The Mirror and The Seashore

Thoughts. Mind. Thinking. No-thoughts. No-mind. No-thinking. 

Within Zen Buddhist and Taoist thought worlds there are two metaphors: these are those of the mirror and the seashore. They serve similar purposes: to promote ideas of non-attachment to thoughts and the refusal to be bound by any thoughts, ideas or narratives at all. This is not a vision of the mind which is about the attainment or collection of things and so the agglomeration of something denominated ‘knowledge’. Indeed, it is one which privileges the refusal to hold anything at all within something we might call our mind. The mirror, for example, is a reflecting surface. It does not hold what it captures. It simply reflects it back. In a similar way, the seashore is caressed by the sea which may, from time to time, deposit items upon it. But the seashore, in this case, is indifferent and unconcerned about this and is happy to let that which is left upon it stay indefinitely or be just as easily swept away again. The metaphors of mirror and seashore encourage non-attachment, being dispassionate and acting without action.

In his book Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, towards the end, Friedrich Nietzsche has the following aphorism:

“Life as the yield of life. - No matter how far a man may extend himself with

his knowledge, no matter how objectively he may come to view himself,

in the end it can yield to him nothing but his own biography.”

I see in this thought a mentality compatible with that of the Zen Buddhists and Taoists above. For what is it to imagine that a path of life yields nothing but the tracings of where it has been, a biography? Is it not to look disapprovingly on the notion that one may have collected up things egotistically regarded as ‘knowledge’ or ‘truths’ and to count them all as vanity? In this aphorism Nietzsche is agreeing with the past, present and future versions of himself that human beings are prey to many powerful illusions and that they should regard them all as exactly that and treat them accordingly. Here it is noteworthy that Nietzsche, in general, did not so much think of thoughts in terms of true or false but in terms of therapeutic valuations: he wanted to know if such things promoted health or disease in the human being and in human culture generally. Already when Nietzsche had written this aphorism in the late 1870s he had written of the human being as that creature which is a matter of will and desire where, for such a being, it doesn’t matter much what illusion they become attached to so long as it gives them a feeling of power and of control.

Yet it is just such power and control that, it seems to me, the Zen Buddhists and the Taoists are looking to give up. They think these things to be some of the “illusions that we have forgotten are illusions” which is what Nietzsche calls those things we denominate truth in an essay he wrote earlier in the 1870s. Taoists, for example, speak of and value the idea of ‘wu wei’ a great deal. ‘Wu wei’ is best translated into English as ‘actionless action’ rather than the often common ‘non-action’ since, so I am led to understand, it is not a concept which means doing nothing. Instead, the Taoist practitioner is imagined as an active participant in the things of life - yet not as someone with micromanaged intentions. This is seen as a matter of genuineness or authenticity in a conception of the whole that is the existence of all things in which ‘emptiness’ is seen as the source of all possibility. From such a point of view desires, will, intentions, attachments, are all barriers to possibility and enemies of becoming because they impose upon people mental structures which limit their abilities to see, to imagine, to participate and to dream. In effect, the Taoist asks why we should put up mental walls or restrict ourselves by means of entirely thought-based schemes when nothing about our universe of experience itself imposes such things or presents them as inherent to life itself. The situation, whatever the situation is, is not limited to the things we immediately, or even reflectively, think about it. There is no equation of thought and reality. This is, in turn, to concede, as the theologian and philosopher Jack Caputo does, that there is nothing we think that is not an interpretation.

But if there is nothing we think that is not an interpretation then this surely also means that there is nothing that we think that is not partial - in at least two senses. First, an interpretation is our’s, and not someone else’s, and, second, because of the first reason it is also much, much less than the whole, the whole which would be all the possible interpretations. Realising this, we now see, once again, how becoming attached to things or desiring things is actually a restriction of possibility. In fact, it is the imposition of a fiction simply because we become attached to it, either because we want to be through desire or will or because we are not sufficiently detached from it to see it as simply an interpretation. It would be like trying to become like a mirror that wants to possess the image it reflects or like a seashore which wants to retain the items the sea spits out onto it. Yet such a seashore, if it did this in reality, would soon become cluttered. Over time, it would cease to be the empty expanse next to the sea upon which things might occasionally be washed and would, instead, become a dumping ground, a tip, a public dustbin. The seashore as mind would actually impair its own ability to be that which it is. In Nietzsche’s terms, we would then be able to diagnose the habits of attachment, will, intention and desire as unhealthy and disease-inducing habits. So, actually, refusing to hold onto things, taking a detached attitude to the action of the sea of life as it sweeps across our minds, turns out to be good for the seashore, the seashore that is mind. The thoughts may come and the thoughts may go, the actions of a mind that is thinking, but we do not need to accept them or be under their tyranny. We are not forced to hold onto them them or take them seriously anymore.

