Object-Oriented Ontology 2. Graham Harman 2.

 Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory

Harman, Graham. 2017. John Willy & Sons.

Object-Oriented Ontology I. Graham Harman 1.

 Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics

Harman, Graham

2009 

re-press

Nihilism by Nolen Gertz. 2019.

Nihilism 

Nolen Gertz

2019

MIT Press

For a better view, click on the photo (the stamp) or click here.

“It is thus only by returning political activity to the public realm, by reclaiming public spaces as spaces for freedom, by seeking consensus rather than seeking votes, by acting as humans rather than surviving as animals, that we can begin to overcome nihilism together rather than continue to suicidally adapt to it alone” (p.159, emphases in origin).

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The book’s ideas are represented in the illustrative stamp above. Because nihilism is a difficult and elusive concept to explain, I will elaborate on it by writing anecdotes, which are built upon real events, real individuals, and real thoughts that I have encountered during research I do.

During one winter in Istanbul, I was walking with a young woman, in her early 20s, in a beautiful neighbourhood. We entered a famous café holding the name of a Turkish communist, novelist and poet, Nazim Hikmet, to have hot tea. “He, Hikmet, would not like this scene we see now; people are gathering, laughing, drinking, and not caring about the hell outside in the world,” I said. Alexandra disagreed, “you do not know. He might be happy. Also, people are free to do what makes them happy.” She added firmly and clearly, “people do not need to care about the world, the whole world, because we cannot change it and because we do not need to do.”

-       - Do you think that the life, the world, has meanings in itself? I asked.

-       - No. Not at all.

-       - So, the life is meaning-free?

-       - Yes.

-       - So, you do not have meanings in your life?

-      -  No, I do have meanings in my life. My meaning. But the life does not, she concluded the short conversation.  

This conversation was the strangest and the dearest to my heart for years. Firstly, the woman is vigilant, she is smart, her mind is sharp, and her ability to seclude thin phenomena in the everyday life was something to respect. Her self-awareness, for a woman in her age, surprised me. Nevertheless, I could not understand (before I read this book) how she has her meanings, whereas no meaning is there in the world. In academic words, this woman individual has a meaning-system, but she believes that the reality is void of meanings. The conversation between us revealed her nihilism. She is nihilist or nihilistic.

 For her the reality has no truth, whatsoever this might be. It is worthless to dig into the reality to discover or construct meanings. To know is something indistinguishable from smoking weed, copulating, drinking tea with a capitalist style in a communist-named café. So, there is no-real-thing to know (see the left-wing of the stamp above); you know, of course, but what you know? Emptiness, nothingness because the reality is not worthy to know, to dig, to confront, to discover, or to construct meaning. Alexandra avoids the Reality by divesting it from sincere meanings. She knows things. She was thinking, before we revealed her nihilism in this conversation, that these things are the reality, are real. She is wrong. She knew nothing (i.e., unreal things, shadows only). This is nihilism. Nihilists prefer a simple meaning-system, white and black. The Reality is much, much richer in meanings and much more complex. White-and-black type of meaning is not real meaning; it is an illusion; it is a shadow.

"Black-and-white labels make life easier, but they do so by making life lifeless" (p.87).

a-     Alexandra has her meaning-system, so she knows.

b-    But, for her, the world is void of meanings.

c-     What does she know then?

d-    Not real things. She knows nothing.

e-     A person who does not know is not nihilist, necessarily. 

 

Moreover (see the right wing of the stamp), Alexandra believes that people should not really care about the world outside; they only have to pursue their happiness. “Is this what you think of?” I asked. “No. This is what all people from all generations think of,” she said. We cannot change the reality and we do not have the responsibility to do so. It is not our job, she believes. The technology and the recent lifestyle have been improved radically to enable us to enjoy and to be free, she said. “Are we really free?” I asked again. “Much more than before,” she replied.

