Oh, the Blog Posts I’ll Never Write!

The Gleaming Sword has been going for roughly four years now, and the last couple years have been particularly productive, but I’ve decided it’s time for a break, or at least a significant slowdown, so I can focus on other projects. Nonetheless, I’ve had a number of ideas on the back burners for months now, and rather than leave them unvoiced, I thought I’d present them all together here in abbreviated form. They’re still only halfway thought out, researched and fact-checked, but here they are nonetheless.

Lana Del Rey: In Praise of No Context

This post was nearing completion when I decided to apply the brakes to my blogging.  The post was to discuss how encountering Lana Del Rey’s music without knowing anything about her personal life and how she is perceived by others enhanced my appreciation for her art. I was particularly excited about making a connection to the Kazuo Ishiguro novel Never Let Me Go (2005) and the character Kathy’s deeply subjective enjoyment of a cassette she purchases at school.

From the post that never was:

“Most people have probably had a similar experience: certain lyrics in a song will jump out, taking on a meaning for the listener that the artist never intended or one that is different from what others experience, but what criteria exist for calling wrong someone else’s innermost experience of  a work of art? The experience of art is a meeting of subject and object that is often better without third parties.”

The context-free experience of art is rapidly becoming scarce as we are constantly bombarded with minutiae about every topic imaginable, reading reviews on iTunes before downloading an album, looking up movies on IMDb even as we live-tweet them. Today, we come to art and entertainment through a haze of chatter, a cacophony of others’ voices, but we might be much happier tuning it out.

From Ultraviolence: 

 

 

Cecil the Lion and the Will to Power

I also intended to crank out a piece about the reaction to the news that a dentist from Minnesota had hunted and shot Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe, but that was nixed early in inception. I found it interesting how every side of the issue illustrated Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power. Killing big game, raging against big-game hunters, pointing out the piety of those who decry big-game hunters, and blogging analysis of the debate (as I’m doing here) all serve to make the self feel superior to others. In Freudian terms, they all feed the ego.

So what could one say that wouldn’t be an expression of the will to power? Probably nothing. As I understand it from my days of heavy Nietzsche reading, the will to power underlies all, or nearly all, human behavior. Taking a clue from a maxim by La Rochefoucauld (previous post), Nietzsche pointed out that even saying “Thank you” is a way of raising oneself above the person who has done you a good turn.

From Daybreak:

“Even when he who strives after distinction makes and wants to make a joyful, elevating or cheering impression, he nonetheless enjoys this success not inasmuch as he has given joy to the next man or elevated or cheered him, but inasmuch as he has impressed himself on the soul of the other, changed its shape and ruled over it at his own sweet will.”

Why Reverse Racism Does Exist

The most potentially controversial of my plans was a post arguing that reverse racism does indeed exist, an opinion very unpopular in certain circles. The argument usually starts with redefinitions of words like racism and discrimination (usually to include power) that conveniently lead, through simple logic, to the conclusion that reverse racism does not even make sense, cannot exist, or is just a misnomer for what is in reality plain old racism. It's a bit of sleight-of-hand the likes of which is increasingly common among the perpetually outraged but which never fools their opponents.

My argument was to be philosophical. In the 20th Century, philosophers began to spend a great deal of time examining language, and one of their favorite preoccupations was regular, everyday speech, which functions in a staggering variety of ways. The reality is that people use the words “reverse racism” to point to behaviors and attitudes based on race that are perpetuated by members of a group that is usually seen as the oppressed against members of the group that is usually seen as the oppressor, and everyone who hears these words knows that. By that right, the phrase is legit and what it describes does happen.

You may find the existence of what is called “reverse discrimination” uncomfortable, you may find it to be negligible compared to the atrocities committed by the usual suspects, you may not like the phrase, you may hate the way it is used to combat any efforts calling for attention to race problems, and you may find it more economical to just call it “racism,” but you can’t just wish it away.

