In conversation with Ken Gemes
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him, you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him…
Within the walls of academia, Ken Gemes has lived a “schizophrenic” life. As a young man, he looked-out at his fellow human beings – people striving for things they didn’t understand, failing at every step, and then trying again to make sense of things – and saw most clearly the “mess” of it all. As an Australian with a “strong bullshit detector”, he had read Freud and had seen quickly through the gloss and veneer to the pseudoscience underneath. He wanted a surer footing for his work, a colder place of theorems and facts, somewhere far from all that mess… he became a philosopher of science!
Flying to Yale, Gemes settled into the philosophical rigor of things by publishing on verisimilitude, bayesianism, hypothetico-deductivism, confirmationism, verificationism… It was all parochially interesting, and as he had hoped, all very cold! Then one day he decided to write a “jokey” article, poking hard into the delicate ribs of Karl Popper. Famous for his anti-inductivism, Popper had claimed that Object A having Property F, would give you no reason to assume that Object B should have Property F. Even if there were a thousand such objects with Property F, this would still give you no reason to assume anything about object B.
Gemes’ short paper (three pages long) was a mathematical proof (using probability theory) showing that this was all wrong – and from across the Atlantic ocean “Popper went ballistic”. One of Gemes’ supervisors at the time, Clark Glymour, was strolling around an international conference, and found himself in an elevator with Popper. Not knowing his relationship to Gemes, Popper turned to Glymour, and launched into a tirade, “There is some idiot in America. This guy called Ken Gemes, who wrote this idiotic article. Do you know anything about it?” Backed and cornered into the shrinking elevator, Glymour was almost nose-to-nose with the Austrian, and so had nowhere else to look but directly into those hot eyes, muttering softly under his breath: “Yes, he’s my student.”
Then life intervened. Gemes was dealt a few “difficult punches”, and found that his old taste for the escapist heights of academia was lost. For personal reasons, he needed to find something more “flesh and blood”. Freud and his gang of psychoanalysts were out there, but they were also still bullshit. Luckily there was someone else, someone who had pre-echoed much of the psychoanalytic movement, just in much more interesting and insightful ways. He was also the most flesh and blood philosopher imaginable: Friedrich Nietzsche. And it all begins with the death of God… and a Madman.
Despite what we might like to think about ourselves, Nietzsche believed that we modern people have never properly appreciated what it means for God to be dead. Most of us have a rather simplistic, mechanical view of apostasy: once you have given up God, you have also escaped religion, and are free from its nightmares, its hangovers, its meaning. This is all wrong! Like it or not, we are still living in “Christian times” – it is still there, floating in the air around us, and in the values that we hug most closely: the value of compassion and the value of truth!
God was once the animator of all we were and wanted to be, including truth itself. So once he is dead and no longer providing for us, no longer telling us what to follow and what not to, all things become suddenly – and painfully – up for grabs. Why should I continue to care about my neighbour, loving him as I would myself? Why hold on to the value of truth as if it is still sacrosanct? Why should I care about it at all? It might take 200 years Nietzsche wrote, but a deep “Dostoyevskian…nihilism of disorientation” of this kind is on its way: “incredibly prescient of him to see our current situation in this so-called post-truth era”.
The other nihilism is the “nihilism of despair”, a collapse of the human spirit, rather than a sudden map-lessness and a drifting at sea. Without God the great meta-narratives of our lives – the ultimate values behind things – can never be fully realised (even though they still exist). And it is here on questions of nihilism and truth, where Nietzsche and Popper would have found each other to be soldiers in the same trench, fighting the same battle, plodding-on through mud and disease and injury, looking for an audience for their overlapping philosophy.
Both nihilisms have a Popperian flavour to them, and a Popperian disgust: disorientation is an appropriate thing to feel, in fact it is the natural state of things as we all doubt, search, and scrape to find a truth that we can never be certain of. But being lost should not lead us anywhere close to nihilism, with all its weak, relativistic horrors (there is no such thing as objective truth).
