Do you think of yourself as religious or spiritual?

Well, I am neither religious in any institutional, theistic, or superstitious senses, nor spiritual in any superstitious, other-wordly, or particularly mystical sense. But I not only grew up religiously but was religious into my early adulthood and my rejection of faith-based thinking was out of adherence to principles that I got from my religion. And I have retained my spiritual intensity, my concern for truth, my adamant attitude that certain primary ethical values be universally respected, and my speculative, metaphysically interested side.

I’ve also retained the highly social and therapeutic, introspective, and self-critical psychologically focused attitudes that are nurtured in both church contexts in general and the modern evangelicalism I was raised in in particular. And there is most notably a zealous, “evangelizing” side to me that wants to work for the cause of people’s deconversions, that wants to help people reject authoritarian thinking and institutions and instead to reason for themselves. So, in some ways my views and goals have religious parallels. Instead of God, I want to promote Truth, and instead of faith, freethinking, and instead of seeing people as sinners in need of redemption, I see people as evolutionarily imprecisely evolved reasoners and ethical judgers who need to scrupulously train themselves in better habits of reason in order to make for greater knowledge, better ethics, and more just politics. And I am admittedly, in temperament, “religious” about advancing this paradigm shift. I do believe in reason’s power to “save” and am willing to sacrifice with religious intemperance to do it.

To whom do you turn when you need support? Or, is there a person or group of people who are really important to you?

I turn to close friends and to my parents. The only group I turn to is EVERYONE ON FACEBOOK.

Pretty big group, apparently you are not shy!

Right, I am comfortable broadcasting to the world. I only feel comfortable in two sorts of settings—

They are?

one on one and talking to large groups of people. One on one I can find that intersection between my personality and someone else’s where we both feel comfortable and relate to one another.

One on one I can understand.

And talking to groups, either my classes of students or my readers on my blog or the readers of my status updates, I feel very comfortable because I feel like an equal half of the equation, just like in a one on one conversation. Whereas, in small groups, the dynamic is not “me and you” or “me and the group”, there’s the 5 people and each of the 5 is 1/5, so I’m 1/5, and if I do not click with the group personality I will feel outnumbered, four to one.

If I get lucky and the whole group, including me, is on the same page, or if it’s a situation where my personality dominates the group, then I feel okay in the small group. But if there is a stronger personality than my own and that personality sets the group personality, or if it organically has a personality that is very different from my own, then I feel like I completely can’t express myself and close down.  Once I was with two of my closest friends who I was used to interacting with primarily one on one or with other groups but never with just the two of them and me.  We were together just the three of us for this rare occasion and their dynamic between them made me feel so excluded.   They indulged a shared side of their personalities that felt so alien and antagonistic to me that I felt as incredibly lonely and rejected as I’ve ever felt.  That night is a terrible memory.

What are sources of comfort and peace for you?

It’s a tough question to answer in general since there are many different sources of discomfort and unrest. So, to specify different circumstances: I rely on music enormously to express my feelings or to sustain me with pleasure during a long, hard day. I love small, temporary habits…

Like?

Like always eating at the same deli on Thursday nights while watching the same thing on the TV, listening to my i-pod, and reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog—that was one semester at about 4pm while I prepared to teach at 7.  I love building in those little rituals.

My favorite was, for several semesters, coming home from the city, whether I had taught in Queens or New Jersey that day or just in Manhattan, I would travel back to the Bronx on the school van and every night I would listen to David Byrne and Brian Eno’s album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. And they say they wrote it as “secular gospel music” and boy does it work for me on that score. It was this meditative stuff, I would always start with the title track and I love the thought—everything that happens will happen today.   Somewhere someone is going through everything and experiencing everything that ever happens.

And every time I leave St. John’s I love playing this Decemberist song, “Yankee Bayonet”

and then the Neutral Milk Hotel’s album Aeroplane Over the Sea, and when I get stuck waiting for a subway that will be a long time I recharge with “Freebird”. So, these sorts of rituals—foods, music, patterns—they are remarkably psychologically pleasing.

