The Gospel of Existence

In the beginning was the absurdity and the futility filled the void and the nihilism was forever. Everything that was in the beginning was emptiness. That which came to be was meaningless and the meaninglessness was everywhere. Nothing came to be that was not without meaning. In this meaninglessness was life and this life was the futile absurdity of Men.The meaninglessness fills the void and the void is nihilistic without end.

There came billions of beings out of the void. They came as witnesses to the futility of life, to testify to the nihilism so that all might comprehend there was no meaning to be found. They came and were not always well received as Men tried to avoid their experience and pretend otherwise. But those who did receive this testimony got no benefit whatsoever from the knowledge. They learnt only of the absurd, futile nihilism of their existence and of their fate: to come from the void and return to it.

Our futility became flesh and dwelt in the void and we saw its emptiness, emptiness that could only be an empty eternity in the void. Many testified to its purposelessness and empty promise. Nietzsche testified about it saying "God is dead and we have killed him!" Of its emptiness and futility we have all received, time after time. For hope was given through the naive beliefs of Men but the futile absurdity of life was given through the nihilism of the existence we all share. No one has ever seen eternal meaning and the void reveals the futility of it all.

Point A to Point B

And so we reach the eve of Christmas (or the first day of Christmas in some countries such as Germany where I used to live) and my last blog of this Advent. At times I've found it hard to write another blog and there was a wobble in the middle of that time where I thought I might run out of things to say. But I got through that and the topics kept suggesting themselves and then inevitably feeding into new ones. I only say something about things that I have something to say about. Where something holds no interest for me I leave it alone as not worth commenting on. Life is short and time is in limited supply, a supply that is always running out, so use it wisely is my thinking. Twenty four blogs in a row is quite a task to set oneself but I have enjoyed the challenge which took up quite a bit of my time. I took to the task seriously and when I write I always try to get what I want to say just right and to check that any facts I might relate at least have a source. My blogs may come across as just someone's thoughts but they are usually produced in interaction with other things, especially books.

My subject in this final blog of this series is intended to be a bit of a "what have I learned?" type of thing given that I have written twenty three blogs before this one. As I sit here now, writing, I wonder if anyone does learn anything from what I have written. This is not a vanity thing. As I've grown older I've become much happier to be in the background, which I kind of always was in life anyway. Popularity or even being known I treat very warily. Better a few dedicated readers than hundreds or thousands of false friends. My ego would, of course, loved to be stroked by the notion that some people have had an insight or two from things I have written. Why would anyone share their thoughts with others or in public unless they hoped to communicate something to someone else? We are social beings and that social element is always within us as a potentiality even if we become private people.

The over-riding idea that sticks with me from the series of blogs I am now completing with this one is the idea of a human existence as a matter of something that goes from Point A, birth, to Point B, death. Writing things down and having to explain them, as I have been doing, can often clarify things in a person's mind and such has been the case here with me and this idea. I have found it interesting to muse, as I've written the various blogs that interacted directly with this idea, how people's views might change depending on where they are along that continuum - or where they perceive themselves to be. Of course, the two might not necessarily marry up since we never know how near to Point B we actually are until its too late. And then, in my mind, we don't know anything at else anymore. For me this points up yet another factor regarding being beings in time, as we are. It is that your perception of time, and your perception of your place in it, affects your views on many things, not least, in the context of these blogs of mine, of yourself, your life and your existence.

It is a truism that many people have what are commonly called "death bed conversions" to some religious faith or other. As they see the doorway out of life opening and the fabled tunnel of light before them suddenly all that has gone before takes on a new context. This, to me at least, is very understandable and, indeed, practical as a general approach. I very much think that we should assess things from our current point of view taking into account our assessment of our current circumstances. For me, there is no necessary consistency in or through life and most of the consistencies we seek or value are usually faked in any case. Life is a very false business. Even the very idea of a consistent character or personality or identity is merely a convenient idea we dignify with our assent, a fiction we believe for its utility alone. I am who I am but every attempt to say what I am is a falsehood for the truth is I am everything you say I am and everything you don't say I am. Maybe it is better to say I am a collection of possibilities and opportunities?

Point A to Point B is, of course, a brief description of the road we are all given to travel, a way to describe how we come from nowhere and go back to it again, briefly passing through a world of sense and sensibility, struggle, chance and change where, suddenly, everything seems so important to us. But is it? Really? The challenges of things like the absurdity or nihilism of the existences we briefly have possession of (if it is true to say we have possession of them at all) produce, at times, a very real sense in me that life is just a performance without any real stakes. To some this will seem an immoral thought because they will be so wrapped up in the imagined seriousness and consequence of life. But I ask myself constantly if anything real is ever really at stake in life. We come, we go. Stuff happens in the middle, but so what? And this "So what?" has real force to me. You do need to explain to me why what you think matters actually does. The world is full of pain, injustice and struggle. Real people do hurt. People die. But every being that has a Point A gets to Point B. And at Point B what went before is rendered irrelevant. All pain ends. All suffering ceases. All punishments stop. You can be sure this thought has comforted many suffering people.

So, for me, I come around to a view that some before me have seen. For Martin Heidegger, a serious German thinker of great depth and detail, it was our "Being-toward-death" that sets the stage for our whole lives. We are beings who know from the formation of our first thoughts that we are finite. We are immediately and definitively set within a terminal boundary. And that cannot but change everything for us. Even though we can think and dream of various forms of eternity and, sometimes, in ecstatic moments, feel as if we can almost touch them (as I have looking at a clear blue sky on a sunny day), it is a dream forever out of reach. And yet (this is the paradox) we are and were always part of the story of that eternity for it is all around us and flows through us. That eternity is a void of nothingness, the on-going history of the energy that makes up the universe (thought of as physical not spiritual energy). The universe is a story that no one will ever tell for no being will ever be bigger than the universe to tell it. But it is a story we are a tiny part of. Our problem is that we want to hold eternity in our hands and we cannot.  

