Nature's Nothing

I started out with nothin
and I still got most of it left

Seasick Steve

 

In the spring of 1836, just one year before his death, the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi wrote what is considered his poetic testament, La Ginestra o il Fiore del Deserto (The Broom or the Flower of the Desert). Starting off with the description of a flower of a broom plant growing on the arid slopes of the volcano Vesuvius, Leopardi progressed into a fiery attack against both the delusions of his century – which still believed in a ‘magnificent progressive fate’ – and those who failed to recognize the malignity of Nature towards us humans.
Nature in particular is targeted by Leopardi as the true enemy of humanity.

He has a noble nature
who dares to raise his voice
against our common fate,
and with an honest tongue,
not compromising truth,
admits the evil fate allotted us,
our low and feeble state:
a nature that shows itself
strong and great in suffering,
that does not add to its miseries with fraternal
hatred and anger, things worse
than other evils, blaming mankind
for its sorrows, but places blame
on Her who is truly guilty, who is the mother
of men in bearing them, their stepmother in malice.
They call her enemy:
and consider
the human race
to be united, and ranked against her”1
 

In Leopardi’s words we can find a movement beyond both the optimism of the Enlightenment and the wide-eyed spirit of Romanticism. Nature, according to Leopardi, is the rock against which all our plans and attempts shatter. Nature’s attitude, according to the Italian poet, can hardly be considered indifference – as the Epicureans did – but should rather be considered actively murderous. In the face of such a powerful adversary, humans should “be united and ranked”, while at the same time restrain from nurturing any hope in their ultimate ability of overcoming it. The acknowledgement of the tragic condition of humanity, says Leopardi, should be accompanied by a disbelief in the promises of progress, may it be technological, scientific or historical.

Let those
who praise our existence visit
these slopes, to see how carefully
our race is nurtured
by loving Nature. And here
they can justly estimate
and measure the power of humankind,
that the harsh nurse, can with a slight movement,
obliterate one part of, in a moment, when we
least fear it, and with a little less gentle
a motion, suddenly,
annihilate altogether.
The ‘magnificent and progressive fate’
of the human race
is depicted in this place.”2
 

Leopardi’s warning of our ultimate inability to confront and succeed against the forces of Nature finds extraordinary resonance today, in the age of Environmental catastrophe. On the one hand, through his words, Leopardi still opposes the hopes of effectively counteracting Nature’s movements by means of human technology and science. According to the poet, if Nature is undergoing a catastrophe – intended etymologically3 as a great and general transformation – humanity’s laughable efforts will have no success in reverting this process. On the other hand, Leopardi’s position is also opposed to that which poses Nature as a benevolent and defenseless entity in need of our protection. Even when responsible for part of her movements, humans are still in the position of the victim at the hands of Nature.

It would be tempting to develop Leopardi’s notion of solidarity in the face of humanity’s tragic destiny, possibly in an attempt to construct an autonomist perspective of collective life and action. However, before even trying to move towards that direction, we must observe one of the fundamental assumptions at the basis of Leopardi’s conception of Nature. At the basis of Leopardi’s bitterness against Nature there is an understanding of Nature as something which exists in itself, and from which humans are somehow distanced. The relationship between humans and Nature is one of interaction, rather than being a constitutive one. But can we really understand Nature as something which exists the same way that her ‘creatures’ do? Is Nature a thing?

Trying to place Nature on an ontological geography is an extremely difficult task. We could find some very useful help in the method employed by St Augustine in his equally difficult definition of Evil4. According to St Augustine, Evil – which could not co-exist with an almighty and benevolent God – was to be understood as a lack of existence rather than as something in itself. Evil did not belong to the realm of being, on the contrary, it could only be defined as a ‘lack of good’. Similarly to this definition, we can acknowledge the non-existence of something called Nature, while at the same time not denying its effects on life. If we were to define Nature, we could do so by calling it a process rather than a thing. Nature-as-process consists of the continuous disappearance of all that exists as part of life. Far from being ‘something’, or from being ‘pure void’, Nature is the process of endless death of all that lives, and its continuous replenishment just in order to die again. Nature is thus the practice of impermanence and, as such, it finds its place inside, rather than outside, life. Jacques Derrida used to refer to this as the ‘autoimmunity of life’5 – that is, life’s embodiment of its own negation.

Life does not go without death, and that death is not beyond, outside of life, unless one inscribes the beyond in the inside, in the essence of the living.”6
 

For this reason, the interaction with Nature imagined by Leopardi and others cannot be possibly conceivable: no space exists between us and Nature, in which such an interaction could take place.

