THE EVOLUTION OF MAN VIA NIETZSCHE, RAY, MAKARAND DESHPANDE, AND TALEB
BY PUSHKAR SANYAL
There is an acknowledgment now that as a society we face a much different set of problems than before. Why not postulate if the individual too has evolved from this lens?
Starting with Nietzsche, a colossal but exhausting figure. Widely accepted as an original thinker, one of his seminal works provides some clues –
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Old and New Laws – Tables, No.5:
“He who is of the mob wants to live gratis; we others, however, to whom life has given itself – we are always considering what we can best give in return!
And truly, it is a noble speech that says: ‘What life has promised us, we shall keep that promise – to life!’
One should not wish to enjoy where one has not given enjoyment. And – one should not wish to enjoy!”
This has lived and breathed among men for centuries, but Nietzsche here reframes it. There is no onus on you – but merely an opportunity to give back to life what it has given you, that is itself. Life is a living breathing sacrificial lamb; and Nietzsche affirms us to give something back, not devour life for free. Yet even amidst this inspiration, Nietzsche adds –
“For enjoyment and innocence are the most modest things: neither want to be looked for. One should have them – but one should look rather for guilt or pain!”
Why guilt or pain? Because these are qualities that elevate us. Guilt or pain is a consequence of longing, desire, becoming, possessing – qualities that Nietzsche admires, and key attributes that encapsulate his most well-known idea of the rapturous man or Superman. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, written in the 19th century posits a reframing of the human condition. But Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘Superman’ was a call for man to rise above the masses.
Now, the masses have since undergone much socio-political revolution throughout the 20th century. Here we move to auteur extraordinaire Satyajit Ray and his ideas on universal humanity as picturized in his films set in post-independence Bengal.
A set of his films, called later the Calcutta trilogy is a commentary on the condition of the Bengali youth in 70’s Calcutta, a period when the spirit of new India grappled to find meaning under a newly elected Leftist regime. Indoctrinated in the ideas of revolution, the youth were promised stable futures, at a time when the structures of commerce and capitalism were taking shape.
In the first of these films, Pratidwandi, Ray introduces the aspiration of capitalist stability via an idealistic and existential protagonist. An intellectual, he is forced to drop out of medical school due to his father’s death. His lack of agency in earning a living wage is juxtaposed against the searing anguish of the times. His intellect equips him to see the oppression around him, yet he remains in the process of seeing, and consequently acting out of it.
In Seemabaddha, the second film in the trilogy, Ray reflects on a different kind of protagonist. It is the story of a mature, successful man who is driven by ambition and wealth, yet whose ethics are questioned by his sister-in-law, a person he has grown to admire. This lack of validation from one of the few people he innately respects leads him to lament his choice to transcend the traditional Bhadralok ideas of virtue and modesty. How could he ever have imagined that his actualization lay in a life of status and monetary success?
In the final film, Jana Aranya, Ray creates a malleable protagonist. He has no job or woman, and after bustling about trying to find a job, he is by chance led into a life as a small-time businessman selling office supplies. He is in the jungle (Aranya means jungle in Bengali). Feet on the ground, working with numbers, and commissions, all proceed as planned until one day he is required to bend his personal book of morals. The film ends on a piercing note, the moral boundaries of a seedy businessman’s life confronting the virtuous tradition that enabled his upbringing. This man sees but is also seen, and via the gullible eyes of the deceived father, his shame is our shame.
This trilogy shot over a decade is symbolic of a psychological evolution. From seeing injustice and oppression to transcending first-order thoughts to arriving as a man of action in the capitalist jungle, to eventually being able to perceive oneself, as seen in Jana Aranya, Ray arrives at an epistemological conclusion.
This final phase of grasping himself as an object to be seen is captured in a recent play by theatre legend Makarand Deshpande. Titled Manushya, this post-modern play tells the tale of a man who in his penultimate quarter of life decides to now be seen as an object of enjoyment. He becomes a clown, an act to be enjoyed by others. Breaking the Fourth Wall at will, this is an experimental piece symbolic of what Nietzsche had principled – to arrive finally as the ultimate object of enjoyment. Deshpande in an eccentric performance roars and postulates, informing the audience to make the movement from Drishti (seeing) to Drishta (perceiving), deploying the clown act as the ultimate analogy to how he wants the world (or at least his loved ones) to perceive deeply.
Nietzsche had speculated the arrival of his man, a man who could give enjoyment and not just wish to enjoy. Deshpande in Manushya operates from a similar vantage while introducing Drishta and thus becomes the ultimate man who provides ‘enjoyment’ to all.
