As kids, we were always told not to stare directly at the sun. It seems, however, that we always took this merely as a challenge. As we aged, we were wont to do the same but perchance would just leave our eyes closed. That feeling I have always held dear to me. Looking up at that fiery ball of gas deep in the sky, feeling its warmth dance across my face, tingling my cheeks; seeing the kaleidoscope of colors dance and dazzle across my eyes. It was, as it were, a respite, a moment that would melt away — albeit for a brief time — that lingering feeling of despair that I have held deep within myself ever since I can remember.
My constant and deep rumination on this issue has backed me into a position in my mind, one that creates a safe “worst-case scenario” due to my proclivity to catastrophize in black and white thinking. I’m at the craps table, and I’m forced to wager, yet it’s a gamble that I’m willing to take. Like Blaise Pascal, I’m willing to throw the dice, knowing that if life is ultimately meaningless, then there is no loss (to me, since this scenario is a highly individualistic and reductionistic hypothetical here which takes no account of the political and social machinations of the world). Epicurus’ four principal axioms come to mind here: “Fear not the gods. Do not fear death. What is good is easy to obtain. What is terrible is easy to endure.” Yet if life does have objective meaning, the reward is far greater on the upside.
The despair stems from an anxiety of life, a hopelessness that beneath it all, there really is no meaning to life (this is a metaphysical concept of anxiety à la Kierkegaard, Tillich, &c. and should not be understood as the same thing as clinically diagnosed anxiety, c.f. Courage to Be). This is our despair: that all our actions, no matter how good or evil, are futile at best, or at worst are an act of turgid and ignominious self-delusion. Who are we fooling here? And no matter how hard I try to outrun this problem, I find myself back in the selfsame situation, the same exact scenario in which a decision is forced. Which hand will you play? Such as it is, I have been thinking about death a lot the past year. I think about the death of my family and friends whom I love. I think about my death as well, as a means to take inventory of my life. Who am I? What have I accomplished? What will be the meaning or interpretation of my life and what value will it have? For no matter how hard we ignore it or cloak our language in euphemisms, we are all careening down the path to ineluctable death. Dylan lugubriously sings in Oh, Sister, “Oh sister when I come to knock on your door, don’t turn away you’ll create sorrow. Time is an ocean, but it ends at the shore, you may not see me tomorrow.” The Qoheleth writes in Ecclesiastes, “For in much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.” The irony being presented here is that it would seem that those who don’t know that life is ultimately meaningless (if that indeed be the case) live the most meaningful lives…however one defines meaning, that is.
And yet, there is not really a gamble here—it’s merely a thought experiment, an illusion. Indeed, since this is the only world that we have and the only life that we know. Contrary to the multiverse string theorists, however, this life is the only one that is observable to us (this idea actually goes back to Ancient Greece in the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus and would be picked up in part by Epicurus minus the determinism c.f the swerve). And to presume that there could be an infinite number of parallel non-life-generating universes to ground and give mathematical justification (probability) to our finely tuned universe would be what Phillip Goff calls the inverse gambler’s fallacy. But at the end of the day, it’s not my head but my soul—I feel it and I know. Like Kierkegaard’s leap to faith. And yet, this feeling can be so evanescent.
When I look at my two beautiful children, I want to believe that our actions have meaning. That we are laboring to establish a more compassionate and sustainable world for our kids and future generations. That we can unify and tackle the global issues of military aggression, impending climate destruction, and religious zealotry. Nevertheless, there is an irritant in the way. A nagging feeling of not only hopelessness…but something more diabolical: that no matter how hard we struggle and strive, history continues to march in syncopated rhythm to the demonic dithyrambs of Dionysus. We are paralyzed and powerless to change while simultaneously forced to watch the destruction of all things. Is this Dylan’s Hard Rain? Or Barry McGuire’s Eve of Destruction? I am become death. It would seem not. Perchance something more demonic, as Nietzsche’s saint and prophet Zarathustra declares:
“Everything goes, everything returns, the wheel of existence rolls for ever. Everything dies, everything blossoms anew; the year of existence runs on for ever. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; the same house of existence builds itself for ever. Everything departs, everything meets again; the ring of existence is true to itself for ever. Existence begins in every instant, the ball There rolls around every Here. The middle is everywhere. The path of eternity is crooked.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Convalescent, 2
Dylan captures this harrowing reality in his 2006 track Ain’t Talkin’:
They say prayer has the power to help so pray from the mother/ In the human heart an evil spirit can dwell/ I’m a’tryin’ to love my neighbor and do good unto others/ But oh, mother, things ain’t goin’ well/ Ain’t talkin’, just a’walkin’/ I’ll burn that bridge before you can cross/ Heart burnin’, still yearnin’/ They’ll be no mercy for ya’ once you’ve lost/ As I walked out in the mystic garden/ On a hot summer day a hot summer lawn/ Excuse me, ma’am, I beg your pardon/ There’s no one here, the gardener is gone/ Ain’t talkin’, a’just a’walkin’/ Up the road around the bend /Heart burnin’, still yearnin’/ In the last outback, at the world’s end. Ain’t Talkin’ off of Modern Love, Bob Dylan
Greil Marcus comments on the track when he writes, “It’s a fever dream, and when he comes to fifteen verses later, there’s a woman in the garden. The night has changed to day, and he senses that she’s looking for a sign. But there’s nothing to see: ‘Excuse me, ma’am, I beg your pardon. There’s no one here, the gardener is gone.'” God—the first gardener, in Eden, the gardener Jesus calls when in John 15:1 he says, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener,” has left this place and left those who remain to silence” (Greil Marcus, Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs, 128-29). It is this despair that made the ancient prophets cry out: “Meaningless! Meaningless! says the Teacher. Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:1, 9). This same suffering and agony are what set the Buddha out to search for a new holy path to freedom from this life of suffering. In the Way of Truth, he says: “I have gone round in vain the cycles of many lives, ever striving to find the builder of the house of life and death. How great is the sorrow of life that must die! But now I have seen thee, house builder: never more shalt thou build this house. The rafters of sins are broken, the ridge-pole of ignorance is destroyed. The fever of craving is past: for my mortal mind is gone to the joy of the immortal nirvana” (The Dhammapada, 153, 154).
