Grandpa Sessions

Living in the End Times

I am indicting not only theosophy and its adepts, but all those who adopt truths incompatible with their nature. More than one such man has an Instant India and supposes he has plumbed its secrets, when nothing—neither his character nor his training nor his anxieties—prepares him for any such thing. What a swarm of the pseudo-“delivered” stares down at us from the pinnacle of their salvation! Their conscience is clear—do they not claim to locate themselves above their actions? An intolerable swindle.

Thus, “the man who unmasks his fictions” through an indiscriminate pursuit of lucidity promoted by modern liberal culture “renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depths.” Therefore, he concludes, “no man concerned with his own equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.”

It is only the familiar double standard of philosophy since its debacle: upholding one standard (health) for the “culture” at large, another (spiritual ambition) for the solitary philosopher. The first standard demands what Nietzsche called the sacrifice of the intellect. The second standard demands the sacrifice of health, of mundane happiness, often of participation in family life and other community institutions, perhaps even of sanity.

Thought becomes “thinking,” and “thinking”—by a further turn of the screw—is redefined as worthless unless it is an extreme act, a risk.

Thinking becomes confessional, exorcistic: an inventory of the most personal exacerbations of thinking. Notice that the Cartesian leap is retained as the first move. Existence is still defined as thinking. The difference is that it's not any kind of cogitation, but only a certain kind of difficult thinking. Thought and existence are neither brute facts nor logical givens, but paradoxical, unstable situations.

The marble that covers the surface of the statue does not allow it to use any of its senses.

In the mental experiment involving this statue, Condillac removes portions of the marble from its body bit by bit, in order to clear (in different combinations) the way for different senses, and to “observe” what happens.

In relation to the sense of sight, Condillac introduces an interesting distinction: “The statue doesn’t need to learn how to see, but it has to learn how to look. . . .It seems that we don’t know that there is a difference between seeing [voir] and looking [regarder].”

The statue does not need to learn how to see, because it sees all there is to see, that is, a colored net of light (generally considered to be the only “pure sight”).

However, the statue has to learn how to look—that is to say, how to “put things in perspective.”

The dichotomy between “net of light” and (perspectival) depth of field was central to this debate, and the passage from the former to the latter was conceived as the moment of the constitution of the ego.

The statue, limited only to the sense of sight, was supposed to perceive what it saw as part of itself.

In other words,the statue that sees only the net of light sees no-thing, because what it sees is a part of itself qua thing.

The sense of touch must gradually teach it how to look—that is, make it conceive of the consciousness of what it sees as a consciousness of something other than itself, of something exterior (i.e. as something that “is seen” outside).

The statue, being at first nothing but part of a net composed of rays and sparkling colors, now emerges as an eye, as the organ of sense.

That is to say: the constitution of the ego (and of its limits) corresponds to the statue abandoning a portion of itself (and of its life) to the outer world, to the world of objects that are themselves constituted in this very same gesture.

The statue ceases to be a thing, and becomes a subject, at the moment when a part of itself is irredeemably lost, and transformed into an object.

The Shortest Shadow

Truth is not and cannot be a function of survival, since it is more harmful than beneficial to life (although, with its inexorability and hardness, it can also strengthen life).

This stance could be recognized as the origin of Nietzsche’s own oscillation between, on the one hand, the depreciation of truth as an enemy of life and, on the other, a kind of ethical imperative to pursue the truth, advocating (or, at least, valuing) a certain heroism of truth.

***

One cannot simply “live in truth”—something like “time without truth” is essential to life.

Thus, for example, the great empiricist Locke writes: "He that will not eat till he has demonstration that it will nourish him; he that will not stir till he infallibly knows the business he goes about will succeed, will have little else to do but sit still and perish.”

We go through life relying on all kinds of probabilities and beliefs; we rarely have the certainty of truth at hand, and this is precisely what endows us with a capacity for action.

To say, as Nietzsche does, that “untruth is a condition of life” is indeed a strong, powerful thesis, yet one that aims at exactly the same point: it is not possible to live in truth; truth is not the adequate medium of life.

***

The two passages quoted above are both, despite their apparent incompatibility, expressions of only one of these two lines of argumentation.

The apparent contradiction between them disappears in the light of a thesis that Nietzsche keeps repeating (in different forms): “so far, the lie has been called truth.”

The first passage is simply an elaboration of this thesis: what Nietzsche calls “untruth,” celebrating its contribution to life, is precisely what has so far been called truth (synthetic a priori judgments, unconditional, logical fictions, mathematics as based on numbers, etc.).

The second passage insists on the fact that what has thus far been called truth can no longer be so called, that truth is elsewhere, and that the first statement of this new truth is precisely that, hitherto, the lie has been called truth (or, in another formulation: "I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies”).

This is the truth that has “always been forbidden.”

But, even though there is no conceptual contradiction between the two passages (they are both based upon the thesis that “so far,lie has been called truth”), there is a clear contradiction or difference in their orientation: one prizes the (newly recognized) lie as a condition of life, and its flourishing; while the other prizes the courage to pursue the truth at the cost of its danger (to our well-being and life).

The Shortest Shadow

He explains to the doctor that every night, a dwarf appears in his dream, saying to him: "And now, dear John, we are going to pee.”

And John duly pees in his bed.

The psychiatrist advises him to respond to the dwarf’s invitation with a determined “NO!"

John goes home, but returns the next day.

"I followed your advice,” he says to the doctor.

"When the dwarf appeared, and encouraged me to pee, I firmly said NO!

But then the dwarf replied: Very well then, in that case, we are going to shit.”

So the question is how to escape the imperative of enjoyment, if—as Freud has so brilliantly shown—every new renunciation, every “no” of this kind, has the effect of involving us even more deeply in this logic of the Superego.

Maybe we should try through a Nietzschean gesture: with a “yes”—a “yes” not to the imperative of enjoyment, but to the little bit of enjoyment that keeps persisting on the subject’s part, although he believes that (as a result of his renunciation of enjoyment) all enjoyment is now the property of the Thing.

This would mean, for instance, that we would reply to the dwarf appearing in our dreams along the lines of:

"Hello there! The very sight of you makes me want to pee.”

This could have the effect of waking the subject, waking him from his dream (but also awakening him to the Real of his own desire and enjoyment).

Instead of spending all his energy in trying to escape this Thing that persecutes him so passionately, he just might manage to feel some passion for the Thing.

It means, rather, that via the coincidence of the Real with reality, we are utterly subjected to it, obliged to serve it and to respond to its inexorable demands.

We can discern in this the result of a mistaken calculation concerning the problems involved in the passion for the Real: let us leave this passion to the Thing, and we will thereby find some peace in this abandonment.

In other words, let us give up on our desire, and we will no longer be prey to all the difficult (and “ideological”) choices with which our desire confronts us — Wrong!

The result is, instead, that we no longer have a moment’s peace, for the Thing has moved to the register of the Superego, becoming the source of the imperative of enjoyment that follows us everywhere.

The Shortest Shadow

The problem of passive nihilism does not by any means consist in the fact that “there is nothing everywhere,” that there is nothing all around us: the problem is, rather, that, all around us, there are “somethings,” yet none of these particular “somethings” has the power to engage our will or desire in any serious way.

The Liberal Imagination