Ad Hoc re media coverage & the Law: Equality and Justice are not equivalences—sometimes with tragic consequences.

AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, FILE

Well, that is certainly some elephant that will be standing right smack in the middle of a Michigan courtroom if the lawyers have their way! Many of us have recently become aware of the tragic shooting, by a white homeowner in a very white suburb of Detroit, of a black intoxicated woman who was standing on his front porch in the middle of the night (between 4-5 a.m.) and pounding on his door. This is a tragedy of truly American proportions… and no one with an inkling of sanity or humanity should wish to take sides in this story, because every side has already lost in the human tragedy. Yet to hear the media tell the tale, the lawyers and legal analysts in the case all seem to be gearing up to heap a layer of legal tragedy upon an already unfortunate core of American historical and sociological tragedy.

            This new American tragedy, which begins to rival Greek tragedy in the convolution of its storyline, could be called: The Black Girl is Dead; So Now Let’s Kill the White Guy too Just to Make Sure That Equality Happens for Everyone! It is telling that there would be no interesting media story had the shooter and the victim both been either white (an unfortunate incident in suburban America?) or black (same old, same old). What this means, however, is that the mechanism that seems to be framing this tragic story so far is the material substitution of Equality, for Justice—more plainly stated: the substitution of racial equality (or, both black and white must suffer) for the more Just consideration concerning what, precisely, the crime is in this story.

My reflection is not about the hard facts of the events of November 2^nd: 19 year-old woman bangs on a stranger’s house door in early morning hours, and ends up shot by the male homeowner. These are the facts that tell of tragedy at a very human level—they are the simple, neutral plot lines of a failure to communicate, and subsequent misfortune and loss. They do not, however, tell us what this particular story is about; and what it is about, it seems to me, is clearly about home-bound notions of race and fear enabled by a promiscuous environment of weapons ownership. After all, it was not this man, the Shooter, who was out prowling around trying to criminally impose his rather broken worldview on some unsuspecting victim; rather, all the complexities of the real world came pounding on his door in the middle of the night, and shaking him out of sleep in his own home, discovered that he was not up to the task of acting like an adult in-the-world. But, then, there are a great many people in the world who already suspect that this might generally be the case with a great many, too many, Americans.

            This story’s “aboutness” may still yet be lost to us, the audience, because it seems that the attorneys in the case and legal minds in the know are trying to stick just to the Plot, and do not wish to explore the Intrigue—they do not wish to re-create the whole tragic Story in all its layered complexity and messiness, but they only wish to give us its “neutral” or “objective” bare bones. This is nothing more than a rather disingenuous attempt to use historical revisionism to hide the existence of the racial and fear-laden context surrounding this event.

            Now there are two ideas imbedded in this lawyerly desire to control the narrative. The first is that behind a thin veil of imagined neutrality is hidden the power of Politically Correct compulsion. In an archetypal Barabbas moment, the crowd is being stirred up and is beginning to clamor for blood; and the media play no small part in the stirring up of this hornet’s nest. The second is that, if this particular Huff-post avatar of the story (November 16^th) is to be believed, the lawyers for both sides in this case seem to be set on arguing for Equality – one dead girl = (the need for) one dead shooter (the Barabbas moment), instead of trying to establish whatever may begin to look like Justice in this event of human tragedy.

            The Cooley Law School professor who was interviewed as an expert analyst for the article, in fact, boldly says that, “both sides would be wise to stick to a "race-neutral" strategy. "Don't go there. Keep it on the facts." "Who wants to bring race into it? Everybody else. ... The defense doesn't want that. And the prosecution doesn't want to bring it in. I don't think they need to." There is clearly an overpopulation of bad lawyers in the world, if a professor of law can publicly make the case just for “facts,” as if facts have any existence apart from “spin” or narrative.

Now welcome to the Twilight Zone of “spin” and complexity. Nota Bene: This is the job the attorneys in this case should be doing, were they interested in the intricacies of Justice instead of some notion of populist Equality.

The Time: Between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m. on November 2, 2013; which means that it was either very late or very early, depending on your point of view, and that it was very dark outside.

