So _That's_ What It's All About!

A recent AP article about a Francis Bacon retrospective quotes the co-curator, Chris Stephens, regarding Bacon: “He was passionately atheist and saw that as the key thing about living in the 20th century. He set out to express what it is to be alive when God does not exist – (when) man is just an animal.” So let’s speculate at the outset that Bacon was, at the very least, an honest atheist (how one goes about being a “passionate” atheist is a bit beyond me – I always think of atheism as representing a singular lack of passion) who did not shrink from the short line to be drawn between atheism and absurdity, and from there (implied, at least) to despair. So the answers to those Philosophy 101 questions wind up being very concise – assuming there even are any answers: Why are we here? No reason at all. What is our destiny? Death and decay (not necessarily in that order). What, then, should one do? Pretty much as you damn please – or, in Bacon’s case, paint. As I said, this is honest atheism. Dishonest atheism is the kind that agrees 100% with the current cohort of anti-God writers, but then turns around and says that having the “correct” political views, and the “correct” views about economics, history, art, culture, and so on is extremely important, and not at all incompatible with a viewpoint that tends much more directly to the absurd. These people will go so far as to trot out some version of the Golden Rule, as though that will smooth over the roughness of their basic premise – but in fact, the Golden Rule itself is a value statement which is based on a decidedly non-absurd, non-despairing view of life – and which requires a theological, not just philosophical, premise; at least that’s my conviction. Frankly, I would rather have a person who acted out their despair through riotous self-centered living than one of these liberal-arts hypocrites. Because the hypocrites want to have the best of both worlds – all the benefits of civilization and human achievement, and all the trappings of whatever power and wealth they may accumulate, but at the same time no ultimate moral responsibility. My feeling is, you’re either part of the human race or you’re not, and if you choose not to be, stop pretending you are.

It is odd, though, that among those artists and other creative souls (oops – I mean “persons”) who adopt the atheistic-absurdity-despair premise, their output tends to fall along very similar lines, i.e. there is a central tendency -- there is nothing random about it. The review points out that Bacon dealt with “twisted forms, mottled flesh and screaming mouths” – or, with “bestial human figures, contorted bodies and screaming mouths displaying jagged teeth.” Now, one would think – OK, let me back up a bit. A true atheist, i.e. a person who saw no transcendent purpose or meaning in human existence, and who saw nature, i.e. the un-created order, as being totally indifferent to our welfare or whether we live or die, and who in fact saw people – especially in the aggregate -- as, basically, totally indifferent to the sufferings of others… who, in sum, saw the world and human existence as basically a series of random events… shouldn’t that person be more or less indifferent to the value judgments of the bulk of humanity? Shouldn’t they be willing to give equal weight to every facet of human experience, i.e. to what most people think of as “good” as well as “bad”? And shouldn’t this consideration inform their artistic or creative output? And yet, one finds that output to be, overwhelmingly, on the negative (again, according to the value judgments of most people) side.

Let me put it another way. Why wouldn’t an artist who has adopted the atheistic-absurdity-despair premise, by which nothing is any more meaningful or significant than anything else, be just as likely to paint pictures of bunny rabbits and merry-go-rounds and children with balloons -- and I mean in a non-"ironic" fashion -- as they are to paint “twisted forms, mottled flesh and screaming mouths”? If nothing has value, then everything has equal value – i.e., none – and therefore there is no reason, a priori, to represent, in art, any one thing over any other, particularly to represent things which most people consider bad over things which they consider good.

Ah, but – you might say – it is their rejection of the world, i.e. of its absurdity, that determines their artistic choices. To emphasize death, decay, and destruction is a way of saying, this is the truth about things. It is even a way of saying, this is what the world deserves for being the way it is, i.e. for being meaningless and absurd. And yes, one could hold to that point of view… but it would necessitate overlooking some important (in my opinion) facts – for example that many people, even in midst of all this absurdity, are in fact happy, and capable of enjoying life. They are relishing small, everyday pleasures as well as the broader epic of life in general, and of their part in it. And no, they are not “in denial” or afflicted with terminal Candide-ism; they have simply decided to emphasize one category of life’s experiences over the other, i.e. the good (admittedly, a somewhat subjective assessment) over the bad. So why shouldn’t their choices be at least respected, perhaps with the occasional artistic representation? (I don’t think Norman Rockwell qualifies as being of the “atheistic-absurdity-despair” school – he would anchor the other end of the scale.)

In fact, I can go a step further with this. Those who relish, and value, the good can nonetheless explain the bad, or evil, in terms of poor choices, flawed will, temptation, concupiscence, and any of a thousand ways of falling into one or more of the deadly sins. They may even come to the conclusion (as Aquinas did) that evil is not a thing in itself, but is the lack of good. In other words, evil is “explained”, in a sense, in terms of that which it lacks, i.e. the good. But the person with the atheistic-absurdity-despair view of things cannot explain the good in terms of evil, or in any other way. To him, the good – or that which people consider the good – is an anomaly, and probably a delusion besides… and believing in it, or believing that it’s possible, is a sign of weakness. In other words, the strong know that there is no meaning to be found, and they aren’t afraid to admit it. (I see this attitude every time I read one of these current “chic” atheist authors – “I am the tough guy and the rest of you are wimps because you’re afraid to admit how rotten things really are. The truth is, life sucks then you die. Now where’s the advance on my next book?”)

