aesthetic in popular culture" [33], as well as an affliction and the "great error of our age" [34]. He doesn't like it, 'cos he can't quite read it's meaning; it's like receiving a wink from a sexbot "you think you know what it means, until you realize the signal you took for meaning emanates from a source for which meaning is meaningless" [36].

That's a nice line; but it fails to convince me to reject irony and embrace sincerity. I have no problem with the seductive deception of the sexbot. Nor does her wink instill in me a general mistrust of things - or ironoia, as Bogost calls it. I don't use irony as a kind onto-prophylactic to make me feel safe. And if, as Bogost claims, irony ultimately fails to protect us from the reality of the world and becomes a "death march into nihilism" [42] and nostalgia - well, isn't that ironic?    

And what does Bogost propose in place of irony? It seems to be something very much like the myth and the metaphysics of presence! He wants to know (and to touch) the world directly. Derrida must be spinning in his grave at this new demand for immediate access to meaning and an end to all indeterminacy and différance.

Even Graham Harman, who, by his own admission, has never been a great fan of Derrida and thinks the French philosopher's attempt to deconstruct presence follows a profoundly mistaken path, agrees with Heidegger that being is not presence and that the latter has, therefore, to be countered as an idea within any school of philosophical realism worthy of the name, including object-oriented ontology.

In as much as things are always withdrawn at some level and vacuum-sealed, we can only ever really know the world in translation, as it were. Or metaphorically. Or ... ironically.


Ch. 3: Fun Isn't Pleasure, It's Novelty

Fun isn't pleasure, says Bogost, it's novelty. I'm not sure, but I think Freud said something very similar; that whereas children are perfectly happy to repeat things over and over, adult enjoyment requires novelty as its precondition.

But what Roland Barthes taught us is not to mistake the mere stereotype of novelty for newness. It's only the latter, newness, in its absolute and often most shocking form, that results in bliss.

But what is bliss? For Barthes, it's more fatal than fun; it imposes a loss of some kind and brings the subject to a point of crisis. For Bogost, on the other hand, it means "giving yourself over to the structure of a situation" [83]. Somehow, that doesn't quite sound as sexy to me. 

Nor does the claim that in order to find the secret novelty hidden in the heart of the everyday object or experience (and thus produce the fun), one must give things one's solemn attention and not treat them in a disrespectful and superficial manner. Fun requires persistence and seriousness and dignity. Bogost writes:

"So long as we are unwilling or unable to consider a set of actions as serious and intentional, even when those actions are mustered in the service of a seemingly absurd, foolish activity or end, then we will never be able to experience fun." [88]

And that's unfortunate, because fun is the antidote to irony:

"If irony represents the crack in the universe through which distrust and anxiety about living in a world full of surplus arises, then fun offers a glue with which we can seal those cracks and restore dignity to all the things we encounter - including ourselves." [89]

Here then is one more difference between Nietzsche and Bogost; whilst the former offers us a vision of the Übermensch, the latter fantasises about some kind of moral Sekundenkleber in a desperate and laughable attempt to put poor Humpty Dumpty together again. Has he not heard that all life is a process of breaking down ...?


Ch. 4: Play Is in things, Not in You

In play, then, for Bogost, we draw ever closer to things until we ultimately "meld with them" [92] in a big sticky unified mess. I suppose that's a goal for those who want it. But I don't want glued-together wholeness; I prefer cracks and fragmentation and if I believe in anything, then I believe in the ruins.

And so, whether play is an experience had with things, or, as Bogost claims, a property of things themselves, the more I hear him mention the idea, the more set against it I feel. It may well be impossible "to fully separate ourselves from the things that surround us" [101], but we can surely try not to be overly-intimate.

Just to be clear: I'm not saying I want to keep things at arm's length - which would make me an ironoiac according to Bogost - but I don't want to be forced to embrace everything and experience the world in obscene close-up. This isn't due to some kind of pathological phobia; discretion and reserve are signs of sovereignty as far as I'm concerned.         

The strange thing is that Bogost himself promotes an ethic of respectful letting-be, that I would quite happily endorse. Rather than attempting to subsume objects, events, and other people into our own sphere of being and influence - or our system of values - we should, he writes, let them play in their own manner.

