Invisible Man

The first chapter of Invisible Man

A beautiful piece that evoked a lot of emotions in me! I think it was beautifully written highlighting human tendencies. I was particularly fascinated by what the grandfather said on his death bed. The narrator doesn’t talk any further about his grandfather and his life but I think what the grandfather meant by this was when your oppressor is very powerful, then it’s wise to go along with him and win his confidence, get into their good books and do your job of educating the masses clandestinely and no one would ever doubt you for that. He was a spy but no one noticed that as he seemed to be so meek. Resisting violently or openly against people who have much more power is not always a wise decision. This reminds me of the presentation that I attended yesterday on Israeli-Palestinian issue. The speaker said one thing that probably I’ll never forget. She said that for the common Palestinians living in the occupied land, “Existence is Resistance.” When you are living under powerful people, who consider you to be an unwanted element, then asserting your right to exist by doing nothing but continuing staying there is a powerful way to resist their oppression.
This piece filled me with disgust. I am not sure against whom- The white southerners who treated African Americans as animals or the black narrator who went through this entire thing still feeling like a winner. This entire “battle royal” thing did not change his attitude towards the “white southerners”, well not in the first chapter at least, I don’t know about the rest of the book. This was why I was literally filled with anger against him and though he was so badly hurt, he gathered no sympathy from me. As I think further, I realize that people who have been oppressed all through their lives develop immunity to oppression and they stop reacting to it altogether. The narrator is a part of the society that has been historically oppressed in this country. Therefore he accepted that what we in today’s world cannot accept. This is the extent to which I am ready to understand things from his perspective. How can he not have any resentment against people who treated him so badly? He was so openly humiliated and what was the reward? A scholarship in an all black college! I don’t know if this is a real story. I hope it is not. Because I would have a hard time accepting the fact that people of his kind exist in the world. People might not openly go against people who humiliate them and treat them like animals, but they would surely develop strong resentment against them. The complete lack of any such feelings just made me hate his character. In fact the narrator was grateful to those guys for giving him the scholarship!
I couldn’t help but be reminded of the movie “Crash” that had a strong effect on my mind ever since I watched it and changed my thinking quite a bit. I was of course not ready to believe what was said in the movie. It was a movie after all but after talking to a lot of people about it I discovered that it was in fact true. I knew that racism exists but did not realize that things were that bad. But I fail to realize what would make people to react that way. What about the color or race of the person would make them hate him so much. It’s something that I have been trying to understand but have never been able to do so. I wonder what goes on inside their minds. Why would they hate someone who hasn’t done anything bad to them? I can understand why would Kurds hate the Sunnis in Iraq but the hatred we are talking about here is nothing of that sort. I wish I were able to solve this puzzle.
The narrator definitely had no dignity. I hated him more when he thought himself to be superior to people against whom he fought in the ring and why did he think so? Because he got a pat on the back by his oppressors? Because he got a scholarship to go to an all black college? The people who fought in the ring did that to get money. They did that out of necessity and though it’s not mentioned in the piece, I m pretty much sure they had their grudges against those people. But the narrator had no feelings of this sort whatsoever! I would say he was way inferior to those people. He had no self-respect and no respect and no thinking ability.

I think the piece succeeded in doing what in aimed at doing i.e., evoking strong emotions in the readers and forcing them to think.

Existential angst

Going round and round, round and round, round and round. Gosh! I already feel dizzy! I don't want to but I already feel nauseated. If things remain this way, I wonder how am I gonna live the rest of my days.

The first time I experienced this kind of nausea was couple of years back. Since then it has become a part of my life, though totally unwanted. Strange feelings and emotions accompany it. Sometimes everything around me seems to be spinning faster than ever, so much so that it all becomes one and I am unable to distinguish one from another. At other times things seem to acquire a pulsating rhythm - coming close to me and then retreating away as soon as I try to reach out to them creating so much confusion that I am unable to move forward or backward and fall flat on the ground lying there motionless for days and months together.

This nausea has posed an existential threat to me. It's an endless spiral in which I am trapped. I want to come out of it but am terribly lost. The vertigo makes me disoriented. I do what I don't want to, I say what I mustn't, I think the unthinkable.

The whirling sensation makes me wanna throw up. But I cannot do so. My mouth is duct-taped. So I'll have to swallow it all in. I want to purge myself of of all the undesirable elements inside me but the duct-tape doesn't let me do that. I feel incapacitated. I fear to remove the duct-tape as I do not know if I would be able to confront all the undesirable elements once they are out in the open staring at me.

