Hell on Wheels

The Job of a Conductor on a New York City Subway Train Is a Voyage into the Heart of Darkness

by Daniel Attila

 I was born in Hungary, from which I escaped in 1982 at age 18. I settled in New York in 1984 with the intention of becoming an artist, but after nearly a decade of struggle I realized I might never make it. In 1993 I enrolled in the City University of New York, while I supported myself for four years as a conductor on New York City subway trains. There can be only a few jobs that so quickly introduce an immigrant to the realities of multi-racialism. Beneath the streets of New York I have seen and done things that very few whites will—I hope—ever see or do.

Conductors operate the doors of trains, make announcements, give information to the passengers, and oversee the safety of people on trains and platforms. Most of the time they stay in a small compartment, or cab, in the middle car of the train. There are many cities that operate subways with only a driver, but New York City is a challenging place, where putting only one person on the train would expose the system to violence and chaos.

Attending college while working under ground is not a dream come true, but conductors are well paid. The starting salary is $30-40,000 a year, with a top salary of $40-50,000, which can be reached in three years. Conductors who become drivers can earn $50-70,000 a year, depending on overtime. The high salaries are a result of the monopoly the Transit Au thority (TA) enjoys over city transportation. The union is a mostly-black workforce, which cannot be tampered with by any politician who wants a career in New York. Even as far back as the 1930s, the all-powerful TA got through the depression without laying off a single employee.

I went to a high school in China Town to take the civil service exam for the job. Once inside, I noticed that I was the only white person there. Except for an Asian-Indian woman who sat in front of me, I saw only black people, even though there were at least 40 of us taking the test. “How come I’m the only white person here?” I wondered. “Don’t white Americans want a job that pays $40-60,000 a year and doesn’t even require a high-school education?” Perhaps in answer, one of the blacks in front of me turned around and gave me a bizarre, hate-filled look—a look I would often encounter in the years ahead.

The test was easy—surprisingly so—and I wondered if it was possible for anyone over the age of six not to pass it. I clearly remember one of the questions; I find it impossible to forget:

If you are a bus driver and find that a kid jumped onto the back of the bus, traveling on the outside, what are you going to do?

a) I will suddenly brake, then accelerate, repeating this process until the kid falls off and learns a lesson.

b) I will just ignore the kid and keep on driving as if unaware of the problem.

c) I will stop the bus and personally make sure that the kid gets off.

As part of the test, we also had to find various places in the city, such as the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn  Bridge, and the United Nations, with the help of a city map provided to us. This is similar to having Parisians find the Eiffel tower with the help of a map. Needless to say, the test went well and I congratulated myself for having settled in a country where well-paying jobs are so easy to get.

I began learning about the reality of America’s racial dilemma right at the beginning of my training program at the Transit Authority. There was a huge black fellow in our class who had the habit of physically bumping into me at every opportunity. I could feel that he did this intentionally, trying to make it hurt more than an accidental collision would, but not enough to make it look like an assault.

The class consisted of about 80 people, with only a half dozen whites. Most of the training was given by an old white veteran who kept telling us funny and scary stories about transit workers on duty. We were told to watch out for assaults by passengers. “Every one of you will be spat at,” he insisted repeatedly, “I guarantee it.” After the class training, which lasted about four weeks, we spent two weeks on trains, operating under the supervision of experienced conductors. Right on the first day, a strong black man who stood on the platform, whose right arm was bigger than both of my thighs put together, made a sudden attempt to punch me in the face as I leaned out the window to observe the platform. The conductor who supervised me assured me that such things are very dangerous and happen every day.

Also during the break-in period, I saw a horrible incident in the East New York section of Brooklyn. A horde of black teenagers descended upon a black boy who was sitting quietly by himself. Within seconds, they beat him from head to toe, then quickly fled before the doors closed. We tried to talk to the boy, who was in bad shape, asking him if he wanted medical help or the police. When he said he didn’t want ei ther, we asked about the attack. It turned out he was on his way to the first day on a job. The gang beat him up because they didn’t want him to work.

After the break-in period, I was qualified as a conductor and began to operate without supervision. It didn’t take long for our instructor’s prediction to come true. I was conducting a “D” train in the Bronx when I noticed a large group of black men gathered on the platform, just outside the conductor’s window. I felt their threatening presence instinctively, but the rules require that the conductor lean out the window and look down the platform in both directions before he closes the doors. I had no choice but to open my window and take the risk. As soon as I opened it, one of the men spat right into my eyes. I was wearing safety goggles but still got some of the saliva on my skin—regulations require that goggles be worn primarily to protect against passenger assaults.

Throughout the four years I spent as a conductor, blacks and Latinos would hide behind posts or other cover and spit at me—with astonishing power and accuracy. Other times they would throw things at me, try to punch me, or yell vile and sometimes inarticulate things at me.

One attack involved a black man of about thirty, who threw a large, glass bottle at my face. I managed to close the window just as the bottle struck—it hit with such force, a piece of glass stuck in the acrylic window of my cab all the way to the end of the trip. As we came into the terminal, I spotted a black supervisor on the platform and couldn’t help asking: “What am I supposed to do when someone attacks me as I operate, and the attack is really nasty?” “If you have an injury, you pull the cord and call command to send for the police and the ambulance,” was the reply. “But what if you have no injuries? What if he almost killed you but you lucked  out?” I continued. “Then there is no problem,” said the supervisor, “you keep on going.”

On another occasion, when conducting a “D” train in the Bronx, a boy in a crowd of high-school students threw a heavy stone right at my face with great accuracy and force. I instinctively held up my hand to shield my face and was injured severely enough to go to the emergency room. At the hospital, the nurse told me that a bus driver, also injured in an assault, had just been treated and released a couple of hours earlier.

When operating during the “school hours,” the early afternoon when students come home from public schools, rowdy students—none of whom was ever white or Oriental—would routinely disable the trains. They would break windows, pull the emergency brake, and tear open the seats so they could cut out electric switches. If the train crew couldn’t fix the problem, we would discharge the passengers and transfer the train to the storage yard for repair. When we discharged trains, black and Latino passengers would threaten violence, accusing us of deliberately disabling trains so that we could “go home early.”

My ordeal did not end with the work-day. The commute home was just as agonizing as time on the job. In the late hours, when I usually made my way home, the trains were largely bereft of normal, working people. Often there were gangs of “youths” roaming the trains, walking from car to car, jumping on seats, starting fights, and harassing passengers. I often locked myself in the conductor’s cab, as I did on the job.

One night, after work, as I was climbing the steps from the subway platform in my own neighborhood, a tall black man came running the other way and crashed into me. He was so badly dressed he looked like a bum. He was carrying a box of Chinese take-out food, which he dropped when he  slammed into me. There went his dinner. Although the collision was entirely his fault, he began threatening me, cursing me, and demanding money. I looked around to see if there was anybody else in the station—not that one can expect help from whites in situations like this—but there was no one.

I don’t know how long we argued, but it seemed like an eternity. Keeping him from attacking me took all the energy I had. I finally managed to break away and run home. Exhausted, I collapsed on the floor and began crying, in a way I don’t remember doing since I was a small child. What broke me down was not so much this particular incident but the sum of all the assaults and humiliation that took place before it—the attacks, the spitting, the name calling, and, ultimately, my complete inability to do anything about it. Violent self-defense would certainly cost any white transit worker his job.

From: FACE TO FACE WITH RACE

Edited and with an Introduction by

Jared Taylor

Trãirism’ and Existentialism

 

Trãirism developed from the thought of Nae Ionescu, whose philosophical term trãire (‘living-ism’) became an inspiration for the younger intellectuals56 between the two World Wars. Tutea was influenced by this, along with Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran. The fact that Ionescu is not universally held in high regard today should not be allowed either to obscure his historical significance, nor debar him from consideration as a thinker in his own right. Ionescu developed trãirism in a religious and non-materialist direction. His horror of system, especially of Marxism,57 is shared by Tutea, who refers to Ionescu’s description of the system as a ‘coffin’, in contrast to ‘living thought’.58 He quotes Ionescu’s view that salvation precludes any sense of ‘frozen form’.59This fundamental emphasis in Ionescu profoundly influenced Þuþea’s own stance against rigidly conceived and constructed systematic thought.

Eliade and especially Cioran transmuted trãirism, as it was originally conceived, into a form of secular existentialism which, Tutea claimed, was itself a system incapable of leading beyond the ‘antechamber of life’.60 Secular existentialism ‘cannot accommodate holiness or heroism’.61 Hence Camus’s ‘radical pessimism’ and view of absurdity as the ultimate context of all experience, at the end of The Myth of Sisyphus: ‘The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’62  Furthermore, for Camus, Sisyphus is almost a Romantic hero or anti-hero. Tutea’s criticism of Camus grows out of his very different experience of life – in its crudest physical and mental brutality. For Tutea, Sisyphus in Hades, pushing his great boulder up the mountain only to have it roll down again as he reaches the top, represents stupefying mindlessness, dehumanising emptiness, and barren stereotyping of humanity as a concept rather than joyful creative celebration of human personality in the infinite diversity and extent of its actual living ‘nuances’. Tutea regards what Camus calls obliquely Sisyphus’s ‘happiness’ as a form of moral suicide inseparable from the absurdity63 of his toil. Camus’s existentialism was simply concerned with existence, not life. Although Tutea appreciated the attempt of trãirism to engage with the totality of the human person, he was unable to accept the existentialist world view of Ionescu’s disciples.

‘Absurd indifference toward, and existential disgust for, the world are characteristics of the period in which we live.’64 Chaos (meaninglessness) and aesthetic anarchy, in Tutea’s view, provide no worthwhile response to, or escape from, the deadening commonplaces and clichés of existence. He rejects pursuit of the absurd, the gratuitous, and the grotesque as means of escape from existential impasse. He has no patience with Camus’s declaration (at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus) that suicide is ‘la question fondamentale de la philosophie’.65 Reduced to the level of ‘existential technique’, secular existentialism indicates a condition of drained communicativeness derived from a kind of colour-blindness in the use of nuance:

‘Lack of communication leads to solipsism, for which Schopenhauer prescribes internment in the madhouse.’66 Within a perspective bounded absolutely by human birth and death, existential pessimism and despair are not surprising, for existence is characterised merely by the futility of change, and by circular, repetitive experience (including failed attempts at escape). Because secular existentialists like Camus live ‘without hope and illusion’, their happiness is ‘inseparable from the absurd’ in which ‘Sisyphus forever shoulders anew his futile burden’.67 Their concept of movement being limited to this world, they can know nothing of nuance in the liberating, transformative, sacramental sense which Tutea offers.

