Life against life: an impossibility?

Self-contradictory types, old and new, biological and cultural

Why does life turn against itself? Why is it that, life, —seemingly just wanting to live, grow, and expand—, comes to live in such a way that is destructive to its own life? This is the question. Whether or not it needs an answer, I do not know. 

The other day I saw a post on social media: “The West has fallen”, this person said, in response to the latest left-gynocratic letting-out. A woman, a white Western woman, replied something in the vein of: “So then it is going according to plan.” Might all be fun and games, I sure laughed, hiding a feeling of disgust. But really, you have to accept that all this decline (or at least the problems) that many describe, it is not just some systemic thing, the result of abstract economic and technological processes. Well, it might be. But besides this, there are people, and they hate themselves and their own culture, that is, their own mode of life. And they take delight in destroying it. In the end, that is all there is to it; people fighting people, and even more cruel, people fighting themselves and their own people. Life turning against life, that is, against itself. All other explanations have to be very careful not to turn into mere cope. 

Freud spoke about ‘death-drives’. Why is it, he asked, that in some cases of psychopathology, the person keeps repeating a certain destructive behaviour for years on end, when this behaviour has no benefit whatsoever in bringing the person to healing. Take someone mourning for a lost family member. At first, and for some time after, the person will be in mourning yes, and this will eat away at him. Yet it has a function; to process the loss. But after a while, there is no point in keeping on mourning, one has to go on with one’s life. Not to forget, but to accept, to process, to “give it a place”, and to move on. There comes a point where it is just pure self-destruction. So why then, do people keep mourning? It is as if they want to feel bad, wanting to self-destruct. Even after years of working through the trauma, becoming conscious of one’s own behaviour and the need to move on, still, the person keeps on mourning. Aren’t we supposed to let go, or at least be able to live with the pain, after the healing is done? But the healing is never done, and the peculiar nature of these cases is in that they make healing an impossibility. They block healing, and in this way, they seem anti-life. Is it not of the nature of life to live on? Stronger, better, more resilient?

And so Freud speculates about the existence of death-drives. He says that maybe, there is not just some will to life as seen in the various drives that lead to life, drives that have as their end the solution and diminishment of stressful states, the overcoming of pain so as to return to pleasure. No, maybe there are also certain drives in us that just want to destroy, to kill, that seek the destruction and stasis of the organism. “Death-drives.” But, Freud thinks, there must be a reason for these death-drives, and so he speculates; maybe these death-drives are ways in which the organism protects itself. This seemingly pointless and endless mourning destructive to the individual, maybe it is there to protect the individual from what would happen if he would stop mourning. Maybe, for this particular organism, the results of healing would be much more destructive than the endless repetition of a certain destructive process. In schizophrenia, take an extreme catatonic case, locked in stasis for days on end. Why is this the case, it is just pure self-destruction, one can’t eat or drink, and brain and body just rot away. But, maybe this catatonic state is there to protect the individual from certain schizophrenic forces and processes that would be too much to bear for the individual. It seems like pure pointless self-destruction, but in fact it is life’s way of protecting itself from those forces in life that are too much for a particular life to bear. The same goes for all the habitual and ritual acts that certain compulsives or autists engage in. Extreme rituals that have to be performed before anything else can be done, making daily life almost impossible. But perhaps this is a wrong way of looking at things, and maybe, it are precisely these habitual and ritual actions that make daily life possible. That is, without them, the individual would be unable to cope with life. 

The analysis is very similar to what Nietzsche says about the ‘ascetic type’; life turns against itself to preserve itself. Nietzsche says: “Life itself must have an interest in preserving such a self-contradicting type.” (Nietzsche, Genealogy, 87.) 

The ascetic type, for Nietzsche, is a self-contradictory type. As a living being it seeks to find a certain death within life. As a living being, it turns against all those vital drives in itself that make life grow and expand. Instead, it renounces life. Not by killing itself of course, but by seeking a sort of death within life. And this death then, this life that is barely living, is called the ‘true Life’. 

“A self-contradiction such as that which seems to occur in the ascetic, ‘life against life’, is — so much is obvious — seen from the physiological, not just the psychological standpoint, simply nonsense. It can only be apparent; it has to be a sort of provisional expression, an explanation, formula, adjustment, a psychological misunderstanding of something, whose real nature was far from being understood, was far from being able to be designated as it is in itself, — a mere word wedged into an old gap in human knowledge. Allow me to present the real state of affairs in contrast to this: the ascetic ideal springs from the protective and healing instincts of a degenerating life, which uses every means to maintain itself and struggles for its existence; it indicates a partial physiological inhibition and exhaustion against which the deepest instincts of life, which have remained intact, continually struggle with new methods and inventions.”

(Nietzsche, Genealogy, 89.) 

The ascetic type seems to be a “life against life”, but in truth, it betrays a deeper will to power.

It might seem as if life is turning against life. But in truth, life can never turn against itself (it can however turn against other lives), and what appears as self-destruction is perhaps only masking a deeper healing. In order to live, life sometimes has to protect itself from itself, and it has to protect itself from healing.

Although not entirely related, there are cases of diseased people who have amassed a lifetime of suppressed feelings and rotten physiological processes, that letting loose a healing process would create such a wave of symptoms that it has the potential of severely harming or even destroying the organism. 

‘Culturally’, you see life turning against itself everywhere you look, but could it be that a deeper process of healing is betrayed? Much like a symptom seems like it is entirely bad, but maybe it is just a way in which the organism is protecting itself from deeper afflictions. Imagine not having the symptom, which serves as a means for getting the disease out of the body. The symptom (what we usually call the disease) is actually the means by which the organism fights against the actual disease which is always hidden out of sight. Imagine not going into catatonia, one’s body being completely crushed by all the various forces of schizophrenia. Obese people, when losing weight after a lifetime of gluttony, often fall ill when all the toxins hidden in their bodies are released from tissue and flood their bodies. 

Now of course, this Western lady wishing death and destruction upon the West, waiting eagerly for the Islamic hordes to cover her and her friends in burqas, what healing could there possibly be in this? 

What is life’s purpose in creating and preserving such a self-contradictory type? 

Is it, as some Ancient men thought, that contrary is known through contrary? Perhaps, but this doesn’t tell us much from a genealogical perspective. How could life come to hate itself, to preserve itself? Is it, to protect from some deeper form of hatred that would crush the organism? What is the real toxin against which these symptoms are offering resistance?

In any case, we see an uncanny type of self-hatred manifesting in the West, perhaps never seen before, and it’s worth wondering what the purpose of it is. Disease leaving the body? An inflammatory response to a great injury? And what are the solutions? Let it rip? But some symptoms are fatal. Which perhaps, is not a bad thing in this case. Maybe it all constitutes the great debris needed to replenish the soil. Most of all, what are the deeper instincts of life from which this ‘life’ is attempting to protect itself? From what is this life fleeing? What are those “deepest instincts of life” with which this ‘life against life’ struggles? What is it, that will soon be let loose upon the world?