The recent spate of celebrity suicides has me thinking about why people, even very rich and famous people, sometimes despair and give up. Of course Nietzsche predicted that despair and nihilism would follow in the wake of the death of God, and he worked frenetically to find a solution. Does his solution work? We shall see.
Nietzsche believed that Enlightenment rationalism and the philosophical materialism that followed in its wake had made belief in God untenable. God is dead and we have murdered him he famously announced in The Madman:
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him — you and I. All of us are his murderers.
Nietzsche recognized that the death of God had clear implications for morality. He predicted that as the knowledge that there is no transcendent basis for meaning and objective moral norms slowly percolated down from the philosophers to the common man, western civilization would spiral toward despair and nihilism:
But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?
Nietzsche’s life project was to find a replacement system of values that would head off the despair and nihilism brought about by the death of God. He believed he had succeeded with his concept of the Übermensch as most fully explicated in Thus Spake Zarathustra. The Übermensch throws off the “slave morality” of Christianity and anything else that would inhibit the unfettered expression of his will:
For today have the petty people become master: they all preach submission and humility and policy and diligence and consideration and the long et cetera of petty virtues.
Whatever is of the effeminate type, whatever originateth from the servile type, and especially the populace-mishmash:—THAT wisheth now to be master of all human destiny—O disgust! Disgust! Disgust! . . .
He hath heart who knoweth fear, but VANQUISHETH it; who seeth the abyss, but with PRIDE.
He who seeth the abyss, but with eagle’s eyes,—he who with eagle’s talons GRASPETH the abyss: he hath courage.—
“Man is evil”—so said to me for consolation, all the wisest ones. Ah, if only it be still true today! For the evil is man’s best force.
“Man must become better and eviler”—so do I teach. The evilest is necessary for the Superman’s best.
It may have been well for the preacher of the petty people to suffer and be burdened by men’s sin. I, however, rejoice in great sin as my great CONSOLATION.—
The Übermensch defeats despair and nihilism through the courageous assertion of pure will. He does not lose heart when he reflects on the vast, indifferent and meaningless universe, because he has evolved beyond man and is therefore able to see past the empty categories of “good” and “evil” held so dear by the petty people. He becomes “eviler” and therefore better, because “better” means the successful assertion of his will to power.
Nietzsche was, of course, wrong about all of this. Science has not killed God. Far from it. 118 years after Nietzsche’s death, scientific discoveries such as the semiotic code contained in every living cell point to a designer more than ever.
But more importantly for my purposes today, assuming arguendo that God was dead, a moment’s reflection shows that Nietzsche’s “solution” to the loss of meaning and morality the absence of God entails is no solution at all. Why? Because his solution is completely arbitrary. The Übermensch transcends values and creates new values based on the courageous assertion of will. But why should we value the courageous assertion of will in the first place? Nietzsche does not say. Apparently, the only reason to value it is because Nietzche valued it. And why did he value it? Pure sentimentality.
Chesterton understood this flaw in Nietzsche’s reasoning well. In Orthodoxy he writes:
But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first. Or he might feel that he had actually inflicted frightful punishment on the cat by keeping him alive. Just as a microbe might feel proud of spreading a pestilence, so the pessimistic mouse might exult to think that he was renewing in the cat the torture of conscious existence.
Nietzsche calls his more highly evolved man Übermensch (superman) and bids us to admire his utterly arbitrary and courageous assertion of his naked will without giving us any reason whatsoever why the arbitrary assertion of will should be considered admirable. To be sure, Nietzsche admires that quality. But that is not enough. For his observations to amount to something more than the expression of pure sentimentality, he must explain more than what Übermensch is. He must explain why he ought to be that way, and this he never does.
In the end Nietzsche’s attempt to replace God fails. Where does that leave us? It leaves us with Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation:
On the contrary, that continual deception and disillusionment, as well as the general nature of life, present themselves as intended and calculated to awaken the conviction that nothing whatever is worth our exertions, our efforts, and our struggles, that all good things are empty and fleeting, that the world on all sides is bankrupt, and that life is a business that does not cover its costs; so that our will may turn away from it.
