“Okay, but I want to go back to the A-R-E. I still don't understand what it even is. I mean, Keens wanted to promote laughter and what sounds like some kind of venue out of one of Foucault’s wet dreams — I can understand that. But what does context have to do with anything?”
“Context is very important to people. They seek it because they need to wrap their heads around their place in the world. Think of Lacan's Big Other.”
“I’m not really familiar with Lacan.”
“Okay. Well, here’s a brief explanation. Think of the super-ego. Think of how it tells the ego, the self, what to do. Okay, now remove this individual superego, and place it in the social world as some ultimate authority figure. This is the Big Other. It issues objective imperatives, and it can be an institution, a person, or even a deity. The most important element, though, is its objective status. This means that people heed its ethical, spiritual, artistic, etcetera, commands without question. The heavy duty Marxists put their lives in the context of historical progress. They believe their actions will eventually bring about a future free of the injustices that are perpetuated by class antagonisms. Their Big Other is history; it, to them, is objective. Christians place this life in the context of trial that is meant to sort out the wicked and the virtuous, and that all people will be judged accordingly either in death or when Judgment Day comes. Their Big Other is the Holy Trinity; God is granted objectivity.
“But even the most destitute vagrant has a context, something apposite to an identity. See, an identity is merely the consequent of an individual’s context within a community. Seen in this light, the question 'Why am I here?' is a question of context. Furthermore, it suggests that you should be somewhere. 'Why am I here as opposed to there?' 'Why am I here at all?' These questions are posed because people want to know how they are supposed to fit into their surroundings, not how they are actually supposed to be. 'How am I supposed to be?' is easy — happy. 'How am I supposed to attain a perpetual state of happiness?' is simple, too — feel at home. And how do you feel at home? You find your context, and you love it. Amor fati.”
“And how do you do that one?”
“That’s the hard one. See, people feel that their freedom is a burden. There is a vacuity in freedom because it provides no answers; it actually eliminates a tangible sense of context. This point is very often ignored because the vast majority of people believe freedom to be, necessarily, a good thing. But it isn't always good, especially for people seriously trying to discover themselves. Freedom, in thought anyhow, opens up a lot of possibilities because it is dialectically opposed to the acquiescence to dogma. True freedom seeks to abolish the a priori, thereby making the proper way to behave a deeply personal and subjective question. Truth is subjectivity, as Kierkegaard said. But proclaiming there to be truth only in subjectivity is nothing more than an admission of ignorance, not to mention an open invitation for anomie and extreme and debilitating alienation. In other words, all context is abolished. This is why people often reject true freedom; they turn to dogma and ideology, to archetypes, to mores that provide the comfort and security that such alienation denies.”
“So Keens was a nihilist.”
“No, absolutely not. A person who refers to him or herself as an “-ist” of any sort clearly possesses a series of tenets, or at least one tenet. Buddhists believe in the teachings of Buddha; Marxists believe in the teachings of Marx, in history. Most nihilists, however, are their own confused brand of believers. I mean, the proposition 'I believe in nothing' is grammatically vague. Do you believe in something that you are referring to as 'nothing' or 'nothingness'? Do you deny yourself any attachment, any cathexis, and espouse a dogma of criminality like some type of metaphysical insurgent? Do you believe in the worship of science and progress, like one of Turgenev's characters, thereby making you more of a Positivist than anything else? Semantically, any of these positions can be true for one who asserts the proposition, 'I believe in nothing.'
“I don't know about you, but I have a hard time taking nihilists seriously. If one renounces dogma, and the tenets of any form of morality, that's fine. But to exhibit such a great deal of pride in one's renunciation reveals that the process is one of negation, not of abjuration. And that's what bothers me.
“To negate all beliefs is not to not-have beliefs. This is something the adolescents who posture as freethinkers fail to observe. To be free is to be lost. And to be truly lost, in the existential sense, is to lack contextual relevance, in your mind, anyway, to any community, any archetype, anything at all, and this means that you don't believe in nothing — you are incapable of possessing a belief, incapable of cathexis, incapable of empathy, sympathy, etcetera. This is far more severe, far more terrifying, than relativism. Relativism can become a dogma like anything else, as it proclaims, in absolutist terms, the non-existence of justifiable deference. The sense of estrangement to which I am referring is something far more profound, but it is not sustainable. You just can't mentally do it, no matter who you are. No, man: see the idea is to jump into this abyss, to abolish all beliefs, but only for a short time. From the abyss one assesses their life, their place within society, their ideas, their opinions, in the attempt to generate a belief structure without contradiction. All great philosophers, most recently Žižek, have suggested that this type of existential quest is a necessary stage in the development of an adult, of what, in Freudian language, is called the genital stage. And, yes, I know Freud is often called phallocentric. But, if you think about it, there is patriarchal control over discourse even now, so it only makes sense for him to be phallocentric. Perhaps he even understood this, which does not make him phallocentric; rather, it means that he understood that the discourse of the community would shape preferences and personalities, and, as the discourse was phallocentric, preferences and personalities would consequently share this tenet.
“Regardless, the point is that the most brilliant philosophers of the past few hundred years have felt that it is necessary for one to abolish all beliefs and to build them back up again in order to truly progress as an individual. Heidegger advocated it, as did Kant. Descartes most explicitly did. Spinoza certainly did — perhaps a bit more implicitly than the others—, as did Wittgenstein. I even believe that's what Nietzsche was always referring to whenever he spoke of climbing to great heights. Zarathustra is the name one can attach to a person who has acquired wisdom as a consequence of this procedure — one who is immoral because morals have become irrelevant; he is not antipodal to morality, he has transcended it.
“But Keens was a far way off from all of that for a long time. I remember him telling me about his life prior to the A-R-E. He was lost in the truest sense of the word. The sixties certainly advocated anomie, but for all of its haughty language it failed to replace all of the alienating forces in society that so many French sociologists and anthropologists and linguists condemned. Just the fact that people continue to speak of The System and The Man should articulate this rather clearly.” My brows narrow. “Look, think of it in terms of definite descriptions — Russellian, not Strawsonian. There is an organizational dynamic, x, that is a System. There is no more than one organizational dynamic that can be truthfully called a System. Finally, if x is an organizational dynamic, then it is a System. They cannot think beyond it. It is The System. They cannot conceive of another System, which is why it has been denoted as such. The best they can hope for is nihilism; furthermore, the best thing a nihilist can be—, what one could say the ultimate virtue of nihilism is—, is martyrdom. They both cannot conceive of a world in which they willfully participate in the System, and cannot conceive of a world without the System. There's no dialectic that can be fashioned out of this contradiction. The existence of any system will always be The System.”