ESSAY IV. On Nihilism.
And the sky above my head became
Like a casque of scorching steel;
And, though I was a soul in pain,
My pain I could not feel.
WILDE.
MATERIALLY it seems that an individual life is like a tensed
muscle, which if exercised is strengthened but if relaxed is emaciated. That
all possible endeavour and effort must end eventually in this relaxation, in
the dispersal of the very tension which makes an individual’s personality, is
fatal to purpose. Therefore man must believe in the spirit. He must believe in
this concept unlike all others. That lemon juice exists and is acid is not
necessary to a man, but that God and the soul exist is utterly necessary to him.
The former belief is merely an incident in existence, a superfluity, but the
latter belief concerns existence itself. The soul guarantees one purpose, God
guarantees all purpose. Belief in Him is belief in a sea captain in the midst
of a vast and unknown ocean. Belief in Him is belief in a landing place, for He
is Himself the landing place, and the oracle of hope when none is apparently
justified.
To state this is
vital when one is to begin a survey of the most injurious and popular
philosophy of the present age, and I feel I must submit at once that I consider
nihilism to be the inevitable consequence of atheism, and that the title of
this essay might as well be such another title as ‘On Atheism’. Equally, I
consider an abject and vicious hedonism to be the inevitable consequence, or
indeed the truer description, of the habits caused by nihilism, therefore I
will not spare it. It is almost ubiquitous and has its defenders.
A great truth belies
the unpleasant old joke, ‘thank God I’m an atheist’, for it is only by the
grace and sufferance of Almighty God that the joke can be told at all, and so too
in the lifestyles of many people since the 1960’s we may see how far in the
scheme of providence human beings are permitted to err, in the process of their
learning, without reaping a complete and terrible destruction. Nor shall the
angry shouts of all the multitudes of the earth in times yet to come, times
certain to come, when the costs of this very new and very reckless mode of life
are made plain, avail us a pennyworth of help. It will be of no use to blame
one man or another, one cause or another, ‘For occasions do not make a man
frail, but they show what he is.’ THOMAS À KEMPIS. When
a man despises himself, that is the time for him to recall his talents and
achievements, be they ever so apparently inconsiderable; when a man exalts
himself boastfully, that is the time for him to remember his many weaknesses,
errors, and infinite dependence upon nature, God, and his fellow men. Balance
is the law both of wisdom and contentedness.
For it is as natural
to cry in prosperity as adversity, and especially so during these golden ages
of health and wealth which have succeeded the long period of the two world wars.
This is not because mankind are innately miserable but because prosperity can
do more to blinker the spirit than adversity itself. Why does luxury, the
effect of work, cause decay in a society? Simply because luxury discourages the
very work which created it. So many people make the same error so earnestly and
frequently that I will state it briefly and coldly. They take their particular
excitement, the socialist her policies, the comedian his jokes, the sophist his
school, the hobbyist his facts, the cook his food, the actress her fame, and
they make of it the centre of the universe; everything orbits around it and is
made subservient to it. This is the rife and virile fault of specialism, and it
is at present distracting the whole world from the duty and pleasure of that
universal sympathy which is faith.
‘Unto the pure all
things are pure: but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing
pure; but even their mind and conscience is defiled.’ TITUS.
i. 15. We none of us deserved our lives and yet they
were given to us. Human justice concerns itself with deserts but divine mercy
concerns itself with itself — with the utmost ways of wisdom. We have now all
at our fingertips and nothing in our skulls, we are become the puppets of facts
(dogmas issued by the fiats of science) and the serfs of doctrines, dominated
by technology, rendered foolish by dependence, our entire lives are become one
long frolic around the environs of Vanity Fair. Some wish to break out, and fly
to an immediate solution. Those who fly to alcohol for example fly to it because
they think they can escape this fate, but in the end the only freedom they find
is that which this fate’s confinement pleases to lend them. Screaming with fear for drunken
dreams of hatching spiders, enormous cobwebs, exploding scorpions, and vicious
dogs, they must painfully break out of their habit and step back in line to
rejoin the social dance.
Some of this can be
traced even to a period before the wars, when the æsthetic philosophy, as it
called itself, was fashionable and the quaint notion of bohemia, not the place but the state of mind, made its rounds with
such types as the Bloomsbury Set. These individuals felt enabled to enjoy a
licence called liberalism, founded on an atheistic impulse generated by the
death of Queen Victoria and a book called The
Way of All Flesh. It was a very amusing period, and art for art’s sake is all
very well when the life in which art exists is held to hold a purpose, but when
that life is not held to hold a purpose then art for art’s sake is not well, it
is ill; it means in fact a disproof of art. For if the worth of things is not
reflected from higher meanings, or stirred by deeper profundities — if in fact
all things are only as they seem and not as they should be — then value is an
invention; dross is ore, ore is dross, and art
for art’s sake is engulfed and obliterated in anything for anything’s sake.