But I hate rigidity and so I love that my schedule varies every semester in some ways and I can build new habits. As for comfort in a more existential sense—when dealing with the hardest times, I have a few people who I know will be entirely in my corner, like my mom or my dad or my friends Paul or Dan, people who will unflappably take my side and even think like my lawyer when I’m in trouble, who are just interested in me coming out okay above all else. We need people like that.

And beyond that, philosophically, I orient myself with the Stoics and with Nietzsche a lot. I focus on the reality of the limits of my control and prevent myself from wanting what it is irrational to want. I fight the urge to beat myself up and take frequent honest assessments of my life. What helps me most is to dwell on the power of small impacts. I really believe that when we do excellent things, we spread our power into the world through those things and they have effects which can be untraceable. I love just throwing myself out there and fighting for what I love and just wondering about, without ever possibly knowing, where it goes and what good it might do.

And I try to really understand that people are who they are and not change them and not vilify them or imagine their motives are as bad as their actions. I’m a pretty quick forgiver if someone sincerely apologizes. I have no years old grudges.  (Okay, maybe one.)  And I am pretty good about not letting ignorant, false opinions define my conception of myself. I am pretty vigorous about judging myself by the truth as much as I can. I can’t take a compliment I don’t deserve without squirming, I take constructive, legitimate criticism very gratefully and conscientiously, and I am pretty good at not letting the voices of the ignorant who don’t know what they’re talking about echo in my head. There are just a couple insecurities and weaknesses on these scores and those can slay me for weeks. But otherwise, I’m really good. I’m as comfortable as anyone could reasonably be expected, for example, with being constantly disagreed with as part of the life of a philosopher. That rolls off my back. I’m good at being wrong and (eventually) changing my mind when I have to.  I only get sensitive if I feel like I’ve somehow failed my students. That will eat at me and eat at me.

One of Nietzsche’s deepest resonances with me is his denunciation of regret. He describes the will as tortured and imprisoned by its inability to change past. He thinks that it is the “It was”—the past which cannot be undone—which drives us crazy as beings who find ourselves as powerful through our ability to will. The inability to will the past to be different is this massive, existential realization of the limits of our power and of ourselves.  And, of course, the past features many things we do not like which threaten to gnaw at us.

And so Nietzsche’s solution to this is to embrace what he calls “the eternal recurrence of the same”. This is the thought that the universe might recur precisely as it has (and presently does) an infinite number of times through all eternity. Whether or not this idea is plausible, Nietzsche argues that the highest affirmation of life, and of our own lives in particular, that we can have is the attitude in which we want nothing more fervently than the eternal recurrence of our lives exactly as they are and have been. To will the eternal recurrence of the same universe in all its totality is to affirm reality in the greatest possible way. To will the eternal recurrence of your own life is to affirm your life as the most valuable and desirable thing for you and, therein, to affirm yourself as much as possible. You are nothing but your life you have lived, and which you still live, and to resent your life is to alienate you from yourself.  To regret what you have done or what has happened to you is to wish that you, as you are, were not.

And for me this is precisely why I have never been able to regret anything. I really can never fantasize about some alternative scenario for very long at all. I can hope for an awesome turn-around in a situation in the future, but I cannot get very far in dreaming up particulars that would be different in my life because it would be wishing my own non-existence to me. It all feels wrong.

I wish I had your discipline. I regret very little, but there is a couple i can’t seem to let go.

I can’t even write fiction because I can’t change the facts of my life. Every idiosyncratic particular of the world fits in the way it really happened in my mind and has to go like that.

And the other side of the eternal recurrence is living every moment with the tremendous weight of thinking, “What if I were to live this life for eternity would I want this choice I’m about to make?”  And that existentialist sort of pressure on every moment, weighs on me all the time.

Some of this sounds like what my Buddhist friend believes.

When I look at the past and my limitations and other people’s, I am a Stoic, I feel it irrational to wish that I or it or they were different when they cannot be. And yet, even though, abstractly, I am a determinist, I embrace Sartre and Heidegger in feeling the openness of life and the radical possibility to create myself with my choices and the pressure to do so with death looming possibly quite faster than I can accomplish all I want to. I have great anxiety not about dying but about dying young. I am convinced that if I live to 83, I will make it, I will be proud of what I leave behind in the form of work and in the people affected and the causes advanced. But I would be bummed if I had to die younger.