As a Christian form of existentialism, trãire means, for Tutea, ‘mystical experience which releases the human being from the antechamber of life and knowledge’ and which, ‘through faith, makes the impossible possible in the believer’s heart’.68 It comprehends the whole of a person’s being, and leads to spiritual growth: ‘This is the sense of Nae Ionescu’s trãirism. Trãirism should be conceived in theological rather than philosophical terms.’69 Yet Tutea’s philosophy of nuances, as I will show later in this chapter, goes beyond the theological, into terms essentially sacramental in nature – perhaps (to suggest a different nuance of categorisation) a kind of affirmative liturgical ‘philosophy’.

From: Petre Tutea
Beetwen Sacrifice and Suicide
by Alexandru Popesku

The Ambiguity of Fame

Fame: Hopes and Horrors
IF each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: "I want to be praised." No one will make such a confession, for it is less shameful to commit an abomination than to proclaim so pitiable and so humiliating a weakness, looming out of a feeling of solitude and insecurity from which both the fortunate and the rejected suffer with equal intensity. No one is sure of what he is, nor of what he does. However imbued we may be with our merits, we are gnawed by anxiety and ask, in order to surmount it, only to be deceived, only to receive approbation from anywhere, from anyone. The observer detects a suppliant nuance in the expression of anyone who has finished an enterprise or a work, or performs, quite simply, any activity whatever. The weakness is a universal one; and if God  appears immune from it, it is because, once the creation was completed, He could not, lacking witnesses, count on commendations. He bestowed them upon Himself, it is true, and at the end of each day!

*

Just as each of us, in order to "make a name for himself," strives to outstrip the others, similarly in the beginning man must have known the vague desire to eclipse the animals, to affirm himself at their expense, to shine at any price. A breakdown of equilibrium, source of ambition if not of energy, having occurred in his vital economy, he found himself thereby projected into a competition with all living things, waiting to enter into competition with himself by that craving to transcend which, in its aggravated form, was to define him in his own right. Man alone, in the state of nature, wanted to be important, man alone, among the animals, hated anonymity and did his utmost to escape from it. To put himself forward, such was and such remains his dream. It is difficult to believe he has sacrificed Paradise out of a simple desire to know good and evil; on the other hand, it is easy to imagine him risking everything to be Someone. Let us correct Genesis: if he spoiled his initial felicity, it was less from a thirst for knowledge than from an appetite for fame. Once he yielded to its attraction, he went over to the Devil. And indeed fame is diabolic, in its principle as in its manifestations. On its account, the most gifted of the angels ended as an adventurer and more than one saint as a charlatan. Those who have known or merely approached fame can no longer turn away and, to remain in its vicinity, will shrink from no degradation, no villainy. When one cannot save one's soul, one hopes at least to save one's name. The usurper who was to assure himself a privileged position in the universe-would he have achieved his purpose without the desire to be talked about, without the obsession, the mania of reputation? If this mania were to seize any animal in its grip, however "retarded" that animal might be, it would press forward and catch up with man.

*

And if the desire for fame should leave you? With it will go those torments which goaded you on, which impelled you to produce, to realize yourself, and to leave yourself behind. Once they are gone, you will be satisfied with what you are, you will subside within your boundaries, your will to supremacy and excess conquered and abolished. Free of the Serpent's kingdom, you will not retain a trace of the old temptation, of the stigma which distinguished you from the other creatures. Is it even certain that you are still man? At the most a conscious plant.

The theologians, by identifying God with pure mind, have revealed that they possess no sense of the process of creation, of physis in general. The mind as such is unsuited to produce; it projects but, in order to carry out its plans, an impure energy is required to set it in action. It is the mind, and not the flesh, which is weak, and it becomes strong only when stimulated by a suspect thirst, by some blameworthy impulse. The more dubious a passion, the more its victim is spared the danger of creating false or fleshless works. Is a man ruled by cupidity, jealousy, vanity? Far from being blamed, he should be praised for these sins: what would he be without them? Almost nothing-that is, pure mind, or more precisely, an angel; now, the angel is by definition sterile and ineffectual, like the light in which he vegetates, which engenders nothing, deprived as it is of that obscure, underground principle which resides in every manifestation of life. God seems much more favored, since He is molded out of shadows: without their dynamic imperfection, He would have remained in a state of paralysis or absence, incapable of playing the part we all know so well. He owes them everything, including His being. Nothing of the fecund and the true is altogether luminous, nor altogether honorable. To say of a poet, apropos of this or that weakness, that it is a "flaw in his genius" is to fail to recognize the source and the secret if not of his talents, certainly of his "output." Every work, however high its level, proceeds from the immediate and bears its mark: no one creates in the absolute nor in the void. Imprisoned in a human universe, once we manage to escape it, why produce and for whom? The more man claims us, the more men cease to interest us; yet it is on account of them and of the opinion they have of us that we bestir ourselves, as evidenced by the incredible hold  flattery has over every mind, crude and delicate alike. It is a mistake to believe that it has no effect upon the solitary, who is in fact more sensitive to it than is supposed, for not often having to suffer its charm or its venom, he cannot protect himself against it. However blase he is about everything, he is not blase about compliments. As he does not receive many, he is not accustomed to them; should the occasion arise to lavish them upon him, he will swallow them with a childish and disgusting greed. Versed in so many things, he is a novice in this one. Also to his liabilities must be added the fact that every compliment functions physically and provokes a delicious frisson which no one can stamp out or even master without a discipline, a self-control which is acquired only by the practice of society, by a long frequentation of knaves and fools alike. In truth, nothing, neither scorn nor mistrust, immunizes us against the effects of flattery: if we suspect or disparage someone, we shall be nonetheless attentive to the favorable judgments he makes upon us, and we shall even change our minds a bout him if they are sufficiently lyrical, sufficiently exaggerated to seem to us spontaneous, involuntary. In appearance, everyone is self-satisfied; in actuality, no one. Should we then, out of a spirit of charity, burn our incense before friends and enemies both, before all mortals without exception, and say amen to each of their extravagances? So deeply does self-doubt work in us that, to remedy it, we have invented love, a tacit agreement between two unhappy parties to overestimate each other, to praise each other shamelessly.

Madmen aside, there is no one who is indifferent to commendation or blame; as long as we remain somewhat normal, we are sensitive to the one and the other; if we become refractory to them, what else can we look for among our fellow-men? It is incontestably humiliating to react as they do; on the other hand, it is hard to raise oneself above all these miseries which harass and overwhelm them. To be human is no solution, any more than ceasing to be so.

The least venture outside the world constrains our desire to realize ourselves, to surpass and crush the others. The angel's misfortune is a consequence of the fact that he has no need to struggle in order to accede to glory: he is born in it, takes his ease there, glory is consubstantial with him. What can he aspire to thereafter? He lacks the very resource of inventing desires for himself. 

 If to produce and to exist are coincident, there is no condition more unreal, more disheartening than his.

To play at detachment, when one is not predestined to it, is dangerous: thereby one loses more than one enriching defect, necessary to the achievement of a work. To shed the Old Adam is to deprive ourselves of our own depths, it is to thrust ourselves of our own accord into the impasse of purity. Without the contribution of our past, of our mud, of our corruption-recent as well as original-the spirit is out of a job. Woe to the man who does not sacrifice his salvation!

Since everything done that is great, important, unheard of emanates from the hope of fame, what happens when it weakens or fades, when we suffer shame for having aspired to count in other men's eyes? To understand how we can reach this point, let us turn back to those moments when a veritable neutralization of our instincts is brought about. We are still alive, but that scarcely matters to us any longer: a fact of no interest; truth, lie-mere words, one worth no more than the other, signifying nothing. What is, what is not-how know such a thing when we have gone past that stage where one still takes the trouble to grade appearances? Our needs, our desires are parallel to ourselves, and as for our dreams, it is not we who dream them now, someone else dreams them inside us. Our very fear is no longer our own. Not that it diminishes, rather it grows, but it ceases to concern us; drawing on its own resources, it leads, liberated and lofty, an autonomous life; we merely serve it as a prop, a domicile, an address: we lodge our fear. It lives apart, develops and flourishes, and makes its own connections without ever consulting us. Undeterred, we abandon it to its whims, disturb it as little as it disturbs us, and attend-disabused and impassive-the spectacle it affords us.

*
Just as we may imaginatively follow in reverse the course of the individual as he comes into life and thereby retrace the various species, so by following the course of history in reverse we may come to its beginnings and even proceed beyond them. This retrogression becomes a necessity in the man who, wrested from the tyranny of opinion, no longer belongs to any period. To aspire to consideration is defensible, in a pinch; but when there is no one on whom to make a good impression, why exhaust oneself being someone, why even exhaust oneself being?

After longing to see our name written around the sun, we lapse to the other extreme and pray that it will be erased everywhere and forever. If our impatience to affirm ourselves knew no limits, our impatience to efface ourselves will know none either. Carrying our desire for renunciation to the point of heroism, we employ our energies in the increase of our obscurity, in the destruction of every vestige of our passage, of the least memory of our breath. We hate anyone who attaches himself to us, counts on us, or expects something from us. The only concession we can still make to others is to disappoint them. In any case, they could not understand our longing to escape the overwork of the self, to stop on the threshold of consciousness and never walk inside, to huddle in the depths of primordial silence, in inarticulate beatitude, in the sweet stupor where all creation once lay, before the din of the Word. This need to hide, to give light the slip, to be last in everything, these transports of modesty in which, competing with the moles, we accuse them of ostentation, this nostalgia for the unrealized and the unnamed-so many modalities of liquidating evolution's attainments in order to regain, by a leap backward, the moment which preceded the agitation of Becoming.

