Neither a Will Nor a Why, but a Life
“The night we are entering isn’t only the dark night of St. John of the Cross, or the empty universe, without a helpful God: it is the night of real hunger, of cold rooms, and of the vacant eyes in police stations. . . . How, in these conditions, to justify the world? Or better: how can I justify myself? How can there be a desire to exist?”
- Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche
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Working with the assumption that only bad films are ruined by spoilers, I start this essay with a discussion of Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler.
Decades ago, Randy “The Ram” Robinson, played by Mickey Rourke, was a premier professional wrestler with a cult following. Now strung out on pain killers, a hopeless frequent at a depilated strip club, broke, recovering from a heart attack, and still wrestling at small venues in the Tri-State area, Robinson attempts to get his life back on track. Through rekindling a relationship with his estranged daughter, retiring from wrestling, sobering up, working at a local grocery store, and beginning a promising romance with Cassidy, a stripper from the club, Robinson appears to be on the mend.
But his wrestling days sing a Siren’s tune and he feels called back to the ring. When Robinson is given an opportunity to wrestle against his past rival, Robinson is conflicted. He neither wants to sacrifice his health nor his newfound love. However, he nonetheless agrees to the fight and views it as his formal exit from the sport.
As the final fight takes place, Robinson begins to feel a sharp pain in his chest. As the pain increases and his vision blurs, he sees Cassidy ringside and intuits that she wants him to quit the fight. Knowing Cassidy will resent his decision to continue the fight, Robinson pauses. The crowd cheers his name and calls for him to do his signature finishing move. He glances at Cassidy and then begins to climb the ropes, preparing for his final takedown.
With his breathes shortening and heart on the verge of collapse, Robinson jumps from the ropes and the film ends. As the credits roll, I ask myself ‘why did he jump?’
Motivated Mystics and Other Oxymorons
Everybody appears to have a why that drives them and gives them a sense of purpose. Managers have ‘vision casting’ meetings and some (rather intolerable) couples have ‘goal-setting’ nights. People across the political spectrum are driven by a sense of resolve and determination. Words such as vision, purpose, and motivation are not only preached by therapists and politicians alike but are incessantly found in the indexes of self-help books and in the captions of social media posts. All the while, those who are purposeless or lack a ‘why’ are ridiculed for transgressing these social norms.
Throughout my life I have quite intensely fought for a steadfast why. Sometimes that why was spiritual, sometimes that why was political or vocational. But in each instance, I attempted to be dedicated and persistent in pursuing what I deemed worthy of pursuit. Carrying myself with a sense of discipline and drive, I worked to achieve my purpose in life. Most recently, such purpose and drive were found, as cringe as it may sound, in being a useful and revolutionary intellectual. I wanted my research, writing, and teaching to be revolutionary, to be utilized and regarded as helpful by Left political movements. I wanted the students in my classroom to work on behalf of the oppressed, to go out into the world and make a difference. I wanted my writing to be immediately translatable into Left political concerns. And I did as much because the politics I had, to profane a traditionally theological term, ‘called’ me to do so.
Eventually, I found that the medieval apophatic and mystical literatures I had long since studied offered enticing critiques of lives that were grounded with an unwavering sense of purpose. As some may know, these medieval texts have become quite fashionable. Such apophatic (from the Greek apophasis, which means ‘unsaying’) and mystical writers were edgier than many of their religious contemporaries. Insofar as they refused to distinguish between heresy and orthodoxy, self and God, good and evil, pleasure and pain, they angered the religious authorities of the day. While not choosing the monastic path of silence, these medieval apophatic and mystical writers constantly ‘speak not’ of God. This speaking not of God or unsaying of God’s nature entailed statements such as God is not wealth, God is not good, God is not a man, God is not knowable. It is not difficult to imagine how statements such as ‘God is unknowable,’ ‘God is unrepresentable,’ and ‘the Beyond can only be spoken of in terms of what it is not’ aggravated those who claimed to know who God was and why a life should be lived.
This is not to say that these apophatic and mystical figures never betrayed their apophatic sensibilities and spoke positively (otherwise called cataphatically) of who God was. Indeed, most of the figures who spoke apophatically did so in relation to the cataphatic—rarely, if ever, was the constant apophatic unsaying of God and the Beyond perpetually practiced without recourse into the cataphatic.
Nonetheless, there exists in these medieval literatures, and in the work of many modern figures who are influenced by these literatures, a radical embrace of life’s whylessness. If one is unable to determine what is Beyond, then it would be inconsistent to ground oneself with a resolute sense of purpose. In a world absent of ultimate, immediate, and transcendent meaning, these mystics were at a loss. Maintaining that God is not representable within the limits of language or reason often meant that medieval mystical and apophatic writers resided in a land without signs, in a cloud of unknowing. It is this grounding of oneself in nothingness, a living in the void, so to speak, that bequeaths a whylessness.
