Europe’s exhaustion and the eternal return of the formless

Europe’s exhaustion and the eternal return of the formless

By Sergio Caldarella

REFLECTIONS FOR THE VIGIL-KEEPER 

Europe has repeatedly been the epicenter of fall and ruin: descending into barbarism and horror, it was able to pick itself up and rebuild from the rubble and, at one point, as Gottfried Benn put it, had even managed to gain a “form” of its own. However, to recall Sir Edward Grey’s epochal statement, the lights of Europe went out in 1914. After 1945, uncertain lamps replaced the lights that shone before the Great War, and now, in the 21st century, the old continent has to retrace the hard and iron paths of decadence. Or is it just the weariness of a land now squeezed between political blocks that also repeat, themselves, a history at least as remote as ancient Babylon? The quaestio is for posterity. Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren’s Diaries between 1939-45 poses, alongside the concerns of the time about a civilization that was going up in flames, the explicit declaration that the world had gone mad, a theme she often raises in this captivating read engaged in everyday concerns and big questions such as the possibility, or ability, of the individual to stand against the great evil brought by war. The fall of 1989, the culmination of the political events of the twentieth century, then broke the dams and let the emptiness burst in like a flooding river: “Morality collapsed with the Berlin Wall” will have Luis Sepúlveda say to one of the characters in a book significantly titled El fin de la historia; The End of History, the mantra of every brave new world.

Europe, as announced by some in the last century, seems to have for its destiny to repeat an apocalyptic transformation toward what is other than itself: the eternal return of the formless. In this case, it seems to be nihilism, thus Nothingness, that wants to impose itself, once again, on Being: Nothingness and emptiness trying to impose itself as destiny and form. For this turn of events, there can be no solely rational explanation: why would the homo occidentalis “rationally” choose the annihilation of itself and its community into Nothingness? A disintegration first in spirit and then in nature itself. The death of art devolved into daubed canvases and bananas taped to the wall is perhaps an intuitive and bizarre indication of this, which, paradoxically, is not grasped or thematized with the concern that should be devoted to it. In the 21st century, for example, it is believed to be “music,” those fractious lullabies for the mind and spirit broadcast everywhere from loudspeakers that the oblivious are now always carrying around with them: ski-ba-bop-ba-dop-bop… Here, too, modern nihilism wants to be paid through collective domination over hearts and minds. Only the soul, the eternal guardian of ourselves, escapes it, but the grip of Nothingness is feral and transforms what is alive, the radiant gaze lifted to the starry sky above us (Kant), into dull eyes and a consciousness slumbering in darkness and pain. The spirit of the Reformation and modernism has then mutated into a twisted as well as discombobulated will to nothingness. The 21st century became the era in which post-nihilism and post-truth (post-vérité) triumphed, that moment in history — which generally precedes fatal collapses — in which emptiness has conquered and reached almost every conceptual and spiritual place and recess. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who believed that the Apocalypse was an aphrodisiac or a disturbing dream (Angsttraum), while he was editor of the journal Kursbuch, wrote: “If it seems to us that the end of the world has not yet come, it is because it is expected once and for all, while it is already taking place, only bit by bit, in installments, in bits and pieces, at different times and places.” The end of the world is presented by the poet as the slow breakdown of the human being, his life, and his personality. But where does this havoc and disarray originate?

Atheism takes the side of nihilism.

Casting a light of meaning on some among the processes of the cosmos, instead of extending the cognition of mystery, seems to have emptied the real of the wonder (θαυμάζειν), which founds philosophical thought and of the fear of the Lord (Timor dei), which founds biblical theology: “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov., 1:7), a passage unabashedly clarified a few verses later “the fear of the Lord is to hate evil,” pride, arrogance and perverted speech (8:13). Lacking the sense of what is right, one can no longer find the measure of what is not. The moment the words “we” or “I” are introduced into a 21st-century discourse, these lead to horrible nonsensical referees such as those in which blatant absurdities such as “my truth” or “your truth” are repeated and nothing more is said about wonder or awe, forms of modesty and limitation.

The book on the Nietzschean Will to Power opens by announcing the telling of the story of the next two hundred years: “What I am telling is the story of the next two centuries. I am describing what is coming, what can no longer come any other way: the rise of nihilism.” And, again, for the Röcken thinker, “the nihilist movement is the expression of the physiological decadence” of the homo occidentalis. Thomas Bernhard will write masterfully that it is “despair that has worn out the ability to feel and think.” There comes, thus, a weariness of everything, and living descends into the dank cellars of surviving. Yet already, the late Pythagorean Sextus (ca. 2nd century CE) had lucidly declared, “It is not death, but a bad life that destroys the soul” (91). Not only does death stand at the center of the will to power, as has been irrefutably seen in the past century, but it is through indifference to being or non-being that the death of sense is perpetrated: “the question whether non-being is better than being is, in itself, a disease, a sign of decline” Nietzsche again. The loss of sound judgment and the loss of sense always proceed in intimate accordance.

