What, finally, dear reader, have we accomplished with all this indirection, with all this aimlessness? Have I made a collage or just a mishmash?
Nietzsche, toward the end of what was published posthumously as The Will to Power, gives us the full-throated embrace of it all:
And do you also know what ‘the world’ is to me? Should I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a colossus of energy, without beginning, without end, a firm, unshakeable magnitude of energy that does not get bigger, that does not get smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself, as a whole unchangeable in size, an economy without expenditures and losses, but likewise without growth, without income, encased by ‘nothingness’ as by its border, nothing blurring, wasted, nothing infinitely extended, but laid into a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that would be ‘empty’ anywhere, rather as force everywhere, as play of forces and waves of forces at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there … a sea of forces flowing and rushing together … eternally changing, eternally flooding back.… This, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, of the eternally self-destroying, this mystery-world of the doubly voluptuous, this my beyond good and evil, without goal … without will … Do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles?
Nietzsche was happy to offer one name: ‘The world is the will to power—and nothing else!’ But I prefer it as a rhetorical question.
I prefer the stray dog, the feral cat.
In 1924 the artist Paul Klee gave a lecture at the Jena Kunstverein (the Jena Art Association), and he hit on our problem:
It is not easy to arrive at a conception of a whole which is constructed from parts belonging to different dimensions. And not only nature, but also art, her transformed image, is such a whole.
It is difficult enough, oneself, to survey this whole, whether nature or art, but still more difficult to help another to such a comprehensive view.
This is due to the consecutive nature of the only methods available to us for conveying a clear three-dimensional concept of an image in space, and results from deficiencies of a temporal nature in the spoken word.
For, with such a medium of expression, we lack the means of discussing, in its constituent parts, an image which possesses simultaneously a number of dimensions.
This is, as I say, a statement of our problem, but does it give us any solution? Is there a solution? Or do we simply announce there is no problem? That would be a nice, but a very empty gesture at best. ‘And, if, as the number of dimensions grows, we find increasing difficulty in visualizing all the different parts of the structure at the same time, we must exercise great patience.’
This is the patience Simone Weil counsels in Waiting for God, too. ‘I saw that the carrying out of a vocation differed from the actions dictated by reason or inclination in that it was due to an impulse of an essentially and manifestly different order; and not to follow such an impulse when it made itself felt, even if it demanded impossibilities, seemed to me the greatest of all ills.’
And as I offer you these further morsels, am I just supplementing the assemblage, just gluing a few more scraps onto the collage, or is there some here here? Is there a philosophy? Is there a method?
As the great depressives have told us over the last decades, depression, the illness of our age, is a form of aimlessness, too. The depressed person looks out at the world and sees nothing that has any more meaning than anything else, sees no object of desire, sees no road forward or back or sideways. Or perhaps it is truer to say that the depressed person does not look out at the world at all. The depressive’s eyes may lift toward a horizon, but whatever they see does not register as a horizon, and it doesn’t register as not a horizon. The depressive doesn’t look out at the world at all, in effect, does not look out. It is not that choice seems futile, it is that nothing appears as a choice. If the depressed person is offered a choice, often they just cannot say.
And yet in depression, as in enlightenment, the search for nirvana is over. Everything is mundane. There is no focus, no striving, no craving.
The first of the Four Noble Truths is that life is suffering. Yes, of course it is, and in the midst of depression, people are not in the least bit attached to that thought, and just as the Buddhists counsel, they are not reactive, not self-pitying. They feel nothing. Desire is the cause of all suffering. Yes, again, of course it is. Depression, like nirvana, is the end of all aspiration, it is emptiness, sitting alone, without desire. Without desire, as the Buddha said, there is no illusion. One deck of cards is as good as any other.
This is the least triumphant version of Buddhism ever. And the least celebratory version of aimlessness. Aimlessness as a black hole.