There is another saying that comes from these Eastern philosophies and it is the following: “the no-mind thinks no-thoughts about no-things”. It seems, to me at least, to be a riddle and yet I imagine that in this brief essay I might have had some thoughts which illuminate its meaning. Zen Buddhists and Taoists know well that we have minds and we think thoughts. The Buddha himself, in fact, is said to have said that “we are what we think”. (He also said ‘there is nothing to stick to’ which is relevant but a whole other story!) This, indeed, is why I imagine such philosophies are so concerned with thinking in the first place. But, that being the case, it suggests that mental hygiene and psychological health are of primary importance for these most therapeutic of spiritualities in which peace and enlightenment are the highest personal goods and the most valuable possessions. This saying, I think, encapsulates the lack of attachment and refusal of imposed narratives that I have already spoken about. It encourages actionless action and loss of intention and a ‘letting things be’ that is hard for people used to ‘gaining knowledge’ or ‘understanding things’ to accept. They only ever do these things to use them in accordance with their own intentions and desires and attachments in the pursuance of some imagined necessity they call “making sense”. Rarely, however, do they question the narrative, and the values, which have motivated them to imagine that this was the purpose of thinking or the mind in the first place. We have here, then, a completely different way to see the world. But you should not then think that this Eastern way is ‘the right way’ where the other, more Western, one was not. 

For then you will only have fallen into the same trap all over again.

A Pious Deception of Self-Creation

What follows is at times philosophical, at others poetic, and at others still, metaphorical. Yet at all times it is thoughtful. Overall, its subject is our world, our place in the world, our rhetorical context as living beings cast into a universe beyond us. If you hate thinking and do not see why human beings should contemplate then it is not for you. Leave, you will only annoy yourself. But if you can think and, even, dare to try to understand then you will find this of use. It requires no special knowledge or understanding outside from a few references the well read may recognise. But, in any case, those with the curiosity to seek further always will. And those without it won’t. That is their joy and the bounty that nature has bestowed upon them. But, for now, I relay to you a kind of myth and ask only that try to understand it….

How we, too, are still pious. - In science convictions have no rights of citizenship, as one says with good reason. Only when they decide to descend to the modesty of hypotheses, of a provisional experimental point of view, of a regulative fiction, they may be granted admission and even a certain value in the realm of knowledge - though always with the restriction that they remain under police supervision, under the police of mistrust. - But does this not mean, if you consider it more precisely, that a conviction may obtain admission to science only when it ceases to be a conviction? Would it not be the first step in the discipline of the scientific spirit that one would not permit oneself any more convictions?

Probably this is so; only we still have to ask: To make it possible for this discipline to begin, must there not be some prior conviction - even one that is so commanding arid unconditional that it sacrifices all other convictions to itself? We see that science also rests on a faith; there simply is no science "without presuppositions." The question whether truth is needed must not only have been affirmed in advance, but affirmed to such a degree that the principle, the faith, the conviction finds expression: “Nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it everything else has only second-rate value."

This unconditional will to truth - what is it? Is it the will not to allow oneself to be deceived? Or is it the will not to deceive? For the will to truth could be interpreted in the second way, too - if only the special case "I do not want to deceive myself" is subsumed under the generalization "I do not want to deceive." But why not deceive? But why not allow oneself to be deceived?

Note that the reasons for the former principle belong to an altogether different realm from those for the second. One does not want to allow oneself to be deceived because one assumes that it is harmful, dangerous, calamitous to be deceived. In this sense, science would be a long-range prudence, a caution, a utility; but one could object in all fairness: How is that? Is wanting not to allow oneself to be deceived really less harmful, less dangerous, less calamitous? What do you know in advance of the character of existence to be able to decide whether the greater advantage is on the side of the unconditionally mistrustful or of the unconditionally trusting? But if both should be required, much trust as well as much mistrust, from where would science then be permitted to take its unconditional faith or conviction on which it rests, that truth is more important than any other thing, including every other conviction? Precisely this conviction could never have come into being if both truth and untruth constantly proved to be useful, which is the case. Thus - the faith in science, which after all exists undeniably, cannot owe its origin to such a calculus of utility; it must have originated in spite of the fact that the disutility and dangerousness of “the will to truth," of “truth at any price” is proved to it constantly. "At any price'': how well we understand these words once we have offered and slaughtered one faith after another on this altar!

