693
Such ecological chaos is indebted to Nietzsche, to Kierkegaard, to Sartre, and to
others. They embraced encounters with Nature as the rude, epiphany-laden open
wounds of biology. Not those nostalgic landscapes blurry-eyed with the historical
romance of Utopia: the Land of Cockaigne, Xanadu, the hortus conclusus, Grails
and Antipodes, the writings of Pseudo-Callisthenes in his documentation of the
travels of Alexander, and the Livre des merveilles du monde;
6
in other words, of
whispering, near-death emotion, and pantheistic speculation, all evoking the fantastic aesthetic of some brilliant alternative to the human condition. Gandhi, Sartre,
and George Orwell had to cope with the British occupation of India, the Nazis, and
what Orwell termed “mental squalor”,
7
not paradise. The existentialist outcome of
these brute realities of the mid-twentieth century was a queasy but quintessential
contemporary activism. Social movements that might help ameliorate every version
of modern desperation (Fig. 76.2).
In his biography of Nietzsche, referencing Nietzsche’s retrospective year (1888)
in Turin, Rüdiger Safranski concretizes the Darwinian stage, already six editions
thick in terms of the public reception of On The Origin of Species, in which “The
ape had replaced God as an object of inquiry” and, hence, God was essentially an
extinct being, a perpetually nagging concept.
8
The platitude, “God is dead,” was first
employed three times by Nietzsche in his collection of essays entitled Die fröhliche
Wissenschaft, 1882). Iterations were soon to follow, such as Nikos Kazantzakis’
early play, Nikiforos Fokas (Athens 1927), in which “God – wounded, pale, pitiable – collapses at his feet…”.
9
“We now touch only his corpse,” the young J-P
Sartre said of God.
10
But despite the French revolutionary’s insistence on an existential form of atheism, the Nobel of escapisms, the Greek Orthodox philosopher
Christos Yannaras claimed that Sartre was “the most important theologian of the
West’s philosophical tradition”.
11
The ambiguities of Sartre’s 74 years are telling.
When he died on April 15, 1980, the obituary in Le Matin included the statement,
“With him dies one of the few truly free men of our age…”
12
echoing Kazantzakis’
famed gravestone citing “freedom” as the ultimate measure of human meaning. But
if we trace the roots of freedom, and the associated impulses to be free, from the Old
6 See The Book Of Legendary Lands, by Umberto Eco, Translated by Alastair McEwen, Rizzoli ex
libris, New York 2018.
7 See “George Orwell’s Biggest Fear Went Far Beyond Big Brother,” by Gus Lubin, Business
Insider, June 25, 2013, https://www.businessinsider.com/george-orwells-biggest-fear-went-farbeyond-big-brother-2013-6, Accessed July 21, 2020.
8 See Nietzsche – A Philosophical Biography, by Rüdiger Safranski, Translated by Shelley Frisch,
W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2002, p. 306
9 Kazantzakis – Politics of the Spirit, by Peter Bien, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New
Jersey, 2007, p. 414.
10 See Kate Kirkpatrick’s essay, “Sartre Does God,” https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/theforum/sartre-doesgod/. Accessed December 27, 2019.
11 ibid, K.Kirkpatrick.
12 See Sartre – A Life, by Annie Cohen-Solal, Translated by Anna Cancogni, Edited by Norman
Macafee, Pantheon Books, New York, 1987. p. 520.
76.1 Pivoting Between Paradox and Existential Biology
Such ecological chaos is indebted to Nietzsche, to Kierkegaard, to Sartre, and to
others. They embraced encounters with Nature as the rude, epiphany-laden open
wounds of biology. Not those nostalgic landscapes blurry-eyed with the historical
romance of Utopia: the Land of Cockaigne, Xanadu, the hortus conclusus, Grails
and Antipodes, the writings of Pseudo-Callisthenes in his documentation of the
travels of Alexander, and the Livre des merveilles du monde;
6
in other words, of
whispering, near-death emotion, and pantheistic speculation, all evoking the fantastic aesthetic of some brilliant alternative to the human condition. Gandhi, Sartre,
and George Orwell had to cope with the British occupation of India, the Nazis, and
what Orwell termed “mental squalor”,
7
not paradise. The existentialist outcome of
these brute realities of the mid-twentieth century was a queasy but quintessential
contemporary activism. Social movements that might help ameliorate every version
of modern desperation (Fig. 76.2).
In his biography of Nietzsche, referencing Nietzsche’s retrospective year (1888)
in Turin, Rüdiger Safranski concretizes the Darwinian stage, already six editions
thick in terms of the public reception of On The Origin of Species, in which “The
ape had replaced God as an object of inquiry” and, hence, God was essentially an
extinct being, a perpetually nagging concept.
8
The platitude, “God is dead,” was first
employed three times by Nietzsche in his collection of essays entitled Die fröhliche
Wissenschaft, 1882). Iterations were soon to follow, such as Nikos Kazantzakis’
early play, Nikiforos Fokas (Athens 1927), in which “God – wounded, pale, pitiable – collapses at his feet…”.
9
“We now touch only his corpse,” the young J-P
Sartre said of God.
10
But despite the French revolutionary’s insistence on an existential form of atheism, the Nobel of escapisms, the Greek Orthodox philosopher
Christos Yannaras claimed that Sartre was “the most important theologian of the
West’s philosophical tradition”.
11
The ambiguities of Sartre’s 74 years are telling.
When he died on April 15, 1980, the obituary in Le Matin included the statement,
“With him dies one of the few truly free men of our age…”
12
echoing Kazantzakis’
famed gravestone citing “freedom” as the ultimate measure of human meaning. But
if we trace the roots of freedom, and the associated impulses to be free, from the Old
6 See The Book Of Legendary Lands, by Umberto Eco, Translated by Alastair McEwen, Rizzoli ex
libris, New York 2018.
7 See “George Orwell’s Biggest Fear Went Far Beyond Big Brother,” by Gus Lubin, Business
Insider, June 25, 2013, https://www.businessinsider.com/george-orwells-biggest-fear-went-farbeyond-big-brother-2013-6, Accessed July 21, 2020.
8 See Nietzsche – A Philosophical Biography, by Rüdiger Safranski, Translated by Shelley Frisch,
W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2002, p. 306
9 Kazantzakis – Politics of the Spirit, by Peter Bien, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New
Jersey, 2007, p. 414.
10 See Kate Kirkpatrick’s essay, “Sartre Does God,” https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/theforum/sartre-doesgod/. Accessed December 27, 2019.
11 ibid, K.Kirkpatrick.
12 See Sartre – A Life, by Annie Cohen-Solal, Translated by Anna Cancogni, Edited by Norman
Macafee, Pantheon Books, New York, 1987. p. 520.
76.1 Pivoting Between Paradox and Existential Biology