We are reaching that point of the year where most of us experience that feeling of an end and a new beginning. This is always an emotional time for me as I get caught up in the collective thought. As I get older its increasingly a recognition that, even though whilst young we think so, we are not immortals. And I don't think we should be immortals. We are physical beings and the physical things must pass away. As Nietzsche highlights, decay is as much a part of the physical world as growth. Birth and death are both alike physically natural processes. I am skeptical of those who want human beings to "technologize" their way out of life's physical downsides. This is not because I think people should suffer or die in pain. Its because physicality is a foundation of the human. Humans are those who suffer, who struggle, who need to make sense of it all in a universe that doesn't allow them to. To some, this will sound perverse, an inappropriate masochism. But I think the Transhumanists and Futurists with their shiny, trouble-free futures are the ones who need to re-examine what it is to be human and ask if what it is they are trying to create is not a new being entirely. Humans are born, humans suffer and struggle, and humans die. Change too many of the conditions of their existence and what you've got isn't human anymore. And humans are, fundamentally, mortal, vulnerable.

Professor Richard Rorty, now much missed after his death in 2007, had a saying that the agenda of the technologists, it seems to me, is very much following. It is, as Rorty said, just "another human project aiming to escape the time and chance" to which human beings, supremely, are fated. This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to relieve suffering or stop pain or cure disease. We should do all these things because to be somewhere between Point A and Point B is not to be at Point B where things cease to have consequences. And those perspectives can be very different. But I think a focus on this, a focus on escaping our fate, is to focus on trying to not be human anymore as opposed to understanding what is at the heart of humanity itself: we are not gods. Of course, we want to be. As I said above, we want to hold eternity in our hands. But consider the rest of our fellow inhabitants on this tiny rock in space, the animals. They suffer and die as we do but they do not have the consciousness and mental abilities that we do. You may say that we have evolved an extra burden but, in many respects, we are as they are. And they are, in their ignorance, happy simply to live and die, to have been. I think that we should be too. Its the old adage about it being the journey and not the destination back again.

For what is at the heart of this human struggle to live and die? It is that everything essential we have has been fated. We chose nothing about the fact that we exist. We were, as some say, "thrown" into existence and are then expected to make the best of it. An essential aspect of the human experience is that so much of it was (and still is!) out of our hands and I think that is something to come to terms with. The trouble is that we are, in so many ways, determined to either narcotize ourselves against these disturbing facts in a "go with the flow" life of bad faith or, in a show of hubris, to imagine that we can engineer our way out of them. (As I write now my song Existenzkrise - "Existential Crisis" plays. I chuckle.) Things will of course change in our future. But we are still humans and its my view that we have barely begun to understand what that even means yet. I have spent all year on this subject (quite by accident) and yet even though I have thought and written much it seems that I'm still in the starting blocks.

I guess that the struggle to be human and to understand what that means is a journey we all take that one day just gets snuffed out, a process to which we are fated that comes from the void and goes back with us to it.

C'est La Vie!


PS: Of course, it does not escape me either that all this trying to escape our fate is very human too. In that case, perhaps the primary human trait is that we are fated to futility. What better example of The Absurd do we need? Nevertheless...

Empty Advertising

The following is genuine promotional copy for a product made by the company Music Computing, an American maker of musical computer instruments based in Austin, Texas. It can be found on their website right now.

The Game is Over. In the past the music industry was a game and products like the StudioBLADE were game changers, but nowadays things have gotten to be serious. If you are a professional music producer, you’ve got every 12 year old kid coming at you armed with a cheap laptop trying to take you down. Your skills and experiences can only defend against that for so long. Super-instruments like the StudioBLADE will give you that extra edge when it really matters. When others can’t run big plugins because their computers aren’t powerful enough or having to continuously bounce tracks down from MIDI to audio so their computers don’t lock up, you can continue to work the way you want, without restraints to dominate. Competition is fierce, why would you go into battle with a handicap? The new StudioBLADE 5, the ultimate weapon for the Music Industry.

What strikes me at first is how ridiculously over the top this is. I wonder who wrote this and who they think they are aiming their product at? The "Studioblade" is essentially a Frankenstein instrument that is a computer, sound card, midi controller, touchscreen and conventional musical keyboard all housed in their own custom housing to look like a keyboard. It also comes with some preloaded software and is meant to be an all-in-one music-making solution.

I notice, at first, how capitalist and military the language is here. Music is an "industry". Others are trying to "take you down". (Yes, even 12 year olds with a laptop!) Music is a matter of competition. You must "defend" yourself. So, of course, what you really need to do is buy something! This is because you are going "into battle" so you obviously need bigger and better weaponry. The Studioblade is "the ultimate weapon". Is it just me that doesn't know whether to laugh at the mindless stupidity of this language or weep at the thorough-going nihilism of it?

What picture of music and music-making is given here? If you make music yourself is it one you recognize? This is a company selling things and presumably they want to sell as many as possible. But to who? Who is attracted to something when language like this is used? I can only imagine it is people who put their Studioblade next to their gun cabinet who are seeking to kill every other musician! But the language of capitalism is equally as prevalent. I had never been aware until reading this advertising that music was a matter of "competition" at all. Much less did I realize that I needed "the ultimate weapon" to win such a competition. Presumably, since even 12 year olds are coming to "take me down," the idea is that I take them down too? To do this I utilize weapons to... to what? To incapacitate them? How does one do that with music exactly? Where does the metaphor lead? Why does having any instrument or device at all lead to me having a "weapon" that could achieve such a thing?

This advertising is stupid and I find it hard to imagine advertising that could be worse. Maybe it is playing to some culture that I am not aware of. The company are based in Texas, after all. But from my British and European context this just seems mind-numblingly banal. If I were aiming to write a parody of all the things I think about music and instruments and what I think they are about I would write something like this. As a musician who has considered instruments like the Studioblade before I find this advertisement actually insults me and my intelligence.  I find out now that music is all about size and power and weaponry. But it isn't. Its about limitations and inspiration and ingenuity. You don't need "the ultimate weapon". You never did. And those 12 year olds? Don't worry about them. Or anyone else. Music is not a competition. Even if it was, the equipment you had wouldn't gain you any advantage. Your originality would. So don't listen to Music Computing and their poverty of thinking. You may or may not need their Studioblade. You certainly don't need their mindset. You're hopefully much, much better than that.

Is Conservation Contrary to Nature?

The blog that you are about to read might confound or upset your own personal beliefs. But before you decide that I am an anarchist who wishes to see wanton and random destruction I want you to read the full blog, attempt to understand it on my terms and give me a fair hearing. You will then have the task of taking on board what I've said and bringing it into critical interaction with the beliefs you already have. This, as I understand it, is something like how our belief systems progress anyway. And so I ask for a hearing.

