Many discussions posted to the Internet during 1995-96 centered around the concepts of unity and the death wish. Unity of the individual oriented toward the transcendent good and unity of the moral community (or consensual polity), when broken, turn towards a death wish, towards abortion, suicide and abolition of national sovereignty. The discussions began with definitions of unity and the death wish from Boethius, where “being among the stars” and “being in the mud,” are exact correlates with Pope John Paul II’s characterization of the “culture of life” and the “culture of death.”

Providence has given its creatures one great reason to go on living, namely the instinctive desire for the greatest possible self-preservation. There is no reason, therefore, for you to have any doubt that all things have an instinctive desire to preserve their life and avoid destruction. Now whatever seeks to subsist and remain alive desires to be one; take unity away from a thing and existence too ceases. So that all things desire unity. But we proved that unity is identical with goodness. So that all things seek the good, which you could describe by saying that it is goodness itself which all things desire.

For I ask you, what is the cause of this flight from virtue to vice? If you say it is because they do not know what is good, I shall ask what greater weakness is there than the blindness of ignorance. And if you say that they know what they ought to seek for, but pleasure sends them chasing off the wrong way, this way too, they are weak through lack of self control because they cannot resist vice. And if you say they abandon goodness and turn to vice knowingly and willingly, this way they not only cease to be powerful, but cease to be at all. Men who give up the common goal of all things that exist, thereby cease to exist themselves. Some may perhaps think it strange that we say that wicked men, who form the majority of men, do not exist; but that is how it is. I am not trying to deny the wickedness of the wicked; what I do deny is that their existence is absolute and complete existence. Just as you might call a corpse a dead man, but couldn’t simply call it a man, so I would agree that the wicked are wicked, but could not agree that they have unqualified existence. A thing exists when it keeps its proper place and preserves its own nature. Anything which departs from this ceases to exist, because its existence depends on the preservation of its nature.

The reward of the good, then, a reward that can never be decreased, that no one’s power can diminish, and no one’s wickedness darken, is to become gods. So long as they look only at their own desires and not the order of creation, they think of freedom to commit crimes and the absence of punishment as happy things. But let us see what is decreed by everlasting law: if you have turned your mind to higher things, there is no need of a judge to award a prize; it is you yourself who have brought yourself to a more excellent state: but if you have directed your zeal towards lower things, do not look for punishment from without; it is you yourself who have plunged yourself into the worse condition - just as if you look by turns at the sky and the dirt of the earth, and everything else disappears and you seem at one moment to be in the mud and at the next moment among the stars, just by the action of looking. But ordinary people do not see such things.

These arguments have been around almost 1,500 years and they are still prime vintage. I find myself utterly in accord with this: “And if you say they abandon goodness and turn to vice knowingly and willingly, this way they not only cease to be powerful, but cease to be at all. Men who give up the common goal of all things that exist, thereby cease to exist themselves.” That is how it is. Those who worship death, have already ceased to exist.

Life-affirmation and the Supremacy of the Solitary Soul

Ralph Waldo Emerson echoed Boethius strongly, and the discussions of Embodied Reason, too. From Emerson’s “An Address Delivered Before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge” (1838) published in Selected Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson (Penguin 1982):

As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into heaven, into hell. Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he. Whilst a man seeks good end, he is strong by the whole strength of nature. In so far as he roves from these ends, he bereaves himself of power, or auxiliaries; his being shrinks out of all remote channels, he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death. The perception of this law of laws awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. By it is the universe made safe and habitable, not by science or power.

Here is explicit, much as in Boethius, that the falling away from good or life-affirmation, results in a kind of non-existence or death-worship. The conclusion that science or power does not make for civilization is forgotten all too often these days. This final passage of Emerson’s is a stellar renunciation of the mob rule of democracy that places the lowest common denominator of safety and comfort as the only public good.

Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing. The doctrine of the divine nature being forgotten, a sickness infects and dwarfs the constitution. Once man was all; now he is an appendage, a nuisance. The doctrine of inspiration is lost; the base doctrine of the majority of voices usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul. Life is comic or pitiful as soon as the high ends of being fade out of sight, and man becomes near-sighted, and can only attend to what addresses the senses.

