The world is beautiful if we’re only looking at it. Unless we’re looking at a pile of dead bodies or a mound of horseshit. But for the most part, we see no shortage of charming vistas. Rapturous, even. What makes the world evil isn’t how it looks, it’s what it does. A beautiful view is a breather between executions. The world an assembly line of slaughter.
Landscapes in all shades will please the eyes. Unfortunately, in support of our eyes we also have bodies, and the primary purpose of our bodies is to die. We also have souls tormented by guilt and envy; souls unable to withstand boredom. We’d rather search for suffering than feel nothing.
A pessimist, like the great old Arthur Schopenhauer, claims that pain drives us on as a positive force. By virtue of simply existing, we feel in proportion to rising hungers and needs. Momentarily satisfying those hungers gives pleasure, a feeling of relief and freedom from the driving needs. Relief doesn’t last and soon hunger lashes us forward again. Pleasure has no substance of its own; it depends on relative levels of pain, the way pain is flexed and assuaged.
Think about a pleasurable experience, like biting into a corned beef sandwich: you might imagine it tastes delicious. It feels right in your mouth and good going down.
Now think about eating four corned beef sandwiches in a row and preparing to eat a fifth. Not so pleasurable anymore. Why not? If pleasure is a positive force, then why doesn’t it scale? The sandwich tastes good when you’re hungry, but the farther you stray from satisfaction of hunger in the direction of eating more corned beef, the closer you come to disgust and pain, until you cross back over into misery.
The word pleasure stands in for what should rightfully be included within pain, as in a reduction of pain, the sensation of filling a lack or satisfying a desire. Take whatever you like, whatever ecstasy: sex is pleasurable as long as it quenches a thirst. Pushing gratification beyond moderate bounds turns sex into a perverted industry, a work of punishment.
In case of confusion, we’re not explaining life as dualistic. Pain and pleasure don’t balance each other, the relation isn’t symmetrical. Rather, pleasure is an effect of a change in the degree of pain. An act is pleasurable to the point of eliminating pain and beyond that it injures.
We’re not only looking at entertaining slides, we’re shuffling around in racked bodies. You keeping yourself alive is the world preparing a meal. Your destiny is to be eaten. You live as long as you kill and then something swallows you, to no other end.
Riches, sex, food, comforts, conveniences, the bodily drives; all seem structured by this dominant negative power, this primary pain. What about the arts, the beautiful views and elegant verses? Our reception and appreciation of art seems to refute the prevalence of pain. Here Schopenhauer shifts his course. A work of art puts us in a state of disinterested contemplation, where we don’t satisfy a hunger, but quiet our will.
So far we’ve talked of pain in relation to pleasure. But we can go farther and examine pain in its positive reality, uncover its own foundations.
Pain expresses the will, a relentless striving. Underneath all apparently individual things, there is one thing that is pure wanting to be, manifesting as various failing forms. Your essence is will. You die as an individual but what animates you is indestructible and in all things.
The will wants to realize itself, it’s essentially this wanting. What it achieves is an orgy of carnage. An ocean of boiling blood. So long as we exist as separate individuals, we must feed and be fed upon. Though what eats and what is eaten are of the same substance, the division of the will into separate individuals makes a ghastly ordeal of this cosmic autophagy.
You might intuit the fundamental unity and immortality of the will underlying all clashing forms, but for the time being you’re locked inside a body with other bodies bearing down on you. And when a giant bird divebombs you as you recline in the shadows of a pear tree on a hot afternoon and slashes you with its talons and tears flesh from your face, only you, the separate illusory you, feels the pain.
We experience pain because we live and want to continue living, always in danger of other living beings ripping us apart and absorbing us.
According to Schopenhauer, a painting, a sonata, a poem distance us from the striving will. In contemplation of art, we dampen our selfish hunger and renounce the universal bloodbath. Schopenhauer’s bleak appraisal of existence accords with Pascal’s, differing in one crucial respect: Schopenhauer changes the locus of redemption from prostration before God to reflection of art.
For Pascal, only submission to God the creator saves us from our wretched condition. Schopenhauer denies God and transcendence. The will never transcends itself, at most it can momentarily renounce its vanity. But then Nietzsche reorients the pessimistic outlook. He argues that when an organism condemns life, it only condemns itself; it judges not the value of life in general, but only its own.
