One of the common but unspoken phenomena to which humans everywhere are susceptible—especially those that have bottomed out after finding that life has very few stable guideposts for the individual—is that of existential despair, which takes as many forms as there are individuals. But while the forms are many, the phenomenon itself is constant; it underlies its various manifestations. It is not strictly universal, since not everyone experiences it—rather than a common malady such as the measles or the flu, it is a kind of despair available to those that have provoked the hidden foundations of their lives, that have been too curious about what lies beneath routine and the satisfied immersion in the everyday.
And who are these that drift, wayfarers of the world, lost in time and driven by strange fancies, the silent sufferers of a nameless, bodiless, elusive anxiety that Heidegger has called “Angst”? Of this Angst, Heidegger (with his usual inelegance and depth) writes, “nothing of that which is at hand and objectively present within the world, functions as what Angst is anxious about. The totality of relevance discovered within the world of things at hand and objectively present is completely without importance. It collapses. The world has the character of complete insignificance,” and he goes on to write that “what is threatening cannot approach from a definite direction within nearness, it is already ‘there’—and yet nowhere. It is so near that it is oppressive and stifles one’s breath—and yet it is nowhere.”[1]
The Angst of Heidegger, in other words, is that of a man realizing the contingency and subjectivity of his values, and the absence of an absolute or divine legitimacy to which he can ascribe them. It is a reaction to the depressive recognition of these as well as nothingness, a real and irremediable nothingness with which one now has to live, as though it were a hobgoblin of the soul. It is a skepticism to the point of despair, the incurable incredulity of that butcher who, having been asked why he is doing what he is, can only say, “I really don’t know why I am doing this or anything else.” As Arturo B. Fallico writes in his book, Art & Existentialism, this butcher “had stopped espousing any and all special projects. Had he been a philosopher or a scientist, he might have said the same thing. His values had collapsed in toto.”[2]
To those that have experienced the extremity of this state, it is monumental and terrifying. It is one of the forking paths: from this point forward, as an individual and as a human being, one can no longer petition parents for the answers, and peers become reflections of a mirror that has already begun to crack. Life itself has changed, becoming a strange and unrecognizable vacuum in which one is now liable to get lost.
But the despair of this existential distress confers a kind of lucidity eschewing those former states in which “impersonality of action and thought creates the illusion that everything that one does or thinks is self-evidently and intrinsically valuable and meaningful,” and affording a bird’s-eye view of what had been experienced as immediate and gratifying. This lucidity and detachment, inseparable from the despair of existential distress and the Angst that accompanies it, make up the preconditions of authenticity, which so many of the twentieth-century existentialists have recognized as the honorable and hard-earned quality of the true individual. Now one can begin the task of living in earnest—with greater despair and a more tenuous grip on life, yes, but also with the terrible lucidity conferring a unique, undiscovered courage about how to live life, and how to go about deriving meaning under a new set of laws.
One of the prominent dynamics of this existential state of realization is apathy, which is inevitable, but a feeling to be integrated and overcome. This is the apathy of the young Samuel Beckett whose plays were to exemplify the absurdity of existence, coming to be known as “absurdist” works of literature; it is also that of the euphoric pessimist, Emil Cioran, who exemplifies his brand of debilitating skepticism when he writes, in The Trouble with Being Born, that “activity and credulity are correlative terms.”[3] The skepticism that debilitates, the existential despair of a collapse of values experienced by the butcher, the severe apathy that the Cioran quotation would make inevitable—all these phenomena beset those that have entered into this kind of experience of life.
The newfound apathy devoid of life and vitality clamoring even for the negative emotions, such as terror or anger, as being better than the nothingness of apathy—this newfound apathy alternates with angst and despair as a recurrent feeling into which one lapses now and again. In the midst of vigorous activity, the pang of self-consciousness can lay low any efforts that seemed reasonable, even productive; this reasonableness is that of a self that now vies with a monstrous force whispering into the ears, with an obliterating and cynical venom: “Why do what you’re doing when it is utterly pointless, occurring in the context of a ‘pale blue dot’ orbiting a solar system whose outer reaches have yet to be explored, and whose surrounding galaxies engulf any legitimate purpose that you’ve assigned to this petty task of yours? You are the analogue of the ant marching in step through the blades of grass that constitute your rightful terrain, and its natural habitat—only you and your kind haven’t seen the feet above you, threatening to squash. You may even be arrogant enough to call these blades of grass the totality of what is, pluming yourself on your significance till you realize…”
This apathy is also that of the royal Hamlet, whom Friedrich Nietzsche illuminates in The Birth of Tragedy as a figure recognizing the absurdity of an existence that is unchangeable but that asks that Hamlet live as though it were otherwise; his response is cynical despair, apathy, bafflement. For in the whole, nothing at all can be changed by any individual; life feeds itself with itself, obliterating in order to subsist, and cruelty and horror, brutality and violence, are the negative corollaries of this fact of life. Generation and rebirth are also the inevitable and positive corollaries—but how can the individual strive for one when each entails the other? The man attempting to change the “way things are” as he conceives it is the one filling one hole by digging another. This is the problem of Hamlet.
