Excess Lucidity

Painting by Darina Muravjeva

In The Denial of Death, the anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote the following:

The prison of one’s character is painstakingly built to deny one thing and one thing alone: one’s creatureliness. The creatureliness is the terror. Once admit that you are a defecating creature and you invite the primeval ocean of creature anxiety to flood over you. But it is more than creature anxiety, it is also man’s anxiety, the anxiety that results from the human paradox that man is an animal who is conscious of his animal limitation. Anxiety is the result of the perception of the truth of one’s condition. What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression—and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would create such complex and fancy worm food? Cynical deities, said the Greeks, who use man’s torments for their own amusement.

In his book The First Three Minutes, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg made a statement that runs counter to everything that believers in divine order and, indeed, believers in a grand natural order believe; but his statement complements Becker's thinking. Weinberg wrote:

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

This feeling that the more consciousness and knowledge a being has, the more unfortunate the being is, and the less consciousness or the closer the being is to animals, the less unfortunate the being is, is echoed by many thinkers and writers. The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa, a writer who did not claim to be a pessimist — although he wrote that life seems to be a mistake of matter and that the weariness of life made him wish he had never existed — is full of statements that curse self-consciousness and intelligence. Among several examples, one of the most striking is the long quote that follows:

Life, for most people, is a pain in the neck that they hardly notice, a sad affair with some happy respites, as when the watchers of a dead body tell anecdotes to get through the long, still night and their obligation to keep watch. I’ve always thought it futile to see life as a valley of tears; yes, it is a valley of tears, but one in which we rarely weep. Heine said that after great tragedies we always merely blow our noses. As a Jew, and therefore universal, he understood the universal nature of humanity.

Life would be unbearable if we were conscious of it. Fortunately we’re not. We live as unconsciously, as uselessly and as pointlessly as animals, and if we anticipate death, which presumably (though not assuredly) they don’t, we anticipate it through so many distractions, diversions and ways of forgetting that we can hardly say we think about it.

That’s how we live, and it’s a flimsy basis for considering ourselves superior to animals. We are distinguished from them by the purely external detail of speaking and writing, by an abstract intelligence that distracts us from concrete intelligence, and by our ability to imagine impossible things. All this, however, is incidental to our organic essence. Speaking and writing have no effect on our primordial urge to live, without knowing how or why. Our abstract intelligence serves only to elaborate systems, or ideas that are quasi-systems, which in animals corresponds to lying in the sun. And to imagine the impossible may not be exclusive to us; I’ve seen cats look at the moon, and it may well be that they were longing to have it.

All the world, all life, is a vast system of unconscious agents operating through individual consciousnesses. Like two gases that form a liquid when an electric current passes through them, so two consciousnesses – that of our concrete being and that of our abstract being – form a superior unconsciousness when life and the world pass through them.

Happy the man who doesn’t think, for he accomplishes instinctively and through organic destiny what the rest of us must accomplish through much meandering and an inorganic or social destiny. Happy the man who most resembles the animals, for he is effortlessly what the rest of us only are by hard work; for he knows the way home, which the rest of us can reach only through byways of fiction and hazy return routes; for he is rooted like a tree, forming part of the landscape and therefore of beauty, while we are but myths who cross the stage, walk-ons of futility and oblivion dressed in real-life costumes.

Pessoa, decades before Becker, basically says the same thing that Becker said in his work: we invented an entire apparatus to make us unconscious of the fact that we defecate, suffer and serve as food for worms. In Pessoa's case, in fact, it is not even necessary to invent an apparatus. The apparatus is factory-made, especially for the vast majority of human beings, whom Pessoa believed did not think, that is, the vast majority who he believed did not understand the situation in which they find themselves. Pessoa — who, I repeat, made the point of emphasizing that he was not a pessimist — considers those who go with the flow of life and do not think about existence to be happier. I tend to agree with him. For example, he writes:

I loathe the happiness of all these people who don’t know they’re unhappy. Their human life is full of what, in a true sensibility, would produce a surfeit of anxieties. But since their true life is vegetative, their sufferings come and go without touching their soul, and they live a life that can be compared only to that of a man with a toothache who won a fortune – the genuine good fortune of living unawares, the greatest gift granted by the gods, for it is the gift of being like them, superior just as they are (albeit in a different fashion) to happiness and pain.

That’s why, in spite of everything, I love them all. My dear vegetables!

Although it may seem like it, Pessoa is not being a complete elitist when he writes these words. In another passage, he states that:

The weariness caused by all illusions and all that they entail – our losing them, the uselessness of our having them, the pre-weariness of having to have them in order to lose them, the regret of having had them, the intellectual chagrin of having had them while knowing full well they would end.

The consciousness of life’s unconsciousness is the oldest tax levied on the intelligence. There are unconscious forms of intelligence – flashes of wit, waves of understanding, mysteries and philosophies – that are like bodily reflexes, that operate as automatically as the liver or kidneys handle their secretions.