Only "by addressing each thing for what it is, while all the while acknowledging that [nothing is] ... ours to address in the first place" [119], can they (or we) find freedom and fulfilment; or pleasure and meaning as Bogost insists on calling these things. 

Notes

Ian Bogost, Play Anything, (Basic Books, 2016). All page numbers given in square brackets refer to this hardback edition.

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Hill and Wang, 1998), pp. 40, 14.

Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, (Pelican Books, 2018). For a discussion of Derrida (in relation to OOO), see pp. 198-209. For a discussion of Bogost - with particular focus on Play Anything - see pp. 222-227.

To read the third and final part of this review - covering Chapters 5-7 - click here.

To read the first part of this review - notes on a Preface - click here.

Ian Bogost: Play Anything (2016) - A Review (Part 1: Notes on a Preface)

Photo of Ian Bogost by Gregory Miller

Preface: Life Is Not a Game

Ian Bogost describes himself as a philosopher who also happens to be a game designer. But I've heard it said that he's more of a game designer with pretensions of being a philosopher. Either way, he's not stupid. But he is badly in need of a haircut.  

His Alien Phenomenology (2012) was a book that I enjoyed, so I've been looking forward to reading his most recent work, Play Anything, since its publication in the autumn of 2016 (apologies to readers who expect this blog to always be bang up to date).

From what one gathers from the Preface, Play Anything promises to be a work of object-oriented ethics; one that offers a perspective on "how to live in a world far bigger than our bodies, minds, hopes, and dreams, and how to do it with pleasure and gratitude" [x].

Bogost doesn't think life is a game. But he does think that games teach us an important life lesson. And it's a lesson concerning the pleasure of limits. To play, he says, is to accept things on their own terms. And to generalise this notion of play is to see structures constrained by their own limitations at work everywhere.

This doesn't sound all that much fun. But Bogost assures us that if we learn how to play anything, our lives will be "better, bigger, more meaningful, and less selfish" [x] - a line that could have been lifted straight from an overly-optimistic self-help book. Or off a bottle of snake oil.   

Our mad obsession with the ideal of freedom, argues Bogost, has made us "miserable and bored" [xi]. We need to understand that real freedom is the chance to find fulfilment by operating within and exploring the implications of "a constrained system" [xi] - i.e., the actual world as is.    

Further, according to Bogost - never one to shy away from the chance to project his own anxieties onto his readers - we are marked by a profound fear; not just of ourselves (our desires and dark fantasies) or our mortal fate (that great shipwreck into the nauseous), but also of the world and its contents - objects and events alike.

Whether confronted by a pickle jar with a tight lid, or the prospect of an illicit love affair, "we worry that it might harm or disappoint us" [xi] - or that we might fail to live up to the challenge that all things present. What we need to do, says Bogost, is "slough off all these false fears that keep us from truly living" [xii].

What he doesn't say is why these fears are false; I have to admit they seem pretty genuine and perfectly legitimate to me. Nor - in the Preface at any rate - does he instruct us how to "replace them with a new sense of gratitude" [xii] towards all the miraculous opportunities the world affords us.  

Well, that's not quite fair - he does suggest that play is the key. Though it's not play in the ordinary sense of the word; Bogost wants to convince us of the need for a radical form of play that is profound and deliberate and "bores through boredom in order to reach the deep truth of ordinary things" [xii].

One suspects that Bogost has the Heraclitean line about man only becoming himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play in the back of his mind. Or maybe he's thinking of Nietzsche's playful vision of philosophy conceived as a gay science. But if he is, he's not going to give the game away as there's no mention of either philosopher in the index - something I regard as a bad sign ...

Still, let us read on and see where Bogost takes us ... Click here for Part 2 of this post on Chapters 1-4 and here for Part 3 on Chapters 5-7.

See: Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, The Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games, (Basic Books, 2016). All lines quoted are from the Preface, pp. ix-xii. 