Alexandra commutes to her job every day, she works behind her desk, and at the end of each month she gets her stipend. She spends some money to buy new phones, clothes, shoes, to drink and eat, and to spend happy moments with friends. “This is life,” she remarked, “and we do not need to do more.” All of these things Alexandra does, what are they? What is the difference between, on the one hand, Alexandra finding herself able (free!) to buy a phone and spend Saturdays and Sundays in cafes and in streets with friends, and finding herself enforced to work (luckily and happily!) the rest of the weekdays, and, on the other hand, a farmer in the 3^rd Century BCE selling his vegetables in a market? We have a farmer who, exactly like Alexandra, has the ability to ride his donkey, to find a safe market, to sell his vegetables, and who, exactly like Alexandra, is enforced (happily and luckily!) to work in a small field every day. What is the difference? She is happy and free because the Job Centre found a place for her to work. She is not jobless anymore. She is happy. She is free. He is happy because the city ruler gave him a good share of the river’s water to cultivate his field. He is happy, he is lucky. No difference. Both of them do things that they found in the social system; they are “good” parts of their status quo; they feel they are free; and both of them believe that they do not need to create the world, to expand the world, to change the life-system, to create things. Then these things they produce (through work) have the exact nature of what animals, trees, and the sun produce. Things that are not making us question, confront, and uncover the Reality. If the things we do are only for survival (as happy and free persons), they are things suitable for animals, trees, and mountains, not for human beings. 

 Alexandra is making nothing (i.e., she is making/doing things that are unreal, although they seem real, but they are not. They are shadows). Alexandra is a nihilist exactly as the farmer of the 3^rd Century BCE.

This is nihilism. 

“Nihilism is about evading reality rather than confronting it” (p.73).

Nihilism “severs freedom from responsibility and so severs freedom from anxiety” (p.100, emphases added). Alexandra and the ancient farmer are free, but they are irresponsible; they absolved themselves from the responsibility towards the Earth, the world, realms, and eventually the Reality. They are free only because they lived within external authorities (Job Centre, Taxes System, Irrigation System, etc.) which enabled them to be free but only to sustain the status quo. They had to relinquish their responsibility towards the Reality, the real things, the real life, to keep their happiness and freedom.  This is, indeed, a good deal: Freedom is not easy, it hurts, it engenders anxiety. So, to enjoy freedom (not REAL FREEDOM) I relinquish my responsibility, so I test freedom without anxiety. This type of freedom is nihilistic: “Nihilism is therefore the ability to enjoy a glass of wine while watching the world burn” (p.107, emphasis added).

“Nihilism is therefore the ability to enjoy a glass of wine while watching the world burn”

 Nihilism is not a case, is not a state, is not a thing; thus, its discovery and understanding are difficult. Is “nothing” a thing to be seen, touched, or recognized? No. Nihilism is all about doing really nothing and knowing really nothing. Nihilism is only revealed. The following anecdote can clarify what I mean. Read this anecdote and interpret it in the way you like.  

I met a 75 years old man, years ago. George is his name. He is, and he was, a very successful man; having good job, respected social status; he is a middle class’s member, with a good and healthy family. “So, please tell me more about your life?” I asked him after a long conversation. “It is not worth mentioning,” he firmly said. He ended the conversation.

 George has been nihilist, he has lived a nihilistic life for years when – ironically - he was thinking that his life is worthy. After the long conversation, the nihilism of this life was revealed to him (he was so similar to the farmer and to Alexandra, although less radical). He concluded the talk: “My life is not worthy.” His apathy, his pessimism, are signs of awakening from nihilism and weakness to face it. He is nihilist no more. This is more real, more painful.

 Philosophical Tour

1.     Socrates was roaming in the market, asking people about the meaning of their lives. For him, “The unexamined life is not worth living” (p.17). Those who do not confront the reality, its complexity, its hidden and un-easy meanings to discover are nihilist. They are similar to people born in a prison, in which they see only shadows of real things. By debate, they should know that what they see are only shadows. They have to reveal the real things, not stay confined to the shadows, the no-thing.

2.     Descartes was trying to know the real things. He lost his happiness that he had tested before his endeavour. He concluded that we have to choose between our happiness (but staying confined to the shadows) and our knowledge of the real things (but suffering). (From this point of view, his duality of Intellect vs. Will emerged: Our will to know is bigger than our ability to know).

3.     Kant questioned the reality: How can we know that we know? How can we know that this reality is real? He suggested that we have two worlds. The first is the noumenal world which exists by its own, independently from us. On this world we lend and exist. The second is the phenomenal world, which is the world, the reality, that we perceive mentally. His question, how we know that we know, is an endeavour to fight nihilism.