In other words, for Pessoa, even among those who are brilliant there is a great number of individuals who are pacified by unconsciousness, consumers of various illusions, who also vegetate. They are like living calculators, capable of solving problems and generating great value for the human world, but are incapable of seeing beyond their illusions. Although brilliant in many aspects, they do not have enough intelligence or perhaps bad luck to understand the fate of having excessive lucidity. To have excessive lucidity is to know that life needs to have at least a certain degree of unconsciousness, otherwise it cannot continue living, given the emptiness of meaning and the pain that all sentient creatures have to endure. The cursed ones who are capable of understanding this without clinging to theological or secular illusions find themselves in the state that Pessoa calls Decadence. The unfortunate inhabitants of Decadence understand that they are neither part of a divine plan, nor part of a natural or historical plan or whatever:

And so, not knowing how to believe in God and unable to believe in an aggregate of animals, I, along with other people on the fringe, kept a distance from things, a distance commonly called Decadence. Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

The only reason we don't all fall into despair is because we have learned to limit the content of our consciousness through thousands of years of evolution. This is what the philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe argued. For Zapffe, we are essentially metaphysical animals, seeking a greater purpose for our lives and for the problems we encounter throughout our lives. There are, of course, culturally and individually manufactured intra-worldly meanings. But these meanings do not always hold up, and we are always just a few steps away from existential horror. These mechanisms of limiting consciousness, however, do not work for everyone. Some people, broken since birth or by life, are able to see what is there at the end of the tunnel. To their despair, it is not a light, but the howling void of nothingness. For the writer Thomas Ligotti, an admirer of Zapffe, without the well-intentioned emotions that keep our brains calm, we would lose our balance and fall into the abyss of lucidity. According to him, lucidity brings the perfect knowledge of nothingness and pain to beings endowed with consciousness.

I claim that people with excess lucidity are broken because they lack a crucial natural adaptation. They would be more content with everything and more capable of leaving descendants if they did not lack the mechanism that constantly deceives the species. From the most brute men to the most renowned scientists, almost the entire species is not helpless because of the natural mechanism that deceives and says that life is not malignantly useless. This mechanism, for Schopenhauer, was a single Will that permeates everything that exists and subsists on its own outside of time and space. It is only in the human animal, possessing self-awareness and intelligence, that the understanding of the Will can be achieved. However, this does not mean that everyone will achieve this understanding. For Schopenhauer, few, in fact, are capable. For him, however, these few are the best of humanity. Among these, there is an even smaller group of people who completely deny themselves, starving the Will that animates them: the ascetics. Far from being broken, for Schopenhauer they are the most advanced of us. They would be happier if they did not see the world through the Veil of Maya, yes, but that is not the point. It is from the point of view of heroism that we can consider the ascetic as the most perfect of humans, not from the evolutionary point of view.

By considering them the pinnacle of humanity, Schopenhauer does not mean, of course, that those who are able to see reality without illusions are free from suffering. On the contrary, according to the philosopher, the more intelligent the individual is, the more he understands the reality of the world, the more he will suffer. But this individual will also be able to deny the Will within himself — and this, for Schopenhauer, places him at a higher level of perfection than the rest, even with all the suffering. Although I agree with much of what Schopenhauer says, the fact still remains for me that the deluded, the brutish and those who are incapable find a contentment that those I call “broken” do not find. For Schopenhauer, the ascetic is the pinnacle of what we can be and he is not broken, on the contrary, he is a perfected expression of the Will, which becomes capable of perceiving the horror and emptiness of existence. Perhaps the ascetic is exactly that. However, I think that, in the ascetic, the mechanism of illusion also does not work, as it does not work in those who Fernando Pessoa says are inhabitants of Decadence.

Ascetics differ from the rest of the broken not in their excess lucidity, which both possess, but in what they do with it. The ascetic dies to the world while still alive, denying himself and living for something else: whether in seclusion, in giving to the suffering, or in meditation. All of this is guided by various myths related to the religious or secular culture of each ascetic, it is true. He inhabits the Decadence that is the consciousness of life, but he elevates himself and makes his earthly existence a mission of detachment. However, since there is nothing outside the concrete existence that surrounds us, there are those who criticize asceticism as madness and even weakness. In fact, placing too much weight on the literal truth of religions that promote asceticism is problematic because there is no archaeological or scientific evidence that proves the reality of even a single supernatural event. However, Schopenhauer himself argued that the anchor of asceticism is beyond the literalness of religious myths: it is found in a figurative, allegorical, philosophical sense.

But beyond the literalness, the idea that rejecting the world would be madness simply because the existence that surrounds us is all there is seems to me to be an attempt to end the conversation and declare oneself victorious without foundation. Those who refrain from judging life by claiming that it is not possible to do so are implicitly affirming it, whether they want to or not. They inhabit the threshold between excess lucidity and illusion, creating a new illusion: that existence, with all its pain and lack of meaning, cannot be questioned and that all we can do is accept it. We can only submit to it, without complaint. However, this is something that no one does or has done. In a way, the ascetic who lets himself die of hunger manages to be closer to total acceptance than the most staunch life affirmer, since being alive is not accepting things that come naturally, things that are inevitable like hunger and other basic needs of any organism. Being alive is moving all the time to escape naturally uncomfortable situations. Accepting this reality is accepting instability, since stability is something that is not part of becoming.

It is for this reason that Cioran wrote that Nietzsche was a false iconoclast, who tore down idols only to raise others: life, becoming, existence, unquestionable as will to power. Cioran's thinking echoes the analyses of Pessoa, Zapffe, Becker and Ligotti. Consciousness, according to Cioran, is a biological scandal that removes us from the absolute present in which animals live. In short, human consciousness is a mistake of nature. In fact, for Cioran, life itself is already a mistake or, in his words, a “bad taste of matter”. Consciousness, therefore, would be an even greater mistake than life itself in less conscious or vegetative states. In the game of life, our species has apparently been dealt the winning deck of cards by nature, since we have become the dominant species on our planet. Today, we are the masters that hold the destiny of the entire biosphere in our hands. However, this victory depends on the constant maintenance of a certain degree of unconsciousness that allows the vast majority of us to go about our lives as if we were going somewhere and, again, as if all of this were not malignantly useless.

by Fernando Olszewski