Morgenröthe: Nietzsche's Red Dawn

Alicia Dunn: Red Dawn No. 5 (2017)

aliciadunnart.com

I. If Passion Ends in Knowledge then Nietzsche is the Best-Read Man in Town

According to Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche's 1881 work Morgenröthe - usually translated into English as Daybreak or Dawn - is the most neglected of all his texts.*

If that's true, then it's a real shame. For it's a brilliant and beautiful book which illustrates how philosophy is, first and foremost, a form of erotics. For what is the pursuit of knowledge if not a passion, suggests Nietzsche; an intense desire to shatter established patterns of thinking and abandon the fears and consoling fictions that have for the greater part of history reduced man to the status of a herd animal.

Nietzsche anticipates "a new dawn in human existence" in which individuals are free to "cultivate their lives in a manner that is conducive to themselves and beneficent to others" [44]. He proposes ways of becoming who one is that involve thinking differently and, just as importantly, thinking critically with regard to the self. It's philosophy as a playful and experimental practice; what he'll term in his next work die fröhliche Wissenschaft.


II. Say Yes to a Single Joy and You Say Yes to All Woe

Nietzsche completed Daybreak in the Italian city of Genoa. He had by this time retired from his professorship at Basel University due to ill health and was living on a very modest annual pension in an unheated garret. His diet was as restricted as his income and consisted mostly of porridge and risotto, followed by more porridge.

Not only did he have to endure extreme cold and isolation, but Nietzsche spent a lot of his time suffering with blinding headaches that lasted for days at a time and caused him to vomit. His only relief was provided by that solitary vice much favoured by Diogenes, but condemned by Kant as an unnatural form of self-abuse. "And yet", writes Ansell-Pearson, "it was under these harsh conditions that he wrote over the course of a year one of his 'sunniest' books" [65].

And this is why one loves Nietzsche: for the fact that he says Yes to life in all circumstances and under any conditions; affirms, in other words, life as an economy of the whole and gives even the most terrible aspects of existence his blessing. It takes an almost inhuman degree of courage to affirm even a single moment or joy, when it's in the knowledge that by so doing we affirm all eternity and every pain, every sadness, every evil.

In sum: Nietzsche constructs a harsh philosophical ethic not only beyond good and evil, but, as Ansell-Pearson argues, beyond solitude and compassion as well; one that rests upon endurance and cruelty. Free-thinking, as he conceives of it, "will, initially at least, plunge people into despair and grief" [111]. But it results at last in happiness and in greatness.

Obviously, this isn't a philosophy that everyone might choose to live by, or be capable of living by: 

"I think it is clear, both from hints he gives in Dawn and says in other texts, that Nietzsche thinks the tasks of free-spirited thinking are ones reserved, and perhaps best reserved, for a few individuals who will constitute what we might choose to call a moral (or 'immoral') avant-garde." [112]


*Note: Ansell-Pearson reminds us that the original German title literally means 'morning redness' and specifies "the precise but fleeting moment at which the sky is aflame with colour and before the red yields to the customary blue or grey. It suggests a time of possibility, invention, inspiration and renewal, in which the freshness of the day augurs a new way of life." [67] 

See: 

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche's Search for Philosophy, (Bloomsbury, 2018). All page numbers given in square brackets refer to this book. 

Nietzsche, Dawn: Thoughts on the Presumptions of Morality, trans. Brittain Smith, (Stanford University Press, 2011). 

Islamism: What Would Nietzsche Do?

I. If Islam Despises Christianity, It Has a Thousandfold Right to Do So

Whilst it's true that Nietzsche does praise Islamic civilisation - particularly the wonderful culture of the Moors - within The Anti-Christ (1888), you rather get the impression he's doing so in order to provoke his mostly Western readers who pride themselves on the superiority of their own Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian inheritance.

For Nietzsche surely knew that Islam - as part of the same moral-religious tradition as Judaism and Christianity - is as problematic in terms of his own critique of values as either of the latter. He might like to romanticise the Arabs as a noble and manly race in comparison to the modern European, but such orientalism was common in the 19th century and needn't detain us for too long.

Besides, Islamism - a militant form of fundamentalism - is very much a phenomenon of the 20th and 21st centuries and so wouldn't have been something that Nietzsche would have been familiar with. He did, however, anticipate the rise of such murderous ideologies and he did directly address the question of revolutionary fanaticism in his mid-period writings.

It is, therefore, perfectly legitimate to speculate how Nietzsche might have responded to the question (and the threat) of Islamism ...       