G.W.F. Hegel here discusses the Unity found when the State is coincident with the common polity (the consensual purposes of society). This is a fine description of Embodied Reason from The Philosophy of History (trans. by J. Sibree 1941, originally published 1831):

Man, finite when regarded for himself, is yet at the same time the Image of God and a fountain of infinity in himself. He is the object of his own existence - has in himself an infinite value, an eternal destiny. The distinction between Religion and the World is only this - that Religion as such, is Reason in the soul and heart - that it is a temple in which Truth and Freedom in God are presented to the conceptive faculty: the State, on the other hand, regulated by the selfsame Reason, is a temple of Human Freedom concerned with the perception and volition of a reality, whose purport may itself be called divine. Thus Freedom in the State is preserved and established by Religion, since moral rectitude in the State is only the carrying out of that which constitutes the fundamental principle of Religion. The process displayed in History is only the manifestation of Religion as Human Reason - the production of the religious principle which dwells in the heart of man, under the form of Secular Freedom. Thus the discord between the inner life of the heart and the actual world is removed.

The Walking Dead and the Need to Destroy

The moral choice of urban tension and money, what Oswald Spengler correctly described as the highest values of urban civilization, produces care and anxiety in individuals, and facilitates the turn towards the Death Wish instead of Unity. Goethe in Faust (1808) published in Selected Verse (Penguin 1964), hits the nail on the head describing the debilitating effects care has on man:

When once I [CARE] have taken possession of a man, the whole world is of no avail to him: down on him comes perpetual darkness, the sun never rises and never sets; his outward senses are unimpaired, but night has nested in his soul, and though he may be surrounded by treasures he can make none of them his own. His happiness and unhappiness hang on whims, he starves amid abundance, he procrastinates pleasure and procrastinates toil; he looks to nothing but the future, and thus he can never have done with anything. Shall he come or shall he go? He has lost the power to decide; in the middle of an open road he gropes with hesitant half-steps. He wanders ever deeper into the maze, sees all things more and more distortedly, is a burden to himself and to others; he chokes as he draws breath, and though not choked to death he is lifeless; though not despairing, he does not accept. This helpless rolling to and fro, the painful letting-go, the irksome must-do-so, this state that now frees and now smothers, this half-sleep, this unrefreshing repose, all this rivets him fast to where he is, and makes him ready for hell.

“Though not choked to death, he is lifeless” sounds like Boethius and Emerson again. The Walking Dead of those thralls of Disembodied Ideology.

Now for some nasty comments on the Death Wish by French compost-modern deconstructionists. The admiration of modern day poets for those who are dragging us toward everlasting nothingness is a tangible reality amongst the city dwellers. This quote is from A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987) by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari:

Totalitarianism is quintessentially conservative. Fascism, on the other hand, involves a war machine. A bizarre remark by Virilio puts us on the trail: in fascism, the State is far less totalitarian than it is suicidal. There is in fascism a realized nihilism. Unlike the totalitarian State, which does its utmost to seal all possible lines of flight, fascism is constructed on an intense line of flight, which it transforms into a line of pure destruction and abolition.

The totalitarian State, sealing lines of flight, ends up stagnant, then every bit as dead as the fascist State does, only slower.

Klaus Mann’s novel, Mephisto, gives samplings of entirely ordinary Nazi speeches and conversations: ‘Heroism was something that was being ruled out of our lives.... In reality, we are not marching forward, we are reeling, staggering. Our beloved Führer is dragging us toward the shades of darkness and everlasting nothingness. How can we poets, we who have a special affinity for darkness and lower depths, not admire him?... Fires blazing on the horizon; rivers of blood in all the streets; and the frenzied dancing of the survivors, of those who are still spared, around the bodies of the dead!’ Suicide is presented not as a punishment but as the crowning glory of the death of others.

Chillingly accurate.