So how do you counter the weight?

How do I counter which weight?

Existentialist sort of pressure on every moment, weighs on me all the time…

I teach and I write and I feel accomplished. I love the expression in sports that players just “leave it all out on the field” and don’t worry about the results. You just live and work as intensely as you can and, when absorbed in the meaningful work, there is no anxiety, no fear, no pressure in those moments, just complete immersion in what I’m “meant” to do and I regret nothing while doing that. When I’m not writing, I feel miserable, I feel anxiety, I feel behind, I feel like I’m accomplishing nothing, so the way to deal with the existential crisis for me is to act and act and act, create value every chance you can and feel good about that.  If I didn’t feel like my life was creating and spreading value well, I couldn’t imagine what the point would be.

What gives your life purpose & meaning?

Purpose comes from our characteristic tendencies. We are what we do, we excel in doing what we characteristically do excellently.

You make an impact by teaching.

So, yeah, by teaching I fulfill myself, I realize my inherent nature in teaching and it’s intrinsically satisfying. And in philosophizing. When I am doing philosophy, I am fulfilling me. But I could also be more than I am now and so there are parts of me I worry may be or may have been fulfilled and I’m too content with just this. But if I could really excel at these things and can have my greatest ultimate impact in creating value this way, then the sacrifice is justifiable. It’s all about the fulfillment of your excellences from an internal perspective and your spreading power and value beyond yourself from an external perspective. And that gives meaning and context to your life as it plays a role in the larger story of the increase or decrease of value, and greater, richer, more complex kinds of value, in the universe.

What brings hope into your life?

I think I have hope because I was so damned loved as a kid, honestly. I think it makes it hard for me not to be an optimist when my primary experiences as a child were all love. It makes you, however naively, assume the world’s going to love you or that the default of life is good. Hope just springs from within in this way.

Now, I’m a total realist and even a pessimist about some things. I don’t count on any doors just flying open for me and I don’t assume even that hard work will get me to the top. I’m aware I might not reach the top or even the tenure track job I had devoted so many years aiming for. But I still just have an innate, unquenchable confidence that I will find my way some place I belong, even if it will be like nothing I imagine right now. And in the cosmic sense—I get hope from the progress of history, I feel so excited to be a part of the story of history—to be part of a people, a discussion, a human narrative stretching for centuries. I think humanity is advancing—however much every two steps forward is followed by one step back. I am excited about contributing to the cause of progress in whatever little ways I can from where I am. It does reinforce my hope.

Your Thoughts?

I would eagerly welcome replies as to the tenability of the positions spelled out both for their justice to Nietzsche’s texts and for their general philosophical merit. With no further ado, here are the questions I was sent followed by my replies:

Does Nietszche want everyone to embrace the noble mindset? He says the individual must always re-affirm himself, act spontaneously and free, without restrictions of some sort of authority/moral over him. But since humans do co-exist in societies, there needs to be some sort of order/law, no? Does he propose societies without leaders, that each person is his own sovereign? Or does he think the noble people will rise above the inevitable masses that will continue with the slave mentality?

Your questions are superb ones without simple answers. They are exactly the kinds of things I’m still trying to sort out. Firstly, Nietzsche acknowledges in a more fatalistic sort of way that not every one will be of noble mind and he is suspicious of philosophies that try to ignore the ways that people really are. The common person will always be the common person. He does, I think, talk about whole ages where a whole people might be more noble but in general there will be these contrasts in mindset and internal constitution between the herd and the more noble types.

So, to an extent, Nietzsche can be read as making his appeals to those fewer ones who will be receptive to the nobler calling to a nobler way of life that he is making. He can, to a greater extent than most philosophers, admit that there can be different codes of life good for the herd than for the nobles. Herd morality does serve the herd’s interests and so is genuinely valuable for them. Nietzsche does not so much want to upset their stability as free the “nobles” to do the sort of value creation that is possible for them as people with greater internal resources.

