Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality

Introduction

This book is about reality. It's about reality as the location of and as a way of living; it's about living in, and living as, reality. Finally, it's about loving the real: what I struggle toward in this book is the affirmation of what is, precisely as it is. This book explores what might happen if one were to eschew all efforts at the transformation of reality, except the effort to transform oneself into a person who is capable of loving the world. That position is, of course, itself inconsistent. To say of myself that I do not love the world sufficiently is to say that I ought to be transformed, and I, after all, am real: I am part of that which I am learning to love. Perhaps, then, I ought to affirm even this: that I cannot affirm the world unconditionally. But to say that I ought to do even that is incompatible with the affirmation of what is, precisely as it is.

In a true affirmation of the world, there could be no more "oughts." For, as I will claim, to say that something ought to be the case is to consign what is the case to an imaginary oblivion. Every claim that something ought to be the case is a judgement that what is the case is insufficient. One might formulate the quandary this way: there ought to be no oughts. Thus, the notion of affirming the world is shattering; it transforms our values, or does not allow us any more values in the way values are traditionally understood. In the history of western philosophy, ethics and aesthetics are the studies of what ought to be the case: every value that is valued in the western philosophical tradition is incompatible with loving things as they are. Every value demands a transformation: we ought to be better than we are, or, more often, you ought to be better than you are; that is, you ought not, as you are, to be. We cannot very easily conceive what would happen if we saw that all such attempts at transformation are pathological. Every flight from the world as it is expresses the pain inflicted by that world; all of our values are minted in fear and nurtured by cowardice. This book is, among other things, an attempt to find out what might happen to values in an affirmation of the world.

The results I arrive at will seem, I hope, disturbing. One project that is trashed in this book is the political state, which is problematic both on (anti)-ethical and (anti)-metaphysical grounds. I regard the state with ontological suspicion; I will suggest that the state, as it is usually understood, does not exist at all. And insofar as it does exist, the state is a grandiose project for the forcible transformation of what is. Every state is to that extent utopian: it dreams of a reality other than the one in which it is operating, even if that reality is merely one in which the dictator has become richer than he is. In that sense, the state is the codification or the fossilization of values; it is a machine for the forcible transformation of human beings. Fortunately, by that standard it is also a miserable failure.

In the course of developing post-ethical values that are compatible with loving life and loving the world, I explore the notions of obscenity and transgression. Because every moral assertion asserts that something ought to be the case, that is, that the world as it is presently constituted ought not to be the case, seduction into evil is an allowance of things to be. In this sense, violation of moral strictures may be a sacrament. The characteristic transgressions in western culture are all affirmations of embodiment: every obscene word is a reminder of the body, just as the fundamental religious disciplines of the culture arise in the pitiful effort of the disciple to transcend his body. Anything that reminds us that we are mammals scurrying around on the surface of a planet is, thus, worthwhile. Fucking is worthwhile, and also saying `fuck.'

The term `reality,' which I chant like a mantra throughout this book, is liable to give the reader pause. It has been used, for example, to pick out Plato's Ideas, or Brahman, or the atoms: it is always whatever underlies mere appearances; it has often enough been used to call us out of our everyday experience into some supposed other realm of the really real. All such uses of the term are inversions. Plato's Ideas are, precisely, unreal: the realm to which Socrates hoped to retreat, by dying out of the world. This book does not give any (well, it does not give many) arguments in ontology. In fact, I shall give reasons to regard ontology as pernicious, and try to avoid any ontological systematization. But what I mean by "reality" is the stuff we encounter every day in the world: trees, cars, the sky, buildings, earth, human beings. Any call to transcend such things into the really real ought to be regarded with the utmost suspicion. First of all, such things cannot be transcended except in an illusion: a human being always lives, while she lives, as situated within them, as one of them and one with them. If you don't think cars are real, go out and let one pass through your body, especially if you don't think your body is real, either. The fact is: you believe in the reality of cars, and so do I, and so does everyone who can live in this world. The kind of reality that is possessed by anything that is real is more or less the kind of reality that is possessed by cars.

To say that we are real is, finally, to say that there is no deep distinction between appearance and reality, though people undergo various piecemeal delusions. But that this world is a delusory appearance, whether its ultimate reality is described in terms of Ideas, or itsy bitsy wavicles or whatever, is a symptom of how much we suspect ourselves. A glowing health, a real affirmation would say: as things appear to me, so they are. I think well enough of myself to see that I am not a weaver of delusions, but a true mirror and microcosm of the world.