And it leaves us with Camus who observed that the only interesting question in philosophy is whether to kill yourself in the face of the patent absurdity of life without meaning.
Nietzsche failed to find a solution to the death of God. Fortunately for us, the solution he sought was a solution in search of a problem, because God is alive and well. But it is easy to see why people who believe otherwise would despair. Despair is a perfectly rational response to a universe completely devoid of meaning.
BA, Maybe, such need to read C S Lewis’ Surprised by Joy — sehnsucht that longs for what is beyond this world, and ponder the God-shaped vacuum within that cannot be filled by money, fame, adulation, Mercedes Benz Maybachs [currently, part of a Caribbean political scandal], power, lovers, thrills, drink, drugs etc. Nor, can it be crushed by shame, pain, oppression, injustice etc. We are amphibians, and yearn for Him who is our true end and joy forevermore. This, I personally saw as I held my dad as he surrendered his spirit to his Lord and mine. KF
PS: if you are depressed and especially if death ideation, despair or utter hopelesness seem to be sucking you into a vortex, get help! Sound help. TODAY. Depression is a killer that tempts us to suicide as a quick, permanent “solution” to something that will eventually pass.
This is the idea for a lot of rich and famous people. They imagine that they are more courageous. The men think they are stronger, the women more alluring.
But they eventually discover the falsehood of this. The god who they have been serving is just themselves – and they realize what a small, weak and fallible god that is.
Most of life for those people is one long string of distractions from those ugly thoughts. They become workaholics. They travel more, do more shows. Some will try to do some charitable work.
But they never really face the abyss.
As mentioned, Nietzsche claimed to be the hero who looks into the nothingness and then asserts his will – but he actually was just very frightened and living in an illusion.
All of his “disgust!” is meaningless and irrational.
He did, to his credit, realize that any appeal to morality was an appeal to the Christian norms that he hated.
It’s a good critique because if Christian men do not exert themselves and strive to seek God with energy, then they will become complacent and effeminate. But it’s a paradox because humility, meekness, gentleness (gentleman) along with the more classic fortitude and diligence are the masculine virtues. They courageously overcome self-love and pleasure-seeking.
Nietzsche’s assertion of Will is merely an assertion of his Ego. It’s narcissism. In the end, its the assertion of a frail, weak man who proclaims his own meaninglessness.
Humility is the most difficult virtue. “How hard it is for the rich and famous to enter the kingdom of heaven”. How do you have humility when the entire world pretends to love and worship you?
Humility is like “humiliation”. When you are oppressed, ridiculed or when your mistakes and flaws are exposed. Celebrities protect themselves from all of that.
Plus, they think that all their fans actually love them – but none of them do. Their fans just want to be like them.
I see these things like Burning Man out in the desert. A festival of egoism. Everybody wants to be a celebrity.
There are many factors that lead to the depression that can lead to suicide. It’s not as simple as religious belief, wealth, celebrity, or any one cause. Sadly, the one thing that sets us apart from other animals on our planet (our brain and the ability to think abstractly) also comes with risks. The more complex something is, the more things can go wrong.
I think we have to view depression as a psychological disorder that can afflict someone regardless of personal talent, wealth or success. It’s more than sadness as a reaction to specific events, It’s more like a general depression of mood, a loss of any enjoyment of things that used to provide stimulation and pleasure and a foreboding that things will never get better. It’s a measure of how closely and subtly integrated are our emotional responses into our experience of the world and what makes life worthwhile to each of us as individuals.
Barry Arrington:
Your thought-provoking article touches a highly important and sensitive subject: the meaning of human life. Thanks.
In the below video, a journalist says:
[time 0:22] “the larger than life celebrity chef”
[time 0:48] “he lived a life many envied, with travel, food and adventure”
then the main subject of this tragic story is seen saying:
“this is what you want, this is what you need, this is the path to true happiness and wisdom”
the narrator adds:
“while celebrities’ suicides catch our attention, when people who seemingly have it all take their own lives…”
Basically, this seems to relate to what kairosfocus wrote so well in the first comment above.