*
When one forms a high opinion of effacement and considers with contempt the remark of the least effaced of modern men: "All my life I have sacrificed everything, peace, interest, happiness, to my destiny" -it is not without satisfaction that one imagines, at the antipodes, the relentlessness of the disabused creature who, in order to leave no tracks, orients his undertakings toward a single goal: the suppression of his identity, the volatilization of his ego. So vehement is his desire to pass unperceived that he erects Insignificance into a system, into a divinity, and kneels before it. No longer to exist for anyone, to live as if one had never lived, to banish the event, no longer to take advantage of any moment, any place, to be released forever! To be free is to emancipate oneself from the pursuit of a destiny, to give up belonging to either the chosen or the outcast; to be free is to practice being nothing.

The man who has given all he could give affords a more distressing spectacle than he who, having been unable or unwilling to single himself out, dies with all his gifts, real or supposed, with his capacities unexploited and his merits unrecognized: the career he might have had, lending itself to variant versions, flatters the play of our imagination; which is to say that he is still alive, whereas the former, frozen in his success, fulfilled and hideous, evokes ... a corpse. In every domain, only those intrigue us who, whether out of incapacity or scruple, indefinitely postponed the moment when they had to decide to excel. Their advantage over others is to have understood that we do not realize ourselves with impunity, that we must pay for every gesture which is added to the pure fact of being alive. Nature abhors the talents we have acquired at her expense, she abhors even those which she has granted us and which we have cultivated unduly, she punishes zeal, that road to perdition, and warns us that it is always to our detriment that we seek to make ourselves illustrious. Is there anything more deadly than a superabundance of qualities, than a clutter of merits? Let us maintain our deficiencies and not forget that we perish more readily by the excesses of a virtue than by those of a vice.

*

To presume one is known by God, to seek out His complicity and His adulation, to scorn all suffrage but His-what presumption and what power! Only religion can utterly satisfy our good as well as our bad inclinations.

Between a man whom no "kingdom" ignores, and the disinherited creature who has only his faith, which of the two, in the absolute, attains a greater effulgence? One cannot balance the notion God deigns to have of us against the notion our fellow-men arrive  at. Without the desire to be appreciated on high, without the certainty of enjoying there a certain renown, there would be no such thing as prayer. The mortal who has prayed sincerely, were it but once in his life, has touched upon the supreme form of glory. What other success will he count on henceforth? Having reached the summit of his career, his mission here on earth fulfilled, he can rest in peace for the remainder of his days.

The privilege of being known to God may appear insufficient to some. Thus in any case judged our first ancestor who, weary of a passive celebrity, took it into his head to impose it upon the creatures, and upon the Creator Himself Whose omniscience he envied less than His pomp, His circumstantial aspect, His frippery. Dissatisfied with a secondary role, he flung himself, out of spite and histrionics, into a series of exhausting performances, into history, that enterprise not so much to supplant as to dazzle the divinity.

*

If we want to advance into self-knowledge, no one can help us so much as the braggart: he behaves as we would do if we were not restrained by vestiges of timidity and shame; he says aloud what he thinks of himself, he proclaims his merits while, lacking boldness, we are doomed to murmur or to stifle ours. Hearing him go into raptures for hours on end over his deeds, his doings, we shudder at the notion that it would take only a trifle for each of us to do as much. 

Since the boaster prefers himself to the universe quite openly, and not in secret like the rest of us, he has no reason to play the part of the misunderstood hero, or the outcast. Since no one is willing to bother with what he is nor with what he is worth, he will attend to the matter himself. In the judgments he passes on himself, no restriction, no insinuation, no nuance. He is satisfied, replete, he has found what all pursue and what few discover.

How pitiable, on the other hand, the man who dares not celebrate his advantages and his talents! He execrates anyone who does not notice them and he execrates himself for not being able to exalt or at the very least to exhibit them. Once the barrier of prejudices was down, once bragging was at last tolerated and even obligatory, what a deliverance for men's minds! Psychiatry would have no further purpose if we were permitted to divulge the immense good we thought of ourselves or if we had, at any hour of the day, a flatterer within reach. Yet happy though the braggart is, his felicity is not flawless: he does not always find someone disposed to listen to him; and what he may suffer when he is reduced to silence it is better not to think of.

However full of ourselves we may be, we live in an anxious rancor, from which we can escape only if the stones themselves, in an impulse of pity, decided to praise us. So long as they persist in their silence, nothing remains for us but to flounder in torment, to gorge on our own bile.

*

If the aspiration to fame assumes an increasingly breathless form, it is because fame has replaced the belief in immortality. The disappearance of a chimera as inveterate as it was legitimate necessarily left a confusion in men's minds, as well as an expectation mixed with frenzy. A facsimile of everlastingness, no one can do without it, still less keep from seeking it everywhere, in any form of reputation, literary first of all. Since death appears to each man as an absolute term, everyone writes. Whence the idolatry of success, and consequently the subservience to the public, that pernicious and blind power, scourge of the century, foul version of Fatality.

With eternity in the background, fame could have a meaning; it no longer has one in a world where time rules, where-to make matters worse-time itself is threatened. We accept that universal fragility, which so affected the Ancients, as something obvious which neither startles nor pains us, and it is with a high heart that we cling to the certitudes of a precarious, a worthless celebrity. Let us add further that if, in the ages when man was rare, there might have been some interest in being Someone, the same is no longer true today, now that man is devalued. On a planet invaded by the flesh, whose consideration matters still, when the idea of one's neighbor is drained of all content and we cannot love humanity in detail or en masse? Merely to aspire to distinguish oneself from it is already a symptom of spiritual death. The horror of fame proceeds from the horror of men: interchangeable, they justify by their number the aversion they inspire. The time is not far off when we shall have to be in a state of grace to be able, not to love them-which is impossible-but simply to endure the sight of them. In the days when providential plagues swept the cities clean, the individual, in his capacity as survivor, inspired with some reason a certain respect: he was still a being. There are no more beings, there is only this swarm of dying creatures stricken with longevity, all the more hateful in that they are so good at organizing their agony. To them we prefer almost any animal, if only because it is hunted down by them, despoilers and profaners of a landscape once ennobled by the presence of beasts. Paradise is the absence of man. The more aware of this we become, the less we forgive Adam's act: surrounded by animals, what more could he desire? and how could he fail to recognize the bliss of not having to confront, at every moment, that vile curse inscribed upon our faces? Serenity being conceivable only with the eclipse of our race, let us meanwhile leave off martyring each other for trifles, let us look elsewhere-to that part of ourselves over which no one has any hold. We change perspectives on things when, in a confrontation with our most secret solitude, we discover that there is a reality only in the deepest part of ourselves, and that all the rest is a delusion. Once a man is steeped in this truth, what can others bestow upon him which he does not have already, and what can be taken from him which might sadden or humiliate him? There is no emancipation without a victory over shame and over the fear of shame. The conqueror of appearances, forever released from their seductions, must make himself superior not only to honors, but to honor itself. Without paying the slightest attention to the scorn of his fellows, he will display, among them, the pride of a discredited god.

What relief we feel when we suppose ourselves inaccessible to praise or blame, when we no longer care about cutting a good or bad figure in the eyes of others! A strange relief, punctuated by moments of oppression, a deliverance shadowed by a discomfort.

Far as we may have pursued the apprenticeship to detachment, we cannot yet say where the desire for fame has taken us: do we still feel it or are we quite numb to it? Most likely we have cached it away and it continues to torment us without our knowing it. We triumph over it only at those moments of sovereign dejection when neither the living nor the dead could recognize themselves in us ... In the remainder of our experiences, things are less simple, for so long as one desires at all, one implicitly desires fame. Disenchanted as we may be, we long for it still, since our appetite for it survives the disappearance of all the rest. He who has drunk deep of fame, has wallowed in it, can never do without it, and, unless he knows it always, will lapse into acrimony, insolence, or torpor. The more emphatic our deficiencies, the more fame gains by contrast and engages us; the void within us calls to it; and when it fails to answer, we accept its ersatz: notoriety. Insofar as we aspire to fame, we struggle within the insoluble: we want to conquer time with the means of time, to endure within the ephemeral, to attain to the indestructible through history, and-supreme mockery-to be applauded by precisely those whom we despise. Our misfortune is to have found, as a cure for the loss of eternity, only this deception, only this lamentable obsession, from which no one except a man implanted within Being could free himself. But who is capable of implanting himself within Being, when one is human only because one can do no such thing?

*

To believe in history is to lust for the possible, to postulate the qualitative superiority of the imminent over the immediate, to imagine that Becoming is rich enough in and of itself to make eternity superfluous. Once we cease believing this, no event preserves the slightest significance. We are then interested only in the extremities of Time, less in its beginnings than in its conclusion, its consummation, in what will come after, when the exhaustion of the thirst for fame will involve the exhaustion of all appetites, and when, free of the impulse that drove him onward, unburdened of his adventure, man will see opening before him an era without desire.

If we are forbidden to regain our primordial innocence, at least we can conceive another one, and can try to accede to it by means of a knowledge stripped of perversity, purified of its flaws, transformed in its depths, "reclaimed." Such a metamorphosis would be equivalent to the conquest of a second innocence, which, appearing after ages of doubt and lucidity, would have the advantage over the first one of no longer being deluded by the (now exhausted) prestige of the Serpent. 

The disjunction between knowledge and the Fall effected, the act of knowing no longer flattering anyone's vanity, no demoniac pleasure would still accompany the mind's necessarily aggressive indiscretion. We would behave as if we had violated no mystery, and would envisage all our exploits with detachment, if not with contempt. It would be a question of neither more nor less than beginning Knowledge all over again, that is, of constructing another history, a history released from the ancient curse, and in which it would be our task to rediscover that divine mark we bore before the break with the rest of Creation. We cannot live with the sentiment of a total sin, nor with the seal of infamy on each of our undertakings. Since it is our corruption which takes us out of ourselves, which makes us effective and fruitful, the eagerness to produce gives us away, accuses us. If our works bear witness against us, is this not because they emanate from the need to camouflage our collapse, to deceive others, and still more, to deceive ourselves? Doing is tainted with an original vice from which Being seems exempt. And since all we accomplish proceeds from the loss of innocence, it is only by the disavowal of our actions and the distaste for ourselves that we can be redeemed.

