Disgust

What is the place of disgust in society today? In previous times, ones more completely saturated with religious ethics, where sinning was thought to be a real thing that barred you from heaven and sent you to hell, it was clear what we should be disgusted with—sin, sinning, and sinners. Now we don’t tend to view the concept of sinning as altogether relevant, which of course doesn’t mean that there aren’t still people who offend in the same way that sinners used to, just that the criterion for evaluating them is no longer valid. The way we evaluated behavior in the past isn’t valid anymore, but people aren’t as different as our evolving conceptual frameworks are, meaning that people, the basis for all moral and ethical ideas, are the same things now that gave rise to the idea of sinning in more unironically theistic ages. Sinning was hated, feared, reviled, and scorned—people, behaviors, and concepts must now, still in our atheistic age, be deserving of similar energy, if with a different set of vocabulary and evaluative criteria, but those feelings and impulses are still there.

We can’t have outgrown the impulses that gave rise to the way we evaluated things for two thousand years. I don’t think we’re all up to the challenge of becoming gods ourselves, of replacing the old value structures and inserting ourselves there instead, mainly because, in contrast to Christian ages, our post-Christian values and societal-goals are not openly discussed, because they are so untenable and new. If we had social gatherings every week in our communities to openly discuss the trials and tribulations of continually becoming the overman, of self-legislation and all those other Nietzschean ideals, then I think our atheistic age would be more tenable, concrete, and altogether less atomized.

The danger of post-Christian life is its atomization—there is no unifying principle which we all more or less agree on and collectively aim toward. There are, no doubt, basic concepts like goodness, decency, political stability, and so forth, but those have always been around and cannot sustain a society—I’m talking about something on the level of our previously existent drive toward heaven. Today, our ideals and deepest spiritual convictions are all resolutely private matters; as if something so important could be kept so strictly out of view without it withering away or becoming so vague and buried inside of us as to lose all meaning or relevance. This is one of Nietzsche’s most salient points—that atheism must not become pale, dim, self-satisfied and passionless; that there must, even after God’s death, be a source of genuine spiritualism and, above all, righteousness, in the collective mind and which friends and family members can, in community, delight in and strive toward. One of the more interesting things Nietzsche tries to do is maintain a sense of righteousness in spite of the recent death of God, the former fountain of all righteousness. His task is our task, even though we aren’t aware of it and we’ve mostly failed at it.

Christianity, like all religions, is a myth, one that we have become too rationalistic to really believe in anymore or allow to guide or behavior, motivate us, and serve as the telos of our lives. We need a new ultimate why which we can all believe in. The absence of such a why has resulted in such widespread ironism that it is either impossible or silly to be in any sense earnest or sincere in public anymore. Irony, as Kierkegaard described it in his inimitable way, is the “first and most abstract qualification of subjectivity.” It is also a product of the subject negating actuality because it does not contain enough reality to suit him. In our time the actual contains little, if any, reality for an unprecedented number of people that the age is so drenched in ironism that the collective judgment of general humanity scarcely rises above descriptions like ‘shallow’ ‘superficial’ ‘flimsy’ ‘pale’ etc.

The question then is how to make the actual (or the givenness of experience) more real, or less absurd, than it so clearly is. We expect the actual to disgust us but we are not surprised or disgusted with the disgust. We are in some sense shocked when we are not disgusted by the lack of reality contained in a given slice of actuality. Whenever I meet someone who is capable of being honest, engaging, interesting, and generous with his past in an at least quasi-reflective way, I am indeed shocked. I expect everyone I meet to be wantonly vapid, and am right most of the time. The result is my personal outlook being deeply, probably terminally ironical, because my given actuality, to my mind, is so eminently negatable.

This isn’t in any way a modern or post-modern (or post-post-modern) problem—Socrates’ very existence was irony, as shown by how relentlessly he negated everything around him through his world-historically unprecedented use of dialectical reasoning. He subjected his interlocutors, who were held in high regard and paid well to impart their knowledge to youths, to such devastating dialectical skirmishes that they were reduced to having to admit their ignorance. Socrates reproached mankind for its vain belief in the possibility of knowledge, but that was all—he only negated the actual, without making any kind of positive contribution. Socratism, as Clitophon pointed out, can’t really help us achieve virtue.

Of course any words like virtue, temperance, piety, wisdom, effort, or whatever else, are so laughably beyond the scope of being used today that no one brings them up in social situations or in educational institutions in an un-ironic way. Or, when they are used unironically, as in a student asking a question about virtue, the professor drones on about nothing and no one knows what the point of listening to the windiness coming from their mouths is, even though after the wind stops issuing forth those present all nod soberly as if something important just happened. But, for the most part, no overtures toward honoring or deciphering those old buzz-words is made, and educational institutions, even higher education in philosophy, even (and especially) graduate seminars, content themselves with bandying about absolutely indecipherable streams of irrelevant nonsense, which are either unaddressed or limply taken up and never addressed straightforwardly as being the kind of nonsense that it is, under the banner of pluralism—i.e., no one thing is right, diversity is the only thing that matters, and passing any kind of judgment whatsoever is beyond unthinkable.