Larger than life?
Life many envied?
Travel, food, adventure?
What we want?
What we need?
The path to true happiness and wisdom?
Wisdom?
VideoVideo
So Nietzsche believed that “Enlightenment rationalism and the philosophical materialism that followed in its wake had made belief in God untenable”?
And also held that “The Übermensch defeats despair and nihilism through the courageous assertion of pure will”?
And yet Neitzche argued forcefully against the reality of free will?
Appealing to ‘pure will’ and denying ‘free will’ is a direct contradiction in logic and I don’t care how much word salad he used to try to get around that direct contradiction in logic.
Apparently Nietzsche did not understand just how helpless he was/is under philosophical materialism. Nietzsche had no power to will anything much less ‘will to power’. Under materialism he is a helpless automaton cast about by whatever random state the particles of his deterministic brain happen to fluctuate into. He had no more ‘will to power’ than a autumn leaf falling to the ground had the will to change its course to the ground.
In fact, under atheism Nietzsche did not ‘will’ himself to write or do anything that he ever wrote or did. It was all the laws of physics:
The denial of ‘agent causality’, which is what we have in the atheist’s denial of his own free will, is simply insane. And yet this insanity is taught at leading universities in America as if it were the gospel truth.
Dr. Craig Hazen, in the following video at the 12:26 minute mark, relates how he performed, for an audience full of academics at a college, a ‘miracle’ simply by raising his arm,,
What should be needless to say, if raising your arm is enough to refute your supposedly ‘scientific’ worldview of atheistic materialism/naturalism, then perhaps it is time for you to seriously consider getting a new scientific worldview?
Might I suggest Christian Theism as a ‘new’ scientific worldview since it gave us modern science in the first place? (And since it can ground agent causality?)
“Will”, whether it be “pure” or “free” will, is a property of a immaterial mind and can only be rationally grounded within Theism.
Moreover, free will demands a perspective outside the material/physical order:
And as Cothran and C.S. Lewis had clearly elucidated through logic,,, the fact that free will demands a perspective outside the material order is now also experimentally verified by quantum mechanics.
As the following article states, “In the quantum world, the property that you discover through measurement is not the property that the system actually had prior to the measurement process. What you observe necessarily depends on how you carried out the observation” and “Measurement outcomes depend on all the other measurements that are performed – the full context of the experiment.”
In other words, due to contextuality, the results we obtain in quantum mechanics crucially depend on how we chose our prior measurements. As Anton Zeilinger stated of the Kochen-Specker theorem “what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”
Thus as far a logic and experimental science are concerned, the Theistic contention for free will is now a matter of experimentally verified reality and is not just a matter of philosophical debate!
Although free will is often thought of as allowing someone to choose between a veritable infinity of options, in a theistic view of reality that veritable infinity of options all boils down to just two options. Eternal life, (infinity if you will), with God, or Eternal life, (infinity again if you will), without God. C.S. states it as such:
And exactly as would be expected on the Christian view of reality, we find two very different eternities in reality. An ‘infinitely destructive’ eternity associated with General Relativity and a extremely orderly eternity associated with Special Relativity:
Verse:
Some people just get sick and tired of all the BS involved with living. And they know they are going to die sooner or later anyway.
Very eloquently stated, this essay, um, SA.
As an aside, I am missing my WJM.
William if you are reading, please opine on some of these posts. I am missing your profound wisdom!
And I am sure it’s not just me!
BA, thank you for being so diligent and persistent in the face of such idiocy. It takes a long time to get through your posts and links, but I do and it is worth every minute. Thank you for all you do.
Paolo V. (5):
Your comment doesn’t seem very clear. What’s your point?
Oscar Luis,
Did you read it well? It must be clear, but perhaps you’re too obsessed with scientific issues and got your feet off the ground, hence don’t see the reality of this world?
Paolo V.(10):
What do you mean by “the reality of this world?”
Can you elaborate?
Thanks.
Oscar Luis,
Did you ever hear this?
