Kafka and the Smell of Truth: Poetry at the Fringes of Thought

Where was Kafka getting it right?  Why do we enjoy his stories?  What about them can account for their intrigue and apparent importance?  

The world is like Reagan’s joke, wherein the optimist gleefully digs in the pile of manure, saying, “There’s gotta be a donkey in here somewhere!”  With Kafka, we find the manure and we have the premonition of finding a donkey, but what is the donkey?  Is it truth?  Is THAT why truth is valuable, namely, that it lies beneath all that is explicit?  That it is intractably hidden?  Perhaps, after all, the notion that truth is “god” has got it right, insofar that is, that this notion acknowledges the invisibility and irretrievability of truth.  Dig as you may, you never turn it up, yet it smells strong all the while.

 Truth is what lies behind that sneaking sense that one can and must escape from oneself in matters of perception and understanding.  That one can get at what lies out there in the god’s eye view…

 No, I’m getting this all wrong.

 Truth, rather, is a gas (Wittgenstein’s comments on mathematics.  Mienong cannot find his objects here, because they cannot be held by hands).  We make cracks in our encrusted what-it-is, in our everydayness, and we begin to smell something seeping up through the cracks.  This compells us to search for the source of this smell, but search as we may, we always come up with nothing.  But most people have their mouths too full of shit to search anyway, and they wonder why we philosophers attend so neurotically to what's underneath. 

 Kafka made cracks, and that was his genius.  Those cracks are the stuff of nightmares, they give us the guilt.  The guilt that we haven’t followed our noses, or perhaps it is this: that had we followed our noses, we would have in the end discovered our wrongdoing (now Dostoevsky). 

It just occurred to me: Humans are copies, archives, of a primative form.  Even their thoughts are reproductions insofar as batteries of mechananisms have produced them, their variance being mere pathetic attempts at variation.  We are like products on shelves—bags of candy—with a “net weight” but not an “exact count or volume,” since “contents may settle during shipping” and besides, the machines do not bother to count each M&M because that wouldn’t be profitable.

 So we are these “net weights,” these approximations, these mass produced goods fit for consumption by time and nature.  Individuals are good for nothing, but are designed to be piled in with all the others (the chief concern of our design being to approximate our mass-produced neighbors on the shelf). 

 In other words, in a naturally evolved world, there is no “me.”  There is not even an “us.”  There are instead reproductions with strategically implanted variations.  But we make the grand, miserable, pathetic mistake of assuming that those variations constitute unique personal identities.  But personal identity is a sham, because the source of our personal identity is a manufacturing facility with machinery having a built-in randomizer. 

 We are only ourselves because it was strategically necessary in the marketplace of survival.  Hume was right:  Personal identity is an illusion.  But he was wrong in defending this perspective by appealing to the disconnectedness of perceptions.  He should, rather, have noticed the common source of our perceptions (the mass production behind the stuff we call the ‘self’) and realized that, in fact, we are all—thoughts and dreams and all—variations on a theme for the purpose of not losing everything when the next pressure to survival comes to town.

 We are bundles of programming with net weights (go to a finer level of measurement, and even that comes out with variation, betraying the mutancy of what the bag contains).

 So, back to Kafka.  Kafka made cracks. That was his genius.

 

So, Kafka’s Cracks

A cockroach

Iron

Descends upon the tempered glass

the crackling lawn

the us

Whose expectations clamor for common recognition

 

And nothing breaks, but

cracks are formed like spiders legs

cold and icy and prying apart

Arctic backgrounds yet unnoticed

Before us

Behind us

invisible.

 

Gas ascends

Putrid rising

I recognize it and fear

My own wanton lust for its

Source in the dark abyss

Beneath the ice.

 

So tempted are we by Kafka

That we want and plead and grope

With a crazy horny desire

To slip ourselves between the cracks

And drown within the darkness

Below

Where truth’s fragrant beams

Are all at once quaffed

And appealingly undiscovered.

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Art is terrifying insofar as it happily reduces any anxiety that we my have about living life as we ought.

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Kafka’s art invites us to receive everything as a potentially other, since beneath everything, is something so other to us, that its smell alarms and, in the end, murders us (The Trial).  Kafka bothers us because he hints at the idea that, in the end, truth is a killer instead of a life-giver.  That smell emanating from the cracks is poisonous, but—AND THIS IS WHY WE PHILOSOPHERS IMBIBE THE FRAGRANCE IN SPITE OF OUR KNOWLEDGE OF ITS NOXIOUS ESSENCE—the smell is a laughing gas.  It makes us laugh at everyone who has failed to smell the gas coming from the cracks.  They die without knowing why, whereas we miserable ones die from deeply breathing in the noxious odours of truth.  We mean to breath it.  Social gas masks look unattractive to us compared to the glamour of the powdered nose.  The padded cell with it’s freedoms (more cracks than the psych-techs can see…notice the icy floor).

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Kafka wanted us to feel guilty about something, but what?  Disaprobation from family (The Metamorphosis), litigation by a mysterious elite (The Trial).