Finally, a poetic notion explaining the origin of the Death Wish in its guise as nihilism due to a lack of Unity, from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Will to Power (trans. by Walter Kauffman & R.J. Hollingdale 1967, originally published 1901):

Pessimism as a preliminary form of nihilism. Pessimism as strength - in what? in the energy of its logic, as anarchism and nihilism, as analytic. Given these two insights, that becoming has no goal and that underneath all becoming there is no grand unity in which the individual could immerse himself completely as in an element of supreme value, an escape remains: to pass sentence on this whole world of becoming as a deception and to invent a world beyond it, a true world. Existence has no goal or end; any comprehensive unity in the plurality of events is lacking: the character of existence is not ‘true,’ is false. Conclusion: The faith in the categories of reason is the cause of nihilism. What we find here is still the hyperbolic naiveté of man: positing himself as the meaning and measure of the value of things.

Well, well, well - words from the master pointing directly at faith in reason as being the root of the Death Wish!! Along with this destructive faith, we find old Protagoras’s foolishness of man being the measure of all things, the ultimate in Disembodied Ideology.

Values and their changes are related to increases in the power of those positing the values. The measure of unbelief, of permitted ‘freedom of spirit’ as an expression of an increase in power. Every purely moral value system (that of Buddhism, for example) ends in nihilism: this to be expected in Europe. One still hopes to get along with a moralism without religious background: but that necessarily leads to nihilism. - In religion the constraint is lacking to consider ourselves as value-positing. Individual goals and their conflict; collective goals versus individual ones. Everybody merely a partisan, including the philosophers. It reaches its maximum of relative strength as a violent force of destruction - as active nihilism. Its opposite: the weary nihilism that no longer attacks; its most famous form, Buddhism; a passive nihilism, a sign of weakness. Nihilism does not only contemplate the ‘in vain!’ nor is it merely the belief that everything deserves to perish: one helps to destroy.

Ah - the Disembodied Ideology is called here “Freedom” in its Libertarian guise as the measure of unbelief; it is an absolute morality, one must help to destroy everything!!

Anti-Religion, Reason and the Longing for Death

We’ve covered separately the topics of Unity and the Death Wish. Now for some quotes from one of my favorite philosophers, Miguel de Unamuno, on the inextricably linked topics of Unity and the Death Wish. From his book The Tragic Sense of Life (trans. by Anthony Kerrigan 1972, originally published 1913):

What is this relish for living, la joie de vivre, they talk about nowadays? The hunger for God, the thirst for immortality, for survival, will always stifle in us this pitiful pleasure-taking in the life that is fleeting and does not abide. It is the frenzied love of life, the love that would have life be unending, which most often leads us to long for death. ‘If I am to be altogether annihilated,’ we say to ourselves, ‘the world is finished for me, it is over. And why not let it come to an end as soon as possible, so that no new consciousness will have to come into being and suffer the tormenting deceit of a transient and apparential existence? If the illusion of life is destroyed and life for life’s sake or for the sake of others who must also die does not satisfy our soul, then what is the point of living? Death is our best release.’ And so we sing dirges to death, the never-ending respite, simply from fear of it, and call it a liberation.

You can’t explain the Death Wish any clearer than that paragraph, much of the destructive behavior we see in the country today, can be seen to be directly related to the liberating effects of slow suicide.

Now for some passionate additions to Nietszche’s claim that faith in the categories of reason is the root cause of nihilism.

Whatever the view taken, it always appears that reason confronts our longing for personal immortality and contradicts us. And the truth is that reason is the enemy of life. Intelligence is a dreadful matter. It tends toward death in the way that memory tends toward stability. That which lives, that which is absolutely unstable, absolutely individual, is, strictly speaking, unintelligible. Logic tends to reduce everything to identities and genera, to a state where each representation has no more than one single selfsame content in whatever place, time, or relation the representation may occur to us. But nothing is the same for two successive moments of its being. My idea of God is different each time I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is precisely what the intellect seeks. How, then, is reason to open up to the revelation of life? It is a tragic combat, the very essence of tragedy, this battle of life against reason. And truth? Is it something to be lived or something to be apprehended?

Now for some penetratingly accurate insight into the anti-religious attitudes of Libertarians, Anarcho-Capitalists and the culturally illiterate scientists (all generally Disembodied Ideology adherents).

