(The title alludes to Bakunin’s celebrated dictum, which my reader must be quite familiar with, by now.)
Continuing the discussion of pain in my comments on Schopenhauer’s Counsels and Maxims, First Section (see the previous entry)--- where does that leave the necessity of pain as a fundamental creative stimulus?
According to the Bible, the childbearing pain of Eve was God’s punishment for her Original Sin, but could she have been capable of any procreation (following God’s command to “multiply” given to all living souls, which is presumably to include the humans as well), not to mention painless procreation, without that sin?! Explicit in the Bible is the suggestion that only after the sin were the eyes of Adam and Eve opened to their sexuality. Ironically, only after that shocking sin of disobedience, were they able to engage in the proper act of obedience to God’s command, starting procreation. Was that a coincidence (no, it could not have been!), or a product of God’s own design? (This is indeed what it looks like!)
In some of my writings I am refusing to treat procreation as creation, and I stand behind my refusal to do so, in those specific contexts. But, like in every matter of deep philosophical contemplation, this answer cannot be generalized to cover all cases. On the one hand, the pain of childbearing is an excellent metaphor for the pain of artistic, scientific, and all other types of creation. On the other hand, procreation can indeed become an act of creation if it is properly and responsibly comprehended as such, with everything that such a mental attitude entails. Once again, “punishing” Eve with childbearing pain, God is deliberately disingenuous, as his intention here and elsewhere is obviously to teach Adam and Eve certain lessons, and, in exercising their freedom of choice, He wants them to become aware of, and to be fully responsible for, the consequences of disregarding the rules. (Which, judging by what we have already discovered about this matter, may not be such a terrible offense in God’s eyes, after all!)
But let us keep moving on with the question of pain as a companion of creation. Generally speaking, is any creation at all possible without pain? What about God’s own Creation? Had He experienced a Creative Pain Himself? I suggest that there is some merit in thinking about this further.
And now we come to the direct correlation between truth and pain. The question of how much truth we can handle goes right to the heart of Nietzsche’s “Fiat veritas, pereat vita” not only linking truth with great pain, but directly with imminent destruction as well. In fact, undiluted truth is poison, as the following Nietzsche passage forcefully asserts:
“Nobody is likely to consider a doctrine true merely because it makes people happy. Something might be true while also being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree. It might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of the spirit should be measured by how much of the truth one could endure, or to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, sweetened, falsified.” (From Jenseits 39.)
But there is yet another reason why this passage is so unusual, or rather, so perfectly usual that it stands out. Even though the title of the book explicitly suggests it, Jenseits is not always as immediately related to the thought expressed by its author as in the case here. If truth is good by one account, and happiness is good by another, similar account, then the fact that truth can be harmful and cause extreme unhappiness means either that what we call the truth here is in fact a lie, or else, that something is wrong with the preceding proposition. However, if neither is the case, and the contradiction becomes psychologically unbearable to us, the only way to overcome this conceptual crisis is to recognize that we have just stepped into the highly perplexing territory of Jenseits von Gut und Böse... Incidentally, I am convinced that this is the essence of Nietzsche’s most famous idea, and it suits my personal understanding of good and evil just fine that on the other side of morality the standards of good and bad do not apply. Otherwise, the truth turns out to be the greatest evil in the world, which would be wrong, because God is truth, and God is good, but in a different sense, because there is an infinite goodness, which exists in God, and goodness that is derivative from the complementary distribution of good and bad, and which relates to the temporal created reality submissive to the created freedom of choice, which produces some confusion, because of such awkward coexistence within one word of two so disparate concepts. (They are disparate, of course, only because one is infinite and the other finite, but they do have more in common than first meets the eye.)
And finally, on the direct correlation of pain and the creative urge, the birthing pains of truth, and nothing but truth, as all creation is true by the fiat of its creator. The greatest happiness in the world is the creative labor, which, as any true creator knows, is also an extremely painful act. Truth, creation, pain, happiness… Pain is indeed destructive, but, like destruction, it is a creative passion too. In fact, like in a woman giving birth to a child, pain is happiness!!!
