Horror of Philosophy Vol. 2: Starry Speculative Corpse

Starry Speculative Corpse

The ‘horror of philosophy’ names the moment when philosophical thought stumbles upon a thought that undermines itself—visible in Descartes’ demon, Kant’s depression, and Nietzsche’s cosmic indifference—and reading philosophy as if it were horror reveals this self-undermining as philosophy’s most generative and honest gesture.

• Descartes’ ’evil demon’ thought experiment pushes methodological doubt to the point where no knowledge is possible, inadvertently revealing philosophy’s greatest threat: the thought that philosophy cannot think without annulling itself.
  • Descartes imagines an all-powerful evil mind that deceives him about everything—sky, air, earth, colors, his own body—arriving at a precipice where neither certitude nor knowledge exists, only ’tenebrous, impassive silence.’
  • “I am like a prisoner who happens to enjoy an imaginary freedom in his dreams and who subsequently begins to suspect that he is asleep and, afraid of being awakened, conspires silently with his agreeable illusions.” —René Descartes
  • The cogito ergo sum only partially resolves the demon: the demon continues to haunt the Meditations, always threatening to undermine whatever conceptual edifice Descartes constructs.
• Kant’s depression—his own confession of being ‘almost weary of life’—suggests that reason itself, rather than serving as philosophy’s cure, may actually produce the depressive realization that thought is ‘only incidentally human.’
  • Kant defines depression as ’the weakness of abandoning oneself despondently to general morbid feelings that have no definite object,’ and prescribes philosophizing as the panacea—yet he confesses his own susceptibility to this very condition.
  • In his essay ‘The End of All Things,’ Kant questions humanity’s presumption to know whether the world will end at all, and asks ‘why do human beings expect an end to the world at all? And if this is conceded to them, why must it be a terrible end?’
  • The implication is that depressive reason—reason taken to its cold, non-anthropocentric conclusion—makes philosophy both improbable and impractical: thought thinks us, not the reverse.
• Nietzsche’s ‘overview effect’—the view of an indifferent cosmos from which humanity is merely a brief, self-important accident—constitutes a tragi-comic humanism that insists there is nothing special about the human, without transcending the human.
  • “In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of ‘world history’ – yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Human, All Too Human, written during Nietzsche’s health crisis and departure from Basel, experiments with the aphoristic form to stage the problem of the human as simultaneously a failure to live up to the human and a refusal of any transcendent beyond.
  • For every misanthropic statement in Nietzsche there is an almost ecstatic affirmation—the gleaming, floating ‘gravesite of humanity’ is also a cosmic jest, not a nihilist conclusion.
• The ‘horror of philosophy’ is the thought that undermines itself in thought—the moment when a philosopher stumbles upon the very thing that nullifies their activity—and this makes philosophy interesting precisely because it reveals philosophy’s constitutive futility.
  • The three cases—Descartes stumbling upon the demon, Kant unable to avoid depressive reason, Nietzsche actively confronting cosmic indifference—form a typology of philosophy’s self-undermining, each philosopher unable to simply switch to poetry or mathematics.
  • The method proposed: read works of philosophy as if they were works of horror, attending to moments when philosophy reveals the thought that undermines it as philosophy—without collapsing the distinction between philosophical argument and literary narrative.
  • Reversing ‘philosophy of horror’ to ‘horror of philosophy’ dismantles the assumption that philosophy can always stand at a critical distance from its object and explain, clarify, or dissect it.

Prayers for Darkness

Tracing a tradition of ‘darkness-mysticism’ from Dionysius the Areopagite through Meister Eckhart, Angela of Foligno, The Cloud of Unknowing, John of the Cross, and Georges Bataille, this chapter argues that darkness functions philosophically as that which both ‘is’ and ‘is not,’ culminating in a mysticism of the unhuman in which divine darkness names an absolute limit that is co-extensive with, rather than beyond, the human.