Anti-theological hate, scientificist (I do not say scientific) fury - hate and fury against faith in another life - is manifest. And even those rationalists who do not fall prey to anti-theological rage still will insist on convincing mankind that there actually are good reasons for living and a consolation for having been born - even though a time will come, in some tens or hundreds or millions of centuries, when all human consciousness will have disappeared. And these reasons for living and working, all that business known as humanism, are the mooncalf of the affective and emotional emptiness of rationalism and of its stupefying hypocrisy, a hypocrisy bent on sacrificing sincerity to veracity, and on refusing to confess the fact that reason is a disheartening power committed to dissolution. Is there any point in speaking of the supreme vacuity of culture, of science, of art, of good, truth, beauty, justice... of all those lofty concepts, if, in the end, in four days’ time or four million centuries’ - either length of time is the same - no human consciousness will exist to receive that culture, science, good, truth, beauty, justice, and all the rest? The majority of suicides would never take place if the self-immolators were sure they would never die on this earth. The self-slayer kills himself to avoid waiting for death.

Wow!! Good stuff!!

Here is Herman Dooyeweerd’s thesis in a nutshell: “It is the same old story: so-called scientific philosophy, whose origin and inspiration is basically theological or religious, put to the service of atheology or irreligion, which is itself nothing but a theology and a religion.”

This next argument is particularly troubling, the question of judging evil turns out to be a very slippery slope all by itself. I have no answer for this point Unamuno brings up of self-judgment of our own species, it’s a very complex dilemma. Save us from the malice of evil-doers as much as from the malice of judgers of evil. What a dilemma!

In the matter of good and evil, does not the malice of whoever makes the judgment play a part? Does the evil lie in the intention of the perpetrator of the deed or does it not lie rather in the intention of the judge of its evil? The terrible fact is that man sets himself up as his own judge, and judges himself!

Here follows a good description of Embodied Reason. Collective guilt reflects clearly that the individual springs from society and cannot ever be separated from it, no matter how much criticism of society that individual makes to give himself the appearance of freedom.

‘Let God do it all,’ some reader may exclaim. But if a man folds his arms, God will go to sleep. For true liberty is not a matter of ridding oneself of external law; liberty is consciousness of the law. The free man is not the one who has rid himself of the law, but the one who has made himself master of it. Liberty must be sought in the midst of the world, which is the domain of the law, and of transgression, offspring of the law. It is guilt, transgression, from which we must be freed, and guilt is collective.

Here is an absolutely fascinating description of Libertarianism as an atheistic monkhood. The Libertarian anti-religious bigotry turns out to be simply partisanship amongst fellow monks!

It is curious that friars and anarchists should fight each other, when fundamentally they both profess the same ethics and are so closely related to each other. Anarchism tends to be a kind of atheistic monkhood and more of a religious than an ethical or socioeconomic doctrine. The friars start from the assumption that man is by nature evil, born in original sin, and that it is grace which makes him good, if indeed he ever does become good; and the anarchists start from the assumption that man is naturally good and is subsequently perverted by society. In the end, one theory is the same as the other: in both cases the individual is opposed to society, as if the individual had preceded society and therefore were destined to survive it. And both sets of ethics are the ethics of the cloister. The truth that society is guilty aggravates the guilt of each member of it.

The “ethics of the cloister” is rich, what an apt description of Disembodied Ideology, it really is Disconnected Fantasy; all that ridiculous talk of not harming each other, as if anyone can possibly be separated from anyone or anything else.

Here is the direction salvation will come from. All must be made into a metaphor.

The world wishes to be deceived... either by the deception anterior to reason, which is poetry, or by the deception subsequent to reason, which is religion. And Machiavelli has said that whoever wishes to practice deception will always find someone willing to be deceived. And blessed are those who are easily duped!