Advancing further, there is a need to demonstrate the man of our age, someone who has arrived as sneakily as the advanced capitalist era that we inhabit.
Within the context of collective systems and technologies that function systematically, the onus is on YOU to thrive. And while the collective mass, an essential majority stake in the societal machinery is busy seeing, the only way to thrive as the ultimate man is what Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes is to have Skin in the Game.
Taleb talks about men who encounter risk, who enjoy risk, who enjoy uncertainty, who can accurately perceive systems designed to exploit, and thus are not rent seekers or slaves, but are people who talk and do. He talks of a society designed for effect, where political hoo-ha and privilege afford status, where half-baked intellectuals use language to wrangle themselves out of positions, where incentives are misplaced, and where legal systems are not necessarily ethical.
All of this requires a new age Drishta, a new outlook to thrive and overcome the masses. He calls on the need for less abstraction, more courage, the ability to identify asymmetries and inequalities, and above all the need to develop the sense of a collective good. And that collective good is how we see through the systems that engulf us.
The linear and transcendental understanding of Ray,
The Superman – or how to overcome Man by helping them perceive and enjoy, as championed by Nietzsche,
The ability to be seen as an object of excitement and enjoyment, as a work of Art, as imagined by Deshpande,
The capacity to distinguish and discern amidst complex modern systems by Taleb,
All constitute the all-new courageous man.
As Nietzsche writes – “He who sees the abyss, but with an eagle’s eyes – he who grasps the abyss with an eagle’s claws: he possesses courage.”
Bibliography
1. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra A Book for Everyone and No One (1883-1884)
2. Satyajit Ray, Director, Pratidwandi (The Adversary) (1970); Seemabaddha (Company Limited) (1971); Jana Aranya (The Middleman) (1976)
3. Ansh Theatre, Makarand Deshpande, Manushya (2023)
4. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game – Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (2018)
KIERKEGAARD'S STAGES OF DESIRE AND ITS RELEVANCE TO MODERN LIVING
BY PUSHKAR SANYAL
Writing an aesthetics essay is not for the faint of heart. Among rigor and character, stands a madness borne out of excessive self-reflection, a madness in which the philosopher finds an ounce of sanity in the world. Through his essays, Soren Kierkegaard came to be known as the father of modern existentialism, his writing style reminiscent of the variant of existentialism that arose in the mid-20th century.
Kierkegaard’s Either/Or is a series of essays that provokes the contradiction between a life of sensual pleasure and a life of upstanding virtue through God and morality. He states that every man encounters this predicament and that eventually if one were to truly live, it would involve choosing between these two paths.
Addressing the above, however, is beyond the scope of this piece; our focus instead is on a brief 70-pager section titled The Immediate Erotic stages or The Musical Erotic. While the essay broadly is an ode to Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and how consuming and understanding the opera was one of the glorious joys of Kierkegaard’s life, it is the ‘three stages of desire’, that is of utmost interest, a remarkable conceptual tenet that Kierkegaard used to conclude the seduction of Don Giovanni as desire and sensuality in its truest form.
Why pick up this obscure aesthetic inquiry? …because our existence rests in the currents of achievement and success, both central constructs of living. Modernity thus indirectly hints at desire fulfilment and an invalidation of the virtues of religion, dogmatic or not. You should want it and you should get it.
The art of desiring and examining one’s own requires a skill of reflection with the description of the stages intended to help build that.
Stage 1: Dreaming
“Desire possesses what will become its object but does so without having desired it and in that way does not possess it”
In the beginning, there is a longing, a ‘desire’ without anything in particular. Desire requires an object and here there is no separate object; the separateness is typically encouraged by a more significant inner movement. At this stage, there is only a dormant longing.
“If one paints the ceiling of a room so that it is entirely covered with figures, such a ceiling presses down on us, the painter says. If lightly and quickly, one puts just a figure on it, this ceiling seems higher. Such is the relation between desire and the desired.”
A beautiful metaphor that describes the relationship between distance and absoluteness
There is no object here, only infinitude and, thus a sigh – a classic case of the old melancholia borne out of the contradiction between the sweetness of melancholy and the despair of grasping at the ungraspable.
Stage 2: Seeking
“Only when the object exists, does the desire exist”
The dreamer awakens and through that inner stirring, a dialectic motion in flow, a separate object comes to the fore. There is no desire for a particular object. At this stage, desire is directed toward objects in general.
“The seeking desire is not yet desiring; what it seeks is only what it can desire but does not desire it”
A seeker is born and it can only desire what it is seeking. Kierkegaard does not consider this as a true desire, only a discovery. There is also a hint of pleasure, attained from the sweetness one gets before these objects of desire disappear one after another, the multiplicities of the objects of desire arriving like a whirlwind.