Here is where the guilt comes from, really, I think, if we read between the lines.  This, namely, the…

loneliness

of your own “right-here-right-now-in-this-place-with-this-shape-and-color-and-texture-and-plasticity-and-sameness-to-all-that-like-myself-are-subject-to-death-without-being-noticed.”

That didn’t capture what I wanted to express.

GUILT.

There is something important about that way of seeing things (things experienced as one who feels guilty).

Dostoevsky needs to give up gOD here in favor of mass-productive-equivalence.

That’s god without meaning and purpose and worthiness.

Not god but garbage that still works when plugged in.

 It makes us uncomfortable, does it not (I revel here!)?

To juxtapose the words GOD and

                                    GARBAGE

                                                ?

 Why?

 Because both smell funny, which is why both are so intriguing and sweet and subject to that “what’s-beneath-this-object”ness that, in my view, helps bring forth truth’s gases.

The unreality of a number is the crack that gives way to a gas which smells like infinity.

I’m not trying to sound deep here.  I’m trying to give voice to a metaphor that I feel, but cannot express properly.  I am trying, hoping, longing, wishing, assuming, giving-my-best-shot-at poking at “the divine.” 

God is never found, never known, never touched.  God is not a being, not a person, not a savior.  God kills us by sneaking into our awareness.  God is the black whole beneath us, drawing us into the dark depths of giving-up.  God is the prophecy of Sagan about the expansion of the sun—no!—God is the hunch had by one about to die—no!—god is…

...The personification of the fear and guilt that happens when cracks are opened up in our everydayness.

Book of Disquiet, an excerpt

“To submit to nothing, whether to a man or a love or an idea, and to have the aloof independence of not believing in the truth or even (if it existed) in the usefulness of knowing it—this seems to me the right attitude for the intellectual inner life of those who can’t live without thinking.  To belong is synonymous with banality.  Creeds, ideals, a woman, a profession—all are prisons and shackles.  To be is to be free.  Even ambition, if we take pride in it, is a hindrance; we wouldn’t be proud of it if we realized it’s a string by which we’re pulled.  No: no ties even to ourselves!  Free from ourselves as well as from others, contemplatives without ecstasy, thinkers without conclusions and liberated from God, we will live the few moments of bliss allowed us in the prison yard by the distraction of our executioners.  Tomorrow we will face the guillotine.  Or if not tomorrow, then the day after.  Let us stroll about in the sun before the end comes, deliberately forgetting all projects and pursuits.  Without wrinkles our foreheads will glow in the sun, and the breeze will be cool for those who quit hoping.” 

Fernando Pessoa

Becoming the Vagrant (a Dream)

Euclid Avenue, Berkeley, in the morning.  Students study the ground before them, walking silently, considering the tasks demanded of them today, tomorrow, next week.  The dawn light, muted by that familiar nebula of haze that shrouds the bay, pours itself over the scene, the street, sidewalk, and shop windows painted by its pink luster.  I hear commuters’ engines slowly pass before me, behind, on my left, their irritated growls betraying the failed hunt for streetside parking close to campus.  As if on cue, the smell of donuts belches from a roofpipe as I pass the shop of that old Asian baker, the one who makes the strong coffee that I often fetch before my mid-afternoon classes.

But this scene is all background and white noise.  As I walk, nothing is real to me except for my projects.  The term papers, the deadlines, the thesis ideas, these all swim back and forth like schools of fish in my mind, my consciousness fixed on them.  These account for my brisk stride, my hurried glances at the clock tower.  It is as if the swirling motions in the scene around me are sustained by these projects, or rather, that my projects have thrown me into this scene without my consent.  They are the energy of my movement: My tasks and concerns are the libido of my world.

I notice a vagrant beneath a bush on my right.  His eyes turn toward me.  They are blue, sagging upon a contorted jaw, its mechanism rotating a set of bare gums.  His gaze captures me as if by a spell and my gait is halted.  As I look back at him, I begin to see not a face, but things.  His face disappears, as it were, and strange objects appear in its place.  There is a sunburned brow, a piece of noodle clinging to shaggy hair, stubble.  Beneath the bush around him I begin to see filth and unmoving chunks, lumps, debris.  A crumpled bit of paper, a half-dried puddle of mucous, a lard stain.

Then, as if startling myself in a mirror while alone in a room, I begin to notice my own body.  With the vagrant’s face, I too have disappeared.  Instead of me, there is only this lumpy mass of objects, disparately organized, heavy, soft in parts and hard in others.  It wants at first to be in motion, but the energy putting it in motion begins to subside and it sits unmoving.  Then the feet appear, two wraiths suddenly appearing to collect me.  Everything grows cold: a book in my hands, the breeze seeping into my shirt.  I smell the donuts again and I smell shit in the bush at the same time.

And I begin to lose my grip on things familiar.  My concerns are fading from the front of my mind like visitors departing without saying goodbye.  My mind is following a strange scent into a place it has never visited before: the background of my world. 