Now though I will not present an ontology here, I should say that I am suspicious of any purported object that we can't get our hands on and throttle properly. And the belief that we are not things of the sort that cars and trees are (that we are souls, for example, or that consciousness distinguishes us in or from the order of nature), is the philosophical expression of a self-loathing so deep and so entire that it must deny what is obviously the case, a self-loathing so intense and so thorough that it seeks to expunge every scrap of the self that is loathed. It is a form of suicide: we hate that we are bodies so much that we simply jettison our bodies imaginatively. If there were a God, the self-loathing of creatures such as we would be loathsome in his sight; health is always an acknowledgement of embodiment.

I am not going to argue for any of this, but I am going to try to show you that you already believe that this world is as real as anything can be. That is why the real is a shock, or why the experience of shock is important: because it brings us back to the real and thus to ourselves. Persons who are in intense pain, and who allow themselves fully to experience that pain, cannot doubt the reality of that pain's source, or of themselves. Pain motivates flight, and intense, prolonged pain motivates, finally, a flight from the world. But as long as one can stick with one's pain, can hang in and allow oneself to be in pain, for that long no ontology is required. To be in pain is to live a demonstration of reality; it is to be forced toward reality. Pain is something that must be affirmed, and of course it is also the hardest thing to affirm. Pain is a call into the reality of what is real, and thus is something creatures such as ourselves radically require.

Thus, much of the history of philosophy and of religion is, in my view, pathological. Much of it is a flight, an obvious flight, from what is, just as the life of the scholar or priest or moralist is a long flight from the real world. This is a diagnosis that I owe to Nietzsche, and if there is a hero of this book, it is he. I read Nietzsche as a radical realist, and I will try to show why, though I depart from him completely when it comes to questions about power. I regard power as conceived within the western tradition, power over the self and over others, as pernicious and delusory; when power expresses itself as the forcible attempt to re-make people and circumstances, it is simply the expression of "values," the enactment of the assertion that what is ought not to be. But Nietzsche comes as close as the history of western philosophy has yet progressed toward the affirmation of reality.

For as long as philosophy and religion have fled the world, for just so long have they returned again and again to it. I will try, in what follows, to concentrate on those figures who have mustered an affirmation, figures such Chuang Tzu, the Tantric masters, Emerson, Black Elk, Bataille, and Vaclav Havel. The message of such figures is one of tremendous hope: hope that we can overcome our self-loathing and our loathing for the earth. Their message, finally, though delivered like a series of blows, is a message of love. When one asks a Zen master a conceptual question, such as, say, "What is the inmost nature of reality?" the Zen master does not reply with a theory. Instead, he boxes your ears. This means two things: first: don't ask. And second: this is the inmost nature of reality; reality is what boxes you on the ears. The delusion, the snare, is to look beyond this, to look toward the inmost kernel. The outer husk is the inmost kernel; the appearance is the reality. You yourself are real, are "the ultimate nature of reality," though you must be cuffed on the ears to be reminded of what you already know. Spiritual discipline is an ever-greater embeddedness in the world; spiritual transcendence is only achieved in total immanence. There is no way out, no way around: escape, evasion, denial: all, finally, are impossible. That you are real, that you are here, that this place, too, is real: that is enlightenment. In the words of the philosopher Joseph Diffie: "I want to go to heaven, but I don't want to go tonight." Right at this moment, I am content to be where I am, and what I am: a human being living on the earth. Any philosophy that calls me elsewhere or calls me something else calls me also toward my own destruction and to the destruction of the earth.

Finally, what I seek from learning to love the world is an exhilaration, a dance that learns and loves even in the face of evil, or that learns and loves even evil. I seek a way to orient myself physically into the world, a way to open myself in a gesture of welcome to all that is. I am seeking a joy that is incompatible with comprehension - incompatible, finally, with systems, concepts, answers, philosophies - that opens always on to the particular situation. Human beings are separated from the world not by the "veil of ideas" or by the mediation of language, not because they are souls or minds inexplicably entangled in a world of physical objects, and so forth, but because they hate themselves for being of the world, and hate the world for being. If this hatred were slowly to dissipate as we opened ourselves to the world, we might know an authentic love. It is into that love that I open this book.