The Kinship Between Knowledge And Hopelessness

In The End All Questions About Self Are Religious Questions

Empty Self Continued

"Believe me," said MV, "people self-destruct all the time. Music has
nothing to do with it. Trust me, I know!"

"Probably true," I replied, "and that's why I found Buddhism so
inviting. Screw the self; according to Buddhism, it didn't exist
anyway. It's all about suffering or so said the Buddha. But the
Buddha also said, `it’s all about escape from suffering too. What I
didn't understand, what I still don't understand, though, has to do
with the Buddhist notion of: `In order to get it all, you had to give
it all up,' and further, in order to give it up, you had to know what
to give up and how to do it. All that knowing had value; Buddhism
didn't value the means like it did the ends. Something was missing, so
I went back to the drawing board, so to speak, and there discovered a
different kind of self."

"It's all gibberish if you ask me," responded MV. "You're telling me
that there is a kinship between knowledge and hopelessness. That's a
contradiction isn't it?"

"Not really," I replied, "emptiness jumpstarts the creative energy
that produces usable knowledge. The upside is that knowledge, if it is
not false knowledge, is inclusive, and as such, it keeps hopelessness
and despair at bay. However, when `unknowing consciousness' falls into
emptiness—hopelessness, despair, or even worse is the result. That's
just the way it is. You have to take the good with the bad, and that's
the down side."

"That is if you survive," MV exclaimed.

"True enough," I said. "Hopelessness and despair can kill. Too much of
anything, in fact, is dangerous; and going to the well of
self-knowledge is ripe with risk. That's a hard one to swallow. For
me, reading Nietzsche kept me afloat, at least in the beginning anyway."

"You learned self-knowledge from a demented ego-maniac. Who's lacking
in nuance now!" replied MV.

"Hey, wait a minute, I probably wouldn't even be alive if it wasn't
for Nietzsche," I replied. "He taught me how to feel good about myself
when there wasn't anything to feel good about. Out of the fires of his
own pessimism, he penned his Ubermensch—his superman, and vicariously
lived life through his own creation. He passionately affirmed his
freedom `to be'—his will to power, and to the extent that he
succeeded, he lived life on the edge. The real Ubermensch, however,
could not survive off the page. It was Kierkegaard, not Nietzsche, who
forged out of despair a life that could live off the page.

"Kierkegaard spread hopelessness and despair to the masses?" replied MV.

"The opposite," I said. "Kierkegaard was able to turn hearts and minds
into `true God-believers.'"

"How did he or anybody else for that matter, go from pain and
hopelessness to believing in God?"