4.     Nietzsche argued that morality, the common morality we have, is lifeless; i.e., it is not real. It prevents us from being real. It makes us accept the status quo; it ignites us to be stagnant. We must not be stagnant because the reality is real as we act, gain power, and grow. We have to grow, to create, to change the world  to be real. If we are concerned only with survival, then we are immersed in nihilism. 

We avoid pain by drinking, sleeping, and watching YouTube. We are nihilistic.

We submit ourselves to the routine, to our bosses. We are nihilistic.

We avoid making decisions, we avoid holding responsibility, we throw ourselves in riots or in an outburst of emotions. We are nihilistic.

Postmodernism struggles to show that meanings are not concrete; they are continuously created. This is against nihilism. Nihilism instructs us to believe that essence precedes our existence, so we can only obey this essence, either it is God, DNA, or a meaning in a text. We have no responsibility to change this essence. We have nothing to do but to worship and obey this essence. Postmodernism says NO! We “worship” the foundations, the reality, the real things, the real existence, only when we are free and responsible to create, challenge, and change. 

The Philosophy of War and Exile: From the Humanity of War to the Inhumanity of Peace. Nolen Gertz.

 The Philosophy of War and Exile: From the Humanity of War to the Inhumanity of Peace. 

Gertz, Nolen

2014 

 Plagrave Studies in Ethics and Public Policy

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Below is a real conversation between me and a friend, which took place in early February 2022:

-       Man, you are hypervigilant now. This is a sign of anxiety. Keep calm. Control yourself better, or visit a psychoanalyst, I said.

-       You might be right from a certain perspective. But let me reverse it [your argument]. The thing that you see as anxiety is the sign of vigilance. Not vice versa. I have peace without any anxiety . . . name it craziness . . . name it anxiety. I do not care.

 This conversation summarizes the book idea, I would argue.

 

Nolen Gertz in his book, The Philosophy of War and Exile, unveils the meaning of and the relations between three concepts: everyday life, the common morality, and exile or anxiety as an existential experience. Everyday life is our worldly home where we, human beings, conceive of familiarity, safety, and certainty in/of this world. But this home is, in fact, nothing but a mask. It is a mask clouding the Self’s eye, refraining it from seeing the reality as it is; we are confused or, perhaps, deceived as we see this everyday-home as equal to the world. The world and the everyday-home become equivalent, their shapes are the same, their spaces are equal, and so are their essence. This is an illusion.  Our everyday-home is made in the world, but it is never the world. 

 

The everyday life/home rests on common morality gluing human beings with a feeling of certainty. In other words, the everyday life produces and is produced by common morality, a set of beliefs, values, premises, and cognitive schemata. We walk, work, sleep, and argue everyday in a way that conforms to and confirms these set’s elements, the common morality. Common morality, therefore, is carved out to channel our brains and hearts (to form the common, the sharable): What I see is exactly what you see, how I evaluate a phenomenon or an event is so similar to how you do.  A man suffering from anxiety is a “deviant” man from the normal. A woman, in a traditional society, disobeying her husband is a “deviant” woman from the normal, the basic, the common morality.

 

 

 

 Read about this woman on Wikipedia

When you see a bird, you believe that this “flying-singing-beautiful-thing” has been there, in the nature, in its world, forever. You are certain about it. The existence of that bird (or of Bird as a universal category) and its beauty is certain. Similarly, common morality makes us think of our social world, our societies, as certain as this bird. I see what you see, I evaluate in the same way you do, so our common world is real, is there, is right. Other ways of seeing and evaluating are deviant, sick, unreal, and illusionary. Common morality is certainty’s producer.  

 

The third concept is exile. Not everyone can accept or submit herself to the common morality; i.e., some individuals or groups can be only “deviant.” Ideas or beliefs that the majority of us take as premises, absolutely true, are simply untrue, non-logical, or ideas that can be discussed and modified for those who can only be deviant. Why some people are like this? Because of exile. Exile, in this vein, is not a place to where prisoners are ousted. It is a metaphor, a concept, alluding to what does not belong to the common morality, and it is a living metaphor (as much as a cow is a living being) enabling people to reject the common morality of their societies. If we stick to this spatial analogy, then exile is what lies outside the common morality’s space, on the edge of what is known to be a human enjoying her certainty about the world.

