A Prelude to Birth: Coincidentia Oppositorum

Nihilism: “To paraphrase Yeats, it is not that the center of a text cannot hold, but that there is no center."

A letter to my historian feminist wife:

We were discussing historical subjugation of women and I mentioned going back to “goddesses” and “sensuality”, going back to images and body worship, worshiping the golden calf, getting stuck in pictures, in totems, and in pleasure as if it is “feminism” and the right of women, is first misleading (as not all women agree with this depiction—Marta Nussbaum, for example), and secondly it is nihilistic. You asked me “why nihilism?” 

In this letter I wish to make my point clear.

What is self-observation? I need to calm my heart and senses to reflect. I need to calm my anger and resentment and prejudice to ponder. I have to step out of points of excess, to arrive at ataraxia. Not strange Jesus rejected even anger and hostility, and Buddha showed how to achieve it by self-observation. I have come back from my prayer and meditation, from my morning walk. I ask myself how should I clarify my point to you in the scope of a letter?

My first thesis is this: If we decenter and unleash history from God and universal values, so that history be explained by itself not by any so called ahistorical overarching principles (Justice, Golden Rule), which are given to us by Axial Age sages, and call it flatly patriarchy, there will remain neither male nor female essence, but sheer historical practices that are subject to arbitrary evaluations based on the immediate need and whims of the speaker. This is the motto of atheist existentialism: existence precedes essence. So anything goes as you wish and desire, now it is sensuality, then it is stopping procreation. Sartre tried to reject this arbitrariness by suggesting that existentialism is humanism. His arguments are not satisfactory and Heidegger later for good rejected his conception of “humanism”. On the other hand, if we hold onto ahistorical divine principles of improvement of the soul against the excesses of desire and hedonism, then historically women would be participating in it, by fighting against the excesses of patriarchy.

My second thesis is this: we try to rectify excess with excess, Aristotle’s golden mean says the same. If one is too insensitive, for example, then we need some excess to push it to the other side, to “proper sensitivity”, and then reside in the medium. Marx insisted that modes and relations of production (substructure) determine (pay attention to this deterministic term) our consciousness and superstructure or culture. Later Engels, his collaborator, said that they had no choice but to excessively stress the importance of political economy to overcome the dominant idealism of their time, which gave priority to thoughts and ideas rather than to the material condition of life.

We are a pendulum oscillating from one excess to another. When slavery was put in question, the politics of identity emerged, the black identity became a central notion, because, according to Fanon, the mirror-image self of blacks was white, how can we extract this pathological phobogenic self (irrational fear of the self and others)? By excess, by pushing all the way to the other side: to “black only is beautiful,” to black segregation from whites, to go back to Africa, for example, to establish a black nation. You know well that in the history of feminism the same oscillation was and is in place, for example the excess of Shulamith Firestone, the New York Radical Women, who held that organs of procreation are the source of subjugation of women. Or the recent trend of identifying gender and sex and hence to erode the natural and even biological foundation of what is to be a woman: it is all historical construction. You told me it was a historical necessity for this excessive reaction to the subjugation of women. I hear you, we waiver from one extreme to another excessively to find a remedy for our historical wounds. And my thesis is: this is destructive and we are breathing and living nihilism in this way. Thinking in total historicism, historical materialism, standpoint-epistemology/morality (moral relativism), and perspectivism are nihilistic. Excessive reactions to the principles of the soul, after all these historical learnings and growth, is nihilistic. I will explain it briefly below.

Nietzsche writes, “What does nihilism mean? That the highest values de-valuate themselves.”

But what is the highest value? The highest value is that life is not a subclass of dead, that God (neither He or She, for limitations of our language I will use the pronoun It if needed), the ineffable, created life, life is not the result of accidental events of dead particles. But 19th c. up to now has been shocked by Darwinism, as if evolution is a mechanical and dead interaction of particles now manifested in living beings to outdo each other for survival. So the highest value, spiritual evolution, to move out of cruelty and bestiality of mere “survival” and strive to become loving and forgiving, Jesus’s and Mohammad’s message, the essence of God, lost their values. This was despair, a startling encounter with our so called “animalism” without any hope for evolving the angelic nature that we were promised by religions and Axial Age sages; as Nietzsche puts it, a monkey now was standing in front of the Gate to Heaven.

Ø Step One: We are excessive beings who oscillate constantly between extremes until we historically come to our senses through Golden Mean and Golden Rule. We want to execute cruelly the “other” aspect of our nature. We can’t easily get attuned to the so called duality of our nature (earth and sky, animal and human, dust and spirit, Jung’s mana attributes) and can’t dove step out of first, the beast, to the other, the divine human (not man or woman separated). Once the Axial Age message moved us out of beast-like stage, we turned the whole angelic message to compulsion and coercion and rather than lovingly embrace the flawed and the falling (as Jesus did) we raised a system of exclusion and torture for those who represented the “negative” and the animalistic in us, hence we fell into monstrosity in the name of fighting monstrosity.

Ø Step Two: The historical pendulum went in excess to the other extreme, hence Western Enlightenment, the reign of “reason” got precedence in our understanding of ourselves. Cartesian “thinking thing” as the foundation of our metaphysical and epistemological certainty became the highest value by the utter exclusion of divine nature within us: now “I”, the self, reason, the thinking subject became God.

Ø Step Three: But reason failed to give us “meaning of life” and “ethical/spiritual compass” and a complete consistent system whose foundations could be justified by reason itself. We attempted to create equality, democracy, social justice, and morality by reason alone. But in our excessive historical oscillation, we created as well the reign of terror (guillotine), Panopticon[1], bureaucracy, world wars, concentration camps, unbridled capitalism, colonialization, modern slavery, wage slavery, and plutocracy.

Ø Step Four: The pendulum moved to the other extreme, God was dethroned (Nietzsche’s God is Dead), as well reason was dethroned, the emergence of moral relativism, hedonism, humanism, and Babylonian sensuality, continued subjugation of women as “sensual beings,” and sensuality as the only meaning remained for us (the dawn of 20th c. Lawrence, Wolff, Russell, impressionism, etc). The struggle for freedom of women and fight against racism, sexism, and for the poor were also in close sway against the background of hedonism and suppression of the deprived and the poor, the colonized and the black, and due to the inherent nihilistic failure of “reason”, we also raised a system of horrors of measurelessness and pleasure seeking souls in the name of progress. While we tried to heal our historical wounds: slavery, subjugation of women, and class conflict, we did it in the ambiance of nihilism, where the ideas of “unity”, “truth”, “goal” and “meaning” lost their essential meaning, they became “names”; we had already become “nominalists”.

Nietzsche writes:

"Having reached this standpoint, one grants the reality of becoming as the only reality, forbids oneself every kind of clandestine access to afterworlds and false divinities—but cannot endure this world though one does not want to deny it.

What has happened, at bottom? The feeling of valuelessness was reached with the realization that the overall character of existence may not be interpreted by means of the concept of “aim,” the concept of “unity,” or the concept of “truth.” Existence has no goal or end; any comprehensive unity in the plurality of events is lacking [. . .]. One simply lacks any reason for convincing oneself that there is a true world. Briefly: the categories “aim,” “unity,” “being” which we used to project some value into the world—we pull out again; so the world looks valueless." (Will to Power)

Not strange when I ask my students how many of you believe there is an over-arching objective meaning to our lives, no hands are raised, yes no hands. Enjoying oneself and having a career, houses and cars, subjectivism and pleasure (sensuality), and if the pursuit of sciences and arts are meant, they are antidotes to a meaningless pathological life, in which survival and pleasure are the only moving engines.

Again Nietzsche says:

"The ways of self-narcotization.— Deep down: not knowing whither. Emptiness. Attempt to get over it by intoxication: intoxication as music [. . .]; intoxication as blind enthusiasm for single human beings or ages [. . .].— Attempt to work blindly as an instrument of science: opening one’s eyes to many small enjoyments; e.g. also in the quest of knowledge [. . .]; art “for its own sake” (le fait) and “pure knowledge” as narcotic states of disgust with oneself; some kind or other of continual work, or of some stupid little fanaticism [. . .]. (Will to Power)"

Ø Step Five: Now the pendulum has come to its full force of excess in Nihilism, it has to take the very value seeking soul, the very God, the very principle of perfection of the soul and attempt for betterment, all the religions and the very Golden Rule responsible for Nihilism.

Krzysztof Michalski interprets Nietzsche in this way:

"Nietzsche demonstrates, theoretically we can also call the process that has led us to this situation “nihilism.” For the world appears to be without value precisely because the values we have invested in the world are failing: they no longer perform their ordering or organizing function. The project (investment) of these very values—the ultimate goal, the all- encompassing totality, truth in itself—is therefore the beginning of nihilism. The sickness whose culmination is the critical situation in which we find ourselves today derives from the attempt to order the world in which we live according to these values. We cannot therefore liberate ourselves from this nihilism if we resume living in accordance with them and seeing the world through their prism. On the contrary, doing so sets us on a path that leads necessarily to nihilism, in the aforementioned sense of historical crisis. Nihilism is a pathology not of outlooks or attitudes but of their historical motivations, a pathology of life—but the attempt to reorganize life according to the patterns from which we have departed when we fell into the crisis of nihilism does not lead to our liberation from it. On the contrary, the values whose abandonment the word “nihilism” signifies cannot save us from it because they are in fact its root cause." (The Flame of Eternity: An Interpretation of Nietzsche's Thought)

Ø Step Six: Marianne pay attention to this step, it is where we evaluate the content and method of our historical investigation. The solution to this crisis accordingly is the re-evaluation of all values so that to overcome nihilism. But this overcoming turns out to be an impossible task. Because the historicism invented and invested is itself self-defeating, contradictory, and devouring itself from the ground up, like a negative ouroboros.

Ø Here we have historical absolutism and fanaticism which in the name of a comprehensive totality of the full excess of “perspectivism,” “moral relativism,” “historical ontology or materialism,” “sociology of knowledge,” and “standpoint epistemology” rejects the ahistorical ethics/spirituality of religions, which used to call for justice, harmony, peace of heart, love, and achieving union with God or Dao or Spirit. Why? Because all these wonderful values turned into their opposites through the inferno of excess of righteousness and zealous gazes that perceived evil all around itself.

Michalski clarifies:

"At any rate, in Nietzsche’s opinion, a logic independent of historical experience is a complete fantasy. We can therefore understand history and its logic, the historicity of history, only by referring to history itself.

The “ahistorical” perspective, the point of view “from beyond” history that would aid us in this understanding, is nonsense. There is no such thing. “History,” in this context, is yet another name for the world in which we live: the world of becoming, the world of constant change and irreducible diversity. Attempts at discovering a goal, a totality, a “truth” beyond it, attempts at discovering the “transcendent meaning” of the world in which we live, or else at understanding in reference to some “external” system of reference—all these end, as we have already seen, in utter failure. Every- thing we know is comprehensible only in the context of our irreducibly diverse, infinitely mutable lives."

It is extremely important to understand this step. This is the nihilistic method in full sway. If we go back to the dawn of history and condemn the so called “patriarchy” in totality and try to create a new history according to “matriarchy”, it is the rejection of the divine continuity and progression of history for better. Women’s values should complement the evolution of the soul, not receding into sensuality of body, or confronting the message of God with sensuality of so called Goddesses. Confrontation of the soul with the body is a nihilistic step, because the universal message of the growth of the soul is assumed to be dead. So, according to Nietzsche:

"Life as we live it is the only possible measure of value. It is our life that creates the order that organizes its diverse and ever-changing forms, but it cannot be appraised in itself: its value is the same in each individual moment, and the sum of values produced by it always remains the same. This is the core of nihilism, the answer to the question of what’s wrong with the values that give birth to nihilism: it is their claim to assess, to evaluate, the world as such, life as such." (Michalski)

Pay attention to the point of excess as if there is no ahistorical measure of life and evolution of soul because the so called patriarchal God and scriptures are dead. Accordingly, we can invent ourselves anew, but as there is no “universal measure and standard”—universality itself is rejected as patriarchy, all we can do is to free women into sensuality or a negative freedom within the abyss of meaninglessness, because the divine soul which tends to evolve to perfection beyond human animal nature is also rejected by the declaration of the Death of God. This is my point: we have constantly thrown the baby with the bath water out. Hence:

Ø Step Seven: The birth of historicism, Marxism, postmodernism, and some variations of feminist nihilism in reaction to historical subjugation of women, are indeed the historical reaction of pendulum in melting the ahistorical truth as such, and to dissolve the divine side of human nature in favor of the animal part, so the emergence of physicalism, materialism, and Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucault’s aesthetic (taste and sensual) creation of the self.

Again: this is my thesis, we oscillate strongly and in excess from one extreme to another, and this oscillation has to be rested in going back to Axial Age sages as the foundation of the evolution of our soul and henceforth moving forward to the fundamental project of improvement, if not perfection, of the soul. This project needs to become conscious of its excessive oscillation so that to harmonize the relation of the soul to body, sensation, and pleasure (e.g., Buddha’s middle way). In rejecting the excesses of patriarchy, the spirit of women should speak not in competition and segregation from men but in harmonizing relation to them. We have been going through the inferno of nihilism to reach this point.

To conclude, I just make one analogy to sum up: in the history of philosophy the Cartesian nucleus self, the priority of innate ideas of the understanding to the body, i.e., the thinking subject is logically more certain than the body, is confronted to another point of excess which is Foucault/Marx/Feminism of so called “embodied self” or “relational self”. This is another excessive oscillation that I have been trying to clarify: having an immortal nucleus self potentially can be developed only within LOVE, which means we are constituted by both the nucleus and relational self, we are both the understanding and the embodied self. Coincidentia Oppositorum. While religions, similar to Descartes, insist that we have a nucleus soul which is immortal, while Confucius and Buddha show that we have a divine essence, the moral light within, they also show that this light has to be developed through our embodied relational self, through Li (common rituals) and dependent origination. The nucleus understanding/soul and relational embodied self are complementary opposites. The problem with patriarchy is its excessive negation of the embodied self at the disposal of the soul, and the problem of crude historicism of nihilistic feminism is that it denies the principles of the soul in favor of embodied self.

"When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly. When people see some things as good, other things become bad. Being and non-being create each other. Difficult and easy support each other. Long and short define each other. High and low depend on each other. Before and after follow each other." --Tao Te Ching

04/03/16

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[1] Panopticon: a circular prison with cells arranged around a central well, from which prisoners could at all times be observed.