by Roy Scranton
Freedom, it turns out, is the whole problem: on the one hand, the conceit necessary to make sense of a moral order structured by a choice between eternal reward and eternal punishment, and on the other the idea that conscious control over nature, from the outward conquest of the farthest reaches of Earth to the zealous inward self-denying asceticism of the Protestant believer, can free us from nature’s limits and dictates. Freedom to choose sin or virtue, on the one hand, and freedom from nature on the other. It is a conception of freedom founded not only in Christian metaphysics, but in the material history of modern Europe, namely a staggering influx of wealth plundered from the Americas, Africa, and Asia, human slavery, and an industrial revolution that opened up vast reserves of solar energy stored in the form of fossilized carbon—first coal, then oil. From the beginning, our modern sense of being free meant not being a slave, whether to a plantation master or to natural powers like wind and water. Indeed, as Andreas Malm painstakingly shows in his book Fossil Capital, coal won out over wind and water as a power source for early industrialization not because it was cheaper, but because it gave factory owners more control over their workers—which is to say, more “freedom.”
If we are honest with ourselves and take a broad enough historical view, we must humbly submit that thought has never really been all that good for all that much. It’s never been especially useful. Oh, there’s invention and law and utopian ideals and so on, which have provided designs and justifications for innumerable human artifacts, institutions, and projects. But thought isn’t engineering, despite Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, which contends that “philosophers have only interpreted the world” while “the point is to change it.” On the contrary, thought resists instrumentalization because it resists subordination to all social value. Thought is good for thought; it is its own end. Socrates didn’t save Athens, the Buddha didn’t save India, Walter Benjamin didn’t save the Jews, and philosophy has never cured a disease or conquered a country or rescued a village or raised a child. It might help you become more compassionate, though that didn’t seem to work for Arthur Schopenhauer, who’s perhaps better known for shoving his landlady down the stairs than he is for his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation. It might help you be more prudent, though, again, the biographies of well-known philosophers from Mary Wollstonecraft to Ludwig Wittgenstein suggest this is not necessarily the case.
Since thought has never been able to save us in the past, it might be a little unreasonable to expect it to do so now. Thought simply cannot solve the root problems of human existence—desire and mortality—and thought cannot tell us what is good, what we ought to do, or how to live, because these questions have no final answers. Thought cannot make us free, from nature or from each other, since human consciousness is determined by countless factors from gut bacteria, neurochemistry, and genetics to acculturation and the weather, and human politics is the product not of logical propositions but of situational negotiation within social power relations. And finally, thought cannot make us gods. It cannot free us from our animal, material existences, the demands of embodied life, and the fact of our finitude. As long as human spirit inheres in matter—even if that spirit is a cloud stored on a server farm in Iowa—we remain mortal, dependent on the Earth, and subject to physical forces which exceed our control. This is what thought truly struggles with: not the possibility of escape, but the inevitability of death.
Only by coming to terms with this conundrum do we realize, at last, that the worm gets one more turn. Thought is, in the end, the only thing that can save us. Here we stand, each one of us one primate among billions in a species that has overrun and ruined its habitat, heading for a population correction the likes of which the human world has never seen, on a wobbly spinning rock with a rapidly warming atmosphere in a distant corner of the galaxy, a temporary accumulation of star dust, once was nothing, will again be nothing, is nothing now but electrochemical pulse and biological striving, a flicker in the web of being. Only thought can help us see who we are, know who we are, and help us reconcile our imaginary collective models of the world, so rich and so vital and so often false, with the truth of our worldly being. Only humble and diligent thought, uncomfortably estranged from daily life, can bring to light our total dependence on other humans and the non-human world we live within while opening the way to the joyful communion our dependence makes possible.
True freedom emerges not from domination or even from escaping domination, but from recognizing and accepting those forces which shape our lives, cultivating detachment, and interrupting the cycle of reaction and desire. Thought slows being, suspends our participation in social life, opens a gap between cause and effect that is in the end our only true sovereignty. The thinker, that is to say, is an interrupter: not merely a node or an amplifier within social circuits, but a place of stillness. An active pause. A total ecstatic absorption in the now.
What is thinking good for today, among the millions of voices shouting to be heard, as we stumble and trip toward our doom? Not much, maybe nothing, maybe less. Certainly memory can help preserve the wisdom of the past and set the record straight, understanding can help us see our situation more clearly, and the two together can help us make sense of how we got to where we are. Questioning our accepted beliefs can reveal to us our hidden selves. Cultivating an awareness of our dependence on others, human and non-human alike, opens the way to compassion, humility, and joyful communion with all being. Practicing detachment vitiates desire and accommodates our souls to death. And finally, ultimately, deliberation slows and limits action. Pondering your situation keeps you from reacting to it, which is, in the end, the highest good thought can offer: doing less, doing nothing, being nothing more or less than we are—a gathering of dust and light, a universe—awake.