The lust and avarice of man for power shall forever seethe through our veins. For no remedy can be found, and we are left wanting in our self-induced misery. As Bob Marley so aptly sung so many years ago, “Until the philosophy which hold one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned: everywhere is war, me say war.” And war there has been, ever since homo sapiens have been wise (pun intended) enough to utilize tools for weal or for woe…or revenge. Such was the way of the first fratricide whereby Cain slew his brother Abel in cold blood (Genesis 4). Perhaps a return to nature is what is needed? This would be, after all, beyond good and evil, but not in a Nietzschean sense with a transvaluation of all values, but rather a return to innocence. And who is to blame? Nietzsche would point his finger at the Jews and Socrates amongst many others (“We Immoralists!” as he was wont to say), but suffice it to say that a return to a harmonious natural state à la Rousseau or Thomas More’s Utopia is simply quixotic. Herman Melville, while visiting the Polynesian islands in the mid 19th century, sardonically deadpanned: “Thrice happy are they, who inhabiting some yet undiscovered island in the midst of the ocean, have never been brought into contaminating contact with the white man” (Typee, 21). Unfortunately the idyllic existence of the uncontaminated man exists no longer; we cannot go backwards, we must find a way forward.
As in the myth of Adam and Eve in the Genesis account, it is the presentation of the choice from God to man that induces anxiety as Kierkegaard explains. This then leads mankind to rise to a level of consciousness wherein true good or true evil can now be engendered with the payoff being Freedom in the most absolute sense. As Schelling puts it in his Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, it is not the existence of finitude per se that allows for evil (Plotinus), but rather the existence of finitude qua Being as a self, that is to say, finite spirit raised up to conscious awareness (Friedrich Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, 38). Thus indeed the serpent didn’t lie when he said: “ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). And thus God is known (in his immediacy) and consequently humans know themselves (the rise of self-consciousness and freedom of choice), but without a level of differentiation which would come with the advent human history. Perhaps the stage of the Father (Absolute Idea), the stage of the Son (Absolute Nature), and the stage of the Spirit (the unraveling of history in the form of Absolute Spirit which is self-conscious) according to Hegel’s dialectic? Schelling, however, would present his history in his Historical-Critical Introduction into the Philosophy of Mythology, where he used mythology as his heuristic device to explain the movement from the One, albeit undifferentiated (RE: loved but not in freedom), to the many and multiplicity (polytheism et al.) back to a dynamic unity and oneness.
And depsite all this struggle, there is no guarantee. Contrary to Hegel’s Absolute Geist, we have no promissory note of our desired Utopia here on earth (perhaps apropos given its eytemology). We have no confidence that we will be soon be ushered into Hegel’s third movement movement of spirit in which Geist as unconditional self-knowledge of art, religion, and philosophy (of which of course philosophy is the paragon). The 20th century is the example of the struggle of a panaply of ideologies in order to bring about this penultimate state. Think of the whole world holding hands and triumphantly singing the 4th movement to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony (Ode to Joy). Or perhaps Kumbaya around a global campfire if you are more of the hippy stripe. The reality of our future, however, may be less sexy: entropic heat death.
I recently had the luxury to read through Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America by Beryl Satter. To say that it was eye opening is an understatment. Satter recounts the history of segregation from post WWII through the 1970s and uses Chicago as the exemplar of the race and power politics at play through this time period. Her research is methodical and judicious, explaining in great detail the legal history of red-lining and discrimnation against African-Americans. In it, she goes on an excursus of Dr. King’s Chicago campaign in 1966, which to be frank I knew nothing about. Coming off of succesfful campaigns in both Selma and Birmingham, and largely instrumental in getting the civil rights act of 1964 signed into law by Lyndon B. Johnson (it is an interseting historical fact to point out that Bob Dylan preformed at the march on washington in 1963 when Dr. King delivered his famous I have a dream speech), Dr. King set his sights up north, determined to tackle the unfair and discriminatory practices used by politicans, savings and loan institutions, real estate speculators, and real estate agents. And yet, the campagin was largely a failure. A couple short years later, Dr. King would be assinated. Almost seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education, and we find our schools more segregated than they were in the 1960s during the height of the civil rights struggle. Racial disparities still persist from home ownership to college education and median household income and more.
And so, what can be done? In what ostensibly seems like a hopeless reality, all I can do is focus on myself and what I can control. As Marley sang as profound as it is poignant, “so much trouble in the world. [Despite] so much trouble in the world. Bless my eyes this morning. Jah, sun is on the rise once again.” And so it’s towards the sunshine that forever and anon I shall turn my face. Its radiance and warm a soothing salve to my soul. A soul that is, forsooth, all too keen to give into its neo-platonic proclivities as it desires to flee from this fleshly god-forsaken prison and become one with the One wherefrom all love floweth.
O Eternal God, everlasting Light without beginning, Fashioner of all creation, Fountain of mercy, Ocean of goodness, and searches Abyss of love for mankind: cause the light of thy countenance to shine upon us, O Lord. Dawn in our hearts, O noetic Sun of Righteousness, and fill our souls with thy delight, and teach us always to meditate on and proclaim thy judgments, and to render to thee our unceasing praise, O our Master and Benefactor.
St. Basil the Great, b. 331 A.D.
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Blessed are the Poor in Spirit 