My blog today starts from one of my own beliefs. This belief is that conservation, not just ecological conservation but pretty much all forms of conservation, are contrary to nature. What do I mean by saying this? I mean that the nature of the universe, the way it works, the way things are ordered, the way this universe progresses, is not based on the conservation of individual specific things. The universe, for example, does not have as one of its guiding principles that you or I must be saved. It does not think that lions or elephants or rhinos or whales or planet Earth or our sun or our galaxy should exist forever. Indeed, it doesn't think that anything should. It just is. Conservation is not a part of its make up. The universe is a big engine of change.

So what is a part of its make up? From observation it seems that constant, radical, permanent change is a part of its make up. The universe, left to its own devices, is merely the living history of forms of energy if you break it down to basics. These forms of energy interact with one another to produce the things we see, hear, and experience. More importantly, they interact to produce things that we will never see, hear, experience or even imagine. Existence, in this sense, is just energy doing what energy does. There are no over-arching rules for it and nothing is mandated to exist or not exist because the universe is impassive and uninterested in what is - or is not. Its just random, chaotic energy. Out of this random chaos came us - quite inexplicably to my mind but that's another discussion. We human beings are not impassive or uninterested. Indeed, we need to be concerned and interested in order to survive. And so from this universe of chaotic energy we interested beings were produced.

I have observed the interest in ecological conservation as a phenomenon with my own growing interest for many years. Its one debate which can get some human beings very hot under the collar. When I hear people saying that we need to "save the planet" I often ask myself "What for?" For me its never really good enough to assume the rightness of an agenda merely because it seems to be either moral or, in some sense, on the side of good. I know both morality and goodness as interested ideas which are in no sense neutral but always serving some interest. You might think that the interests of saving the planet are very good ones but I would always seek to undermine the foundations of a belief to ask what presuppositions it stands on. Our beliefs always have these groundings and they are often very revealing and easily toppled. Such are human belief systems.

Of course, conservation is about more than wanting to save the planet or some species upon it (whether that is a rare kind of insect, a cuddly mammal or even us). I had a think and I reasoned that you could connect capitalists (who want to preserve their economic status in society as well as the value of capital), theists (who want a god to be the guarantor of everything that is as it is right now), Greens (who want to preserve the planet and species of life as we have them now) and Transhumanists (who want human beings to outlive our current surroundings and even our planet) all as types of people interested in conservation broadly understood. You may be able to think of others. Conservation is, of course, most commonly associated with the Greens but, as we can see, the drive to conserve things is actually apparent wherever people want things to stay roughly as they are right now (or in an idealized, utopian form of right now). My point, as I've said above, is quite simple: this is contrary to the way things are, contrary to nature, against the organizing principles of an indifferent universe.

You may argue that this is to misunderstand the way things are and that's a fair point to challenge me on. You may say that I am right and the universe doesn't care what stays or goes. It will just keep rolling on until the energy all dissipates in the eventual heat death of the universe in some trillions of years. In that context you may say that what is is then up to those species who can make something of it and that if the universe allows us to make and manufacture things a certain way, guided by our principles, then we should. I don't actually find this position all that wrong. My concern here, I suppose, is with those who reason that there is some form of rightness or naturalness or in-built goodness with this drive to conserve. To me it is entirely manufactured and interested as a phenomenon. It is the activity of self-interested and self-important beings. To want to save the whale because you have an impulse to save whales is one thing. To say that we have a responsibility to save whales is to use rhetoric in the service of an agenda. The universe doesn't care if whales live or die. It follows that there is no imperative for me to care either - although I may choose to and may give reasons for so doing. But these reasons will always be interested and (merely) rhetorical.

So what am I arguing against? I'm arguing against those who want to find or impose imperatives. I'm arguing against those who think that something put us here to "save the world". I'm arguing against those who see us as over and above nature as opposed to merely an interested and self-interested and self-important part of it, a species and individuals with a will to survive. I'm arguing against those who see us as anything other than a rather pathetic bug-like species on a nothing ball of rock in a nowhere solar system in an anonymous galaxy floating in a space so big you cannot begin to quantify it. I'm arguing against those who regard life as nothing to do with power and its operations and how those dynamics play out in human societies. Human beings are very conscious of their station in life and will seek to preserve or increase it. This, amongst other things, is why there are differing sides of the Green conservation argument. People have empires to protect. But seen from that angle life just becomes a power struggle between forms of energy marshalled to power differing agendas. We, instead of being the savior of our world, the universe and everything, are merely just more energy acting in the vastness of space until we dissipate.

So yes when I hear the slogans of Greens I chuckle. I wonder what we are saving and why. I smile at the naivety, if that's what it is, that just assumes this is the right thing to do. I wonder at the hubris that thinks we and our planet in some sense deserve to live. I wonder how these people have factored in the assumptions of our eventual destruction. I wonder how they explain away the fact that well over 90% of things that ever lived on Earth are gone forever without any human action whatsoever. Because that's what things just do - have their time and then cease to exist. I wonder where they reason the meaning they ascribe to things fits in. For nothing exists in a vacuum. (Feel free to ponder on the vacuum of space here and how that affects my last sentence.) The reasons we give for things, the beliefs we hold, are supported by other things and it is they, when articulated, that support our actions and drives. Life is wonderful and random. But it is not permanent. And, as far as I can see, it was never meant to be nor can it be. The drive to conserve is an interested human drive, just one contingent outworking of the energy that drives a form of life. This doesn't mean we shouldn't care or should ravage and destroy. Its just a context for something humans want to do for their own, personal reasons. It is, in the end, just one more example of the universe doing its thing, its the energy that exists exhausting itself until there's no more left. 

Its an example of the kind "Anything the universe allows is allowed".


Now you may feel free to think about this and decide who is right or wrong and, just as importantly, why.

Commentary (Part 1)

From time to time I write a commentary on things. More often than not this is on myself or my past or things that occur to me in life. This week I will publish a number of these commentaries for public consumption by unwary readers. Often these comments aspire to be nuggets of wisdom. It is of course for the reader to decide what they mean, if anything, and if they are of any use.

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1.

