Katmandun unet. Kirjoituksia idästä ja lännestä

Tero Tähtinen’s second collection of essays is focused physically in the wilds of a Finnish national park and Nepal – where the author (born 1978), a literary scholar and critic, has frequently travelled – and mentally in the divergences of Western and Eastern thought, which Tähtinen, who is familiar with Zen and Buddhist philosophy, studies, occasionally by means of literary examples. The ‘Socratic ego’ of the Western egocentric, individual ‘I’, which strives in vain to understand the whole of reality by rationalising it, is his favourite bête noire. Tähtinen quickens the pace of his verbal virtuosity as he discusses both dogmatic, materialistic faith in science – as well as some of its representatives – and Christian faith: he considers that both, in their pursuit of an absolute and total explanation, end up in a metaphysical vacuum. Unlike them, Eastern philosophy, in which the individual ‘I’ is not the centre and measure of all things, does not give rise to the anxiety of compulsive cognition. The virtual narcissism of Facebook, a platform tailor-made for the Socratic ego, receives Tähtinen’s outright condemnation: ‘Facebook trivialises humanity,’ he declares. At the end of these passionate essays on the author praises silence.
Translated by David McDuff

An essay from Kulttuurin sekakäyttäjät (‘Culture-users’, Teos, 2011)

If a film camera had stood outside my home from the time when it was built, I would rewind the movie it made from the end to the beginning. The story would begin with my children, one autumn morning in 2011, walking backwards home from school. The speed of the rewind would be so fast that they would quickly grow smaller; I, too, would get thinner and start smoking. I would curiously seek out the point where my wife and I are seen together for the last time, stepping out of the front door, back first, and setting out on our own paths, to live our own separate young lives.

At that time my grandmother still lives in the house with her two daughters and their husbands, and lodgers upstairs. The next time I would slow the rewind would be the point where, at the age of 18, finally move out of the house. The freeze-frame reveals a strange figure: almost like me, but not quite. In the face of the lanky youth I seek my own children’s features.

When I let the film continue its backwards story, I seek glimpses of myself as a child. Even though we lived in distant Savo [in eastern Finland], we went to see my grandmother in the city of Tampere relatively often. We called her our Pispala grandmother, although her house was located to the west of the suburb limit, in Hyhky. I follow the arrival of my grown-up cousins, their transformation into children, the juvenation of my grandmother and her daughters, the changing lodgers. At some point the film becomes black-and-white.

My grandfather moves in when my mother is 11. I follow the young family’s life with interest up to the point when the house’s inhabitants move out and demolition begins. There are many people on the job, for the work is done carefully from top to bottom; planks are removed one at a time until all that is left is the house’s skeleton, which is itself soon dismembered into its parts. At the end of the film all that is left is an empty site. There my grandfather walks backwards sketching the external dimensions of his future – or, in this version of the story, his former – house.

When you increase the speed of the movie, you realise that many people go in and out of the house’s doors. It looks as if a revolving door has gone made and is, by turns, sucking people in and chucking them out – them and their belongings. The changing seasons follow their even cycle, leaves changing from browny-red and –yellow to deep green and then pale buds, finally disappearing completely into the wrinkles of the bare branches. The colour of the house brightens and fades, and the birch trees that stand outside it atrophy to saplings that are then dug up and carried away.

I derive particular pleasure from seeing the pastel-coloured two-storey buildings that went up behind the house in the 1980s and 1980s demolished; in their place rise little wooden houses with vegetable gardens. At some point, too, potatoes grow in the garden of my house.

I have been told that gazing backwards is an activity that increases with age. People begin to seek explanations of themselves in the past, their family roots, the places they have visited. Perhaps, in every person’s life, there is a watershed; once one has passed it, one turns one’s gaze back in the direction from which one has come. I myself am still travelling with my gaze fixed firmly forward, but on the level of ideas I understand the wisdom that is hidden in history. It is clear that I would not be as I am if I had not lived the kind of life I have lived, if my parents’ backgrounds and choices had not been those they were. And I would not be myself if I had not lived where I have lived, moved from place to place and finally ended up in the family home, the same house where my grandmother brought up her family and where my parents celebrated their wedding. My family’s path is a circular one, and I have clearly been unable, or perhaps even unwilling, to stray from it.

As well as revealing the ingredients of the individual identity and the youth of the built environment, looking at the past backwards demonstrates the fact that history is constant motion. People travel in groups of different sizes, first in aeroplanes, cars, trains and ocean-going ships, then in horse-drawn waggons and finally walking backwards, toward their place of birth, their starting point, their home. Stopping is always temporary, a break in the torrent of history.

If you continue rewinding far enough, there is no trace of nation-states, civilisations, cities or villages, not stone upon another stone, not even the first sign of them. If the camera had stood in the same place before my home since the ice age, I would be able to follow backwards human life right back to the appearance of the ice masses. Standing on the best crossing-point on the ridge between Lake Pyhäjärvi and Lake Näsijärvi, Hyhky was already an important route for the people of the stone age.

In his essay Die grosse Wanderung (‘The great migration’), the German essayist and poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger examines the world from the top of a great pile of books. His pen encompasses both the movement of nations on the surface of the earth and the most secret aims and motives of individuals. Enzensberger writes directly in the tradition of European knowledge and understanding.