A sick animal on the verge of ruin sees conflict and suffering as refutations, but a healthy animal exults in war and discord, uses pain as an instrument for growth and creativity. The proper role of art isn’t to suppress the will, but to excite it, spur it on toward conquest. Weak and inferior types preach resignation, pity, the submersion of the ego in the community of sufferers, while hardy and independent spirits affirm life as chaos, possibility, contest.
The trouble here is that we don’t have consistent standards by which to judge the value of a life and determine its strength or power. Purely vital success is tautological; survival and domination appear in all shapes, systems, behaviors and beliefs. An apparently life denying philosophy sometimes rules, expresses one kind of health, while an apparently life affirming philosophy could just as well indicate weakness, timidity, illness.
Nietzschean vitalism views all action as signs of health or sickness in need of interpretation. But ambiguity clings to interpretation insofar as superficially diseased behavior could dominate and seemingly powerful acts could hint at profound weakness.
To say that life can’t be judged from the outside is to covertly uphold a perspective you’ve denied. Our nightmare isn’t that we’re trapped in life, it’s that we’re beyond it as well, we feel it as if part of us doesn’t belong.
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The weather has warmed. Compared to the last few days, at 26 degrees I might as well be on the beach, bathing in saltwater. I’m standing outside the apartment, on the corner of a busy street running from shabby hoods to a button-downtown. At rush hour the bedroom rattles with the sounds of a junkyard drag race.
I’ve been reading some essays and recollections of Jozef Czapski, a polish prisoner of war held by the soviets at a camp in Sterobielsk. An officer and a cultured man, he painted, wrote and gave lectures on Proust. His written account of the time highlights his fellow captive officers; doctors, poets, architects, professors. Men of learning and spirit. Leaders and teachers.
Nearly all of them died, most of them were never found. The Soviet Union denied the massacre for decades. Czapski was one of the few who lived, one of the few who could remember. He reflected on art; of painting he said one first needs to see. Painting reproduces the vision of color and form. Contemplation guides the hand. As a manual for training the mind, Czapski recommends the writings of the mystics.
(Good advice, but I hear a note of sacrilege, a questionable tone. The problem lies in subsuming religion under art, conflating the desire to know God with the desire to create for ourselves. We’ve stood on our heads for a while now, seeing our highest longings as low impulses. In the 19th century, influential left Hegelians (see Feuerbach, Marx) argued that man projected his own powers into the heavens; he only needed to reclaim ownership. Not only has internalization of divine creativity failed for historical, political and social reasons, it has intensified alienation and emptiness in its own right.)
Similarly, when writing, one first needs to think. The writer must sharpen his vision before slapping words around the page.
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Thick white clouds brushed on a pane of blue sky. Early evening sun. The faded earth in electric wiry light, a little coppery. Traffic hurls ahead and dabs my lungs with black smoke. Crows break against the sky like bits of ash. Their shrieks the sound of a riot in hell.
Unemployed time, a hole so big nothing solid passes through. Without a constraining force, every act seems herky-jerky. I could stand out here for ten minutes, an hour; I could drive to another town. Give myself a new name, a new backstory. The dull possibilities of reinvention without reason. My concrete situation wafting by like bad breath.
The hours amble, I write and read. Hunger returns. The body never stops pressing its pains. Down to the lowest level of motive but outside the calendar, separate from shared rhythms, organized beliefs. Out here’sit’s me and my angry organs.
Later I drive downtown. The sky fills with a dim canvas blue against which a splash of silhouetted clouds can still be seen. Fattened traffic lurches along. I’m going to get a burger at a fast casual chain restaurant. Sit by myself and eat moderately clean beef like a garbage disposal. The ritual elements of eating stripped down to mechanism.
Reading war prison literature so I don’t lose perspective. Men better than me, with families and futures, caged and tortured and slaughtered and dumped into mass graves for a misbegotten cause.
When you read about the prisoners who endured, you glimpse something more than a will to survive, you witness a coherent force and identity beyond electromagnetic pulses, evolutionary algorithms. A spirit we can’t shake off or limit to physical processes.
I just got smarter. Good stuff.
"An act is pleasurable to the point of eliminating pain and beyond that it injures"
So if pleasure is really the absence of pain, and not it's opposite, then wouldn't our real default state be something like ecstasy? Maybe this is what Heaven is like. Sin causes suffering, and sin is everywhere around us and in us, but we are allowed glimpses of what we were intended to be, and this is also a glimpse of Heaven.