Still the same room. Still the same things. Still the same external conditions. And yet now I feel more hopeful. A sense of finitude can do that to a Man. Of course, my question concerning “what the point of me is” has not been answered. I currently think it’s one of those questions that can never be answered. To seek after generalised meaning or reason is a fool’s errand. Perhaps now I see life as a process of understanding, an awakening from an Edenic innocence, in which you try to make sense of who you are, where you are and why. This, you may agree, is basically a study of Being and what it means in a world without purpose or meaning beyond the local and contingent. I meditate, sometimes daily, on the fact that my life is but an Augenblick and my non-existence will be an eternity. In that perspective, how can any earthly, human, “cares of the living” really be that troublesome?

2.

Anything that can be thought of must certainly be a fiction, so wrote Nietzsche. How can my self-understanding, my telling of the paths and conduits of my life, be any less so? It is no privileged account to be sure. It’s merely my own as it occurs to me at a point in time. But I am lying to you and I do have my reasons. How could I not? And how could you not read me with your own needs to be satisfied? We are none of us here blank slates.

3.

The clock is ticking. That’s how important you are.

4.

Innerspace and Outer Space. Within your own imagination you can dream a billion dreams. Without, there are a billion truths you will never guess at. Each of us is stuck between the world within and the world without, an insignificant point of contact between the two. To one, you are of utmost importance. To the other, you are almost an insignificance. It is a source of wonder and mystery how consciousness could come of something so unconscious as the Universe.

5.

I got my wish. Am I happier? No. It remains a truism that people have little idea what is best for them. As a species, we are half blind in the fog, scrabbling around. For me, relationships are an excellent example of my blindness. The scars of bad ones get deeper and have more long-lasting effects over time. Of course, isolation is no solution.It merely solves one problem by creating another one. I console myself that at least no one else is involved in that case. But it’s a sticking plaster to deal with a broken bone.

6.

Are people basically honest with each other, or basically dishonest with each other? I come down on the side of the latter. Oh, I know that from time to time some people (perhaps Christian types) try to show that human beings are good and basically altruistic. However, I think they are pissing into the wind on this one. Of course, people CAN be altruistic but it seems to me that the fact you need to point this out speaks against it. The fact is that altruism is occasionally useful. But it’s the “what’s useful to me?” mentality that prevails overall.

7.

Not so much crying these days. Over the past year or two I’ve become very attuned to the solar cycle. Currently, as I write, we are heading towards the summer solstice. The days are long and the light hangs on into the night. I awake to sun beams through a gap in the curtain. I experience the beneficial effects of extra electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum (that’s light to you and me). I’ve noticed over the years that I seem very sensitive to the amount of light that is around. It’s no coincidence, in my mind, that my worst episodes of panic occur in early Autumn when light disappears. I know that there is a disorder for this (Seasonal Affective Disorder) and I think that I might fall within that category. Like everything else, I’ve never been diagnosed though.

8.

Power. In the end, I think that quite a lot comes down to this. Having it. Wanting it. To feel it, just for a moment. A lot of things can be explained by the idea of power. And that’s without being Foucauldian about it. Power, and powerlessness, are things that you could get very philosophical about if you wanted to.

9.

I’m still impotent, of course. But I wonder if I might not have settled for less. I was embroiled in an internet conversation in which I had taken on a false identity and I revealed myself to my unfortunate and unwilling victim. He took it quite magnanimously, considering, but then left a landmine of his own behind by suggesting that if only I used my clear powers of intelligence positively I might actually achieve something in life. It came to me as a slap in the face, I must admit. It’s good to hear contrary points of view. Humans are self-deceptive. They need it.

10.

Death can be a shadow, there is no doubt of that. And we can live in that shadow. I had always wanted to be able to die happy, joyously, having, as it were, howling into the void that I had existed. It would have been futile of course. But it would also have been my victory cry. “I existed! Fuck you all!”

11.

I am 46 years old. Still NO actual friends. A lot of the time it isn’t that bad. I have time, such as now, to think and write. Life without other people is certainly less complicated. In an ideal world of my imaginings I wouldn’t have lots of friends coming round anyway. I like (or, I have learned) to keep myself largely to myself. And I don’t dislike that fact.

12.

“The record shows I took the blows and did it my way.” And isn’t that all that one can ask for in life? It’s easy to be negative. My autobiography gives some examples of where I am certainly that. But how about biting back? There can be no more perfect life but than that you took hold of your circumstances and lived the life you wanted to live considering the circumstances you had. I don’t mean this in some secular, economic sense. I don’t mean it in the shallow terms of capitalist society either. I mean that you followed your own beliefs and motivations through. Authenticity to yourself, that’s surely what counts when you have to look yourself in the mirror? On your death bed what comfort would it be that you had achieved material possessions or a life enviable to others in the world? I’d much rather lie there thinking I had been true to myself. You may occasionally need to justify yourself to others. But you will need to justify yourself to yourself every day.

13.

My life and my music are truly intertwined. For those with ears to hear, my music is the best guide to what goes on with me internally. Its the escape valve.

14.

I don’t honestly think that I have any duty to justify myself to anyone. Oh, of course, it may be that this is sometimes expedient. Sometimes, it may even be due to power and authority taking me in hand. But it’s all a joke, isn’t it? A game? I return to a perpetual thought of mine right now: my life is an Augenblick and my death will be forever. What do I care what you think about me? If you honestly wanted a genuine assessment from the horse’s mouth, I could give you one. It wouldn’t be pretty because I know the things I have done. But I’m not a very convinced bad person. When I do wrong its because I’m bored, because I can or because I thought it “clever” to do so. I often regret bad things I’ve done. My heart isn’t in it. I just want to be left alone really and “live and let live” seems to be the best policy for that.

15.

“Physician, heal thyself”. Pulling threads from the twisted haystack of life is certainly a perilous thing. I should heed my own, unasked for, advice. The women were largely a mistake and responsible for massive scars on my psyche. Do good times ever outweigh the bad? I find it hard to think so. If only there was a way to have good times WITHOUT the bad. A solution to this problem has not yet been discovered.

16.

Knowledge is not all it’s cracked up to be. This is a conclusion that gains more force the longer I live. What’s more, knowledge without wisdom is next to useless and dangerous. There is little good in the bare knowing of something. At a bare minimum you also need to know where it fits and what to do with it. This is why choosing not to know things is often the better course. It is hard to “unknow” and such is our make up that we often feel the need to do things about what we know. This way many bad things have happened and not just for me but in general.

17.