At the beginning of his essay, Enzensberger leafs through a world atlas: ‘Clusters of blue and red arrows that thicken into eddies and then disperse in opposite directions.’ The freeze-frame of a page of the atlas toes not, however, reveal turbulence to be the normal state of the climate. The same is true of the population of the globe, Enzensberger comments. The history of the world is the history of great migration.

In his essay on the great migration Enzensberger is attempting – so I believe – a dynamic image of a dynamic phenomenon. One method he uses is some human experiments he presents as a thought experiment: There is a train compartment in which two travellers are sitting. The train stops, and two new travellers attempt to enter the compartment in which the original travellers, irrespective of whether they already know each other, feel their position to be under threat: ‘They appear, in the eyes of the new arrivals, to form a group. The compartment is their territory. Every new traveller is, for them, an intruder.’ The essay’s characters are, of course, theoretical constructions whose intention is to demonstrate social laws.

The essayist knows how to package the phenomena he describes as aphorisms: ‘Group egoism and xenophobia are anthropological constants which existed before reasons for them were expressed. Their global spread speak for the fact that they are older than any known social form.’ In a masterly way, the essayist’s pen shapes a rational explanation of complex historical developments such as the birth of hospitality. Its taboos and rituals were invented, Enzensberger comments, ‘to make it possible for even minimum exchange and communication between different clans, tribes and ethnic groups’. The mechanisms and dynamics of the great migration, with their causes and consequences, are drawn for the reader in broad, convincing strokes.

But where is the essay’s narrator? Although his gaze is unlimited in terms of either time or geography, it does not appear to be located anywhere – unless the European essayistic tradition is considered some kind of point of view.

I test Enzensberger’s writerly location by exchanging my fixed historical camera for a divine perspective. I rise to the height of a satellite and orbit the Earth beneath me in whatever way I wish. Oceans and deserts, forests and cities flash by, blue, yellow, green and black on the surface of the ball as it spins on its axis. If I notice something interesting I zoom in to look at it. As I examine people on the move I narrow my eyes until all I see is motion, currents, streaks of light. Seen from a suitable distance, the Earth’s crust begins to live like the surface of an ant-heap. I am a great and powerful anthropographer; I see the forest but not the trees, the torrent but not the droplets.

As a celestial statistician I am able to see at one glance that 214 million people live permanently outside their native lands. I am able to abstract the movements of groups of human beings into arrows pointing from south to north, east to west. The stream is, however, the strongest in the southern hemisphere. The demographic calculations I make confirm my visual observations: among the lands people are leaving Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia are the top three, while the best results for receptor countries are Pakistan, Syria and Iran.

As an all-knowing narrator, I have the ability to move in time. I set the clock of history so that I am able to follow the complex movement of peoples across the Earth. Migrations that have lasted centuries take place before my eyes in a few minutes. I watch as people spread throughout the world, encounter one another, settle down and then continue on their travels, endlessly. I focus on situations in which two peoples approach each other from opposite directions. I see mergings into one, trade, exchange of ideas and goods, but also battles and wars, genocides and conquests. The movements of peoples on the atlas of history, however, do not move me a great deal, for what, seen close up, forces one to ponder the senselessness of human activity is, from the cosmological perspective, a meaningless glimpse in the rushing stream of time.

Enzensberger, too, emphasises the importance of scale: ‘It is difficult to imagine big numbers.’ Charities offering help in catastrophes, too, focus on ‘just one small child with its big, inconsolable eyes’. Nevertheless, Enzensberger does not ponder the role of science, and the tradition of thought that he represents does not question the position of the narrator. The fact that the essayist examines the world from the outside is such a well-worn device that it is no longer considered a device. We are unable to wonder at the omnipotence, the impartiality, of the writer who comments on the world as God.

For this reason the essayist must write himself into the story, must step into and inhabit the world he wishes to describe and understand.

The return to the surface of the ant-heap is not easy, for the powers of vision of the almighty have intoxicated me. Whereas, just a moment ago, I was examining human life at the scale of the universe and understood the insignificance of the individual in the torrent of history, now I stand, toes numb, in the autumnal garden of my home, the burden of meanings on my shoulders. I gaze around me, but in every direction my gaze founders on trees, hedges and houses squatting in their gardens. I can no longer see farther than my everyday life. There is no sign of the historical movie camera, there is only this moment, which itself dissolves second by second beyond reach.