Continuing the discussion of pain in my comments on Schopenhauer’s Counsels and Maxims, First Section (see the previous entry)--- where does that leave the necessity of pain as a fundamental creative stimulus?
According to the Bible, the childbearing pain of Eve was God’s punishment for her Original Sin, but could she have been capable of any procreation (following God’s command to “multiply” given to all living souls, which is presumably to include the humans as well), not to mention painless procreation, without that sin?! Explicit in the Bible is the suggestion that only after the sin were the eyes of Adam and Eve opened to their sexuality. Ironically, only after that shocking sin of disobedience, were they able to engage in the proper act of obedience to God’s command, starting procreation. Was that a coincidence (no, it could not have been!), or a product of God’s own design? (This is indeed what it looks like!)
In some of my writings I am refusing to treat procreation as creation, and I stand behind my refusal to do so, in those specific contexts. But, like in every matter of deep philosophical contemplation, this answer cannot be generalized to cover all cases. On the one hand, the pain of childbearing is an excellent metaphor for the pain of artistic, scientific, and all other types of creation. On the other hand, procreation can indeed become an act of creation if it is properly and responsibly comprehended as such, with everything that such a mental attitude entails. Once again, “punishing” Eve with childbearing pain, God is deliberately disingenuous, as his intention here and elsewhere is obviously to teach Adam and Eve certain lessons, and, in exercising their freedom of choice, He wants them to become aware of, and to be fully responsible for, the consequences of disregarding the rules. (Which, judging by what we have already discovered about this matter, may not be such a terrible offense in God’s eyes, after all!)
But let us keep moving on with the question of pain as a companion of creation. Generally speaking, is any creation at all possible without pain? What about God’s own Creation? Had He experienced a Creative Pain Himself? I suggest that there is some merit in thinking about this further.
And now we come to the direct correlation between truth and pain. The question of how much truth we can handle goes right to the heart of Nietzsche’s “Fiat veritas, pereat vita” not only linking truth with great pain, but directly with imminent destruction as well. In fact, undiluted truth is poison, as the following Nietzsche passage forcefully asserts:
“Nobody is likely to consider a doctrine true merely because it makes people happy. Something might be true while also being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree. It might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of the spirit should be measured by how much of the truth one could endure, or to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, sweetened, falsified.” (From Jenseits 39.)
But there is yet another reason why this passage is so unusual, or rather, so perfectly usual that it stands out. Even though the title of the book explicitly suggests it, Jenseits is not always as immediately related to the thought expressed by its author as in the case here. If truth is good by one account, and happiness is good by another, similar account, then the fact that truth can be harmful and cause extreme unhappiness means either that what we call the truth here is in fact a lie, or else, that something is wrong with the preceding proposition. However, if neither is the case, and the contradiction becomes psychologically unbearable to us, the only way to overcome this conceptual crisis is to recognize that we have just stepped into the highly perplexing territory of Jenseits von Gut und Böse... Incidentally, I am convinced that this is the essence of Nietzsche’s most famous idea, and it suits my personal understanding of good and evil just fine that on the other side of morality the standards of good and bad do not apply. Otherwise, the truth turns out to be the greatest evil in the world, which would be wrong, because God is truth, and God is good, but in a different sense, because there is an infinite goodness, which exists in God, and goodness that is derivative from the complementary distribution of good and bad, and which relates to the temporal created reality submissive to the created freedom of choice, which produces some confusion, because of such awkward coexistence within one word of two so disparate concepts. (They are disparate, of course, only because one is infinite and the other finite, but they do have more in common than first meets the eye.)
And finally, on the direct correlation of pain and the creative urge, the birthing pains of truth, and nothing but truth, as all creation is true by the fiat of its creator. The greatest happiness in the world is the creative labor, which, as any true creator knows, is also an extremely painful act. Truth, creation, pain, happiness… Pain is indeed destructive, but, like destruction, it is a creative passion too. In fact, like in a woman giving birth to a child, pain is happiness!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment