Being an Animal in Existential Anxiety
A reflection on endorsing moral nihilism while caring deeply about addressing broad social problems through feminist advocacy
I wanted to write about something general and abstract this week. I wanted to write about merely verbal disputes, the indispensability argument for the existence of mathematical objects, social epistemology, or something else of that sort. But it feels impossible. Circumstances I won’t disclose have led to a mess of the following questions instead: “How and when does someone report assault? Can restorative justice work for things that are not trivial? How does patriarchy seep into seemingly benevolent spiritual speech? What does it mean to take responsibility?”
Lovely philosophers have worked on these questions. I haven’t encountered an answer that feels satisfactory, yet, possibly because no intellectual response would feel viscerally satisfactory. Am I, a self-proclaimed moral nihilist, desperately looking for a universal decree? Camus would call this gap absurdity.1
The best I could coherently accomplish, by my own world view, would be a pragmatic shorthand. If I’m a human animal and want to keep other human animals around me happy, I might find some slogans to shout out at the correct intervals. We all seem better off with the concept of bodily sovereignty, for example, so I’m very inclined to say stuff such as, “you own your body,” in a voice of absolute conviction. On other occasions, I might say, “the scope of identity is a choice,” with just as much conviction. This is Daoist. Identify with the whole, and the thing that is identified with does not seem to die.
On neither of these occasions will I mention moral nihilism, or nihilism about the property ‘ownership.’ The mention of nihilism doesn’t seem to be in the medicine, so I, conveniently, omit it. I don’t include my skepticism about the metaphysical relevance of chosen identity scope, either. I simply allow myself to engage in speech acts that I believe will help women walk around in the world with more confidence and less fear.
I endeavor to look for more useful pragmatic shorthands, over time. If an utterance makes it easier to get out of bed, I’ll keep it in a box. The phrase, “my actions will not lead to any lasting ramifications due to the eventual heat death of the universe,” is in the box. So is, “it is absolutely essential that I attend the meeting I said I’d go to now or everything will go to hell.” The former can be helpful if the reason for inaction is a sense of overwhelming pressure from the responsibility to take certain actions but not others. The latter, though often a bit too aggressive, might be helpful if the problem is an overarching sense of aimlessness.
To total newcomers, philosophy is stereotyped as the search for the so-called “meaning of life.” But if you ask a modern analytic philosopher if their work has helped them find the meaning of life, they’ll probably laugh at you. If I wanted to be a smartass, I’d say, “The answer is in the laughter.” It would sound awful nice. It would be a play on a passage from the Tao Te Ching:2
When the wise hear of the Tao,
They immediately follow it.
When the conventional hear,
They wonder if it’s true.
When the foolish hear,
They laugh out loud.
If there were no laughter,
It wouldn’t be the Tao.
I don’t want to be a smartass. I don’t know if the answer is in the laughter or not. I don’t know if it’s useful to think that the answer is in the laughter. I don’t know if the phrase, “The answer is in the laughter,” can go in the box.
Instead, my mind drifts back to Ella Fitzgerald, singing, in all earnestness, “It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing.” When I was a teenager, I thought this song was silly. Now, a part of me thinks it’s about as good as we’re going to get, when it comes to instructions that allow us to build a feeling of meaningfulness without convolution or dishonesty. To focus on the swing is to attend not to what is done, but the quality in the doing. It pertains not to what you believe is true, but the zest in the belief.
Nietzsche instructs people to choose their highest hope, and act toward that, wholeheartedly and without moderation, despite the lack of an overarching morality. Metaphysically, his instruction seems indistinguishable from moral nihilism. But, boy, does he add dramatic flair.3
With Nietzsche’s pro-emotion sentiment, I drift back into questions about the patriarchy. I feel into my animal body, and all I can think is that the air smells strange. It smells like underhanded tactics. It smells like God, gone bad. It smells like men who believe they deserve to have their hands around a woman’s neck. It smells like Epstein. It smells like men who think they ought to have access to teenagers, who do not care at all about their healthy development.
It smells like women getting skinny. It smells like weak arms that can’t push back. It smells like excuses. It smells like covert discomfort with female leadership dressed as fair backlash against Girl Boss feminism. It smells like milk, from a cow. It smells like eggs, from a chicken. It smells like sourdough, baked by a fake trad wife, through a smell-less screen. It smells like the mirage of a farm, like pure bucolic heaven that breaks into a pile of a million pixels. I don’t like it.
For a rich discussion of the absurd, see The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus.
This is from section 41 of the Tao Te Ching. The particular translation I am quoting is an online composite by Shan Dao. Translations differ substantially; I recommend looking at multiple translations if you have special interest in any particular passage.
My primary reference for Nietzsche is Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which, stylistically, is a dramatic—albeit sincere—parody of the Christian bible.