Absentmindedly, I move the children’s bikes strewn around the garden to lean against the walls of the house, out of the way of cars. Just a moment ago I unscrewed the auxiliary wheels and pushed both children, turn by turn, along the nearby park road, until, after many falls and tears, they learned to ride without support. Fortunately I still have time before the revolving door of history chucks them out of our home.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Maailmankansalaisen uskonto

This book focuses on the core questions of religious philosophy with special emphasis on Christianity, but it also addresses Judaism, Islam and the Middle East conflict as well as conflicts between Hindu nationalists and Muslims. Juha Sihvola, a professor of history, ends up advocating the view which holds that religion and science are largely independent of one another: under-standing the special nature of belief enables a justifiable critique of both religious fundamentalism and radical neo-atheism. In this work, Sihvola examines the relationship of faith and morals to history, freedom of conscience, religious tolerance and the possibilities of developing a more pluralistic society. The ideas of contemporary philosophers John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum seem closest to Sihvola’s own thinking. He formulates an optimistic vision in which religion that is liberal, non-fundamentalist and understands the special nature of belief faces important tasks ahead.
Translated by Ruth Urbom

Ihmisten eläinkirja. Muuttuva eläinkulttuuri

This book adopts a multidisciplinary approach in its examination of the relationship between humans and animals, highlighting historical, ethical and philosophical connections. The authors include humanists, theologians, anthropologists and artists. They address issues such as animal and nature conservation, animal breeding and husbandry, attitudes towards animals in myth and religion, and depictions of animals in Finnish art. Humans’ relationship to animals can hardly be said to have been consistent: in some religions, certain animals were worshipped as gods, whereas others viewed them as symbols of evil. We treat our pets as members of the family, while livestock animals are subjected to more and more cost-effective production methods. The architect Juhani Pallasmaa introduces readers to the master architects of the animal world and their highly refined, diverse architectural solutions, from which people have learnt a great deal.

What’s the meaning of life? There are those who seek it in religion, while for others that is the last place to look. The scientist Kari Enqvist ponders why some people, including himself, seem physiologically immune to the lure of faith. Perhaps, he suggests, we should look for significance not in the big picture, but in the marvel of the fleeting moment

As a young boy I must have held religious beliefs. However, I cannot pinpoint exactly when they disappeared. At some point I eventually stopped saying my evening prayers, but I am unable to remember why or when this happened. ‘I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it – without knowing why,’ writes the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet.

When I was reading the Christmas story aloud, I didn’t believe in it. Although I know it cannot be true, I have the feeling that I have in fact never believed in God. My memory does not stretch back as far as my childhood so I cannot say what I thought back then or what kind of child I was. It is as though I have forgotten myself, as though the connection to that little boy is nothing but a construction, a play that in the deepest recesses of my ego I perform for my own gratification. It is for these reasons that my religious Bildungsroman is not a story of relinquishing but of forgetting.

What do I believe in? I believe that the universe is an infinite physical system without goals or objectives of its own. I believe that life on Earth is the result of serendipitous coincidences: our planet happens to be located a suitable distance away from a suitable star. I also believe that life may be found in many of the solar systems in our galaxy, but that intelligent life is a very rare occurrence. At the same time, I know that I do not know these things but that they are beliefs.

I believe that my ego is a process, a capitalist system of molecule factories lacking a concrete core, a five-year plan or a designer that I might call my ‘self’. Its seat is not in only in my brain, rather my whole body takes part in preserving my sense of self. I believe that my experience of my ‘self’ has been stitched together from smaller parts, that I have been many people and that at this very moment different versions of this self are present in my brain, versions that assume prominence according to need and situation. I believe that my will is not free but that my every action, opinion, desire and thought is born of the dance of atoms and molecules that obey the laws of physics and are unguided by the spirit. I believe that the word ‘I’ is a calming lullaby, selected via a process of evolution, a narrative echoing through my consciousness, constructed by my brain to maintain an illusion of continuity and control. I consider religious faith to be a meme that can easily take root in the mind, and I believe that religions do not answer any of the big questions facing the human race but that, for people of faith, religions offer the sense that these problems are being answered.

And I also think that these views do not in any way lessen the value of humanity; they do not lead to nihilism or to the disintegration of ethical values. On the contrary, I believe that regardless of these views – or even because of them – I am on the whole an optimistic, cheerful person, a mild pacifist equipped with a conscience that, compared to that of many people of faith, is highly social.

It is often said that science answers questions as to what the world is, while religion provides the world with meaning; science tells us how, religion tells us why. In this way, science and religion can be seen to complement one another. In the words of Archbishop Jukka Paarma: ‘Science examines the mystery of the birth of the world and the development of nature and humanity. Faith trusts in the notion that God’s will and His love for human kind is behind everything.’

But what exactly is the meaning that religion gives us? What does the archbishop mean with the words ‘behind everything’? Does he mean that God has created the world and its laws? And what, then, is the significance of this belief? That human life has meaning because God has a plan that He is hiding from us? Isn’t such a manner of thinking merely an example of the simple contention, ‘faith has meaning for me’? But what significance does religion attribute to a loved one’s brain haemorrhage? What meaning can be hidden in my mother’s Alzheimer’s disease? What significance can we read into the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers or the detonation of the atomic bomb above Nagasaki? Once again, people of faith are confronted with a fundamental theistic problem in attempting to establish a correlation between the meaning of God and the significance of individual events.

Indeed, is it not the case that religion cannot offer explanations of the meaning of human life, and that rather, in the face of disasters like the 2004 tsunami, it must accept that these are such incomprehensible events that all prayers simply evaporate on our lips? Why did the Burma Plate slip on Boxing Day 2004? Neither texts deemed to be holy nor the most fervent man of prayer can provide an answer. It is therefore reasonable to suggest that there is no glorious core that can be considered the source of religious meaning. Rather, there is simply a selection of practices that have assumed the stamp of religiosity. At times that stamp can fade away, while at others it can become strengthened through influence of strange coincidences in the surrounding society or human life. It is as though religion were a means-tested stencil for which the logic guiding its use is both fuzzy and passed down through generations.