The preservation of civilization and liberal society.

Any dictatorship, whether material, spiritual, or both, always wants to drive out the freedom, courage, and dignity with which every human being comes into the world. For many, defeat comes from their earliest years, when their autonomy of thought and conscience is quietly removed. Almost everyone knows that one of the most well-known phrases repeated by Nazi henchmen when called to account for their atrocities was, “We only carried out orders,” that is, you cannot ask us to respond as autonomous human beings in the sense and conscience. The more extensive the means of instructing subjection (Unmündigkeit) will then be, the greater will be that part of humanity that will not participate in the dance of real life, those to whom autonomy and freedom will have been precluded from the beginning.

The 1700s, through the American Revolution and its many implications for European history, had offered what Henry Adams later called the four “laws” of “Resistance,” “Truth,” “Duty,” and “Freedom.” Four pillars for a civilized and democratic society and the intellectual and political determination of the individual. The following centuries, rather than flourishing, have instead seen the withering and slow disappearance, through mystification and repression, of these four essential and existential principles of liberal and democratic society. World War I killed an entire world — see the painful description given by Stefan Zweig in that spiritual testament that is The World of Yesterday — which the Second War then buried under the rubble of a devastated Europe. The postwar period, which called itself “of reconstruction,” partly to avoid acknowledging the epochal tragedy and responsibility for the carnage, carefully avoided mourning the loss of that past world by claiming a split between eras. Almost nothing has risen from those ashes, and only a few souls of bibliophiles, capable of retaining wonder in their eyes and awe in their hearts, still mourn the catastrophe, carried through two frightening and epochal wars that buried an entire world.

Every great intuition that has accompanied the steps in the history of civilization contains roots (ῥιζώματα) capable of reconstructing or, staying in the metaphor, of re-sprouting those paths of meaning that such intuitions synthesize. It is curious, but again symptomatic, that it is necessary today to reiterate that civilization consists in the general evolution of dignity and rights of freedom for all, and anything that stands contrary to this fundamental directive is the opposite of civilization.

It seems almost as if, the moment homo faber rises from the bondage of the belly and immediate need, he or she begins to produce, on its own, discombobulated opinions that give rise to collective dementias and horrors: from paradoxical cults to totalitarian regimes, to interpretations of the world and the self that respond to nothing but fantasy and the will to power. Sociality is also constituted by the sum of these oddities, which find political expression in the conditions and constraints imposed by the mythopoesis of the generality. This is also why a true civilization always places the autonomy and dignity of the individual in a sovereign position over the collective; anyone who advocates the extra-legal sovereignty of the collective over the individual invokes, instead, the triumph of ochlocracy and totalitarianism. An individual living in a vacuum already lives in the absence of freedom: a civil democracy is, on the other hand, sustained by laws determined by rational and informed consent. It is then the average level of a society that determines the general moral conditions: civilization is never a gift but is always an achievement that must also be maintained through civil and rational consensus. All it takes is for a few generations to neglect to maintain the edifice of civilization, and it begins to crumble. Given the diversity of cultures and human beings, no civilization is ever entirely safe from barbarism since the former is, in its essence, a rara avis that is difficult to achieve and maintain, while barbarism is easy, too easy.

The empty ethics of Utilitarianism: the world becoming arbitrariness.

The state of the abasement of the contemporary individual is first spiritual and then intellectual. The individual is asked for too much and too little at the same time. Too much, in terms of his existence, is sacrificed on the altar of time devoted to mere survival, consumption, and distraction, and too little, in terms of his moral independence and intellectual autonomy, diverted through ludes and distractions wickedly contrived for purposes of control and profit. The human being ends up trapped in the mere synthesis between pleasure and pain: the purpose of existence is then exchanged for a race aimed at reducing pain and maximizing pleasure in a cage supported by the pillars of reward and punishment, which take the forms of Mammon (μαμωνᾶς) by which it is claimed and believed to be the measure of everything. In the modern, it is no longer, with Protagoras, the ánthrōpos (ἄνθρωπος) measure of all things, but the compulsion to him external to money which is, in the age of fiat currencies, a mere convention, which becomes the measure of all things. It can be observed here as a consequence, without the opportunity to elaborate, that already the subsistence of monetary mechanisms distanced from the facticity of the economy of things is, in itself, a threat to the freedom of the individual.

The age-old question about the meaning of life is not a question about the organization of things but a profound existential demand unfolding over time. What human beings believe — or are given to believe for right and true — is never irrelevant concerning individual and collective existence. The symbiosis between the mores of sociality and the beliefs of the individual determines one and the other to the point where it is possible to say that the care of society resides in the individual and the care of the latter in sociality. The more sociality is directed by ideology and opinion (δόξα) that despise truth and facts, the more the individual will grope trapped within enormous falsifications that mark his cognitive and existential fate. This kind of sociality — “administered world,” Adorno and Horkheimer would say — becomes a form of affliction, and the more capillary its modes of intervention on the person, the more radical the inner tribulations and alienation generated. Responding indirectly, without even knowing it, to the fraudulent distinction between “apocalyptic and integrated” put into circulation by Umberto Eco in 1964, two great humanist psychologists such as Erich Fromm and Alexander Mitscherlich had already taught that those who are most integrated into such social models are also the most alienated precisely because this is the fundamental demand of such models of monocratic administration of sociality. The prerequisite for social participation in systems of the administered world consists of internalizing any falsification of the world, dominant narrative, or ideology, even when these are found to be integrally contrary to the evidence. To participate in the administered world is primarily to alienate and self-deceive: to believe lies, subversion of facts and enactments about reality as “absolute truths,” or to “play a part,” which, put another way, means to place oneself in the world as other than oneself. The question here is no longer “who you are” but what is required of you to be. 

Passivity (Kantian minority), for those who wish to participate in the dance, must become the norm, while autonomy of thought and character are methodically denigrated, criminalized, or pathologized. When such demands include passive acceptance of any subversion of visible reality in favor of obedience through which privileges and prebends are accessed, this detachment indicates the achievement of maximum alienation. Tyrannies, organized forms of violence, never propose real concepts but only diktats or axioms and start from the assumption that human beings are made to be acted upon, while humanist, democratic, and liberal thought advocates the thesis that the people are born free and have the right to pursue their fulfillment: Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Two visions of reality and history clash with increasing force and, unfortunately, increasingly to the detriment of individual autonomy.

Nature and Life.

The Aristotelian hypothesis of the horror vacui –– the discourse on τὸ κενόν from Book IV of the Physics — which, overcoming the objections of the atomists, in its sixteenth-century formulation becomes the Natura abhorret vacuum (nature abhors a vacuum, ca. 1530) on which, in the following century, Galilei himself would begin to meditate, can also be freely interpreted as an admonition to ensure that the vacuum does not prevail, lest we be abhorred by Nature which is the measure of the True and, therefore, of the Beautiful and Good. Death, then, always hastens to fill the void, and this should already be an indication in itself sufficient to fear it.

Friedrich Nietzsche, using metaphor and poetics to arrive at the well-known eternal return of the same, a conclusion perhaps historical or anthropological but certainly not cosmological, starts with the lie of what is straight: “All straight things lie” and concludes by stating the thesis that “all truth is curved” and, therefore, “time itself is a circle.” Röcken’s man, through these singular poetical correlations, speaks of an ontology of time by closing, with his pale fingers now trembling from incipient delirium, Aristotle’s linear time: poetic fantasies which, instead of fantasizing unicorns, imagine bending time as well and attract, thus, the uncertain of the self for whom the phantasmagorias of the will are always at the center of all things. Any discourse, theory, image, or representation that does not have the yardstick of Nature and facts as the center from which to start is mere illusion, fantasy, or dangerous embodiment of the will to power: Natura semina nobis scientiae dedit, scientiam non dedit (Nature has given us the seeds of knowledge, not knowledge itself. Seneca).

The bleak emptiness that dwells in the hearts and minds of homo novus in the modern can also be measured by the distance experienced, particularly through skepticism, toward terms such as Good, True or Beautiful today, if and when written, strictly with a lower case. To deny the three transcendentals of Greek thought is also to reject the dominance and supremacy of Nature, which, precisely by following and pursuing the theological reading proposed by the book of Genesis, is the measure of the Good. Negative thinking, with its fundamental separation of subject and object (Subjekt-Objekt-Spaltung), tells us, on the other hand, that Nature is, if not “ugly,” at least “hostile,” or even “evil” (this element was, until the eighteenth-nineteenth century, a mere prerogative of abstruse magical theories and pagan cults). Here we leave out, once again, the great Platonic dictum that we, too, are Nature. Stig Dagerman, in a poem, will write, “A sky, an earth, an offspring / can only give you joy.” If Nature is then truly hostile, it is so against itself, that is, in contradiction to itself, and this does not make much sense, but it is precisely meaning that is lacking in a world invaded by the spectrality of nothingness. In such a context, ideology holds sway in every field, and the ordo naturalis can even be presented as a supposed “hostility” of Nature against itself.

