Media, Metaphysics, Liberalism, and Religion
A brief introduction to Dionysian-Nietzschean-Deleuzian-Lady Gagaian optimism
When most people hear the word metaphysics, they think either “hippy bullshit,” “nerd bullshit,” or “what’s that bullshit?” Those who are familiar with the term might instead think of arcane dialogues about if there is only one thing or infinitely many things, or if things can have accidental properties or if things are necessarily the properties that they are, or some other question that a normal person would find only marginally more interesting than watching paint dry.
That is why I am unlikely to make many friends with my metaphysics, but nonetheless, here I am writing about them anyways. I get my metaphysics as much from philosophy as I do from art. One of the greatest influences on my metaphysics is a song I heard during my month-long hiatus from work from April to May 2020. YouTube, in its artificial wisdom, divined that I would enjoy “The Other Side of Paradise” by Glass Animals, from their Album How to be a Human Being. It was right. Besides the unusual style behind the song, there was one line which stood out to me:
“My my baby blues / Why can’t you see the wicked truth?”
I’ve heard truth called many things, but “wicked” was not one of them. A person revealing the truth can be wicked in their character or intentions, or perhaps the truth is about someone doing something wicked. However, that isn’t how I understood it. I understood it to mean that truth can be inherently wicked. I haven’t been able to shake this concept since.
The name of the album also called to me. “How to be a human being,” as if someone was searching the internet for a guide, or it was a question which was just alien to some. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that one of my favorite books is No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. Not only do they hint at similar themes, the struggle of being human at all, but “The Other Side of Paradise” invokes a similar feeling in me: revulsion. “The Other Side of Paradise” suggests to me an inherently wicked world, while No Longer Human provides a thoroughly hopeless view of the world. Not that noone can be truly happy; I will leave that argument to the Buddhists and pessimists out there. It’s the argument that, for some people, the best you can do is awful. That’s it.
Alfred North Whitehead is an important philosopher to me. It’s unfortunate that he’s often downright inscrutable, but nonetheless. In Modes of Thought, he wrote that while he generally regards some early modern thinkers like Spinoza and Leibniz well, he dislikes how they try to sweep conflict under the rug. Spinoza tried to say everything is actually only one thing and conflict is just an illusion, while Leibniz tried to argue that there are infinite things, all pre-ordained to be in harmony. Whitehead had no such delusions about the nature of the world. Sometimes we’re in conflict. Sometimes we fight and struggle. That’s life. That’s metaphysics.
Gilles Deleuze took this to the next level. Whitehead tried to salvage a unifying force in the form of his philosophical God. Deleuze had no time for such an entity. He rejected a singular organizer in favor of a postmodern crypto-polytheism, a polytheism in all but name, hiding in plain sight. He has been widely regarded as an atheist, but he had a vision of a plurality of little deities effecting change in the world, moving through the world, being changed by the world.
Deleuze thought very highly of Whitehead. Whitehead talked about a perpetual increase in creativity, a magnification of intensity, a unification of more and more differences. It is this unification of difference that drives me to these pieces of media which make me feel such revulsion. The Song “Paralytic States” by Against Me! in Transgender Dysphoria Blues is a prime example. It tells a story of a transgender woman who goes to great lengths to change her appearance, only to reach a triumphant-sounding crescendo at this line:
“Standing naked in front of that hotel bathroom mirror / In her dysphoria’s reflection, she still saw her mother’s son”
It’s nothing other than cruel. It’s a cruelty born not out of Laura Jane Grace’s immorality. Frustratingly, it’s a cruelty that has no clear cause, noone who can definitively take the blame. It’s a decentralized cruelty, decentralized from a cause but centralized in effect, resulting in immense suffering. In itself, that’s cruel, before you even get to the self-hate. The intense combination of successful-sounding chords and awful cruelty makes me feel nauseous, but in a way that causes me to come back over and over. Maybe Whitehead was right that creativity, as a unification of differences, is good, but just in a way he might not have imagined. Maybe conflict is so fundamental that even “good” is tinted with cruelty.
Not that that would come as any surprise at all to Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze was a close friend with the philosophical superstar Michel Foucault. Foucault argued that the social world is laced through and through with power relations. He didn’t say this in an exclusively negative tone. Instead, he emphasized how power can be oppressive as much as it can be liberatory, how it can destroy as much as it can create. Power is unavoidable, and it is always frustrating, but never purely evil. Deleuze, that Whitehead devotee, understood that well; we are always frustrated, and it’s unclear how we could be anything else. A world free of frustration and cruelty couldn’t exist.