Exile à Anxiety

When you come from the exile, you do not fit into the realm of certainty (attested by the common morality), so you experience anxiety and radiate anxiety among others. What is used to be a beautiful bird for others, is not so anymore for you. It is something else. You, now, are alone. You are detached from the world and its everyday-home, so you are homeless. This existential anxiety is the exile flag, its marker. To be more precise, exile is a locus of anxiety, not as a sickness, but a way of being in the world.

 

Anxiety à a way of being in the world; Everyday-home ≠ the World Certainty à a way of being in the world; Everyday-home = the World

 

Fencing the Exile, Curbing the Anxiety, Protecting Our Home

We fight this exile, curbing it, and preventing it from seeping into our “known” world and morality to sustain our certainty and to keep the resulted anxiety away from our everyday-home. How do we so? By labeling this exile and the people coming from it, feeding themselves from it, as deviant, sick, insane, and needy for medical care. We bend exile-agents to fit into our common knowledge:

-       No sir, this thing, flying, singing . . . is a bird. You do not see it as a bird, then I will drive you to a hospital so they apply their knowledge-power to cure you; very soon, you will see it as a bird again, or you will be kept captive behind the hospital wall until your death.

This imagined talk has the exact power (power of logic, power of common sense, power of knowledge) of the conversation that I had with my friend:

-       Man, you are hypervigilant now. This is a sign of anxiety. Keep calm. Control yourself better, or visit a psychoanalyst, I said.

-       You might be right from a certain perspective. But let me reverse it [your argument]. The thing that you see as anxiety is the sign of vigilance. Not vice versa. I have peace without any anxiety . . . name it craziness . . . name it anxiety. I do not care.

My friend has just come from exile. He is now connected to it, speaks of it, and from it he drinks, eats, and thinks. I tried to tell him you are crazy. I did so to protect my everyday-home, the common morality and to keep myself isolated from anxiety (although, indeed, I am super “anxious,” and a super cursed exile’s man). He, on the other hand, pursued invading our (not only my) world, the known world, the home (more precisely) with the exile he had discovered.

This exile is, however, what we should embrace not expel, to welcome not fear. It is a (or maybe the) the source of nourishing our humanity and our potential, whereas the common morality is what refrains us from doing so. That is, exile opens new horizons for the Self to be. It creates. Common morality and the constant restoration to the everyday-home is cowardice; it imprisons the Self. 

 The Self shrouded into the common morality and the everyday-home is rooted or grounded into this world enjoying a high level of certainty, exactly as these plants in the picture happily rooted (Prairie Studies, John Earnest Weaver, University of Nebraska 1932-52). They hold their ground, their roots in the world, so they are certain about themselves. Exile uproots their roots, shakes up their ground, telling them, “Your roots are only a part of the world, of the reality, and you can expand your roots in other directions; you, dear plants, can even walk.”

These plants (analogy of the Self) conceive the space into which their roots are grounded as the world. Exile, a deviant plant/Self, unmasks this illusion. The roots occupy a part of the possible world; that is the reality.

We need to live the experience of exile because it reveals to us the reality as it is; in that, incommensurability is more real than commonality (the common morality), and an open-ended and ever-unfolding world is more real than a close-ended world.

This call for welcoming anxiety, emanating from exile, and the call for opening our Selves are elaborated on through three cases in this book: veterans’ PTSD, torture as a way to fight terrorism, and unmanned drones as a means of war.

Serene Everyday life, home. Painting by Paul Fischer. 

Understanding instead of Judging

A veteran coming back from a war zone (in a Western country, the US as the prevalent empirical base for the author’s argument) is diagnosed by other people, by the authority, the medical authority as endorsing PTSD when he fails to reintegrate back in the zone of peace, in the everyday life (home) that is distinctive essentially from the life of war. The inability of a veteran to draw a clear line between peace and war, between acting normally in the zone of peace and abnormally in the zone of war is seen as illness: A veteran suffers from PTSD, he is a deviant, he invades our home (the peace zone) with things/feelings/actions that belong to the war zone. He invades our everyday-home with the exile (the exile that was generated in the war zone). We, the people who are instructed about PTSD, try to help that veteran to be back to the normal, to the everyday life of peace. As we do so, he feels more and more alienated. We neither understand him nor he does understand our world. We ask him to be “normal,” but normality for him is no more what we understand. The fact that suicide rate is extremely high among veterans in the US is not, therefore, a result of less-professionality to treat PTSD veterans, but it is a result of our persistence to see veterans as patients of PTSD, as deviants.