My origins are an absurdity to me. It must be true, I muse, that absurdity is the principle of the Universe.

18.

I don’t think that it occurs to people very much just how temporary and fragile they really are. Of course, the old and the sick have this reality impressed upon them more frequently and with more force. But, in general, we seem to have a consciousness which, on the good days, operates as if we are in some way eternal. And I suppose that makes sense. How could you live on an even keel if your every other thought was of how vulnerable and contingent you are? Well, let me tell you from experience that the answer is “Not very well”.

19.

“The crisis of Being”. Only now, as I keep reading, in fits and starts, do I learn that people have been discussing this for decades, if not centuries. Perhaps I’m not so weird and individual after all? This year I’ve written a suite of music in 10 parts called “Human/Being” which really functions as a musical meditation on what it means to be human and the whole subject of Being. If my life is become anything to me it is a process of self- Enlightenment, a process that will one day just be snuffed out. Gone. Unimportant. Another example of “the concerns of the living”.

20.

“The Wanderer. He who has come only in part to a freedom of reason cannot feel on earth otherwise than as a wanderer - though not as a traveler towards a final goal, for this does not exist. But he does want to observe, and keep his eyes open for everything that actually occurs in the world; therefore he must not attach his heart too firmly to any individual thing; there must be something wandering within him, which takes its joy in change and transitoriness.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, #638.

I could accept this quite well as a description of me. If I am anything at all it is a wanderer.

The Zero Theorem: Life in the Void

The Zero Theorem is a film directed by Terry Gilliam (of Brazil and 12 Monkeys fame) that, depending where you live, was released late in 2013 or in 2014. It is set in a surreal version of now and in it we follow the journey of Qohen Leth (played by Christoph Waltz), a reclusive computer genius who "crunches entities" for a generic super corporation, Mancom. The story is a fable, an allegory, and in watching it we are meant to take the issues it raises as existential ones.

Qohen Leth has a problem. Some years ago he took a phone call and that call was going to tell him what the meaning of existence was. But he got so excited at the prospect that he dropped the phone. When he picked it up his caller was gone. Ever since he has been waiting for a call back. But the call back never comes. So day by day he faces an existential struggle because he desperately does want to know what the meaning of life is. His life, you see, is dominated by a vision of a giant black hole into which all things inevitably go. His work life is shown to be much like everyone else's in this parody of our world. People are "tools" and work is a meaningless task serving only to enrich those far above their pay grade. Workers are replaceable cogs who must be pushed as hard as possible to achieve maximum productivity. Their value is in their productivity.

This world is run by corporations and the one that stands in for them all in the film is Mancom. Mancom have a special task for Qohen. They want him to work on an equation proving that "Everything adds up to nothing." That is, they want him to prove that existence is meaningless. Why do they want him to do this? Because, as the head of Mancom says in the film, in a meaningless universe of chaos there would be money to be made selling order. The point seems to be that commercial enterprises can make money from meaninglessness by providing any number of distractions or things to fill the whole at the centre of Being.

The film paints a picture of a world full of personalized advertizing that is thrust at you from all angles. Everywhere there are screens that are either thrusting something into your face or serving as conduits to an online escape world where you can create a new you and escape the existential questions of existence that the real world thrusts upon you. There is a scene in which people are at a party but, instead of interacting with each other, they all dance around looking into tablets whilst wearing headphones. Further to this, there are cameras all around. If it's not the ones we are using to broadcast ourselves into a cyber world, it's the ones our bosses are using to watch us at work or the ones in the street that can recognise us and beam personalized advertizements straight at us as we walk. This is the surveillance state for company profit that records and archives our existence.

And what of the people in this place? Most of them seem to be infantilized, lacking of any genuine ambition and placated by the "bread and circuses". Their lives are a mixture of apathy and misdirection. They seek meaning in screens with virtual friends or in virtual worlds and, presumably, a lot of them take advantage of the constant advertizements they are bombarded with. When Qohen has something of a crisis early on in the film "Management" send along Bainsley to his house (Qohen doesn't like going out or being touched and so he negotiates to work from home). Bainsley, unbeknownst to Qohen, is a sex worker in the employ of Mancom. She is sent along as stress relief (so that this malfunctioning "tool" can be got back to productive work) and inveigles him into a virtual reality sex site which, in this case, has been tailored to Qohen's specific needs. (This is to say it is enticing but not overtly sexual to give the game away. In essence, Bainsley becomes his sexy friend.) Other characters drop hints that Bainsley is just another tool but Qohen doesn't want to accept it. She is becoming something that might actually have meaning for him. But then, one day, Qohen goes back to the site and, in error, the truth of who Bainsley is is revealed and all his trust in this potential meaning evaporates. (One wonders how many people are online at pornography sites filling the meaning-shaped hole by trying to find or foster such fake attachments?)

So what are we to make of this in our Google-ified, Facebooked, Game of Thrones watching, Angry Birds playing, online pornography soaked, world of Tweeters and Instagrammers? I find it notable that Terry Gilliam says his film is about OUR world and not a future dystopia. And I agree with him. The trouble is I can sense a lot of people are probably shrugging and/or sighing now. This kind of point is often made and often apathetically agreed with with a casual nod of the head. But not many people ever really seem to care. Why should we really care if hundreds of millions of us have willingly handed over the keys to our lives to a few super corporations who provide certain services to us - but only on the basis we give them our identities and start to fill up their servers with not just the details of our lives but the content of them as well? The technologization of our lives and the provision of a connectedness that interferes with face to face connectedness seems to be something no one really cares about. Life through a screen, or a succession of screens, is now a reality for an increasing number of people. In the UK there is a TV show called "Gogglebox" (which I've never watched) but no one ever seems to realise that they might be the ones who are spending their lives goggling.

So let's try and take off the rose-tinted specs and see things as they are once all the screens go black and all that's reflected at us are our real world faces and our real world lives. I wonder, what does life offer you? Thinking realistically, what ambitions do you have? (I don't mean some dumb bucket list here.) When you look at life without any products or games or TV shows or movies or online role playing games or social media to fill it with, when you throw away your iPhone and your iWatch, your Google Glass, and all your online identities, where is the meaning in your life to be found? When you look at life as it extends from your school days, through your working life to inevitable old age (if you are "lucky", of course), what meaning does that hold for you? Would you agree that this timeline is essentially banal, an existence which, by itself, is quite mechanical? Have you ever asked yourself what the point of this all is? Have you ever tried to fit the point of your life into a larger narrative? Do you look at life and see a lot of people who don't know what they are doing, or what for, allowing themselves to be taken through life on a conveyor belt, entertained as they pass through by Simon Cowell and Ant and Dec? Do you sometimes think that life is just a succession of disparate experiences with little or no lasting significance?