 

How an Atheist Can Enjoy Darren Aronofsky’s Noah

I refused to watch Ridley Scott’s Exodus, because as an atheist (previous post) I see a return of big-budget Biblical epics as exactly the kind of religion-stroking the world is better off without, but I was intrigued enough by Darren Aronofsky’s past films like The Fountain and Black Swan to check out Noah (2014), and I’m glad I did. I loved fantasy elements like the Watchers, savored the way it toyed with orthodoxy, admired Emma Watson’s performance, was moved by the human relationships, and was gripped by the plot. Scenes like the one in which Noah tries to kill Ila’s twins always used to leave me unmoved--I sensed screenwriters trying too hard to get a response from their audience--but now that I’m a father, I was like, “Oh no you don’t, motherfo!”

This is how we interact with stories. Aronofsky said he never intended Noah to be a traditional Biblical epic espousing an exclusively Judeo-Christian worldview, and his film did turn out to have much to offer aside from whatever lessons the religious may find in it. No doubt some atheists would adopt a harder stance, but many atheists such as myself remain open to inspiration--strictly humanist--from religious art.

 

Joseph Conrad’s Use of Irony in Heart of Darkness to Critique Colonialism

The meatiest of my planned projects, one which ill health derailed last spring, was a series of posts focusing on Joseph Conrad’s use of irony in Heart of Darkness (1899) to criticize colonialism. While Heart of Darkness is devoid of sermonizing, I noticed that Conrad often uses officious and grandiloquent language when describing functionaries of the British Empire, precisely when he means to scorn them. And his portrayal of the effects of colonialism on the colonialized is damning--whether the colonialization is military, commercial or in the name of civilization.

And is American imperialism any different? I don’t have a simple answer for that, but I intended to address the question via a look at Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which sets Conrad’s novel against the Vietnam War, and also to examine colonialism as a racist endeavor. My primary text for this last topic would be a chapter from Darkwater (1920) by W.E.B. Du Bois. In  “The Souls of White Folk,” Du Bois presents a condemnation of white supremacy that I highly recommend reading:

“How many of us today fully realize the current theory of colonial expansion, of the relation of Europe, which is white, to the world which is black and brown and yellow? Bluntly put, that theory is this: It is the duty of white Europe to divide up the darker world and administer it for Europe’s good.”

Possibly Fruitless Pursuits

A few other ideas were on burners even further back. I was hoping to continue exploring my idea of the thin graphite line, a conception of artists, writers and thinkers as a bulwark against barbarism, in light of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Another idea that may not have panned out was investigating des choses in Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme (2010) as examples of das Ding in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. A lighter post was to be a look at the variety of pop styles exhibited by Kylie Minogue’s discography from Light Years (2000) to Kiss Me Once (2014).

Alas, these posts will never come to full fruition. However, while The Gleaming Sword is slowing, I am still here. I welcome comments at the bottom of the page or through Twitter (my profile). Now I leave you--only temporarily!--with some music:

 

 

The Philosophy of Zombie Strippers

Woefully unimportant things have a way of lodging in my brain, so I never forgot about the unexpected success of Zombie Strippers back in 2008. When I ran across the DVD recently, I picked it up out of curiosity and was pleased to find it references several major philosophers.

When a facility running tests on zombies shares a building with a strip club, the worst is bound to happen. A zombie escapes and bites a pole dancer and it’s all downhill from there. The strippers feed on their clientele, discolor, and fall apart, but they keep on gyrating and peeling off garments. Eventually, the guns come out and the gore ramps up even further.

 

Surprisingly, Zombie Strippers is a cut above your usual B-movie about zombies or strippers, so if any of the above sounds intriguing, knock yourself out and look for these nods to great thinkers.

 

 

SOCRATES (470/469-399 BC)

Early in the film, the strip club DJ introduces the next dancer to take the floor:

“Now Bobby Sox, is gonna tease you with her Socrates!”