This is the stance espoused by, amongst others, theologian Ilkka Pyysiäinen, who argues that Lutheran practices provide Finns with a religious prototype. They represent a yardstick by which other religions can be recognised as religions. ‘After this, there is a widening, never-ending sphere of phenomena that resemble religions to a greater or lesser degree. There is no clear boundary between religion and non-religion; there are only phenomena, some of which seem religious, while others do not,’ writes Pyysiäinen.

The small amount of religiosity that I was able to make out in my parents was also largely ritualistic in nature. As a family we never went to church. At Christmas we had a tradition of reading the Christmas story aloud before eating. This was designated my task, and perhaps my parents were hoping to achieve something almost holy as they listened to their only son’s clear voice as he read fluently and with conviction (and over the years with a certain level of theatricality) the familiar story of Emperor Augustus’ decree. As a child, my mother used to read my evening prayers with me, but on the whole it was as though the mere mention of religion was, by some unspoken agreement, deemed improper. The words ‘Lord’, ‘Jesus’ or ‘Christ’ were never used. I believe that my grandmother’s Pentecostalism must have been lurking in the background as an example of the dangers that can be associated with religious language, as though devout religious practice had, thanks to my grandmother, become synonymous with failure, misery and insanity.

It seemed that, over the years, my father’s attitudes towards faith became increasingly indifferent. In this he was very much the product of the age, a century marked by the marginalisation of religious life in industrialised countries. Religion is dying away. It long ago relinquished its place as a guiding beacon for all human life, but its memory lives on in religious practices and rituals. My mother, whom I believe to have been more religious than my father, would sometimes use expressions like ‘such is our lot’, though I am unsure whether there was any deep, religious sentiment behind these words or whether they too were merely part of a ritual of sorts.

Although the focus of faith may be something supernatural, the seat of faith is firmly in the flesh. Though it is often said (in my opinion, erroneously) that thoughts are more than simply the sum total of electrical brain impulses, faith itself remains firmly anchored in the real world and in the laws of physics. It resides in the brain’s neurons and synapses. It rattles along the cortex and flies like a bird over the corpus callosum. It is both electrochemical and molecular biological. In our consciousness, it is physically present in the same way as memories, predilections or next week’s shopping list.

The analogy to a virus is particularly apt in the case of religion, as faith can be transmitted unwittingly and spontaneously. Unlike purely physiological viruses, religion is a virus of psychological reality or, more specifically, a collection of viruses – or memes.

Memes contain some element that makes them easier to remember. However, we cannot say with any certainty what that element is. Why some books become bestsellers while others are flops is a mystery that every publishing editor would dearly like to solve. One can only surmise that the architecture of our brains, their physiological structure and the ways in which they are filled with memories, opinions and personality traits make us particularly susceptible to certain memes.

Once the faith meme has been transmitted, it already has the power to spread itself. ‘Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations,’ it commands us. As a result of this, sparing no expense, people will get into their cars, drive around ringing the doorbells of complete strangers and asking whether they would like to hear about Jesus. More importantly, however, it commands us to baptise small children and to implant the meme in their minds. Were this not a question of religious faith, such brainwashing would seem wholly immoral, making, for instance, the British scientist and writer Richard Dawkins’ outrage over the religious labelling of children seem perfectly reasonable. Dawkins argues that talk about Christian or Muslim children is grotesque, for what is at stake is not the children’s faith but that of their parents. Still, the faith meme does not listen to such reasoning, but tells us that this is all for the good of the children, that in this way those children will be saved.

Seen from this perspective, faith is a collection of practice that is descended from one generation to the next as a meme. Its longevity is assured by the subsidiary belief, namely that the prize of such ritualistic practice is everlasting life and that to deny this will be punished with eternal suffering. The faith meme carries with it a package saying that faith is always the morally right choice and that non-belief is wrong in the most profound manner. This branding bears painful similarities to Microsoft’s saturation of the computer technology market.

Dawkins famously argues that DNA is selfish; its only concern is to reproduce itself. If we consider the faith meme in the same fashion, the various characteristics of organised religion seem suddenly to fall into place. The faith meme does not jump from one mind to the next as physical matter (doctrine), rather it is transmitted with the help of associated subsidiary beliefs (‘it is right to believe’, ‘faith will be rewarded’) and rituals. If the spread of Christianity had relied solely upon its muddled theology, the church would have dwindled away and become a mere curiosity centuries ago. But the image of the crucifixion or the thought of life after death, a life in which we will be reunited with our loved ones, awakens such powerful physiological reactions within us that faith is transmitted almost by force. All of a sudden we are saved – and who wouldn’t want to go out and spread the good news? It makes no difference that the doctrine itself is incomprehensible and riddled with inconsistencies. Why does a benevolent God allow evil to exist? How can one God become three? Why do we eat God – quite literally – at communion? But what of this! This is why faith has no core to speak of, for ultimately what we are dealing with is simply a group of practices that help the meme to reproduce and that caress and calm the human mind. Faith does not reveal the meaning of life and neither does it provide answers to the why-questions so despised by scientists, but regardless of this it gives us a strong sense that these questions have been answered.