The Zero Theorem is essentially a film about the meaning of life. Gilliam, of course, made another film that was actually called The Meaning of Life with the rest of his Monty Python colleagues. Now you might be wondering why the question is even raised. Perhaps, for you, life has no meaning and that's not very controversial. You shrug off all my questions as not really very important. But I would reply to that person by asking them if meaning has no meaning. For, put simply, there isn't a person alive that doesn't want something to mean something. Human beings just do need meaning in their lives. So Qohen Leth, for me, functions as an "Everyman" in this story. For we all want to know what things mean. And, without giving away the ending of the film, I think that, in the end, we all have to face up to the twin questions of meaning itself and of things meaning nothing. We all have to address the question that values devalue themselves, that meanings are just things that we give and that nothing, as Qohen hoped for, was given from above, set in stone, a god before which we could bow and feel safe that order was secured.

For order is not secured. Some people might try to sell it to you. (In truth, many companies are trying to right now.) Others might try to convince you that they've got the meaning and order you need in your life and you can have it too. But they haven't and you can't. That black hole that Qohen Leth keeps seeing is out there and everything goes into it. Our lives are lived in the void. The question then becomes can you find meaning and purpose in the here and now, in the experience of living your life, or will you just pass through empty and confused, or perhaps hoping that someone else can come along and provide you with meaning without you having to do any work? Who takes responsibility for finding that meaning? Is it someone else, as Qohen Leth with his phone call hoped, or is it you?

The question of meaning is, in the end, one that never goes away for any of us. Not whilst you're alive anyway.

Being is Nothingness

"Stoic absence of passion, Zen absence of will, Heideggerian gelassenheit and physics-as-the-absolute-conception-of-reality are… just so many variations on a single project - the project of escaping from time and chance." (Richard Rorty)

 It is our human nature to rage against the dying of the light, to fill the nothingness with somethingness, to give meaning where there is none, truth where there is none, knowledge where there is none, to make reason where none exists, to be rational where irrationality reigns. At least, this is my observation. I thought I should write something about this at this current time and lay out a more comprehensive article after my last few on being and consciousness. As you will know, these things mean something to me and I want to try and give a slightly more comprehensive account of them from my own understanding. It will at least help me to do this and, maybe, one or two others as well.

It is my intuition that the time has come to acknowledge the gaping hole that exists at the centre of Being, to acknowledge that our human powers and perceptions fail, to acknowledge that truth is insubstantial, knowledge is merely what is useful, that our seeing is partial and mostly blind, that we are contingent and merely fitted for a form of life, a very narrow form of life, evolved to live and die on an inconsequential speck in the vastness of space. I do not see that there is any Whole or Unity or Truth or amount of Knowledge or Privileged Insight or Enlightenment or Meaning that we can work our way towards or find. There is no Deity or Spirituality, no Body of Privileged Information or Holy Being which is going to allow us to see behind the veil of our limitations and glimpse the Holy of Holies of  "how-things-really-are" or "what-life-is-all-about". There is no "our-true-place-in-the-universe". These things are a mirage, and we are victims of their illusion.

It should be noted, then, that I am hardly the first person to diagnose nothingness at the centre of all that is. "Nihilism" has been a problem for European philosophy for 200-300 years. In other traditions, emptiness has been held as a value in itself. 2,300 years ago there was at least one Jewish teacher (a person named Qoheleth, the speaker in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes to which I will return below) teaching that life is "breath" and a chasing after the wind. And he was continually asking "What does it profit...?" So we can be sure that we are not the first to have the thought that at the centre of Being is…. nothing and that life itself is insubstantial. It may be, like the Ego, that certain illusory goals and beliefs (the aforementioned list of gods and pseudo-gods such as Meaning, Truth and Knowledge) were necessary and that evolution fitted us with them to best enable our survival. But we make a terrible mistake in taking them too seriously, petrifying them and making deities of them. But, then again, maybe we are only living out the life that we were meant to lead in doing so?

Nevertheless, I want to suggest today that the claim that something "is" (in any essentialist or foundational sense) is the most meaningless claim any human being could ever make, in my opinion. We have neither the insight nor the means to make any such claim. We live in a constant stream of existence, of consciousness, and randomly pluck things from the torrent as it rushes past and then make connections between one and another. If it has the utility of working or being, so it seems, repeatable, then we deify it as something that is…. but have no genuine right to do so. We can only ever speak properly of a constant becoming, a changing as one day turns into the next. We are part of a stream and we observe a small stretch of the journey before we blink… and cease to exist.

I think the key insight here, which I hope to flesh out below, is that it's not in spite of the nothingness that we make meaning, truth and knowledge: it's because of it. It might have been thought, pre-reflectively, that these things arise as we have an awareness of a greater thing that is out there, some god or truth or insight into being that is currently beyond us. And so we yearn to reach it guided by our belief that there is "a-way-things-are". But this is not so. Instead, we experience the void of nothing and experience the edge of chaos and cannot bear it. And so we become (or, in evolutionary terms, became) machines for the creation of meaning, truth and knowledge to give us something that can allow us to live. No one could survive the chaos, it would make our lives unlivable. Instead, we find a form of life through which we can survive, endure and prosper. Because at the heart of Being there is a void, we find things plastic to our touch and begin to create. This is to say that our "reality" is not nearly so fixed as some might have you believe. Or, at least, not nearly as restrictive.

It's worth noting at this point that I am not here making any claims to universal knowledge. That would be both arrogant and entirely contradictory to my point. I am simply emptying out onto the page my understanding such as it is at this current time as it has been educated by the thoughts, and the thought, that I have encountered on my journey down the stream. I regard "right and wrong" in this connection as to be strictly missing the point. I don't regard the journey as about right or wrong. I regard it as about the experience of the journey. I regard philosophy, which is nominally what I am doing here, as about utilization of the mind and as about, as it originally was, a love of wisdom and not as a means to some fabled special insight, much less some technical or hidden knowledge. As such, I believe that questions are more fundamental than answers and that thinking is the most important activity, one that can lead us to find the questions at the heart of our existence and our being. This, I see as I look back, is what I have really been doing throughout my life since I was 8 or 9 years old.