Not that the wise caution
against vanity should be the foolish behest to sloth. False values do not
depreciate the true, but it is the vanity which lives on intellectual conceit that
has proved the most deadly in recent history. As Jane Austen observed, it is
better to be without sense than misapply it. Meanwhile so many prospects in
faded decades once, nay many times, seeming so full of bounty and promise, have
passed, and what we are left with is undoubtedly the most confused and tortured
age in the history of civilisation. The church seems to have no power to alter
this, for silk in mire muddies the silk but does not clarify the mire. All that
ever seems to be published is the same abhorrent manifesto of taking and
accumulating as much as possible, and this great wealth is not even well spent,
as it might be on stone churches, cathedrals, cottages, or architecturally
pleasing towns, no, it is spent on eating, vast amounts of eating, shelves
brimming with food, processed to last for years, cakes, chocolates, burgers,
and pizza, wine, beer, whisky, and vodka. This is Utopia. We argue in words as
fine as filigree the case for human rights but we say nothing whatsoever for
human ideals. We have the right to be slobs but not to have a common faith or
identity, is it then very strange that nihilism prevails?
There are times in
the common course of life when all things seem distasteful and hopeless. These
are fateful moments, and if they come to a mind unprepared in philosophy, weak,
idle, inclined to self-pity and indulgence, they can easily lead it upon a
merry goose chase of exhausting delusion. This chase will conclude by producing
a mind swimming in conceit, employed in all manner of false methods and
tactics, which had looked upon the heavens and turned
away with thought to deceive. From emptiness to nihilism, from nihilism to
hedonism, the path is all too discernible. For whereas the Christian is usually
logical in ordinary affairs because his belief is inhumed in God, the atheist
is often illogical and discrepant in his ideas of life because his faith is
exhumed from its own sepulchre, like a phantom disturbed from rest, wandering
restlessly about the earth, possessing hundreds of trivialities in its
confusion.
There seems to be a
permanent connection between the vice of a hedonistic life and the danger of
death. Consider the many activities which the soporific and voluptuous citizens
of the west often indulge in, consider the extreme sports which frequently
cause them hideous injury, practiced solely it seems for the thrill of the
risk; consider the increasing recreational indulgence of harmful drugs, the
effect of which on the brain might even have something to do with the injuries
they inflict. Those who have been very unwell, or near to death, will know that
there is a kind of strange exaltation in illness. Death of course the rowdy
never seek, it is only the thought of death which excites the aggressive, so
they teeter in a No Man’s Land, exulting in every bullet which flies over them.
They could not be poised on a death bed, for death is in itself a peaceful
thing, violence is their desire.
Man is inclined to extremes. He must it
seems be either very good or very bad, but the art of life is the art of
balance. Vices are potent, more potent than virtues, and
more prolific. They are the weeds of the garden, to extract them is no light
work but it is vital work of great benefit in itself. Of course a trifle spade
work always helps a share, though to a well or unwell hypochondriac it is a
hard remedy. Spending time under the thumb of necessity, a real necessity not
fancied, will assist in this, but to change a gloomy disposition is no simple
matter. Nihilism is not a natural state of mind; the animals do not partake
of it, their lives are always moving forwards not backwards, it is a disease
unique to mankind. Of the animals however we may learn something in this regard
for they are bestowed custody of a remarkable power. Through their discernment,
by their consumption, and according to their partiality, they breathe value and
importance into things seemingly purposeless. That this power is not merely
imaginary or symbolic is shown by the sciences which all animals employ, and
which are evident in the building of nests with twigs, the making of honey with
pollen, and the production of silk webs through a diet of flies. If only we
could develop such a concentration of purpose in this new age, we should be a
step nearer redemption.
