fragilekeys

The only relation of consciousness to happiness is gratitude: in which lies its incomparable dignity. —Theodore Adorno

Theological connotations and religious conclusions aside, let me briefly entertain the following hypothesis: the name “God” emerges from our spontaneous need to give thanks. “God” might be perceived and understood as a catch-all-and-nothing term that serves a psychological function for us, namely: it corresponds to our need to express feelings of boundless thanks. “God” names the ‘receiver’ of this thanks. This minimal definition of God leads to the idea that “God” is thanks through and through (Gott “sei” Dank); and that perhaps what pertains most profoundly to God in our experience is and has always been gratitude approaching the limit of what is thinkable, what can be known, what is.

This thanks is boundless because it is not merely for this or that thing, occurrence, person, etc., but for the that-it-was in general: the evident or apparent fact of it all having been. It is thanks for whatever has ‘hung together’ in having happened; and it is boundless because this ‘hanging-together’ surpasses logic and the scope of our vision. It renders descriptions impotent and symbols silent. It defies computation or full account. This thanks is boundless, also, because we can always penetrate into another aspect of the improbability of everything, the ‘gratuity’ of Being at all.

“God” is then a weakly sufficient term, a label by ‘default’ (because better terms are lacking); it only has to correspond to this feeling or need to address boundless thanks to the ‘unlimited’ or ‘unconditional’, which nothing in our imagination can ever exhaust. Perhaps one needn’t even utter this word out loud or think it; the feeling is enough. God would then name that something or someone who might know why we give thanks, what all we give thanks for, and why thanks is so appropriate to give; who might know all this better than we do and be able to receive it better than any of us could.

The impression in question is so strong that the issue of ‘who’ exactly one addresses by the name “God” fades. In fact, it is almost irrelevant in comparison to the function that it or a substitute name serves as the ‘addressee’ of ultimate thankfulness (hence perhaps the plurality of God’s names). Such an addressee is only hinted at in this upsurge of feeling toward an unknown ‘thankee’—a thanks surging for our having existed, for our having had a history, a body, a drive, a connection to others, to nature, to the world. Issued in holistic fashion, this thanks includes all: joys and sufferings, terrors and reliefs, in contemplation of the whole mortal state, without prettying it up. This is why it cannot help but seem like a miracle, unbelievable, an impossibility: that something happened at all, light and dark. God would represent first of all the possibility of being grateful, despite everything, for whatever happiness we’d had amidst so many damages; for any glimmer of possibility, any convalescence, any chance.

One could easily object that such thanks needn’t be addressed to “God”, a name carrying much baggage and prone to misinterpretation and misuse. Thanks could be addressed to the universe, or to whatever else provokes wonder at our ‘abandoned’ existence. The objection is valid and worth the challenge. But using the name God needn’t imply what it has traditionally, either—a being who planned all this, wanted all this, the agent cause of all that is, including the worst. That connotation could be set aside, such that God would no longer be conceived as the guarantor of order but rather as analogous to what emerges improbably out of disorder, like our lives. It may be a godless universe, dominated by entropy and death, but still improbable moments and thankfulness for them do/did exist, however briefly. When our wonder and appreciation at the it-was seeks something ultimate—not to explain the reason for existence, to make sense of suffering, or even to justify it, but merely to offer a gesture of thanks—perhaps humans stumble upon this non-religious, almost natural function for the name “God” in human language: as the total phenomenon of improbable emergence, that which possibilizes the improbable (since, from a certain perspective, everything we’ve ever observed, known, and experienced was improbable—a gift).

By invoking God, I do not wish to reduce the puzzle: whom to thank? Let it linger as an open question. My only insistence here is that this desire and need to give boundless thanks is profoundly human. It corresponds to the fragility of our situation; to the feeling that all the phenomena of life are gifts we receive, as if from nowhere; and to the infinity or ‘unendingness’ we sometimes feel in those subtle moments when we’re overwhelmed by the beauty of the whole in spite of it all—a beauty and profundity we perhaps name “the presence of God”. Such thanks is motivated by a saturation or excess of this emotion, when it overflows all the cognitive containers, though we remain aware of our finitude and limited time—aware as well of the possible absurdity of addressing our thanks to anyone at all.