II. Serenity Now

Firstly, it's important to point out that, despite what many of his adherents as well as opponents often claim, Nietzsche - for all his anti-humanism - remained pro-Enlightenment; that is to say, someone with a deep admiration for the faculty of reason. It was important to Nietzsche that he not be regarded as an irrationalist or fanatic; i.e., one who demands faith and obedience from his followers, whilst displaying all the irritable impatience and resentment of the invalid.  

As Keith Ansell-Pearson reminds us, Nietzsche conceived of philosophy as a method for curbing excessive forms of enthusiasm and tempering the emotional and mental hysteria that we encounter in the world's hot-spots. As so many of these hot-spots happen to be Muslim majority countries, one is tempted to characterise the entire Muslim world as one huge tropical zone full of absurdly violent passions and "the most savage energies in the form of long-buried horrors and excesses of the most distant ages" [HAH 463].

Ultimately, moderation is the key to Nietzsche's mid-period therapeutics. And the main aim is to counter all forms of religious and ideological stupidity. It is the duty of those he calls free spirits to cool things down in a world that is "visibly catching fire in more and more places" [HAH 38], via an analytical naturalism and a dose of eudaemonic asceticism.

Ansell-Pearson is keen to trace such a practice of philosophy back to the ancient Greek thinker Epicurus and he makes a very strong case for why it is instructive and legitimate to do so. Personally, however, I'm more interested in how Nietzsche's thinking resonates within contemporary popular culture; such as in the work of comic genius Larry David ...


III. Zügel deine Begeisterung

Like Nietzsche, Larry is driven by a stubborn and sceptical form of honesty that tolerates no bullshit or groundless idealism. And like Nietzsche, Larry encourages us also to find joy in the small things - in details and in the minutiae of daily existence (including our language). Ansell-Pearson writes:

"There remains a strong and firm desire for life but [...] this voluptuous appreciation and enjoyment of life [...] is modest in terms of the kinds of pleasures it wants [...] and in terms of its acknowledgement of the realities of a human existence." [43] 

Such a philosophy is clearly antithetical to any faith that claims absolute moral authority. And so, it's little surprise then that in the most recent season of Curb Your Enthusiasm Larry runs foul of the Islamists and has a death sentence placed upon him by the Iranian Ayatollah.

His crime: Mocking Muslim clerics on a TV talk-show whilst discussing his new project, Fatwa!, a musical-comedy based on the Salman Rushdie (Satanic Verses) affair.

His defence: Religion should be made fun of. It's ridiculous. If I believed that stuff, I'd keep my mouth shut lest somebody think I was out of my mind.

Notes

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche's Search for Philosophy, (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Vol. I., trans. Gary Handwerk, (Stanford University Press,1995). 

To watch a clip from the final episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm season 9, featuring a rehearsal scene from Fatwa!, click here.  

I'm in a Rut (But I Don't Wanna Get Out Of It)

To play this classic 1979 punk single click here. 

A woman emails to let me know she fundamentally disagrees with almost everything that is posted on Torpedo the Ark - and particularly the anti-Christian Easter message on warmheartedness [click here]:

"Most of the ideas - if we can even call them ideas - are no more than academic clichés. And to these you repeatedly return as if gripped by an obsessive compulsive disorder, offering the same crude assertions and vulgar insults as if also suffering from Tourette's. I'm sorry to say - though as a follower of Nietzsche perhaps you'll appreciate the cruelty - but I think you're in a deep philosophical rut."

This seems a bit harsh, I have to say, even to a follower of Nietzsche ...

For whilst it's true that I can't concentrate and I don't feel straight - and might also have some issues around the notion of sovereignty - I wouldn't say that I'm in a rut; certainly not in the wholly negative sense that is implied here.

I prefer to think that, as Madonna would say, I've got into the groove and that's ultimately how one proves one's love of wisdom. For philosophy demands a certain level of consistency and, yes, obsessive-compulsive behaviour; an eternal return to the same ideas, same scenes, same songs. It also involves the stuttering of language and a display of idiosyncratic tics, both verbal and behavioural in nature, which to an outside eye might seem to indicate a neuropsychiatric disorder.

But, really, why quibble or get pedantic over terms?

