4 posts tagged “nihilism”

I just found a one page paper I wrote in college about Blue, I figured I'd put it up.

Thesis: In Blue, Julie regains hope through the people around her and
gains the most important kind of freedom.

After losing her husband and daughter in a terrible car crash, Julie
most wants to get away from everything she's known. She wants to be free
of everything; no attachments. However, what she wants "to avoid is
disappointment." [M. 55] She wants to be free to avoid being hurt again.
So she proceeds to cut herself off from everything and everyone, hiding in
her little apartment with only a blue glass lamp to remind her of the past.
Somehow, even though she's doing her best to cut herself off from
others, and perhaps from her own emotions, her connections come back to
her. The boy brings back the necklace, Oliver finds her at the coffee
shop, and she finds the woman who had been her husband's mistress. She
even unintentionally makes new connections, such as with the whore who
needed her help. These people seem to be even more determined to connect
with Julie precisely because she has locked herself away so tightly.
It is these connections that allow Julie to regain her hope. They
force her to deal with the finite and not to get lost inside the infinite
nothingness of solitude.

".hope is always associated with a communion, no matter how interior
it may be. This is actually so true that one wonders if despair and
solitude are not at bottom necessarily identical." [M 58]

The love that Oliver gives and the compassion that the prostitute shows
begin to open Julie up. The finite is again confronting her, but this time
not in the horrifying and limiting way that it did in the crash. However,
it is not until she gives in and loves them back that she begins to release
herself from the prison of complete freedom from the finite. She begins to
trust that the finite will lead her somewhere. She is able to regain her
compassion, and begins to love with an intensity that transcends facts.
She even loves the woman who had her husband's heart in her place.
It was said that Julie had been a kind and compassionate person before
the accident. Upon first glance it may seem that she has returned to her
being. She lost herself and is now found. But it is more than that. The
return is there, but there is something else that is entirely new. It is a
freedom, not from the finite things in life, but in them. It is a freedom
fueled by love; a freedom to give love to those around her, and in turn to
allow her to see paradise in the dust of the streets.

Not much that has been said before, but I figured I'd post it anyway.

The last line is a reference to Denise Levertov's poem, City Psalm.

The next book and movie that we'll be reading/watching over at The Analogical Imagination is...(drum-roll)... Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and Match Point by Woody Allen!

As always, you'll have a couple weeks to acquire the book before we start reading it.  This is a relatively short book (especially compared to Brothers Karamazov), so we shouldn't need more than a month to read it.  Two weeks to get it, a month to read it.  If things go faster or slower though, we'll gladly adjust.

Also, special thanks to Charmedbuttercup, who pointed us over to The Vonnegut Library, where you can read any of his books for free online.  So now you don't even have to spend money!  Unless you're me and you bought the book a month ago. ;)

In the meantime, see if you can get a hold of the movie.  Remember, as soon as you've seen it, you're welcome to comment on it.  No need to wait for me, feel free to make your own post and add it to the group!  Even if you just want to let us know if you liked it or not, post away!

Here's a little more about the choices:

Review from Amazon.com
To the best of my knowledge, there really is no other writer quite like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Mother Night appears to be a rather straightforward, albeit quirky, novel at first glance, but as one delves down into the heart of Vonnegut's prose one finds grounds for contemplation of some of life's most serious issues. This novel is the first-hand account of Howard Campbell, Jr., a most remarkable character. Campbell is an American-born citizen who moved to Germany as a child and became the English-speaking radio mouthpiece for Nazi Germany during World War II. In the fifteen years since the end of the war, he has been living an almost invisible life in a New York City attic apartment. He misses his German wife Helga who died in the war, sometimes thinks about his pre-war life as a successful writer of plays and poems, and perhaps just waits for history to find him once again. As we begin the novel, he has been found and is writing this account from a jail cell in Israel, awaiting trial for his crimes against humanity. While he is reviled by almost everyone on earth as an American Nazi traitor, the truth is that he was actually an agent working for the American government during the war; this is a truth he cannot prove, though.

Thus, in this 1961 novel, the hero is ostensibly a Nazi war criminal. The primary moral of Mother Night, Vonnegut tells us in his introduction, is that "we are what we pretend to be" and should thus be pretty darned careful about what we are pretending to be (a secondary moral being the less enlightening statement "when you're dead, you're dead"). In the eyes of the entire world, Campbell is exactly what he pretended to be during the war, a traitorous Nazi purveyor of propaganda who mocked and demoralized allied troops as well as regular citizens. Internally, Campbell hardly knows what he is anymore; he claims no country, no political values, wanting only to live in a "nation of two" with his beloved wife Helga once again. A series of significant events forces Campbell out of the cocoon of his past fifteen years, and his thoughts and actions along the way provide big juicy morsels of food for thought: taking personal responsibility for one's actions, the harsh truths of war and peace, the sometimes vast differences between truth and fact, individual redemption before self and society, finding direction and a purpose in a world gone mad, etc. Vonnegut's scythe-like dark humor cuts deeper than mere satire, aiming directly at some of the darker sections of the human heart, areas which most individuals too often ignore or refuse to acknowledge. The gallows humor can be quite funny on the surface, but it is in actuality a scalpel which Vonnegut wields to open up the heart and soul of the reader for self-examination. Mother's Night, the title of which is taken from Goethe's Faust, is a relatively short but very powerful novel.

 

Many people have asked the question:  Are we basically good or are we basically evil?  Almost everyone wants to answer both, but almost no one investigates as to why.  We give our opinion, the answer we believe in, and then walk away content.

I would contend that our basic nature is extremely obvious, and it stems from both our place in the earth as finite animals and our place in evolution as the only such animal to have conscious thought. 

Man is paradoxical in nature.  That is, he is a finite being who will wither and die, but he creates for himself a symbolic identity that does no such thing.  Even if we ignore the debate about whether consciousness ends after death, there is no question that the person's identity and character lives on in the people they leave behind.

But these two parts to man don't seem to fit very well, and why would they? We usually end up trying to deny one or the other in sometimes large and sometimes small ways.  Many people try to separate the two, and think that the self lies only in the symbolic identity.  They become almost disgusted with the physical, as if it is somehow degrading.  Others want to deny the identity, and try to lose themselves in physical feelings alone.

Why?  At the deepest level, to deny the uncertainty in life, especially the uncertainty surrounding death.  Man is the only animal that is consciously aware of the fact that he will die for his entire life.  A deer might feel fear in the moments right before an impending doom, but if they survive it, forget until the next time they face danger.  The human animal doesn't get that comfort.  We *know* we will die, it's just a matter of when.  We're like a ticking time bomb.  To call it a fear might be a little over the top, but I would definitely say that it is a constant uneasiness that we try to bury and not think about.

The person who hates the physical?  They want to deny it so that they don't have to deal with that uneasiness.  If the true self is purely symbolic (or spiritual, as many claim), then death does not defeat it.

The person who hates the symbolic?  They too want to deny to avoid uneasiness.  Without the symbolic identity, we can revert to the same situation as the deer, and not deal with our death until the moment it arrives.

Even though most of us seem to be a mixture of the two types in different combinations, the way we think about ourselves is constructed in such a way as to deny our basic anxiety.  We desperately need to control that unpredictable and uneasy feeling in the pit of our stomachs. 

And so we build our lives in order to do just that.  Our "sin" and selfishness is born from our will to control (our basic denial).  Evil is born from the powerless trying to deny their state, and giving themselves the illusion of mastery.  We cannot accept our own mortality.

And so where do good acts come from?  The exact same place.  If we cannot accept our own mortality, then we long for the opposite: immortality.  We look for a way to in some way survive our death.  If you believe in an afterlife, this is particularly easy.  Just be good enough to go to Heaven.  But this is a basic need that we *all* share.  Most of us try to achieve a different type of immortality.  Immortality in the eyes of others.  We have to do great deeds, and be good people, and leave a mark on the world.  We need to assert that we *do* matter, and that we're more than just tiny blips in the timeline of human history.

We see this all the time in our daily lives.  The typical Hollywood romantic comedy, where no matter what, we always get the fairy tale ending.  The person who, when something bad happens to them, tries to gloss over it, put it behind them, and think happy thoughts.  The person who, when something bad happens to them, convinces themself that this is how the world is, and that they should *expect* bad things to happen to them.  But this person is *still* lying.  The reason the depressed person wants to expect bad things is to somehow lessen their power over him/her.  We *need* to feel in control, especially of the things we have no control over.

The whole of our lives is built upon this denial, this will to control.  It is, according to Ernest Becker, the "vital lie of human character."  It is a lie because it is built from denial.  It is vital because without it, we would have to face the uncertainty and uneasiness, we would have to face nothingness.  To give you a mental picture, it's like we are born empty, and we can't stand it.  We fill the emptiness with whatever we can find, whatever seems appropriate.  We fill the emptiness with a lie.

But if it is a lie, we should try to rid ourselves of it, shouldn't we?  If we want to get closer to the truth, we must shed this vital lie no matter the cost, right?

More to come later, perhaps, about what ridding ourselves of the vital lie might look like, and how to go about doing it.

Here's my review of Match Point when I first saw it in the theater:

Went and saw Match Point tonight. Very good movie. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Of course, it's only good if you really understand it. I heard a lot of people coming out of the theater saying how it was pointless and depressing.

It was good because of how very complex it was.

Let's start at the beginning of the movie with Chris' quote on luck. How we don't like to admit how much of our lives are out of our control, how so many events don't seem to have a purpose. Luck is as random as it is meaningless. Chris is a man who is losing faith. Not faith as in some greater power, but faith as in the basic belief that our lives have some sort of meaning. That there is a point to it all.

At one point someone (Tom?) quotes that "Despair is the path of least resistance," but Chris replies back that it is not despair, but faith. In a way he is right. People like to fool themselves into thinking everything is okay, and that they have power over the meaning in their lives. It's easier for us to deal with the tragedies of life by simply paving them over with happy thoughts. But if you do that you ignore a whole side to life. Life isn't all pretty flowers and sun and light. There is darkness there. Ignoring it does not make it go away.

Chris sees this more clearly than anything else. He seems to have a small obsession with the tragic. He also is desperately searching for some sign of meaning. Justice. Freedom.

Freedom is a real trouble for Chris. He is constantly trying to free himself of obligations. He quits tennis for free time, marries a rich girl for financial freedom, and shacks up with a hot girl for sexual freedom. The funny thing is that all of these attempts at freedom lead him to become more and more attached to obligations. His escapes always turn into limitations, each being stronger that the one before.

But even more important to him than freedom is justice. In a world that is completely random, how can there be any justice at all? Chris doesn't think there can be, but he desperately wants to be proven wrong. He is hanging onto faith by a thread. Because of this, Chris is constantly pushing limits. He is finding out how much he can get away with. In a just world, he would be found out and punished.

So he cheats on his wife and lies to his mistress. When he kills Nola, that is the final straw. He wants to be caught. This is his last desperate attempt at proving justice.

If you pay attention, there's something there that at first glance does not seem to fit. When he throws the ring, it bounces on the fence and lands on his side, which should signify his defeat. But when he goes to the police for questioning, he gets off scott-free, right? So he didn't really lose, right?

Wrong.

What happened with the murder investigation was the absolute worst thing that could have happened to Chris. He will have to live the rest of his life with that guilt, but that's the easy part. The hard part is that he was proven right. Justice doesn't exist. Meaning doesn't exist. There is no point to our lives. If there was, he'd be in jail. How can a man live if he has no faith?

The ironic part is that Chris was looking to be punished, and he ended up receiving the worst punishment of all. If he was really paying attention to the signs in his life, the fact that he was proven right proves him wrong.

Chris was punished. There is justice; it just never comes in the form you expect. There is meaning. Sometimes, in the depths of despair you can find hope.