It’s amazing, but sometimes we do not notice the worst in our lives until we are sufficiently distanced from them, until we step back from them, as it were, and give them their space. We give them their space so that they may–continue doing what they do best, doing what they have done, remaining in their rut. So it is not out of bitterness that we must take leave sometimes; it is simply, or utterly, because we have been called somewhere else, in order to give our energies there for a while, as we gave our energies formerly to our former lives, our former projects and friends, our former ambitions and ways of filling our days. But then–we look back. We look back on what we were for a time; indeed, we look back on what we are still partly carrying with us into the future, what we seem not to be able to completely shake off; we look back on it as on a faraway stage-set and we mutter to ourselves, or our heart putters with what nobility it has left in its arteries, How poor! How stupid! How could I? This life, as we have lived it and still partly live, we realize is all poverty and filth and wretched contentment, just as Nietzsche warned. He warned, but said as well that such a time is our greatest hour, the time of the great contempt. The great contempt as self-contempt blending into world-contempt, as, like any strong curse, like Job’s curse at the day he was born, it realizes the infamy of a world that breeds such contempt, or, conversely, it realizes its complicity with the world, or with the highest, what is even over in above the world, with God Godself, in relation to this infamy. The infamy is as much the world as his, as much God’s as the world’s and his, so the contempt spreads accordingly. Nietzsche, however, refused to take our commonsense leanings and proclaim such a spell of contempt the uttermost of undesirability. No, such contempt turns out to be, or can turn out to be, our greatest hour, the hour when we may turn, after looking back (or perhaps we will discover that we should not look back), to a life that, to quote Nietzsche again, justifies existence itself.
The greatest suffering teaches us to so turn in our hearts, as Job turned in his, notwithstanding, almost in defiance of, his innocence. But Job was in the mire of his suffering and right in the thick of it; as Alphonso Lingis describes suffering phenomenologically in his work, suffering is this being imprisoned in oneself and as though backed up into a corner, only able to scream or cry or curse or prostrate in helplessness in deafening silence from this vantage. We are speaking of a different phenomenon from Job’s, the different suffering that can breed contempt as wholeheartedly, the one brought by this distancing, this looking-back or at least this taking-leave, the phenomenon Nietzsche was probably more readily after in the aforementioned passage from Zarathustra or other such passages, hinting in a similar direction. What is it that has us take leave sometimes, and what is it that gives us the sense that that life from which we have taken leave is worse than the life toward which we are beckoned and are now traveling, is, perhaps, in all honesty, worst, at least worst yet? Could we be mistaken at such times and in such contempt, despite the long time it has taken us to reach this perspective, this vantage from which our lives before look meager or poor or–plain stupid?
To begin with the second question: In such times as these, as these we have been considering, the hours of our great contempt, mistakes, failing and faltering, is the name of the game; we cannot escape the sheer possibility of being mistaken, even in our greatest commitments and turns or movements, perhaps especially there–definitely especially there. But this does not eliminate from our insight the phenomenon of growth, since growth, indeed, is perspectival and a MANNER OF MOVEMENT, a WAY OF BEING in relation to other ways of being, before anything else. It still makes sense, despite this perspectival relativization, this thorough perspectivization, of our practices and the ways we take our course through life, to speak of one course being more worthy than the other. Especially when these perspectives which can widen and shrink, which can overcome and be overcome, especially when it is their chief concern to make such judgments, and find themselves at their best. At their best, at their maximum, at the point precisely when they are ready to leave this maximum behind, for another game, for another shot at praising life, affirming life in its grandeur. For it is just this grandeur, the incredible diversity and magnitude that go to make up the fabric of life, weaving and counter-weaving with one another, that goaded him on and got him to see, when it goaded him a good enough distance, that his life, even at its high-point, was small, all-too-human, small and pathetic. To see this former life as worse, or worst, though, is again not to see it in bitterness, for the direction of this contemptful glance is for the better, the best, the unspoken future which whispers to today with challenges, yes, but also with promises and tender kisses. Partnered with life in such a way, we promise back, catapult ourselves into this tomorrow with what we have learned today and yesterday, only with what we have learned, what can be made into the best and not, as we are wont, with its sad notes and gloomy tinny singing. It is growth when we realize the turn off the road we have taken AS just such a turn, when we see the dead-end of the road we have traveled until now, or when we see that there are avenues besides the one we are treading.
But can’t it be that you turn–into disaster? That the road you leave behind was the better, and you turn, despite all your confidence, only to plummet off any ground, only to break into pieces? Because you didn’t realize why that way had been closed off to you to begin with, you didn’t read the signs with anything of perceptiveness, even though they were right before you. Again, although when put in this manner the objection gains in strength and vividness, we have approached the matter already, and have given a sufficient response: what grows is thoroughly and essentially perspectival, and these perspectives, the multiplicity of perspectives that grow and change always in relation to one another, cannot help but be valuative. Such is there direction and their way of being what they are. Mistakes are precisely not ignored; indeed, the perspectivism of existence calls for them–growth, in other words, is ridden with mistakes, sometimes of the most dreadful sort.
To approach the first question, though, of what gets us into this business of overcoming ourselves to begin with, what makes us see an avenue when we might otherwise not and go on walking our contented walk: What calls us, in other words, to this alternative life, this option for a new or different way of living? We have already seen, though we have not said it as explicitly: life itself. Life itself, its diversity and multiplicity, the way in which it is many and at the same time many of different sorts and classes and manners, this, this complexity mixed with sheer number, with quantity, has poked us in the direction of overcoming ourselves, overcoming, taking leave and surmounting, our former lives, even the former grounds of our lives (to approach, indirectly, part of the concern riddling the objection above). Why, or for what, Warum oder Wozu? Because–we must pause because it is so hard to be strict here; perhaps there are other spurs to the turn we imagine, Job’s spur to start–because of their smallness, their meagerness, their filth and self-contentment, because of how they imagine that they had arrived at final answers, at finality, when they hadn’t, when the game, the child’s game, still goes on. Contempt, therefore, as both danger, a night, and calling itself, a day, itself, as the lowest hour and the highest. Contempt itself calls us to maximize ourselves not as a better version of what we have been hitherto, but a better version in respect to a visionary sense of life, for life, for which our highest standards and achievements, our greatest practices and ways of life, are but pawns or dice-rolls, part of an adventure, but a small part, the dust beneath the hero’s feet. And the hero is life. Always life, but in this case especially.
The hero is life and life in its courage, if we may dare to continue in our anthropomorphizing, life itself all courage and no fear, it seems, as though she wishes to counter the Socratic argument, goes forth wastefully and with a grand accounting beyond reckoning and, like the God of old, only so much more explicit, with so much more bone and muscle and flesh, pushes us to become just like her, like a terrifying mother, forces us into love of her, and therefore love of ourselves, love of all things; slams the door shut on us behind us, so that we HAVE to keep going, through whatever maze lies before us, so that we HAVE to keep twisting down its corridors–and be thankful for it, no less.
Love the Dust 