On old wineskins and the taste of Easter

Three and a half years ago I contributed a brief piece to my university's student magazine which I titled "Tasting Christian Truth: Wine or Nihilism?" The issue was on lifestyles, broadly defined, and because I was attending an institution that had all on-campus students sign a lifestyle pact addressing such matters as alcohol consumption and sex, I wanted to complicate the "Christian" approach to such topics. The article distorts both Nietzsche and the Christian aesthetic (Nietzsche as nihilist? The beauty of the cross unproblematically related to the taste of good wine?), and is rhetorically overblown (please make note of the bit about feeling up creation with the hands of the body of Christ), but I find it rather compelling to this day. And so, in the interest of documenting my early exposure to Nietzsche (or something), here is a slightly abbreviated version of the text:

Nietzsche was a teetotaler. Apparently, Zarathustra spake without the aid of any German brew, not to mention wine. But perhaps we should mention wine. It is the first of the miracles after all – water to wine. David Bentley Hart, an American Eastern Orthodox theologian (and a brilliant one, at that), calls the wine of the scriptures “the perfect and concrete emblem of the beauty of creation and the joy of dwelling at peace in the midst of others”. Hart then suggests that one might develop a theological response to Nietzsche entirely through a typology of wine. Although he (rather unfortunately) doesn’t immediately take the task upon himself, he does manage to say that Nietzsche’s inability to appreciate Christianity is intimately connected to his rather “pedestrian palate” when it comes to wine. [Even after reading Nietzsche extensively, I can hardly think of a better way to insult him than by calling him pedestrian.]
[Regarding communal accountability:] Hart connects “dwelling at peace in the midst of others” to joy, and to the beauty of creation. I’m not particularly interested in how much wine people are drinking, but whether we’re properly tasting it, whether we’re letting it roll around on our tongues. Put another way, can we keep each other accountable to beauty? Can we together begin to smell and to taste the wine of the scriptures? Or the words of the scriptures? Can we use the hands of our body, the body of Christ, to ‘feel up’ this good creation?
Hart argues that although Nietzsche was a teetotaler, he did understand something about Christianity that so many fail to see: Christian truth is about aesthetics. We are Christians because it is a beautiful story; it appeals to us. It didn’t appeal to Nietzsche, however, so he advances a different story, one of the will to power. He found nothing attractive about a God on the cross. Certainly this had not only to do with abstaining from wine, but by suggesting as much, Hart draws some important connections. The Christian body is a body that savors beauty, and perhaps only in keeping each other accountable to such savoring can we taste Christian truth. If we do not have practice tasting, smelling and touching properly, how are we to taste, smell and touch the feast when it comes?

Maybe now, in the season of of Easter and spring, the sensual experience of the gospel message is worth considering, yet much to the astonishment of my undergraduate self, Nietzsche may end up being a more helpful guide in this task than Hart. I will spend the Easter weekend considering the relationship between the phenomenology of the icon - in which the senses never find their object and are, perhaps, failing - and the nature of life as kenotic drama - in which we are undoubtedly failing. More on that later.

I have lately discovered that several people are regularly attending this Ass Festival. If you are here, let me know sometime.

Since he murdered the Time, the Time won't do a thing for him

There's a fantastic critique of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland over at k-punk. He rightfully claims that the movie smuggles a Narnia-via-Harry-Potter messianism into Lewis Carroll's "beyond good and evil schizofiction." Carroll properly belongs in the company of Dickens' Great Expectations and Kafka's The Trial, in which the nonsensical, the grotesque, and the excess of signifiers form a world that is wholly one's own and yet in which one has no place. This uneasy navigation of Wonderland (or Miss Havisham's house or the court system) is a far cry from Burton's confident embrace of destiny. K-punk doesn't even address the film's conclusion, in which it appears that the real benefit to thinking impossible things is it's utility in the global capitalist market!

Read the article and watch the clip of the tea party from the 1965 BBC version of Alice in Wonderland.