One occasionally hears the contention that, whereas the genes written into our molecules are real, memes are nothing but words and, as such, are every bit as real as the tooth fairy. However, it would be wrong to imagine that memes have no physical being. They inhabit not only the world of the imagination, for thoughts and beliefs are firmly rooted in physical matter. When a belief takes root in our minds, it does so in a very concrete sense. Changes occur in the structure of certain nerve cells; the chemistry of our synapses is altered. The trace of a memory is a physical trace left on our molecules themselves. In fact, memes are probably far more complicated affairs than genes, as an individual belief is not isolated to one single molecule, rather, with all probability, it affects collections of different molecules in different areas of the brain. A meme is therefore a configuration made up of certain molecules. Neither is it necessarily an unambiguous one: different configurations can, in principle, correspond to the same beliefs.

The American philosopher Daniel C. Dennett had argued that, though we cannot identify the physical manifestation of a given meme in different people’s brains, this does mean that the meme itself doesn’t exist. All in all it is a question of how matter is arranged. We might consider memes as intricate mobiles suspended in abstract space, something that can grow or crumble as beliefs change. That being said, certain constellations can be very stable indeed and can latch on to brain matter with relative ease. If, by virtue of their structure, they strive to build similar constellations in other brains, they are behaving like viruses.

The genetic information stored in our DNA is copied from one molecule to the next using, for instance, messenger RNA, which transports the structural drawings of proteins into the cytoplasm around individual cells. Copying and transporting the faith meme is a more complicated affair: the meme causes an electrochemical reaction that is released in the form of preaching and chanting, practices which in the recipient’s brain trigger a construction process resembling the constellation of the original meme.

In the manner of real viruses, the faith virus can be easily transmitted to children whose immune systems have not yet fully developed. Children can be infected at the drop of a hat. The elderly are also in the high-risk group. This too fits the picture.

In theory, viruses can spread easily, but there is always someone who is immune to them. There are a myriad of reasons for this, but of crucial importance is the fact that the reason for their immunity is physiological. Certain parts of that person’s certain cells are structured in such a way that the virus – which is itself nothing more than a longish molecule – cannot latch on to other cells or reproduce itself in the way it is programmed to do (though, naturally, viruses do not have a free will of their own). Alternatively, in some people the body’s defence mechanism is so exceptionally effective that it even produces molecular structures that can neutralise the effects of the virus.

Similarly, the faith virus doesn’t infect everyone. The reasons for this must also be physiological, as recent neuroscientific research suggests. It has been discovered that religious experiences activate certain areas of the brain, leading some neuroscientists to talk of the ‘god module’. And although such a module may not exist, ultimately the phenotype of religion, anything from singing a hymn to reciting the creed is, as has already been ascertained, the expression of brain activity. Non-religious people are therefore people who, because of the architectural make-up of their brains – and therefore, by chance – demonstrate an immunity to the faith virus. In non-religious people, the meme does not trigger any kind of reaction.

Non-religiosity is not a wholly rational position either. People do not become non-religious merely from the weight of the scientific evidence. The unresolved problem of evil or the wrongs of history are not enough to snuff out religious sentiments, though of course they have played a role in developing atheists’ opinions. The philosophical semiotic analysis of religious language is, I assume, of even less significance. For non-religious people, their beliefs do not represent the rational acceptance of a certain doctrine, but what their heart tells them. I cannot reasonably claim that I decided that faith doesn’t have any emotional significance for me. This is simply the way things have happened, thanks to the architectural make-up of my brain. This is the way the molecular machine of my ego has worked: it has created certain chemical changes in my cells and synapses, the manifestations of which we call beliefs. It therefore follows that I do not believe my will has been free in the vulgar sense of the word.

When the city of Espoo celebrated its 550th anniversary, every home – including mine – received a little booklet from the church entitled Safe: An Espooite’s Faith. The booklet consists of short tales, which are a mix of high literature in the style of the author Bo Carpelan and texts by ordinary people. According to the text on the back cover, their aim is to ‘make the reader think about life and its meaning’. Well, I read it and I thought hard. Little booklets like these provide a far better window into the everyday religious life than the learned and carefully honed epistles of bishops. (An essay fragment by the pastor and writer Matti Paloheimo remembers to mention Wittgenstein, but who among us would not have committed that same sin?)

I had forgotten quite how anguished religious language can be: ‘One day this sorrow and wretchedness will end.’ Many of the texts in the booklet make repeated reference to ‘fear’ and ‘shame’. The assurance of joy and happiness, the climax of most of these texts, sounds like a mantra, just as a tightrope walker crossing a ravine might repeat to himself, ‘I will not fall, I will not fall’. Exaggeration and the obsessive exaltation of mercy speak of a terror that, despite the beatitude of faith, lurks on the edge of consciousness. These writers are at their most sincere as they thank the parish for the sense of security it offers, being able to cuddle up to someone else, protected from the dark, just as our ancestors at the dawn of humanity must have warmed themselves in their caves at night.