From The Fall into Time
Translation: Richard Howard

Undirected meditation

 SN 47: 10 The Bhikkhunīs’ Quarter

Then in the morning the Venerable Ānanda dressed and, taking bowl and robe, he approached the bhikkhunīs’ quarters and sat down in the appointed seat. Then a number of bhikkhunīs approached the Venerable Ānanda, paid homage to him, sat down to one side, and said to him:

“Here, Venerable Ānanda, a number of bhikkhunīs, dwelling with their minds well established in the four establishments of mindfulness, perceive successively loftier stages of distinction.”

“So it is, sisters, so it is! It may be expected of anyone, sisters—whether bhikkhu or bhikkhunī—who dwells with a mind well established in the four establishments of mindfulness, that such a one will perceive successively loftier stages of distinction.

”Then the Venerable Ānanda instructed, exhorted, inspired, and gladdened those bhikkhunīs with a Dhamma talk, after which he rose from his seat and left. Then the Venerable Ānanda walked for alms in Sāvatthī. When he had returned from the alms round, after his meal he approached the Blessed One, paid homage to him, sat down to one side, and reported all that had happened. [The Blessed One said:]

“So it is, Ānanda, so it is! It may be expected of anyone, Ānanda—whether bhikkhu or bhikkhunī—who dwells with a mind well established in the four establishments of mindfulness, that such a one will perceive successively loftier stages of distinction.

“What four? Here, Ānanda, a bhikkhu dwells contemplating the body in the body, ardent, clearly comprehending, mindful, having removed covetousness and displeasure in regard to the world. While he is contemplating the body in the body, there arises in him, based on the body, either a fever in the body or sluggishness of mind, or the mind is distracted outwardly. That bhikkhu should then direct his mind towards some inspiring sign. When he directs his mind towards some inspiring sign, gladness is born. When he is gladdened, rapture is born. When the mind is uplifted by rapture, the body becomes tranquil. One tranquil in body experiences happiness. The mind of one who is happy becomes concentrated. He reflects thus: ‘The purpose for the sake of which I directed my mind has been achieved. Let me now withdraw it.’ So he withdraws the mind and does not think or examine. He understands: ‘Without thought and examination, internally mindful, I am happy.’

“Again, a bhikkhu dwells contemplating feelings in feelings … mind in mind … phenomena in phenomena, ardent, clearly comprehending, mindful, having removed covetousness and displeasure in regard to the world. While he is contemplating phenomena in phenomena, there arises in him, based on phenomena, either a fever in the body or sluggishness of mind, or the mind is distracted outwardly. That bhikkhu should then direct his mind towards some inspiring sign. When he directs his mind towards some inspiring sign … He understands: ‘Without thought and examination, internally mindful, I am happy.’

“It is in such a way, Ānanda, that there is development by direction.

“And how, Ānanda, is there development without direction? Not directing his mind outwardly, a bhikkhu understands: ‘My mind is not directed outwardly.’ Then he understands: ‘It is unconstricted after and before, liberated, undirected.’Then he further understands: ‘I dwell contemplating the body in the body, ardent, clearly comprehending, mindful; I am happy.’

“Not directing his mind outwardly, a bhikkhu understands: ‘My mind is not directed outwardly.’ Then he understands: ‘It is unconstricted after and before, liberated, undirected.’ Then he further understands: ‘I dwell contemplating feelings in feelings, ardent, clearly comprehending, mindful; I am happy.

’“Not directing his mind outwardly, a bhikkhu understands: ‘My mind is not directed outwardly.’ Then he understands: ‘It is unconstricted after and before, liberated, undirected.’ Then he further understands: ‘I dwell contemplating mind in mind, ardent, clearly comprehending, mindful; I am happy.’

“Not directing his mind outwardly, a bhikkhu understands: ‘My mind is not directed outwardly.’ Then he understands: ‘It is unconstricted after and before, liberated, undirected.’ Then he further understands: ‘I dwell contemplating phenomena in phenomena, ardent, clearly comprehending, mindful; I am happy.’

“It is in this way, Ānanda, that there is development without direction.“Thus, Ānanda, I have taught development by direction, I have taught development without direction. Whatever should be done, Ānanda, by a compassionate teacher out of compassion for his disciples, desiring their welfare, that I have done for you. These are the feet of trees, Ānanda, these are empty huts. Meditate, Ānanda, do not be negligent, lest you regret it later. This is our instruction to you.”

This is what the Blessed One said. Elated, the Venerable Ānanda delighted in the Blessed One’s statement.

Nisargadatta Maharaj on meditation

Questioner: All teachers advise to meditate. What is the purpose of meditation?
Maharaj: We know the outer world of sensations and actions, but of our inner world of thoughts and feelings we know very little. The primary purpose of meditation is to become conscious of, and familiar with, our inner life. The ultimate purpose is to reach the source of life and consciousness.
Incidentally practice of meditation affects deeply our character. We are slaves to what we do not know; of what we know we are masters. Whatever vice or weakness in ourselves we discover and understand its causes and its workings, we over-come it by the very knowing; the unconscious dissolves when brought into the conscious. The dissolution of the unconscious releases energy; the mind feels adequate and become quiet.
Q: What is the use of a quiet mind?
M: When the mind is quiet, we come to know ourselves as the pure witness. We withdraw from the experience and its experiencer and stand apart in pure awareness, which is between and beyond the two. The personality, based on self-identification, on imagining oneself to be something: 'I am this, I am that', continues, but only as a part of the objective world. Its identification with the witness snaps.
Q: As I can make out, I live on many levels and life on each level requires energy. The self by its very nature delights in everything and its energies flow outwards. Is it not the purpose of meditation to dam up the energies on the higher levels, or to push them back and up, so as to enable the higher levels to prosper also?
M: It is not so much the matter of levels as of gunas (qualities). Meditation is a sattvic activity and aims at complete elimination of tamas (inertia) and rajas (motivity). Pure sattva (harmony) is perfect freedom from sloth and restlessness.
Q: How to strengthen and purify the sattva?
M: The sattva is pure and strong always. It is like the sun. It may seem obscured by clouds and dust, but only from the point of view of the perceiver. Deal with the causes of obscuration, not with the sun.
Q: What is the use of sattva?
M: What is the use of truth, goodness, harmony, beauty? They are their own goal. They manifest spontaneously and effortlessly, when things are left to themselves, are not interfered with, not shunned, or wanted, or conceptualised, but just experienced in full awareness, such awareness itself is sattva. It does not make use of things and people — it fulfils them.
Q: Since I cannot improve sattva, am I to deal with tamas and rajas only? How can I deal with them?
M: By watching their influence in you and on you. Be aware of them in operation, watch their expressions in your thoughts, words and deeds, and gradually their grip on you will lessen and the clear light of sattva will emerge. It is neither difficult, nor a protracted process; earnestness is the only condition of success.

*
Q: Will meditation help me to reach your state?
M: Meditation will help you to find your bonds, loosen them, untie them and cast your moorings. When you are no longer attached to anything, you have done your share. The rest will be done for you.
Q: By whom?
M: By the same power that brought you so far, that prompted your heart to desire truth and your mind to seek it. It is the same power that keeps you alive. You may call it Life or the Supreme.
*
Q: What is meditation and what are its uses?
M: As long as you are a beginner certain formalised meditations, or prayers may be good for you. But for a seeker for reality there is only one meditation — the rigorous refusal to harbour thoughts. To be free from thoughts is itself meditation.
Q: How is it done?
M: You begin by letting thoughts flow and watching them. The very observation slows down the mind till it stops altogether. Once the mind is quiet, keep it quiet. Don't get bored with peace, be in it, go deeper into it.
Q: I heard of holding on to one thought in order to keep other thoughts away. But how to keep all thoughts away? The very idea is also a thought.
M: Experiment anew, don't go by past experience. Watch your thoughts and watch yourself watching the thoughts. The state of freedom from all thoughts will happen suddenly and by the bliss of it you shall recognise it.
*
Q: In meditation, who meditates, the person or the witness?
M: Meditation is a deliberate attempt to pierce into the higher states of consciousness and finally go beyond it. The art of meditation is the art of shifting the focus of attention to ever subtler levels, without losing one's grip on the levels left behind. In a way it is like having death under control. One begins with the lowest levels: social circumstances, customs and habits; physical surroundings, the posture and the breathing of the body, the senses, their sensations and perceptions; the mind, its thoughts and feelings; until the entire mechanism of personality is grasped and firmly held. The final stage of meditation is reached when the sense of identity goes beyond the 'I-am-so-and-so', beyond 'so-l-am', beyond 'I-am-the-witness-only', beyond 'there-is', beyond all ideas into the impersonally personal pure being. But you must be energetic when you take to meditation. It is definitely not a part-time occupation. Limit your interests and activities to what is needed for you and your dependents' barest needs. Save all your energies and time for breaking the wall your mind had built around you. Believe me, you will not regret.
Q: How do I come to know that my experience is universal?
M: At the end of your meditation all is known directly, no proofs whatsoever are required. Just as every drop of the ocean carries the taste of the ocean, so does every moment carry the taste of eternity. Definitions and descriptions have their place as useful incentives for further search, but you must go beyond them into what is undefinable and indescribable, except in negative terms.
After all, even universality and eternity are mere concepts, the opposites of being place and time-bound. Reality is not a concept, nor the manifestation of a concept. It has nothing to do with concepts. Concern yourself with your mind, remove its distortions and impurities. Once you had the taste of your own self, you will find it everywhere and at all times. Therefore, it is so important that you should come to it. Once you know it, you will never lose it.
But you must give yourself the opportunity through intensive, even arduous meditation.
Q: What exactly do you want me to do?
M: Give your heart and mind to brooding over the 'I am', what is it, how is it, what is its source, its life, its meaning. It is very much like digging a well. You reject all that is not water, till you reach the life-giving spring.
Q: How shall I know that I am moving in the right direction?
M: By your progress in intentness, in clarity and devotion to the task.
Q: We, Europeans, find it very difficult to keep quiet. The world is too much with us.
M: Oh, no, you are dreamers too. We differ only in the contents of our dreams. You are after perfection — in the future. We are intent on finding it — in the now. The limited only is perfectible. The unlimited is already perfect. You are perfect, only you don't know it. Learn to know yourself and you will discover wonders.
*
M: As long as you take yourself to be a person, a body and a mind, separate from the stream of life, having a will of its own, pursuing its own aims, you are living merely on the surface and whatever you do will be short-lived and of little value, mere straw to feed the flames of vanity. You must put in true worth before you can expect something real. What is your worth?
Q: By what measure shall I measure it?
M: Look at the content of your mind. You are what you think about. Are you not most of the time busy with your own little person and its daily needs? The value of regular meditation is that it takes you away from the humdrum of daily routine and reminds you that you are not what you believe yourself to be. But even remembering is not enough — action must follow conviction. Don't be like the rich man who has made a detailed will, but refuses to die. 