• The concept of darkness carries an irreducible philosophical duplicity—it both ‘is’ and ‘is not’—and this duplicity drives the tradition of darkness-mysticism to think a nothing that is simultaneously a something.
  • Empirical, moral, epistemological, and theological connotations of darkness all point back to the philosophical dyad of presence and absence; darkness exists but its existence is always tenuous, the stuff of shadows and night.
  • The chapter’s key question is whether a mysticism without God—or a mysticism of the unhuman—is possible today, using medieval Christian mysticism as its primary genealogy.
• For Dionysius the Areopagite, the via negativa and the concept of ‘divine darkness’ (θειου σκοτους ακτινα) produce three stages of darkness—privative, oppositional, and superlative—culminating in ‘unknowing’ beyond all human conceptualization.
  • Dionysius describes Moses’ mystical ascent: after initial illuminations, Moses ‘plunges into the truly mysterious darkness of unknowing… being neither oneself nor someone else, one is supremely united to the completely unknown by an inactivity of all knowledge.’
  • The apophatic way has for its object God in so far as He is absolutely incomprehensible; superlative darkness claims to move beyond both experience and thought, arriving at a kataphatic darkness that haunts every subsequent concept of darkness.
• Meister Eckhart compounds the Dionysian tradition by distinguishing God (manifest) from the Godhead (hidden, dark), arriving at the enigmatic formulation that ’the final end of being is the darkness or nescience of the hidden Godhead’—a knowing of the impossibility of knowing.
  • Eckhart’s God is non-anthropomorphic: sensory darkness gives way to mystical darkness as the self is emptied, but the Godhead radiates light that the human can only receive as darkness—a mystical miscommunication in which human knowing meets absolute limit.
  • Eckhart’s logic of negating negations (negatio negationis) produces a notion of the Godhead as ‘a non-God, a non-spirit, a non-person, a non-image; rather, He is a sheer pure limpid One, detached from all duality.’
• Angela of Foligno and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing each extend darkness-mysticism: Angela through a material, corporeal mysticism of the decaying body, and The Cloud through a contemplative practice that names its limit ‘I love what I cannot think.’
  • Angela’s visions—drinking from Christ’s wounds, entering the open wound in his torso, embracing him in the tomb—participate in a material mysticism where divine darkness is not the abstract inaccessibility of the Godhead but an ambiguous, ecstatic annihilation of the self.
  • The Cloud distinguishes two clouds: the ‘cloud of forgetting’ (negating the world) and the ‘cloud of unknowing’ (the limit between self and God), combining the darkness of human knowledge and the darkness of God into a single contemplative practice.
  • “But now you put to me a question and say, ‘How might I think of him in himself, and what is he?’ And to this I can only answer thus: ‘I have no idea.’” —Author of The Cloud of Unknowing
• I love what I cannot think. Perhaps there is no better formulation for the philosophical impulse in these religious, mystical texts.
• John of the Cross distinguishes sensory and spiritual darkness as two stages of purgation leading to a third, unnamed divine darkness that is the impossibility of experience itself—’the darkness of experience’ rather than the experience of darkness.
  • John condenses the mystical typology into a pre-Cartesian dualism of flesh and spirit, both of which must be negated, or ‘purged and emptied,’ before arriving at the ‘ray of darkness’ described by Dionysius.
  • The clearer and more obvious divine things are in themselves, the darker and more hidden they are to the soul naturally—mystical experience is precisely that which cannot be experienced, the impossibility of experience.
• Georges Bataille transforms the darkness-mysticism tradition into a secular, atheistic mysticism of the unhuman, in which divine darkness is an ’excess of darkness’ co-extensive with the human at its limit—not a transcendent beyond, but the ‘outside’ (dehors) that permeates and darkens the human from within.
  • Bataille’s reading catalog from the Bibliothèque Nationale confirms he was actively reading Dionysius, Eckhart, Angela of Foligno, and John of the Cross during composition of the Atheological Summa—this is direct genealogical influence, not metaphor.
  • “What I suddenly saw, and what imprisoned me in anguish – but which at the same time delivered me from it – was the identity of these perfect contraries, divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror.” —Georges Bataille
  • Bataille’s mysticism is neither a revived humanism nor a romantic posthumanism but a darkening of the human: revealing the shadows and nothingness at its core, moving toward an ‘unknowing of the human,’ a mysticism of the unhuman.
• Three modes of darkness organize the tradition—dialectical, superlative, and divine—with divine darkness being the most radical: not the limit of human knowing, but the limit of the limit, the thought that ’there is nothing, and it cannot be known.’
  • Dialectical darkness subsumes darkness within an opposing term (dark/light, knowledge/ignorance); superlative darkness claims to pass beyond opposition into a kataphatic ‘brilliant darkness’; divine darkness questions even the principle of sufficient divinity underwriting superlative darkness.
  • Maurice Blanchot’s ‘other night’ parallels this third mode: not the lyrical night opposed to day, but the registering of absence itself—‘what appears in the night is the night that appears’—a night that philosophy can only approach from within the light of day.
• Robert Fludd’s black square representing the pre-universe, and subsequent color theory from Goethe and Schopenhauer, converge on a ‘retinal pessimism’ in which black is not merely a color but the condition of all color—and of all perception—a ’nothing-to-see (and you’re seeing it).’
  • Fludd’s cosmological black square, noting ‘Et sic in infinitum’ on each edge, is an image that must negate itself in order to be seen—representing formlessness and boundlessness through a bounded, colored form.
  • Goethe treats black as privation (absence of light); Schopenhauer identifies it as ‘retinal inactivity’; both leave unresolved the paradox that black both is and is not a color—at once absorbing all light and designating total absence of light.
  • “François Laruelle: ‘Black prior to light is the substance of the Universe, what escaped from the World before the World was born into the World.’” —François Laruelle