 

A raspy voice is calling me into the bush.  The old man with his wizened hands and filth.  He is saying something and now, as if entranced by his voice, I am wholly occupied by him.  I want to touch his face. 

            And a strange kind of terror begins to take hold of me.  The same terror attending a descent into paralysis.  Every option for acting—an infinite number—is suddenly available to me.  Every way I look with my minds eye, I see nothing except objects overlaid with options.  This paralyzes me.  I cannot decide which option to choose because I see no means of preferring one over another.  Yet I feel that I must choose, so I turn round and round in my mind, possibilities swimming before my eyes.  But, as if I am viewing them from a high speed carnival ride, they become a blur. 

In this condition, I feel that I may sit here all morning, all day, all night.  I could remain tomorrow, the next day, and the day after until, like this man, I begin to resemble a bag of garbage.  Having become this, all of my projects will disappear completely and cease to exist.  Indeed, to this point they have merely resided on the edge of existence, not having any being except in my own mind.  Having existed only in my mind and cast out by my mind, they will be extinct. 

I consider that my sitting will not draw the slightest attention from the students walking on Euclid because it would make me part of their white noise.  They would not see me.  I would be a venue for their projects.  No, rather, I have always been such, but did not know it because I was using them in the same way (using them through neglect).  I have fallen into another world or, perhaps, I have clambered out of the world into which I had, in the beginning, already fallen. 

My existence is becoming suspect.  Something—the vagrant?—has punctured my world and deflated it, and now I cannot take hold of it anymore.  I only see things attached to other things, and everything without any attitude or relation to me.  Pieces of gum, black and round, spotting the pavement.  Dried leaves clustered in cobwebs beneath the hedge.  My own hands, as if I had never seen them before.

And I wonder what is beneath the skin of that hand I find before my face.  This wondering reinforces an option for acting and this—acting—slows the dizzy spin.  I reach into my bag for another object, a pen, cheap, stolen from the library.  I plunge it into the palm of my left hand and the pain emerges as if it, too, were an object, a thing outside of me.  I perceive it in the same way I perceive the pen.  I do not perceive it as pain.  The as-ness of the world is fading.  There are only frightened nerves.  The oozing begins and I fall backward into the bush, twisting the pen deeper and harder, aiming between the bones.  I ponder the surfaces of these sensations as I might those of a stone, absent-mindedly.

Blood is running down my arm.  I feel it chilling and notice the strange color that appears when it contacts my pale blue shirt.  The pen has plunged so deeply now that I can see a dancing peak on top of my hand as the tip of pen tries to pierce its surface.  But I lose my interest and toss the pen into the street as if it had become empty.

The blood reaches the sidewalk.  Shoeprints form and fade in twos and threes as students, unnoticing, step through it.  It will dry soon, I think, and silently watch.

The vagrant turns his gaze to me, his yellowed eyes gaping.  And suddenly, as if taken by a fit, he flies upon me, his long, twisted fingers about my neck, clutching.  I hesitate for a moment, noticing the sensations: his greasy, trembling hands, his bony legs bent backward.  Vapors of vodka and tobacco.  Teeth like little shards jutting from gray gums. 

My left hand scrambles across the pavement and I find the pen near the gutter as my vision begins to dim.  I realize now that the vagrant is squeezing harder, asphyxiating me. 

Fight.  Finding my strength, I roll over, trading places with my assailant, pinning him to the sidewalk.  His eyes are shut hard now and his mouth is bent downward at the sides, clownish.  In our tumble, his head hits the pavement; he is grunting and coughing, remembering his weakness.  I release my grip and the pen falls to the ground again.

            Others have noticed us now.  They have seen the blood and the conflict and some have stopped.  They are murmuring with disguised voices.  I look up at them, panting and vicious.  “I am this stuff,” I say, displaying my wound.  One of them grimaces and walks off.  Another of them—a young woman—waves her arms at someone across the street.

“He killed the old man!”  She shouts.  She has an Asian accent.  I don’t immediately understand why she is shouting.  I cannot find meaning in anything except fighting, but that is done now. 

Others approach and form a small crowd.  Their faces fill me with terror.  I try to explain:  “There is no point in doing this.  I can sit under the bush.  I can just be here like him.  I am just this.”  I raise my hand to them, proving my case, but to no effect.

I stagger to my feet and stand over the vagrant.  The crowd moves back, forming a semi-circle around us.  I gently nudge the man’s head with my shoe, then again and again, harder so that I’m kicking.  There is no response.  I point at the man, “I don’t know who he is.  I don’t know where to go.”  These words seem to be addressed to myself, but I only hear the sounds in my head that do not speak to me.

Down the block, I see a police car round the corner. 

Flight.  I find a gap in the crowd, dart forward and run, thwarting someone’s attempt to block me.  The crowd is pointing and shouting at me but their voices merging with the noise of the traffic. 