So with that in mind, let’s get back to Bacon for a moment. Despite his alleged philosophical premises, he did, in fact, make artistic choices, and coincidentally made the same ones that nearly all other students of the absurd have made. Every work he turned out represented the statement: “This is important; that is not.” So he was making a statement of value in an allegedly valueless world – i.e. he was saying that death and decay are more important than life and health, even though, strictly speaking, he had no philosophical basis for saying that. Why are death and decay more important, if nothing has any meaning? And why, for that matter, is despair a more valid point of view than the view that life has meaning? And if – bear with me, now – life has no meaning, is it any less meaningful, or more absurd, to pretend that it does? Are you saying that my bunny rabbits are less meaningful than your mottled flesh? But you have no basis for making that claim, according to your own premises.

What, then, makes an artist, given that he lives in a world where nothing matters, take up art at all, not to mention troubling his mind with complex artistic decisions? I think it’s because even the most militant, the most “honest”, atheist is nonetheless trapped into making decisions, because he is, by his very human nature (despised tho’ it might be), trapped into having preferences – likes and dislikes. There are philosophers (and Eastern religious teachers) who deny the very existence of the body – i.e. they contend that the body is an illusion that arises within the immaterial mind. (They are, of course, in stiff competition with psychologists who contend that only the body exists, and that the so-called “mind” is an epiphenomenon. I say, let those two camps fight it out.) But most atheists, I daresay, are perfectly willing to admit the existence of bodies – at least of one, i.e. their own, even if everyone else’s is in their imagination. But actually, most of them would be willing to admit that the observable world is real, on some level, if only temporary. But then we come to our relationship with the world, or what characterizes our existence within it, and thus we are faced with the brute fact of, or requirement for, self-preservation. This, of course, is where the philosophical community starts to fragment in a big way. Some will contend that, since life is absurd, so is wanting to sustain it. But they then have to explain the self-preservation drive, since it’s so, well, anti-philosophical. Mostly they just figure, that’s the way it is, it’s just part of the overall absurdity – we strive and strain to stay alive only to experience another day of absurdity and despair. But they certainly would not fault anyone who decided, on that basis, to end their life and had the courage and resourcefulness to do so (Bacon lived to age 82, BTW – none of this “early out” nonsense for him). But in any case, once one admits that “the body in the world” seems to have its own priorities, regardless of the philosophy of the brain that inhabits it (call this the “existential stage” of development), then we can, if we so choose, admit that the self-preservation urges of others are no less valid (call this the “humanistic stage”). But here’s where a funny thing happens, because now one finds that the most basic self-preservation urges of certain other people – i.e. their very existence – are not, in fact, granted automatic validity by everyone, and certainly not by any adherent to one of the collectivist or totalitarian schools of political and economic thought. Under those systems, many will have to die before the world can be remade as it ought to be – and now we’re deep in heart of “values”. And to make things worse, the benign humanist has no good arguments against the malevolent collectivist. (This is the mistake our “secular humanists” make when they argue against totalitarianism – well OK, against totalitarianism of the “fascist” hue vs. the “socialist” hue.)

So the absurdist, to be consistent, should jump back in horror at this point, and disown any notion of human values, at least as they might be forcibly applied to others (even though the use of force per se cannot be judged, because it’s no more absurd than pacifism). But sure enough, intellectual history is full of cases of people who not only did not make that perfectly logical move, but did just the opposite, i.e. jumped headlong into some form of collectivism – Sartre being, perhaps, one of the more prominent cases. And this in itself could be considered a form of absurdity – but it’s never identified as such. It’s more along the lines of, I can’t prove (using the tools of philosophy) that such-and-such is true or good, but I’m going to act along those lines anyway, and I expect others to do likewise. Which makes just about as much sense as a rocket scientist filling an Atlas booster with bat guano instead of rocket fuel, and expecting it to work just as well, because, why not?

I guess what I’m coming around to with all this is the notion that what I call the atheistic-absurdity-despair world view, while it appears to be nihilistically simple and intellectually undemanding, is really full of contradictions and of metaphysical and epistemological accidents waiting to happen. The adherent of this world view has to get up every morning and “esplain” (as Desi Arnaz would say) to himself why things are as they appear to be – and, admittedly, one of the preferred media for this sort of self-explanation is art. And just as admittedly, the artist never succeeds in his quest for an explanation, because if he did he could stop doing art and go do something else. But no such luck – the artist has to go over it and over it again, as Bacon did… which ought to be a clue that what he is trying to explain to himself cannot be explained, perhaps because it’s simply not true. But that’s the last thing that will occur to any of them.