Endnotes
We’re Doomed, Now What?
No doubt this is Nietzsche’s revision of his predecessor Spinoza’s ideal of amor dei intellectualis, the intellectual love of god (or nature), which for Spinoza took form in the practice of rational inquiry.
According to Climate Central scientists working from NASA and NOAA data, February 2016 was 1.63° Celsius above preindustrial temperatures, and March 2016 was 1.54° Celsius above. See “Earth Flirts with a 1.5-Degree Celsius Global Warming Threshold,” Scientific American, Apr. 20, 2016, www.climatecentral.org/news/world-flirts-with-1.5C-threshold-20260. Tobias Friedrich and others have predicted temperature increases of up to 7.36° Celsius by 2100. See Friedrich, Tobias, et al. “Nonlinear Climate Sensitivity and Its Implications for Future Greenhouse Warming,” Science Advances 2:11, Nov. 9, 2016, http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/11/e1501923.
Arctic Ghosts
Hadn’t found them, that is to say, until recently: the wreck of the Erebus was discovered in 2014, and the wreck of the Terror in 2016.
The Precipice
Philip Shabecoff, “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate,” New York Times, June 24, 1988, www.nytimes.com/1988/06/24/us/global-warming-has-begun-expert-tells-senate.html.
Thomas A. Boden, Gregg Marland, and Robert J. Andres, “Global, Regional, and National Fossil-Fuel CO2 Emissions,” Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, TN, 2017, http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/tre_glob_2014.html.
Scott Waldman, “Rise in Global Carbon Emissions Slows,” Scientific American, Nov. 14, 2016, www.scientificamerican.com/article/rise-in-global-carbon-emissions-slows.
Hannah Arendt, introduction to Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 3–4.
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, 257–58.
Memories of My Green Machine
J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1958), 21.
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sp; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990), 143. For an interesting and provocative exploration of the “biopolitical” question in terms of nuclear war, see Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),” Diacritics 14:2, Nuclear Criticism (Summer 1984): 20–31.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 8.
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 31.
Neil Badmington, “Theorizing Posthumanism,” Cultural Critique 53 (Winter 2003): 10.
Daniel T. O’Hara, “Neither Gods nor Monsters: An Untimely Critique of the ‘Post/Human’ Imagination,” boundary 2, vol. 30, no. 3 (2003): 121–22.
Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds. Who Comes After the Subject? (New York: Routledge, 1991), 109. See also Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994), 17.
Bernd Hüppauf, “Experiences of Modern Warfare and the Crisis of Representation,” New German Critique 59 (Spring–Summer 1993): 62.
“Identity, seen as a complex and continuous process of indentifying with or rejecting other individuals, values, social and natural surroundings, was subjected to crisis very soon after soldiers experienced conditions of the front. There was very little to identity with or to relate to. Soldiers felt cut off from real life.” Ibid., 58.
Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 12.
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Penguin, 1976), 286, 493ff.
Heidegger, “Question Concerning Technology,” 27.
Ernst Jünger, On Pain (New York: Telos Press, 2008), 31–32 (author’s italics).
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 150; and Alphonso Lingis, “The Effects of the Pictures,” Journal of Visual Culture 5, no. 1 (2006): 84.
Russell A. Berman, preface to Jünger, On Pain, xxv.
Wolf Kittler, “From Getalt to Ge-Stell: Martin Heidegger Reads Ernst Jünger,” Cultural Critique 69 (Spring 2008): 84.
Jünger, On Pain, 30.
Paul Richards, “New War: An Ethnographic Approach,” in Paul Richards, ed., No Peace No War: An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 3. See also Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Scribner, 1994), 6. Additionally, interesting discussion of some contemporary issues in the anthropology of war can be found in Keith Brown and Catherine Lutz, “Grunt Lit: The Participant-Observers of Empire,” American Ethnologist 34, no. 2 (May 2007): 326–27; Steve Featherstone, “Human Quicksand: For the US Army, a Crash Course in Cultural Studies,” Harper’s, Sept. 2008, pp. 60–68; Danny Hoffmann, “Frontline Anthropology: Research in a Time of War,” Anthropology Today 19, no. 3 (June 2003): 9–12; and David Rohde, “Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones,” New York Times, Oct. 5, 2007.
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 74.
Phillip L. Walker, “A Bioarchaeological Perspective on the History of Violence,” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 590.
Ibid., 586.
Allen Feldman, “Memory Theaters, Virtual Witnessing, and the Trauma-Aesthetic,” Biography 27, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 186.
Yuval Noah Harari, “Martial Illusions: War and Disillusionment in Twentieth-Century and Renaissance Military Memoirs,” Journal of Military History 69 (Jan. 2005): 72.
