I'm very well now, but it's taken time

Someone demanded in effect that I explain why Nietzschean philosophy would not lead to genocide.  I declined to answer at the time because it seemed like a loaded question, which no answer would be sufficient to solve.  For instance, one could ponder long and hard on whether the stock market might not lead to genocide.   One could ponder the same about nature reserves -- but then it becomes more obvious the question is loaded.

"When one is misunderstood as a whole, it is impossible to remove completely a single misunderstanding. One has to realize this lest one waste superfluous energy on one's defense."  -- said Nietzsche.

It could be argued that because one hasn't understood something, the other party has done a poor job in conveying its meaning.   My interlocutor in fact did try to present this view -- namely that Nietzsche is a poor communicator because this interlocutor and others could not discern Nietzsche's intentions regarding morality.

When communication devolves into mindless rhetoric -- "I can't understand this, therefore it must be wrong!" -- I think this is the last splutter of failed communication.

I can' t understand the majority of things in the universe.  Much of complex physics escapes me and the efforts I had to go to, to crack Nietzsche, spanned a couple of decades.  To my credit, not very often during this time did I conclude, "I can't understand this, therefore it must be wrong."   I probably did have a couple of lapses like that, but they were not many.   Had I lapsed too often in this manner, I would certainly have given up the project of ever understanding Nietzsche, or any other philosopher for that matter.

Real understanding takes time -- but there are also mental barriers.  The mind is a palimpsest.   Into it has been etched all the ideas and ideologies of one's society and one's time.  Some of these ideals have left deep scores in one's subconscious; others less so.  In all, though, there is something written there, giving emotional structure to one's meanings.  The emotional sense of what is real and what is important may seem so compelling that one can't imagine others having a different way of seeing things.   Depending on historical circumstances and culture and other events, we vary in our ways of making sense of the world.  This ought to be the basic knowledge we bring when handling others or engaging with their questions.

When someone asks me to explain a philosophy, they should come armed with the knowledge as to whether they would like me to explain Nietzsche to them in his terms or in theirs.   One might go to a football game and, not understanding the rules, ask to have them explained.  Alternatively, one could go to the game and complain that it is incoherent as it fails to communicate its purpose effectively.   "It doesn't make any sense to me at all.  Explain football to me in terms of cricket.   I'm familiar with cricket," he says, "but at the moment football isn't communicating."  If I had tried to explain football in terms of cricket that would not work.  Similarly, Nietzsche can't be explained in terms of morality.

It's not just a cognitive issue, but emotional one.   Judeo-Christian morality has often found a place in one's emotional structures.  It gives life meaning.   For instance, in my twenties, I thought the goal of life was to morally perfect oneself.    Looking back on it, it seems absurd.  For reasons I will never be able to gauge, I had presumed that I could get ahead in life by exhibiting perfection in the public sphere and being a people-pleaser.   Coming from repressive, proper, right-wing Rhodesia, I suspect I was only acting according to what my socialization had put into me.   It made me deeply unhappy.  I was very angry about a lot of things, but you wouldn't have known it, because I didn't feel angry.  I didn't feel much of anything at all, except for the concrete of duty on my shoulders.   They were slim shoulders and life seemed heavy and oppressive.  I had no idea I was, but I was in a rage.

Then I began reading Nietzsche and an  immediate effect was an alleviation of part of the burden of Superego.  

The process of blasting away at my own mental structures took many years.   The point was to explode the structure of the prison without destroying myself.  Of course, this prison was part of my mind, so I did end up destroying quite a lot of myself, too.   I did this by means of "transgression" -- by going against the grain of certain patterns of behavior I'd been taught.  As I made progress, my physical health improved and I no longer suffered from colds and viruses perennially, as I had in the past.  I lost the ache around my neck and shoulders and unclenched my permanently tight jaw. By incorporating aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy, my body began to recover from years of abuse.   My mind itself had not properly grasped Nietzsche yet.  It took another couple of decades, during which time I dismantled and restored my being.

From my experience, I can understand why some people find Nietzsche difficult to grasp.  If the palimpsest of one's mind has been written over by a moral ideology, one will not grasp what one reads too easily.  That takes a lot of time and effort.   That effort won't be worth it if one is happy just the way one is.  I was certainly miserable, but in some cases, people imbibe just enough Christianity to keep them happy.  A small amount of poison can produce levity.