You caught the pun, right? Socrates was the ancient Greek philosopher made to drink hemlock for corrupting the youth of Athens. It was his habit to hang out in the agora, the city’s public gathering space, to discuss the issues of the day: What is the perfect form of society? Is there an afterlife? What is the nature of language? Much of what we know about Socrates comes to us through the writings of other ancients, most notably the dialogues of Plato.

Plato’s dialogues showcase a form of discussion lacking in public discourse today. Typically, the interlocutors will venture their respective ideas of, say, justice, and then make rational objections to each other’s hypotheses. Often, when reason reveals a flaw in an argument, its purveyor will abandon or revise his position. The result is a conversation that makes progress, steadily drawing near a more perfect conception of the truth. When was the last time a talking head on television showed any capacity for backing down in the face of a superior argument?

 

RENÉ DESCARTES (1596-1650)

Proceeding forward along the history of philosophy, our next thinker appears as the club descends into mayhem. A stripper and her ditzy boyfriend confront a soldier hunting zombies. The soldier demands that they say something human to prove they aren't zombies, and the boyfriend does his best:

“Uh . . . shit! Could you give me something easier? Okay, okay! Um, I think therefore I am. I think? Actually, I have doubts about that one.”

“I think therefore I am” is the common English translation of French philosopher René Descartes’ Latin dictum Cogito ergo sum. Descartes wanted to set the sciences on a firm foundation but realized our senses often deceive us. In fact, it was possible to doubt just about everything. He even considered the possibility that the whole world was but a dream concocted by an evil daemon. So he looked around for one thing he couldn’t doubt, something solid to serve as a beginning point for constructing an entire system of knowledge, and--Voilà!--he realized that with all this doubting (thinking) going on, the existence of a doubter (the self) was certain.

 

 

Philosophers never let a good a proposition stand, so they have poked holes in this elegant maxim in the centuries since it appeared in Discourse on Method (1637). However, while it would be faint consolation to the philosophe, I still think we can say his first principle is pretty good.

 

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844-1900)

Earlier in the film, Kat (played by porn star Jenna Jameson) is in the dressing room reading The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche and even quotes it:

“That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?”

Okay, most of us know that one, but she can do even better:

“Yeah sure, but everything great must first wear a hideous and monstrous mask in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.”

Friedrich Nietzsche is a philosopher dear to me, although it has been years since I read and reread most of his major works. The first quote is from Twilight of the Idols (1888). The second has proven harder to pinpoint, but it may be from Beyond Good and Evil (1886), so Kat appears to have made it to the later Nietzsche.

Nietzsche remains a scary philosopher in the public imagination because of his bombastic writing style, iconoclastic quotes like “God is dead” and concepts like the will to power. Unfortunately, his ideas were not fully understood or even widely available until long after they had been purveyed in a twisted form by his sister and some of the 19th-Century’s worst political actors. The Übermensh, for example, describes an individual who is superior through self-overcoming, with no need to seek validation through power over others (previous post). In fact--if I remember my Walter Kaufmann correctly--Nietzsche was considered by many of his contemporaries to be a soft-spoken and polite fellow.

 

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE (1905-1980)

The philosophical references in Zombie Strippers are too numerous and forced not to be an intentional motif. When aspiring stripper Jessy is walking home one night, she passes a large sign bearing the name of her fictional hometown: SARTRE, NEBRASKA.

Jean-Paul Sartre, while not generally considered the handsomest of philosophers, was nonetheless able to convince his romantic partner, early feminist thinker and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, that an open relationship would be a good idea so he could entertain a young Algerian mistress whom he later adopted as a daughter.

JP--as I assume his amants knew him--is known as one of the great existentialist philosophers. In a wonderful essay entitled “What Is Existentialism?” he explains that whereas for centuries we have been taught that our essence (our soul) exists first and then comes to inhabit the flesh in existence, it’s actually the other way around. We are born, and through the experience of living in existence, we determine our essence. The choices you make, with no confidant but your own conscience, determine who you are. This is Descartes in reverse: I am, therefore I think.

