The laborer should reap the benefits. The last thing he needs is someone to follow him around explaining his own behavior to himself. It is only respect for her parents’ memory that prevents the master from dismissing the maiden from his service.
***
Object of oblivion: all the ways idleness, lassitude, the disquiet of empty thoughts went into meriting the philosophy professor’s paycheck—blood and sweat of student fees. The paycheck is not just the instrumentality of living, but far deeper than what we thought it was. Beneath it—beneath everything—is less. All along a veil of presence had been cast over the paycheck so as to not overwhelm us with its bare nothingness; to uncover the setting of the paycheck—the night jobs of insomniac grad students—is to swoon about in void-vertigo.
***
The only way one can use philosophical terminology these days is to take it hostage: buy an academic’s book and mail a new page to him every day. With any luck, he’ll define your ransom with a restraining order. “The defendant is prohibited from approaching within five hundred feet of the plaintiff’s book . . .” If only contemporary philosophers would appeal to a judge to design their book cover, so the curious will instantly know where they stand in relation to it. The law is perhaps philosophy’s last friend, the one who stays behind to help clean up after everyone else has left the party. But then, the law is obliged to be everyone’s friend . . .
***
To sum up the history of the “love of wisdom”: the journey of philosophy begins in wonder; the Journal of Philosophy ends in bewilderment. Philo + strophia: love of turning. Philosophers today are dancing masters. “Step here, and here, and here,” they say. Good form is a product of technical mastery; those who try to keep up with the incessant twirling of the bios theoretikos collapse in dizziness.
Children grow into imbeciles when neglected. When the educated retreat into research caves, mass culture learns to tie its shoes with a safety fuse and brush its teeth with matches. If our basic pyromania skill-set doesn’t end in self-arson, the smoke from our knowledge will asphyxiate us. The leviathan has grown too large for sailors to navigate without trembling for uncertainty—rightly so, for they have lost their mastery of the sea. The armada scattered, the sailors of each ship lower their flags and drift along, charting lonely bays.
The New Pedagogy
Learning by doing: a child who gets the idea of a hat by using it after Dewey’s fashion—lecturing into it. Sounds conveyed into the ear indirectly are transformed into expectations of entertainment: the child, hoping Dewey will pull a rabbit out, receives instead a sluggish lesson on the reflex arc. An adolescent deprived of magic grows to imitate the habits of knowing.
Dewey the Destroyer: progressive education is philosophy’s euthanasia. The only way to make the aim of the philosopher compatible with that of the nonphilosopher is by unplugging the superannuated search for wisdom and hooking everyone up to the science industry. Academia and the factory are two islands stranded by one sea, bridged only by journalism dialectics and the sophisms of media moguls.
The Forgotten Pessimists
Mainländer, von Hartmann, Michelstaedter—residue from a time when pessimism’s popularity inspired every adult with an unhappy childhood memory to compose a master’s thesis on despair. Periods when the temptation not to exist has become a fad may be indicated by the loci of lesser figures in this tradition. Not imaginative enough to merely write about suicidal scenarios, they must either commit themselves to one or achieve a worldly success that prevents them from sympathizing with the act in any way whatsoever. It is instructive to read such figures for the manner in which their posthumous reputations lived up to their theories.
If Schopenhauer had taken lessons in civic duty from Dr. Pangloss, von Hartmann’s system would be the result. It did not occur to him that his best of all possible worlds—one in which the species strives towards nothingness through collective asceticism—is outclassed by a better possible world—ours—in which the same goal is achieved more swiftly through collective hedonism.
Mainländer: if he would have only put off his admirably consistent conclusion a bit later, giving himself enough time to establish an influence consistent with his thesis: to make the world that comes after him the ruin of a self-annihilated god.
The inference of the 23-year old Michelstaedter, the same as that of the 23-year old Cioran—that we must live in the moment, on the crest of an unending temporal wave—requires an effective method of entertainment, one that is not adequately achieved by systematizing playful rhetoric within a dissertation. Hence why Michelstadter was led to the limits of an austere logic while Cioran felt no such obligation—not so much by the validity of that logic as its utter boredom.
Given that a man seeks to become his own principle of non-contradiction, his metaphysic of suicide might for once take an original variation. Where is the heroic nihilism of ending one’s life through gluttony? That life has no essence without good nutrition is as compelling an essentialist bias as any to protest against. The persuasion of a high-fat diet; knowing that one wants healthy arteries and seeing no way to unclog them. Alone in the desert of processed food, nougat makes naught of thought.
The Underworld Optimist
As the pessimist learns to smile at the grimness of life, so the optimist need take up his good conscience. He too must learn. Not to take the opposite track and frown—that would cause him to be misidentified. Everyone knows that the satirist is at home in laughter, but no cheerful soul ever spoke of progress with a grimace. No, the optimist must learn the art of the paroxysm. Coughing, hacking, sneezing—expelling his jolly slogans loudly and violently, sending out a snotball to accompany his words of inspiration. He coughs in lieu of disappointment; if his expectations are too extravagant he spits up a bit of blood to foreshadow their miscarriage. His friends will think him in need of manners and medicine, giving themselves just enough pause to sober their idealism with a wrinkled nose and curled upper lip. Principles that can endure the common cold are stronger for having been tested. The more unremitting the viral infection, the surer one becomes that things must get better soon. The late stages of consumption cannot but bring on a fortified zeal for life. Retreating into hostile territory, the Hadean optimist confines himself in a sanatorium to prove his health, refusing to give up on progress just because he moves against the grain; for him, retrograde motion is a sign of eventual advancement, battling death the ultimate evidence of one’s verve. In a sequestered obscurity without glory, without a statue to pay tribute to the fallen soldier, there is only the prospect of life to propel one onward, the knowledge of advancing medical science. The experimental subject can look forward to a haler humanity; the invalid hopes the hospital food will improve. Beyond their individual lives lies a future where illness is not necessary and death can be rescheduled.
This realist of hope despises his green, sunny archetype—he who has never known the winter snow, the summer monsoon, a plague of locusts, one who limits his cheerful outlook to his own life, selfish for happiness. Bellowers of the Neverlasting Yay! are cynics in the making, secret sons of despair who curse fate at the first occurrence of misfortune. Enduring optimism, pitiless and implacable, can only be spread by an epidemic.
Selective Determinism
Among the enlightened, free will is not yet sophisticated enough to influence more than one automatic behavior at a time. Breathing is interrupted by a sudden thought, thinking halted by a deep breath. Asphyxiation or benightedness: absorbed meditation is a rare enough habit that the majority of people escape this dilemma. Theirs is a different doom: not in the choice between instincts, but unconquerable drives.
Swan Song
Our civilization