Stage 3: Desiring
“The first stage desired the one ideally; the second desired the particular under the category of the multiple; the third stage is the unity of these. In the particular, desire has its absolute object, it desires the particular absolutely”
This is a summation of the previous two stages. Desire expresses now as a principle in itself. Here, Kierkegaard uses ‘Don Giovanni’ and the music of Mozart in it as the expression of desire. It is this opera of Don Giovanni that he calls an idea of the pure spirit of sensuality.
Through an elaborate and languid examination of Don Giovanni, Kierkegaard goes on to describe the inner world of Don Giovanni’s seduction. For context, he places sensuality and the idea of seduction at the heart of the Christian world. The path to renunciation leads to a withdrawal to the higher regions of the mind, or the spirit. But in the immediate aftermath of the movement towards spirit, the pleasure of the senses rises, stronger and with such demonic ferocity that one decides to indulge, actively participating in the sensory pleasures.
The purification by means of renunciation opens the channel where the power of desire flows greater than before. “As the spirit then frees itself from the world, sensuality appears in all its power”
This truth has found weightage across eras. Beautiful World, Where Are You, a contemporary novel by Sally Rooney has one of its protagonists Simon having a similar consequence to adopting Christianity. He struggles to understand his demons and gives in to the sexual frivolities of the time albeit in the image of modern romance thus not tainting the idea of his self with this deviancy. He suffers though because this is not what he was told would happen.
In Don Giovanni, Kierkegaard writes “It is not the realm of sin, for it must be grasped at the moment of aesthetic indifference. Neither is there reflection”
This fascinating idea brings us to desire in its truest sense. All sins and immorality cave into the power of sensuality because the absolute spirit is involved. This is the learning by which Kierkegaard exalts Mozart’s legendary opera.
Applying this learning to the context of our desires, there are critical questions to consider –
Can one renunciate to the absolute without experiencing the stages?
How does one probe deeper into their desires?
Does one achieve success by only operating in the first two stages?
A PATH TO TROD ON
BY PUSHKAR SANYAL
I stand butt naked in front of the mirror. Looking at myself, trying to identify the traces of time, I don’t find who I intend to find. It is a damn indictment of myself since I believed I was onto something, a path I was trodding on.
It should reflect.
In the past, this would have caused a meltdown of gargantuan proportions, but with some newfound understanding, even the panic has been objectified.
The path to God is the final path. There is no denying that. That I have realized. But a path is what is important.
I decide that I am going to soak in the beach just before the sun sets. I holler my instructions to the noblest breed of men who ever lived, the men who in their khaki plunge their chariots in the invisible potholes devouring the angular stream of rain as if sailing amidst a Pacific storm. This minute detail of the rain brings me back from my so-called ascetic contemplation of a path and I drop my plans of the shore to shore up to my balcony.
People need a path to trod on, a timely justification of cause and effect as it appeals to the intellect. It is more than the will to exist. It is a will to thrive, and our minds set about assimilating physical and internal stimuli to create this path. A path to set the individual Self free.
Creation is possible. My fingers tap the keys to write this, I feel heady. I don’t even notice myself breathing.
The breath is a funny one…Buddhist monks, Hindu acharyas in self-inquiry start with the breath as the object of meditation. It slowly subsides into nothingness as the recognition of oneself takes hold. But as the breath returns, so does the reminder of time and our experience of our physical body…. the drizzle of rain, the honking, the change from day to night…. all a reminder of our limited potential.
They say that the truth can set you free. It may or may not, but if it sets you on a path, it’s done its job.
Relationships have to be cultivated. Either you become an expert at reading minds, or you let someone read your mind. Funnily, this is not a choice you have. If you do think it’s a choice, the self-deception has been deemed as your path, which is still err…. a path.
The experiences we have in themselves don’t mean anything. Going by Advaita philosophy, what we experience is Maya, an illusion. The philosophy goes on to outline what is real, and through faith, perseverance, knowledge, and purification can one arrive at that which is real and unchanging. While all this is good, the idea that everyone could follow a path to arrive at reality is batshit crazy in itself. The potential exists, but do people care? I do. People however lean toward the pleasures of relationships, money, art, etc…. which seem worthwhile pursuits to have.
I look at myself as pathless vermin, from one stupor to another, reveling in the stupors, with full knowledge that these stupors are not real. The idea of perfection excites me in the sense that it can excite anybody.