Q: Is not gradualness the law of life? 

M: Oh, no. The preparation alone is gradual, the change itself is sudden and complete. Gradual change does not take you to a new level of conscious being. You need courage to let go.

Dante’s Ten Existential Lessons

To regard Dante and Sartre as philosophical twins would be zany. Whereas Dante’s Inferno literally accepts Hell, Sartre’s depiction in No Exit is only a metaphor for inauthentic earthly living. Whereas Dante unequivocally accepts the Divine, Sartre unequivocally accepts only earthly life. Whereas Dante gratefully embraces an inherently meaningful cosmos, Sartre relishes the opportunities afforded by an inherently meaningless world. The list of differences could be extended considerably.

However, when judged only in terms of how human beings ought to live their lives on earth, numerous points of agreement between Dante and existentialism sparkle. I’ll call these Dante’s ten existential lessons for leading a good human life.

1 We define ourselves through our choices and decisions

For Dante, unlike for existentialist philosophers, human beings embody a natural telos: the goal of spiritual purification and reunification with the divine. But, like the existentialists, Dante does not claim that human beings embody an antecedently fixed essence. We must define ourselves through our choices and decisions, which reflect our exercises of freedom. Our goal must be won through the process of living artfully. We are responsible for the people we are becoming. Facile excuses, ego-saving rationalizations, and denials of responsibility are all too common, but unhelpful. Assuming a transcendent world of perfect substantive justice, Dante is confident that we will all receive precisely what we deserve. Lacking belief in a transcendent  world, existentialism makes no such guarantees; although in a sense we will get what we deserve on earth, as our choices and actions rebound to mold our characters. Neither Dante nor the existentialists exonerate individuals from responsibility on the basis of their starting position in society, their early socialization, or the vicissitudes of outrageous fortune. For better or for worse, both Dante and the existentialists highlight human freedom (transcendence) over genetic endowments and social circumstances (facticity). At the end of our lives, Dante and the existentialists jointly insist that we are responsible for the lives we have led and for the people we have become. Sartre’s overly simplified but still profound slogan “No excuses” could just as easily have been uttered by the Florentine poet.

Dante is utterly convinced that we can connect to enduring value, that the transcendental world is rational and just, and that our lives attain an ultimate culmination; whereas secular existentialism contends that human beings have no fixed final end and that our lives are thoroughly finite. But both sides agree that, for human beings, the process of earthly living is self-definition through the exercise of freedom. We are completely responsible for those matters that fall under our control. Both Dante and the existentialists are convinced that the most important matters – those pertaining to the construction of the self – are under our control. No excuses!

2 Soul-crafting is our most important project

Moreover, the ongoing process of soul-crafting is the paramount human project for both Dante and the existentialists. That the two parties differ radically on the final end of this process must not obscure their agreement on the essential point that we must never lose sight of the value of soul-crafting.

For Dante, soul-crafting involves spiritual purification in confrontation with temptation, suffering, and human fallibility. No light matter is at stake: our flourishing on earth and our fate in the afterlife depend on the outcome of this struggle. For (secular) existentialists, soul-crafting involves forging a worthy character in confrontation with human weakness, the inclination to make excuses, and the comfort of inauthentic living. Again, no light matter is at stake: our flourishing on earth depends on our success at living a life that is authentic for the most part and avoids major self-deceptions. We become what we choose and what we do.

For example, Nietzsche sketches the process of soul-crafting in terms of higher human types. They represent the full process of Nietzschean becoming – recurrent construction, deconstruction, reimagination, and re-creation. To prepare as much as to approximate a higher human type, we must pass through the “three metamorphoses” of discipline, defiance, and creation. The spirit, like a camel, flees into the solitude of the desert to bear enormous burdens (the process of socialization and the construction of the self); the spirit, like a lion, must transform itself into a master, a conqueror who releases its own freedom by destroying traditional prohibitions (the process of deconstruction of the self and liberation from the past); but the lion cannot create new values, so the spirit must transform itself into a child, whose playful innocence, ability to forget, and capability for creative games signals the spirit’s willing its own will (the process of re-imagination and re-creation of the self).10

The texture and shadings of Nietzschean transcendence, eternity, and world creation are much different from religious versions of these features. The focus is on this world, the premises are cosmic meaninglessness and a tragic view of life, eternity is recurrent flux, and transcendence is the process of socialization, destruction, reimagination, and re-creation. In sum, Nietzschean redemption is nothing but a response to the lack of religious salvation, a message of affirmation to nudge away the chaos arising from the awareness that “God is dead.” Cosmic congratulations will not spring forth, but higher human types, who embody the proper attitudes, do not need any.

Nietzsche’s grand individualism, however, is dangerous. Physicians understand that insecurity, a relentless striving for achievement, chronic impatience, intense competitiveness, and deep hostility increase bodily stress and their presence is the best predictor of several diseases. These characteristics are much more likely to be embodied by people alienated from others than by people intimately connected to others. The path to health, wisdom, and joy is reached by broadening one’s boundaries and widening one’s subjectivity. Moral of the story: our inner deconstructions, reimaginations, and re-creations must ultimately invigorate the quality of our participation in the external world. Otherwise internal explorations are tepid exercises in abstraction and narcissism. Are Nietzschean relationships robust enough to ensure mental and physical health?

In any event, the parallel between Dante and an existentialist such as Nietzsche is created by their joint concern for the human art of soul-crafting in a context where everything is at stake and nothing is guaranteed. Embedded in the vortex of everyday tasks and activities, human beings, too often unconsciously, relinquish the paramount project of their lives. Typically, we expend too little of our conscious effort and we reflect too infrequently on crafting our souls. Dante anticipates existentialism when he demands that we explicitly and vigorously attend to this matter.

3 Authenticity is required for human flourishing

Dante does not use anything like the term “authenticity.” But his emphasis on human freedom; avoiding self-deception; taking responsibility for one’s choices and deeds; reflecting upon one’s mortality; self-consciously crafting one’s soul; rejecting facile excuses for inappropriate conduct; and parlaying suffering and adversity into practical advantage – all prefigure existential themes. Dante sketches how to live authentically in what he takes to be an inherently meaningful cosmos. His position diverges from that of modern secular existentialism in the matter of whether the cosmos is inherently meaningful.

But both Dante and the existentialists agree on the broader framework of what authentic living requires; they differ stronger on the details because of their divergent views on the fundamental nature of the cosmos.

For example, Albert Camus provides an alternative sketch of living authentically in what he takes to be an inherently meaningless cosmos.11 Camus argues that human beings desperately crave for inherent value, meaning, and rationality, but discover only a neutral, meaningless, indifferent cosmos. The enormous gap between human needs and an unresponsive universe is the summit of absurdity. Once we recognize the absence of a master plan and the absurdity of our existence, we underscore our own insignificance, our alienation, our lack of ultimate hope. Our acts are ultimately futile. The absurd is not a philosophical concept but a lived experience. Camus concludes that we cannot transcend or destroy the absurd, but we can forge and manifest our characters through our response to it.

Camus’s account oscillates between two descriptions of how human beings might create meaning and live authentically. The first way is by meeting our fate with scorn and rebellion. Camus’s preferred authentic response requires an awareness of the absurd: living life in the face of our fate, affirming life through rebellion, maximizing life’s intensity, and dying unreconciled. Relentlessly confronting his or her fate; refusing to yield, rejecting psychological crutches; embracing no doomed hopes for release; and creating a fragile meaning through endless rebellion – the existential hero soldiers forward.

Fueled by resentment and bravado, the existential hero refuses to bend or to beg for relief. We should not live within a perspective from which our lives are insignificant; we should revel in our hardness and endurance. We can create virtues out of contempt, pride, and strength. Like a stubborn army recruit sentenced to dig continually and fill the same hole all over again, the existential hero finds victory in his or her refusal to seek the consolations of ordinary human beings. The hero will neither admit defeat nor yield. The hero lays a patina of defiance on extraordinary mental toughness. The hero’s attitude is a monument to the human spirit: authenticity leavened by indefatigability.

The image invokes mixed blessings. Some of us will admire such defiance as it distances the existential hero from typical human reactions. The hero has seemingly proved himself or herself superior to peers, most of whom will be unable to fight the good fight while consciously accepting the human condition. However, other people will not embrace the existential hero’s self-styled martyrdom and victimization. Fueled by resentment, utterly detached from commitment beyond rebellion, intolerant of lesser responses, and keenly aware of his punishment, the hero embodies a destructive romanticism.

Camus offers a second description of how human beings might create meaning and live authentically: they may bask in the immediacy of their life, engage in the process of living to the fullest extent, and immerse themselves in the textures of experience. We should avert our gaze from questions of what we are accomplishing by hurling ourselves into our tasks with gusto. We must pay close attention to the textures of our journey. By luxuriating in the process of life and by living in the present, to the extent possible, we internalize and transform our fate. For those who are thoroughly engaged in their tasks, the meaning of their lives is single-minded engagement. From this perspective, we are too busy and too fascinated with the wonders surrounding our journey to focus on destructive emotions such as contempt and defiance.

The best experiences of flow, though, are episodic and unique. We cannot live our entire lives “in the moment” even if we wanted to. The temporary loss of a sense of self, total immersion in the project at hand, and suspension of our awareness of time energize our spirits. At their best, flow experiences add complexity and nuance to our selves. The risk, however, is dehumanization through inadequate reflection. By operating solely from a personal perspective, without a robust sense of past and future, and oblivious to other possibilities, a perpetually engaged flowmeister could become less human. Perhaps such a person would be relatively happy, innocently contented, or simply too engaged to assess his or her condition. Nevertheless, flowmeisters risk dehumanization as their givenness destroys their transcendence. Such people work busily in their chains, but do not recognize how they remake their context.