At minimum, we can say that these nobler individuals can transform a culture in a way that takes the whole people to another level for its having the influence of their greatness. The importance of great artists is of great significance for Nietzsche as exemplary figures who effect this kind of move within a culture. Now, whether or not the masses will be able to incorporate the profundities of these transformative cultural figures in such a way that makes them embody all his virtues and be as great in themselves is hard to say. It’s likely they won’t, but they will nonetheless be better off for the contributions to their culture.

Now the question of laws and ethical precepts are a couple whole other balls of wax. I think Nietzsche tends to focus on creating the conditions for the excellent to emerge and to be the cultural leaders. He totally mistrusts statism because he thinks that state apparatuses are woeful substitutes for genuine culture when it comes to genuinely uniting a people. Also, while he is not an individualist, he is protective of the values-innovators who state and religion will vilify as evil. The problem that Nietzsche sees the values-innovator as facing is that when (s)he questions the dominant values, (s)he is inevitably going to be deemed evil according to the dominant values because (s)he is a threat to them themselves. How can you question your values when your values are the judge of what’s a good answer? So, a large part of Nietzsche’s concern with morality is this conservative dimension to it, by which it shuts off the questioning that goes against it. So, he is concerned to break the hold of laws that would enshrine the values of the present. Whether he wants laws created by the coming values-innovators who will replace the Christian values or whether he wants them only to be cultural influences who don’t get into the business of actually turning their new values into actual laws, is a difficult question that I can’t really definitively answer yet.

I am starting to write my paper and I am a little confused about Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence.

As far as God is concerned, I thought Nietzsche doesn’t believe in God or an afterlife per se, just that you keep living your life over and over again, like reincarnation except its always the same. So in that sense its not really an afterlife(because an after life, in the Christian sense anyway, is some spiritual never ending life after a short period of temporal living), I think it would be more like some never ending circle of temporal life. You would really never die (because death is understood as your spirit separating from your body for another place). It would be sort of like a book with many chapters, each saying the same thing. Does Nietzsche believe that there is some infinite being causing this eternal recurrence? and how exactly does it work, because obviously time goes on, so you couldn’t keep living your successive lives on Earth, they would have to be on some other plane or dimension right? And since people are born and die at different times, how does that work out( say I die today, and start my eternal life, but my brother doesn’t die for another 50 years…how does he end up in my “new” eternal life?)

Also, Nietzsche doesn’t believe in any seperate infinite being or “other”, but rather the unity and oneness of the universe. So how are we all connected? Is there an interconnecting spirit or something?

thanks!

You’re basically on the right track. The only things that I would correct are as follows. There is no reference to a being beyond the universe such as an independently existing God. If he is to speak of a “divine” at all, it would be just the totality of the universe taken as a whole. What I mean by this is as follows: the question of “what is God?” is a question of what is the ultimate, eternal reality upon which all particular being depends for its existence. The metaphysical intuition that leads people to talk about the “divine” is that temporal beings as we know them require outside causes to come into existence—they can’t cause themselves. So, the divine has usually been interpreted by philosophers in some way or another as whatever that thing is that didn’t need a prior existing thing to create it.

Obviously particular material objects don’t seem fit for such an uncaused existence since they require causes outside of themselves. Where the monotheist posits a separate being, a God, who exists by his own power, uncaused by anything else, the atheist or the pantheist usually just posits that the universe itself has some sort of eternal dimension such that even though particular combinations of matter are created through causal interactions, there is some eternal dimension to the universe that itself is not caused to come into being or to go out of being.

This is a very rough way of spelling out Spinoza’s essential position and Spinoza was the thinker most fundamentally in the background of Schopenhauer—-who in turn deeply influenced Nietzsche. Nietzsche also speaks very highly of Spinoza. So, it’s fair to infer some common sympathies with Nietzsche and Spinoza and flesh him out in the Spinozistic terms I like to use. For Spinoza, the universe is “God:” it is the totality of everything that is and it is eternally existing. The particular beings that we are and that we experience are just modes of the universe—forms it takes within the greater unity of itself. For Spinoza, as I think for Nietzsche, the universe is not merely matter, nor merely mind but rather is both in every one of its modes. What I mean by that is that there is both a material and a mental dimension to all of existence. This means that everything in existence has both a mental side and a material one to it.