The reality of the wicked truth is part of why Deleuze proposed an alternative critical project. Immanuel Kant revolutionized philosophy with a critique of pure reason, testing the limits of what reason can get us and under what conditions. Deleuze believed that Kant failed to create a truly critical philosophy, because a truly critical philosophy would be about values, not reason. It would be about the revaluation of values and the conditions for values, not the reevaluation of reason and the conditions for its exercise. If the truth is wicked, it seems that we would have a moral obligation to either abandon the truth (seems like a bad choice) or to revaluate things in accordance to make moral use of truth.
All of this focus on unavoidable conflict might strike some as inherently illiberal. Isn’t liberalism about the reduction of conflict, and, ideally, turning conflict into something productive? Isn’t liberalism hopeful that we can resolve problems? An incomplete reading of liberalism might suggest so, but there is at least one strain of liberalism which survives this aggravating view of the world. A robust moral and liberal pluralism, like that proposed by Isaiah Berlin, can be an effective political program in a world of unrelenting struggle. Isaiah Berlin proposed that there are several fundamental foundations for morals. No fundamental moral can be reduced to any other, and nor can they be objectively judged against each other. You can create subjective judgements of how one moral is higher than another, but you can’t ultimately justify it objectively. In a world of such terrifying moral indeterminacy, enforcing one vision of the good life on people seems pretty arbitrary. The powers and principalities are pressured by the liberal presumption in favor of liberty not to infringe on people’s freedom to subjectively determine their view of the good life. The struggle then takes place on a much less violent micro-level, as opposed to a potentially genocidal macro-level.
This doesn’t negate the nauseating struggle of existing. Not only is what we ought to do undetermined; in the pursuit of doing good, we may also do bad. We may exceed at adhering to one moral and in the process violate another. In some cases, perhaps, we might be forced to choose between two, and there is no principle we can run to to justify our actions. It is truly an awful situation, and it is this fact that has drawn me to Isaiah Berlin ever since I was introduced to his ideas by Jacob T. Levy’s book Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom. It more accurately reflects how I have felt about certain decisions in my life than anything else. Sometimes, once in a blue moon, I have to pick and choose in what way I will be good, and in what way I will be evil. I can’t always be good. Not fully. Not entirely. I must be evil to some extent. And that is awful.
While Isaiah Berlin most represents this view, two of his metaphorical students, Judith Shklar and Jacob T. Levy, also share a vision of an undetermined liberalism. Shklar’s Ordinary Vices is a series of case studies in how there isn’t always an easy solution, and the end of Levy’s Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom is devoted to arguing that there is no way to create a principle that can reliably pick when liberalism needs to be rationalist and when it needs to be pluralist. And at the end of the day, if liberalism has trouble imagining itself in conflict, it can always imagine itself in conflict with illiberalism, which, as John Rawls admitted, will probably always exist, and must be fought and contained like a disease.
Another saving grace for the idea of a liberalism of conflict comes from Montaigne and Montesquieu in the form of negative egalitarianism. A key part of their argument can be distilled into the following maxim: “Do not attribute to nature what can be attributed to social construction.” This principle is prudent because it stems off some of the worst cruelty, the cruelty caused by assuming your enemy can never be anything other than your enemy, and retains hope for a better world. It does not negate the centering of conflict in metaphysics. We can retain the belief that conflict-in-general is unavoidable while preferring to label any particular conflict as transient.
The basic, implicit question when doing philosophy should always be “why should I believe this?” With regards to my views on conflict, my first answer is that you simply trust your experiences. Life is full of conflict. It’s hard to have a narrative without some level of conflict, even if it’s incredibly weak, like “I desire cake but it is in the kitchen, so I must go and grab it.” To try to scrub away any semblance of conflict in life seems to me to be more difficult than to say that conflict-in-general is a constant. This “trust your experiences” approach is generally applicable, and inspires other things, such as my philosophy of religion. Not only have I had religious experiences, but I also question the urge to reject, reduce, or minimize the religious experiences of other people. It might not be immediately obvious how to reconcile various monotheisms, but that doesn’t mean that only one of them is right; it might just mean I haven’t thought hard enough about the technical aspects. In the meantime, it seems like it would be thoroughly condescending to others and a betrayal of my own experiences to not believe in some kind of polytheism, a rich and robust religious pluralism.