An important message lies at the heart of the image. Human beings too often project into the future while immersed in the everydayness and routines of life. We ignore the textures of the immediacy of life as we busily fulfill our daily schedules and fantasize about a better future. In the meantime much that is valuable in life seeps through our fingers. Even if total immersion in the flowmeister image is dehumanizing, a dose of it is healthy, given the structure of our lives.

4 Vice is its own punishment

That bad things sometimes happen to good people and good things happen to bad people seems uncontestable. In response, Eastern spiritualists invoke the notion of karma: bad things happen only to those who deserve them; although it appears at times that bad things happen to good people, in fact those seemingly good people are working off their karmic debt from past lives. The doctrine of karma, in concert with a belief in reincarnation, allows the conclusion that earthly life is, after all, rational and just.

Neither Dante nor the existentialists accept the doctrine of karma. Whereas Dante was convinced that perfect rationality and justice would be realized only in the afterlife, secular existentialism is equally convinced that the cosmos is benignly indifferent to human needs and that no afterlife awaits us. Yet Dante and the existentialists insist that vice is its own punishment.

For Dante, the seven capital vices deeply affect a person’s character regardless of how fortune and other people respond. We become our sins in that our souls reflect the nature of our deeds. Regardless of how other people perceive us and of how luck favors us, who and what we are is an objective matter, determined by the way we exercise our freedom – what we choose and what we do. For Dante, although a fuller dispensation of justice occurs in the afterlife, we do reap what we sow on earth. Thus arrogance distorts and amplifies the self; alienates us from salutary human communities; and renders us empty and self-absorbed. Envy simmers in its own resentment; diminishes the self; and deepens our sense of inadequacy. Wrath wallows in spite; severs us from righteous elements in the community; and hardens our hearts. Sloth begins in joyless apathy and blossoms into hopelessness and muted self-absorption. Avarice fastens us onto a pendulum of frustration and relegates us to a quicksand of rapacious desire; we ignore the interests of others when we should not, and we become captive to our  own insatiability. Gluttony, understood as excessive self-indulgence, diverts us from noble pursuits; weakens the resolve of our wills; and promotes unnecessary suffering. Lust replaces the human need for intimacy and bonding with the yearning to satisfy immediate cravings. As such, lust distances us from loving the proper things in the appropriate measure.

Accordingly, Dante is firmly convinced that vice carries its own punishment; our characters are formed and reflected by the way we exercise our freedom; and the condition of our characters is an objective matter. Indeed, the punishments Dante conjures in Hell and Purgatory are metaphors for what sinners have already made of themselves while living. The afterlife reflects infallibly what sinners have become through their choices and acts. For Dante, the law of contrapasso operates on earth, not merely in the afterlife.

In that sense, Dante prefigured an existential theme. For example, in Sartre’s No Exit, the Hell depicted is not literal. Instead Sartre describes how many people, through their choices and deeds, create their own Hell on earth. As a secular existentialist, Sartre put no stock in an afterlife. By living inauthentically, wallowing in bad faith, immersing ourselves in received opinions, fleeing from responsibility, and the like, we forge our characters in feckless fashion. For Dante, Christian vices bring their own punishments; for Sartre, existentialist vices do the same. Similarly, for Nietzsche, to live as a “last man” – whose central interests revolve around trivial pursuits, a life of comfort, and social conformity – is to craft one’s soul pathetically; for Heidegger, to take solace in das Man – seeing myself as a member of a generic type and submerging myself into the crowd – is to manufacture one’s own craven existence; for Camus, to grasp for psychological crutches and to remain in denial about the human condition is to supplicate oneself before illusion. In all cases, existentialists regard these behaviors as the worst human vices, which engender their own punishments. For Dante and for the existentialists, to flunk the test of soul-crafting is to fail life. Regardless of how fortune responds to us and how others perceive us, we are in the process of becoming certain people, with particular characters that are forged from the way we exercise our freedom.

5 Self-deception nurtures vice

Dante’s Hell includes a host of sinners whose self-deception constituted or promoted their vices. Of course, the most infamous of this group is Francesca. She deceives herself that lust is love; that her (mis)reading of a romance novel underwrote her actions; that reason is defenseless when confronted by strong desire; and that she is not responsible for her misdeeds. Francesca is one of several cases where self-deception abets wrongdoing. In general, for Dante, self-deception is a major cause of why we too often love the wrong objects, or love the right objects in inappropriate measure.Once again, Dante anticipated an existential theme.

For example, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) gave to existentialism the terminology of authenticity. He described inauthentic human living as  distinguished by wrongly denying freedom and succumbing to false ideas of inevitability. He suggested at least five, partially overlapping, ways in which I might be living inauthentically, denying my individuality.12 For Heidegger, living inauthentically is the greatest human vice and various forms of self-deception are its most common cause.

I am sunk in everyday-ness if I live in the “they” and consider myself as das Man – which applies roughly to generic humankind; thinking and acting in accord with “what one does” or “what people do”; subjugating myself to the mass of others; regarding myself as a member of a kind or type. If I accept the seductions of conformity, then a banal life of habit and routine, punctuated by diversions, follows. A particular example of this is distancing myself from any reflection on my mortality. If I recognize in the abstract that all human beings are mortal, but I insist that my death has nothing to do with me now, then I prevent myself from consciously and continually creating who I will be. Heidegger calls this a mark of falling.

I am denying my freedom and transcendence if I think of myself as necessarily being who and what I am. The act of regarding the roles I play and the categories to which I belong as a necessary part of who I am denies my capability of transforming who I am.

I am kneeling before false necessity if I take my decisions, choices, and actions as being the appropriate, natural, inevitable result of the kind of person I am. Doing so relegates my future to my unalterable nature. I am clinging to fixity if I accept that I have a fixed, unalterable essence. Doing so denies my transcendence – my freedom and capability of transforming who I am – and overly empowers my facticity – my givenness, aspects of me that cannot be changed, such as my birthdate, biological inheritance, birth parents, and the like.

I am settling for chatter if the overwhelming bulk of my conversation with others centers on small talk, babble, gossip, and shop. I am merely squandering time in non-threatening ways. I avoid profound issues such as politics, religion, philosophy, and race because discussing such topics   jeopardizes my acceptance by das Man. In sum, das Man, necessity, fixity, fallenness, and chatter are the standard bearers for inauthentic living.

For Heidegger, authentic human living focuses on transcendent self-creation in the context of one’s facticity. I must recognize my uniqueness and not identify as a member of a kind or type. I must embrace consciousness of my particular death by heightening my awareness of my mortality instead of regarding mortality in the abstract, as universally pertinent. I must embrace my freedom by concentrating on the decisions, choices, and actions that constitute my life and help form my self. I must shape my future in context, by denying that I am a fixed essence, by accepting the limits of my facticity, and by understanding my transcendent possibilities. I must appreciate the contingency of kinds and types by viewing them as accidental memberships subject to reimagining and revision. Although none of us is entirely authentic or inauthentic, we differ in degree, and those differences distinguish the quality of our being.

For Heidegger, as for Dante, the forms of self-deception are numerous and its results are dire.

6 Commitment and conviction are required for crafting the soul

Dante invents the vestibule of Hell for those without passion, decisiveness, or conviction. They refused to take a stand between virtue and vice during their earthly lives, so they are now compelled to race forever without purpose. They are rejected equally by both Hell and Heaven. Being in the vestibule, they have no hope of transcending their meaningless activity. Shunning vigorous commitment and lacking deep passion while on earth, the neutrals are now stung repeatedly by insects. Having refused, in existentialist terms, to create a robust self on earth, they brought about their disgraceful eternity. As with all punishments in Hell, the sentences of those condemned reflect their earthly lives, or, in this case, their refusal to commit to crafting a substantive life.

The vast horde of indecisive neutrals remains nameless: this is a just response to their nondescript lives. The neutrals sought personal safety over commitment to principle. Stark in their despair, the indecisive neutrals run futilely after a banner that may symbolize a leader or a firm conviction or a connection to enduring value. Dante the author invented the vestibule of Hell for cowardly “nowhere people,” who merited neither praise nor blame. Cravenly fleeing from an authentic existence and remaining agnostic about value, they deserve the disgraceful vacuity of their eternity. It is striking that Dante depicted a vestibule of Hell for the cowardly, because Christian doctrine does not include such a reference. Again, Dante heralds the existential theme that intense commitment and robust conviction are required for authentic living.

Nietzsche provides a striking image of soul-crafting. His desiderata for higher human types include the ability to marginalize, but not eliminate, negative and destructive impulses within oneself and to transfigure them into joyous affirmation of all aspects of life. The best among us will understand and celebrate the radical contingency, finitude, and fragility of ourselves, our institutions and the cosmos itself. They will regard life itself as fully and merely natural, as embodying no transcendent meaning or value. They will harbor little or no resentment toward others or toward the human condition; confront the world in immediacy; and with a sense of vital connection. Higher human types will refuse to avert their gaze from a tragic worldview and, instead, will find value not in happiness conceived as pure pleasure uncontaminated by pain and suffering, but in the inherent activities and processes themselves. They will refuse to supplicate themselves before great people of the past but, instead, they will accept the challenge to go beyond these exemplars. They will give style to their character by transforming their conflicting internal passions into a disciplined and dynamic unity. Higher human types facilitate high culture by sustaining a favorable environment for the rise of other great individuals. They strive for excellence through a self-overcoming that honors the recurrent flux of the cosmos as they refuse to accept a “finished” self as dispositive of personal identity. Most important, they celebrate the ongoing process of human existence – release from the tasks described here is found only in death. Given the human condition, high energy is more important than a final, fixed goal. The mantra of “challenge, struggle, overcoming, and growth,” animating and transfiguring perpetual internal conflict, replaces prayers for redemption to supernatural powers.13

Regardless of how we might evaluate Nietzsche’s image, we cannot deny that his vision, like that of Dante, celebrates the importance of intense commitment and conviction for progressive soul-crafting.

7 Suffering can be redemptive 

For Dante the author, writing the Commedia was, among other things, to participate in a redemptive process, a coming to grips with his own shortcomings and a struggle for possible remedies. For Dante the pilgrim, participating in the sins of penitents in Purgatory was a necessary part of purifying his soul, in preparation for Paradise. Following established Christian doctrine, Dante deeply appreciated the redemptive power of suffering. He understood keenly that a pristine world of pleasure would bring no glad tidings for the development of human character. Dante could easily have embraced the slogan “No pain, no gain,” especially when applied to mental and spiritual transformation.