Although it was the first of his published writings and one whose thoughts and sentiments he was later to revise, The Birth of Tragedy lays some of the groundwork on which Nietzsche was to build his oeuvre, analyzing ancient Attic tragedy in the work of Aeschylus and Sophocles as the acme of a duality of the gods, Apollo and Dionysus; this acme was the combining of the spirit of each god in works that affirmed the whole of human existence, reveling even in its destructive and horrific aspects. These tragedies exemplify an artistic capacity for affirmation that was, and is, otherwise lacking in the rational and impassive experience of living. Nietzsche posited these fundamental attitudes as a means of experiencing different from our ordinary faculties and perceptions, which entail the apathy and despair of those intelligent, critical skeptics of whom Hamlet is a pristine exemplar. Mentioning this problem of Hamlet, delving into a profound and epigrammatic analysis of the character, Nietzsche writes that “knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no—true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man.”[4]
What is the solution to the apathy and nausea and despair conferred by “true knowledge” (to which one could attribute this phenomenon of existential despair, the butcher’s loss of values) as expressed by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy? “Here, when the danger to his will is greatest, art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows now to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live: these are the sublime as the artistic taming of the horrible, and the comic as the artistic discharge of the nausea of absurdity.”[5] What is affirmable and palatable of the world and existence becomes, in The Birth of Tragedy, the product of an aesthetic transmutation of what one sees and experiences under normal, non-artistic conditions; Nietzsche encapsulates this aesthetic sensibility as a response to life and the world when he writes, in a potent aphorism, that “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.”[6] Life stymies the human desire for what is perfectible and unconditionally beautiful, good, and just; but it is in some aspect of life, as an aesthetic experience, as art, that one can come to terms with it and experience a new kind of lucidity, like that which the existential crisis of the butcher has ushered in.
In fact, these two kinds of lucidity—that of the butcher experiencing an existential crisis and that of the aesthetic spectator—go hand in hand, as though each were meant for the other in some kind of metaphysical harmony. Realizing the vacuum of values that have become meaningless, the butcher possesses the godlike attribute of a dispassionate, detached understanding of his own condition, stripped of all its innate values. He is the epicenter of the nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche, the absence of all innate meaning and purpose. Despair ensues; the feeling of being utterly lost and alone, as in a void of darkness engulfing the self and the spirit, “stifling one’s breath” in Heidegger’s terms, becomes commonplace; moments occur, infrequent and terrifying at first, of the nearness of death and nothingness in the context of a complete triviality of the self, revealing that one’s earthly disappearance in death would mean nothing—family and friends would become upset, sure, but what are these trivial numbers beside the billions and trillions of a universal scale?
This is a fundamental realization of those undergoing existential despair: nobody would miss a man unborn, and human existence has no need of you; sundry religions and cults and institutions, popular piety and societal cant, all have long tried to abate the insignificance of the individual, but any given person is in actuality superfluous. Humankind can do with more—why not? Come and join the party—but it doesn’t need you. In proof of this barren and ineffaceable fact, imagine the thousands who die every day, relevant only to those with whom they have lived, missed only by those that have loved them, and soon forgotten even by those that held them dearest. This is the merciless solitude of those people, like the butcher, that have become strangers to themselves teetering on the brink.
Created by curiosity and a philosophical openness that are themselves noble attributes, this desperate state of human experience is the perfect precondition of the artistic sensitivity to life; the meaning and unity to be found in art reveal themselves as the salutary inroads to a new experience of life. As an aesthetic phenomenon, life can become more than what it was, and one need not turn away from the existential challenges embodied as dark valleys and hillsides nestled among burned-out forests. For these challenges become part of who one is, and the experience of art, an aesthetic receptivity to the world, invigorate them with the luminous sunshine of brighter valleys and lusher hillsides. But while the lushness of life reappears, all liberty and independence come at a price, so that their reappearance can seem unsettling. Are these the conditions under which one is to live? Can this life be lived? This is the foremost concern of those that have fallen into this mode of perceiving: Can I bear the ultimate uncertainties whose contextual reward is the insight and authentic experience of art?
The butcher, frightened and disturbed, ridden with Angst, despair, and apathy, has now come to the possibility of aesthetic wholeness and an independence with which he can begin to determine the meaning of his life. It is the beginning of a terrible, lonely, and wondrous development, and I suspect he is likely to find, after a short while, that he cannot turn back—even if he wants to. O the madness of individual variation, of talents that are curses, and curses talents! All knowledge, self-awareness, and wisdom come at a price—but is the price too high? Is he a madman that says, “at any price!”? He might be, but he is also an idealist. And madness and idealism have never been mutually exclusive.