The Shooter Setting: Dearborn Heights, MI.

·      Place (part 1): Detroit, MI, which is the 12^th most populous urban area in the United States. According to Wikipedia, at the time of the 2010 census Detroit reported 70.1% White, and 22.8% African American, which accounts for 92.9% of its population, the rest being composed of Hispanic/Latinos, Native American, Asian, Pacific Islanders, and other races.

·      Place (part 2): As is true with all populous urban areas, Detroit is an agglomeration of numerous smaller communities. So, more specifically on the question of Shooter Setting, this tragedy occurred in Dearborn Heights, which is an even more racially unmixed enclave of metropolitan Detroit. For Dearborn Heights Wikipedia reports that in the 2010 census the racial makeup of the city was a whooping 86.1% White, and 7.9% African American.

All things being equal, then, the white Shooter was asleep in his bed, which was in his home, which is situated in an overwhelmingly white bedroom community of metropolitan Detroit.

The Victim setting: Southfield, MI.

·      Place (residence): The victim was from Southfield, MI, which is only 21.3 km from Dearborn Heights, or about 18 minutes by car. At the time of the 2010 census, the racial makeup of the city was 70.3% African American, and 24.9% White, which shows a marked shift in demographics from the 2000 census, when Southfield was only 54.22% African American, and 38.83% White.

All things considered, then, the Victim found herself in an accident, very late at night, in a Looking Glass world… because Southfield (70.3% African American) is as remote from Dearborn Heights (70.1% White) as Timbuktu from the Halls of Montezuma.

These simple-to-obtain demographics do not yet provide us with any insight into why a man in the safety of his own home and behind his locked front door, the Shooter, would shoot with a shotgun and kill a girl who was on his porch and banging on his door in the middle of the night. It seems, certainly, to be an act of absolute irrationality. And the expert legal analyst, the Cooley Law School professor, seems to think that this case will hinge on a single factor: ‘"It's got to be reasonable," he said. "The question is: What would a reasonable person do in these circumstances?"’ So, according to our legal Expert Opinion, the Shooter is clearly guilty… he has to be guilty, because his action is not that of a reasonable person.

            Or is it? How might we reconstruct the worldview of a reasonable person living in Detroit, MI?

Point 1. For anybody living in the United States, let alone a reasonable person, race is clearly an issue in almost any case involving crime or the penal system.  America may have a black president, and the Supreme Court may have overturned the National Voter Registration Act in a moment of euphoria and blind ivory tour optimism, but race is still very much a live-wire issue for citizens not-living in the La-La Land of the U.S. Supreme Court justices. For Bill Maher’s take on the U.S. Supreme Court, questions of race, etc., follow the link.

Point 2. For a reasonable person living in Detroit, Detroit itself is clearly an issue in this case.

·      Case in point: On the official website for the French government, the French State urges their citizens to avoid traveling in certain areas of the United States, including the city of Detroit: “The center is not recommended after the close of business.”

·      Case in point: Just for kicks and giggles let us consider a Contest for Crime among various cities in the United States. We can limit ourselves to the following seven categories of criminal activity: crimes of Murder, Forcible Rape, Robbery, Aggravated Assault, Burglary, Larceny Theft, and Vehicle Theft.

o   Between Detroit and Chicago, where both cities roundly trounce the national average in most categories (there is a discrepancy in Larceny Theft), Detroit whoops Chicago resoundingly in the number of crimes per 100,000 People (data from 2006).

o   Between Detroit and Miami, where both cities again beat the national average in most categories (except, again, in Larceny Theft), Detroit stomps all over Miami (except, yet again, in Larceny Theft). What is there with Larceny Theft?

o   Between Detroit and New York City, (with several areas of discrepancy in terms of the national average), Detroit absolutely destroys New York City in every category.