Ultimately, I'd rather be entrenched in the deepest and darkest of philosophical ruts than have my head in the clouds like my idealistic critic who concludes her email by telling me to cheer up and insisting that life is beautiful and Jesus loves me (which it isn't, and he doesn't). 

Chris D. Thomas: Inheritors of the Earth - Six Key Ideas (Part 2: Sections IV-VI)

Chris D. Thomas (Photo: Allen Lane)

IV. Vive la bio-révolution!

According to Chris D. Thomas, we are today in the midst of a great global interchange; a biological coming together, facilitated by humanity, of previously separated species which will conceivably be "the greatest spur to evolution for a hundred or more million years" [169]. Speciation seems to be unfolding in front of us at a pace that Darwin would have found unimaginable, although, of course, the real proliferation of new species will come in a far-distant future.

In another crucially important passage, Thomas writes:

"These new connections are unlike any previous period in the Earth's history. The explosion that killed off the dinosaurs, and the other four major episodes of mass extinction in the last half-billion years, did not transport vast numbers of the survivors around the planet on a timescale of hundreds to thousands of years. There was no equivalent bringing together of species from different regions. ... Given the geographic distances and rapidity of connections that are taking place in the Anthropocene, there is no precedent since multi-cellular life forms colonized the land." [195-96]

He concludes:

"I find it difficult to imagine a period in the entire history of terrestrial life on Earth when the speed of origination of new evolutionary lineages could have been faster, as a result of  the combined forces of populations arriving in new locations and starting to diverge there, the previous residents becoming adapted to the new species that arrive, and new hybrids coming into existence as species meet up for the first time in new habitats and new geographic locations." [196]

In brief: the human era is undoubtedly a time of unusually rapid extinction. But, ultimately, the Anthropocene bio-revolution will almost certainly represent a bright new dawn.


V. On Translating Man Back into Nature

The idealistic separation of man from nature continues to this day, despite the fact that Darwin published his theory of evolution over 150 years ago. Even some philosophers and scientists who really should know better, still insist on the myth of human exceptionalism and regard human abilities and activity as, in some sense, either unnatural or transcendent. Thomas, to his credit, is having none of this:

"When we contemplate the biology and impacts of humans on the Earth, there is no doubting that Homo sapiens is an extremely unusual animal. But at what point in the unbroken sequence of generations should we decide that humans ceased to be part of nature ... There is no scientific or philosophical justification that could be used to separate this continuum of ape-then-human animals into two qualitatively different categories." [207]   

Evolution has been going on long enough so that humans and chimpanzees are recognisably different; but we are still primates, just like them, and whilst it is man who exercises dominion over the Earth, this is still essentially the planet of the apes. And everything that happens upon it - including art, agriculture and architecture - is absolutely natural and represents an "indirect product of evolution" [209]. 

Indeed, even our anthropocentrism has an evolutionary basis; for this will to species self-privileging is shared with other animals: lions, bison, and killer whales, for example, "respond strongly to other members of their own species for exactly the same reasons" [210] we do. When they see others of their own kind, they see potential mates, family members, collaborators, enemies, etc. "Every species is special to itself because the survival of each individual's genes depend on it." [210]

However, whilst evolutionary predisposition encourages us to develop ideas of human uniqueness, it's important to recognise that we are still just animals and that "everything we do ... is natural" [211].


VI. Welcome to Anthropocene Park

Finally, we arrive at the last chapter of Thomas's book, entitled 'Noah's Earth'. Here, and in the Epilogue that follows, he speculates on what we might do today and how the world might look one million years from now. Different, is the answer to the latter question. But difference and becoming isn't something that has been engineered by man. It's built into the very fabric of the universe, including biology.

What we need, therefore, is an environmental philosophy that is based on an acknowledgement of change and the further recognition that change is something beyond good and evil regardless of whether the consequences are beneficial or harmful to human well-being and survival (although, obviously, we will want things to turn out for the best and it's perfectly legitimate for man to attempt to direct life's unfolding in "a desired direction as effectively and efficiently as possible" [230], eradicating deadly new diseases, for example).

