Religious? Spiritual?
If you asked me if I am spiritual or religious the answer is very debatable. You could ask me if I believe if there is a God, if there are religious rituals I follow or if there are certain paradigms and strays of thought I follow. The answer to all this will highly depend on the moment and person I am talking to and in how much I care to discuss my ideological position, which I myself find constantly challenged and changing. I guess that for the purpose of this post, I can say that if my religious views are mostly agnostic (if needed to be put in a box), I also reflect deeply with certain regularity in a very Cartesian fashion and I practice certain forms of meditation from time to time, and I do follow a couple of traditions stipulated by the western culture I have grown up in.
Oriental Commercial Wisdom
Thinking more and more about all this in the last few years and asking myself the deepest questions that concern us all (Who am I? What am I? What do I really want? Is there a higher purpose or meaning to this all? Is this real? Etc) is that in this time I discovered a trend of thought and practices mainly made popular and sold as ancient oriental wisdom that talked a lot about the words “balance”, “living in the present” and “detaching from desire”. Like many people around me, I saw myself drawn to try some of all these in my life and there was a drastic change in the way I perceived life in a day by day. From having a mind in constant motion trying to solve problems methodically day and night and believing there is no achievement with any action I switched to a “what is meant to be” attitude. I am not sure I achieved what all these books and people preach I should, but what I do know, is that after a while I was living in my own way according to many of those principles of “trying to reach balance” and I became hard to be emotionally disturbed, which was at times confused with indifference and that certainly my observations of what was going on around me became more acute, product of learning how to shut up and listen and see without omitting premature and poorly funded judgments.
Of numbness and Nihilism
It was a few months back, almost a year actually, when I decided to take a bit of a plunge into the works of Nietzsche and Focault. I think I first got interested in Nietzsche’s work ten years ago given the sound pronounced when saying his name correctly; And I got later interested in Focault as a person that stands with ideas towards a cause, sort of like an ultimate idealist that sets ideas into actions. I never thought that going into their works I’d actually see many of my ideas reflected, and that some of those ideas would actually have an influence in the way I perceive the world. I went deeply into their works in a time of my life in which by combining the whole “nothing affects me because I desire nothing and I live today” thing with “I do what I please because I am comfortable with myself and I want to” thing I started feeling numb. It was like all the intensity I had searched and found had become empty; and then I found an amazing word in their works that helped me find a bit more of what I really consider is essential and relevant to live my life with meaning and purpose. The word was Nihilism.
A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought NOT to be and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of ‘in vain’ is the nihilists’ pathos – at the same time, as pathos, an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Foucault’s nihilism? Foucault himself claimed (in a couple of interviews that his histories were in a sense nothing but “fictions” and that what he was really interested in when writing them was of experiencing some form of personal transformation! this confirms the kind of account that presents Focault as a nihilist as it shows that Focault sought to present as reasoned, scholarly, work the kind of alternative account(s) that must outmaneuvered in order for the conventional normal one to hold onto its claim to validity. Foucault’s painstakingly reconstructed genealogies are therefore not the truth at last coming out, but the more disturbing unworking of every possibility of truth at last, which is a transformative experience which Foucault would like to share with his readers. He is not interested in the “disturbing unworking of every possibility of truth at last.” That’s nihilism! Foucault was not a deconstructionist! Truth is incredibly important to Foucault. But not because it has an essence so much as it has such profound effects. And something that has profound affects must be taken very seriously.
Was Nietzsche a nihilist? The answer is no, right? He was a diagnostician of nihilism. He thought it was a necessary stage of intellectual life, the “lion” stage. But it could not be the “goal” of intellectual activity. It was not something that Nietzsche or Foucault positively hoped for, because the ideal agents of nihilism are precisely the thoughtless products of the disciplines (Foucault) or the satiated bourgeois ridiculed in the Preface to Zarathustra. Nihilism is the shrug of indifference directed at every valuation and isn’t that exactly what liberal toleration is?
Foucault was not a nihilist. He did not want to unwork every possibility of truth. Neither did Nietzsche. “Truth” might be an error, but the word “error” does not always literally translate into “undesirable” or “harmful”. In “Genealogy” for instance Nietzsche constantly accuses priests and religionists of committing errors that “promote life.”
I was happy to discover that someone else thought already about what I classified as the “numbness” I was living, and that I am certainly not a nihilist either which allowed me to further work in my view of knowledge, my own understanding of “balance” among others. The search for balance does not necessarily lead you to nihilism.
As someone really smart and wise I know said: To walk on a rope you need to keep strict balance, but keeping balance in such circumstances is definitely intense, definitely not numb or indifferent. Not nihilist.
Of Balance and the Fear to “Act with Balls”
And so I guess somehow we reach a comfortable point (if balance can be considered something impossible to reach), learn to feel comfortable on our skins and to live under our rules and for shorter or longer fleeting periods, we feel at ease. I heard sometime in a prayer: You force us into this world and make it incredibly difficult to feel home here and just as we are where we want to be you kick us out of it.
Is that so? Is it true that after we have reached a certain point of comfort we will look to feel at least a bit uncomforted to push us further in the search for meaning, purpose and wholeness? The only problem is that sometimes in the search for this healthy discomfort one may take decisions or take actions that lead to big discomfort, misbalance and can be even destructive, which makes the search for the healthy discomfort pretty scary, and then doing the thing that could possibly take us further, make us grow, feel more complete requires a big deal of balls to be done. There are times in which you either make it or break it and there are times in which opening your mouth may be have a bigger risk than base jumping.
I guess the fear for me, like maybe it is for other people, is to take on actions that will make me lose myself. I have been able to cope with the difficulties and rejection from life by believing in myself, so what to do about the things that could be a big gain but could at the same time end up on me losing that confidence that so far has pushed me further? Call it confidence, call it pride, and call it dignity; to jeopardize these for me is a big thing and the things that worth it risking them can be wonderful, but when to know if the risk will worth it? How to know where the line is between “Phew! Saved by miracle” and “Shit, I wish I said something?
Tricky. For all of us it is tricky to have the balls to do the things that really make us feel alive, the things that will push us further even if they mean scarifying some or all of the balance and comfort we have to find it all new. We are so afraid to lose the way of the essentials, the meaning and purpose to go further on it…