Hopefully it’s clear: boundless thanks in no way excludes giving thanks to concrete others in our lives, empirical actors and factors that help us, challenge us, or somehow contribute to our journey in life. Rather, “God” would be whom one thanked for all these factors and actors: for their very improbable ensemble and consequential impact on us. After all, none of them could claim total control over their having-been-there, their having-existed; none were the unique cause of themselves. God thus thanked for fortuity, chance, encounter, trial, discovery, event, understanding, and loss, all wound together in a contingent network of links and significations. God thanked for what happened at every scale of reality and how it seemed or appeared to us epiphenomenally—how it exceeded all our plans, efforts, and knowledge. It is a thanks for that which no consciousness could fully grasp. Or rather: which consciousness knows it can only grasp, and grasps best, in thanks.

In the last instance, maybe reality is indifferent to human meaning, which is fleeting, not to last, and not necessary in any merely natural system. But this does not cancel the emotion we sometimes have—however absurd, contradictory, illusory, or wishful it may be—of a need to express boundless thanks for the life we have lived, which, although it couldn’t be, somehow was. Gott sei Dank! May God be thanks, nothing more, nothing less.

—from Sept 1, 2018, Trieste airport
—published online Thanksgiving 2018
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Images: Max Ernst, Birth of a Galaxy, 1969; Andrei Rubilev, cover of the Trinity icon, 1425

Both enchanted Nature and the immanent Divinities are lost once the Absolute comes close and wants to be near us, bei uns. What is left in its proximity is the disenchanted World, without any ‘outside’, any ‘sacred’—except perhaps where the Absolute is touched and traced. This is, or would be, true life: incarnate, embody, incorporate, in sum, mediate the Absolute in the World, in the absence of any other intermediaries; instantiate the ‘touch’ of the Absolute at the limit between somewhere and ‘nowhere’.

In this arrangment, Nihilism represents awareness of the loss of intermediary steps, of gradations, of mediation. Both real and apparent World, empirical and ideal, show their artificiality, constructibility, and contingency. This applies especially to any world or worldview that is bought or sold, marketed or packaged to any degree, which tries to persuade us it holds the key, that it could successfully mediate. Eventually, however, all are shown up as dust, corruptible, lossy, not absolute—at best, ladders to be discarded after climbing to a vantage point where one can survey it and see its nonsense. Every opinion, belief, worldview, can fall to such criticism, for all are by definition ‘less than’ the Absolute, which once known by touch is not easily mistaken to be where it’s not. Nihilism is a radical skepticism guarding against such a mistake, a criticism of anything ‘less’. It is always at risk of despairing before this fact, given the lack of intermediaries and, on closest scrutiny, the absence of God. Its tendency is to deny, given its artificiality, any meaning in the World, to accept such a state as ‘absolute’. (This is where nihilism proves incomplete: when it deduces from the Absolute’s ‘inexistence’ its outright impossibility.)

What is exacerbated by this criticism is the apparent ‘fact’ that there is no escape from ‘finitude’, the circulation of goods, spectacles, bodies, languages, views, opinions, etc.—except perhaps through some procedure of keeping in ‘touch’ with the Absolute, an open possibility I must leave unclarified. For such a procedure could involve many things, liturgy, art, romance, science, service; indeed it could never be reduced to any one intelligible activity. Such pressing issues burn from within, call upon all our powers of invention and imagination, as well as our courage and perseverence in the process. At stake here is what Lacoste calls the subversion of the topological, the transgression of World-space and -priority, though this is no leave-taking of the World either. The point to stress is that, inside, one recognizes the difference between the Absolute and its substitutes, enough to decide between them. In Kierkegaard’s parlance, the difference lies between the sickness unto death (endless circulation in the market of finite possibilities) and willing to be oneself (willing one’s potentiality in the infinite). Roughly, this corresponds to Nietzsche’s own distinction between passive and active nihilism. Conscience informs when the contact is true or not, when something ‘eternal’ is near or at play. It guards against being deceived about that contact or nearness, it being unable to accept any substitute for the Absolute, just as nihilism intuits.