Consequently, "will to truth" does not mean "I will not allow myself to be deceived" but - there is no alternative - "I will not deceive, not even myself”; and with that we stand on moral ground. For you only have to ask yourself carefully, “Why do you not want to deceive?" especially if it should seem - and it does seem! - as if life aimed at semblance, meaning error, deception, simulation, delusion, self-delusion, and when the great sweep of life has actually always shown itself to be on the side of the most unscrupulous polytropoi. (“Polytropos” was a word used by Homer of Odysseus in the opening lines of The Odyssey. It describes his wily ability to deceive which, in the story, is what gets him safely home and vanquishes even his divine enemies.) Charitably interpreted, such a resolve might perhaps be a quixotism, a minor slightly mad enthusiasm; but it might also be something more serious, namely, a principle that is hostile to life and destructive. - “Will to truth" - that might be a concealed will to death.

Thus the question "Why science?" leads back to the moral problem: Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are "not moral"? No doubt, those who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history; and insofar as they affirm this "other world" - look, must they not by the same token negate its counterpart, this world, our world? - But you will have gathered what I am driving at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests - that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine. - But what if this should become more and more incredible, if nothing should prove to be divine anymore unless it were error, blindness, the lie - if God himself should prove to be our most enduring lie?

As interpreters of our experiences. - One sort of honesty has been alien to all founders of religions and their kind: They have never made their experiences a matter of conscience for knowledge. "What did I really experience? What happened in me and around me at that time? Was my reason bright enough? Was my will opposed to all deceptions of the senses and bold in resisting the fantastic?" None of them has asked such questions, nor do any of our dear religious people ask them even now. On the contrary, they thirst after things that go against reason, and they do not wish to make it too hard for themselves to satisfy it. So they experience "miracles” and "rebirths" and hear the voices of little angels! But we, we others who thirst after reason, are determined to scrutinize our experiences as severely as a scientific experiment - hour after hour, day after day. We ourselves wish to be our experiments and guinea pigs.

New struggles. - After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave - a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. - And we - we still have to vanquish his shadow, too. (Let us here not be dumb enough to imagine that what is meant is merely one sort of god.)

Let us beware.- Let us beware of thinking that the world is a living being. Where should it expand? On what should it feed? How could it grow and multiply? We have some notion of the nature of the organic; and we should not reinterpret the exceedingly derivative, late, rare, accidental, that we perceive only on the crust of the earth and make of it something essential, universal, and eternal, which is what those people do who call the universe an organism. This nauseates me. Let us even beware of believing that the universe is a machine: it is certainly not constructed for one purpose, and calling it a "machine" does it far too much honour.

Let us beware of positing generally and everywhere anything as elegant as the cyclical movements of our neighbouring stars; even a glance into the Milky Way raises doubts whether there are not far coarser and more contradictory movements there, as well as stars with eternally linear paths, etc. The astral order in which we live is an exception; this order and the relative duration that depends on it have again made possible an exception of exceptions: the formation of the organic. The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos - in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms. Judged from the point of view of our reason, unsuccessful attempts are by all odds the rule, the exceptions are not the secret aim, and the whole musical box repeats eternally its tune which may never be called a melody - and ultimately even the phrase “unsuccessful attempt" is too anthropomorphic and reproachful. But how could we reproach or praise the universe? Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things; it does not by any means strive to imitate man. None of our aesthetic and moral judgments apply to it. Nor does it have any instinct for self-preservation or any other instinct; and it does not observe any laws either. Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word “accident” has meaning. Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type.

Let us beware of thinking that the world eternally creates new things. There are no eternally enduring substances; matter is as much of an error as the God of the Eleatics. But when shall we ever be done with our caution and care? When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to “naturalise" humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?