Conclusion

What does all of this philosophy have to do with the deeper content of Zombie Strippers? At first, I was tempted to say there is no deeper content to Zombie Strippers--after all, it has a bit about a zombie firing pool balls out of her vagina--but the film actually makes an effort to comment on the cheap thrills pervasive in America today, cheap thrills that the movie itself represents but also underscores through references to our rich heritage of philosophical thought.

I would say all the philosophy I’ve described above is Philosophy 101, but of the above thinkers, I only studied Socrates and Descartes as an undergrad. I had to study Nietzsche and Sartre on my own, so I guess that makes this a notch above Philosophy 101. But that doesn’t spare this from being one of the most pointless blog posts ever.

 

 

Amor Fati and the Birth of a Child

A curious thing happened when my son was born. I found I was now okay with everything that had ever happened to me--both bad and good. Doubts about decisions made, resentment over wrongs received, pain over past suffering, it all disappeared. In fact, if given the chance to do life, with all its bumps, over again, I would have chosen for it all to happen exactly the same way, for all of it led to the birth of my son.

Other choices, other events would have led to a different life, maybe one with more money, maybe a professionally more successful one--or maybe not--but in any case, a life that, from my vantage point in this life, I don’t want. I didn’t have any thoughts along those lines before my son came along, but once he did, I found this change had occurred within me.

At the time, despite having already long been an atheist, I saw something of the Christian idea of redemption in my experience, for the sacrifice of Christ on the cross is said to effect a pardon for sins past and future. The retroactive nature of what had happened was stunning.

It recently occurred to me, however, how the nature of my experience is even more precisely described by Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati. This Latin phrase literally means the love of fate and is used by Nietzsche to describe the love of everything, not just the good, that happens. Furthermore, you don’t just tolerate the bad, you love it, you love it all:

“Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well. All things are chained and entwined together, all things are in love; if ever you wanted one moment twice, if ever you said: ‘You please me, happiness, instant, moment!’ then you wanted everything to return! You wanted everything anew, everything eternal, everything chained, entwined together, everything in love, O that is how you loved the world . . . ” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra)

As the above passage makes clear, Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati is closely linked to that of eternal recurrence: the belief that everything that happens will happen again and again in exactly the same way for eternity. An analysis of eternal recurrence isn’t necessary here, we only need note that you want the good moments to come again, and that means affirming the not-so-good moments tangled with them.

Have I ever said yes to one joy? Yes. When my son was born. And there have been many moments with him since that are, as they say, worth the world, moments that I would love to have come twice, or thrice, or countless times for infinity. And that means wanting everything that led to those moments and everything that stems from them.

Constantly holding on to this love of all amidst the daily grind is not easy, probably not even possible, but despite it all, the world has granted me a wonderful blessing that makes it possible in the precious moments to assert and truly believe that I live in the best of all possible worlds.

 

 

The Impotent and the Potent, Part 4—In Which the Android Sings

(continued from "In Which Zarathustra Spake")

One big problem with adherents of reactionary worldviews like that of Return of Kings is that their definition of themselves comes with a definition of others. Men must be masculine according to certain rules and women must be feminine according to certain rules. Norms of their choosing are to be imposed.

There is no room in this for a boy who decides to wear a dress to school. I remember watching Robert Smith of The Cure describe on Later . . . with Jools Holland the ridicule he faced when he did just that. I found the anecdote fascinating and respected him all the more because of his bravery. A world without Robert Smith, without The Cure, without men who wear mascara, is a poorer one. The same could be said for many of the world’s great artists, scientists and thinkers--as well as nonfamous folk--who don’t conform to their time’s or culture’s idea of masculinity or femininity and who in many cases bestowed their particular beauty on the world precisely because of that refusal.