Presumably the
animals perform their labours because it is an instinctive and preferable thing
to do, and they are happier at work than at leisure. Here again we may learn a
lesson, for truly there is something of a moral and social duty to uphold one’s
own contentedness in life, without straying into the vice land of narcissistic
selfishness, for contentedness is a great surety of good works. Spinoza devoted
much of his book called The Ethics to the problem of attaining an
ordinary contentment or satisfaction in life, even in the most unfortunate
circumstances. It was his opinion that man could achieve contentment, to be
distinguished from happiness because happiness is a word too often used in a
shallow sense, chiefly through an internal meditation upon the customs of
existence. His attitude was comparable to stoicism but distinct from it in its
active purpose. Hope is stoical but stoicism is not hopeful. Though it frowns
on vice it seldom smiles on virtue. Thus whereas the stoic manner tended to a
passive and frankly miserable sufferance of ill, Spinoza’s manner required an
active, continuous, but wisely justified, analysis of daily events; a thing
more easily wished for than attained. For the trouble with his optimistic
notion that all will be quite well in a gutter if the gutter can only be justly
appreciated is that the primal parts of the mind, shaped and indurated like
mortar across the dark millennia of man’s brutal past, hold the keys to the
emotions. It is this savage aspect, which civilisation has wrestled with across
history without as yet emerging conclusively the victor, which determines our
emotions with the quickest force and the strongest energy.
Survival is the
immediate concern. People first wish to exist and only later wish to exist in a
certain fashion. Energy breeds energy but how can a mickle make a muckle? It is
one thing to replicate but another to grow in increment. Only from enthusiasm
can a large and sustaining passion emerge, and only from a passion can the
sudden and necessary explosions of energy occur in a person’s life which lead
to a salutary and hope-sustaining rate of compound interest. The question is
therefore boiled down from how might I
grow in energy? to how might I feel
enthusiasm for something? The answer to that is uncertain and advisory. No
two individuals are identical, and no two individuals are even very similar. At
birth it would be foolish to deny, although much can be acquired, that there
are innate propensities, congenital powers, and natural talents, which will
develop such an enthusiasm when the appropriate object is found. Society has
developed in many respects in order to discern and capitalise upon these inborn
abilities. Yet much may be acquired, and the most brilliant genius is not so
important a figure as the most virtuous man. Everything which the individual
is, everything which he learns, originates outside him. Therefore everything which
is within him is also abundant beyond him, and he is less than his
surroundings.
He must aspire to
link arms with the world and wrestle with its difficulties. Every morning,
afternoon, and evening, requires renewed resolution, for every morning,
afternoon, and evening, is its own lifetime with its own cares, its own trials
and temptations, its own rewards, and its own snares. The morning calls for
action, swift action, resolved and diligent action. One must wash and dress,
one must clean and cook, one must prepare for the business of the day, all at a
period when the body and mind are both most accustomed to the absolution of
rest, and most willing to submit to its enticements. But then business must
begin, in all its forms, and be carried forth upon the orange coattails of the
sun to its apex and meridian. Thereafter begins the afternoon; that long period
of essential concern, when all seem pulled upon the rails of their purposes,
and each man has the hour's trouble upon his countenance. The slow hands of the
clock seem to drift like leaves along the treacle river of time, and a hundred
hours seem to inhabit a minute. A vexation will occur and a thousand
recriminations at its nature, its bringer, its causes, and its solutions, will
fill the irritated inspiration of a second, while the hollow tedium of all the
rest will dampen the minds and spirits of their sufferers. Worst yet is the
evening of recumbent relaxation, when the mind is most strained, conviction
most drained, and the voice of self-indulgence most eloquent. That is the time
to recapitulate the day and renew its ideals.
For by an inward sympathy with outward
things it is possible that despair, another name for nihilism, should be
overcome. It is not a simple business, but I for one have sometimes experienced
a certain set of sensations, an exquisite array or medley of feelings and
thoughts, which combined conduce to the most sublime and pacifying state. It is
when the sea and sky are calm and sparkling crystalline in a sunset, when I
smell salt in my nostrils and feel it encrusting my skin, when a well tuned
piano plays Chopin’s second nocturne, when silhouettes declare time is turned
to its latter half, when I realise friendships once thought eternal are already
vanished forever, a bittersweet feeling, for the end truly rounds the life, it
is when I see a fire at night with no one else, the stars, the Hunter’s Moon,
staring like a glowing eye on the petrified earth. Yet I am no very rapturous
individual by nature, too often I find a walk more tedious than uplifting, but
this exaltation of the spirit is possible and should be sought by all,
especially the despondent.
‘Brethren,
whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are
just, whatsoever things are pure,
whatsoever things are lovely,
whatsoever things are of good report;
if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.’ PHILIPPIANS;
iv;
8.