By the same token, since there is no substitute for it in the World, the Absolute can never be said to be ‘here’ like a given element, just waiting to be found. The Absolute is never ‘there’, but emerges, arises, opens, like a surprise, a breakaway, an ‘event’. Such words only signify its otherness to what exists, its happening quality: as a suspension or swerve from the known, determined World (though this does not transpire in some other realm or hinterworld either). In point of fact, although the difference between the Absolute and whatever is ‘less’ can be recognized, no rule is at hand. Nor any criteria for reaching it, nor any Way. Why? Because Way is World, its components World; whereas the Absolute is not component, not destination, not ‘something’, not container or circumference of what exists. The Absolute is not a cheap trick, revealing itself at a magic word. Nor is it the object of an aim per se, but more like what is constitutively missing, no matter desire’s action.

The best we can say, without overdetermining it, is that the Absolute is an intensity, an intensiveness which can charge any human activity but never becomes identical or exchangeable with anything extended (Earth and World). As such, however, it also prescribes the intensity of a possible dissatisfaction and restlessness, since ‘evidence’ for the Absolute in the World is perennially lacking and its intensities notoriously hard to grasp. What’s more, supposing such an intensity did manifest itself, was ‘reached’, it is all too easy to later doubt that very experience or forget it happened, so much so that one disbelieves its reality in one’s memory and excludes that anything like it could happen again. The intensity of the Absolute bears upon both extremes, missing and touch, makes both intense from the same longing, its same inexistence.

To formulate things this way is to take the negative road and emphasize the radical incongruity or ‘difference’ between the Absolute as intensiveness and the World as extendedness: the gap between infinite and finite. Yet there is no idea or thing to ‘absolutize’ here. Nor is there any room for belief in an Absolute, which would imply knowing what it is, that it is, where it is, how to attain it. Moreover, it would imply a language and categories to handle it, whereas the Absolute is by definition not known according to an already-existing logos. Epistemology, our access to the knowable, loses its status as intermediary, its status is ‘lowered’, largely due to the restlessness we feel in pursuit of the unknown, of what might satisfy our aptitude for truth.

This is very likely why the closeness of the Absolute—minimally: the enticement to true life—corresponds to the total disenchantment of the World (and, historically speaking, to the explosion of scientific knowledge about it). The subjective ‘mood’ of disenchantment, bereft of absolutes, is one of abandonment, a lack of divine assistance. Orientation to the Absolute here is ‘atheist’ in that sense: nothing in the world gives a foundation for it, no ‘sign’ can claim unequivocal reference to it. Faced with evil, no one can claim the World is its ‘expression’. On the contrary, it would appear that it lacks all expression of it, leading to the conclusion that there is no such thing and never was. Hence nihilism: the absence of any ‘answer’ regarding the Absolute, loss of any sure guarantee that there is anything other than World and information.

Yet ours could not be experienced as a ‘fallen’ World if there were not some memory or trace of what we’d fallen from, meaning, we retain some capacity to recognize what may be Absolute, even if at any given moment nothing fits the bill. Nihilism is a highly positive development in this critical sense: it functions as a very refined bullshit detector, forcing you, even against your will, to test the truth of everything against the stalwart powers of negation. However ostentatious, combative, and annoying the nihilist may be, a good one challenges unchallenged beliefs and forces examinations of conscience that eliminate hasty conclusions, ideological pipedreams, doctrinal commonplaces, and so on. For the worst offense to the Absolute would be an unacknowledged false belief, or false designation: that one had touched it when one hadn’t, that in lieu of genuine contact one had faked it, that one had spun a web of deceptions just to give an impression of absoluteness. But as the old saying goes, “God is not mocked.” Nihilism is coterminus with the phenomenon of never settling for less than the most truth-filled life, refusing to make a mockery of what could be true, or to compromise with the sloppy, simplistic, uncritical, or rosy-eyed. Voraciously it devours whatever is deemed second best, even if no first best, technically speaking, can be found. If one ignores its prompt, one either lives in a bubble of happy deception or eventually (thank God!) one befalls bitter consequences, until a new choice is made and bullshit left behind—even when this means staring into the horror of the void, answerless.