 

To return to Nietzsche, while he spoke of the Übermensch, Kaufmann says he also spoke of the Normalmensch, the sick creature that results from conformity. I’m no follower of Nietzsche--his thought isn’t a system to be followed anyway--but I do believe that individuals are happier in a pluralistic climate and that pluralistic societies are healthier as a whole. America isn’t at the forefront of creating more open and inclusive societies, but it is making progress, and that’s what puts The Fear in male chauvinists. Their egos can’t handle a world that doesn’t spin around their phallus.

Sometimes, people such as myself who make a point of visibly griping are criticized for devoting too much attention to numbskulls, thereby generating interest in their causes and even making the feeble and unknown into the strong and famous. I have a nagging feeling that such criticism may be just in this case. The worst of the manosphere is unworthy of attention.

And yet, if someone doesn’t speak against the numbskulls, they will overrun the marketplace. In thinking about this, I keep coming back to alternative soul artist Janelle Monáe. From what I know of her life, her talent, and her values, she seems to be particularly skilled at self-creation of the sort Nietzsche might approve, going so far as to reinvent and portray herself as an android. Her song “Cold War,” suggests there is a fight to be fought, at the very least through moral example:

 

 

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The Impotent and the Potent, Part 3—In Which Zarathustra Spake

(continued from “In Which the Übermensh Has a Pair")

 I wrote the preceding passage about the Übermensh based on fairly extensive reading of Nietzsche and secondary sources in my free time years ago. To make sure the years hadn’t introduced a swerve to my understanding of the material, I went back and reviewed, adding in some unread material I’d been dying to get to, and I was surprised to find that the emphasis on self-improvement in Nietzsche as well as scholarship about his writing is much stronger even than I remembered.

Consider this from Walter Kaufmann’s classic introduction Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist:

“It was not the military or political successes [of Caesar] that Nietzsche looked to, but the embodiment of the passionate man who controls his passions: the man who, in the face of universal disintegration and licentiousness, knowing this decadence as part of his own soul, performs his unique deed of self-integration, self-creation, and self-mastery.”

Also from Kaufmann, and simply put:

“Tyranny over others is not part of Nietzsche’s vision.”

But the real meat is always in the primary sources. One of my favorite concepts from Nietzsche is giving style to oneself:

“One thing is needed. – ‘To give style’ to one’s character – a great and rare art! He exercises it who surveys all that his nature presents in strength and weakness and then moulds it to an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason, and even the weaknesses delight the eye. . . . It will be the strong, imperious natures which experience their subtlest joy in exercising such control, in such constraint and perfecting under their own law . . . ” (from The Gay Science)

And more, this from “Of the Way of the Creator” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

“Can you furnish yourself with your own good and evil and hang up your own will above yourself as a law? Can you be judge of yourself and avenger of your law? It is terrible to be alone with the judge and avenger of one’s own law. It is to be like a star thrown forth into empty space and into the icy breath of solitude.”

That’s true potency and it’s hard work and it has nothing to do with telling others who to be. Calls for a return to a past order that marginalizes those who don’t easily slot into that order are the whimperings of impotents. Real men, the man of the future, the manly man, the alpha dog, and so forth should be so grounded in themselves that other people behaving differently is not a threat, but a reason to celebrate.

 

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The Impotent and the Potent, Part 2—In Which the Übermensh Has a Pair

(continued from “In Which the Manosphere Needs a Pair”)

 

Return of Kings does, of course, deny misogyny. Yet the eight key beliefs themselves define women in terms that many women simply do not want for themselves and that is a big problem. No one gets to decide for others what their sex or gender roles should be, with whom they should sleep, or where their value primarily comes from. Threatened by a world in which their worldview is losing, they make up a code for reality whereby they are the rightful winners. Instead of Return of Kings, they should name their website Return to Infancy, where instead of a scepter, every man wields a baby's rattle.