With its emphasis on how the experiences of dread, angst, anxiety, and the absurd nurture insight, existentialism underscores the power of suffering. For example, Nietzsche argues that the will to power is not fulfilled unless it confronts struggle, resistance, and opposition. Pursuing power, in the sense of increasing one’s influence and strength, requires intentionally and actually finding obstacles to overcome. Indeed the will to power is a will to the precise activity of struggling with and overcoming obstacles. Because suffering and pain attend the experience of such struggle, a robust will to power must desire suffering. The resulting paradox is that the fulfillment of the will to power – the overcoming of resistance – results in dissatisfaction when the struggle has (temporarily) concluded. The will to power actually requires obstacles to the satisfaction of its specific desires because, beyond specific desires, the will to power has a more fundamental desire: to struggle with, and to overcome, obstacles. In sum, the will to power deeply desires resistance to the satisfac-tion of its own specific desires. Accordingly, it cannot embrace final serenity or permanent fulfillment. The satisfaction of one specific desire brings both fulfillment – a feeling of increased strength and influence – and  dissatisfaction – as resistance has been overcome and is no longer present. Only endless striving and continual conquests fuel a robust will to power.14 

Nietzsche, then, embraces the criterion of power: exertion, struggle, and suffering are at the core of overcoming obstacles, and human beings experience and truly feel their power only through overcoming obstacles. Higher human types joyfully embrace the values of power, while “last men,” Nietzsche’s male-gendered notion of embodied banality, and utilitarian philosophers extol the values of hedonism.

The highest ambitions of last men are comfort and security. Last men are an extreme case of herd mentality: habit, custom, indolence, egalitarianism, self-preservation, and muted will to power prevail. As seekers only of comfort, security, survival, and conformity, last men lack deep convictions, inspiring projects, or significant purpose. Accordingly, they embody none of the inner tensions and conflicts that spur transformative action. They take no risks, lack convictions, avoid experimentation, and seek only bland existence.

Nietzsche’s tragic view of life understands fully the inevitability of human suffering, the flux that is the world, and the routinized character of daily life. Yet it is in our response to tragedy that we manifest either a heroic or a herd mentality. We cannot rationalize or justify the inherent meaninglessness of our suffering. We cannot transcend our vulnerability and journey to fixed security. We are contingent, mortal beings, and we will remain so.

A happiness worth pursuing is based on experiencing and expressing human creative power. Instead of taking refuge in an easy, secure, comfortable life, the best among us will achieve creative greatness through confrontation with and overcoming of formidable suffering. On this view, suffering is not evil as such, but it provides opportunities for the only life worth pursuing. Imagination and effort give pain and suffering an important role in a good life. While a life of overwhelming misery precludes happiness and prevents the robust creativity that Nietzsche prizes, a worthwhile happiness resides in passionate response to an appropriate amount and range of suffering.

We are tempted to fantasize a painless life, devoid of suffering and loss. Such a life is more easily invoked than fully imagined. A life without pain, suffering, and tragedy is not human. Completeness, self-sufficiency, and the absence of suffering are unreliable criteria for human happiness. No single accomplishment or event is capable of saturating our spirits once and forever. And that is good news. For Nietzsche, human life requires continuous activity, self-transformation, and exertion, not a perfection that ends the journey. A worthy happiness must be earned through choices, actions, and direct confrontation with suffering. The sense of having earned our satisfactions elevates our spirits and partially defines the only happiness worth pursuing.

Most importantly, we are free to create ourselves: we bear no antecedent duties to external authority; we are not under the yoke of preestablished goals. We need not recoil squeamishly from the horrors of existence; instead, we can rejoice in a passionate life of perpetual self-overcoming. Art can validate our creativity; laughter can ease our pain and soften our pretensions.

Of course, Dante does not subscribe to the radical contingency of human life; instead, he joyfully embraces antecedent duties and pre-established goals. For him, struggle and conquest concern the ongoing personal quest for spiritual purity. Dante’s process, unlike Nietzsche’s, embraces a fixed context and aims at a given human telos. As always, Dante and existentialism part company on those foundational themes. However, both Dante and existentialism profoundly appreciate that struggle with and conquest of challenges, obstacles, and suffering are critical for the paramount human project of soul-crafting.

8 Faith is a must or your life is a bust 

At the beginning of the Inferno, the pilgrim remembers how he found himself in a deep, dark, dense wilderness whose savagery mirrored his own forlornness and hopelessness when he was about 35 years old.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, chè la diritta via era smarrita. Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte che nel pensier rinova la paura! Tant’ è amara che poco è più morte [“Midway along the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path. How hard it is to speak of what it was like, that savage forest, dense and difficult, which even in recall renews my fear; a bitter place! Death is hardly  bitterer”]. (II, 1–7) 

The pilgrim must visit Hell in order to begin his own redemption. Having lost hope, he is severed from the theological virtues that define salvation. By observing and interacting with those who never developed or regained faith, hope, and love, the pilgrim can deepen his understanding of the inexorable connection between despair and the corruption of the soul. Without faith, hope must perish, and the soul automatically shrivels. Theologically, this is spiritual death. The denizens of Hell abandoned all faith and hope on earth; they now reap in the afterlife what their lives embodied.

At first glance, the fact that Dante celebrated faith is a yawner. His religious convictions and the narratives, myths, and rituals that sustained those convictions supplied meaning, a sense of order, and answers to the fundamental questions of life: Who am I? What is my destiny? Why am I here? How should I live? What does it all mean? Dante’s faith nourished him and soothed his doubts in times good and bad.

Kierkegaard celebrated the knight of faith, the person who sometimes renounced universal, ethical norms in service of a higher calling. He understood the danger of doing so and the lack of guarantees that the leap of faith required in order to cast aside the general demands of reason and of the moral law. Kierkegaard, though, was convinced that such risks promised great rewards for those human beings willing to take them in service to the religious life.

Not all faith, though, is religious. Believing in ourselves, accepting ourselves unconditionally, and being deeply committed to projects that transcend our own concerns all require faith. Faith can be defined more generally as commitment, conviction, and action in the face of radical uncertainty. Nietzsche’s highest value, amor fati, a maximally affirmative attitude toward life, required faith. Neither he nor anyone else can prove, deductively, that such an attitude is of the greatest objective value. On Nietzsche’s own standards, this is impossible. His highest value requires instead an act of faith.

Nietzsche’s highest value, amor fati, exemplified and was reinforced by great creative projects; sharp understanding of the tragic dimensions of life; acceptance of the world as it is; enthusiastic engagement in the recurring process of self-evaluation, self-deconstruction, reimagination, and re-creation; the ongoing transformation of values; and willingness to live our lives innumerable times over, in the same sequence and without editing out disturbing events. The greatest good is the maximally affirmative attitude toward life, the values it exudes, the creative projects it undertakes, and the obstacles it vanquishes. A worthwhile happiness is often, but not invariably, an accompanying benefit.

We should be drawn to life so powerfully as to celebrate it in all its dimensions, sufferings, and joys alike. We should not seek to edit out tragedy or revise the past. For Nietzsche, suffering does not have an antecedent negative value. The value of suffering or joy or any state in between is mostly up to us. Influenced by aesthetic values, he advises us to evaluate our lives in their entireties. To edit out the pain from our life is to want to be a different person, which betrays a lack of love for our life and for life generally. To desire to live our life as it has been, time and time again, is the psychological test. If we had full knowledge of our lives, only the robust would pass this test. The inner power that either attracts us to life or repels us from it is a person’s measure. The greater the attractive power, the greater the person who embodies it. As his highest value, Nietzsche’s amor fati is not derived from more basic reasons or rational argument. Those who are most strongly attracted to our world, the only world for Nietzsche, will find it most valuable.

Nietzsche’s attitude of amor fati is not achieved through rational argument. Instead, it focuses on the rapture of being alive. Amor fati is an experience animated by faith, not by cognitive discovery. Amor fati demands high energy and robust engagement. First, human beings have the freedom to order their interior life, their responses, to the thought of leading a life worthy of being repeated, in every detail, over and over again. Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence embodies this theme. While lower types adopt passive nihilism, higher types will embrace the entirety of life and will view the lack of inherent cosmic meaning and infinite redemption as liberation from external authority. Even the Stoics admitted that there are things that nature cannot control: our attitudes toward events in the world. Second, unlike the Stoics, Nietzsche glorifies the passions as robust manifestations of the will to power. To become who you are, to overcome yourself, and to destroy, reimagine, and re-create require an active nihilism that elevates the present into a fated eternity. Third, higher types will recognize that passive nihilism or fatalism rests upon the life-denying illusion that the “individual” is separate from the world. On the contrary, the thought of eternal recurrence underscores the individual’s complete immersion in the world of becoming: cosmic fate is not external to us, it is us. Eternal recurrence is the test determining whether one truly loves life. Would you live the life you now lead, in all its details, over and over again? The test can make a difference to your life, as you may ask now and in the future: “Does this action merit infinite repetition? Am I becoming the kind of person whose life deserves to be lived repeatedly?” The thrust of the test is to affirm life in all its dimensions, to love that we are alive, to aspire to excellence. Instead of imputing a crude determinism to the acceptance of eternal recurrence, we can view acceptance as a free act: affirming the immediate moment, the present, willing its return and the return of every other “moment.” By visualizing the present moment in terms of eternity, Nietzsche challenges us to embrace the ceaseless world of becoming, in which eternity does not freeze our choices but, instead, fulfills the present with endless possibility. The solution to the problem of living the good life, then, is grounded in attitude, not in cognition.

Living a robust life requires faith of some sort. Even the most pious  worshipers at the shrine of reason must admit that reason cannot prove its own standards noncircularily; reason cannot prove itself. Even the idolators of reason require faith. Part of the human condition is the lack of certain answers to our most pressing questions about life. Religious believers accept a series of answers, but faith is at the core of their acceptance. Nonbelievers in the religious answers must develop other values, principles, and narratives, which can sustain their connection to the life force. A maximally affirmative attitude toward life also has faith at its core.

