Let Cold Monsters Lie: thoughts on nihilism, part II

by Steve Neumann

[part I of this essay can be found here]

I have a strong affinity for Nietzsche because I have experienced firsthand the nihilism and subsequent problem of values he so presciently described in his 1872 book The Gay Science. Whatever else his failings as a philosopher and a human being (e.g., his attitudes toward women), he gave voice to precisely the existential predicament I was in.

Having been raised in a born-again Christian household and church, I took for granted that God was the source and sustainer of all values and meaning. Since my family was not what you would call scholarly or intellectually-inclined, there was never even any thought to question or doubt this most basic fact of existence. And, it wasn’t until college that I was forced to confront the startling naivete with which I had lived my faith.

But a basic introductory course to philosophical thought and history, combined with a comparative religion course that included exposure to the Eastern religions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, as well as actually getting to know people who fervently practiced some of these doctrines, all led me to my first real crisis of faith. Unfortunately, at the prompting of a fellow congregant, I subsequently fell for the specious reasoning of C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity, and doubled-down on my faith until after graduation.

Beginning a demanding career as a CPA after college and starting a life on my own didn’t give me much time to reflect on how sound the underpinnings of my newly-revived faith were. However, at age twenty-nine, a confluence of life events, which included the terrorist attacks of 9/11, forced me yet again to confront the conditions of my preservation, as Nietzsche might put it. Long story short: the bottom fell out, and I was every bit a mastless barque adrift on an open sea with no sight of land anywhere, surrounded on all sides by ominously threatening squalls. A poem of mine tries to express this:

Treading Water

When treading water, fatigue

and foaming spatter can

make you falter. And this

undulating plane is all

that separates you from

two worlds: one where some

hope is clung to like

barnacles to a hull; the other

we could call surrender,

the willful slackening of all

long-taut muscles, beginning

with a cascade of chemicals

from deep inside your brain.

And no one may ever know

about the throes of anguish

in your little pixel of ocean,

once you've slipped seamlessly

beneath the plane with

barely a blip or detectable ripple.

Though it would take another five years or so after that to turn to Nietzsche’s writings, to which I had had only the most superficial exposure in college, I eventually came to see my own life mirrored, albeit in a much less histrionically hyperbolic fashion, in the sentiments of Nietzsche’s “madman” which he described in section 125 of The Gay Science:

“Where is God gone?”  he called out. ... “We have killed him you and I! What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker?”

That feeling of frigid desolation and terminal abandonment in the image of a planet without its sun, and the sense of chaos evoked by his cadences here, give a good example of the gravity of the experience of nihilism. To be clear, though, let’s get Nietzsche’s ideas about what he means by nihilism, from his posthumously-published notes (i.e., The Will to Power):

Nihilism as a psychological state will have to be reached, first, when we have sought a “meaning” in all events that is not there: so the seeker eventually becomes discouraged. ... One interpretation has collapsed; but because it was considered the interpretation, it now seems as if there were no meaning at all in existence, as if everything were in vain. ... Underneath all becoming there is no grand unity in which the individual could immerse himself completely as in an element of supreme value.

Whatever the vagaries and vicissitudes of life, the individual religious believer retains a certain sense of comfort and security in the “knowledge” that there is a moral world order, and that this order was created and is indefatigably sustained by a Master of the Universe who is looking out for them. But what is left for the apostate to cling to? He could become a hedonist of a certain sort; or he could, as the poet Rilke observed, throw himself into any one of an array of endless societal diversions and conventions: a demanding career, lifelong military service, raising a family, political gerrymandering — all the trappings of Nature, not Culture. As Nietzsche puts it elsewhere in his notes:

It was morality that protected life against despair and the leap into nothing. ... Morality guarded against nihilism by assigning to each an infinite value, a metaphysical value.

If one possesses enough of a tendency toward near-morbid introspection and self-reflection, one may ultimately see that even these pursuits don’t necessarily satisfy or replace that gaping, sucking hole left by the untethering of absolute and ultimate value and meaning from a belief in God. Our apostate is thus tempted to plunge into the opposite valuation of life; namely, the fatalistic notion that nothing matters, so why bother? This attitude is echoed in a Led Zeppelin lyric (That’s the Way, Led Zeppelin III) from 1970:

Yesterday I saw you kissing tiny flowers;

but all that lives is born to die.

And so I say to you that nothing really matters,

and all you do is stand and cry.

In my private journal, I’ve reduced my own experience of nihilism and its subsequent overcoming to a little formula: liberation => disorientation => despair => nihilism => affirmation. In other words, having been liberated from a fundamentalist Christian worldview, I didn’t know how to make sense of life anymore; so I fell into despair after being frustrated trying to put the pieces back together, which ultimately led to a feeling of the complete meaninglessness of life. Achieving an affirmation of life is still possible, though, and Nietzsche has his own ideas and suggestions about that. I have my own as well; and in Nietzschean fashion I imagine that each one of us must blaze his own trail.

It seems to me that the Humanimal is and has been in a phase of arrested development. Despite all of our frenetic political activity, we seem to have been lulled to sleep by the cold monster; or perhaps we should say that it has convinced us that this somnambulistic state through which we daily move is the ultimate existential pinnacle attainable by us. Nietzsche seemed to feel that the State alternately bullies and seduces the individual into conformity and relative passivity; and it’s true that the State takes a mile when we allow it an inch; but for millennia, the State has made Culture possible. Yet we still need to move beyond the moral and institutional confines of the State in order to move Culture forward. And when I say that we need to move beyond the moral confines of the State, I don’t mean that we should abrogate the equal rights of others and do whatever we please; I simply mean that we would do well to set up a Base Camp in what Sam Harris called the moral landscape, and then allow and encourage each individual to scale the peaks and summits in her own way.

Ultimately, achieving the transfiguration from Humanimal to transhuman involves the alchemy of transmuting the lead of events and the detritus of accidents into a coherent whole, in order to create a piece of gold, the spark, that flicker of the central fire that the ancients claimed to be perceiving inside each mortal frame. The poet, or one whose attitude and approach to existence is that of a poet, redeems life and existence not only for himself but also for everyone else, for anyone “tuned in” to what he is doing:

And this is all my creating and striving, that I create and carry together into One what is fragment and riddle and dreadful accident. And how could I bear to be a man if man were not also a creator and guesser of riddles and redeemer of accidents?

— Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

So the title of my post has a double meaning. Let Cold Monsters Lie is the imperative to not destroy the State (i.e., anarchy), since it is the condition of our individual and collective preservation. And, it is the realization that the State lies, but also that the Humanimal possesses the capacity, the Talent, to overcome the State’s lies and move from the all-too-human to the transhuman. All it needs is the Opportunity to Practice its artistic approach to life best exemplified, in my opinion, by the work and life of the poet, properly understood.