Origin of the logical. - How did logic come into existence in the human being's head? Certainly out of illogic, whose realm originally must have been immense. Innumerable beings who made inferences in a way different from ours perished; for all that, their ways might have been truer. Those, for example, who did not know how to find often enough what is "equal" as regards both nourishment and hostile animals - those, in other words, who subsumed things too slowly and cautiously - were favored with a lesser probability of survival than those who guessed immediately upon encountering similar instances that they must be equal. The dominant tendency, however, to treat as equal what is merely similar - an illogical tendency, for nothing is really equal - is what first created any basis for logic.

In order that the concept of substance could originate - which is indispensable for logic although in the strictest sense nothing real corresponds to it - it was likewise necessary that for a long time one did not see nor perceive the changes in things. The beings that did not see so precisely had an advantage over those that saw everything "in flux." At bottom, every high degree of caution in making inferences and every skeptical tendency constitute a great danger for life. No living beings would have survived if the opposite tendency - to affirm rather than suspend judgment, to err and make up things rather than wait, to assent rather than negate, to pass judgment rather than be just - had not been bred to the point where it became extraordinarily strong.

The course of logical ideas and inferences in our brain today corresponds to a process and a struggle among impulses that are, taken singly, very illogical and unjust. We generally experience only the result of this struggle because this primeval mechanism now runs its course so quickly and is so well concealed.

Cause and effect. - "Explanation" is what we call it, but it is "description" that distinguishes us from older stages of knowledge and science. Our descriptions are better - we do not explain any more than our predecessors. We have uncovered a manifold one-after-another where the naive person and inquirer of older cultures saw only two separate things. "Cause” and "effect" is what one says; but we have merely perfected the image of becoming without reaching beyond the image or behind it. In every case the series of "causes” confronts us much more completely, and we infer: first, this and that has to precede in order that this or that may then follow - but this does not involve any comprehension. In every chemical process, for example, quality appears as a "miracle," as ever; also, every locomotion; nobody has "explained" a push. But how could we possibly explain anything? We operate only with things that do not exist: lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time spans, divisible spaces. How should explanations be at all possible when we first turn everything into an image, our image!

It will do to consider science as an attempt to humanise things as faithfully as possible; as we describe things and their one-after-another, we learn how to describe ourselves more and more precisely. Cause and effect: such a duality probably never exists; in truth we are confronted by a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces, just as we perceive motion only as isolated points and then infer it without ever actually seeing it. The suddenness with which many effects stand out misleads us; actually it is sudden only for us. In this moment of suddenness there is an infinite number of processes that elude us. An intellect that could see cause and effect as a continuum and a flux and not, as we do, in terms of an arbitrary division and dismemberment, would repudiate the concept of cause and effect and deny all conditionality.

How far the moral sphere extends. - As soon as we see a new image, we immediately construct it with the aid of all our previous experiences depending on the degree of our honesty and justice. All experiences are moral experiences, even in the realm of sense perception.

The four errors. - Human beings have been educated by their errors. First, they always saw themselves only incompletely; second, they endowed themselves with fictitious attributes; third, they placed themselves in a false order of rank in relation to animals and nature; fourth, they invented ever new tables of goods and always accepted them for a time as eternal and unconditional: as a result of this, now one and now another human impulse and state held first place and was ennobled because it was esteemed so highly. If we removed the effects of these four errors, we should also remove humanity, humaneness, and "human dignity."

Life no argument. - We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live-by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody now could endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include error.

In the horizon of the infinite. - We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us - indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realise that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom - and there is no longer any "land."

The madman.- Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace. and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!'' - As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? - Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him - you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us - for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves.”

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”

Mystical explanations.- Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial.

Long live physics! - How many people know how to observe something? Of the few who do, how many observe themselves? "Everybody is farthest away - from themselves"; all who try the reins know this to their chagrin, and the maxim "know thyself!" addressed to human beings by a god, is almost malicious. That the case of self-observation is indeed as desperate as that is attested best of all by the manner in which almost everybody talks about the essence of moral actions - this quick, eager, convinced, and garrulous manner with its expression, its smile, and its obliging ardour! One seems to have the wish to say to you: "But my dear friend, precisely this is my specialty. You have directed your question to the one person who is entitled to answer you. As it happens, there is nothing about which I am as wise as about this. To come to the point: when a human being judges 'this is right' and then infers 'therefore it must be done: and then proceeds to do what he has thus recognized as right and designated as necessary - then the essence of his action is moral."