The agony is unbearable. The nausea is getting worse. I will have to deal with it on my own, either get rid of it or learn to live with it. The latter seems a more real option, the former is only an idea. Once discovered there is no escape from this nausea. It then becomes your companion for life. Nausea, in one of its several different forms, will remain with me till death do us part. This conjugal relationship is one of its kind where one is feeding on the other like a parasite. This forces the other to become stronger so that the predation continues for a little longer. I am therefore getting stronger by the day to outsmart my predator until one day it overcomes me and that day when it wins over me, it would see its last day. And so would I!

Mahamrityunjay jaap

The Maha Mrityunjay is a mantra that is said to rejuvenate, bestow health, wealth, a long life, peace, prospperity and contentment. The prayer is addressed to LORD SHIVA. By chanting this Mantra, Divine vibrations are generated which ward off all the negative and evil forces and create a powerful protective shield. And it is said to protect the one who chants against accidents and misfortunes of every kind.
"Om hom jhum swah,
Om Trayambakam yajamahe, sugandhim pushtivardhnam,
Urvarukmiv vandanaat, mrityormukshi yamammritam,
Om swah jhum hom."
The spiritual side of me is active today. This is not a common occurence, which is quite unfortunate. I wish I were able to maintain the same spiritual energy in me all the time. My soul has been kept away from its food for quite some time now. It needs to be fed more often before it dies of starvation.

Nitezsche: Man or Super-man

Nietzsche, the one who proclaimed the death of God is himself portrayed as a super-human, or in his own words as "super-man". Man's search for God continues....