In fact, according to Forbes, and despite a recent drop in its rate of violent crime, Detroit, MI is the single most dangerous city in America, coming in first for violent crime for a continuous 5 years. Their data was compiled from “the FBI’s Crime Statistics database, screening for cities with populations above 200,000,” which allowed Forbes to eliminate cities like Flint, Mich., with its record-busting murder rate of 63 per 100,000, but yet which still allows them “to focus on major American cities that presumably have full-fledged police departments.” In descending order of violence:

1.     Detroit, MI

2.     Oakland, CA

3.     St Louis, MO

4.     Memphis, TN

5.     Stockton, CA

6.     Birmingham, AL

7.     Baltimore, MD

8.     Cleveland, OH

9.     Atlanta, GA

10. Milwaukee, WI

So, what might we conclude about the worldview of an idealized Reasonable Person living in Detroit, MI? Well… WTF comes quickly to my mind, at the very least. Because suppose that I, Mr. Reasonable Philosopher, lived in or near Dearborn Heights, MI., and that, although I wanted to go to church on a Sunday morning, I dared not for fear that my home in this veil of tears would be robbed as I attended to my heavenly duties (Read the story here). Let us further suppose that I live in the most dangerous city in America, in a country whose record of gun ownership per 100 residents is # 1 in the entire world, at 89 guns per 100 residents. Mr. Reasonable Me in Detroit already begins to look markedly different from a Mr. Reasonable Me in the Netherlands, for example, which is # 112 on the list of gun ownership, at 3.9 guns per 100 residents. To the rest of the civilized world outside the United States, such an idealized Reasonable Person as these Detroit attorneys are seeking to reconstruct, would conceivably look very much like an insane savage.

            If, then, as the lawyers for both parties pretend, this trial should play itself out on a terrain of neutral and theoretical reason, was this man’s act reasonable in the most neutral sense of that term? Absolutely not. His action was completely unreasonable – irrational even. In much the same way, it would be irrational that I should shoot the Anonymous Someone [knowing, as I do, that 81% of the population of the Netherlands is Caucasian of Germanic or Gallo Celtic descent—that is to say, they look like me so there is no automatic sense of alienation between us] who rings our doorbell in Middelburg (Netherlands) in the middle of the night on a Friday or Saturday, which the kids around here seem to enjoy doing on a regular basis (which is why, I suppose, doorbells around here all have shutoff switches). Why would it be irrational for me to shoot them? Because I “know” them without knowing them. I know they are like me; that they do not wish me harm, either to my person, my family, or my property; I know that, for the most, they also do not ring my doorbell armed; nor do they have any particular malice in ringing my doorbell; they are just stupid. So were we to follow this lawyerly line of idealized reasoning, the Shooter in Detroit is not only unreasonable, he is a raving lunatic; and the conclusion of the trial at a guilty verdict is a foregone conclusion.

            However, there is another type of possible irrationality in this situation, which is the irrationality of fear. How does one rationally explain fear, an emotion, an inherent irrationality that comes of living in a jungle, of being surrounded by danger and Hostile Otherness? It is not possible. So, in fact the race question and the climate of fear engendered by the dark Other who happens to find herself in a significantly white-bread milieu, as much as we may find it reprehensible on a variety of levels, does in fact give reasonable explanation for an irrational act. An act that is intellectually unreasonable because it is thoughtless, but which is not emotionally unreasonable; because like the stream to the ocean, this type of discriminatory act flows from the wellsprings of indiscriminate fear.

Follow-up:

• https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-crime-dearbornheights/tearful-judge-gives-man-17-years-for-michigan-porch-shooting-idUSKBN0GY14C20140903
• https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/wayne/2015/06/12/renisha-mcbride-civil-settlement/71160078/ 
• http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/wayne-county/2017/01/25/michigans-high-court-weigh-porch-shooting-case/97040888/

 

November's Blog_The Existentialist “Project” & the Ostensible “Problem” of Existence.

Douglas Adam’s computer, in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, famously spits out the following answer –42, when asked the question, what is the meaning of life? So not daring to tread where even fictional computers only go sluggishly and with trepidation, let me distinguish between the hitchhiker’s question concerning the meaning of life, and a much more focused reflection on the so-called “problem” of existence.