But my friend, you are speaking of three actions instead of one. When you judge "this is right," that is an action, too. Might it not be possible that one could judge in a moral and in an immoral manner? Why do you consider this, precisely this, right?

"Because-this is what my conscience tells me; and the voice of conscience is never immoral, for it alone determines what is to be moral."

But why do you listen to the voice of your conscience? And what gives you the right to consider such a judgment true and infallible? For this faith - is there no conscience for that? Have you never heard of an intellectual conscience? A conscience behind your “conscience"? Your judgment "this is right" has a pre-history in your instincts, likes, dislikes, experiences, and lack of experiences. "How did it originate there?” you must ask, and then also: "What is it that impels me to listen to it?" You can listen to its commands like a good soldier who hears his officer's command. Or like a woman who loves the man who commands. Or like a flatterer and coward who is afraid of the commander. Or like a dunderhead who obeys because no objection occurs to him. In short, there are a hundred ways in which you can listen to your conscience. But that you take this or that judgment for the voice of conscience - in other words, that you feel something to be right - may be due to the fact that you have never thought much about yourself and simply have accepted blindly that what you had been told ever since your childhood was right; or it may be due to the fact that what you call your duty has up to this point brought you sustenance and honours - and you consider it "right" because it appears to you as your own "condition of existence" (and that you have a right to existence seems irrefutable to you).

For all that, the firmness of your moral judgment could be evidence of your personal abjectness, of impersonality; your "moral strength" might have its source in your stubbornness - or in your inability to envisage new ideals. And, briefly, if you had thought more subtly, observed better, and learned more, you certainly would not go on calling this "duty" of yours and this “conscience" of yours duty and conscience. Your understanding of the manner in which moral judgments have originated would spoil these grand words for you, just as other grand words, like "sin" and "salvation of the soul" and "redemption" have been spoiled for you. - And now don't cite the categorical imperative, my friend! This term tickles my ear and makes me laugh despite your serious presence. It makes me think of the old Kant who had obtained the "thing in itself” by stealth - another very ridiculous thing !- and was punished for this when the "categorical imperative” crept stealthily into his heart and led him astray - back to "God," "soul," "freedom,” and "immortality," like a fox who loses his way and goes astray back into his cage. Yet it had been his strength and cleverness that had broken open the cage!

What? You admire the categorical imperative within you? This "firmness" of your so-called moral judgment? This "unconditional'' feeling that "here everyone must judge as I do"? Rather admire your selfishness at this point. And the blindness, pettiness, and frugality of your selfishness. For it is selfish to experience one's own judgment as a universal law; and this selfishness is blind, petty, and frugal because it betrays that you have not yet discovered yourself nor created for yourself an ideal of your own, your very own - for that could never be somebody else’s and much less that of all, all!

Anyone who still judges "in this case everybody would have to act like this'' has not yet taken five steps toward self-knowledge. Otherwise they would know that there neither are nor can be actions that are the same: that every action that has ever been done was done in an altogether unique and irretrievable way, and that this will be equally true of every future action; that all regulations about actions relate only to their coarse exterior (even the most inward and subtle regulations of all moralities so far); that these regulations may lead to some semblance of sameness, but really only to some semblance; that as one contemplates or looks back upon any action at all, it is and remains impenetrable; that our opinions about "good” and "noble” and "great" can never be proved true by our actions because every action is unknowable; that our opinions, valuations, and tables of what is good certainly belong among the most powerful levers in the involved mechanism of our actions, but that in any particular case the law of their mechanism is indemonstrable.

Let us therefore limit ourselves to the purification of our opinions and valuations and to the creation of our own new tables of what is good, and let us stop brooding about the "moral value of our actions”! Yes, my friends, regarding all the moral chatter of some about others it is time to feel nauseous. Sitting in moral judgment should offend our taste. Let us leave such chatter and such bad taste to those who have nothing else to do but drag the past a few steps further through time and who never live in the present - which is to say the many, the great majority. We, however, want to become those we are - human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves. To that end we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world: we must become physicists in order to be able to be creators in this sense - while hitherto all valuations and ideals have been based on ignorance of physics or were constructed so as to contradict it. Therefore: long live physics! And even more so that which compels us to turn to physics - our honesty!