To be clear, I am not saying there is anything wrong with being a man or woman who exemplifies, respectively, masculinity or femininity as traditionally defined. Nor am I saying that all arguments by feminists, gay rights advocates, etc. are above criticism. But Return of Kings makes it clear that there is a specific and very limited order to which people should conform, and for this I have only condemnation.

Also to be clear, I’m still exploring the manosphere as I write this. It appears that not all aspects of it are as backwards as Return of Kings. Poking around the Internet, I ran across this post by Kid Strangelove via Manosphere.com that isn’t all bad. The post raises ways traditional and emerging social practices adversely and unfairly affect men. Apparently, other environs in the manosphere skip the social commentary and agon in favor of simply celebrating traditionally masculine fashion, sports, etc. If you simply must participate, be vigilant. Compared to the darkness of Return of Kings, Maxim looks positively enlightened.

My advice to men threatened by powerful women, gay men and others who unsettle them is to improve themselves. Self-improvement already appears to be a big part of the manosphere’s philosophy, but the focus is often on getting “game” and it comes with an awful lot of hate: slut-shaming, fat-shaming, homophobia, etc. These would-be kings have discovered, as have many before them, that one of the easiest ways to feel good about oneself is to insult others. 

Even though Friedrich Nietzsche was not addressing gender roles when he formulated his idea of the Übermensh, I feel like it is instructive here. Übermensh is often translated as superman or overman. It designates a particular type of superior individual, which has unfortunately made it an attractive concept to every jackass looking for an authority to tell him he is better than everyone else.

The problem for those who use the idea of the Übermensh in this way is that the overman is defined by the strength to overcome him or herself. The Übermensh is so superior due to this ability to grow as a person that he or she does not need to lord it over anyone. In fact, as soon as you begin to do so, you immediately lose the right. If you would be über, my dear Mensch, then you must master thyself and look no further.

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Nihilism in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons

Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons is about many things--parents and children, a fading social order and an emerging new one, romantic love--but the heart of the novel around which all else is arranged is the nihilism of the young medical student Yevgeny Bazarov. Indeed, in his book Modernism and Nihilism, Shane Weller writes that it was Fathers and Sons more than any other work that gave the term nihilism currency.

Nihilism is generally defined as the belief that nothing has any meaning. The Oxford Guide to Philosophy says, “By definition, the nihilist believes in nothing and disdains all values.” As Weller points out, however, nihilism can take many forms. There are nihilisms--philosophical, political, social, Nietzschean, Heideggerian and so forth--and various “deployments” throughout history.

Bazarov’s nihilism in Fathers and Sons is of the destructive sort. Seeing all norms and institutions as empty, he disregards them and wishes to see them cleared away without himself desiring to replace them with anything. He doesn’t believe in social hierarchy, superstition or art. Soon after Bazarov comes to stay at Arkady Petrovitch’s house, he gets into a philosophical discussion with his friend’s family. Here is a brief exchange with Arkady’s father:

“Allow me, though,” began Nikolai Petrovitch. “You deny everything; or, speaking more precisely, you destroy everything… But one must construct, too, you know.”

“That’s not our business now… The ground wants clearing first.”

     --(Fathers and Children, translated by Constance Garnett)

Bazarov’s philosophy is different from what Weller calls programmatic nihilism, which seeks to remake the world. In fact, for all his contempt of the status quo, he has no belief in progress either.

For Friedrich Nietzsche, nihilism as the sense that nothing has any meaning is the result of that which we considered the highest value turning out to be of no value at all. The central crisis of modernity, one which society as a whole became unable to deny in the 19th Century, is the death of God, and it poses a question we are all familiar with today: If there is no God, what gives life meaning?