As part of this new philosophy, Thomas thinks it worth considering radical conservation projects that don't just try to save a limited number of endangered species in their present location, but dare to move them to new places where they might thrive, just like the yellow-crested cockatoo, for example, which is thriving in Hong Kong, even as it continues a rapid decline in its Indonesian homeland:

"All the many thousands of transported plants and animals that have established populations in new regions have demonstrated time and again that species may flourish outside their historical ranges. In doing so, they normally increase the total number of species that live in each region, they start to evolve into distinct forms and they sometimes hybridize and create new species. Eventually, they will increase the diversity of life on Earth." [235]

And, in the meantime, it means we might get to see African lions hunting in the USA and black rhinos stomping about in Europe. I'm all for that and all for thinking about the creation of new ecosystems and biological communities - including communities made up of deliberately engineered new species (or even extinct species resurrected).

Ultimately, I agree entirely with Professor Thomas that we shouldn't allow those who worry about Frankenstein science prevent us from using all available means to maintain and increase biological diversity in a variety ways that many puritans would regard as not only unconventional, but unnatural and immoral.

See: Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction, (Allen Lane, 2017). All the page numbers given above refer to this edition of the book. 

To read Part 1 of this post (Sections I-III) click here.

Chris D. Thomas: Inheritors of the Earth - Six Key Ideas (Part 1: Sections I - III)

I. Extinction isn't the End of the World and Change is the Only Constant

Professor Chris D. Thomas is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of York who has written a book that lends scientific support to Rupert Birkin's vision in Women in Love of a far-off future in which biological diversity is even greater than it is now and unimaginable new species of life will have unfolded. Of course, Thomas doesn't share Birkin's misanthropy and long for a world free of humanity, but he does affirm that evolution never ends and that there is thus an infinite array of lovely things still to come (after - but also out of - the Anthropocene period).

Thomas begins by setting out a familiar tale of woe concerning the negative effect that mankind is said to have had on the Earth. Whilst conceding the importance of recognising ways in which human activity threatens the existence of life, he quickly counters this doom-laden narrative of eco-apocalypse and suggests we take a broader view, considering all the evidence and not just those facts that reinforce the moral and political concerns of those who subscribe to a green philosophy based on a desire to save the planet.     

Essentially, Thomas is arguing that short-term ecological upheaval and species extinction pales into insignificance when seen from the perspective of evolution. Ultimately, no matter how great the losses, there will be winners; that is to say, species that will not only survive, but thrive; not only thrive, but diversify into an unimaginable variety of new species. Periods when the levels of extinction are high - as they are presently - obviously present setbacks; "but in the end they have provided new opportunities for enterprising creatures that have been able to exploit the new conditions" [7]. Come back in a million years, says Thomas, and you're likely to be astonished at what you'll find.  

We might not like it, but never-ending change is the only constant; the world is in a state of permanent flux. Futile attempts to conserve the world as it is - or, even more vainly, to restore it to some earlier, more pristine, more natural state - are not only untenable, but "implicitly dismiss as undesirable the continuing biological gains of the human epoch" [8]. Further, the logic of such a way of thinking can have ugly consequences, such as the call to eradicate alien arrivals and exterminate impure hybrids. Rather than "swim against the tide of ecological and evolutionary change" [9], writes Thomas, we should go with the flow and joyfully facilitate and accelerate biological processes.


II. The Future Walks Among Us

Just to be clear: Thomas isn't arguing that we shouldn't, for example, try to prevent unsustainable fishing and the dumping of plastic into the oceans. But, we need to open our eyes to the evolutionary reality of the world and acknowledge biological gains made. It can also be strangely comforting to realise that we can glimpse the future within the present; that the "inheritors of the future Earth are already among us today" [43], just as birds and mammals were coexistent with the dinosaurs for millions of years and did not "suddenly appear after the asteroid hit" [41] (an idea that greater knowledge of the fossil record plus revolutionary advances in molecular biology has shown to be false).

These inheritors, as Thomas calls them, might not be the wild and charismatic megafauna that most people worry about (tigers, gorillas, pandas, polar bears, etc.), but we should probably get over our sentimental privileging of such beasts and recognise that domestic animals and household pets - as well as cereal crops - have all been incredibly successful by taking advantage of "a gullible primate" [45] in order to ensure their survival and global proliferation.