We impose a picture that our world, our everyday life, is well grounded, resting on our common morality, and veterans are the groundless because they were immersed in a war that – by its nature – subverts the common morality (through the action of killing, see below Box 1), so they fail to re-integrate in the “common morality,” simply because they have subverted it during the fighting. Hence, they become alienated (exiled, uprooted) and anxious.

But veterans are not those who are the groundless, but our world is. What we think of as a ground is nothing but an illusion. The veterans know that because they had experienced the exile. We did not.

Thus, common morality assures an essential commonality on which our humanity becomes possible. But what if commonality is just an illusion, a suppression of otherness, and what if incommensurability is on which our humanity should be (and in reality is) dwelled. In other words, the everyday-home is the soil of communality where we are what we are; everything is fixed and certain. Exile is the soil of incommensurability, where otherness and openness, becoming and thriving allow us to change what we already are and to become what we can be.

Box 1   

A veteran knows that what he does in war is killing, and killing is against common morality, and that his state has trained him to justify killing enemies in the light of morality. A veteran would easily ask himself if killing other human beings in a battlefield is justified morally, why then is not everything also justified in the “normal” everyday life? The distinction between good and evil, between war and peace becomes blurred. A veteran kills, but the others, the non-combatants, do not. They assume that what belongs to war is just ephemeral. A veteran does not share with them this belief. For non-combatants, war is ephemeral – in terms of morality – because it denigrates human conditions (we have to fight, we do not have another choice!), whereas a veteran believes that the denigrated nature of human beings is what produces war and what makes its condition possible, not vice versa. As a result, a veteran develops a different view and understanding of the world; he now sees what we call common morality, everyday normal life, from his exile. We reject to admit this exile as a real realm. So, we categorize that veteran as sick suffering PTSD. We judge him. Instead of looking at our world, our humanity from his own eyes, from the exile, we enforce him into our commonality again. We often fail, he kills himself. 

What we must do is to allow for this exile to be alive, to admit the incommensurability (so, otherness, the differences, etc.) so we develop, improve our human conditions. This endeavour kindles anxiety, but we are already suffused with anxiety. The problem is not preventing anxiety but stopping to flee from it. We need to embrace it, so the Self is open and thrives, is becoming rather than is what it is (p.63).   

 

How Soldiers/Veterans Enter the Exile?

Soldiers enter wars and kill others because they experience ecstasy. Warring as an institutional action is ecstatic: A self is absorbed by a “bigger” reality than itself, by the outside that surrounds it, which might be the command, the comrades, the fighting itself. This ecstasy yielded by war is located out of the common moral realm; thus, it is neither moral nor immoral, it is amoral. Ecstasy penetrates the boundaries of the Self, exposing it to be absorbed into the world around. This process is not psychological, merely, but it exists in the reality of the war; it is natural in its existence as much a tree is natural in its existence and not merely a psychological perception: if “something can be attacked it must be attacked” (p.51).  This is the ecstasy’s  “natural existence.” As a soldier attacks what is, by its own, attackable, he loses himself into the realm of war, into the command and the relation with comrades, and he leaves the realm of morality. His conscience is silenced, and he is not responsible for what he/they/the nature of war does. He experiences this “amazing” feeling of making the Self absorbed in a “higher,” an outer reality.

Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix, 1830, materializes what war’s ecstasy is.

However, once this soldier or veteran receives a command to kill and suddenly recognizes that he, his Self, can disobey the order and cease killing, his conscience comes back from the realm of ecstasy to the realm of responsibility. He and his actions become im/moral again. He looks at the killing, the horror there in front of his eyes, and feels guilty. However, this is not his own guilt, but the guilt of the world, the state, the system, the human being itself which made this war possible, the guilt of the possibility – for us as human beings – to experience this ecstasy by warring (metaphysical guilt).  Now, instead of being absorbed, the Self is disconnected from anything. This disconnectedness’s anxiety should be assuaged. It can be so only by putting the conscience to silence again. However, this time silencing the consciousness cannot be achieved by ecstasy anymore (the light of awareness is there, no absence into a higher reality). The disconnectedness must pitter out; how? only more war and more engagement in destroying others can silence the soldier’s responsibility, the moral awareness, his metaphysical guilt. When the war is over, how can we, the bearers of the common morality, ask the now-veteran to come back to the peace zone, to the home of humanity. If we do not admit the exile he revealed and lived, he never comes back to be like us.