One becomes healthier through reading Nietzsche, so long as one does not combine his thoughts with Christian precepts or try to read his writings under the oppression of Superego.  These mental contaminants lead to a Naziification of Nietzsche  which won't be health-giving.  A reader who wishes only to understand Nietzsche through a moralizing lens will go away with a distorted understanding of the game, which he regrettably mistakes for mental clarity.  There can be no short cut on the path to real understanding.

Bataille was also useful.  Bataille is Nietzsche's 20th Century pupil.   He has some differences with Nietzsche, because they come from different centuries, which leads to having different purposes.   Whereas Nietzsche adopts an aristocratic tone, Bataille speaks to the barbarian in me.   For all the polite English manners and repressed emotions, Rhodesians were barbarians and had there not been a barbarian in my basement, my jaw would not have been fixed so tight.   In fact, this barbarian wanted to go to war, to rage and to kill everybody.  I had to let him out slowly.  So that he didn't kill me.

He had been in there too long and now his volcanic rage was liquid fury.  I wrapped him in soothing layers of dry ice, so that he didn't kill me.   Then I looked for avenues where it was safe to vent.  I knew I could definitely kill a distant stranger by that point.   It was one of the questions they asked me when I applied to join the army and I answered it with a strong affirmative.

But then Bataille rescued me although it took a while.  The process of transgression involves turning one's destructive impulses against oneself by pushing the boundaries of one's comfort.   Some of Bataille's writings are very sordid because he attacks the limited, polite dimensions of his psyche so violently.  In the same spirit, I attacked my excruciatingly considerate nature violently, in whatever ways I could manage.  Martial arts and my writing were two primary means.   I drew the barbarian out of the cellar by these methods and I tamed him well.

After a couple of decades I recovered from Christian morality and the way it was making me ill.   It wasn't easy, but the final step was facilitated by a more contemporary shaman, Dambudzo Marechera, who helped me recover from residual colonial guilt and the spiritual hangover of identity politics.

I'm very well now, but it's taken time.  And I'm not sure how to go about explaining this to someone still deeply entrenched in Christian morality.

2

One of the disadvantages of growing up during a war is that you have to learn to act and think like an adult, rather too early.   So, you are not really emotionally nurtured as a child, or indulged as a child, or given useful teaching as a child ought to be given.   You are taught to at least give the appearance of being self-reliant OR to be very, very ashamed of yourself.  There is no other path out of the forest.  For a child, war is not good for the soul.

I’ve had to go a great deal to overcome my own emotional emaciation, and it wasn’t easy.  If you are accustomed not to receive much emotional nourishment, you don’t know how to take it in, especially and above all when the environment changes – one no longer knows how to forage.

To me, Marechera’s motif of sacrifice – a kind of suicidal rain at the end of BLACK SUNLIGHT – meant the drought of war was over.   Shamans sacrifice themselves to end something very negative in the community, so I understood his writing implicitly in this sense, although I haven’t been able to explain my reaction until now.   Bataille says the poet sacrifices himself and that the work of art is meant to be devoured.   I don’t think the nature of this sacrifice makes sense to non-warlike people.  They have no need for some final ritual of purification.

The whole book of BLACK SUNLIGHT is clearly conciliatory between black and white people, since it dissolves the differences.   It reduces everything to HUMAN experience, or even to animal alertness as to what it means to be alive and threatened.   It is quite clear to me that in several parts of the book, there are textual references to some of Bataille’s writing.

So war is not always good and we need ritual purification from it – but the kind of ritual needed is related to the experiences of suffering, long term endurance and emotional emaciation.   If you haven’t had those experiences, the whole book can read like postmodern nonsense or like (the opposite of what it is) a celebration of gratuitous violence.   If you don’t have the basic emotional state of neediness, this book does not speak to you.   If you do have that warlike state of being conditioned into you, then it overloads you with emotional imagery of violence and then finally calls an end to your whole inclination to be at war.   It makes it seem too much, a kind of madness, and unnecessary.   In that sense, the suicide at the end of the book portends a rebirth of the kind of subjectivity  that is NOT warlike.

So I do not have a hunger for war.  I really managed, finally, to solve my problem of emotional emaciation through means other than by continuing to be at war.

I think Marechera’s use of Bataille’s motifs of presenting all of serious intent and human aims potentially laughable, sacred, sad and ecstatic, broke me out of my own linear thinking patterns and the necessity for retribution.   I no longer had that in me, after I had read the book about 20 times.

I am left with a residual sense that somehow I owe myself a great deal for having the persistence to have finally broken through in terms of my consciousness, although I feel that I owe Marechera a lot more for taking the risks he did to write in this way.   He genuinely wanted to heal his society, but without taking sides.