Roy Voragen
Modern-Day Nihilists, the Inherent Value Of Life and the Reason Amrozi Smiled
It is the Platonic ideal to turn away from mortality, vulnerability, contingency and mutability of the worldly appearances and to search for unchanging stability, clarity and precision. It is a move away from the plural to the singular. Reading, writing, thinking and talking about our vulnerability, though, does not make us any less vulnerable. However, it can give us ways to create lasting values despite our mortality. Recognizing the contingency of our horizons means that we can have the power to alter them.
All moral systems start by the acknowledgement that life of us finite beings ought to be an inherent value. Life itself is our source of values; without a life, there are no values. If we do not value life in all its facets then we cannot create values. If life is not seen as the starting value one is not immoral — that means that one breaks the norms and values of a moral system — but amoral — that means that one goes beyond morality, i.e. nihilism, a leap into the void of nothingness.
An example of this nihilism can be seen in the movie “Funny Games” by the Austrian Michael Haneke. In this movie people are murdered for no reason whatsoever. Haneke is critical of violence in such movies as “Pulp Fiction” by Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino does not give any reason for the use of violence other than entertainment value.
Another example is Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s book “Crime and Punishment.” The main character of this book is Raskalnikov and he commits a murder to see if he can get away with it without feeling guilty. According to Raskalnikov, men like Napoleon Bonaparte are great because they can step over petty conventional morality. Raskalnikov, though, is no Napoleon; he has to deal with his internal struggles and he is punished by the conscience he tried to escape from in the first place.
If we keep Ludwig Wittgenstein’s adagio in mind that an aesthetic form or style shows an ethical perspective on the world, then how should we judge the actions of individuals in general and creations of artists in particular? A different moral perspective needs to be shown through a different form or style. How then should we judge the artwork “For the Love of God” by the British artist Damien Hirst? What does it all come to? What sense does it have or give? The use of a form or style without the will to show a perspective on one’s world is nihilistic.
“For the Love of God” is a platinum crust of a human skull of the 18th century. The skull is encrusted with 8,601 flawless diamonds, with which Hirst messed up the global diamond market. Set on the forehead is a large, pear-shaped diamond, called the “Skull Star Diamond.” And the teeth are from the original skull.
Hirst said in a September 2008 interview that “As an artist I try to make things that people can believe in, that they can relate to, that they can experience. You therefore have to show them as well as possible.” Art that is skillfully crafted can get immortal status.
Dutch art historian Rudi Fuchs described “For the Love of God” as “a supernatural skull, almost heavenly.” Fuchs relates the work to the “memento mori” theme, which was popular in the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century.
Hirst explores human experiences: life, death, truth, love, immortality, money and art. The traditional memento mori theme addresses the transience of human existence. Hirst said, “I am aware of mental contradictions in everything: I am going to die and I want to live forever. I can’t escape the fact and I can’t let go of the desire.” “For the Love of God” is therefore also a self-portrait of our wish to become immortal. Hirst asked himself what the maximum is that can be thrown at death. Diamonds!
Hirst, obviously, employs irony. This irony can already be identified in the title. Irony is a way of dealing with contradictions. The danger of irony is that we can never know for sure what is meant. Or worse: total misunderstanding. Some call Hirst’s art vulgar and cheap (of course in a metaphorical sense, because those 8,601 diamonds are worth a fortune — 14 million British pounds).
How to deal with disagreement, indeterminacy, inconsistency, incoherence, incongruity, ambivalence, heterogeneity, opacity, paradox, contingency and uncertainty in our present-day modernity? Irony is one way; however, sometimes it can be misleading as well. Friedrich Nietzsche is the philosopher that warned us that ontological uncertainty causes anxiety. According to Zygmunt Bauman the task of philosophy today is to teach us how to deal with uncertainty and contingency. The search for absolute and universal values, though, is the existential need for traditional security.
The debates concerning abortion, euthanasia and the death penalty seem to show that we do not have a consensus on the question of what constitutes man. It is interesting to note that orthodox believers, who claim to believe in the sanctity of life, are against euthanasia and abortion (i.e. they claim to be pro-life) but often they are not against the death penalty. They would rather see man going to war than making love (i.e. homosexuality).
We can also apply the Wittgensteinian aesthetic ethics/ethical aesthetics on the actions of fundamentalists in general and terrorists in particular. Through what symbolic forms do they convey meaning?
According to the sociologist Julia Suryakusuma, Islamist parties like the Prosperous Justice Party and organizations like the Indonesian Council of Ulema and the Islam Defenders Front, promote the prudish antipornography bill because in paradise lusty women await. In our mundane world the libido needs to be regulated. It is better to go to war — Jihad! — than to make love.
For the self-acclaimed martyrs, there await lusty women in paradise. They withdraw themselves from life — taking others, infidel bystanders, with them. Are these martyrs Dostoyevsky’s modern-day nihilists? They claim to know the exact ways of Allah even though the infinite is mysterious to us finite beings. Isn’t that more blasphemous than a cartoon of a Danish kafir who depicted the prophet as a terrorist?
Susan Sontag wrote in September 2001 that the 9/11 terrorists were no cowards, asking “Where is the acknowledgement that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?”
It is questionable whether courage is a neutral virtue. Aristotle claims in the “Nicomachean Ethics” that the deficiency of courage is cowardice and that the excess is rashness, i.e. a display of too much courage at the wrong place in the wrong time directed to the wrong people using the wrong means (bombs instead of words).
It is also problematic that Sontag puts the responsibility of the attack on the side of the American people working in those World Trade Center towers. Those Americans did not do this to themselves. Buruma and Margalit write in “Occidentalism, The West in the Eyes of its Enemies” that “anti-Americanism is sometimes the result of specific American policies … but whatever the U.S. government does or does not do is often beside the point.” The writers said that occidentalism referred “not to American policies, but to the idea of America itself, as a rootless, cosmopolitan, superficial, trivial, materialistic, racially mixed, fashion-addicted civilization.”
Terrorism and the “war on terror” kill the most precious value — life — by creating death and terror.
Amrozi showed a smile and thumbs-up when he heard the verdict for his part in the 2002 Bali bombings. Amrozi viewed himself as a martyr; he died for a cause he claimed was just. For him killing was an act of justice. For him those people were not innocent. He did not suffer from his conscience for he was convinced he had a free pass to enter paradise.
The survivors got a taste of revenge. Perhaps the death penalty is like a placebo that works for those who lost loved ones.
To view Amrozi as less than human, though, insults the court; he could have been killed right away. Is a world without the likes of Amrozi a safer place? No, I am afraid not. To make our place safer we need more than a tighter legal and security system. We need to know the soil of the Amrozis. And the Indonesian authorities postponed the execution for fear of the Muslim voice — for fear of the soil where the Amrozis were born. Moreover, Amrozi was turned into a celebrity due to heavy media exposure.
Is terrorism a form of art as a leap in imagination as some claim? No! Terrorists dehumanize. Terrorists take precious lives. And artists, when their work succeeds, create something immortal. Immortality is the wish to live forever in this imperfect world. And this immortality is not to be understood in the Platonic sense. Plato and terrorists yearn for eternity, i.e. for never having lived at all by leaping from an earthly life to the eternal life. For them life is punishment, not death. That is the reason Amrozi smiled.
The writer teaches at Parahyangan Catholic University and can be contacted at fatumbrutum.blogspot.com.