Camus once claimed, (over-)dramatically, that suicide was the only  genuine philosophical question. For Dante the author, those who commit suicide, with only a few exceptions, are consigned to the second ring of the seventh circle of Hell. From a purely practical vantage point, Dante gives Camus an answer: you should not commit suicide unless you yearn for eternal damnation.

More profoundly, both Dante and secular existentialism could agree that the lack of faith and hope creates a hell on earth. For Dante, the law of  contrapasso declares that Hell is merely the eternal continuation of the kind of life of the soul that reprobates molded during their earthly existences: Hell makes transparent what was hitherto obscure. For existentialists, human beings without faith and hope in life – fueled, for example, by Nietzsche’s amor fati, or Camus’s attitude of rebellion or commitment to reveling in immediate experience – become unwitting collaborators in their own spiritual impoverishment. Neither Dante nor the secular existentialists require appeals to punishment in an afterlife to locate the horror of despair. After considering the question of suicide, Camus concludes that it is  typically a cowardly, inauthentic response to the human condition.

While Camus insists that we should discard the false hope of being rescued from the human condition, his prescriptions for resolute action in the face of what he takes to be the absurdity of our plight require faith and hope. Without faith and hope of a different sort, relentless rebellion and immersion in immediate experience lack all motivation.

Nietzsche disparages as lower types of human beings those who deny, or shroud themselves from, the tragic nature of life. Despite numerous philosophical differences and theological commitments, Dante, Camus, and Nietzsche join hands in declaring that faith and hope are absolute requirements for human fulfillment. (Of course, they differ as to the definition, recipe, and scope of human fulfillment.)

The fact that faith is required for living the good life is not earth-shattering news either for Dante or for the existentialists. For, without faith in something, we lose the ballast for living. Where there is no faith, there is no hope; where there is no hope, there can be no human fulfillment.

9 We have the power to change

Dante hammers the theme that human beings have the power to change their wrong habits, to learn to love the proper objects in the appropriate measure, and to repent over their past wrongdoing. Sincere repentance, even at the moment of death, will lift a soul out of Hell. Although Dante did not invent a twelve-step program, his embrace of human freedom and  responsibility, as well as his intense commitment to faith, coalesce comfortably with his firm conviction that salutary change is possible. We are not fixed objects whose characters are set once and forever.

For their part, the existentialists glorify human transcendence, our capability of reimagining and re-creating our characters. For example, Nietzsche insists that the good life is not found in reason, but in the passions: in aspects of life that are of ultimate concern, our creations, devotion to worthwhile causes, and commitment to projects. Our instincts and drives create our meanings. Conscious thought can obscure our creativity. Not only does Nietzsche recognize the power to change, he extols that power as crucial to worthy soul-crafting.

For Nietzsche, the meaning of life focuses on stylistic movement – graceful dancing, joyful creation, negotiating the processes of a world of flux with panache and vigor – instead of goal achievement. We cannot reach an ultimate goal. But we can develop through recurrent personal and institutional deconstruction, reimagination, and re-creation. Our exertion of our wills to power in the face of obstacles, in the knowledge of inherent cosmic meaninglessness, and with profound immersion in the immediacy of life, reflects and sustains our psychological health.

Personal and institutional overcomings will permit us to become who we are: radically conditional beings deeply implicated in a world of flux. By aspiring to live a life worthy of being infinitely repeated in all its details, we joyously embrace life for what it is and we regard it, and ourselves, as part of a grand aesthetic epic.

Whether self-mastery and self-perfection are the sole focus of the will to power, they are the prime concerns of Nietzsche’s work. Neither state idola-try nor discredited supernatural images can offer human beings enduring consolations for their unresolvable existential crises. Instead, a new image of human beings is necessary.

Nietzsche promotes the individualism of the highest human types while understanding that values are initially established by people. Human beings create the value they embody by living experimentally and by nurturing an environment that propagates great people and high culture. Existence and the world are justified as aesthetic phenomena in that the highest artistic creations are great human beings themselves.

Nietzsche’s new image of human beings is not projected for all, or achiev-able by all. His vision is an explicitly aristocratic ideal, which is pitched only to the few capable of approximating it. Greatness and genius are fragile and vul-nerable: they bring about their own destruction, but arise stronger than ever.

The thrust of Nietzsche’s thought is that we can formulate entirely new modes of evaluation that correspond to new, higher forms of life. The value of humanity is established by its highest exemplars and their creations. The higher human forms are extremely fragile and rare: self-control, mastery of inclinations, resisting obstacles, experimentation, and forging a unified character require recurrent destruction and re-creation of self.

We can never transcend our conditionality and the lack of inherent meaning in the world of becoming, but at least a few of us can loosen the limits of contingency, experience fully the multiplicity of our spirits, forge a coherent unity from our internal conflicts, and learn to overcome ourselves and our institutions: theoretical insight can be turned to practical advantage. The episodic rhythms of the camel (self-construction and socialization), the lion (deconstruction), and the child (reimagination and re-creation of the self) beat on.

10 We must confront our mortality

That human beings inevitably die is not newsworthy. But Dante anticipates the stress on a proper attitude toward death, which distinguishes much existentialist writing. For Dante, death is the ultimate, radical fact – a fact that we cannot overcome. Although he is convinced, unlike secular existentialists, that an afterlife awaits us, Dante suggests that the proper approach to death has implications for how we live. That is, our explicit awareness of death bears value by ratcheting up the intensity of our earthly choices and deeds; by highlighting the urgency of our soul-crafting; by underwriting our experience of freedom; by celebrating our individuality; by distancing us from the minor concerns that consume everyday life; and by riveting our attention to the major projects, especially soul-crafting, that make our lives meaningful, significant, and valuable. In short, for Dante, a more acute awareness of our inevitable death can energize us into appreciating our freedom and responsibility more deeply, and can make us attend more carefully to molding our destinies in the afterlife.

While secular existentialists discard the appeal to an afterlife, they, too, emphasize that a keener awareness of our mortality can energize our lives. For example, Heidegger argues that human beings are beings-toward-death. This stilted expression means that human existence is saturated by the understanding that it is finite and headed toward extinction. We suffer inevitable and recurrent anxiety because of our impending deaths. This anxiety is not merely psychological; it is not a problem we may or may not endure. The problem is ontological; it is inseparable from human existence. Awareness of death is an immanent structure of human consciousness. Death is an ever-present potentiality, a constant foreshadowing of the future.

Human beings often deal with ontological anxiety inauthentically. We take refuge in routine, habit, and diversion as a way to forget our destiny. Or we imagine, irrationally, that death is something that happens only to others and applies abstractly to us. Or we regard death as the great disaster that we need not confront until a later, undefined moment. Such approaches are inauthentic because they falsely try to bracket, instead of confronting, ontological anxiety.

To confront ontological anxiety authentically requires continuous awareness of our destiny. Death is part of human experience and should not be denied, either explicitly or implicitly, through the strategies of bracketing. We should affirm ontological anxiety as a step toward liberation. Although we begin from the distractions of everyday-ness, we nevertheless must confront nothingness self-consciously. Heidegger takes the dread of our own nonexistence as the road to authenticity. My death is the one event of my life that no one can duplicate: it is my own and no one can understudy my role.

Thus, awareness of death confers on us a sense of our own individuality. To bracket awareness of death is to renege on individuality. Awareness of death energizes life by stimulating a sense of urgency life would otherwise lack.15 Heidegger draws us to the particularities and concreteness of our experience instead of our typical definitions in public terms. He is not counseling an obsession with death, but a more authentic understanding of our own individual lives. Keen awareness of the ontological anxiety we confront in our death shakes us out of the everydayness of habit and diversion, which dulls our sensibilities. Our desperation can no longer be silenced. Received opinion, inherited social structures, and preexisting political institutions turn us toward stultifying conformity. But getting in touch with the anxiety spurred by impending nothingness turns us back toward authentic living. Learning to confront our death teaches us how to live as authentic individuals. The unspoken dictatorship of social conformity, the leveling tendencies of group-think, and the push and pull toward mediocrity require a strong antidote. The cost of being tranquilized is inauthenticity. The flight from mortality corrodes the spirit.

Heidegger’s call to rise from everyday structures, thought, and action is inspiring. But is confronting death the answer? Other strong moods and emotions – such as love, vengeance, compassion, hate, and conviction – can awake us from dogmatic complacency. Confronting death, then, is not necessary for individuality and concreteness. Confronting death is not always enough to elevate us above social conformity. Even direct experiences with death do not necessarily lead to authentic living. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s main insights can be refashioned: sharpening our awareness of death can be one path toward more robust and authentic living; confronting death is connected to learning how to live; and tranquilized immersion in the everyday-ness of habit and diversion dulls our spirits and dishonors the narrative of our life. But we must temper Heidegger: we are more than beings-toward-death. Death is not the center of our existence.

Heidegger assumes that only the monumental can elevate the everyday-ness of human life to authenticity. Death, then, is for him a source of meaning. But how much awareness of death is liberating? Existentialists such as Heidegger are invariably dramatic. They stress dread, nausea, angst, and high anxiety as primary moods. Sometimes the drama works, sometimes it does not. In the case of awareness of death, too much concern becomes the kind of obsession and neurosis parodied in Woody Allen’s films. Preoccupation with death paralyzes rather than liberates. Much human activity aims at nurturing and extending life, and at struggling against death. A healthy attitude toward death includes fully recognizing its inevitability, refusing to live less energetically, constructing our projects in ways compatible with viewing ourselves as part of a long generational chain, pursuing ideals that affirm life’s possibilities, maintaining a zest for the adventures, triumphs, and failures that constitute life, and appreciating the chance to be part of human history.

I am not necessarily criticizing Heidegger. I do not think his view amounts to a neurotic obsession with death. But he tends to downplay our survival instincts and to venerate ontological anxiety in ways that invite correction. While it is true that denial of death and distraction by the routines of everyday-ness are self-defeating, and that recognizing mortality can provide opportunities for meaning, Heidegger leaves the misleading impression that only immersion in our finitude produces liberation. In any event, both Dante and Heidegger insist that a proper attitude toward death, confronting our own mortality, can facilitate valuable soul-crafting. To ignore our mortality – to refuse to reflect upon it and to bracket it from consciousness – is to live inauthentically.

from the book Dantes Deadly Sins Moral Philosophy in Hell

by Raymond Angelo Belliotti