Gray, Warriors, 116.
Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 126.
Ivana Maček, “Sarajevan Soldier Story: Perceptions of War & Morality in Bosnia,” in Richards, ed., No Peace No War, 64.
Ibid., 73.
“In his study of the technological changes in warfare over the course of civilization, for example, William McNeill finds the creation of the modern army in the seventeenth century ‘as remarkable in its way as the birth of science or any other breakthrough of that age,’ and lists as a major effect of drill—the rhythmic movement of marching in step with many men or of firing a gun by following a precise series of forty-two successive acts performed identically by all participants—the disappearance from the soldier’s body of the signs of a particular region or country: ‘the psychic force of drill and new routines was such as to make a recruit’s origins and previous experience largely irrelevant to his behavior as a soldier.’” Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford, 1985), 118.
Gray, Warriors, 27.
Shay, Achilles in Vietnam, 82–99.
Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel (New York: Penguin, 2003), 239.
Simone Weil, The Iliad; or, The Poem of Force (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 2001), 26.
Sigmund Freud, “Why War?” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 22 (1932–36): New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=SE.022.0195A, p. 204.
Nietzsche’s insistence on the bodily animal being of man is well known, and his influence on Jünger, Heidegger, Derrida, twentieth-century thought, notions of the “end of man,” and even this paper—while they cannot be addressed here—should not be left unnoticed: “But the awakened, the enlightened man says: I am body entirely, and nothing beside; and soul is only a word for something in the body. The body is a great intelligence, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a herdsman.” Friedrich Nietzsche, “Of the Despisers of the Body” Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part 1 (New York: Penguin, 1969).
Richard W. Wrangham, “Evolution of Coalitionary Killing” Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 42 (1999): 1–30.
Ibid., 2.
Ibid., 26.
Although there may be problems with his hypothesis and its political implications certainly make it very controversial, it nevertheless remains convincing. For one (rather flat) criticism of Wrangham, see Paul Roscoe, “Intelligence, Coalitional Killing, and the Antecedents of War,” American Anthropologist 109, no. 3 (Sept. 2007), 485–95.
Hüppauf, “Experiences of Modern Warfare,” 60.
Jünger, Storm of Steel, 92.
Jünger, On Pain, 22.
Shay, Achilles in Vietnam, 15.
Gray, Warriors, 179.
Ibid., 53.
Ibid., 28–29.
Jünger, On Pain, 1.
Allen Feldman, “Political Terror and the Technologies of Memory: Excuse, Sacrifice, Commodification, and Actuarial Moralities,” Radical History Review 85 (Winter 2003):, 62.
Scarry, Body in Pain, 81.
Jünger, On Pain, 16–17.
Scarry, Body in Pain, 65.
Weil, Iliad, 3.
Hanna Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), 46.
“Although in all forms of work the worker mixes himself with and eventually becomes inseparable from the materials of his labor . . . the body in war is, to an extent found in almost no other form of work, inextricably bound up with the men and materials of his labor: he will learn to perceive himself as he will be perceived by others, as indistinguishable from the men of his unit, regiment, division, and above all national group . . . as he is also inextricably bound up with the qualities and conditions—berry laden or snow laden—of the ground over which he walks or runs or crawls and with which he craves and courts identification . . .” Scarry, Body in Pain, 83, cf. 88.
Richards, “New War,” 17.
See, for example, Gray, Warriors, 148–58; Scarry, Body in Pain, 88; Shay, Ac
hilles in Vietnam, 103–20; and Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 42–73.
See Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (New York: Anchor, 1998), 137, 188–90; Gray, 142–48; and Jünger, Storm of Steel, 216 for accounts of warriors who face their enemies with respect.
Shay, Achilles in Vietnam, 103.
Gray, Warriors, 163.
Ibid., 81.
Michael Taussig asserts that fetishes “come across more like people than things, spiritual entities that are neither, and this is what gives them their strange beauty . . . Unwinding the fetish is not yet given on the horizon of human possibility.” Michael Taussig, My Cocaine Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), xviii. Consider this passage from The Things They Carried: “The things they carried were determined to some extent by superstition. Lieutenant Cross carried his good luck pebble. Dave Jensen carried a rabbit’s foot. Norman Bowker, otherwise a very gentle person, carried a thumb that had been presented to him as a gift by Mitchell Sanders. The thumb was dark brown, rubbery to the touch, and weighed 4 ounces at most. It had been cut from a VC corpse, a boy of fifteen or sixteen.” Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (New York: Broadway Books, 1990), 13. On the superstitiousness of soldiers and the myth-making elements at work in the combat zone, see particularly Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1975]), especially pp. 114–54; and Shay, Achilles in Vietnam, 30–32, 137–48.
