The Pagan Agenda

I have been haunted for some time now by the notion that I am somehow less human for not finding the time or inclination to write fiction, learn an instrument, or create something that was not there before, preferably in a manner which exerts a profound influence on the rest of humanity. If I were hit by a bus tomorrow, I can safely say that any vestige of me would only carry on as a memory in those who knew me personally, and when those acquaintances die, even those small fragments of myself will cease to exist, and I will be gone forever.

Becoming more familiar with the worldview of one Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzche does not help. Richard Rorty on Nietzche, from “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity“:

“(Nietzche) hoped that once we realized that Plato’s ‘true world’ was just a fable, we would seek consolation, at the moment of death, not in having transcended the animal condition but in being that peculiar sort of dying animal who, by describing himself in his own terms, had created himself…(page 27)

For Nietzche…the line between the strong poet and the rest of the human race has the moral significance which Plato and Christianity attached to the distinction between the human and the animal. For although poets are, like all other animals, causal products of natural forces, they are products capable of telling the story of their own production in words never used before…(page 28)

The “strong poet” here is conceived of in a broader sense than just those who write verse, “so that Proust and Nabokov, Newton and Darwin, Hegel and Heidegger, also fall under the term.” By Nietzche’s standards, it seems, unless we are artists or creators in some form, we lead worthless, pathetic, animal-like lives.

The funny thing is, while I adore their creations, I have a significant amount of disdain for those who create, and question the reverence with which the Romantic movement has infused the artist in Western civilization in the last few centuries. Why should the person who sits down and pecks away at a computer all day making up stories get to be a human triumph when the bricklayer outside is simply an animal?

Rorty diagnoses the antidote to Nietzche in Freud, in an argument I find wonderfully lucid and eye-opening as to the real influence of Freud:

“Freud shows us that if we look inside the bien-pesant conformist, if we get him on the couch, we will find that he was only dull on the surface. For Freud, nobody is dull through and through, for there is no such thing as a dull unconscious. What makes Freud more useful and more plausible than Nietzche is that he does not relegate the vast majority of humanity to the status of dying animals. For Freud’s account of unconcious fantasy shows us how to see every human life as a poem- or, more exactly, every human life not so racked by pain as to be unable to learn a language nor so immersed in toil as to have no leisure in which to generate a self-description…

Seen from this angle, the intellectual (the person who uses words or visual or musical forms for this purpose) is just a special case- just somebody who does with marks and noises what other people do with their spouses and children, their fellow workers, the tools of their trade, the cash accounts of their businesses, the possessions they accumulate in their homes, the music they listen to, the sports they play or watch, or the trees they pass on their way to work….Any such constellation can set up an unconditional commandment to whose service a life may be devoted- a commandment no less unconditional because it may be intelligable to, at most, one person.” (pages 35-37)

This last point is critical, because our language skews us in a way that makes it possible only to talk about poetry as though it applies to art, music, or literature. We can’t talk about the poetry in an office manager’s ability to harmonize a work force of multiple personalities and agendas into a productive unit, even though the office manager’s base understanding of human beings might be just as profound in its own way as a critically aclaimed novelist. We say: “Isn’t Jill a great boss!”

I realize this whole line of thought sounds pretty debased in some way, and of course it is incredibly self-serving for people who don’t have the tenacity and brilliance to create. But it also makes a lot of sense to me.  It certainly makes me feel less like a worthless, dying animal.