The painful emotions
are usually maintained in modern psychotherapy to be the effects of certain
thoughts, the reaction of a subject to an object. Sometimes this is true. In
the most ordinary instances it is certainly true, in grief, trauma, bullying,
or a particular phobia, it is possible to resolve unpleasant emotions by
altering an unsatisfactory circumstance. There are however more ambient, less
specific, more general, and far less easily diagnosed, feelings which people
tend to suffer from quite unrelated to the particulars of their life’s
experience. A worrisome dog is so by nature, so is a worrisome person. It is
not to be expected that the types of men so clearly delineated in the world are
to be simply resolved through a process of objectified blame, cured out of
their nature and character by a sentence. What is needed by all is a general understanding,
a common sympathy, rather than a specific. A sense of identity, not only with
one’s people and one’s culture, but with the universe around one. From such a
sense of identity it is quite likely that the more painful sensations of an
existential crisis may be diminished.
All the trivial cures
are meagre; only the transcendent cure is sound. There are myriads of false
methods claimed to summon at a moment’s notice the Golden Patience, the
glorious reserve, the very blood of happiness. One has not to look far to see
tens of claims, claims more strident than religious claims, which pretend to
reveal profound mysteries in the most commonplace things. I have tried
squeezing rubber, holding breaths, minding passing aphids, counting thirty
seconds, imagining roast dinners, stretching limbs, drinking regular port, and
taking regular tobacco. I found they induced more stress than they reduced. I
have ventured philosophies, repeated sayings, worn talismans, forced hypnosis,
fasted, gorged, pretended I was American, pretended I was a tramp, pretended I
was a pirate, pretended I was an athlete, pretended I was a colonel. Pretence
is a refuge of fear. Most people tend to act for whole portions of their lives;
I am still, for instance, under the lively delusion that I am an author. I have
spoken to counsellors and been thoroughly convinced I am persecuted; I let the
long contention cease, saw geese were swans, and swans were geese. Still I was
impatient. Only as my poor character improved generally did my stock of
patience increase. It is the simplest answer of all, which is why it is seldom
supposed, that patience is but a symptom of greatness, an indication of noble
character. It is only the truly wise who are truly patient.
We cannot continue in this endless purgatory
of cheap consumption, repeatedly learning lessons only heeded in our better moods. Man’s
vain and vengeful spirit is still far from dead, it rears its head in many ways. Also in
self-adoration, worship of the human form, many are drowned. For my part, I
find it difficult to have narcissistic delusions about the beauty of my
appearance when I regularly see orange wax seeping out my ears and yellow jelly
pouring from my nostrils, but that is by the way. Such delusion has the flavour
but not the savour of life. From vanity we turn to vengeance as from loyalty to
war, and anger is the common outlet of pain. It is the voluntary submission of
patience, will, judgement, reason, inspiration, dignity, wisdom, beauty, peace,
gentility, fellowship, humour, excellence, order, charity, honour, responsibility,
virtue’s and joy’s abundance, for the sake of a paltry vexation, the vain pride
of conceit. It is a ridiculous surrender.
‘The news announces that this Baader-Meinhof gang have again started
more thuggery: they’ve kidnapped a Dutch millionaire. So the mess goes on. All
the warnings have been in vain. Some of my earliest diaries have got entries
about the terror that would be unleashed as a result of disbelief. The world of
the agnostics / atheists is a cruel and comfortless one. Not only are the
neighbour’s goods coveted, they’re actually stolen: and the neighbour is
murdered. And all without passion. It’s done coldly, sickeningly... as mindless
as the Manson horrors.’ KENNETH WILLIAMS’ DIARY,
28.10.1977.
We must bear and forbear, and try not to fray ourselves with worry. Worry is distraction, an error of concentration. He who has faith in providence must ultimately rest assured come what may, and keep his mind on pleasant things, working at his duty, maintaining his integrity, awaiting eternity but bowing to time. ‘If thou bearest thy cross willingly, it will bear thee. If thou bearest it unwillingly, thou increasest thy load, and yet thou must bear it.’ THOMAS À KEMPIS. Kindness is the quality of greatest importance in life. Honest affability is a golden passport, sincerity is quicker than deception, and faith exceeds all comforts. With such fruits nurtured in the garden of the mind anyone may attain blessedness and begin anew, seeing value in everything instead of nothing, partaking of a meaning not summoned out of dust but perceived in the thoughts which lead to God.
We cannot kindle when we will
The fire that in the heart resides,
The spirit bloweth and is still
In mystery our soul abides:
But tasks in hours of insight will’d
Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.
With aching hands and bleeding feet
We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;
We bear the burden and the heat
Of the long day, and wish ‘twere done.
Not till the hours of light return
All we have built do we discern.
ARNOLD.
.png)
No comments:
Post a Comment