This responsibility, the anxiety that humans are all apt to endure (and we really do as we, the common morality bearers, design wars and justify them, designate military, and invent nation states), “is best understood as a matter of identity rather than morality,” so we accept the exile as a place into which our identity (not reducing it into morality) can grow, blossom: “we must become becoming” rather than being that “we are who we are” (p.63). 

On Torture

Torture is not a moral issue to be questioned whether it is right or wrong in case of investigating a terrorist hiding a bomb and aiming to kill thousands of innocents. It is a matter of identity (p.83). This what we will elaborate on.

Torture is not a personal action; rather, it is institutional. A recruited person, who will be a torturer later, is integrated into an institution, which will be seen as the moral agency by which the responsibility of torture is hefted. Entering this institution, voluntarily or not (by kidnapping, for example), is masqueraded with an illusion of free choice. The recruited is given a choice: either he becomes a member in this institution, or he faces his fate, which could be death. As the recruited chooses joining and integration in the institution, he seems as if he had freely chosen to do so. He had the choice to leave, but he preferred to stay. This choice will be later the choice of being a torturer instead of being tortured or dead (torture is a matter of identity not morality).

Being a torturer, after institutionalization, requires training or routinization. A torturer himself passes through torture, watches torture videos, so he isolates his feelings from his later actions (torture), and he takes torture as a duty, a moral duty: If I could stand pain, he tells himself, then a tortured person can do so.

This process of torture is competed by dehumanizing both the tortured and the torturer. It is the empirical fact both of them suffer from similar traumatic symptoms. Torture as a process of denigrating human beings, similarly to a war experience, forms a re-transformation of dehumanization, eternally passing, between the tortured and the torturer.

Torture should be/is a matter of identity not morality because it is imposed forcefully into our common morality (understanding) as torture of the body not of the soul. It is your body what was tortured not the real you. It is impossible for whoever to torture the real you. This understanding or framing of torture dwells on the dualism doctrine of mind/body, human/universe, the Cartesian doctrine. However, this dualism is not real. The tortured is - really - his body and his body becomes everything as he is fumbling into pain. It is not that, as we are pushed to believe, the body of the tortured is a façade of his real identity, and it is not that death embraces only the flesh while the soul is untouchable, and it is not that pain can pass because it is less real than the mind/soul (under the umbrella of dualism). The dualist doctrine frames responsibility of a wrongdoing (e.g., torture) as something attached to an action, so it is easily isolable from our normal, common life. It is a wrongdoing, simply an action, simply belonging to the body not the real you. So, do not worry, it is an exemption of the everyday life, and the common morality is still clean from this wrongdoing; and we are irresponsible for what some of us have done. But no. The responsibility of wrongdoing is not a feature of actions, it is us. It is our identity.

When we ask a tortured to forgive or forget, or when we ask a torturer to justify his torture by the morality of saving innocents, we prevent the exile from showing us our own identity, as human being, as the real responsible of torture. It is our commonality and our present human conditions, which make torture possible.  Again, that is why torture is a matter of identity not morality: It is we, not our morality, which tortures. It is we, not the lack of morality, which makes us suffer. We are the suffering, we are the responsibility, Gertz firmly stresses.

NOTE: The author discusses unmanned drones and their usage in war, contending that drone operators suffer from trauma as much as those who fight at real fronts. However, I will not discuss it here.

Finally . . .

Everyone of us should be the veteran experiencing anxiety and exile: Through anxiety the “I” is unmasked and comes under the spot of reflection. Anxiety is not a feeling we pass through, but it is who we are (p.143). Martin Luther King is seen (through the same logic of seeing PTSD veterans and torture as an exemption/ephemeral/outsider), as an exemplar. He is not. He should not be. He is like as anyone of us, who could enter the exile and see what is real about our own identity (not morality) as humans.

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