Still, despair is worse! It steals away the beauty of our world, and leaves us sulking about not having the final solution to our problems. Always with work to do – with knowledge to birth, and creativity to apply – to be map-less is a wonderful thing; it is what gives life its purpose, it is what keeps us going, it is how those ultimate values will be found, and it is the one thing that ought to keep those feelings of nihilism at bay.
And there is nothing wrong with embracing your critical, destructive side and announcing proudly to the world, as Nietzsche does, “I am dynamite”. Dynamite is just criticism on a larger scale, and with a larger target – it is bold, and a worthy thing to be proud of. Contrary to popular readings, all that Nihilism that Popper would have hated, Nietzsche did too – talking about these dark turns of the mind, and of group psychology, only in order to predict their coming, and to warn against them: a diagnostician, never an advocate.
The nihilist out there – and perhaps within us all – has a readymade answer to this: if your whole purpose is to go out into the world and falsify everything you see and hear, then sooner or later you will be left with nothing, or at least nothing but disorientation and despair. The Popperian counter is: if you try to falsify everything, you are indeed left with nothing… except for all the things that aren’t falsified. Whether or not Nietzsche would agree with this, is another problem of bad readings.
The concept of objective knowledge – and its possibility – gets a hard rattling within the pages of Nietzsche’s books, and leaves all of us on the outside of his mind wondering what on earth he is on about: surely he can’t be making such a simple, nihilistically-flavoured mistake, as to say that the pursuit of truth is nothing more than a religiously infused error. The problem runs first back to language, and then more deeply to the type of philosopher that Nietzsche is, and finally on to what his fatherly hopes are for his readers.
In reverse order: when Nietzsche predicts that nihilism will become the future of Europe, he is saying this as a doctor might to a wilting patient in his surgery. Staring into the jaundiced eyes, the thinning hair, the loose teeth, the folds of obesity, the declining posture, the worrying blood tests, the horror-esque habits, Nietzsche is warning people about the ghastly future that awaits them only so that they might avoid it. He wants those people – he wants us – to fully appreciate the meaning of the death of God, to construct our own master narratives, creating and celebrating replacement values; to become gods ourselves.
The type of philosopher he is: anyone who reads Nietzsche well, reads him as a psychologist – prefiguring all the best work of Sigmund Freud, without any of the scientism (the effort to apply the veneer of science to places where it does not belong). He is a loud champion of the Dionysian spirit, not because he prefers the emotional side of the human condition – the intoxicated, disordered, passionate side. But because, ever since Socrates, the Apollonian spirit has won the day – with logic, reason, and progress dominating our truth-obsessed lives.
Caring deeply about his patients, Nietzsche sees a coming clash, something that a little more Dionysian indulgence can help with: our deep psychological need to understand truth vs. our need to find meaning in the world. The God that we so ruthlessly killed, did more than explain the otherwise unexplainable, he also gave significance and purpose to our small, individualistic lives. Religion both bound us together and lifted us up… the fact that it was also harmful – particularly to creative spirits – and needed to be replaced, should not cause us to lose sight of why it held for so long, and why it animated so many lives.
The lament, the malaise, the depression, the disorientation, the despair, the nihilism of our times, is largely because the world no longer appears enchanted in the way that it once did. Without our myths, all we have is truth. And an obsessive, compulsive lust for more and more of it – buffering the things that give life its meaning back into darkness and scorn. Nietzsche is here cheerleading for a return of myth, fairy tales and folklore, because this is the aspect of his readers’ psyche which then (and perhaps currently) needed the biggest champion.
Finally back to language, and to a place where Popper and Nietzsche stand far apart: working in a time of obscurant philosophical language, and of leading intellectuals deliberately writing so as to be misunderstood, Popper lived by a refreshing motto of a kind: anything that can be said, can and should be said simply and clearly. Nietzsche didn’t play games with his prose like those contemporaries of Popper, but he was consciously writing for an audience. And so the pages of his books are dripping with bombast, with drama, and with inspiration. He was screaming into the darkness, hoping to catch the ear of the next great creative talent, and to guide them away from the herd. To pull apart his language analytically, looking for the simple and clear meaning, is to lose sight of the philosopher and his philosophy.