Leopardi was thus correct in understanding Nature as the mark of our mortality, but he was delusional about the possibility of creating a distance between it and ourselves. Yet, he was right in perceiving something like a distance between our constitutive, continuous dying – that is, Nature in us – and our desire to freeze such a process, or at least to delay it. We can find a trace of the painful experience of this distance between the desire for survival and the fact of death in countless philosophical experiences. In particular, we can identify two fundamental solutions traditionally proposed against the unbearability of such tension. On the one hand, we have the lesson of Tsunetomo Yamamoto, from the 18th century text Hagakure:

If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. His whole life will be without blame and he will succeed in his calling.”7
 

Yamamoto’s solution finds its equivalents in most Western and Eastern types of mysticism. In order to leave behind the suffering produced by an existence founded on death, such an approach imagines the possibility of transferring our desire for survival from our mortal bodies to a plane of immortality. Whether it is referred to the immortality of the soul, of God or of the Tao, this attempt is founded on the belief in the existence of a ‘true’ Nature – more true than the deadly Nature which we carry inside ourselves – in which we could finally find refuge and peace.

On the other hand, we have the solution offered by the scientist school of thought, which finds its apparent peak in contemporary, capitalist medicine. Here, the possibility of escaping from mortality is not sublimated in the imagination of another, immortal Nature which we might attain through the rejection of our body. On the contrary, the attempt of the capitalist medical discourse is to ‘fix’ our own Nature, until our own bodies will be provided with their own immortality. Clearly, such an attempt relies heavily on the active transformation of our body into something different, something ‘more’ than what we already are, and possibly into the evolution into the superior life form of the machine. The very discourse on evolution, already embodied by this project and this hope, affirms that life forms continually evolve in response to their mortal Nature, along a linear progression which sees such Nature being progressively ‘fixed’, towards the limit concept of perfect survival – that is, of the immortality of the body.

Both in the case of the mystical project of becoming-one with immortality, and in that of scientific medicine of making immortality our own, we can often witness a movement towards that ‘unity’ and collectiveness between humans, similar to that advocated by Leopardi. Mystics and monks unite their energies in monasteries, scientists and doctors do so in laboratories. In both cases, as well as according to Leopardi, the understanding of Nature as a collective problem develops into the creation of a collective response to it. Perhaps, it is exactly this collective experience of the painful bearing of Nature within ourselves which gives energy to the belief – either pessimistic, as with Leopardi, or optimistic, as with mystics and scientists – in the possibility of finding a solution to the distance between our condition and our desires.

In truth, however, the mere fact of sharing an equal condition does not necessarily mean that collective action can be taken about it and, even less, that a solution – individual or collective that it may be – can be possible at all. If we understand collectiveness as a part of strategy of survival which is aimed at resolving the problem of Nature, we are deeply deluded. Nature cannot be resolved, it can only be prolonged. Survival in itself is still Nature, and its prolongation is, indeed, not procrastination but an expansion of the process of dying. What we might understand as our attempt at living longer is, in fact, a plan for dying for longer. We exist in vanishing, as we are vanishing bodies. Embracing vanishing, rather than obsessing over permanence – if only temporary – could thus be a good foundation on which we could unfold our existential trajectories and everyday lifestyle.

In this sense, the ‘auto-immune’ life of each and every one us is – and has always been – a suicide case. As opposed to the common saying which invites us to live as if each day was our last, we should understand that we already live every day as a fragment of the expanded eve of our self-annihilation. It is to ourselves as actively suicidal, then, that we should ask the fundamental questions at the basis of our daily actions. Under this perspective, our relationship with our own temporality and with that of seemingly a-temporal entities such as causes and ideals, becomes particularly clear. What would someone committing suicide say in front of the demands of the immortal narratives of the Nation and the State, or of those of Morality and of Work Ethics? How would a suicidal person perceive and respond to the desires which traverse him/her? How would s/he react to fear, to submission, or to guilt?

On the eve of one’s suicide, a sense of relief takes over the obsessive anxieties of what we call our ‘normal’ life. The desperate acknowledgement that everything will come to an end – depriving us of all we have – turns into the revelation that everything is already coming to an end, or, to be more precise, that everything already exists only as coming to an end. The acceptance of our condition as a suicide case allows us to re-position our desires, moving them away from their position of discordance with the deadly process of Nature, and finally grounding them on this very process. On the eve of his/her suicide, a person desires not just as a mortal – with the pains and anguish of being under the threat of an external death – but as a dying creature. A suicidal person's desires, plans and actions are thus founded on the death which is at his/her core, that is, on the Nature that is inside of him/her. We might say, then, that our desires, plans and actions are founded on something which does not exist as ‘full in itself’; on nothing. Max Stirner briefly commented on the nothingness which is at the core of an individual.