For me this booklet did not serve to anchor my everyday life; it made me sad. I felt bad for these people because of the anxieties they experience. They offload this anxiety by writing to one another: once I was lost, living in fear of death, adrift on a churning sea, but now I am safe. But why do people feel the need to repeat these matters ad infinitum? Why did not a single text take joy and love as its starting point? The only exception to this was a text written by an 81-year-old former deacon, offering an  uncomplicated account of his working life. I felt almost embarrassed for the editors of the booklet. For once they had the perfect opportunity to reach the vast majority of people in Espoo for whom religious life means very little. And yet I get the sense that, in that respect, they have been unsuccessful. What invigorates those in the hermetic common rooms at the parish, wilts under the broken light of the indifferent outside world into something banal.

These small vignettes about moving from the darkness into the light do not touch me, because I do not live in constant fear of death, I do not feel shame, sorrow or wretchedness. The average day is not perfect and my life includes unfortunate events, but it is not constructed around fear and shame. In this respect, I do not believe that I am in any way exceptional.

When we look for life’s meaning, we should not look for it in the overall structure but in life’s constituent parts. This is by no means a new observation but one that dates back to Horace when he shouted ‘Carpe Diem’! The words ‘seize the day’ may sound somewhat business oriented, but they can also be understood as a Zen microscope focussing on a single moment in order to separate it into as many elements as possible. This is also what natural science teaches us.

In fact, nature only teaches us if we examine it closely, with as fine a resolution as possible. In this way, nature reveals the mysteries of both matter and the cosmos, thus uncovering the world’s secrets, everything from the atomic bomb to the physiology of proteins. In science, people often say that the devil is in the details. But perhaps something else is hidden there too.

A pragmatist might argue that, if human life is the sum of its experiences, one would be well advised to maximise those experiences. However, this does not refer only to extreme experiences: hang-gliding over the Antarctic, riding on dolphins or travelling to Mars. In this instance, less can often be more. Perhaps it is enough to watch the Sun casting a beam on the wall; an autumn butterfly warming itself there; a cloud high in the summer sky; the wind scattering leaves; a hand holding a book. You need only watch people hurrying along the street to the Market Square; people spilling out of commuter trains at the station; people in far off countries sitting behind their stalls, hopeful and expectant; people that every day, with every step, carry life’s light burden with them. It is enough to listen to the sound of your breath, just enough that you can say to yourself: I am here, I am alive in this moment, this fleeting moment like a diamond between two strikes of the clock. ‘Not altogether bad,’ as the Brits say.

And perhaps it is at moments like this that we can disregard our destiny, forget the past and the future, and feel, if only for a brief moment, the burden of sorrow lift from our shoulders.

Translated by David Hackston

Much misunderstood: father of the superman, Friedrich Nietzsche.

The term nihilism is often bandied about, but often badly misunderstood. In extracts from his new book, Ei voisi vähempää kiinnostaa. Kirjoituksia nihilismistä (‘Couldn’t care less. Writings on nihilism’, Atena, 2008), the social scientist and philosopher Kalle Haatanen discusses the true legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche, nihilism’s high priest

The word nihilist is derived from the Latin: ‘nihil’ means, simply, ‘nothing’. When someone is labelled as nihilist or seen as representing nihilism, this has always been a curse, a mockery or an accusation, whether in philosophy, politics or everyday conversation. More recently, the word has generally been used to refer to people who do not believe in anything – people whose world-view is without principle, without ideals, barren. Often the closest word that flashes across the mind is ‘people-hater’. Sometimes, however, its meaning is comically unclear. In writing this, I have noticed that the word ‘nihilism’ has been used in the press to describe, for example, one of the autumn’s fashion megatrends (perhaps it means that dressing in black is ascetic, slightly futurist and machine-romantic, which is indeed well-suited to good people-haters). In the commentary on the Finland-Germany football match, it was noted that the German defence was ‘nihilist’, but I haven’t the faintest clue why, in what sense and with what reference this particular word was chosen. In addition to referring to a unprincipled but enthusiastic people-hater, the everyday word ‘nihilist’ can often take on a meaning implying passivity. In this case the subject is a lazy opportunist who cannot be bothered to believe in anything and whose world-view is characterised solely by endless irony and the feeling that everything has already been seen. Sometimes a synonym for such a dogma is ‘teenager’, but – as sociologists have taught us – many adults live a kind of prolonged youth today. I often feel sympathetic towards lazy people for whom the world does not exhibit that single error that must be put right….

Active nihilism is a slightly more problematic concept. It is used in reference primarily to Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of the superman who is able to carry this insignificant, nihilist era heroically on his shoulders. The active nihilist is an exceptional individual who, in his endless appetite for life, encounters nihilist insignificance again and again, but nevertheless, in his passion for life, accepts even this nothingness – the most terrible of all thoughts – eternally shouting ‘Yes!’ in its face. Not an easy task, as we shall see….