I run between two buildings, behind a row of bushes beside a hotel, through a sea of cars in a parking lot.  I have the disturbing sensation of the perfect freedom of going nowhere and anywhere, of moving without acting and without destination.  The self I had forged among others is dead and gone.  I am a vagrant; an animal with no identity.  I have committed suicide, perfectly and purely.

Social Inertia: A Parable

M. leaves for the bar with two pills in his pocket.  He eats the first pill just as he leaves the house and it takes hold before he arrives.

Entering the bar, he finds himself surrounded by animals.  Mammals walking upright.  They are noisy and always moving, but share no tangible connections.  They are discrete organisms.

M. walks around the bar to inspect them.  They are pressing into one another in clusters, clotting the passageways.  Up close they have an ugliness about them.  He notices pock marks and sagging asses and reeking breath and scalps and oil.  Fleshy worms.

Halfway across the room, M. becomes nauseous.  His mind is spinning. 

He orders a drink and eats the second pill.  There must be something more here, he thinks.  To pass the time, he turns his gaze to more appealing objects.  Labels on bottles.  Patterns in the wood of the furniture.  Curling fingers of smoke. 

The moments drain slowly, but after a time the nausea subsides and another shift begins.

Now the animals are concealed and there are only connections.  The scaffolding of action.  All the hidden networks of agreements between the people, once invisible, become an intricate landscape of mechanical engineering.  An infinite maze of circuitry.  Wires.  Wires everywhere, linking everything together and divided by black boxes and hubs of blinking breakers, all buzzing with the electricity of the rule structure.

Now M. cannot act.  He is inert.  His ability to decide is crushed by the complexity of the scene.

A girl, panning, fixes her eyes on him suggestively. 

But he is preoccupied with the circuitry now—its nakedness and intricacy and frenetic flux and, supervening over the whole system, a thin wispy wire gauze of social history—and so he cannot determine the proper response to her gaze.  She is pretty; he knows that.  But he doesn’t know “what one does” when smiled at this way.  The rules for action are hidden in the wires.

He looks around for other men in the bar.  He understands that they have the privilege of naiveté in not seeing the circuitry.  They navigate it perfectly because they don’t take notice of it.  They do not hesitate long enough to see it.  They are devices that are compatible with the network and all plugged in.  Actions purely expressed, without conscious deliberation. 

(Had M. eaten these pills in another age, there would be a stack of books before him, each of them containing thousands of pages of codified rules of response.  In that scenario, he is supposed to index the sector of rules suggested by the girl and follow them, but the books are so vast and suddenly so unfamiliar that he finds himself unable to do so, at least not in the time required, since the response time itself is part of the rules). 

The girl, seeing his terrified blankness, judges him to be insecure.  This judgment flashes across the wiring so quickly that the very fact that she looked at him does not consciously register.  Without a hitch, her glance falls upon others.  She is canvassing.

Her immersion into the system of rules is completely hidden to her.  She can navigate it perfectly and make the response appropriate to her rules community:  “That guy isn’t worth anything further.” 

M. becomes anxious and suddenly lonely.  He knows what this anxiety tells him:  It brings to light his own latent relationship to the structure he sees before him.  I can see it but I cannot use it.  They, on the other hand, can use it perfectly but cannot see it.  I am an invalid here because I am not blind.  I am not even here.

This first event—the failure to properly meet the girl’s gaze—only serves to bolster M.’s feeling of detachment from the crowd.  Searching for a sense of power after having been accused, albeit implicitly, of weakness, he decides to detach completely and make the crowd a specimen of his investigation.  This feeling invigorates him; it is empowering.  His inability to be involved has resulted from the alien authority of his position as the investigator.  They are his specimens, weak, like frogs or mice or fruit flies; objects of manipulation and research.  It is as if he wants to approach the girl and say:  “Do you realize that the look you gave me a moment ago was triggered by social structures according to which I—if interested in your company—am supposed to comply in very specific and complex ways, for instance, that I would return your gaze and look at you a moment longer than I would look at an ordinary person on the street, and that you, in keeping with this set of rules, would reciprocate in the proper way either to continue or end the germination of the relationship-building suggested in my response?  Can’t you see that were are all playing in a complex game with a collective acceptance of rules that act as a scaffolding for the overall structure of the social situation we are taking part in?  If you could only notice this scaffolding, you would see how artificial it really is.  Deep down, we both just feel like fucking tonight, but instead of going straight to the fucking, we participate in this elaborate pair-bonding game that is, as a matter of fact, completely dispensable as regards our deepest aims.”

But this does not succeed in protecting him from the return of his anxiety and loneliness.  He is the last man standing in the world: All others have been reduced to the likes of rocks and grass.  There is no one else, only parts in the system with their blind, determined movements.  Even his own body seems foreign to him.  There is nothing left except his own grief at having been left behind by the others while he, inert and terrified, lays down beneath the wires to wait for a signal or else die, grieving the loss of his world.  