The meaning of our cheerfulness. - The greatest recent event - that “God is dead,” that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable - is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. For the few at least, whose eyes - the suspicion in whose eyes is strong and subtle enough for this spectacle, some sun seems to have set and some ancient and profound trust has been turned into doubt; to them our old world must appear daily more like evening, more mistrustful, stranger, “older.” But in the main one may say: The event itself is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude's capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet. Much less may one suppose that many people know as yet what this event really means - and how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined because it was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it; for example, the whole of our European morality. This long plenitude and sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin, and cataclysm that is now impending - who could guess enough of it today to be compelled to play the teacher and advance proclaimer of this monstrous logic of terror, the prophet of a gloom and an eclipse of the sun whose like has probably never yet occurred on earth?

Even we born guessers of riddles who are, as it were, waiting on the mountains, posted between today and tomorrow, stretched in the contradiction between today and tomorrow, we firstlings and premature births of the coming century, to whom the shadows that must soon envelop Europe really should have appeared by now - why is it that even we look forward to the approaching gloom without any real sense of involvement and above all without any worry and fear for ourselves? Are we perhaps still too much under the impression of the initial consequences of this event - and these initial consequences, the consequences for ourselves, are quite the opposite of what one might perhaps expect: They are not at all sad and gloomy but rather like a new and scarcely describable kind of light, happiness, relief, exhilaration, encouragement, dawn.

Indeed, we philosophers and "free spirits” feel, when we hear the news that "the old god is dead," as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an ''open sea”.

Taken from sections 344, 319, 108, 109, 111, 112, 114, 115, 121, 124, 125, 126, 335 and 343 of Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft by Friedrich Nietzsche.

Intoxication

In the recent past I made an album of instrumental electronic music called Forces of Nature. You can read about what's behind that album elsewhere on this blog. The album Intoxication that I have just completed is a companion piece to this.

Sadly, for those second guessing the subject of this album, it is not about alcohol. The "intoxication" at issue here is metaphorical but no less real or powerful in its effects. The intoxication under discussion here is intoxication as discussed in the written works of German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche discusses intoxication from his first book, The Birth of Tragedy from The Spirit of Music right up until books in his final year of sanity in 1888. For example, in his Twilight of the Idols. "Intoxication" is what Nietzsche thinks the greatest, most creative, artistic spirits must have. He writes in that latter book:

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

But what is this Nietzschean intoxication? Nietzsche recognizes many forms of it - sexual, feasting, agitation, victory, cruelty. The list goes on. "The essence of intoxication is the feeling of plenitude and increased energy.... In this condition one enriches everything out of one's abundance: what one sees, what one desires, one sees swollen, pressing, strong, overladen with energy."

In short, Nietzsche envisages that the artist is full, and overfull, with inspiration as we might put it today. From their own fullness the creation comes to be. And surely there is something to this. Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, was writing in the context of Dionysian feasts and so it is not hard to understand where the idea of intoxication might have come from since at these feasts many were often quite literally intoxicated. Nietzsche expands on this idea metaphorically in the course of describing the conditions of culture and art as he saw it.

My album Intoxication is a hybrid project, however, in that it conflates two at first seemingly unrelated subjects that find their point of common interest in this idea of "intoxication". It is not the first time that I have done this this year. My first album projects of the year were Jedem Das Seine and Arbeit Macht Frei, two albums which united twin themes. In this case it was the horror of the Nazi concentration camps and the film Under The Skin which I conceived these two albums as an alternative soundtrack for. Here in Intoxication one side of the work reflects an interest in this Nietzschean notion of "intoxication" but the second is an altogether more serious subject - as before where I combined matters cultural and historical.

The second sense in which I use the term "intoxicated" here is in reference to current world events: specifically I use the term with reference to refugees - what some others may call "migrants". These are people I conceive of as being "intoxicated with life". That is to say that they find themselves in the direst of straights and they have that all consuming will to survive that only those who have looked death in the face really know. I can say from my own personal experience that someone never wants to stay alive so much as in that moment when their continued existence might be terminally in doubt.