Nietzsche shouts Yes! to life – and thus, inseparably, to death. Nietzsche’s essentially ancient Greek, pagan and Dionysian world-view deprecates life, which attempts only to protect life for its own sake. Such life is merely concealment within a self-satisfied and resentful shell. On the other hand, the question, ‘Who would Nietzsche like to see dead?’– a question to which so many people would evidently like to know the answer – is simply extraordinarily stupid. Those who pose it do not understand and have no idea that it is the nihilistic powers that deny and destroy life which Nietzsche has in his sights, and indeed not any individuals, races, or ‘lesser beings’. The superman is the human figure (or perhaps a wish/desire) in the Nietzschean conceptuary who no longer feels any resentment. The superman is free of conventional moral codes because he sees them, first, as artificial, and second, as ways of controlling crowds or masses. I do not wish to make Nietzsche excessively tame: he certainly also says that morals are produced by herd-souls, and are suitable for them. In his tumultuous texts he curses those people to the lowest circles of hell and lifts others to the heavens. Nietzsche does not feel pity – because he loves life.

But then there are the lunatics. The proponents of the school murders at Columbine, USA, declared themselves nihilists. Last year, in the testament he left on the internet, the Finnish school murderer Pekka-Eric Auvinen demanded that he should not be psychologically analysed, but that he and his actions would be met face to face. In both cases, the Nietzschean undertone was clear, in part even correctly understood (the avoidance of psychological analysis, the inevitability of violence). – But the idea that rising to the far side of good and evil would mean merely resisting the predominant morality of pity and, in its name, would allow for pitilessly slaughtering lesser people! No.

Listen up: such resistance in fact only preserves the morality in question in its negative form; it is a resentful reaction in a world of resentful morals. Nietzsche was much more radical. How banal, unaristocratic and unaesthetic a school killing is! It is true that Nietzsche’s radical philosophy, with its emphasis on the advent of the totally unexpected and, on the other hand, the destruction of the old, has no logical endpoint that might somehow reign in destruction or even give it a purpose of any kind. This is what is meant by radical thought. Still less does it offer advice or guides for the realisation of some sort of programme, particularly if this breaks with the values of aesthetic aristocracy. There may no longer be any use for the moral and the ethical, but if something True, Beautiful and Great in this insignificant world still, or again, receives an echo, it is aesthetics. If Nietzsche were to confront the actions that have been carried out in his name, he would turn away in horror. Not out of pity perhaps – the world is a cruel place – but out of revulsion: his ‘followers’ put in to practice a ‘programme’ in which radical, untamed violence is shackled to a perfect, life-despising lack of style….

In nihilist philosophy – in other words, of the kind found in real literature, not in internet nonsense or fanatical interpretations – no one gives instructions or reasons for killing, and no encouragements to such actions are contained in any texts. The last thing a Nietzschean superman would do would be to ‘overcome himself’ in such an action, however much he were to move on the far side of good and evil….

Some people adopt a particular version of nihilism as their ideology or principle, leaving their testament, public statement or video on the internet, and are guilty of indescribable violence. Then the term ‘nihilism’ takes on a different content from simple hatred of humanity. The worst self-justifications used by killers are often found in the Nietzschean concept of the superman. True: the superman is an exceptional individual; true: the superman is on ‘the far side of good and evil’; true: the superman despises the herd-soul, democracy and the equalising of everything; true: the superman cannot be psychologically analysed; true: the superman is destructive.

Let me briefly examine these arguments. The analytical method is, however, not the best approach, for Nietzsche’s philosophy is not easily susceptible to logical or exhaustive explanation. I am, anyway, of the opinion that it is not possible to present an overall picture or certain truth concerning Nietzsche’s tumultuous and often fragmentary oeuvre. Rather, the question is of more or less about successful interpretations. I shall now, however, attempt to unravel this argument a little.

First, the superman would never act reactively and respond with violence to some circumstance or state of being, or by attacking it resentfully. The destructiveness of the superman lies in the creation of the new, which does not serve any purpose or dogma. The ‘object’ of destruction is the old world of values, but only in the sense that the creation of the new always destroys the old. Second, the superman is ‘beyond good and evil’, but at what point did the interpretation change in the blink of an eye to being ‘on the side of evil’? Nietzsche’s vision may nourish irrational destruction (because it has no direction), but existence on the far side of good and evil means, first, a grasp of the accidental nature of the predominant moral values and, second, an aesthetic rising above them, not a recursive return to the programmatic destruction of the old. Third, despising the mass man does not mean despising people, it means despising the forces that trivialise life.

If nihilism is, quite rightly, interpreted as a kind of attempt at liberation from the burden of history, Christianity and humanism, it must be understood how arduous this liberation is. In the opinion of some, it is quite impossible – most closely comparable to Baron von Münchhausen when he rose from the marsh by pulling himself up by his own hair.

It is not, in other words, easy to become pagan again. For that reason, I am nervous about sociology’s sometimes too easily applied prefixes, post- and neo-. For example, the French sociologist Michel Maffesoli, who constantly draws on Nietzsche, often speaks over easily of ‘neo-tribalisation’ or ‘neo-paganism’. In his conception of history, the Apollonian period with its emphasis on reason and harmony is once more making way for the new coming of a Dionysian age marked by passion, drunkenness and danger. Maffesoli speaks of an ‘orgiastic age’. The idea is interesting (I, at least, periodically become enthusiastic about it), but a couple of years ago fifty per cent of sociology dissertations were on the urban tribes of club cultures and cities. Neo-pagans and post-modern orgiasts who have rejected rationality? Oh well. Then they grow up, there’s work in the morning, and they have to go home early – if they have ever left it, as there are the children to be looked after.