Suicide, Identity and Vagrancy: Another Aged Journal Entry

9/2/04

 The social network is held together by atomic relationships which have a structure of mutual accusation.  You receive me as one who accuses you and I receive you as one who accuses me.  The basis for these accusations and the source of their authority is not immediately clear, but they are attended by guilt.  

It is clear that these accusations have force.  I am in the wrong already, by default. 

 To pry beneath this network to find the basis of the accusations and their authority is a futile enterprise.  We find nothing except an endless paper trail, an ever-widening social beaurocracy, a chasm with no bottom, a pervasive, omnipresent godlike nothingness.  My guilt is constitutive of my being.  It cannot be escaped.

 Yes, it can be escaped, but only if I turn my back on my own being, if I relinquish life.  Freedom from guilt can only be achieved through suicide.  It exists only in the sphere of inertia, where the intentional origins of my movements are not related to the social network, where boredom reigns, where ‘ought’ ceases to show itself, where the ‘I’ no longer accompanies the ‘I think’. 

 The self is a construction of the social network, it is sustained by a structure of accusation.  Therefore, to go beyond good and evil is to dissolve the self. 

When I become a vagrant, I no longer have any resources when asked, “Hey, let’s see some ID.”  I do not carry an identity card.  The authority implicit in the social network is useless against me, it cannot get a grip on me.  In attempting to apprehend me, it finds thin air.  I am free.  Inert, yes, but free.

Perfect freedom lies just below suicide.

A Phenomenology of Hesitation

People who firmly believe in things are very good at performing actions.  They move around all the time.  They know other people.  They do not hesitate.

Hesitation is an expression of doubt, a subtle recourse to uncertainty, a sense of gravity toward inaction or inertia.  To hesitate is to create a gap in a natural stream of behavior and to find in that gap a subtle but uncomfortable consciousness of the structures underlying that behavior.  It is, in that sense, a kind of exegesis. 

Yet it takes us unawares.  We do not decide to hesitate.  There is something latent in our Background (W/Searle sense) that triggers a higher level interruption.  In that sense, hesitation seems more like a revelation.  It is as if it comes from without.

Those who do not hesitate are often the same sort of people who do not find discomfort in many kinds of social contexts.  They are the confident ones.  But confident in what?

Are they confident insofar as they do not seriously question their actions or the beliefs upon which their actions are founded?  Or perhaps they have occasion for questioning and doubt, but they are able to somehow cordon off this doubting into an isolated portion of their schedule, so that, at one time, they do not hesitate to act, but at another, they sit and do nothing except doubt.  This latter possibility seems unlikely to me.

Private doubters are public hesitaters.

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When we are easily startled, it is often because we have a “guilty conscience.”  We are afraid of being caught.

Hesitation occurs most of all in those who feel guilty about the state of their understanding of the world.  To hesitate is to be startled by a social state, and that startling is precipitated by a latent guilt on our part about the nature of things.

Hesitation, when it becomes too frequent, is diagnosed as a mental illness.  This is because it betrays a lack of social acuity, and an extreme lack of that kind just is “mental illness.”  (On the same token, one cannot become too confident, either.  The Golden Mean is an index of power:  The power that attempts to hem us in to a particular segment on this gradient I am describing).

Experpt From My Journal, Four-Years Aged

5/5/04

 Social naïveté is empowering.  It is blindness with a smile.  We all appreciate it, yet disparage it when we find it.  We never appreciate it publicly until after.

 Life, technique, savvy.  Things that make things interesting.  Perhaps intrigue is the spice of life, not variety.  Variety as such seems tiresome, not spicy.

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 When a saying just barely makes sense, but the barely is so powerfully aromatic, you cannot help but to suspect that truth has come round.

 When a saying makes sense entirely, there is nothing more to learn, so we shrug and say, “Aint it the truth.”  But that’s not truth, which is just why we say that.

 Truth implies discomfort, challenge, disturbance, a demand for change.  Without those things, we have only common sense which, as we all ought to know, is not truth in any substantive sense.

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 These aphorisms of mine swirl.  That is because they gather interest but aren’t necessarily true or useful.  They are my entertainment; they elicit the right emotions; the ones I’m after in situations of this kind.

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  Why does wine help me think straight?  I think it must be because it aids in the stripping off of social accumulation, gained throughout the day.  It helps me become the recluse that, deep down, I long to be. 

 Why do I long for such?  Because it smells so nice…I smell things I don’t otherwise smell.

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 Aromas are everything to me.

 And ultimately it all breaks down to an acceptance of the saying:  All there is is this stuff (holding out my hand).

If Values Are Unreal, Why Does Everyone Believe In Them?

If, as nihilism asserts, values are nothing more than mental fictions, why do they seem so real and compelling?  For most people, it seems beyond dispute that rape, torture and murder are wrong, plain and simple.  This seems so obvious that one is inclined to say:  "No discussion necessary: Rape, torture and murder are morally wrong and it would be entirely absurd to say otherwise."  At bottom, this is simply an argument from common sense that justifies the reality of moral claims by appealing to salient features of our experience.  This argument can be formalized in many ways, but three are most common:

(1) By appealing to intuitions or feelings that support certain value-based beliefs.  For example:  "I know ‘deep inside’ that murder is wrong because it is upsetting, revolting and in conflict with my feelings at every level" or some such. 