So I find it easy to describe the many refugees we see across the world, many fleeing from war-ravaged areas, many others merely from living in poverty and squalor, as "intoxicated with life". They want to live and this desire fills them and overflows within them, pushing them across land and across seas and oceans in the hope that they might find the circumstances for it. I do not blame a single one of them. Indeed, I find it strange that in the 21st century, in 2015, the idea that we might let people die or go hungry because they happen to come from a different country to us is still prevalent. I ask myself if border regulations and our notions of civilization really count for much in such circumstances. In 2015 have we not progressed to the point where a human life can expect to find food, clothing and shelter as a matter of course? The answer, I'm afraid, is no. Our Western societies are very much infected with the idea that in order to have food and shelter you have to earn it. Thus, those who are not seen to be earning it are regarded as "scroungers" who are receiving "hand outs".

I don't see things this way. I say a plague on all your polite notions of society, of progress, of humanism, of needing to "earn" the right to live. Life will find a way and those intoxicated with life will naturally be pulled, as a magnet pulls iron, to those places where food and shelter and safety seem evident. Do not be surprised. Do not say "Go back where you came from". You would not go back where they came from. Do not say "They belong back in their land" when the history of this planet is the history of the people upon it moving around to places that supported them best. It is the significant characteristic of life that it wants to survive! Expect life, wherever it shows itself, to want to do exactly that!

So this album of mine called Intoxication unites an interest in the refugees of the world with the Nietzschean notion of a creative superabundance of energy. It is in this sense that it is a companion piece to Forces of Nature. I see it as a personal version of those forces. The force to create, the force to live and survive. Don't be surprised these things exist. Every organism that comes to be only wants to grow and make more of itself. Its genetic. It is the mystery of why there is anything at all instead of nothing.

You can listen to Intoxication on my Bandcamp HERE!

What is the Meaning of This?

Today's blog is about the subject of meaning and its a fairly "stream of consciousness" type of a blog. As I write I am just back from my daily exercise which is my chance to blow some cobwebs out of my mind and loosen up my gradually aging body. It happens quite often in these times that thoughts come to mind and coalesce in ways that are fruitful and many of the blogs you see here are a result of such times. This is going to be another one like that.

So if you have been reading this blog at any time during this year you will know that my grand subject has been human being. I have been asking myself what it means to be human, where humans might be going and what the difference might be between a human being and the possible technological beings that we might become in the future. There has also been a strand of that which concentrated on consciousness. I have found it all greatly stimulating and it has brought me forward in my own thinking and inspired much new music from me that led me down new paths.

It was a couple of weeks ago, however, that it finally dawned on me what this was all about though. It was then that I realized that the great question here, perhaps the greatest question of all, was the question of meaning. Read back through some of my earlier blogs if you like and confirm this for yourself. It further dawned on me at that time that the question of meaning had really been the question that has animated me from my earliest days as a thinker back when I was 8, 9 and 10 reading biblical stories or The Odyssey which I read aged 10 at school. There was always a sense of wonder with me (a naive sense of wonder, I might add) and that has probably not served me very well in the long run but it has meant that I wanted to try and get answers to the questions that have animated my life.

Fast forward to a middle-aged man with 35 years more reading and experience under his belt. Meaning, why things mean, how things mean, what things mean, have come to be the central questions of my existence. Perhaps they are, in various forms, for everyone. Not everyone confronts these questions of course. Some try to hide from them or run away from them, scared of the possible answers. But I take a more prosaic and present view of things. Life would be hell if I didn't try to work out some answers. My thinking and reading this year have brought some progress for me it seems. At least, it feels that way. And as those writing about consciousness know very well, how things feel is very important to we humans. This, too, is something else caught up in all the "meaning" questions.

So what of "meaning"? Why do things mean? This, it seems to me, is a problem of consciousness. Neuroscientist Christof Koch sees consciousness as a feature of complex enough systems, systems, for example, such as the human brain. Koch himself does not limit the possibility of such consciousness to the human brain alone. He conceives it is possible that machine networks, if complex enough, could also become conscious. He also suggests that other animals with brains not so different from ours could be conscious - if in not quite the same way or to the same extent. For my purposes here the relevance of this is that with a developed enough consciousness comes the problem of meaning.