The Only Independence Possible for Us is Dependence on Transcendence

Karl Jaspers on the subject of freedom, evil and guidance from Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy (trans. by Karl Manheim, 1951):

...Evil is only the will to evil - the will to destruction as such, the urge to inflict torture, cruelty, annihilation, the nihilistic will to ruin everything that is and has value. Good, in contradistinction, is the unconditional, which is love and hence the will to reality. [At the metaphysical level] the essential lies in the motives themselves. Love is opposed to hate. Love impels to being, hate to nonbeing. Love grows in bond with transcendence; hate, severed from transcendence, dwindles into the abstract punctuality of the ego. Love works as a quiet building in the world; hate as a loud catastrophe, submerging being in empirical existence and destroying empirical existence itself.

I have also seen thinkers who posit that the opposite of love is indifference. In the next quote, Jaspers identifies this as evil, along with hate. The difficulty is that the turn upward, to the stars, must be accompanied by striving. Absent the striving, we fall, by default, into the mud, regardless of our best intentions.

A man can only want one thing or the other, if he is authentic. He follows inclination or duty, he lives in perversion or in purity of motive, he lives out of hate or out of love. But he can fail to decide. Instead of deciding, we vacillate and stumble through life, combine the one with the other and even accept such a state of things as a necessary contradiction. This indecision is in itself evil. Man awakens only when he distinguishes between good and evil. ...We finite beings need the discipline by which we conquer our passions, and because of the impurity of our motives we require distrust of ourselves. When we feel sure of ourselves, that is precisely when we are going astray. Only the unconditional character of the good fills mere duties with content, purifies our ethical motives, dissolves the destructive will of hatred.

If we awaken only when we distinguish between good and evil, what of our educational system that is training our students to “Don’t judge”? Does this not mean that our educational structure’s primary goal is to keep our students asleep? For what purpose do we want succeeding generations to be asleep? Nothing good, you can count on it.

This is the great question of humanity: Whence does man obtain guidance? It is given to man to work in freedom upon his empirical existence as upon a material. In the free and forthright self-awareness of judgment, in self-accusation, in self-affirmation man indirectly finds God’s judgment, which is never definitive and always equivocal. Consequently, human judgment is in error from the outset when man expects to find in it God’s final word, upon which he can absolutely rely. We must mercilessly unmask the self-will that lies in our moral self-satisfaction and self-righteousness. Yet the judgment that is ultimately decisive for [an individual] is not even that of the men he respects, although this is the only judgment accessible in the world; only the judgment of God can be decisive. In every historically actual situation guidance lies in an immediate necessity-of-doing-so, which cannot be derived. But what the individual in this case perceives as his duty remains questionable, however certain he may be of it in his own mind. The very nature of this hearkening to God’s guidance implies the risk of error, hence humility. This excludes reliance on our certainty, forbids us to generalize our own acts as an imperative for all, and bars the way to fanaticism.

This is a good description between healthy skepticism and humility, which we require to live correctly, and the radical skepticism which is synonymous with nihilism, as well as the lack of skepticism which is synonymous with fanatic ideology.

I am going to quote some from Truth and Symbol by Karl Jaspers (trans. by Jean Wilde, William Klubeck & William Kimmel, 1959; originally published as Von der Wahrheit, 1947) on the subject of myth, because he has a very thoughtful consideration of the topic. His terminology of the “cypher” must be understood to be the concept in our brain, prior to processing through the semantic neurological structures, that is, prior to symbolic representation. The “cyphers” are what symbols dimly point to in external reality.

“All being is bound up with Being in a graduated linking. Every level, even the lowest, is still a cypher, participates in Being, is acknowledged, and has a glimmer of beauty: omne ens est bonum.”

This is pure Thomism so far, the linking of the transcendentals in “esse”: good, beauty, truth, unity.

In the cypher lies a transcendental model (pattern, primal image) to which what is perceptible or conceptual corresponds more or less. The universal gives a foundation and structure; the historically particular is what actually takes hold. The universal shows the abstract images, the historical, so to speak, the embodied form. Cyphers are created in the perceptible imagery of myths and in conceptual speculations. The former narrate and communicate in images; the latter move in the sequence of thought-consummation.

The movement of the mind from mythic imagination to abstract analysis raises up emotional meaning. Mythic emotions are primal, analytical emotions are cold, the emotions experienced during the move between the two can be refined to the sublime. This maximizes meaning in our lives.

