Nietzsche's Madman (or 1637)

"Have you ever heard of the madman who on a bright morning lit a lantern and ran to the marketplace calling out unceasingly: "I seek God! I seek God!" As there were many people standing about who did not believe in God, he caused a great deal of amusement. Why? is he lost? said one. Has he strayed away like a child? said another. Or does he keep himself hidden? Is he afraid of us? Has he taken a sea voyage? Has he emigrated? - the people cried out laughingly, all in a hubbub.The insane man jumped into their midst and transfixed them with his glances. "Where is God gone?" he called out. "I mean to tell you! We have killed him, you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? - for even Gods putrify! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife - who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event - and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!" Here the madman was silent and looked again at his hearers; they also were silent and looked at him in surprise.At last he threw his lantern on the ground, so that it broke in pieces and was extinguished. "I come too early," he then said. "I am not yet at the right time. This prodigious event is still on its way, and is traveling - it has not yet reached men's ears. Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, deeds need time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard. This deed is as yet further from them than the furthest star - and yet they have done it themselves!" It is further stated that the madman made his way into different churches on the same day, and there intoned hisRequiem aeternam deo. When led out and called to account, he always gave the reply: "What are these churches now, if they are not the tombs and monuments of God?""

The Gay Science, 1882

Beyond the foothills

"In contrast to a steady progress, where we move unawares from one thing to the next and everything remains alike, the leap takes us abruptly to where everything is different, so different that it strikes us as strange.  Abrupt means the sudden sheer descent or rise that marks the chasm's edge.  Though we may not founder in such a leap, what the leap takes us to will confound us."

Reading in the Shadow of the Law

"In the middle of our life's path
I found myself in a dark forest
Where the straight way was lost."
Inferno

There was a time when the forests covering Europe provided a home for vagabonds and outlaws, outside the king's grasp.  Nevertheless these forests were considered property of the monarch, and so under the canopy and out of sight, outlaws lived in the shadow of the law. 

In every institution, especially religious ones, there are forms of normative discourse, proper ways to read and expound texts.  "Normative" could be replaced with "dominant" in the previous sentence because as we know the -normative is- by virtue of coercion and power.  This coercion and power may take many forms.  Think of this normativity as the clearings and cultivated land of the kingdom.  Here the king may bring his full power to bear on the inhabitants of these open spaces, open to his force and to his gaze.  In such places the reading of a text has a genealogy, a tradition.  Interpretation and explication is grounded in this tradition, and is known as "received" or "majority." 

The wilderness has long been a place of refuge.  It is the oldest form of sanctuary, the sylva sacrosancta, the inviolable wood.  It is both a place of shelter and of madness.  In it the most powerful forces of chaos lurk, the savage, the beast, the wildman.  Here too the gods and a host of spirits dwell unseen.  A chance encounter with these may lead to terrible things indeed.  While some may travel into the forest out of necessity, others may do so for adventure.  The forest has claimed these as well, turning some mad, killing others.  Some, like Tristan or Lancelot, endured their madness and returned to civilization triumphant over the forces of the forest. 

Here in the shadows of the trees, in the shadow of the law, we sit down to read and write.  We cannot dwell here long lest the gods drag us into the darkness, lest we be punished for our own presumption.  Yet we do not come here merely for adventure.  When we return to civilization we will remember, and we will not think we have overcome the ancient sylva sacrosancta like these others.  We will not forget that along the edge of every civilization the forest lies in wait, as outside the walls of Rome or the stockades of the New World, to reclaim what was once its own.  We will respect the law, but we will not allow it a purchase on our soul.  And yet we must resist the urge to abandon ourselves to the forest, for this is another kind of madness, one in which we are liable to be torn to shreds.  Can we dance with Dionysos without falling prey to his Bacchae?

From a Requiem

"When somewhere, from deep within me, there arises
the vivid sense of having been a child,
the purity and essence of that childhood
where I once lived: then I don't want to know it.
I want to form an angel from that sense
and hurl him upward, into the front row
of angels who scream out, reminding God."

Rilke

Great thoughts

Make for lonely nights

Behold a mystery

A hooded figure makes his way among the cenotaphs of a great city
And as I stand honouring the dead he passes near
I hear him whisper, a violent exhalation
And grasping my collar he collapses

"I give you my last words, draw near," he gasps for breath
"I am Azazel, now mortal," and spitting gnashed his teeth

Speech of a madman I think.  I will give this wretch his parting company

"You think I am mad.  But no more than you who stand before a corpse
You defile a flower to honour the worms and yet think me mad," choking with mirth says he

I bite my tongue, for he will soon join the worms by the look of him

"Very good.  You are not the fool you appear to be
Now listen fine fellow I give you a gift"

From his filthy pocket he passes me a tattered cloth, his hands shaking. 