“I’ve always been mad, I know I’ve been mad, like the
most of us…very hard to explain why you’re mad, even if you’re not mad…”
I travel a fair amount for work. No where as much as Bourdain did, but still more than most of my friends. And people tell me that they envy me my job. I am not complaining about the travel because I do get to see things that most don’t. But there is a lot that isn’t very fun. Airports, planes, customs, getting to the hotel, trying to sleep in a hotel, having to eat in a restaurant every day, jet lag, being away from your family, etc.
So when people wonder why someone who appears to have everything would kill themselves, you should step back and ask what they had to give up in order to have the appearance of having everything.
Paolo V (12):
Did somebody say that?
What does it have to do with my question at #11, which you haven’t responded yet.
AK
This is true and I think very appropriate for celebrity lifestyle. Every step forward towards success requires giving up something. But, the gains should outweigh the losses.
If, however, what must be sacrificed to “have it all” actually causes so much suffering that a person to wants to kill himself, then the gains (celebrity, fame, money, tv status) are a foolish goal that do not satisfy a person’s soul.
In Christian terms, Jesus teaches that we should sacrifice worldly things, but the goal is not for temporal benefits which do not provide satisfaction.
AK
it’s easy to forget … life itself is an immense gift. When you think about it – you’re given this amazing person/being, yourself – with so many incredible capabilities and potential. Just the possibility of exploring and understanding – of helping someone, of giving and receiving love. It’s amazing.
I know people who suffer from a deprivation of so much that we take for granted. Very poor, by worldly standards. And there are so many I don’t know but we can see how little they have to live with. But they do it.
So, a jet-setting celebrity? No, there’s no equivalence with whatever sacrifices it takes to live in hotels or fly around.
Instead, it’s an emptiness of soul. That happens when we try to fill ourselves with transient things. Food? sex, power, attention, esteem of other celebrities and the media … it’s totally empty.
Paolo V,
I found the text you quoted at #12 associated with the lyrics of a song?
SA,
I don’t see it quite the same way. Let’s take someone like Bourdain. When he started his celebrity journey, I’m sure that it was fun. But then it must become a grind. Add to this the pressure of all of the people who depended on him for a living. That is a lot of pressure to put on anyone. The fact that a person is good in front of a camera, or good at singing, or good at comedy, does not prepare you for the fact that your success means that your success means that you are now responsible for numerous other people.
AK
I understand and agree, in fact, this says even more than it being just the problems of lonely hotel rooms or difficult travel.
As you say – he had a lot of people depending on him. He had more responsibility (not even including his daughter). The idea of having “a great life” in our culture today, often means “having a lot of fun”. It doesn’t mean having responsibility. The celebrity life actually promotes this notion – it’s all about pleasing oneself, being entertained, having continual fun, acting like a perpetual adolescent – doing what you want. But suddenly, there is responsibility.
I actually think that’s even a worse excuse for suicide.
Having care and responsibility for people is a privilege.
Plus, it doesn’t make sense.
“I have so many people who need me, what can I do? If I don’t take care of them, they will suffer. So, I have to work myself harder. But this is intolerable. I could take a break, stop working for a while, or work less – but then these people would have less money.
So, instead – I will kill myself.”
It’s the problem many celebrities have. It’s the pathological condition of having a huge, pampered ego. People praising you as a genius all the time. They laugh at all your wry comments, they smile when they see you, they just want to be with you. You are important.
But now, your ego is so big – you can’t admit that it’s too much work for you to deal with. You can’t admit that you can’t handle the pressure.
Now what? The pressure builds, and the only way out is suicide.
It’s hard to blame any individual, like Bourdain. Our culture really is very celebrity-oriented and we put a lot of money and interest in building up stars, but very little interest in things of much higher value. Celebrities look like heroes, but they’re just like the rest of the people who chase after ephemeral things. Celebrities believe they are more meaningful and important, because so many people in society act like they are.
OLV @ #17:
Yes, that’s a desperate loud cry of hopelessness of this spiritually dead world. Read the lyrics of all the songs in that album. That’s the explanation to this discussion thread.
The loud cry of this lost world