Superstitious Selfishness

by Benny Mattis

Religious apologists often think themselves clever paraphrasing Dostoevsky:  "If God does not exist, then everything is permitted."  They claim that, without God, there must not be any ethical standards higher than one's own held preferences.  In this view, the only theories of morality available to the atheist can collectively be referred to here as "egoism," because in practice they all look the same:  "I do what I want, when I want to."  The altruistic New Atheists (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Dennett, and friends) are often presented as philosophically naïve, because they never got the memo that "Altruistic morality depends on God's existence, gosh darn it!"  They are often contrasted to the "Real Atheist" (TM), who becomes their own god, unconstrained by petty morality.

The aforementioned religious apologists often subscribe to something called Divine Command Theory, which says that an action is moral just because it is commanded by God or immoral just because God forbids it.  This theory is self-defeating, as Russ Shafer-Landau explains in The Fundamentals of Ethics with the "Euthyphro Argument":

1. Either God has reasons for his commands, or God lacks reasons for His commands.
2. If God lacks reasons for His commands, then God's commands are arbitrary--and that renders God imperfect, undermining His moral authority.
3. If God has reasons that support His commands, then these reasons, rather than the divine commands, are what make actions right or wrong--thereby refuting Divine Command Theory.
4. Therefore, either God is imperfect, or the Divine Command Theory is false.
5. God is not imperfect.
6. Therefore, Divine Command Theory is false. (63-64)

The arbitrariness of divine laws under Divine Command Theory reveals that it is, in fact, just as amoral as Real Atheism.  As Shafer-Landau notes, "If there is nothing intrinsically wrong [i.e., wrong independent of divine condemnation] with rape or theft, then God could just as well have required that we do such things.  He could have forbidden that we be generous or thoughtful.  But this makes a mockery of morality, and of our view of God as morally perfect" (64).  Of course, there are stories of God actually commanding such things, and the New Atheists don't hesitate to mock, but that's a different issue.  The point is that Divine Command Theory is at its heart as nihilistic as the egoism of Max Stirner.

In fact, I think it's also appropriate to say that the Real Atheist's egoism is as religious as the faith of a Divine Command Theorist.  The Real Atheist, in fact, is not an atheist at all, but a polytheist: each ego in their view is a moral law-maker, as opposed to a law-taker, and so each individual is their own god.  Moreover, the Real Atheist's extolled "self" is an undefinable and undetectable point of subjectivity, much like the god worshipped by Divine Command theorists.  The Real Atheist is not godless; he is his own god.  It is, in fact, the New Atheists who go all the way, claiming that nothing--not even their own egos--is above the laws of nature and morality.

Source

Shafer-Landau, Russ.  The Fundamentals of Ethics.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.  Print.

A Crappy Post

by Benny Mattis

"What is of the meaning of life?"  Various groups will have their own answers to this question, many of which are locked in seemingly eternal conflict with each other.  An equally important question, however, is "What is meaninglessness?"  I have some thoughts on the subject, but it will help to explore some themes in existentialism beforehand.  As Brandy Burfield understood when I took her course on these topics last semester, this is best done by watching an episode or two of South Park.

The Other

In the episode entitled "You're Getting Old," Stan celebrates his tenth birthday, and one of his friends give him a "Tween Wave" CD as a birthday gift.  Stan's birthday joy, however, is abruptly cut off by his mother, Sharon, who who forbids him from listening to it because it "Sounds like crap."  Stan is frustrated by this maternal censorship, which continues even through his new age of double digits.

Sharon here plays the part of what Jean-Paul Sartre calls "the Other."  Stan sees himself as a free individual who understands the coolness of Tween Wave, whereas Sharon's gaze reduces his personality to an object and his music to excrement.  He cannot ignore this judgmental perspective once it enters his awareness, and the conflict between Sharon's view and his own self-perception (from the moment before she interrupted him) is manifested in his defensive response: "Mom, I'm ten years old now!"  The objectifying gaze of the Other, and its tension with one's own experience of freedom and responsibility, leads Sartre to hint in No Exit that "Hell is other people," and in Being and Nothingness to write that "My original fall is the existence of the Other" (352).

The Death of God

Despite the fact that he and his friends are forbidden to listen to Tween Wave, Stan takes out his iPod at night and sneaks a listen while his mother isn't looking.  Expecting to hear some new beats from his favorite genre, however, he is confronted with an aural assault of farting sounds.  It literally sounds like crap.

Stan goes to the doctor to see what's wrong with his tastes.  The doctor diagnoses him with "A condition called 'being a cynical asshole.'"  "You see, Stan, as you get older, things that you used to like start looking and sounding like shit, and things that seemed shitty as a child don't seem as shitty," explains Stan's pediatrician.  "With you, somehow the wires have gotten crossed, and everything looks and sounds like shit to you."  