"Take this and read.  It contains a great mystery revealed to me by our father"

"Man there is nothing written on it" I cry

Laughing and spitting, gnashing his teeth into the ground he breathed his last

And leaning back against a tombstone shiver
But upon glancing at my hand I leap to run
And fancy hear the madman at my back
Behind me drop the tattered cloth
Whose filth-stained threads now bear the words:

"the perversion of sin is the secret of salvation"

In Praise of Love

"When I lean on the shoulder of the woman I love, and can see, let's say, the peace of twilight over a mountain landscape, gold-green fields, the shadow of trees, black-nosed sheep motionless behind hedges and the sun about to disappear behind craggy peaks, and know - not from the expression on her face, but from within the world as it is - that the woman I love is seeing the same world, and that this convergence is part of the world and that love constitutes precisely, at that very moment, the paradox of an identical difference, then love exists, and promises to continue to exist.  The fact is she and I are now incorporated into this unique Subject, the Subject of love that views the panorama of the world through the prism of our difference, so this world can be conceived, be born, and not simply represent what fills my own individual gaze.  Love is always the possibility of being present at the birth of the world."

Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love.

Symbol

"All symbols assert that the good for man is to live realistically; where they differ is in the vision of reality they construct."

Geertz

Victor Turner

"Cognitively, nothing underlines regularity so well as absurdity or paradox.  Emotionally, nothing satisfies as much as extravagant or temporarily permitted illicit behaviour."

Felix culpa

Infinite Night

My feelings regarding the afterlife are well-known and may be found on this blog.  They are based not just on science, but common sense (and by that I mean a common method of reasoning, not popular sentiment).  That there is nothing beyond this life, no conscious existence outside of the present, is without doubt. 

It is interesting that others have accused those of us who hold this position of wishful thinking!  The reasoning goes like this: "When forced to choose between eternal damnation and complete annihilation the choice is an easy one.  You deny an afterlife out of fear, yes out of psychological necessity."  On the face of it and from a certain perspective this is a reasonable critique.  A similar one is made in the opposite direction, namely, that heaven is the product of a similar type of wishful thinking, a consolation in a world desperately in need of such a comforting thought.  The two arguments are not equal however.  In the former, a certain assumption is being made: it presupposes belief in a place of damnation or hell.  Out of fear of this place, a real possibility, one turns to annihilation.  This argument can only be framed from the perspective of faith.  As such it constructs a straw man, only to blow him down.  It is simply not the case that those who reject the notion of an afterlife are secretly harbouring religious beliefs.  Now regarding the latter critique the presumption of faith is warranted.  Those who believe in an afterlife, for the most part, hold religious beliefs.  While wishful thinking may shape the debate on both sides, one should not define that wishful thinking on the side of the afterlife deniers as a religious fear of hell.  This is simply a false attribution, a religious projection.

This latter view also makes the assumption that annihilation is a comforting thought to afterlife deniers.  This again is a reflection of the influence of a religious alternative creeping in, i.e. hell.  On the contrary, the thought of nothingness can be somewhat unsettling at times.  Even when one reflects that the same condition will exist after death as it did before conception and development of the nervous system, it is still quite a pill to swallow at times.  Before conception and nervous system development, one had no relations, no memories or loved ones.  At death, however, one has all these (unless the brain has already started to decline).  It seems like a great loss, and I suppose it is at one level.  But I suppose there is also something quite fitting about it.. a kind of sacred simplicity even.  Every symphony must end..  every string on every instrument cease its vibration.. We must all, as conductors of our own lives, lay down the baton a final time.

Malinowski contra Durkheim

"The lover near his sweetheart, the daring adventurer conquering his fears in the face of real danger, the hunter at grips with a wild animal, the craftsman achieving a masterpiece, whether he be savage or civilized, will under such conditions feel altered, uplifted, endowed with higher forces.  And there can be no doubt that from many of these solitary experiences where man feels the forebodings of death, the pangs of anxiety, the exaltation of bliss, there flows a great deal of religious inspiration.  Though most ceremonies are carried out in public, much of religious revelation takes place in solitude."