… “to make the journey to the truth upon the waters of make-believe” (Salmon Rushdie, Joseph Anton). It is a rather wonderful irony that most of existentialist philosophy is actually existentialist and Nobel Prize winning literature. This makes reading transpositions of existentialist themes and perceptions, from authors such as Luigi Pirandello (1934), Hermann Hesse (1946), André Gide (1947), Albert Camus (1957), Jean-Paul Sartre (1964), and Samuel Beckett (1969), much more interesting, aesthetically satisfying, and emotionally inspiring.

            This is a noteworthy advantage when reading existentialist fiction, because for a rather long time the only other alternative was the point of view represented by the Princeton philosopher Walter Kaufmann. Kaufmann edited the first, and for a long while only, existentialist primer intended for English-language students of philosophy, so for texts from philosophers of the existentialist persuasion he had the market cornered; and of course on that corner only Kaufmann’s dictum reigned supreme: that the criterion for belonging to the club of existentialists is to be depressed! This, notwithstanding that Kaufmann’s life work was the rehabilitation of the most joyful of all existentialists, Nietzsche, who, if we consider philosophy only historically, was really only a proto-existentialist.

            An exception that confirms our above-stated rule that existentialism is most cogently expressed in the language of prize-winning literati, is the Russian existentialist writer, Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), who, although certainly worthy to be a NP recipient, had the misfortune to flourish well before the onset of Nobel Prizes in Literature, which did not begin until 1901. There is also the Argentinian author, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), an exquisite and exquisitely existentialist writer if ever there was; and if in their infinite wisdom the Nobel Committee did not deem Borges fit to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which they did not, then it must be that the esteemed NP Committee Members had already begun to follow the type of selection peculiarities that would later characterize the train(-wreck) of thought that would lead them to award the Nobel Peace Prize to American President Barack Obama (ostensibly not for the following non-peaceful types of things: wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; supporting military intervention in Somalia, Libya, and Syria; escalating the drone war in Pakistan; Guantanamo; extending the Patriot Act; etc.).

            To put clearly the obvious point to the argument: the writing of existentialist littérateurs is significantly and just all-around better than the writing of existentialist philosophers. By way of demonstrating the unfortunate philosophical standard—if you are looking to pass a thoroughly soporific moment, crack one of the covers of existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers who, although obviously superbly educated, reads like a dehydrated mud puddle.

Common to all of these contributors to the existentialist project, of course, is that they follow their own inimitable visions and imaginary fancies concerning the World of Men; and each narrates into existence heuristic forays into that World outside of the normal high-ways and by-ways of the classical thought tradition, thus exposing to our view and for our consideration the almost infinite variety of themes associated with the existentialist realization of Man’s Coming-of-Age, of our radical solitude and vulnerability. In language borrowed from Rushdie (who has only won the Booker Prize for literature), story telling of this philosophical sort is in fact an invitation for us to enter into the existential frame of interiority, to recognize that the World within is without borders. Formulaically, the Open Self equals the Open Universe. So Rushdie writes in Joseph Anton:

Literature tried to open the universe, to increase, even if only slightly, the sum total of what it was possible for human beings to perceive, understand, and so, finally, to be. […] There were plenty of people who didn’t want the universe opened, who would, in fact, prefer it to be shut down quite a bit, and so when artists went to the frontier and pushed they often found powerful forces pushing back.

This is a literature that puts us in the awkward position of having to reflect on our lives from womb to tomb; and in that reflection we will be called upon to give an accounting for what we will Stand For in the space & time between the extremes. This is a literature that asks from us that we enter into the world of Symbol; that we allow our life to become transmogrified into a “Standing For”; and that the days of our lives should become representative or reflective of some notion of Otherness, some Idea(l)—that we should strive to embody the Symbolic Life.

Heads & Hands. A common device used by both littérateurs and philosophers, and which is certainly worth our meditating upon, is the rather typical existentialist opposition between Homo Faber, man as maker or doer, and Homo Sapiens, man as thinker or knower. A superb illustration of this device frames Hermann Hesse’s 1930 novel, Narcissus and Goldmund, where Narcissus will represent the life of the mind and Goldmund the “handy” life of the creator or artist; and Hesse’s story-telling talent is such that all the peripeties of his two protagonists will carefully shadow the singular antagonism in our own Western lives between the life of the mind and the life of the body. When one takes this particular device, opposing the doer to the thinker, and applies it to the Western philosophical Life-world, which is becoming ever-more defined by all the various types of materialisms, then the existential dilemma achieves a certain philosophical poignancy and urgency, which is exactly what the NP Committee Members have not failed to recognize in the great existentialist literature of the last 100+ years.