Western civilization’s highest good, the monotheistic God, turned out to be nothing more than the product of the smoke and mirrors of our own consciousness. In the modern world, we are all faced with this nihilism, the absence of what was for so long taken to be the objective ground of all values, but nonetheless some, unable or unwilling to face it, turn away to veneration of the smoke and mirrors in their head.

Nietzsche, unlike Bazarov, saw nihilism as a force to aid as well as overcome. If nihilism is destruction, then the solution is creation. If what we have valued has passed away, then we need new values. The artist, through his work, brings forth new values, his or her values, and imposes them on the world through force of will, places them against the nothingness, like a painter portraying his subject against negative space, or a musician invoking music out of silence.

My own beliefs have traced the path of nihilism outlined by Nietzsche. In the years after my infatuation with religion, I realized that I could no longer maintain my intellectual integrity and still believe in God, whether that of the mild Methodism of my upbringing, that of the fundamentalist Baptists who courted me, or that of the sophisticated Christianity of my professors in college and the theologians we studied. As a seeker for truth, I could hardly accept the notion of a being for which there is not only no proof, but for which not even a single compelling argument that can withstand scrutiny or even a single piece of solid evidence exists.

At that point, my highest value had been devalued. This was never a cause of utter despair for me, for I was convinced that anything that wasn’t true shouldn’t be believed, but nonetheless, as the years passed, my thoughts sometimes strayed into nihilistic territory. If there is no God, no moral order imposed on the universe, then on the grand scale of the universe, what do the worst atrocities matter?

It has taken some time to find new values and bases for them, but I have and continue to do so. There may not be a divinity to impose order on the world, but I do, through the force of my will, even determined as it may be by natural causes. My values are those of secular humanism and they can do much good in the world--some would say more good than those of fantastical superstitious systems.

I was never in any danger of falling into the blackest, most destructive of nihilisms anyway, because such nihilism is, for basically decent and mentally sound folks, impossible to uphold. Along our mental journeys, we may rationally reach a point where we declare that nothing has any meaning, but we cannot stop life from having meaning for us--it just does whether or not we like it, understand it, or think it should.

Nihilism is the impossible philosophy, and this is something the characters in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons demonstrate.

Like many great novels, Fathers and Sons is populated with a wide variety characters and we see that for each of them, life has meaning in different ways. For the fathers and mothers, the meaning lies principally in the well-being of their children, although they do have other values as well, like Nikolai Petrovitch with his music, reading and desire to modernize his farm, and Pavel Petrovich with his aristocratic dignity and foppish Anglophilia.

Life has meaning for the novel’s nihilists as well. It is plain from the earliest pages that Arkady’s heart isn’t into it--that he harbors sympathy for the backwards ways of his family, their stuffy customs and foolish superstitions--and he eventually falls madly in love with Katya, marries, and presumably settles down to a conventional existence with kids and all the rest.

Bazarov mocks Arkady for becoming a “jackdaw” (“a most respectable family bird”), but even he, the novel’s most strident nihilist, falls prey to love, becoming infatuated with Anna Odintsova. It comes to nothing, and even on his deathbed, he remains defiant, declaring:

“I said I should rebel,” he shrieked hoarsely, with his face inflamed and distorted, shaking his fist in the air, as though threatening someone; “and I rebel, I rebel!”

While his spirit is admirable, we have seen its limits in more than love. He participated in his father’s medical practice, with care, almost as if...it meant something to him. And this should come as no surprise, for throughout the book his passion for learning about the natural world was evident, and in the end, it was this passion that led to his contracting typhus.

The experiences of the characters in Fathers and Sons are much like our own. We construct personae for ourselves, worry over things, dedicate ourselves to causes, and fall in various kinds of love. We might ask as Bazarov does on occasion, “What good is it?”, and in the long run, on a cosmological scale, perhaps none of it is any good at all. The universe will someday undergo heat death or some other demise, long before then the sun will turn into a red giant and scorch the earth, and in not so long at all, each one of us will die, but until then, we cannot help life having meaning. It simply does.