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Kurt Cobain, Nothingness, and Michael Novak

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 00:01:00 -0400

And I forget just why I taste

Oh, yeah, I guess it makes me smile

I found it hard, it’s hard to find

Oh well, whatever, nevermind

-lyrics from the Nirvana album “Nevermind” (1991)

I took a worldview class in college. The professor for the class actually understood worldviews, so rather than mere didactic note-taking on presuppositions we had a healthy dose of cultural participation. Of course, this meant we were held hostage to the professor’s musical horizons, but regardless it was not surprising that the postmodern worldview was introduced by the tunes of Nirvana.

It’s been twenty years since the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind , an anniversary that’s almost impossible to mark without betrayal, as the New York Times notes. The celebration of Kurt Cobain’s indifference and depression is ridiculous and disrespectful. Not because his downer lyrics were unjustified, but because celebration was exactly what seemed antithetical to him.

Rewind back twenty more years. In the late 1960s, what would become known as postmodern philosophy was making its first major marks”Derrida’s Of Grammatology , Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality , and Foucault’s The Order of Things had all recently been published. In culture, radical questioning was making inroads to the middle class. Amidst both the philosophical and cultural uncertainty, a young Stanford professor was working to reconcile the genuineness of these doubts with the misdirection he felt they had taken.

“Nihilism is an ideological interpretation imposed on the experience of nothingness,” wrote Michael Novak. “Most writers on nihilism have placed the experience of nothingness in opposition to the values of culture, as though that experience were a threat to it. I want to argue that the power of the experience of nothingness has been misperceived.”

Novak is now frequently identified as a neoconservative. Without defending the appellation, it can confidently be said that he was no such thing in 1968, while he was writing The Experience of Nothingness . Novak had a deep sympathy for the student unrest, and a deep incredulity to the war being protested. At this time, in fact, Novak labeled himself as a radical.

And yet Novak had a unique perspective on the nothingness that young people found themselves within. As he relates, he spent his youth and young adult life immersed in the Catholic Carmelite mystics: St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and St. Therese of Lisieux. All three figures are known for their profoundly deep spirituality, and yet all suffered through long experiences of nothingness. However, it was through their fidelity to that experience that their insights (and eventually, their ecstasies) were able to be faithful to real human experience. All three mystics are among the most widely read spiritual literature in Christian history, precisely because they did not abandon their experience of nothingness for cheap satisfaction - an easy way out that would make themselves feel better.

In Novak’s view, nothingness is a real experience, opened by the drive to question: “When I perceive the drive to question in its purity . . . I perceive the ambiguity of my own conscious life. I recognize the formlessness, the aimlessness, and the disunity implicit in my own insignificance, my mortality, my ultimate dissolution. . . . These insights are true insights . Not to experience them is to evade the character of one’s own consciousness. It is to live a lie. The experience of nothingness bears the taste of honesty” [emphasis added].

Society may be built on realities that we must construct, but that reality must be built in fidelity to our deepest experiences if it is to make any sense to us, as Novak suggested. And that reality is that any culture we construct is not eternal. To find that the things we construct are not eternal is the true experience that the experience of nothingness makes evident.

This is not a new discovery. It is the message of the book of Ecclesiastes, as well. As commentators from Jacques Ellul to Peter Leithart have pointed out, the Teacher in the book is not concerned so much with “Vanity” or “Meaninglessness” as he is with the evanescence of all things around him. The Hebrew hebel is something more like vapor . It is here, and then it is gone. Labor is a vapor, and yet productive labor is still the best thing for us to do in the present. Like Novak, the Teacher in Ecclesiastes is not merely giving an exposition of life without God, but a realistic view that is not overly beguiled by the promises of eternity in work, culture, or happiness itself.

According to Novak, there are values implicit in the drive to question: genuine questioning can exemplify honesty, freedom, and courage. And the embrace of these values, he says, can be a true way out of the experience that must not be ignored.

Michael Novak has made a helpful distinction between the experience of nothingness and the ideological outworking of nihilism that is unwarranted. This would leave a person merely with the experience, but again, we are back to Kurt Cobain and the postmodernism of culture, even if it is not the postmodernism of philosophy. Perhaps Novak is a little too cheery about the experience of nothingness. He fails to attend to the problem of futility”the inability to find answers”that makes nothingness so painful, so depressing, so “Nevermind.”

Maybe Novak would have something to say to Cobain. Maybe Cobain could have found a way out, through fidelity to the values that enabled his experience. However, in his own experience of nothingness, Novak has stayed faithful not only to values, but to the commitment of faith that he (rightfully) did not consider assaulted by his present experiences. Likewise St. Teresa.

And likewise the Teacher in Ecclesiastes: “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep His commandments” (Ecc. 12:13)”which is a simple lesson, the lesson of his upbringing, to be persevered when all other lessons have been unveiled as hebel . Through it all, he must serve God “ . . . for this is the whole duty of man,” or literally in the Hebrew, “this is the whole of man.”

God’s existence can be questioned. The whole world can be questioned. Your own justification for yourself can be questioned. All of these can be done in all honesty. But to leave the Lord would destroy a man, for participation in God, loyalty to God, “is the whole of man.” To leave the whole is to leave the questions, and forego the very ability to question. To abide in the midst of questioning is painful, but the Teacher (and out best teachers, where they will be found) tells us that this is the true honesty that both legitimizes and gives true perspective to the question.