It's a Lawrentian nightmare, but there are now about 1.5 billion cattle, 1.2 billion sheep, 1 billion pigs and an astonishing 22 billion chickens in the world, all being fed and cared for in addition to the 1 billion cats and dogs, by 7 billion human beings. In other words, "the present is not a dip in the total numbers or combined weight [biomass] of large animals ... it is a substantial increase" [47] and the Anthropocene remains "just as much an age of mammals and birds as it ever was" [47].

Thomas concludes that "it's time to stop yearning for a pristine, wild world ... [as] there is no longer any such thing as human-free nature" [53] and we cannot reverse time. Besides, many species of large non-domestic animal are recovering in number and returning to their former lands; bears, bison, wolves, deer, boar, etc. Such recoveries seem likely to become more widespread (albeit within human-managed spaces) and the chances are "there will be considerably more large wild mammals in existence one hundred years from now than there are today" [51].


III. On Accelerated Evolution

Ecological transformation is one thing; evolutionary change is something else - something, in the long run, far more fundamental. Evolution, as Thomas says, is how life on Earth responds to and recovers from natural disasters, including periods of mass extinction.

People often parrot the phrase sixth extinction and like to blame humanity for it. But perhaps we should also consider whether this will in turn trigger a new flourishing of life. Thomas certainly seems to think so. Further, he argues that new species are already "coming into existence with immodest haste, adapting to new conditions" [118] - such as the Italian sparrow.

In a crucial passage, he continues:

"Remarkable as it might seem, new plant species may be coming into existence faster today than at any time in the history of our planet. A new era has arrived in which we see an acceleration of evolutionary change and the genesis of new life-forms. Given that many of them would not exist but for humans, they challenge us to contemplate the relationship between humanity and nature." [118]

We should abandon our human (all too human) guilt about our place in the world and our influence upon it. We should abandon also our privileging of old species over new and the mad desire to save everything. Life doesn't need saving, it needs accelerating and diversifying and the rapid evolution taking place not just in plants, but in animals, fungi and microbes, is something to marvel at.

"Great replacements have frequently been at the heart of large-scale and long-term evolutionary change ..." [140] and rather than always try to conserve things and weeping over the creatures that disappear into the void, we might seek to "build new biological communities composed of compatible species so that future ecosystems are more robust than those that currently exist" [126].


See: Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction (Allen Lane, 2017). 

To read Part 2 of this post (Sections IV-VI) click here. 

On Warmheartedness (An Easter Message from the Anti-Christ)

The twin themes of tenderness and warmheartedness dominate in Lawrence's late work. In Lady Chatterley's Lover, for example, challenged by Connie to say what he believes in, Mellors famously tells her: 

"'I believe in being warm-hearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It’s all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.'"

I don't know if that's true or not. But I do know that Nietzsche problematizes the notion of warm-heartedness in Human, All Too Human - particularly in relation to Christ, whom he regards during this mid-period of his writing as not only the noblest human being, but also he who possesses the warmest of hearts.

For Nietzsche, however, this warmth of heart led Christ into the fatal error of over-identifying with the poor and meek in spirit and thus ultimately promoting an enfeebled morality full of ressentiment and base stupidity.

And where did this unintelligent goodness get him? Nailed to a cross. For when warm-heartedness is made into an ideal, it ultimately results in self-sacrifice - an issue that Lawrence often discussed in his critique of Christianity (see for example the novel Aaron's Rod).

So we should be wary of the claim made by Oliver Mellors that warm-heartedness will eventually make everything come good; though, to be fair, he constructs a libidinal practice rather than a moral teaching upon his belief. Thus, whilst Christ beseeches us to love our neighbour, Mellors busies himself fucking a little flame into being between himself and Connie; just as the flowers are fucked into being between sun and earth.

And Nietzsche? Nietzsche teaches us the philosophical importance of coldness and cruelty and demonstrates how the highest intelligence and the warmest of hearts cannot coexist in the same individual.               

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), Ch. 14. 

Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1986), Sections 475 and 235. 

I am grateful to Keith Ansell-Pearson, whose new book on Nietzsche's mid-period writings - Nietzsche's Search for Philosophy, (Bloomsbury, 2018) - inspired this post. See Ch. 1 of this work in particular, 'Cooling Down the Human Mind', pp. 17-45.