But for both men truth does matter! It is never certain, it is always open to change, and yet it does exist out there, waiting to be found by us. For Popper, us literally meant all of us. His philosophy was written to finally – and scientifically – put to bed a nagging idea from history: that great men drive it, and drag the rest of us along in their wake. Again, Nietzsche was having none of this. That audience for whom he was writing, for whom he sweated through illness, psychosis and rejection, was a rare breed of characters – the self-creating, elitist, Ubermensch (superman or overman).
The rest of us (which Popper cared so much about) Nietzsche was happy to dismiss with the forgetful tone of a schoolyard bully: “Let the values of the majority rule… in the majority.” Just who made it into the ranks of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch wasn’t so clear: for a time his friend Richard Wagner (along with other composers like Beethoven) were there, and then they weren’t; then his old “teacher” Arthur Schopenhauer was there, and then also removed. The one constant name? Nietzsche himself.
Questions of ego and grandiosity aside, all this talk of becoming supermen has its place within Popperian philosophy. More than just a document for domination and power, Nietzsche had in mind a much more internal individualistic triumph. He was encouraging his followers to stretch the boundaries of what it was to be human, to create new and beautiful things, to ignore the disapproval of the masses, to be their own metaphorical executioners (as well as executioners to what they hold most precious) – so that they can become much, much more than their “human, all too human” origins: “all great things must bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming”. Or… to be bold, to take risks, to embrace fallibility, and to enjoy the Popperian pleasure of burning your own theories to the ground.
We might all have the desire and the capability to overcome what we are, but Nietzsche wants more from us – he wants us to have the will as well. In more of those Popperian tones, the world isn’t some colourless project, but a value-laden (or theory-laden if you prefer) interactive phenomenon. There is nothing that can be said about the world which doesn’t come with a set of presupposed values attached to it. Every action and thought and observation involves a thick tapestry of values – so why not cultivate your “will to power” and make those values your own, make them worthy of the place within your mind, and within the world.
And of course, being Nietzsche, he also wants us to suffer for it… a lot! Not just to prove something to ourselves or to others, nor to achieve a known outcome, but because it is where life and meaning are to be found: “To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them”. He has no pity, and he wishes you wouldn’t either, because they are the lucky few who are capable of making their lives worthy of the name.
While the rest of us are left to wallow in the herd with our bitterness and weakness and fragility and resentment and self-loathing and fear and hatred and procrastination and spite and impotence and malevolence and vengefulness and shortcomings and instability and malice, all polished-up into an excusing slave morality. People who avoid suffering, and so will never amount to anything.
During his shortened life, Nietzsche suffered as much as anyone. He also felt horribly ignored, even having to pay for his final few books to be published, telling anyone who might listen to him that he had been born posthumously. Popper too suffered, felt underappreciated, and shared with Nietzsche an unconcealed dislike for academia and academics. But Popper and his work were wildly successful (professionally speaking) during his life. As Popper’s last years were spent on university payrolls and receiving knighthoods, Nietzsche’s were in poverty, illness, obscurity, and eventually madness.
When Ken Gemes looks back at his own turn towards the work of Nietzsche, he sees it as “really disjoint from my philosophy of science work”. I am not so sure that it is! For me, there are more similarities between the two than people tend to think, and when both are done well they ought to be boiling red with emotion and import.
Perhaps most of the confusion is a matter of timing. Within his era, Popper had largely won the debate over the history and the future of science and knowledge creation, while Nietzsche had won nothing but a life of extreme suffering. Then slowly, bit by bit, building into an irrepressible drumbeat, Nietzsche’s posthumous birth has happened. And while the name Karl Popper might one day fade and disappear (hopefully because his ideas become so mainstream as to not need the reference), the name Friedrich Nietzsche will never die, never wilt, never again lack for an audience:
…How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us, for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars, and yet they have done it themselves.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Parable of the Madman (1882)
*** The Popperian Podcast #13 – Ken Gemes – ‘Karl Popper vs. Friedrich Nietzsche’ The Popperian Podcast: The Popperian Podcast #13 – Ken Gemes – ‘Karl Popper vs. Friedrich Nietzsche’ (libsyn.com)