(2) By appealing to the universality of certain value-beliefs in a community or in the world.  For example:  “Everyone thinks that rape is a bad thing, regardless of time and place, so it must be bad.”

(3) By appealing to ‘human nature’ as an authority.  For example:  “It conflicts with human nature to say that torture is not wrong.”

However expressed, the argument from common sense is undoubtedly the most common reason that people reject nihilism and, on that score, it deserves serious consideration.

  In my view, these arguments say nothing about why values are real and rest solely on references to the same psychological foundations that, in my view, make them unreal.  That is, under appropriate rational scrutiny, the common sense argument fails to point out real world basis for the reality of values.  The argument is equivalent to saying: “But I just know there is such a thing as right and wrong!  I just know it deep down!” 

Suppose our intuitions about the reality of values are so fundamental that they could not possibly exist unless values are, in fact, real.  If that were the case, I would grant that the argument from common sense might have some validity.  However, that is not the case, and the remainder of this essay will demonstrate just a few reasons that those intuitions exist and why they are so strong.  And mind you, none of those reasons have anything to do with their being rational, based on fact, or any other valid justification.  In other words, the question at issue here is not whether people happen to be convinced that values are real.  That much is obvious.  The question is whether there are good reasons to be convinced of them, and that is not obvious at all. 

 People find value claims compelling for many reasons, but none of these reasons point to the notion that value claims are real.  The list below is designed to demonstrate this point.

How We Get Fooled Into Believing in Values

1.  We are fooled when the basis for a value claim is simply assumed.  “x is the right thing to do, so you should do it.” Obviously, saying that “x is right” is simply a claim without any justification. To establish that this value claim has force, we need to know why x is the right thing to do. 

2. We are fooled when the justification is just a restatement of the fact that some people hold the belief in question.  “People in this community believe that you should do x and that means that you should do x” or “You ought to do x because, in my opinion, x is something that ought to be done.”  Genuine support for the moral demand is absent in both cases.  The demand is simply based on the fact that a certain person or group of people hold a particular moral belief and says nothing about whether the beliefs are valid.  It is the same as saying: “The earth is flat because everyone thinks it’s flat.” One wants to say: “Yes, I understand that it’s a popular belief, but can you point to a real fact suggesting that the earth is flat?”

3.  We are fooled through appeals to gods or other moral authorities which themselves lack any support by evidence or rationality.  I will grant that, if such an  authority did exist and made these morals known to us, morality might have legitimate support and might, on that basis, turn out to be real and binding.  But let’s face it, every argument in favor of the existence of god has failed, the world can be explained quite handily without any appeal to god, and the prevalence of "evil and suffering" in the world (which supposedly matters to most gods) are just what we would expect in a world with no god around to help out.  In short, supporting the delusion of values with yet another delusion ("god," “the goodness of nature” etc.) is just to double the absurdity of your case.  

4.  We are fooled though hidden circularities in moral reasoning.  In most cases, value claims are justified with reference to the authority of god (“x is wrong because god or my special revelation says so”) while the existence of that same god or revelation is justified with reference to the authority of the same value claims (“god must exist because otherwise we would have no way to support our conviction that x is wrong”).  In other words, we justify our morals with appeal to god and justify god with an appeal to morals, thereby assuming both before proving either one.  Again, there is a tremendous amount of emotional comfort and social compatibility to be gained from these beliefs and this makes it extremely easy for the circularity to persist unnoticed.

5.  People are fooled by appeals to their emotions, especially guilt.  "How would you feel if your brother took your hard earned money?"  This presumes the authority of the golden rule (“Do unto others…”) but gives us nothing in support of that rule.

6.  People are pressured to believe in values because of threats by social groups and institutions.  Most social institutions are founded on moral principles that resonate emotionally with the public and carry some negative repercussion when they are not obeyed. “You must follow vehicle safety laws or you are a bad citizen and an immoral person; besides, you'll also get punished by the authorities."  The organization of society makes it extremely difficult for us to admit that moral rules do not exist in the real world.  Indeed, refusal to defend these rules can put a person at risk of being socially ostracized or even incarcerated as criminal or insane.  So it’s no wonder that we are easily swayed by moral arguments:  Doing so is integral for getting along in life.  Nevertheless, if we peer honestly into the facts of the matter, these arguments are nothing more than social threats (“you don’t belong if you believe that”) and appeals to feelings (“how can you believe something like that!?”), not genuine supports for the values in question. 

7.  We are also fooled into believing in values when they are supported with appeals to yet more values.  For example:  “It is good to help others because that makes me feel happy, and feeling happy is important.”  This quickly becomes a vicious regress, since we have just appealed to another value (happiness) to justify the validity of the original value.  So, like the original value, this supporting value needs to be supported as well.  And if yet another value is cited, that will also need support, and so forth and so on.  With this kind of argument, value claims never gain footing in the real world.