            However, if we had only the philosophers and their generally impermeable writing styles to inform us on this, the very intimate confrontation between our bodies and our minds, then it would look something like the analysis composed by the Stanford professor of German and philosophy, Kurt Reinhardt, in his 1952 book, The Existentialist Revolt. Reinhardt introduces his topic by considering the merits of a diagnosis about Western culture, doomed to materialism and despair, which is advanced by a German philosopher of history, Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) in his 1917 masterwork, The End of the West.

There is no doubt that if his premises of an all-inclusive materialism and naturalism were correct, the conclusions presented in The End of the West are logically conclusive and thus equally correct. If the distinguishing mark of man is indeed “his hand” rather than his head, then such a being might actually achieve its greatest triumphs in the creation of “millions and billions of horsepower. But if man’s distinguishing marks are his intellect and free will, then the entire picture changes, and the essentially different premises call for essentially different conclusions and solutions. If in fact the crisis of human existence issues from the confused mind, the sick heart, and the perverted will of modern Western man, then he and his civilization are not irretrievably doomed or lost, because then even at this critical juncture human nature will be able to rouse itself and to rise again, to challenge the “spirit of the age” and to recover the wholeness and balance of a truly human life and civilization.

Reinhardt’s book allows us to cherry-pick yet another splendid illustration of the device of opposing the doer to the thinker, and then applying that to the Western philosophical Life-world. According to Reinhardt, French personalist philosopher Emmanuel Mounier (1905-1950) frames his thinking in a parallel between “creative nihilism” and “destructive nihilism.” Creative nihilism, which characterizes the thinking of Nietzsche and Heidegger, is of the head (Homo Sapiens). It is an intellectual nihilism that sees the death of philosophy and the life of the mind through valuation of faith and the anti-intellectual life. This nihilism is “creative” because it is “preliminary” in nature, which simply means that Reason precedes Action. Destructive nihilism (Homo Faber), on the other hand, is where the hand is occupied with actual physical nihilism, the destruction of man and his planet. This type of nihilism is, to state the obvious, rather definitive in nature.

            There is also Reinhardt on a Nietzschean oppositionalism, citing an 1873 reference concerning barbarism—that “Western hearts had been emptied of the strong and noble sentiments of a heroic past”: ‘…barbarism in human minds, which had lost their sense of direction and orientation, and of the barbarism in human works and deeds which had become the stillborn children of intellectual and moral chaos.’”

            Finally, Reinhardt reminds us, in the words of French Catholic and existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973), that Man is Homo Viator (a “traveling man,” a voyager, or explorer), constantly unterwegs between the world-at-hand, as Heidegger might have said, the world he creates with his hands, and the world pulsating in his head, the world of meaning and purpose and intent, the philosophical world. The journey, when conceived of in this Heracleitan kind of way, is between the greater sophon, divine wisdom, which is immanent in the cosmic dialectic, and human phronesis, “introspective listening” to the way, or the being, of the world around us.

Now although the ideas with which Reinhardt is engaged are certainly and obviously interesting and important in and of themselves, and even engrossing, their stylized philosophical articulations have nothing of the littérateur’s je-ne-sais-quoi related to the turning of a phrase in the art of telling the Story. This is perhaps history of philosophy at its best; but it is just not the stuff of a Nobel in Literature.

The Horns of the Human Dilemma. Another component common to collaborators in the existentialist project, is that central to their narrative plots is the “problem” of existence.

