von Hartmann, Michelstaedter—residue from a time when pessimism’s popularity inspired every adult with an unhappy childhood memory to compose a master’s thesis on despair. Periods when the temptation not to exist has become a fad may be indicated by the loci of lesser figures in this tradition. Not imaginative enough to merely write about suicidal scenarios, they must either commit themselves to one or achieve a worldly success that prevents them from sympathizing with the act in any way whatsoever. It is instructive to read such figures for the manner in which their posthumous reputations lived up to their theories.
If Schopenhauer had taken lessons in civic duty from Dr. Pangloss, von Hartmann’s system would be the result. It did not occur to him that his best of all possible worlds—one in which the species strives towards nothingness through collective asceticism—is outclassed by a better possible world—ours—in which the same goal is achieved more swiftly through collective hedonism.
Mainländer: if he would have only put off his admirably consistent conclusion a bit later, giving himself enough time to establish an influence consistent with his thesis: to make the world that comes after him the ruin of a self-annihilated god.
The inference of the 23-year old Michelstaedter, the same as that of the 23-year old Cioran—that we must live in the moment, on the crest of an unending temporal wave—requires an effective method of entertainment, one that is not adequately achieved by systematizing playful rhetoric within a dissertation. Hence why Michelstadter was led to the limits of an austere logic while Cioran felt no such obligation—not so much by the validity of that logic as its utter boredom.
Given that a man seeks to become his own principle of non-contradiction, his metaphysic of suicide might for once take an original variation. Where is the heroic nihilism of ending one’s life through gluttony? That life has no essence without good nutrition is as compelling an essentialist bias as any to protest against. The persuasion of a high-fat diet; knowing that one wants healthy arteries and seeing no way to unclog them. Alone in the desert of processed food, nougat makes naught of thought.
The Underworld Optimist
As the pessimist learns to smile at the grimness of life, so the optimist need take up his good conscience. He too must learn. Not to take the opposite track and frown—that would cause him to be misidentified. Everyone knows that the satirist is at home in laughter, but no cheerful soul ever spoke of progress with a grimace. No, the optimist must learn the art of the paroxysm. Coughing, hacking, sneezing—expelling his jolly slogans loudly and violently, sending out a snotball to accompany his words of inspiration. He coughs in lieu of disappointment; if his expectations are too extravagant he spits up a bit of blood to foreshadow their miscarriage. His friends will think him in need of manners and medicine, giving themselves just enough pause to sober their idealism with a wrinkled nose and curled upper lip. Principles that can endure the common cold are stronger for having been tested. The more unremitting the viral infection, the surer one becomes that things must get better soon. The late stages of consumption cannot but bring on a fortified zeal for life. Retreating into hostile territory, the Hadean optimist confines himself in a sanatorium to prove his health, refusing to give up on progress just because he moves against the grain; for him, retrograde motion is a sign of eventual advancement, battling death the ultimate evidence of one’s verve. In a sequestered obscurity without glory, without a statue to pay tribute to the fallen soldier, there is only the prospect of life to propel one onward, the knowledge of advancing medical science. The experimental subject can look forward to a haler humanity; the invalid hopes the hospital food will improve. Beyond their individual lives lies a future where illness is not necessary and death can be rescheduled.
This realist of hope despises his green, sunny archetype—he who has never known the winter snow, the summer monsoon, a plague of locusts, one who limits his cheerful outlook to his own life, selfish for happiness. Bellowers of the Neverlasting Yay! are cynics in the making, secret sons of despair who curse fate at the first occurrence of misfortune. Enduring optimism, pitiless and implacable, can only be spread by an epidemic.
Selective Determinism
Among the enlightened, free will is not yet sophisticated enough to influence more than one automatic behavior at a time. Breathing is interrupted by a sudden thought, thinking halted by a deep breath. Asphyxiation or benightedness: absorbed meditation is a rare enough habit that the majority of people escape this dilemma. Theirs is a different doom: not in the choice between instincts, but unconquerable drives.
Swan Song
Our civilization has no genius of collapse—an Alcibiades who parades his people down an avenue of ruin with the flamboyant insouciance of a homecoming prank. We totter and sway to the flat trumpets of bandcamp cadets. If only greed or sloth or some other deadly sin were the prime cause (at least then we could give the old excuse that our natures made the downfall inevitable), rather than effects of the sheer incompetence of good will lacking experience. Familiar enough with history’s seismology that the more perceptive among us can feel a spike coming, we are relegated to watching leaders try to beat their drums in sync with the masses, who stomp their feet with increasing randomness.
Society’s Rickety Scaffolding
Civilized man admires an unhinged instinct, appreciation fizzing into obsession as his sophistication advances towards effeteness. His last course of action, as admirable as it is foolish, would seem that of Tennyson’s Ulysses, setting out for adventure with the misguided conviction not to yield and the hope of regaining a strength forever lost. Sailing past the sunset for proof of life, he lands in a tropical Eden and discovers his elemental self.
Hoping to lubricate butchery and enslavement with wonder, he ensures that the manner of his arrival will be sufficiently grandiose for the tribal men to take him as a god. But the civilized man is surprised to find many of the rural inhabitants of Papua New Guinea wearing t-shirts, looking at him only with mild curiosity instead of the awe he needed. To regain at least a mirage of his former strength, he tries to exploit their primitive prejudices by brandishing modern gadgets. They laugh, pulling out rusty, outdated models of the same tools given to them by previous explorers. No matter, he realizes. In the end, strength doesn’t lie in technology or perceptions of godhood, but in a state of health. By spreading infection among the natives he can dwindle their population enough to make conquest all the easier. So he coughs on them. Their faces take on a look of disgust, but though they take offense they stand unaffected. They are immune to his cold; they have already adopted the worst of Western man’s diseases and made them their own.
Without the possibility of conquest, the civilized man has nothing to offer but diplomacy. Before leaving for home he makes a blood pact with the tribal chief and contracts a rare brain disease.
Defeated, he heads back to his private jet and pours himself a drink. The primitives are gone from the earth. Modernity has extended its reach over everything. Soon these virile semi-barbarians will gain the resources they need to overrun him. Then they too will become like him, urbane and enervated. Even in their current state the gap was too narrow to seem magnificent by comparison.
The white man’s burden had been lifted. There was no one left to civilize.
More Than Geographically Isolated
Lacking a ruined continent like the Europeans, Americans cannot take refuge under grand columns and sigh with Doric docility, grooving tattoos of past glories into our flesh columns. But neither can we live in a perpetual present like the Greeks, the example of that prior society still too heavy on our memory to invent a series of heroic epics culminating in our presence. To say nothing of the Chinese, for whom one’s own individual existence is just another flower on the garland, the continuation of a living antiquity.
So we are relegated to live in the space of the recent past—the limbo between a golden age and raw life, the lost and the sweaty. Mythologizing what little figures and episodes we have of our history, but with too much evidence to believe the stories about cherry trees and liberation from tyranny (the penny-yoke of a sugar tax), our near-present is a slush of folklore and irony, each interpenetrating the other in turn.
The Greeks, looking back to an age of Gods, aspired to divine