For with a consciousness such as ours, one that is self-aware, aware of its surroundings, able to extrapolate and problem solve, able to refer back to previous events and project forward into future ones, meaning floods in. Why is this? It is because meaning-making is a matter of relating things one to another, a matter of contextualizing things with other things, a matter of giving things a situation, a matter of relating and relationships, of networks. It just so happens that the universe bequeathed to us consciousness, quite blindly, and, in so doing, meaning flooded into our lives and all the problems that go with it. Meaning is what happens when conscious minds start going about their business. It is what happens when you take one object or idea, something that means nothing at all in itself or in isolation, and then relate it to something else. Or anything else. It is in the interactions of things and ideas that meaning is produced. As beings with a developed consciousness this was something we just couldn't help doing - the making of meaning.

In recent centuries our great thinkers have had problems with meaning though. Some wanted to try and fix meaning, believing that in so doing they could get things "right". Time and time again that project has failed but there are still those who believe that there is "a way things are" that could fix meanings. I am not one of those. Others have seen a problem with "nihilism" which is the lack of meaning. This issue is tied to the first inasmuch as by their constant failure to fix meaning it seemed to some that there was no fixed meaning to be found. I don't think that there is but I also don't think this should be cause for despair. Coming from a different angle, there were others who said that the problem wasn't that there was no meaning but that, instead, there was too much! These "poststructuralists" argued that the issue wasn't a lack of meaning but that there was so much it could never be fixed. Meaning was a matter of the "play" of many different meanings.

It seems to me that if you follow my basic ideas above of how meaning arises at all then it is no surprise that meanings are not fixed. It seems to me that if I am anywhere close then it would be impossible to fix meaning in the first place. For if meaning is simply a matter of relating things to other things then there are as many meanings as there are things to be related and in as many ways as you can relate them. In that, context may sometimes guide but it can never be determinative. We would still end up with as many meanings as it would be possible for people to have in any given scenario. It would seem that the poststructuralists were on to something with their ideas of a superfluity of meaning.

This, of course, brings its own issues. How is such a superfluity to be controlled? After all, we all need meaning and meanings for things but we all also need to live. In this I find something that the recently departed neuroscientist Oliver Sachs said deeply relevant. He wrote that "Each of us … constructs and lives a ‘narrative’ and is defined by this narrative." I find this to be intuitively and reflectively true. Sachs is here saying that we all build a story of our lives as we grow up and develop, one that gets added to every day with each event, thought, idea, that happens. This comes to be the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, about our circumstances, our possibilities, our past, our future. This forms a major context for all the meaning-making that we will do in life. It becomes the borders of what things can mean and acts as a stabilizing, if also sometimes an imprisoning, force. It is the boundaries of our thought. But these are not to be thought of as hard and impervious boundaries. The boundary can sometimes move and new meanings become possible. It is a movable border but a border nevertheless.

One corollary of this is that things will not mean the same thing for everyone. Nor, if this is right, should they. Difference is in-built into this understanding of things and is something to be negotiated rather than denied or avoided. We will tell completely different stories about ourselves and live individual lives and this will add to the list of possible meanings that can be made. This in turn speaks to an amazing plurality of lives and of meaning-making that often scares those who want to fix things or find a "way things are". There is no "way things are". And this is why there can also be no gods. Gods are used to try and fix meaning. They are there as guarantors of "the way things are" and act as a kind of über-context for everything. But there is no über-context. The universe did not come with meanings attached. It merely blindly created beings for whom things must mean.

This is what is bequeathed to us: to make things mean something useful to us, something that we can understand and live with. That may be a struggle but we cannot avoid it unless we die or go mad. I hope to study meaning and its making further over the coming days and weeks. There are those, such as Nietzsche or Foucault, who studied how things mean in more detail, for example, by using "genealogical" or "archaeological" techniques - but upon knowledge and its meaning itself. Nietzsche did great studies into the history of morality, something he saw as a problem, whilst Foucault, amongst other things, studied the history of prisons, sexuality, the treatment of mental illness and even scientific knowledge itself. None of these things, or their meanings, are givens. The idea of the "given" is one that those who want to fix things one way (and its always their way!) would like us to have. But following the path I have that seems crazy and to be rejected. What intellectual studies such of those of Nietzsche and Foucault have shown us is that no knowledge and no meaning is a given, Rather, it is all created and with a very specific history that was necessary for its formation. We would do well to remember this.

So we are in a world of play, the play of meanings. We are free to make ours to the extent that our lives, and the stories we tell about them, allow us. Meanings do not come with things so the idea of an "in-itself" with a meaning attached is silly. The meaning comes in the relating of one thing to another, in the activity of our conscious minds.