More could be cited, but these factors alone are strong enough to show that the argument from common sense does not have the rational power that it might at first appear to have.  It tells us a great deal about the way societies function and about the role of emotion in belief-formation, but says nothing about whether values are real and binding.  To demonstrate their reality, we need to identify something other than human opinion to justify their validity.  As far as I can tell, nothing of this kind has ever been identified.  But if it ever is, I'll be the first in line to give up nihilism and embrace the world of values.  

That last line may surprise you, but hey, I only claimed to be a nihilist, not a masochist!  I want to find purpose, happiness and fulfillment just as much as anyone else.  The only reason I'm still a nihilist is that my desire for happiness isn't strong enough to trump my loathing for self-delusion.  It must be the philosopher in me, who knows.  Mark Twain once said that "Faith is just believin’ what you know ain’t so."   If adopting delusion is something you're willing and able to do, I heartily recommend you do it.  At least you’ll have better chances for a happy life (Oh the bliss of ignorance!).  Just make sure you don't commit to a life of philosophy or spend too much time thinking about reality or the delusion might collapse right on top of your head and plunge you into an existential crisis from which you may never escape.  

What is Nihilism?

In popular culture, the term "nihilism" is often used to label those who advocate anarchistic political views, deviant behavior, atheism or who otherwise resist accepted social norms.  In this vague and pejorative sense, “nihilism” is roughly synonymous with “anarchist,” “defeatist,” “nonconformist,” “suicidal” and even “mentally disordered.”  Indeed, the term “nihilism,” for many, conjures up an image of a dark, malevolent underworld that seeks the proliferation of death and chaos.  This popular conception has fomented a public suspicion and aversion to nihilism in general, including the philosophical nihilism discussed in this blog. 

The pejorative use of the term will undoubtedly persist until a more serious treatment of the philosophical nihilism appears in the popular media.  To my knowledge, there is no serious defense of the position published for wider audiences, a defense that would undoubtedly cement a more accurate, specific and useful understanding of the term in everyday language.  Of course, one might argue that Nietzsche provided a sound defense of nihilism and may be regarded as its figurehead and greatest defender.  But Nietzsche, like most great philosophers, is seldom read by the masses and, even when he is read, his meaning is often misunderstood and his nihilism obscured and unappreciated.

So, in view of the confusion attending nihilism in popular discourse, I will begin with a more specific definition and general summary as an opener for this blog.  With these preliminaries on the table, future discussions should prove more fruitful and not simply squabbles over different understandings of terms.  This will become particularly valuable when we encounter the more controversial elements of the position. 

To this end, I propose the following as a provisional summary of my own position and a starting point for discussion:

Nihilism is a philosophical position that denies the reality of values, especially moral values.  Values might include moral standards (“it is good to be honest”), claims about intrinsic worth (“the environment is our most valuable resource”), aesthetic judgments (“Mozart was a superior composer”) or any other judgment that includes notions of goodness or ethics (“we should strive to be good citizens by contributing to the political process”).  On this view, values of every kind are, at best, devoid of any legitimate support in the real world and, at worst, delusions that impair objective inquiry.  In short, nihilism is the view that, in reality, nothing matters.

In other words, nothing in the world--no object, event, idea, etc.--has any importance, purpose, goodness or meaning except in the subjective experiences of value-equipped minds.  Good and bad, ugly and beautiful, wonderful and dreadful, and all other value judgments do not exist in the real world.    

For example, consider the following moral principle:  “it is wrong to kill infants.”  Most people assume that this principle is beyond argument and is somehow a self-evident feature of reality.  In other words, like most moral principles, it appears to have intrinsic validity, so that we might say: “the killing of an infant by another human being is a special kind of event that is necessarily wrong in every time and place."  These kinds of moral judgments are so obvious and emotionally resonant that they seem to be hard-wired into the basic structure of the universe, making them impervious to refutation.  Indeed, because of the strong emotions attending these judgments, it seems almost perverse for anyone--nihilists included--to deny their validity. 

But there is no getting around the implications of the nihilist perspective:  If nihilism is true, we cannot rationally maintain that infanticide is a bad thing.  Of course, this is not to say that infanticide is a good thing either.  Good and bad do not really exist.  So in spite of our emotionally charged intuitions to the contrary, infanticides are just events alongside other events, completely devoid of moral content.    

These arguments might seem absurd and repulsive to many readers.  I can imagine a comment arriving in my inbox: “Vern, if you seriously believe that the murder of babies is not morally wrong, you are a twisted, sociopathic monster of a person and, in all likelihood, a threat to public safety.”  I can sympathize with this kind of reaction and, in spite of my philosophical convictions, I have very strong feelings about all kinds of violence.  But my feelings say nothing about the real world and nothing about the reality of value claims.  My feelings only suggest that certain value claims have very deep roots in my psyche.