For myself, I see myself at a crossover of Philosophy and Spirituality, two things which can, indeed, be compatible. There have been many spiritual and philosophical thinkers. The belief in god is a logical outworking of one way of doing these things but not a necessary one and not one I have found myself coming to be convinced by in the end. Indeed, I think back 20 years to when I would have said I believed in a god and cringe at how naive I was at that time. However, I don't think that spirituality, in itself and in all its forms, is to be pilloried or violently attacked as some like Richard Dawkins do. Both Philosophy and Spirituality are searching for things to fill the nothingness at the heart of being (things like meaning, truth, knowledge or god) and, as such, are entirely understandable in that context. The attacks of those like Dawkins merely show an arrogant and boorish lack of humble understanding. Humility, we should remember, is perhaps the quality human beings need most in the face of the all-encompassing nothingness that surrounds us. Perhaps those who are least humble are the ones who are most desperately running away in a futile attempt to escape it? I would argue that where Dawkins sees "god" and rages he actually only sees "Truth" instead - which functions in much the same way for him as god does for his opponents. He is more like those he despises than he would ever want to admit.

My approach below in the rest of this blog will be based on a firm belief that all the connections human beings make in their thinking are fictions. They are merely either useful or not useful. (It is to be noted that fiction is not an opposite of truth. We habitually share fictions that, whilst not true in themselves, elucidate some truth or beliefs we would hold dear.) All syntheses are at least fictional and tell a story that works at a certain time and place. We know that nothing stands for all time and so in place of models of accuracy and truth, models which have their very failure inscribed within them from the start, I use models of honesty and authenticity which have a validity of time and place. What follows will be my attempt to describe the nothingness at the heart of not just human being, but all Being, and how I came to find it. I will do so in my own words (believing that this is the most authentic way I can do it in a blog for general readers) and I will also try to point up some issues this raises and some of the options before us. I take it that I don't need to point out again that this is merely my own partial account (in at least 2 senses).

So why would anyone think that at the heart of Being there is a gaping chasm of nothingness, a black hole at the centre of all that is? For me this realisation came by thinking and reading in addition to the lived experience of my life. I read philosophers like William James who said that "truth" was those things that were merely "good in the way of belief" and Richard Rorty who wrote papers and books extolling the idea that beliefs are not true or false in the sense of corresponding to an antecedent world, but only in the sense that they are useful beliefs and that it pays to believe them. Where James, a man of his philosophical time, talked about the world of experience, Rorty, in keeping with the linguistic turn and focus in more modern philosophy, talks about language. Indeed, Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher obsessed with thinking about Being, called language "the house of Being". But it is when thinking about language that we begin to realise that language is not a perspicuous tool for penetrating to the heart of Being but, instead, a collection of "tools for coping with objects rather than representations of objects, and as providing different sets of tools for different purposes" (Richard Rorty). Another very famous philosopher of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, described language as like a game in which we, as various different communities, need to know the rules of the game we are playing in order to take part in using the language. This makes language sound very much like a social practice as opposed to the innate logic of the universe, something that, at first, Wittgenstein himself had tried to find. But, on his later thinking, no language gets us closer to reality because that is not what language is for. Language is there to help us deal with things not represent them, correspond to them or describe them in their essence. All this is to say that language is in no way foundational to Being like a code for how things really are. Rather, it is descriptive of it in as many ways as there are human purposes.

There were for me other philosophical indicators that traditional god substitutes such as Knowledge, Truth or Meaning had ideas above their station. About 16 years ago, as I prepared to start my PhD studies, I chanced upon a book by Friedrich Nietzsche. I knew next to nothing about him save that I knew his work had been co-opted (and corrupted) by the Nazis. I began to read the book (which, soon after, grew to become all his books) and found it very reader friendly but in no way simplistic. I have learned many things in those 16 years since by reading Nietzsche. One of those things is the "will to system" that human beings have. Another is that human beings are excellent at deceiving themselves. Nietzsche, at times, is a very astute and insightful observer of his kind and of their intellectual habits and failings. Thus, he describes truth as "a mobile army of metaphors" and says that "We believe when we speak of trees, colours, snow, and flowers, we have knowledge of the things themselves, and yet we possess only metaphors of things which in no way correspond to the original entities." In the same piece of writing he will argue that our concepts are a "making equivalent of that which is non-equivalent" and that "The thing-in-itself (which would be, precisely, pure truth, truth without consequences) is impossible even for the user of language to grasp". Perhaps my favourite Nietzschean thought, though, is this one:

Life as the product of life. However far man may extend himself with his knowledge, however objective he may appear to himself - ultimately he reaps nothing but his own biography.

I find in this perfectly crafted thought (and Nietzsche's books are full of hundreds of such thoughts as well as more lengthy arguments) a perfect summary of all of our lives. Life, so it says to me, is not about knowledge or truth or meaning. Language does not get to the heart of anything. We do not perceive past some intellectual or spiritual barrier to something that is more real than real. Life is just a time period and all we do when we live is create our history.

And so I took up and ran with this theme as I continued my studies. I entered the world of  French 20th century philosophy where Camus tells us that the only genuine philosophical question is to ask if life is worth living at all. In that same environment Sartre proclaims that we are all "condemned to be free", an expression of our individual existential freedom, Foucault delineates how our human knowledge is shaped by the operations of power and Jacques Derrida builds a whole philosophy around the idea that human language, and human meaning with it, corrupts and deconstructs itself even as it goes about its business. 

My final philosophical insights came not from a Frenchman, but from the very American literary and legal academic, Stanley Fish. His work on meaning as constructed, on human communities as always situated and contextualised and, thus, on just "anything" never having the possibility to be the case, ("anything that can be made to go, goes" is his insightful gloss on the more traditional "anything goes" that people who "don't believe in reality" are often accused of believing) convinced me that there can be no "real world" in the highly philosophical sense that some people often mean it. There is the world that is available to us, the world that we sense and describe and brush up against every day. It is a world that constricts and constrains us. But we cannot penetrate it in the way that some deceptive dualisms such as those like reality and appearance or intrinsic and extrinsic would have us believe. There is no inner reality to find. There is, for example, no inherent morality of the universe (there is merely prudent or considerate behaviour). Instead, all we have is a world of relations and descriptions, some more useful than others, a world that constrains but that is also material for the constructive and creative engines of our minds and language and purposes.