God is neither the material nor the mental aspect of existence or things but just the entirety of the whole universe, he is the “substance” in which all the particular beings exist. An analogy I like to use is to take a human being. There is a material and a mental dimension to you. And you can express those yourself in all sorts of ways physically and mentally. You can take on different modes. Your body can be sitting or standing or walking or chewing, etc. and your mind can be thinking and feeling all sorts of thoughts. You are not separate from any of these things but expressed through all of them. You are more fundamental than any particular mode you take. You exist before and after all the particular thoughts you think and body positions you take, etc. But you also don’t exist without any body position or thoughts whatsoever. So, to apply this analogy to the world. “God” is like you in that scenario, he is the totality of everything but he only exists in the particular modes that his attributes (matter and mind) take. You and I are just the modes of God’s attributes. We’re just shapes his material and mental attributes twist themselves into. He doesn’t exist without expressing himself in his attributes, but he is the more fundamental being because we exist in him, rather than him in us. He doesn’t have an independent identity apart from all the modes of the universe. In other words, our thoughts are God thinking, he doesn’t think separately from that as though he were a distinct person from all of us. We are modes of God’s body, he doesn’t have a different body than the material universe itself. So God=the universe.

So, that’s in a nutshell, Spinozistic pantheism. The connection between all of us in such a scenario, as Nietzsche to some extent accepts, would be that we all boil down to the same fundamental being of the universe. Nietzsche never explicitly embraces pantheism and so that’s why I suggest in my review of Julian Young’s book Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion that we shy away from calling him a pantheist as Young does. What he does share with the pantheist though is that the universe itself is what is eternal and so if anything is to be called divine, that would be it. But I think he would reject ultimately reject the idea that the universe is indeed one substance since his major rejection of Schopenhauer is denying that the entire universe is a single will, in favor of interpreting it as made up of innumerable centers of will to power. In this way, Nietzsche is more Leibniz than Spinoza and less inclined to positing a notion of a fundamental unity to all the universe that we could call “God.”

Now, on Nietzsche’s thinking, how the eternal recurrence would happen is a little sketchy. But what he speculates is that with an infinite amount of time and a finite amount of matter following out fixed laws of nature, eventually all the combinations of matter would recur an infinite number of times. Since there are only a finite numbers of combinations among material in the universe and there’s an infinity to keep recombining the same combinations, following the same laws of nature, would recur an infinite number of times. This is roughly how Nietzsche sketched out the recurrence.

So to answer your question of how we can each recur in our own lives when we die while others continue their present lives—-the issue there I think is simply that it’s a matter of the universe recurring and our lives recurring when we are reconstituted in it. So, in other words, you don’t recur immediately but only when the universe gets back to reconstituting history to the point where you come into being again. There are others who think more in terms of dimensions similar to the one you theorized and argue that our infinite recurrences actually all happen simultaneously. I have to admit I have a hard time wrapping my mind around that idea since it’s hard for me to grasp what would distinguish all these infinite versions of the same existence. If they happen sequentially, then I can grasp that. But if they’re all happening simultaneously, how are they distinct?

I think the argument for the simultaneous recurrences is that eternal recurrence does not happen in time in the sort of manner I described earlier where the matter just keeps recombining sequentially in time. Rather than there being eternal recurrences in time, there would be the eternal recurrence of time itself. So, this would require different dimensions in which time and matter recurred separately from their instantiation in each other dimension.

Now, it is possible that none of these physical and metaphysical speculations are correct and it is also possible (though I don’t think likely) that Nietzsche didn’t think it important that they be correct. In such cases, the meaning of the eternal recurrence still stands as a test for affirmation. Is what we want most desperately to be eternal our own temporal lives in this temporal universe, recurring for all eternity? If it is, then we maximally affirm our lives—regardless of whether or not the universe honors our desire. This is at minimum our test. There are those (like Paul Loeb) who stress though that for Nietzsche it must also be that the universe does indeed recur for this to be such a crushing existential question to contend with. They argue that if the eternal recurrence is not real, we can just dismiss the question of its possibility as not at all the kind of thing that would lead us to the sort of turmoil that Nietzsche describes in the Gay Science 341.