Perfection is God. A blissful, formless state, perfect in the potential to create or be anything. It is this aspiration that is the seed of all our aspirations. The path is this. Eventually, all will fall in line. Today privilege or the environment restricts them, but the ideal will be realized someday.
This is what eastern philosophy refers to as Moksha. And each path to trod on is the path to Moksha in disguise.
The recognition of oneself can be the recognition of emptiness. Without knowing, this is what can transpire.
The more I dig and learn, from one thread to another, until the mind in its disquiet can be forcibly made quiet. There is an understanding, an acceptance.
The path, the road from emptiness leads to silence…this is most amusing. People fill their lives up, but the realization of the Self is bereft of words or thoughts. It is pure awareness at play. Scary or not, it will eventually be the succession plan of your throne.
As I type this, I diagnose myself and predict that time will haunt me as my cunning scheme to enter these silences mean that I have not enveloped a strand of this knowledge. I hope people see through me and forge their own paths.
LIVING IN THE BIG CITY, LIKE SISYPHUS
BY PUSHKAR SANYAL
“…..and as the first birds and the first autos trudge out in the morning, the city seems tired and hungover. The night was too long and the inhabitants didn’t get
enough sleep. I don’t make the same mistake.”
One of my earliest “philosophical” influences Alan Watts used to say – ‘we are not born on earth; we are born out of it. The earth has peopled.’ Almost half a decade after my Watts phase, staying on my own and with people, the city has truly peopled. There is a precise dance which only the city dwellers know. A group of two or four, whether old or new, the acclimatizing period is squeezed. It’s like the raucous pace of the approaching fast train is the symbol to sum up the city. Whether it is the heat, or the limbs, minds and bodies don’t rest because nothing can be achieved in that. I am forthright to admit that I have found myself participating in the same adventure, squeezing the seconds out of a minute, minutes out of an hour and so on. Only recently, in a few escapades, did I rid my mind of things, starting with getting rid of my earbuds to not using my phone. In that deafening silence of my mind, the absorption of the city and its people, did not matter. Like meditation, I had arrived at a place where the guilt of having thoughts ceased to matter. And just like that, the city revealed its absurd truths to me.
The city
does not care if you are excelling or going mad. The city cares if you are
peopling. Getting peopled is not difficult here. Cheerleaders, friends, lovers
and groups abound like no other place. In people’s manic craving or eagerness,
and your conscious judgment of the same, the space for dialogue is sparse, and
even if available, the space is limited. If one is crippled by the banality on
those times, the chance is lost forever. It is thus a cruel jump to meet people
at their own terms. A jump into a bed of water from which both cannot emerge
unscathed. I suppose, life and conversations are a bit like those.
The streets
are honest. They never resemble what they shouldn’t, the corners are ridged in
unique ways, the people walk like only they should. The city does not lie of
its existence. Every new road or structure will soon be weathered down by people
and the weather to soon join the truthful microcosm of this city. Even the people
in guise know it’s a lark – either to ask you for a meal, for some extra on the
meter, for a picture, real estate, cover charges. It’s almost as if at one
point, people confronted themselves, an intervention to sign this agreement of absurd
joy at living ceaselessly. One must imagine Sisyphus happy etc.
To find an
objectively prosperous existence in the city is impossible. The lights will
always be above you. This particular line of examination is romantic to the
city dweller born and brought up here. The contrast to another city makes it evident
that sheer hands and feet have made the towers, the roads, the apartments. It is
humans giving aspirations to other humans. With this simple and perplexing
thought, there is a recognition that there are two broad classes – the aspiring
and the living absurd. Not that the aspiring is not absurd. To the contrary,
they are a living embodiment of Sisyphus trying to roll the boulder to the top.
The top is really high in this city. As long as it exists, among the swirls of
clouds and angels playing harp, the pace will remain.
Which
brings me to the consideration of the city’s inhabitants being unphilosophical
by nature. Seemingly harsh, the fact is that the quality of contemplation
typically brought about by solitude is missing in people’s lives. The center of
visual, design, communication, design, all collaborative and economic activities
thrive here. The art of reaching into your dwellings and picking apart society
and the city at its seams, not so much. The idea then can be to join a program
or a clique, both fair choices yet lacking in the sheer reclusion that is
required to arrive at the right questions. If one were to describe the philosophical
ideology of the city, it’d be in its application to existence, the sensory
pursuit of the city’s landscapes riddled with the ceaseless sounds of its inhabitants
all in a harmonious dance.
…..and as the first birds and the first autos trudge out in the morning, the city seems tired and hungover. The night was too long and the inhabitants didn’t get enough sleep. I don’t make the same mistake.