It is at this point that it would be reasonable to feel loss. We want to think that what we have in our hands is solid and, well, real. I say that the world I am describing, the one with nothingness at its heart, is and that I certainly have no problem believing that we live on an amazing planet in an amazing universe full of everything from planets, stars and galaxies to electrons and electro-magnetic radiation. It's just that there is no god figure for us to bow down before, nothing really real that we can feel appropriately supplicant before or in touch with, no divinity of any kind that we can share in, no "real-way-things-are" unconnected from some human purpose or description. There is only the world of experience and our means of describing it and making use of it. Perhaps, then, we might want to share in the conclusion of one of the biblical writers, Qoheleth (to give him his Jewish name), when he says "Sheer futility, sheer futility, everything is futile!" (Qoheleth 1:2). I myself often translate the Hebrew word "Hebel" that is behind the word "futile" there (I did study biblical Hebrew at university with some success and so feel able to make such comments) as "absurd". Everything is absurd. It is absurd not in the sense of funny or amusing but in the sense of being pitched into a game you must play but can't win or where, as Camus discusses in The Myth of Sisyphus, we must forever push a rock up a hill only to have it roll down. And thus the cycle begins again. 

Qoheleth looks out upon a world in which human beings die like beasts and the good suffer whilst the evil prosper. No path seems to lead to any meaningful conclusion. There seems to be no point, no target to aim for. In lieu of a better conclusion we might almost say that stuff just seems random, a matter of time and chance. "Why be wise when the wise and the fool both die?" he asks. "All is futility (or absurd) and chasing after the wind" (Qoheleth 1:17). In a later section, Qoheleth muses on that fact that we humans can grasp no overarching meaning or knowledge or truth about our existence or about existence in general. (Today we would call this the death of the metanarrative.)  His conclusion is that the only pleasure to be found is in "pleasure and enjoyment through life" (Qoheleth 3:12-13). And that sounds very like Nietzsche's biography comment to me. If you look for meaning in something greater than yourself, or something greater than you within, you will not find it. It's not there. All you have is the life you actually live - and to enjoy it. 

Of course, the charge may be raised that there are, indeed, many people who do find meaning and truth and knowledge in things greater than themselves. The world does not lack for believers in gods of many kinds - from the little old lady who goes to church to the evolutionary biologist who worships at the altar of "truth" (the aforementioned Dawkins). "So what is going on here?" you may rightly ask. One answer to this, I think, might lie in the thought of French postmodern thinker, Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard is famous for saying that things like the first Gulf War "never happened". He did not mean to suggest that there was no war. He means to suggest that the war we saw through newspaper headlines and 24 hour rolling news coverage was empty and devoid of referent. It was an act of creation in which the reporting came to replace and represent as true something that wasn't really there. This rolling news then became "The Truth" but had no actual referent behind it. Baudrillard's most famous work, Simulacra and Simulation, fleshes out this idea more fully. A simulacra is, for Baudrillard, "never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true". As Baudrillard notes in a section dealing with the media in this book:

We live in a world where there is more and more information and less and less meaning.

So what am I saying here? I'm saying that people can be deceived. I'm saying that much "information" today is shallow and useless and refers to nothing beyond itself in a very reflexive way but, nevertheless, becomes the truth that conceals there is no truth. I'm saying that people can believe anything for the purposes that they have that the world of our experience allows. This may, for some, include gods whilst, for others, it won't. I would remind readers here of the quote I used as the heading to this blog and it's focus on human beings wanting to escape the "time and chance" that they have, with complete disregard for their will, been pitched into. It has, to date, been a project of some, if not all, humans to try and escape the stream of consciousness, the time and chance which is all they have, to find a solid, firm foundation on which to stand. I doubt that this purpose will go away anytime soon. But given a wider perspective, we have every right to doubt the privileged access or insight some people claim. Better, then, to see it as just one more human attempt to shoot at the moon, one more self-referential news report about gods and rumours of gods with nothing behind it, one more go at the oldest human project of all - finding solid ground when, as Nietzsche says, all we have now is the vicissitudes of "the infinite sea".

But if at the heart of all Being there is merely nothingness, a reaching for something forever out of reach, as I claim, then what are we to do? I can think immediately of two things but I think that we are already doing both of them. The first thing we can do is hope. We can hope for a better life in a better world full of better people - whatever we take better in these cases to mean. We can hope to have a better life personally and we can work towards it. We can hope and so allow the seeds of imagination to flourish within us and make use of the opportunity that time and chance has afforded us in our being born. Of course, you can sit in a corner and wait to die too. It's up to you. You might even muse that in the end it doesn't make much difference and I couldn't really argue against you. Not in the end, at least. But there is always the here and now for the living to concern themselves with even if eternity is forever and life is short.

The second thing we can do in the nothingness is create. This certainly applies in the personal area. I was reminded by a friend's tweet the other day that there is no "inner self". Sometimes various kinds of guru try to claim there is an inner self and that you need to find it. But there is no inner self. Just like all the other attempts at grasping something really real, it has an imaginary target. But, in the absence of an inner self, there is just you in all your particularity with all your history, thoughts and feelings. And there is no one version of you for you are always becoming, always changing. You don't even know yourself better than other people. You just have your own thoughts about you, your own descriptions and your own reasons for preferring one over another, albeit that you have more information to go on because you have always been there! 

This world of experience that we live in yields to our descriptions. It is plastic to our touch. We can make use of it and manipulate it and make it useful for our many purposes. And we can do that with ourselves too. We have the opportunity to create something beautiful, if that's not too naively poetic. It may not be that it lasts for a long time for we know that meaning is as temporary as human beings and their projects but, as Nietzsche and Qoheleth both saw, all we have is the lives we are creating day by day. That is where we will find our being and the world of our possibilities: in our world of Nothingness.

I thank you for reading if you got this far!

Yours,

A Nihilist.

You can find a whole catalog of music which flows from my existentialist and nihilist frame of mind by going to my Bandcamp including a series on Human/Being and another called Elektronische Existenz. Thank you for any listening that you do as I try to create and infuse with hope my own existence in this world.