Bryan Wandel is a Research Fellow for the John Jay Institute and blogs at Humane Pursuits . He resides with his wife and daughter in Washington, DC.

RESOURCES

New York Times , Post-Grunge, Seattle Rocks On

Michael Novak, The Experience of Nothingness

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The Christian Neurotic

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 00:01:00 -0400

You have probably seen him before: the Evangelical Christian who is distraught over God’s will for his job change, or speaks too strongly one minute and desperately seeks reconciliation the next. Who pours his soul out at accountability groups, but finds it difficult to comfort his recently divorced friend.

American Evangelical Christians seem, at times, to be afflicted by neurosis. But it may not be such a bad thing.

In the traditional psychological formulations, psychosis refers to a loss of contact with reality”think, catatonic schizophrenic or the man who insists he is Jesus Christ. Neurosis keeps contact with reality, but social functioning breaks down. To put it another way, a neurotic is probably aware his life is a wreck.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) dropped the term “neurosis” in the 1970s; it is replaced by a litany of specific anxiety and personality disorders: chronic anxiety, phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder, borderline personality disorder, etc. The APA shrinks from references to the Freudian past of its terminology, but the psychosis/neurosis schema is still helpful.

There is no clear etiology for these disorders. Rather, the DSM lists a series of criteria, to which behavior is compared. A proposed revision to the new DSM, due out next year, lists the following as a mild impairment of interpersonal intimacy, and thus a criterion for the neurotic/personality disorders: the patient has the “[c]apacity and desire to form intimate and reciprocal relationships, but may be inhibited in meaningful expression and sometimes constrained by any intense emotion or conflict. Ability to cooperate may be constrained by unrealistic standards.” So we might describe the Christian neurotic.

In the early twentieth century, American Protestants became split over how to interact with the persistent “historical explanations” that had been exploding into nearly all the human sciences: Freud in psychology, Charles Beard in history, John Dewey in philosophy, Oliver Wendell Holmes in law, Max Weber in sociology, Franz Boas in anthropology. According to historian Grant Wacker, liberal Protestants “made their peace with modernity” by insisting that revelation must be mediated by the historical process, whereas conservatives became increasingly insistent that God’s revelation had somehow bypassed that process. The latter’s impact on Evangelical Christianity in America has been persistent.

In the 1960s and 1970s, many mainline Protestant denominations discovered the “Second Wave” Pentecostal movement, with its emphasis on personal interaction with God. Thus, many American Christians have had their minds wrung by the challenges of extrahistorical standards (due to the fundamentalist response to modernity) while their epistemologies have been strung out on the throes of immediate communication with God. This is not an enviable situation.

Now, this mental exercise pushes some people to extreme confidence, and others to exasperated apostasy. Nevertheless, there are a great many faithful believers that struggle toward daily balance: the demands of responsibility in a capitalist society, seeking to hear God’s voice, living in a seemingly self-sufficient world, vastly expanding that world through belief in a spiritual reality.

The issue of day-to-day living is the greatest import of faith for most American Christians. The majority are constrained to live in and alongside a world whose expectations of reality do not always correspond to their own. Is Jesus speaking to me? Was that a sign? Do I give comfort to a dying friend, or should I make sure she hears the full weight of the gospel? These pragmatic questions of quotidian spirituality are the concerns of the faithful, many of whom find themselves frequently distraught. In psychological terminology, evangelicals’ “ability to communicate may be constrained by unrealistic standards,” as the American Psychiatric Association put it.

On the one hand, the DSM might fault (or diagnose) a Christian for failing to interact healthfully with the world around him. On the other hand, the Christian’s pastor will likely reassure him that the world is unhealthy. Still, this average Evangelical is going to feel the vortex within him of conflicting assumptions about the world. Whatever theological reassurances might be given, the actual epistemological impact of partly fundamentalist, slightly charismatic spirituality is very hard to contain.

Another proposed revision to the new DSM qualifies the definition of personality disorders: this diagnosis “excludes culturally normative personality features.” That is, the writers of the DSM recognize that the norms of some cultures could fall under the label of “disordered” even though they work healthfully in their own context.

The Christian (of any stripe, but especially the American evangelical) lives in a unique culture. The culture of his faith worships a God that cannot be seen, and assumes a level of spiritual reality that sociologists discount. They think that prayer is an appropriate response to sickness. The ekklesia is described in the Scriptures not only as a body, but as a distinct kingdom and nation, which therefore has its own norms. And yet the majority, surrounding culture is also always there.

The psychological conflict of living in two cultures at once can be overbearing. However, it should also be observed that immense creativity is latent within the stress. Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Karl Marx, and Amedeo Modigliani were all European Jews. C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot were adult converts to Christianity in a modernizing world. Kierkegaard, Solzhenitsyn, and Tolstoy all felt like outsiders.

Is the neurotic Christian unhealthy? Possibly. But you would have to judge him according to the norms of both his cultures. Moreover, this tension may be merely an enhanced version of the tension that all people are susceptible to when living in a finite, hurtful world. The world is good, and yet it is bad. People are spiritual beings, but find themselves far from God. The Christian neurotic, with the right guidance, might have the best experience to relate to when the world seems cruel and contradictory.

Bryan Wandel is a Research Fellow for the John Jay Institute and blogs at humanepursuits.wordpress.com . He resides with his wife and daughter in Washington, DC.

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