Nietzsche :
Eternal recurrence and death of God

The death of God as proclaimed by Nietzsche was undoubtedly one of the most outrageous of all the ideas put forward in the twentieth century. It has been subjected to various interpretations which also makes it one of the most misapprehended concepts. The other doctrine of Nietzsche which got considerable attention was the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence. Eternal Recurrence, if not as horrifying as the death of God, was something that terrified people of his times
‘God is dead’ is perhaps the most famous and the most misunderstood of all the statements of Nietzsche. This statement seems to be so frightening to us that we automatically want to deny it without even understanding what it actually means because our entire socio-cultural structure is based around the existence of God. But when Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, he did not mean physical death of God as that would not make any sense. If God is dead, then he must have been alive at some point- but if Christian God were ever alive, it would be eternal and could never die. So apparently the madman in Aphorism 125 of The Gay Science cannot be talking about the literal death of God. By the death of God he means the loss of faith and belief in God. This is evident when he say in aphorism 343, “..the belief in Christian God has become unbelievable.”
What I understand is that Nietzsche was not against the concept of God but just against the way Christianity talks of God. He is against institutionalizing the concept of God because this would lead to the destruction of endless possibilities of humans. He is against a system that would stifle human growth and creativity and also his freedom. Therefore he seems to favor the polytheistic notion of God over monotheistic one as is evident in aphorism 143, “It was here (polytheism) that the luxury of individuals was first permitted; it was here that one first honored the right of individuals.” He said that polytheism placed the sovereignty of individuals over everything else as it allowed them the freedom of the “invention of gods”, whereas, monotheism “threatened us with the premature stagnation”. The liberty of individuals to create their own gods also results in greater faith in them as it is something the individual can relate to; more than an institutionalized, impersonalized God.
Going along with this line of thought, something that really struck me in aphorism 125 was when the madman says, “…Don’t we smell the Divine rot?-for gods rot too!” This statement made me think really hard. I felt that by this statement Nietzsche somehow wanted to talk about the unchanging and inflexible nature of the religious values which has made them irrelevant. The world is a dynamic and ever changing place. For such a world we need values that are dynamic too. We have now reached a stage from where we cannot go back since something that has rotted cannot be made fresh again. It is thus a time for making new beginnings. Here is when he talks of the formation of a new cultural order that wouldn’t be contingent on God’s existence. He believes that we need to build a social system that would suit our needs and times. Our values should be based not on some supernatural entity but something more worldly.
Nietzsche says that the death of God would lead to anarchy when he says, “…Aren’t we falling constantly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in every direction?” But again, this is not enough to prove that he believes God to be the creator and the care-taker of the world. He believes that all the morals and values are dependent on the notion of existence of God. They are made by society but in order to compel people follow to them, they were said to have the seal and sanction of God. Now if this all powerful entity dies, people would no longer be afraid of any punishments and the world would be chaotic. Also the entire social system would collapse since it is based on the existence of an Omni-potent and Omni-benevolent God.
As a solution to this problem he gives the concept of superman. “God hath died: now do WE desire -the Superman to live.”(Thus Spoke Zarathustra, LXXIII -2). He is a human being who steer his life on his own without any external support. He is someone who keeps reinventing himself as per the changing times. He is the epitome of individual will and liberty. He is someone who would base his morals on the realities of life and would keep upgrading them with changing times. This would definitely guide others in their endeavor for formulating their personal value system. Though Nietzsche might be skeptical to the entire idea of progress I think it is only by following his example can we hope to improve ourselves and our society as it would give a taste of reality to our entire belief system. Superman would thus get rid of the rigid moral structure that we are presently tied to which was also one of the reasons of the decline in faith because humans are rational animals at the end. Faith can lead to a certain point but this also has to have some rationale behind it. If the laws are all based on faith then it would be hard to make everyone follow them. The rigidity and the inability of these laws to adapt with the changing times cause the more rational men to denounce them.
The death of God is in fact taken positively by the more rational men. Nietzsche says, “In fact, when we hear the news that the “old God is dead”, we philosophers and “free spirits” feel as if we were struck by the rays of a new dawn; at this news, our heart overflows with thankfulness, wonder, presentiment, expectation.” This shows that Nietzsche himself was expecting something good to result from the death of God. He believed that this would free us of all the restrictions placed on us in the name of God. We can now tread on paths that were earlier prohibited in the name of God. We can discover what is best for ourselves on our own. It also seems to me that he might be indicating about the creation of “new god”. This god would not have some out of the world existence, but would be worldlier. This might be his superman.
Nietzsche, thus, doesn’t leave us alone and helpless after the death of God as he knows that we humans are too much dependent on Him to carry our lives further without His existence. He leaves us with a superman who would be our guide in the trying and difficult situations following God’s death. But what conditions would stimulate the creation of the superman? One of them is the death of God. But another important thing is the doctrine of eternal recurrence. It is based on Nietzsche’s concept of time and space (Morgan, 287). He believes that time is infinite whereas space and events are limited. So events have to be repeated over and over again in the same space through eternity. In other words, humans will have to live the same life over and over again eternally. This realization is a great disturbing factor for humans as this would strip us off all the meaning and purpose in life (Guignon and Pereboom, 105). This would be a hard fact for us to take in. A person who succeeds to accept this reality willingly and get over his initial horror and one who realizes that he has to take thoughtful decisions in order to have a good life in all the future births would first show the traits of the superman.
Nietzsche was himself horrified by the whole idea of eternal recurrence as is evident when he says in aphorism 341, “What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you ….” The fact that he calls that person a demon that chose to come to you in your utter loneliness to break the news of your eternal recurrence, shows that Nietzsche was somewhat terrified of this idea (Kauffmann, 17). But he put it forward with some specific purpose in mind. He talks about it in aphorism 341 “The heaviest burden”, of the Gay Science. So it might be thought of as an attempt to provide a solution to the sense of “weightlessness” that would follow God’s death. (Guignon and Perebroom, 104). It seems that he calls it a burden because with it comes the question as to in what way do we want to live our life so that we can live it not just once but countless times again. This is a difficult choice to make and thus a great burden. Each and every decision and choice that we make in our lives would be influenced by the fact that we would have to go through the same thing through eternity. This obviously makes our lives burdensome and very difficult. But Nietzsche chose to view this in positive context. He believes that this would help us get rid of most of our impulsive and unthoughtful actions which usually make us commit errors. The moral vacuum created by the death of God would be filled up by this as every person would invent a moral code for himself. He would be more inclined to follow it as it comes from within and is not externally imposed.
Nietzsche believes in the individuality and sovereignty of a person. Every person has the right to live according to his belief system. Ordinarily, this individualistic belief system faces opposition from all over but the doctrine of eternal recurrence places a check on this.
The idea of God’s death also throws light on the existential side of Nietzsche’s philosophy. He gives great importance to humans and their ability to construct a whole new socio-cultural system which would not dependent on any higher order but would be of this world. This also shows his belief that humans can function without using the crutches named God. We have depended on Him for a long time and now it’s time that we start functioning on our own. He is a great believer of human freedom and wants them to have total control over their lives. He believes that we ought to construct our own values and morals. He asks us to question authority and not to take everything as it is given to us. Further, he says that the death of God would lead to a sense of “weightlessness” of all things. This can be compared to “homelessness” of existential philosophy. Our lives seem to have no meaning after God’s death because He is the center of our existence in the present day society. We would not have anything to hold on, no all powerful Father to take care of us. We would be alone and would have to carve our own paths. These things go to make Nietzsche an existential philosopher.
Nietzsche, an atheist, after proclaiming the death of God does not leave humans stranded but gives meaning to their existence by creating a superman. The superman would be a guide for others and thus would be a sort of replacement for God. He also gives weight to the “weightlessness” created by the death of God by talking of eternal recurrence which he calls the heaviest burden. To accept this would require great love for fate and life. Acceptance of life as it is would liberate humans of all sorts of cravings and desires. This would definitely have a positive effect on the society as most of the crimes originate out of desire for something. He thus gives a new look to morality. He, though unintentionally, also gives a whole new world for humans to build a more worldly and progressive socio-cultural system.