My partner is reading Freud's *Beyond the Pleasure Principle* and it's exciting in two ways. First, it's a thrill to hear her summarize in a breath what I'd be groping for in infinite regression; second, it's exciting because it resonates with some of the thinking I've been doing about writing and thinking and the way thoughts are connected.
Freud seems to be puzzling about why people do things that debilitate them, that interfere with pleasure, immediate or deferred. Instead, they will get tangled in myths and practices that don't do them any good and make them unhappy. What logic is that? But the answer, that we seem driven to engage in a sort of imaginative control over events we can't actually control, rings true for me. It seems to be another way of arguing for the utility of myth--that we create stories because they give us something even more valuable than pleasure: they give us meaning. Usually I think of "making meaning" as a pretty definite and constructive act: figuring out mysteries in science or just personal memory; finding a form that will enable you to engage in a certain kind of conversation (such as a blog!); noting the results of long effort and planning for the future based on that feedback. Making meaning--as opposed to just doing stuff--is something you have to intend to do, right?
Or not. And here is the problem. For creative acts, including meditation and love, the most important events of making meaning are not all about achieving a goal; lots of times, it's more a matter of falling into a conclusion, discovering something, not just driving toward it. So does uncertainty matter? Can it be a necessary part of making things meaningful? What does it do for people (like me!) who are very goal-directed and serious? How can I encounter the limits of my own control without succumbing to either nihilism or fundamentalism?
These two poles--nihilism and fundamentalism--for me are about the same. Nihilism is cynicism at the ground-out end of a bad week of drinking. Nihilism is quietly histrionic, but also ironic, unintentionally. It rejects meaning (curiousity, patience, change) by displacing it with a flat assertion, a kind of flat certainty about the ultimate failure of meaning (a paradox that would be funny to anyone but a nihilist!). It's an intellectual response to being depressed (and depression is often a lack of oxygen and sleep, I've found). In this way, nihilism is a instantiation of going *beyond* the Pleasure Principle: one finds meaning, in this case, in the conviction that there is no meaning that can, certainly and enduringly, endure or redeem us. It's a kind of absolutism.
Fundamenalism is the same assertion flipped on its back. Fundamentalism claims that there is an ultimate order that stitches all events together ("even the hairs on your head are numbered"); it's an extrapolation of one's own hope for absolute, guaranteed meaning. Fundamentalists, unlike nihilists, have heaven to retreat to; their actions are guaranteed and sanctioned.
Both nihilists and fundamentalists tend not to be very curious or humorous, in my experience. Both nihilism and fundamentalism are struggles: one professes losing the struggle to make meaning; the other professes to have won. They are ultimate states, imaginative absolutes taken as accurate descriptions of a shared world (but a world only the wise can see clearly, they claim).
So how do you do it, negotiate between a deep anticipation of ultimate order (fundamentalism) and a disparing nostalgia for absolute order (nihilism)? How do people do this? How also do you teach this (I'm a teacher, so I use an image of teaching it as my way of making sense of it)? How do you construct a college classroom, a writing class, a writing assignment sequence, a curriculum, a college so that people can make sense of things?
More tomorrow....(I have an agreement with my class to write daily)....
DF
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