Prayers for Nothing

Tracing the concept of nothing/nothingness from Aristotle through Heidegger, Sartre, and Badiou, then through Meister Eckhart’s four definitions of ’niht,’ and finally to the Kyoto School’s concept of śūnyatā, this chapter argues that the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ inevitably produces its own undoing—a philosophy compelled to think ’there is nothing,’ which simultaneously undermines and fulfills the philosophical project.

• The fundamental Western metaphysical question—‘why is there something rather than nothing?’—contains within it the possibility of the answer ’there is nothing,’ which would render philosophy both futile and absurd, revealing a horror at the heart of ontology.
  • Aristotle analyzes the ‘void’ and finds that every attempt to render nothing as something ends in the void slipping away from thought—both ‘is’ and ‘is not’—concluding that asserting a void produces ‘a result which is the very opposite of the reason for which those who believe in a void set it up.’
  • The pre-Socratic philosophers—Thales (water), Anaximenes (air), Heraclitus (fire), Democritus (atoms), Parmenides (unity)—all commit to the presupposition that there is something, and that the philosopher’s task is to determine what the ‘is’ is.
• Heidegger’s ’the nothing’ is commensurate with Being itself (not its negation), disclosed in anxiety before mortality; Sartre’s ’nothingness’ is a present absence generated by beings and prior being; Badiou’s ‘void’ as empty set formally captures both the somethingness and nothingness of nothing.
  • Heidegger: ‘The nothing does not remain the indeterminate opposite of beings but reveals itself as belonging to the Being of beings’—Angst before death momentarily discloses this ’nothing’ as the Being of beings held out into nothingness.
  • Sartre’s café example: waiting for Prema who isn’t there, the human being ’nihilates’ the background to make room for an expected foreground—nothingness is a flickering of absence, and ‘being is prior to nothingness and establishes the ground for it.’
  • Badiou uses the empty set (Ø) from mathematical set theory to designate a void that has both somethingness as a set and nothingness as a set with no elements, enabling a philosophy grounded on the void rather than presence.
• Meister Eckhart’s Sermon 19 derives four distinct meanings of ’nothing’ (niht) from Acts 9:8—Paul’s seeing ’nothing’—moving from the nothing of finite creatures, to the nothing of creaturely being, the nothing of God, and finally the nullifying nothing of the Godhead.
  • Eckhart’s four senses: ‘God is a nothing and God is a something. What is something is also nothing’—a non-philosophical notion of divine nothing that has nothing to do with ontological categories of being and non-being.
  • The nothing of creatures is privative (they are temporal and finite); the nothing of creaturely being is subtractive (they rest on primordial non-being); the nothing of God is superlative (God is not a being among beings); the nothing of the Godhead is nullifying (encompassing all, including the dichotomy of something/nothing).
  • “Bernard McGinn summarizes: ‘Poised between two forms of nothingness, the nihil by way of eminence that is God, and the nihil that marks the defect of creatures, Eckhart’s mystical way will be an invitation to the soul to give up the nothingness of its created self in order to become the divine Nothing that is also all things.’” —Bernard McGinn
• The distinction between metaphysical correlation (thought hunting its object within a single real) and mystical correlation (thought oriented toward an excess of thought across two orders of the real) reframes mysticism as a paradoxical mediation that can only succeed by failing.
  • In metaphysical correlation, thought is a hunt—always after a response it has already posited before the thinking begins, a self-fulfilling prophecy. In mystical correlation, thought is a sacrifice—always oriented toward that which is simply without-thought, and can only affirm through negation.
  • Mystical correlation is a loop that never closes: the unhuman real can only be verified ‘from this side,’ and what is confirmed is only the blank, impersonal opacity of the ‘divine nothing’—the wayless abyss.
• The Kyoto School thinkers Nishida, Tanabe, and Nishitani develop the Buddhist concept of śūnyatā (emptiness) in dialogue with German Idealism and Nietzsche, arriving at an ‘absolute nothingness’ that neither opposes nor is contained by being—a negative ontology foreign to Western metaphysics.
  • Nishida’s ‘absolute nothingness’ replaces ‘pure experience’ as the continuum underlying all divisions of subject/object and being/non-being, drawing on Zen practice where nothingness pervades all things including the self, rather than being looked at as an object.
  • Nishitani identifies ’nihility’ as the Japanese crisis: not Nietzsche’s European nihilism from religion’s collapse, but a spiritual core that simply wasted away without announcement, leaving emptiness that has not been ’lived through’ or won through struggle.
  • Nishitani on śūnyatā: ‘Emptiness in the sense of śūnyatā is emptiness only when it empties itself even of the standpoint that represents it as some “thing” that is emptiness’—a double negation that is neither nihility nor a return to being, but their indistinction.