I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.”8
 

Within this perspective, also writing changes its character and direction. On the one hand, we have Kafka’s observation, taken from his Diaries:

Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little despair over his fate... but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees difference and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.”9
 

The person unable to live ‘fully’ – that is, the one who is aware of being constituted around Nature-as-death – is thus the kind of writer who leaves behind him/herself something different from the usual “succession of beautiful lies”, as defined by another suicidal author, Pessoa’s heteronym Baron of Teive. All the production of such writers can be contained in just one definition: they are only authors of testaments. Their writing has the clarity of the last words, and their uncompromising skepticism.

On the other hand, we have the sharp recommendation of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, in Journey to the End of The Night:

Those who talk about the future are scoundrels. It is the present that matters. To evoke one's posterity is to make a speech to maggots.”10
 

We are thus talking about a kind of writing that is not aimed at one’s posterity, but at one’s very present – a present already impregnated with its own end. A writer who is aware of the place of Nature within him/her is thus an author of testaments of the present. These are something similar both to what the Baron of Teive called a ‘definition’ of oneself, and to the existential mark left by a person throughout their life. If we look at a text that has conscience of its ‘Natural’ foundations, we will find a type of writing which does not have any ambitions of usefulness, but that originates as a trace from the author’s use of his/her own life. A writing, thus, which does not presents itself as the possible cause of actions yet to come, but that is itself the visible consequence.

In fact, acknowledging the fact that we rest on nothing – or that nothing lies at our core – does not mean that all possibility of action is taken away from us. It simply means reversing the common assumption which sees only ‘things’ as productive, while assuming the unproductiveness of nothing. Based on nothing, human life reveals itself in a previously unknown lightness. Thanks to the curse of Nature, which laughs at our plans and ambitions, our plans and ambitions can unfold in the world as feather-light. Failure disappears as a possibility – being rather a precondition – consistency shatters together with immortality, obedience explodes in its absurdity – why should nothing obey another nothing? – and desires can finally take flight without fear of not reaching their aim: their direction, it is finally revealed, is not towards the sun but is already, and has always been, that of a fall towards the earth.

Once aware of our condition, we are no longer in the position to accept the discourses produced over the centuries by the vast majority of cultural, political, religious and economic institutions. Their project of existing as immortal constructions of ideas has always justified their exploitation of human life in the name of the production of ‘something’, and their exploitation of the environment to the bone on the basis of the claim of extracting ‘something’ useful out of it. But what is there to extract, what is there to exploit? Nothing is the land on which we live, and nothing can come out of it but more nothing. The promises of Capitalist medicine – as well as those of the Great Nation, of the Church, Society, and so on – are finally revealed as purely fraudulent. There isn’t anything waiting for us at the end of our working-life, at the end of our obedience and sacrifice, since nothing is all that is attainable for us. And even if these ‘somethings’ which we are supposed to work towards ever existed – as things full in themselves – they would not  share the same plane of existence as us, and would be of no interest for us. Such is the case with the virtual rewards proposed by Capitalism, with the great promises of Nationalism and Revolution, with the heavenly benefits of religious discourses. If the Epicureans used to say that if the gods existed, they would be indifferent to us, we can respond with the opposite statement. If the gods exist, if ‘some things’ exist in themselves, we should be indifferent to them. And we have only Nature to thank, that malicious stepmother gnawing our marrow, if at last we can forget about them.

 

 

1 Giacomo Leopardi, ed. J.G. Nichols, The Canti, p.143-144, Routledge, New york, 2003

2 Giacomo Leopardi, Op. Cit., p.146

3 From the Greek katastrephein, ‘to overturn, to come to an end.’ 

4 see Saint Augustine, Confessions, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008

5 see Martin Hagglung, Radical Atheism, Derrida and the time of life, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 20086 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 176-177, Routledge, New York and London, 2006

7 Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Hagakure, the book of the Samurai, p. 18, Kodansha International, Tokyo, 1979

8 Max Stirner, ed. David Leopold, The Ego and Its Own, p. 8, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995

9 Franz Kafka, Diaries, as quoted in Walter Benjiamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, p 19, Schocken Books, New York, 1968

10 Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night, OneWorld Classics, London, 2010