                  I should perhaps concede at this point that, before reading existentialist literature, it had never occurred to me that “being here” in the world was especially problematic (beyond muddling through the usual predicaments of growing up, finding a job, thinking about relationships, and difficulties of that sort)… nonetheless, with respect to existence, the philosophical dilemma upon whose horns we are ostensibly poised, is that we are here instead of not here (to speak like Parmenides by way of Heidegger); and so also, by extension, being here, what should we do to pass the time? (When stated like this, though, the problem actually begins to sound a lot more like a religious rather than a philosophical inquiry – a sort of Pirandelloesque, six-characters-in-search-of-an-author (i.e., a god) problem of origins.)

            In another post that also deals with this “problem” of existence, I suggested that we humans, each and every one, are not any particular “thing,” but rather like so many layers of an onion without an actual being or core at the center. I have since come to realize, however, that while I really like my onion metaphor, as I really like being able to “blame” Heraclitus for the philosophical direction of that earlier reflection, I did not really like discovering, as well, that I was following a point of view also shared by the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. So I have decided to give equal time for the question to another French existentialist intellectual, Albert Camus. Perhaps it is just that I find Camus more personally likeable than the rancunier Sartre. Color me vindictive.

            On this one question, though, inspired by an intuition from Heraclitus, which Sartre translated into philosophical constructs and I blogified into an onion-like metaphor, Sartre and I have both found it plausible that the human individual is not some essential “thing,” some substantive self, some type of noun-idea.  Rather, Man is a Verbal idea – a Deciding and an Acting. The existentialist conclusion from this premise is then rather straight-forward and unavoidable: that because our decisions and actions are 1) absolutely arbitrary—in the infinite diversity of decisions and actions the ones we choose are simply from among an infinite many, and 2) profoundly irrelevant to some bigger, and specifically pertinent picture—life has no obvious or intrinsic single goal, it would therefore seem that, along with our decisions and actions, which have no specifically ultimate arguable point, neither does Mankind as such have one precise and decisive point to it.

            On this particular question of being, however, unlike Heraclitus, Sartre, and this humble teacher of philosophy, Camus follows Friedrich Nietzsche, holding that the individual is in fact some essential “thing,” and that there is in fact a fundamental nature to the animal that is Man.

            Whatever we think Man is ultimately, though, He is still very much alone in an unanchored kosmos (read: surrounded entirely by immanence with no hope of transcendence); and cocooned by despair and absurdity, He is become defined by a condition of Worldlessness, which is the precondition for the existential possibility of self-creation. Camus will find this idea so persuasive, in fact, that in the 1938 autobiographical collection called Noces, he will even transform the existential life-journey, the adventure of coming-home-to-self, into a type of Odyssean journey Home, a Nostos : « ce n’est pas si facile de devenir ce qu’on est. »  It is on this point, precisely, that Camus, the intellectual and journalist, will oppose Sartre, famous philosopher and arrogant jerk.  

            Philosophical one-upmanship notwithstanding, it is an interesting irony of history that while Sartre may have possibly won the greater academic battle for existentialism on the question of being, it will still be Camus who will most influence general international readers of existential literature, with books such as L’Etranger. After all, who has ever read Sartre’s massive 1943 opus, Etre et le néant (which tips the scales at 722 pages in the French edition), and can still claim to have some kind of a life?

Zarathustra summons from outre-tombe. Another piece of the existentialist project, which goes well beyond how the various story-tellers, both littérateur and philosopher, frame their stories and which devices they use, is that each seeks deliberately to make of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, arguably the West’s first full-bodied albeit fictional existentialist, a paraphrase into real-world categories of human existence. These translations will be multifaceted, certainly, and not necessarily recognizable for any one quality that might bind them together as a particular type. Yet it may still be argued that each translation, each fictional incarnation, no matter how they differ from one another, is a plausible imagined-reflection of some aspect of the Zarathustrian type, as that type could appear in the World of Men. Ultimately, it will be up to the Reader to determine what the various characters in the various narratives symbolize, and whether the journey of those characters on their way to Übermensch-Symbol is actually successful, either as embodying a faithful son of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, or simply as representing a credible Life of Man.

            Zarathustra can look out at us through the eyes of Camus’ Merseult (L’Etranger), for example, as he can be translated through the binary philoso-phrenia of Harry Haller (Steppenwolf). Normally in his writings, Hesse tended to split the mind/body problem classically, such as he does through the characters of Narcissus (mind-intellectual) and Goldmund (body-artist) in the eponymously titled work. His depiction of Haller, though, not unlike that of his Siddhartha, unifies the dichotomy in one person, one body.