To try to understand how Nature is instead good (Tob), theology tells us that this must be read through the lens that formed it. Jewish tradition adds that there is something before the moment of biblical creation, before calling the universe into existence, the Eternal formed wisdom (Ἁγία Σοφία) at the beginning of His acts. Regardless of the enormous conceptual implications of this foundation of the world in Western theology, this teaches us that Nature must be read through sapientia, which is scientia, the mortar with which the Almighty created and determined the world. Curiously, the true fathers of nihilism, never mentioned in this context, will first be Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and, later, Scotus Eriugena who, in the Periphyseon, wrote: “in the name, nihil is signified the ineffable, incomprehensible and inaccessible brightness of divine goodness, unknown to all intellects both human and angelic” (III). It is from these profound original mystical insights that, through the centuries, the theme of nothingness will be turned around and appropriated by modern rienniste. It is understood from the assumptions mentioned above how the Sapientia of which the theology that precedes the book of Genesis speaks is not, nor can it be, Scientia alone but must be both. Scientia devoid of Sapientia is, on the other hand, that gray plant of which Goethe writes in his best-known writing: All theory is gray, my friend. But forever green is the tree of life.

The spreading of evil.

In the context just sketched here, one can see, with astonished clarity, the spread of evil, certainly not in Nature, in itself the realm of consequences (action and reaction) alone, but in the deafness to meaning which is, at first, only moral, but becomes, then, ethical and, in the end, involves logic and semantics as well. The spread of evil, even when this occurs quietly and without the fanfare and brown, black, or red shirts of the last century, always brings with it pain, first psychological and spiritual (neuroses, anxieties, phobias, alienation, regression, depression, etc.), then material. The ego, as a particular manifestation emerging from the self, contains the wounds of the emergence of consciousness in a sociality lost among the delusions of the will to power. From the succinct hints presented here, it can be seen that the triumph of the ego is forcibly nihilistic and, in such nihilism, lurks the form and symptom of the disease of the modern, perhaps the most consequence-laden manifestation of this serious affliction of the spirit that posits emptiness as the shape of fullness.

If from Socrates down to Augustine or Rousseau, passing through Montaigne, the ego is contrasted as an empty form from which only echoes come the cry of the insignificance of the will, in the modern, this is elevated on ever-higher pedestals, bringing nothingness to the heights of the world. An empty ego devoid of substance, however, ends up recognizing only the echo: the mere biological life at the mercy of fate that is a naked misery, no longer Pascal’s “thinking reed” or the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog of the painter Caspar David Friedrich: “Imagine a great number of human beings, all in chains and all condemned to death, some of whom are daily slaughtered before the eyes of others. Those who remain see their fate in that of their fellow human beings; looking at each other sorrowfully and hopelessly, they wait their turn. This is the image of the human condition” (Pascal). At a certain point, the days no longer follow one another but just repeat themselves: that is the moment when the individual sinks into a despair in which his life is no longer unfolding as much as a continuous repetition. Here is the most hidden meaning, and never before stated, of the eternal return of the identical, which represents, with chilling clarity, the triumph of human despair in the face of a cosmos in which it can no longer recognize anything other than the echo of nothingness: pede poena claudo, punishment [comes] with a limp foot (Horace). When, then, emptiness has conquered every nook and cranny, death, the disturbing throat-cutting described by Pascal, arrives.

“Evil” — a now obsolete and almost rejected category — to conquer the hearts of human beings, as the well-modern character of Faust teaches paradigmatically, passes through the will to power, emptiness, and death. Everything is nullified in the void. The narratives, enactments, language games, and tales that substitute themselves for facts and reality to show it otherwise are then shown to be the product of a deformed will that forces the mind to believe and follow phantasmata, which lead straight and without escape, to the desert of reason. Through such daydreams, the human being ends up rejecting his nature and frailty, rejecting natural transience, and in most cases, even dreams no longer come to his rescue: “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams,” (Hamlet). The task of the vigil-keeper becomes hic et nunc, to continue to keep lit the candle of rationality that feeds on sense, even amid this horrendous storm signifying nothing (Macbeth).

 

Image: John HainPixabay

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