Walking old paths with trepidation

John Milbank used to dominate my intellectual landscape but has for several years been peripheral at best. Well, I took him into my sights tonight after stumbling across two interviews, both very articulate (wouldn't have expected any less), both downright obstinate (also hardly surprising).

The first took place earlier this month and includes some startling theo-political triumphalism. The conclusion seems to suggest that Red Toryism, as a re-working of the religious and classical legacy of the Western world, "alone can now save Europe, America, and the world." The man's got balls. To demonstrate:

NS: Do you see your participation in this dialogue as evangelization? What do you hope to accomplish?

JM: Yes. Victory.

In the other interview, printed nearly two years ago, Milbank gives some of the bang-on cultural analysis that has brought him so many disciples over the years.

The boy at the shop counter with no customers is not allowed to read a book to improve himself all day, but who cares what he gets up to with sex and drink after the shop closes? ...in general it would seem that, as Adorno and Horkheimer predicted, sexualization is intended to keep us all quiet: neurotic, hysterical, frustrated and unhappy but still ‘looking’.

Science and the so-called sexual revolution are happy bedfellows in the quest for individual liberty, one guaranteeing the possibility of an unquestionable morality, or freedom to truth, and the other guaranteeing the endless freedom of choice. Milbank recognizes the perverse nature of this new ideal of subjectivity. Of course, his stories of how this subjectivity has been created and how we might be saved from it are far too simple, or at least too confident in themselves.

I've been dipping my feet into the theological blogosphere lately and find myself drawn in and put off in equal measure. I've been away from the us-them rhetoric of the church and theologians for so long. Ironically, I would wish of this sphere exactly what Milbank wishes of the public debates surrounding atheism: for "more recognition that many embrace a complex mix of belief and unbelief" and, I would add, a greater humility and reserve when it comes to social stories of salvation. Some bloggers demonstrate great acumen in navigating this complexity, like Ben Myers over at Faith and Theology. The best post I've read in recent browsing is his brief contribution to the official 2010 Global Atheist Convention online discussion, on the role of atheism in Christian thought.

Aesthetic Justification of Existence

or The Convalescent

I had a predominantly unremarkable weekend... really quite boring. But for the entirety of the weekend I was somehow able to hear music well. Like that night at Folkfest back in 2006, standing in a hushed crowd watching Bruce Cockburn master the 12-string guitar and perform songs from several decades of his career. That night I walked to the parking lot with one thought in my mind: life is going to be awesome. If I can keep hearing superb music I've never heard before - fuck, if I can hear superb music at all - then life will literally be awe-some. A simple sentiment, I know. Perhaps too romantic, decadent even. And yet it has returned with such force over the years, often when discovering old and new music at the same time - both old to me and old in the sense that there are people who have been listening to that exact recording for 40 years.

This weekend involved favourites from a few years ago (Picastro, Karl Blau), favourites from childhood (the aforementioned Emmylou Harris), simple classics I had never heard before (Nancy Griffiths), flash-in-the-pan pop from before I was born (Haircut 100) and good stuff I somehow passed over in the last years (The Decemberists). The cumulative effect: life is going to be awe-some.

In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche suggests that if our existence can be justified, this justification is aesthetic. As Apollo disappears from his later books, so does this far too Wagnerian notion of aesthetic justification. He finds something unseemly in his previous assertion; it is in bad taste. (Whether the redemption Nietzsche finally does embrace is not equally in bad taste is a matter for future discussion.) I am inclined to believe that aesthetic awe is something quite different from aesthetic justification, but, to be honest, I have misplaced my notes and cannot expand at present. No matter. None of these posts are really finished anyway.

Had to include this tune, considering I'm re-reading On the Genealogy of Morals, in which Nietzsche speaks with such reverence of those brave races whose action is spontaneous, instinctual, not reactive and weak. Those blond beasts, those lions.

Ego

The Gay Science, aphorism 275:

What is the seal of liberation? -- No longer being ashamed in front of oneself.

