Before and Beyond Nietzsche

Pause for a moment before the last philosopher, possibly the anti-philosopher, thanks to whom philosophy, history, theology, religion and a few other follies are dismissed.

I know Nietzsche largely as a destroyer. Behind him, the china shop of civilizations lies in ruins. He left no system behind; ultimately he left nothing except a vision of a better future for humanity, and yet it is a negative image, a vision he fleshed out with surprisingly few details about practical matters.

When he took stock of his life in the last section of his final work, Ecce Homo, he essentially identified his own failings by stating that philosophers had thus far been obsessing over moral and metaphysical daydreams while “the things in life which require serious attention, the questions of nutriment, residence, cleanliness [and] weather” remained ignored—by everyone except, most startlingly, by his predecessor, Thoreaux.

Then, let’s continue from where Nietzsche stopped (and, in part, summarize Thoreaux):

1. Nutriment

Nietzsche experimented with vegetarianism, and just imagine how that went in 19^th century Germany. Nutrition should concern philosophers not only because its production via agriculture is implicated in the ongoing destruction of the biosphere, but, because proper nutrition is vital to human health. Though I feel crude in admitting it, I have never known an elephant capable of writing anything worth reading. And with nutrition we should also mention exercise, as scientific studies show that daily physical activity boosts intellectual performance. With all due respect to the chair-bound, the mind is not benefited by extreme inactivity—a great temptation for philosophers who have already made up their minds.

2.  Residence

The home should never become its own world, a place of refuge from an uncomfortable and frightening outside world. If the outside world must be averted, find a new neighbourhood or a new country, or busy yourself creating a foundation for one. A house should be designed to ensure the highest quality sleep, for sleep too is essential to human health and thinking. A house should be practical, functional, designed with children and the elderly in mind. A house should not be treated as an art project, as architecture, as something worth admiring for its symmetry, aesthetic quality, luxury, spaciousness, and so on. Nor should having a house and land demand years or decades of work because they are treated as possessions and objects of pride for which much is sacrificed. Do I even need to say that the problem of ownership and fear of loss, as well as possessiveness and greed, should be among the foremost concerns of every philosopher, psychologist and teacher?

3. Cleanliness

Nietzsche may have had some tragic understanding of how cleanliness applies to sexual matters, but this topic also applies to burial, garbage disposal, water use contact with animals and contact with the corrupt—if I my use the word in its broadest sense. If you think such matters unworthy of a philosopher’s thoughts, then philosophy is irrelevant, not only because higher standards of cleanliness could have prevented all contagious plagues and epidemics, but because the ability to identify and avoid mental corruption is crucial to intellectual development. Without it, entire generations become hopelessly infected and—to use a misnomer—‘brainwashed.’ In an industrial world, the question of cleanliness also involves urbanization, chemistry, engineering, and pollution. The challenge for philosophers, if they are not to become chemists and engineers themselves, is to conceive of a form of consciousness whose outward expression, with regards to all aspects of life, is unified in sustainability and cleanliness.

4. Weather

The common people’s concern about the weather is a standard joke among us. And yet, 120 years later, Nietzsche’s concern is a prophetic concern, though, in contrast to us, weather concerned him for entirely personal and physiological reasons. His doctors recommended warmer climes, and Nietzsche—if he had bothered to criticize Western imperialism—might well have concluded that cruel environments, and especially the cruel climate of the north, produced peoples and civilizations marked by a spirit of cruelty, destruction, and an almost understandable drive to conquer and settle other lands, especially southern lands. Does anyone subscribe to the idea that the Inuit settled in the far north because it seemed a nice place to be? I prefer the argument that the net effect of the Norse or Viking conquests and settlements of the dreary lowlands and British Isles was that the natives became vikinnized, infected with a taste for blood, which unleashed upon the world the colonial period of Western imperialism. To paraphrase Conrad’s Marlow: In contrast to that period, imperial and Mediterranean Rome represents a much gentler imperial period.

But we indulge in unnecessary speculations about the past. The future alone should concern us.

The question of weather is topical; it concerns the subject of Vitamin D and the human immune system, and it concerns the subjects of eating locally and living sustainably.

Ultimately, for the philosopher, more than our previous questions, the question of weather is one that best questions the historical assumption that humans are above the Earth, virtually immortals immune to their environments, actually both capable and authorized to live everywhere. Viewed as such, the question of weather should concern every philosopher.

The Golden Fool

The neatest bit of moral insipidity ever conceived is probably the Golden Rule: “Treat others as you want them to treat you.”

First Problem: The Golden Rule is circular. It essentially means that kindness will prevail if people are kind to one another.

Second Problem: Does the Golden Rule help to improve the world by suggesting that other people have the same feelings we do? Experience has taught me that people do not have the same feelings in either intensity or origin as I do, and that the Golden Rule’s appeal to pity is quite useless with people who possess power to harm.

Third Problem: The Golden Rule assumes that all men and women know what they should do to keep their conscience clean; in other words, it assumes that everyone has a receptive, enlightened and sensitive conscience, possibly one that forbids doing anything unpleasant to anyone, criminals and naughty children included. The trouble is that plenty of ignorant people fulfill the Golden Rule while entirely mis-educating their children. In contrast, responsible teachers and parents know that some unpleasant ideas must be communicated to children and they know how to do this without doing undue harm. Unfortunately, few people understand anything about this; the problem is that despite their systemic neglect of their parental duty they fulfill the Golden Rule.

Why must unpleasant ideas be communicated to children? So that they can grow comfortable with reality, which is not entirely pleasant, although the quality of reality is also a reflection of our own education. The unpleasant aspects are like gravity, without which we would float away and with too much of it we would be crushed.

“That which is hateful to you do not do to another … the rest (of the Torah) is all commentary, now go study,” said Rabbi Hillel, for he loved to study, but many hate to study, therefore why do you require it of them, you hypocrite! —You joker!

“So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them; for this is the Law and the prophets.” (Matthew 7:12 RSV) Oh, this is too good to resist: Didn’t Jesus accept his crucifixion as a good and necessary action? If so, then he must have wished for it, and then he should do it to us. Funny, right? And yet, I’m quite serious. A good atheist poet will know how to redeem the crucifixion as a symbol of a universal necessity.

Death as Thought: A Dialectic on the Real and the Ideal

What is death? While human words cannot explain what humans have not experienced, science claims that death is the end of life, and religion maintains that it is the door to the next life. But people still wonder, and death still inspires fear, outrage, and sometimes hope.

Beyond science and religion, there is still philosophy. For the philosopher, death is more than a single moment in time, it is also a thought to be thought at any time. Actually, this is misleading. Death is more than a thought, on close inspection it cannot be categorized as one among other thoughts; death is actually a part of thought and consciousness. Death is not a thought, or an object of consciousness ,so much as it is the non-object, the object-negating object. It is an action; it is the action that deletes objects of thought and frees consciousness for new objects. This means it is vital to change and imagination.

Trying to imagine one’s own death means performing the thought-event that deletes all known objects of consciousness, all memories, all beliefs and—and ultimately everything is a memory in relation to death. The death-though is a performative thought, a thought action that does something more than tell us about the future, it negates everything we know or remember in the present. And yet, this is still the death implied by science, for science foresees nothing for the individual consciousness after death.

If death represent the negation or deletion – in theory – of all objects of consciousness, death is integral to consciousness, for consciousness cannot exists as anything but a negation-production process. Simply put, without the ability to negate one thought we could never produce another; without leaving one thought we could never move on to the next. And so, even the smallest or most trivial thought process involves a small negation or a small death. What makes death so difficult for consciousness is that it demands we negate all thought-objects, which is arguably impossible and certainly unsustainable. Eliminating objects from consciousness by reducing mental activity and going into a vegetative state entirely eliminates the challenge posed by thinking about death, for death-as-though is a challenge which, to the highest degree, demands mental activity in active negating.

The benefit of treating death as the active negation of objects is that the mind grows strong in exercising itself with death-as-absolute-negation. In learning to negate any object of consciousness, the mind gains the only self-mastery it can ever have. It frees itself from the power exerted by objects of consciousness, eliminates all clinging and buries the idols. Of course, it also frees us from all that is good, but that is also good, for in freeing us it teaches us to value and love the good.

Negation, or the death-though, is intrinsic to all imaginative thinking, both in science and the arts. No new cause-and-effect relationship could even be imagined without the ability to negate the old; no new experiment could ever be attempted without the ability to imagine the new. The arts themselves would be an endless mimicking of natural phenomena and tradition if the mind were not able to negate, destroy, and make room for the new. Even someone who can speak a human language and chooses to shriek like an ape must have used their imagination first, however little, and in doing so they have performed a negation, though a small one that required no more than the negation of the thought of human language coming out of a human mouth.