Whether I think of God as the One and its emanations; as the seed, the source, the ground of the development of all things; as the overseer or the architect of the world; as the One and its creation out of nothingness; as personality; as the Trinity - it is always the same thing: everything is at best metaphor and pointer.

“Everything is at best metaphor and pointer,” is the theme of the latest work of cognitive neuroscience; see Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999) by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

The contents of claimed revelation, when stripped of their absolutisms and their character of exclusiveness, are to be adopted philosophically in the form of cyphers. But the Christ myth is a cypher for the justification of the cypher as mediation between God and man. The man who invents God and does not believe in Him does not experience the uplift. The one God cannot be acquired in a definite manner in an exclusive way. Only in the totality, out of historical depth, in the Encompassing of everything thinkable and everything that can be experienced, is the ascent possible to the One who is not less, not emptier, not more abstract than the world, but who encompasses the world in which everything, through the fact that it is in relation to Him, can be elevated to its highest potentialities. There are no directions as to how the ascent may be accomplished. Here it is as in all essentially philosophical procedure: what is decisive each time happens only once and cannot be generally anticipated.

In other words, revelation cannot be anticipated, nor repeated. The sacred is presented to us, but it is our job to philosophize about it, to make it transmissible to those who did not directly experience it. This is St. Paul’s timeless accomplishment.

Also, Karl Jaspers writes about myth some more in Way to Wisdom. He addresses Mary Douglas’ question of which comes first, conceptualized symbols or the institutional structures influencing the conceptualizer:

[M]astery over one’s ideas remains ambivalent - does it mean an arbitrary freedom from ties or does it imply ties in transcendence? Because of this ambivalence, independence, instead of becoming a road to authentic selfhood in historic fulfillment, can easily be confused with irresponsibility, or the perpetual availability for something else. Then selfhood is lost, and all that remains is different roles played in different situations. This pseudo-independence, like all delusions, takes on countless forms. For example: It can take the form of an aesthetic attitude toward all things, regardless of whether these things be men, animals, or stones. Those who cultivate this independence of irresponsibility shun self-awareness. The pleasure of vision becomes assimilated to passion for being. Being seems to reveal itself in this mythical thinking, which is a kind of speculative poetry. But being does not reveal itself to the mere passion of vision. The most serious solitary vision, the most eloquent turns of phrase and striking images, in disregard of communication - all this dictatorial language of wisdom and prophecy is not enough.

Dictatorial myth-making is not enough because we must concentrate on our relationships with concrete human individuals to really be alive and effective. When we concentrate on only abstractions or only imaginations, only on objectifying “things,” we don’t really exist, as Boethius said. I think that the effusive posting of short messages in cyberspace falls into this category of impotency, there is no vitality in it, unless joint concrete actions occur arising from the activity. There’s a lot of myth-spewing in cyberspace.

Indeed, independence in the world implies a particular attitude toward the world: to be in it and yet not in it, to be both inside it and outside it. Independence does not derive its content from itself. It is not any innate gift, it is not vitality, race, the will to power, it is not self-creation. As man we suffer from fundamental weaknesses from which we cannot free ourselves. With the first awakening of our consciousness we fall into error. In the Bible this thought is expressed in mythical terms as the fall of man. In Hegel’s philosophy man’s alienation is magnificently elucidated. Kierkegaard speaks poignantly of the demonic in us, which drives us to despair and isolation. Our independence itself requires help. We can only do our best and hope that something within us - invisible to the world - will in some unfathomable way come to our aid and lift us out of our limitations. The only independence possible for us is dependence on transcendence.

“Dependence on transcendence” is a very nice turn of a phrase, and very true. In an immanent, neo-Pagan world, where transcendence is absent, how could true independence of thought be possible? I can’t figure it out. “Independence does not derive its content from itself.” So where, in an immanent world, does it obtain content, since in such a world, there is no separation of the self from anything else, all is equally sacred? There can be no independence in a monist universe, thus, the would-be Caesars of today push neo-Paganism on a worldwide scale in order to prepare the world’s masses for servility.

Reilly Jones

© 2001

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