Thus, Stan is confronted with what Nietzsche called the "Death of God."  The death of God is not the literal death of a living being per se, but the cessation of a value-system's contemporary relevance and inspirational power: "What are these churches anymore, then, if they aren't the crypts and catacombs of God?" (The Gay Science 142).  The difference between mere change of tastes and the death of God is that a mere change of tastes is usually dependent on a wider framework of values that remain intact; Stan might have found a new genre, for example, that just made Tween Wave sound shitty by comparison.  The death of God is the destruction of that very framework itself; Stan doesn't just think Tween Wave is shittier than some other music he found, but he has entirely lost his whole system of differentiation, and the value of everything is reduced to that of fecal matter.  Stan seems to be overwhelmed by nihilism.

The Absurd

Throughout the rest of the episode and into the next one, Stan becomes depressed.  "I just want everything to go back to the way it was," he confesses to Mr. Mackey.  "When all the things that made you laugh just make you sick, how do you go on when nothing makes you happy?"  He eventually becomes acquainted with the Secret Society of Cynics, who explain that "The world around us actually has completely turned to shit, but aliens are putting out a brain wave that keeps most people seeing a false reality...Or robots from the future, whatever."  Despite the Society's enthusiasm, Stan continues to experience a tension between a desire for meaning and the inability to find it--this tension is the absurd.

The absurd isn't just the lack of experience of meaning; it is the experience of a lack of meaning, i.e. meaninglessness.  Albert Camus elaborates in The Myth of Sisyphus:

This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said.  But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.  The absurd depends as much on man as on the world...It binds them one to the other as only hatred can weld two creatures together.  (21)

The absurd is the sense of futility, of meaninglessness, when one finds oneself unable to find an ultimate meaning or all-encompassing purpose authenticating one's daily routine:  "Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm" (12).  Upon viewing one's own life in the light (or darkness, rather) of the absurd, a failure to decipher ultimate meaning can make everything seem like shit.

Yo Dawg, I Heard You Like Negations...

The doctor may have said that there's no cure for "Being a Cynical Asshole," but Stan nonetheless finds a way out of his rut.  When he nearly gets killed on a mission for the Secret Society of Cynics, he tells them that they are "Full of shit."  Stan realizes that, yes, he may not be interested in the things he used to be interested in, but now he can start finding new friends and hobbies.  "For the first time in a long time," concludes Stan, "I'm really excited."

So, in the end, Stan escapes cynicism by becoming cynical about cynicism itself.  In a Hegelian dialectic, Stan can only find meaning by passing fully through its opposite:  general shittiness loses its shittiness when it is itself realized to be nothing but shit.  This is somewhat reminiscent of Thomas Nagel's response to the absurd: "If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that doesn't matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair" (727).  As it turns out, neither the Secret Society of Cynics with their dramatic missions nor Stan with his plague of despair were truly living in nihilism--they were just basing their lives on a practically religious philosophy of insignificance that would inevitably negate itself in the end.

The Abyss

In fact, I don't believe that anyone in the episode was a true nihilist.  Stan was incapable of making any practical value judgments, but he still wanted to be happy as before; he had found meaning, albeit entirely negative, in the loss of his former interests.  The Secret Society of Cynics was in the opposite situation:  They also were incapable of making any practical value judgments, but they were determined to make everyone else see like they do.  They were only worshipping the empty space left open by the absence of their preceding frameworks of evaluation.  

If "Hell is other people," then it seems to follow that the Other, as a judge, in some way plays the part of God.  But if "the absurd is sin without God," this suggests that the absurd can best be thought of as a gaze without the Other.  It is the invasive experience of a universal negation that would negate itself were it ever carried to its fulfillment in the mind of a thinking person.  So, as Nietzsche noted in aphorism 146 of Beyond Good and Evil, "If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."  Meaninglessness is the gaze returned by that abyss stumbled upon in a dissatisfied search for clarity and ultimate purpose.

Sources

"Ass Burgers."  South Park Studios.  Viacom, 5 October 2011.  Web.  3 July 2012.  <http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s15e08-ass-burgers>

Camus, Albert.  The Myth of Sisyphus.  New York: Vintage, 1955.  Print.

Nagel, Thomas.  "The Absurd."  The Journal of Philosophy 68.20 (21 October 1971): 716-727.  JSTOR.  Web.  5 July 2012.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm.  Beyond Good and Evil.  Public Domain.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm.  "The Gay Science."  Existentialism: Basic Writings.  Guignon, Charles, and Derk Pereboom, eds.  Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001.  Print.

Sartre, Jean-Paul.  "No Exit."  VTheatre.  Theatre UAF, 2007.  Web.  3 July 2012.  <http://vtheatre.net/script/doc/sartre.html>

Sartre, Jean-Paul.  "Being and Nothingness."  Existentialism: Basic Writings.  Guignon, Charles, and Derk Pereboom, eds.  Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001.  Print.

"You're Getting Old."  South Park Studios.  Viacom, 8 June 2011.  Web.  3 July 2012.   <http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s15e07-youre-getting-old>