The attempt to become pagan again, or ‘to able to be superficial’, as Nietzsche put it, is perhaps best described in the Bertolt Brecht text that is often used in death notices: ‘And when she was finished they laid her in earth // Flowers growing, butterflies juggling over her… // She, so light, barely pressed the earth down // How much pain it took to make her as light as that!’ [‘Song about my mother’, translated by Christopher Middleton].

When used in death notices, it is fairly clear that this beautiful text of Brecht’s makes reference to a death caused by a long, painful illness, in which death really comes as liberation or oblivion. The same is true of nihilism, when taken seriously. Nihilism is that illness. It is a lifelong struggle against (easy) life. It has no logical conclusion – some kind of post-moral age – instead, the question is of a continual struggle against various moral doctrines, collections of rules, theologies as well as triviality. For the active nihilist, freedom is does not lie in someone saying how things should be done; neither is it to be found in throwing oneself into the belief that nothing means anything. The passive nihlist acts entirely according to the logic of opposition. He finds freedom in both extremes. ‘OK, I could do that’ and ‘What point is there to anything in the end.’ Perhaps a more accurate analogy – better, at least, than the illusion of a post-moral age – is the fate of Sisyphus (Camus’s favourite, by the way), who is condemned eternally to roll a boulder up a hill. When the boulder reaches the top, it naturally rolls down again, and Sisyphus has to begin all over again, forever. That is also the fate of the nihilist.

Philosophically nihilism – in the eyes of Nietzsche and Heidegger, the entire history of western thought, from Plato onward – never reaches a conclusion, can never be overcome. It can be attacked, attempts can be made at destruction, at radically new thought, just as Nietzsche and Heidegger did. The Nietzschean idea of coming, the appearance of something completely new, is thoroughly destructive. It is an anti-nihilist radical force which destroys the past and the existing, but it has no inner definition or future horizon. The thinking of something completely new, the coming of something completely new, is not born of given conditions and does not obey the predominant laws. In other words, it destroys the conditions of its own coming. It does not return and cannot be reduced to causes or circumstances. It is completely unpredictable. For this reason the extreme anti-nihilist pathos of Nietzsche’s philosophy has been called nihilist – it has no content, it is nothing.

The question, however, is of something completely different. Niezsche does not emphasise emptiness, but something destructive, radically creative of the new and destructive of the old. It cannot be shackled or anticipated – or considered to represent something good or evil. It is aesthetics in the most radical sense of the word. It is Nietzsche’s active, heroic and aesthetic nihilis: pure force, which does not bend to truths or purposes. For precisely that reason it is able to destroy the worst curse of our age, nihilism.

There is one more, in some ways more comforting, way of thinking about nihilism. It is the desire to remain silent. In addition to Nietzsche, the 20thcentury philosophers Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt also constantly emphasise activity, creation and pathos. Such things can be tiring. The same is true of the American analysts of conservative national values and bourgeois public life and their horror of couch potatoes and ironists. In this connection I feel a sneaking sympathy for passive nihilists and their lazy irony. ‘The time is out of joint,’ as Hamlet said, but could some handyman not be paid to fix it? I don’t feel like it. I don’t have the energy. Forgetting to vote, political inactivity and watching the shopping channel all night feel more and more tempting.

There is one branch of philosophical nihilism that I have not dealt with in any detail because it is not linked with the continental philosophical tradition of nihilism. It is the habit in western philosophy of describing the word through logical sentences and language. Ludwig Wittgenstein, in particular, is considered a representative of this kind of nihilism. He apparently hated unclear sentences and wished to see philosophy as a language game, and language as limited, and, in fact, the whole of philosophy as action. Philosophy makes philosophy and thus it is quite pointless to ask what philosophy is. It is an obscure question to which one can never receive an answer.

Stanley Rosen, author of perhaps the most significant study of nihilism in recent years (although it was actually published in 1969) calls this Wittgensteinian desire for clarity a ‘yearning for silence’. Rosen considered it little less than an obsession, which wanted to remove all lack of clarity from philosophy and achieve a kind of peace in which philosophy works and A = A.

In Derek Jarman’s stylised film Wittgenstein, this desire for clarity and thus silence tortures Wittgenstein throughout his entire life. Jarman, too, sees this nihilism as an unsupportable state in the end. In the final scene, a Wittgenstein seen once more as a small boy examines the world he has created. It is purely a film set: an empty background and a mathematical grid or co-ordinate system. There the poor young Wittgenstein would like to fly in the plane he has built, but the world he has created is cold, barren of imagination, and empty. It leaves no room for flying or the imagination. The ‘yearning for silence’ was finally victorious.

I am an optimist: perhaps a suspicion of pathos combined with lazy irony is a suitable mixture of nihilist elements. At least it seems like a world one might be able to live in.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins
(First published in Books from Finland 4/2008.)