Prayers for Negation

Moving from the biological paradox of extremophiles (life that should not be alive) through Schopenhauer’s ‘Will-to-Life’ as a negative ontology of life, this chapter argues that the concept of life is constitutively haunted by negation, and that Schopenhauer’s ‘cosmic pessimism’—an impersonal, unhuman indifference beyond moral or metaphysical pessimism—is the most rigorous philosophical response to an ontology that cannot ground itself in sufficient reason.

• Extremophiles—microbes that thrive in conditions antagonistic to life, like bacteria feeding off radioactive rocks with no sunlight or oxygen—are living contradictions that transgress Aristotle’s Law of Non-Contradiction and Law of the Excluded Middle, revealing negation as constitutive of life rather than its exception.
  • The bacterium Desulfotomaculum, which thrives in radioactive rocks without light or oxygen, is both alive and not alive according to the same scientific criteria, making the relation between logic and life itself the philosophical problem.
  • Benjamin Noys identifies ‘affirmationist’ thinking in contemporary theory as the systematic subsumption of negation within affirmation—treating negation as a failed or reactive affirmation—which the example of extremophiles challenges at the level of biology itself.
• Post-Kantian German Idealism responds to Kant’s phenomena/noumena split with an ‘ontology of generosity’—Absolute Life as overpresent, self-generating, and immanently flowing—but this ascensionist thinking is compromised by the Kantian framework it claims to overcome, producing an ouroboros of self-caused source and self-fulfilling end.
  • Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling externalize thought as ontologically prior to the human subject, raising life to a metaphysical continuum (Absolute Life) that bridges phenomena and noumena—but must still posit a source, an end, and a causal distinction between them.
  • Two modes of ascensionism: ’the world is alive’ (scaling concrete life up to the planetary) and ’life is the world’ (raising life as the privileged manifestation of a metaphysical principle like becoming or process). Both forms imply each other and are present in Hegel and Schelling.
  • Life-as-genesis flows into vitalist ontologies (Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze); life-as-givenness flows into phenomenological approaches (Husserl, Marion, Michel Henry)—these are the contemporary avatars of Idealist ascensionism.
• Schopenhauer’s Will-to-Life—his recast of Kantian noumena as the body’s anonymous, blind striving—constitutes a negative ontology of life in which life is not overpresent but ‘underpresent,’ driven by an inner antagonism of ’life negating life’ that is radically indifferent to the human.
  • “The will, considered purely in itself, is devoid of knowledge, and is only a blind, irresistible urge… the will-to-live generally feasts on itself, and is in different forms its own nourishment, until finally the human race, because it subdues all the others, regards nature as manufactured for its own use.” —Arthur Schopenhauer
  • Schopenhauer’s compendium of examples from natural science—insects that lay eggs in hosts for whom birth is death, the ant whose head and tail fight if bisected, the cosmic negation of black holes—illustrates a Will that asserts itself through contradictions and self-negations.
  • The Will-to-Life points to a principle of insufficient reason at its core: it has no sufficient reason because it lies outside the phenomenal domain, and any anthropocentric conceit—that life exists ‘for us’—is refused.
• This very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is – nothing.
• Schopenhauer’s Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics develops an ‘unhuman ethics’ by externalizing the human will as an anonymous, indifferent Will, replacing Kantian categorical imperatives with compassion (Mitleid) and loving-kindness—but this ethics ‘fails’ in the way cosmic pessimism must fail.
  • Schopenhauer critiques Kant’s categorical imperative as a church masquerading as a court of law: conceiving ethics in imperative form as doctrine of duty stems solely from theological morals and the Decalogue, not from any philosophical ground.
  • The Royal Danish Society refused to award Schopenhauer a prize for his ethics essay—the only submission—because it referenced ‘distinguished philosophers such as Hegel,’ provoking some of Schopenhauer’s most vitriolic footnotes.
  • Schopenhauer’s compassion is not limited to human-for-human feeling but opens toward strange, unhuman compassions with animals, plants, rocks, oceans—‘suffering-with’ ranging from dread and horror to affinity and loss of self.
• Cosmic pessimism—distinct from moral pessimism (worst attitude) and metaphysical pessimism (worst world)—questions the self-world dichotomy that enables pessimism itself, moving toward an impersonal indifference of the world toward the self that renders even misanthropy consolatory.
  • Moral pessimism expresses a subjective attitude; metaphysical pessimism makes objective claims about the world’s structure. Both implicitly rely on anthropocentrism—either a bad attitude or a bad world, with the human at the center of both.
  • Cosmic pessimism’s logical endpoint is to question even the misanthropy of moral and metaphysical pessimism, for even that leaves a residual consolation: at least the world cares enough to be ‘against’ us. The Will-to-Life is simply indifferent.
  • Pessimist logic oscillates between oppositional negation (something has negative value) and nullifying negation (something has no value at all); the latter devours itself in paradox and contradiction, which is why pessimism must always ‘fail.’
• Contemporary speculative philosophy polarizes between panpsychism (everything-already-everywhere) and eliminativism (nothing-ultimately-nowhere), but a ‘dark eliminativism’ that eliminates even matter itself approaches the Schopenhauerian Will-to-nothing or Willlessness.
  • “Steven Shaviro describes thinkers like Negarestani, Woodard, and Thacker as occupying an alternative that abrogates both poles: ’they have a very negative view of the efficacy of thought, and in that sense they’re eliminativists. And yet they couldn’t find the universe as horrible as they find it, in this Lovecraftian way, without being kinds of inverted panpsychists.’” —Steven Shaviro
  • Traditional eliminative materialism (Churchland, Dennett) stops at the biological or neurological baseline—a dark eliminativism would not stop there but continue to eliminate that basis as well, approaching a paradoxical plenum of nothing.

Last Words, Lost Words

This final chapter surveys the three pillars of Western philosophical realism (Plato, Descartes, Kant) as ruins that philosophy itself demolishes, argues for a ‘depressive realism’ that connects pessimism’s anti-anthropocentrism with philosophical realism’s claims, and culminates in Ray Brassier’s thesis that extinction—the scientific certainty of the death of all thought—is not philosophy’s defeat but its most honest starting point.

• Western philosophy rests on three shaky pillars—Plato’s two-world intuition (’there’s got to be more’), Descartes’ cogito as the vehicle between worlds, and Kant’s critical delimitation of philosophy’s jurisdiction—each of which collapses into its own contradiction, with Nietzsche as a possible fourth pillar asserting ’this is it.’
  • Plato’s two-world view: the world here-and-now is insufficient; abstract forms of chairness, bookness, and jellyfish-ness populate an inaccessible beyond—an intuition recycled through every subsequent philosophy under names like the One, God, noumena, the Absolute, Will-to-Power, Being, difference.
  • Descartes’ Meditations is a performative text showing how to travel from the world here-and-now to the world beyond, but its secret is that once the path of skepticism begins, there is no good reason to stop—God as deus ex machina saves the day, but ‘we don’t really buy it.’
  • Kant gave philosophy a job description—it says what philosophy is not and cannot do—yet even this conciliatory gesture ends happily: we can know how we know, and perhaps minimally infer ‘something more’ making an impression on us.
• ‘Depressive realism’—the psychological proposition that pessimists have a healthier and more realistic grasp of their lives—points at a broader, species-level anti-anthropocentrism: the pessimist holds no illusions not just about their individual superiority but about the relevance of all human beings, of Being itself.
  • Depressive realism frees the pessimist from the ’locus of control’ fallacy and the ‘optimism bias’; extended to philosophy, this becomes a species-wide depression in which the pessimist holds no illusions about the superiority or relevance of all beings.
  • Pessimism and realism are distinguished in everyday use—realism as neutral necessity, pessimism as luxurious complaint—but their connection lies in the shared refusal of value-laden fantasies about ’the way things are.’
• Pascal’s abyss—discovered by simply shifting scale above and below the human—reveals a thought of total uncertainty that philosophy repeatedly covers over with theological or mathematical rescue, while modern cosmology confirms that the universe’s eventual obliteration of all matter renders even the thought of extinction a limit for thought.
  • Pascal: ‘Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere’—the macrocosm and microcosm each open onto an abyss that human imagination cannot traverse, leading Pascal to reach for God just as philosophy reaches for the Absolute.
  • Ray Brassier summarizes scientific cosmology: roughly one trillion, trillion, trillion years from now, every star will have burnt out, all matter will have decayed, stellar corpses will evaporate into elementary particles, and ‘only the implacable gravitational expansion will continue… pushing the extinguished universe deeper and deeper into an eternal and unfathomable blackness.’
• Ray Brassier’s ’negative Enlightenment’ argues that human extinction—the scientific certainty that all thought will end—forces thought to be externalized as a ‘perishable thing in the world like any other,’ making extinction the starting point rather than the defeat of philosophy.
  • “How does thought think a world without thought? Or more urgently: How does thought think the death of thinking?” —Ray Brassier
  • Enlightenment is Janus-faced: it decenters the earth to recenter human scientific reason, but followed to its conclusion produces a negative Enlightenment of disenchantment in which the sciences reduce human self-valorization to an act of self-nullification.
  • “Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living; indeed, they can have been pitted against the latter—contra Descartes, not ‘I think’ but ‘I am thought.’” —Ray Brassier
• Philosophy ends not in conquest of its object but in an itinerary of futility: pessimism must fail because its negations always presuppose the living, existing, human subject they negate, but this failure is philosophy’s most honest acknowledgment of its own constitutive limits.
  • Pessimism is always half-hearted, ready to give up at the slightest inclination; as a philosophy it is dismissed for mistaking the subjective for the objective, but this error is already embedded within pessimism—it knows it must fail.
  • The antiphilosophers—skeptics, cynics, nihilists, pessimists—refuse to live within the ruins or leave the site: Pascal’s self-doubt, Schopenhauer’s funereal spite, Cioran’s stark transmissions are not methods but missives against the philosophical enterprise from within it.
  • The human being discovers at last that its existence has always been subtended by its non-existence, that it dies the moment it lives—perhaps we do nothing but carry around a corpse that itself carries around the sullen grey matter that occasionally wonders if the same stars at every scale also occupy this starry speculative corpse.