Nihilism and the Hazards of Truth

Values—especially those related to birth, sex and death—are so deeply entrenched in our mental equipment and supported by such severe social pressure that most people cannot even conceive of doubting their reality.  In fact, such doubt is explicitly prohibited in many societies and the penalties backing these prohibitions can be severe.

This makes nihilism rather unique among philosophies.  Granted, it challenges the most fundamental assumptions governing society and culture, but in reality it is nothing more than a simple philosophical claim that has no practical implications and no ethical imperatives (it rejects both).  Nevertheless, nihilism can expose its outspoken adherents to many risks, from depression and suicide to social persecution and alienation.  In addition, consider how life would change if, in America, religion died off and nihilism became the dominant philosophy.  I cannot imagine a more horrifying vision. 

This furnishes an important lesson about intellectual honesty.  If you consider yourself a “truth seeker,” you will concur when I say that the sole target of honest inquiry should always be truth (i.e., the facts, reality, what is really the case or what have you).  If an unbiased investigation uncovers a fact about the world, we are bound as truth-seekers to at least admit that the truth of this fact.  Regardless of how ugly or unpopular or nauseating the facts may be, the target must not be moved: Truth and truth alone is the goal of honest inquiry.  So if—like most—your ultimate concern in philosophy is to pick out the best candidates for truth when approaching life’s most compelling questions, you cannot allow the social implications or emotional difficulties of nihilism to have any bearing on your analysis of it.  In other words, if what you really want is the truth, you have no choice but to accept or reject the nihilist position on its own rational merits and without any consideration of its potential consequences for your life or for society.  Only in myths and storybooks does truth exist to make us happy.  In the real world, it doesn’t give a damn how we feel about it.

Pardon me while I brandish some values of my own for the sake of persuasion.  In my view, it is naïve and intellectually dishonest to judge the truthfulness any idea with recourse to whether or not it promotes peace, happiness, self-esteem or any other emotionally amenable results.  Indeed, it just might turn out that, in reality, the world is a dark, depressing and terrifying place, and if you eliminate this possibility in advance, you will never be certain whether you’ve got things right and you will lose access to the least trod paths of thought.  Of course, you could always be upfront about your intentions and admit that, if the world turns out to be a dark and hopeless place, you would rather remain ignorant of that truth in the interests of your own happiness.  If that’s your approach, more power to you.  But if you want to claim that you are a philosopher or that truth is your sole concern, be prepared to enter the dark forests as well as the sunny meadows.

I have been speaking of truth as a valuable commodity that is worthy of pursuit.  Obviously, this conflicts with my claim that nothing matters since, if nothing matters, truth doesn’t matter either.  I’ll grant this point.  However, in my own defense, I’ll freely admit that my obsession with truth is entirely without foundations and forces me to adopt false motives to keep it moving.  There is nothing worthwhile about truth.  But there is nothing worthwhile about anything and no purpose in life, so I don’t need a good reason to seek truth.  Frankly, philosophical inquiry is so deeply rooted that I can’t keep away from it. 

With this said, let us return to the problem of child killing.  I have a very simple request to make of those who would deny the nihilist position.  Show me how the killing of a child in itself, as a bare event in the world, includes the raw materials to form and support a full-fledged moral judgment.  It is clear that, no matter how closely you scrutinize the details of a child-killing event, there is nothing about the event or about the structure of the universe that exhibits value judgments.  To repeat:  Infanticide, homicide, earthquake, bombing: These are nothing more than segments in space time that have distinguishable characteristics allowing us to name them.  There is nothing "out there" in the events themselves implying anything about goodness, tragedy, or any other value. 

In other words, values do not exist except as features exhibited in subjective experiences.  No experiences, no values.  Frankly, I’m not convinced that evolutionary biologists have adequately explained the evolutionary circumstances behind the development of values.  I suspect that values have emerged, in part, to organize and strengthen social groups in response to various kinds of threats and competitors.  It is not difficult to see why a group would be advantaged by built-in value systems to organize, assign roles, eliminate socially hazardous behaviors, and convince members to give their lives for the survival of the group.  However, for my purposes I simply want to argue that values have no extra-mental origins, no extra-mental sustenance, and no extra-mental justification.  They are, for lack of a better term, delusions that developed during the course of evolution.  

My argument may also be summarized as follows:

(1) For anything in the world to "exist" or be "real", it must exist in the world and not solely in some aspect of a person's experience that has been added by the mind.  Anything that exists solely in the mind of a perceiver but is believed to exist in the extra-mental objects of their perception (i.e., out in the world), is the object of false belief and therefore a delusion.   

(2)  It is absurd to suppose that values or the raw materials to construct and support values could be excavated from the brute facts of the world without any recourse to emotion, moral intuition and other mental phenomena.  Values have never appeared outside of subjective experience.

(3)  Since values exist only in our heads (in experience, in emotional intuitions, et al), they do not pass the test for being real and, if believed to be real, must be regarded as delusions.

This leaves us with nihilism: Values are unreal and nothing matters.