I recently spoke of my experience on the Camino de Santiago as a Lenten journey, one of both self-discipline and self-mortification. My body was breaking down and I was becoming increasingly less attractive; my intellectual capacity was diminishing as my mind was taken over by mundane daily concerns; spending nearly 24 hours a day with other people also meant that I became less patient and less kind. I could not be the person that I think I should be... that I think I am. While I recognize the importance of allowing these self-narrations to fall away, the ego puts up a hell of a fight.

Here's to bruised egos. May they perish from their wounds.

Lately, when I'm not listening to the ambient techno of Pantha du Prince or Emmylou's gospel tunes, I've been enjoying rock anthems. Below you will find a slick tribute to endurance. I hope this is what the kids are listening to these days.

Standouts

The second half of one of the more intriguing aphorisms in The Gay Science:

There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us. Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you: "Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?" --Immediately, you did not want to any more; and when I asked you again, you remained silent. Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn't. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.(Nietzsche, The Gay Science Book One, Aphorism 16)

I'm not sure what to make of this but I'm convinced it's awesome.

On another note, in the last while I can't seem to get enough of several of 2009's highly acclaimed albums, what you might call the British androgynous contingent. I only started listening to Micachu & the Shapes and The XX after finding them on year-end lists across the blogosphere, but don't be turned off by the buzz and the general hipster-ness, folks. This is the catchiest shit I've heard in awhile.

Not Nietzschean

Time to ramble on about Nietzsche again.

An English-speaking reader of Nietzsche cannot avoid Walter Kaufmann. As (one of) the most prolific translators and commentators out there, Kaufmann has basically delivered Nietzsche to the English world. I have limited myself to his translations for reasons of verbal and aesthetic consistency (i.e. it looks good on the bookshelf) and am finally wading through his own extended treatment, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist.

Now, Kaufmann never considered himself a Nietzschean and vocally disagrees with him on many matters, not least of all that of writing style, and yet his description of that style is right on. Kaufmann asks whether Nietzsche in fact falls into the decadence of his age, as described in The Case of Wagner:

That life no longer resides in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, and the page comes to life at the expense of the whole--the whole is no longer a whole.

While this decription may superficially apply to Nietzsche's aphoristic style, Kaufmann argues that all of these experiments (Versuche) are distinguished by their existential quality. Nietzsche took on only those problems which seemed to threaten his very life and would attempt to answer them simply by living them; one need only look to his relationship with Wagner for an example of how Nietzsche's philosophical convictions shaped his life. His existentialism 'saves' his writings from the atomistic problem of decadence for, quite simply, life does reside within the whole. His own life resides in the whole of his work.

Kaufmann defends Nietzsche from accusations of deliberate incoherence and contradiction by invoking existential unity, but then he turns around and suggests that Nietzsche's failure to systematize his thought has prevented the probable truth of his hypotheses from being established. In other words, he is willing to use "existentialism" (not really as a philosophical school but rather as descriptive of a particular type of personal commitment) to show Nietzsche's consistency, but is not willing to admit the possibility of existential truth. I don't understand how one can speak of substantiating existential claims in any way other than through a similar existential commitment to the problem. If one is not compelled by Nietzsche's writing then one won't be compelled by a systematized version of his thought, unless one did not understand Nietzsche at all to begin with. I will allow that "unless". We humans need some structure to make sense of things, so I understand the pedagogical need for a more systematic approach to Nietzsche's body of work, but the system won't substantiate the hypotheses. Only the continued life of the whole, and living of the whole can do that. Does that make any sense?

Kaufmann is not Nietzschean. Neither am I, but there's not much at stake in that. I'm not sure why one would be Nietzschean and I don't know why Kaufmann bothers to say so much, especially considering his subsequent likening of Nietzsche to the prophet Hosea - "Sometimes prophecy seems to consist in man's ability to experience his own wretched fate so deeply that it becomes a symbol of something larger." Although I trip over the word "symbol" a little, this seems a fair assessment of both Hosea and Nietzsche. Kaufmann would hardly call himself "Hosean" or "not Hosean" and yet he still seems determined to make a school or an "ism" out of Nietzsche. Curious.