Life and Death 1
Introducing the challenge: to create meaning, and overcome relativism and nihilism.
To live on the edge, and not drift into relativism and nihilism. To live a life of pure difference and release identity.
Critical freedom is the radical freedom to change, to create our own values and meaning. And we do possess it. But what do we do with it?
For, in a sense, we are on our own now. We can live experience freed from thick external authority.
We either exercise our own critical freedom, or sink into nothingness:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (MacBeth)
In a world in which we must create our own meaning, how do we prevent life becoming nothing more than a walking shadow?
Authority and Experience
In the structured societies of the past, the question of what to do with the time we have was surely not as daunting as it is today. Then, authority took precedence over experience.
Traditional beliefs and a structured environment sheltered most from the question of what to do with their lives, how to live out each day. Traditional mythologies informed the metaphysical, cosmological, social and psychological aspects of humanity.
Religion was the foundation of our views of who we are, what our place is in the universe, how we should interact with others in society and how to be fulfilled from within.
But with radical freedom, authority cannot take precedence over experience.
We must find our own way through the shattered remains: transcendent, mythological symbols that no longer provide meaning.
Creativity
Creativity must empower experience, or we very well might drift into nothingness. As any creative knows, this is a tall order to fill, and the risks are great.
The challenge is to create new meaning and symbols, immanent to this world, that inspire and inform in relation to the metaphysical, cosmological, ethical and psychological.
In the absence of authoritarian religious belief, science, art and philosophy are the only means we have for conveying this meaning; for delivering symbols that inspire.
Creative acts in relation to these three areas of engagement are the modern means we have for informing and expressing radical freedom; for creating signposts along the pathless path that leads to the experience of being alive.
The creative symbols and signs we forge and carry with us energize us as we engage in all activities in life: whatever we care about deeply, whatever we are passionate about.
Creative symbols connect with empowerment and transformational desire as the source of life.
We can think of art as a source of meaning, a means of finding inspiration to act, a means of facilitating the flow of desire. So too, science and philosophy, provided they affirm life, spur us on to new vision, thought and action.
All three, done right, make us feel alive again and restore a quality of adventure in life. They are inspiration for the hero on a journey to find life and love; not objective truth, but the affirmation of creativity.
Science
The dawn of modern science, coinciding with the modern conception of the individual, provided this inspiration. No longer entangled in myths governing the metaphysical and social, the individual rose to center stage, empowered by science to make sense of life and the universe.
Science was, and still can be, an exploration and adventure. The leaders of the Enlightenment experienced aesthetic arrest via their discovery of a new understanding the mechanics of the universe. It was a crucial moment of adventure for the hero.
But over time, science became authority.
Our faith in deterministic mechanics transformed into objective truth. Experience once again took a back seat to authority. Science became the final forum for the metaphysical, the cosmological, the social and the psychological.
Science became transcendent, the scientific method sacrosanct.
Cervantes, in his tale of the man from La Mancha, Don Quixote, warned us of the dangers associated with the end of adventure, as it gave way to determinism:
“Destiny guides our fortunes more favorably than we could have expected. Look there, Sancho Panza, my friend, and see those thirty or so wild giants, with whom I intend to do battle and kill each and all of them…”
“What giants?” Asked Sancho Panza.
“The ones you can see over there,” answered his master, “with the huge arms, some of which are very nearly two leagues long.”
“Now look, your grace,” said Sancho, “what you see over there aren’t giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone.”
“Obviously,” replied Don Quixote, “you don’t know much about adventures.”
For Don Quixote, “facts are the enemy of truth,” and distract from what really matters in life:
“To dream the impossible dream, that is my quest.”
Alienation
The nightmare of being alone in a world that seems alien would continue to be expressed in the formal arts from the Enlightenment forward.
Emily Bronte, a woman writing in the social straightjacket of Victorian England, perhaps put it most eloquently, in the context of a tale of tragic love:
I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.
The thing that irks me most is this shattered prison, after all. I’m tired, tired of being enclosed here. I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it, and in it. (Wuthering Heights)
As much as the establishment attempted to maintain the social order of a previous age, it had slipped away, and in its place a sense of desolation and paralysis set in.
More personally, she writes:
The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot, cannot go.
The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow,
And the storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.
Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing drear can move me —
I will not, cannot go. (Spellbound)
Faced with the despair of meaninglessness, we must re-think the world in a manner that resonates and sets us free, our deepest desires.
I hope you enjoyed this article. Thanks for reading!
Tomas
Please join my email list here or email me at tomas@tomasbyrne.com.
Excerpt from my forthcoming book, Becoming: A Life of Pure Difference (Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of the New) Copyright © 2021 by Tomas Byrne. Learn more here.