The problem with pluralism, diversity, or relativism or whatever contemporary slogan we use as the fulcrum for the fact of our gathering together, is that they are in a very important sense not pluralistic, diverse, or relative, but rather, in a real sense, absolutist. For a relativist, everything is relative except the fact that being an absolutist is absolutely wrong—i.e., any real opposition is beyond the pale. At its root, the kind of pluralism guiding our educational institutions, which are at least allegedly meant to provide our unprecedentedly context-less students with some kind of tangible psychospiritual fabric from which to weave the essence of their subsequent lives to an extent sufficient to make them good citizens (a concept that of course has, like most others, become utterly unintelligible), is paper-thin in this sense: it provides for a merely apparent rather than substantive diversity and pluralism. We defend to the very death a person’s right to look and act bizarrely, but not to present truly upsetting or radical ideas. We are too anxious at the prospect of thinking to permit this. A genuinely pluralistic discourse would not be boring, because the basis of what was going on would have constant attacks against it, whereas just about every second a student spends in our educational institutions is boring because no thinking is happening or is expected to happen, since the debate doesn’t exist and, if it did, no possible challenge to it would be given anything more than token consideration.

Again, what is the place of disgust in our society? We are disgusted with basic crimes, and that’s just about it. But what an imprecise animal we’ve become if we cannot apply any righteousness to the finer elements of social intercourse and reserve it all for glaring violations of law. We’ve become so proud of ourselves for ‘tolerating’ difference, and so intolerant of those who do not fit into this rapidly ossifying paradigm of tolerance in extremis, that we’ve more or less forgotten what real difference sounds and feels like. Too much focus on accepting marginal sexual practices, racial identities or economic situations has sapped us of our ability to identify or engage divergent thought. Obviously sex, race, class, and sexuality should never be used to subjugate a person—but an individual who has made it to college, in the overwhelming majority of instances, already knows this in her mind and heart—why dwell on it to the exclusion of sophisticated, self-confident dissent?

Most educational experiences consist in appreciating what the power structure has deemed important from the corpus of thought that has already happened, and almost nothing more than this is required of the future citizens who are paying tens upon tens of thousands of dollars for a college education. Most students, of course, want nothing more than to have some facts and concepts tossed at them which they will eventually volley back to the instructor in a somewhat varied form. But some are foolish enough to think that college education is different from the regimented, purposefully boring, imagination-squelching schooling of grades 6-12. That is six years of hardcore, institutionalized boredom, and it is very widely recognized that those years will be unfulfilling, desperate, and pointless, existing only to permit one access to college. So those few college students who made it through that gauntlet and have enough energy and righteousness left in them to really tackle some higher level books will find out a) that this kind of energy will narrow down the number of friends they will be able to have in college quite drastically and b) the professors who aren’t threatened by rigorous, confident, yet irreverent writerly energy are equipped and permitted to do little more than agree that collegiate actuality contains a degree of reality which is thoroughly negatable, and to perhaps commiserate with the stranded student about the general hopelessness of society.

All of this is to say that the notion, which I think still exists, of secondary and, more so, higher education having anything whatsoever to do with untethered critical thought, with the possibility of valuing, is more or less absurd. No one receives or is expected to receive any kind of moral instruction or to even witness or absorb any kind of righteousness during their educational experiences. They are of course expected to drink obscene amounts of alcohol, develop superficial friendships based on shared experiences of being so drunk that they don’t remember what happened, engage in meaningless and semi-anonymous sexual encounters, talk mainly about sporting events, either professional or ones housed in their enormous and enormously expensive college stadiums, mainstream entertainment cartridges, and, every few weeks or so, give an at least over-the-shoulder acknowledgement to basic literacy.

There is a familiar and to some trite problem in philosophy of how to make space for value in a world of fact, but I don’t think we’re too familiar with it or that the ideas behind the question are that trite, if its general phrasing might be. When do people feel that they are engaged in something, or near something, or have heard of something, that smacked in any sense of whatever the word ‘value’ might mean? Value basically means some phenomenon that points to nothing beyond itself, that isn’t replaceable or reproducible or instantly forgettable. But what in our lives today as we lead them isn’t replaceable or instantly forgettable? Of course even asking questions along this line makes one smirk because the notion of value has been so thoroughly excised from our experience that acting as if it might mean something smacks of religious quackery. But these ironic atheists, which I count myself as too, have to stand on some ground, don’t they? And when you smirk or laugh at some misguided fool, don’t you have to at least in some sense know something they don’t? Well, what do the pale atheists know that the post-post-modern seeker after virtue doesn’t? They know that they do not know, just like Socrates did; but was Socrates really a good enough role model to still be the texture of our souls even today?

Nietzsche certainly didn’t think so—he thought that Socratism represented the death knell of all that was great about Greek culture. This is not to say that Socratism is not important or significant to the human enterprise—it was perhaps an inevitable development and is eminently worth absorbing into oneself, but it is not sufficient to constitute the fulcrum of a world-view, because irony is not enough to live on, and as Kierkegaard submitted, Socrates’ very existence was irony. Nietzsche thought that the Socratic tendency of reasoning about everything negated the very possibility conditions of value or valuing—because value can never be estimated or reasoned over, it has to just be. Reason = virtue = happiness has led us astray, Nietzsche says, and this has culminated inevitably in nihilism. We’ve lost touch with the ability to experience value because we’ve become too Socratic, and need to get in touch with a pre-Socratic sense of life.

But it is I think less useful to go into philosophical history for answers than to use the present and what one conceives of the future to be. The history of philosophy, after all, is primarily the history of a series of errors, of bad answers to badly stated questions, and can often confuse more than clarify, frustrate rather than inspire. Studying doesn’t necessary have much to do with wisdom—the recognition that studying might be important is I think a precondition for wisdom inhabiting a person, but that should be more or less the extent of it. Scholarship cannot yield much else besides more scholarship—Husserl famously declared that facts can only produce other facts; a fact which is now presented at students in a classroom who take note of it and move on. That is sort of disgusting and it is also the main thing that happens in the primary place where thinking is allegedly happening.