Once World and Absolute reveal such closeness, such that there’s no intermediary between them—which at the same time has made us aware of the infinite difference between them and sharpened our power of recognizing that difference—it is not obvious how to stay in touch with the Absolute, or indeed what such a phrase even points to concretely. At this point, relativism tries to step in and assuage restlessness prematurely, telling us there is no Absolute, no Truth. As no evidence of it can be found in all the diversity of the world, best give up on such illusions. But the nihilist’s discontent, making it difficult to affirm anything whatsoever about the World, points in another direction, away from the good conscience of the relativists.

Whoever stares into the abyss knows that nothing ‘relatively true’ will ever satisfy our aptitude for the ultimate. If something cannot be recognized as participating in the Absolute, we know it. This knowledge haunts and hurts us. It raises within us, necessarily, the urgency of ultimate ends. It is here that many questions proliferate, many personal and profound journeys after that ‘touch’, that ‘end’, seemingly so vague and paradoxical: what activities sustain it, what keeps the lines open, such that it is not a ‘belief’, not just empty verbiage, to say, “I abide in the Mediator, the true life”?

Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.

So Nietzsche preached, and if there is one lesson to take away from his work, perhaps it is this: creative forgetfulness conditions fullness.

Nietzsche’s critique is lodged against those who, on the contrary, are stuffed up, clogged, overfull. It’s not just that they can’t forget what they’ve done, who they’ve been, and what’s been done to them – and thus are stung by bites of bad conscience, guilt, remorse and regret constantly. They also can’t get out of their head all the different behaviors they’ve observed in others – and so they struggle to define a mode of life that would deviate in any way from the norm, from anything that could not be absorbed in the mass of insignificance. Such people are damned to a straight-jacket of memories and unbendable observations, unable to sense new chances, or to will another way.

Being unable to forget, for Nietzsche, amounts to forgetting that one “is.” So stuck in the loop of what was, clinging to bygone determinations, one acts as if existence were beyond transformation – a trap, a “life sentence,” a punishment. Whereas, in reality, so long as we are still living, it remains unfinished, open to the end to new habits, new attitudes, new speech. Amor fati – to see what is necessary in things, so as to make them beautiful – liberates us from fatalism. It affirms our freedom to treat every circumstance as a gift, as an opportune occasion (kairos): condition of possibility for fullness.

The creative process – merged here with life itself, in that the ‘rule’ it follows coincides perfectly with the ‘form’ it takes – is no different. To produce the new is to forget what’s been produced past. But let’s avoid a misunderstanding: this does not imply that there’s no development from one stage to the next, or that what lies behind is ignored. Only that, in the heat of innovation, there is no time, no room, to pay attention to what’s already been transcended. Surely, it remains; we still survey and learn from our own traces and those of all humanity. But once we set off to generate new ones, to chase down new ideas, we hardly need to choose to forget the old. Suddenly they are all swept up into an unprecedented configuration. They have already disappeared or mutated, along with whoever in us created them. In this way, what’s past is perfected and ‘redeemed’.

For in truth we are always reproducing ourselves with a difference – a difference we can never master, a difference we never get the better of, but do undergo and can direct. It is this difference – eternal return, in every instant, of the ‘same’ creative forgetfulness – that lets us get the better of our blunders, to act beyond the confines of any previous stage, and so to ‘become who we are’, unknown to any former self, yet underway.

(Nov 12, 2016)
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Image: Dom Sylvester Houédard
https://www.lissongallery.com/exhibitions/dom-sylvester-houedard