For the technical aspects of this comprehensive religious pluralism, I turn to Plato and Deleuze. Plato is often misunderstood. He is frequently presented as a monotheist, although he and his followers certainly were anything but. The One, in Plato’s thought, is not the singular God of monotheism, like the Christians, Jews, and Muslims after him understood it to be. Rather, the One is the principle of individuation, of individuality or non-equality. A very strange logic develops: If the One is non-equality or individuality par excellence, it seems that it cannot be equal to itself. As one of Plato’s dialogues goes, the One is not one; instead, it proliferates into an indeterminate plurality. Each individual is pure individuality, perfectly unique and unequal to any others, and yet each of them is as much the One as all the rest. These are called the henads, and they played the role of the gods.
Deleuze had an interesting response to Plato. Like how Marx flipped Hegel’s belief that ideas run the material, Deleuze inverted Plato’s notion of real abstract rules and deceptive changing matter into a world of concrete rules and abstract machines. In the process, he, perhaps accidentally, resurrected Plato to be more relevant to the modern world. Deleuze envisioned a “chaosmos” where the ideas are changing and active and the concrete world is full of binding rules and limitations. In this way, if the gods are anywhere, they are in the changing world of ideas, setting the rules for the concrete world. What’s more, this preserves the commonsense notion that not all gods are on the same footing; not all are good, not all are evil, not all follow the same rules. Sometimes they come into conflict and fight over how the world will actually be. Deleuze’s chaosmology is more effective at comprehending polytheistic mythology than Plato’s cosmology, and keeps open the door for a modern religious pluralism.
Beyond being a framework that can support a commonsensical approach to modern religious pluralism, Deleuze also has a metaphysics which is more ready to handle contemporary science than many others. There are people today who still hold to Aristotelian and Platonic metaphysics, with no regard to how well those metaphysics fit with quantum mechanics, general and special relativity, and contemporary mathematics. Deleuze had these developments in mind when developing his metaphysics. What you get from a Deleuze-inspired metaphysics is a framework which is responsive to the needs of today, not the debates of antiquity.
Over the past several paragraphs, I have gotten increasingly technical and away from art as an inspiration for my beliefs. That’s not because I exhausted art’s role in my thought, but rather because I wanted to address that important question, “why should I believe this?” Most of my intellectual life is done in engagement with the media I consume. For example, my views on history are as much inspired by Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” as they are by “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel.
“We didn't start the fire / It was always burning / Since the world's been turning”
Many of my favorite songs reflect the unity of opposites in some way, like “Hard Times” by Paramore, which has a very upbeat tone but is bleak, or “Becky” by be your own PET which sounds happy but culminates in teenage homicide, or “Always Happy” by Grandmas House which sounds angry as hell as they sing:
“I am always happy / You can’t wipe this smile / Off of my face”
Of course, the unification of opposites leads to a great appreciation for baroque music as well, not to mention baroque art and architecture.
With the love of the baroque and Deleuze comes, naturally, a love for Leibniz, whom Deleuze affectionately called the philosopher of the baroque. I am enamored with him, and yet when I think about his signature idea, the notion that we live in the best of all possible worlds, I find a more full-throated endorsement of the concept in Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” than Leibniz:
“I'm beautiful in my way / 'Cause God makes no mistakes
I'm on the right track, baby / I was born this way”
While Leibniz proclaims that the world is ultimately the best it can get, even if it seems in the short analysis that things are bad, I find the concept more fleshed out in the Dionysian-Nietzschean-Deleuzian-Lady Gagaian sense that the world needs no redemption.
And don’t even get me started on the “MONTERO” music video by Lil Nas X. I could write a whole essay just on the religious significance of that video.
In this essay, I’ve introduced a lot of ideas which aren’t commonsensical, and yet function very well as a framework to support commonsense notions: the reality of conflict, religious pluralism, trust in the progress of science, and the relevance of art, among others. It is comprehensive enough that even a rough overview such as this can touch on its relevance to art, politics, social life, religion, math, and science. Is it weird? Yes. Does it work? I think so. It serves me pretty well. Should you agree with it? Maybe. That’s up to you to decide. I hope that at the very least you find the concepts I’ve mentioned here thought-provoking.