            A quality that would seem to knit together many of Sartre’s existential protagonists, is an overwhelming feeling of nausea (Les mains sales; La nausée); but the sine que non characteristic of his Zarathustras, which Sartre makes unmistakably clear in his 1946 lecture Existentialism is a Humanism, is that in the person of the existentialist, Zarathustra is a man (or woman) of action.

            In a work such as Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot, on the other hand, the Zarathustrian type might not necessarily be reflected through one of the characters, nor even be implicitly housed in the Omniscient Narrator. Rather, the Reader may be called upon to recognize that the situational outworking of the plot may itself be the subject of the piece, and that Beckett might perhaps be suggesting that the most relevant way to speak of a god who is expected to arrive, to be there (present), is to speak of the God(ot) who is not there (absent).

            Zarathustra is also present in other existentialist literature, but perhaps only as a fragmented composite, where no one character has all the traits that we might associate with an Über-Man, with one who has achieved the freedom of having divested himself, intellectually, of the emotional and irrational accouterments of Culture. Diverse Zarathustrian traits might be shared among various characters, thus giving the impression that each of the players in the novel’s cast of characters is wandering around somewhere on the road toward the liberation of his own Thought-Life. This seems to me to be true of André Gide’s 1902 L’immoraliste.

            There are many ways to become waylaid in our thinking about this novel—that it is about homosexuality, or pedophilia, or evil; but this is to wander along the Holzwege of Gide’s thought-world, instead of daring to tread the high road of his fictional vision. For it is indisputable that Gide is attempting to characterize Zarathustrian qualities in L’immoraliste, which have little to do with specific forms of sexuality or with evil; he is taking us along on the journey back to the natural world (Penguin: 2000, 120), away from the masks (cities, labor, morality) created by men in their histories…. (Ibid, 110). Indeed, it is perhaps only in this way that the principal protagonist, Michel, reflects any recognizable quality of the Zarathustrian hero.

            Gide’s Ménalque, on the other hand, although he plays only a small part in the overall narrative of L’immoraliste, is a Zarathustrian hero of Wildean proportions; and it is through this character that we come to see just how impoverished Michel is, how pathetically dim his illumination, and how very much bound he is to the chains of his shallow thought-life. Ménalque incarnates Man-as-Choosing-Agent who is very much at home in himself in his world. He offers drink to others for their pleasure, but does not himself drink, because, he says, “I find sobriety a more powerful form of intoxication, one where I retain my lucidity. […] I seek to heighten life, not diminish it through intoxication.” Continuing the conversation with Michel, Ménalque lays out the existential underpinnings that explain his life:

. . . I hate resting. Possessions encourage this; when one feels secure one falls asleep. I love life enough to prefer to live it awake. So within all this wealth I preserve a sense of precariousness with which I aggravate, or at least intensify, my life. I can’t claim that I love danger, but I do like life to be risky. I like it to make demands on my courage, my happiness, my health at every moment . . .

Against the life-affirming light of this Zarathustrian existentialism, Michel is able to measure his own intellectual puniness and pastiness: “But how pale are mere words compared to actions! Wasn’t Ménalque’s life, his smallest action, a thousand times more eloquent than my lectures? Now I understood that the moral lessons of the great philosophers of Antiquity were given as much by example as by words, if not more so.”

It seems fitting to close our meandering reflections on the Existentialist “Project” with a sentiment from Gide’s Ménalque, which, because it is so obviously and so fully inspired by Nietzsche’s proto-existentialism, could be said to lie at the heart of the very best of existentialist thought:

The Greeks created their ideals directly from life. The life of the artist was itself an act of poetic creation, the life of the philosopher the enactment of his philosophy. Both are bound up with life: instead of ignoring each other, philosophy fed poetry, and poetry expressed philosophy, with admirably persuasive results. Nowadays beauty no longer appears in action, action no longer aspires to be beautiful, and wisdom exists in a separate sphere.