Such an apophatic and mystical whylessness is quite different than the many people who live with an overflowing sense of meaning. Conservatives are determined to set back the clock to some imagined time when families were valued, men did not have sex with each other, and racial minorities were obedient and subservient to the strictures of white supremacy. Such determination gives conservatives an ultimate meaning. The same can be said of progressives. Indeed, as the term suggests, progressives see themselves as being on the right side of history. Refusing to let history backslide and succumb to reactionary politics, progressives work for further inclusion within the preexisting institutions and structures of society. The list goes on: Marxists fight for the revolution, capitalists fight for power, Christians fight for conversion. Grounded in meaning and conviction, such parties are quick to answer, ‘but why?’
Could it be that these mystics and apophatics knew each attempt to determine a why, each occasion in which a justification for one’s life is offered, is but the rejection of understanding their life as intrinsically good and just? This mystical whylessness is an acute recognition that locating meaning and purpose, a why, in the unfolding of your life is to deny that your life does not need a motivating factor to be good and just.
Eckhart and Being Good for Nothing
Let’s consider the words of one late 13th century German mystic known as Meister Eckhart. In “Sermon 5,” one of Eckhart’s better known sermons, he states:
“… you should perform all your works without asking, ‘Why?’ I say truly: So long as you perform your works for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, or for God’s sake, or for the sake of your eternal blessedness, and you work them from without, you are going completely astray. . . If anyone went on for a thousand years asking of life: ‘Why are you living?’ life, if it could answer would only say: ‘I live so that I may live.’ That is because life lives out of its own ground and springs from its own source, and so it lives without asking why it is itself living.”
In order to see how Eckhart adamantly insists on living without a why, one neither has to comprehend Eckhart’s theological differentiation between the knowable ‘God’ and the unknowable nothingness of the ‘Godhead’ nor understand Eckhart’s departure from earlier apophatic traditions and writers. It suffices to know that, for Eckhart, living so that one may live, is to detach oneself from the world, to become nothing and rid oneself of your will. Such whylessness entails that one’s life depends not on its productivity, its ability to fulfill a given purpose, or a disciplined forging of a why. Life is lived so that life may be lived; life is not a utility but a beauty absence of any and all ends-driven mediation or labor.
Given many people search for a place in world and usefully work so that they may achieve what they think the world needs, Eckhart’s life without a why, one which leads to a ‘calling the world dead,’ comes across as scandalous. Consider our earlier examples of those who find a robustness of meaning in life. Such meaning is derived from a pursuit, a process, of ‘building a life.’ Meaning for the conservative is in the process of setting the clocks back. Meaning for the progressive is in speeding the clock forward. In other words, meaning and purpose are placed into a relation with history and it’s the duty of a given conservative or progressive to work for an era of history. Even for the Marxist, meaning is achieved in reaching that final revolution that is the riddle of history solved. The path of history, whatever direction it may follow, is what determines the meaning and why of such lives.
Eckhart’s life without a why is a refusal to work for some era in world history; more radically, it refuses that one should have to work for the world at all. Eckhart, like several other medieval and modern mystics, participate in no such relation with history. Crucially, this is far from espousing an idiotic position of ‘not being political.’ Such an opinion not only erroneously imagines that a position of neutrality is possible, but that indifference to suffering is somehow virtuous.
Relatedly, a life without a why does not necessitate one vacates themselves of any and all political involvement. The categorical difference, though, is that continual participation in union meetings, actions, community organizing, and rallies does not ground or propel one; such actions are what I and others do to survive. However, I do hold, along with other scholars of mysticism, that mystical whylessness maps onto a politics of refusal, of preferring not to. Such a politics of refusal is how various communities survive and reproduce themselves in manners far from what we deem as properly political. Withdrawing from unjust political institutions, of which there is no shortage, and finding whyless ways of living, loving, and friendship that refuse this world are what a mystical (non)politics might look like.
Rather, not invested in a future that will never be their own nor a past that is but imagined, the goodness of the mystical life is located precisely in its absence of meaning. Never deferring the culmination of history, meaning, and the righting of wrongs to a distant point in the future that they work on behalf of, mystics empty themselves of all relations with the world. In not working for the world, in emptying themselves of all savors, wants, and desires, they become good for nothing.
Uselessly Teaching
There was nothing necessarily wrong or immature about my earlier determination to teach, write, and research in such a way that would be beneficial to Left politics. However, such purpose and utility robbed the students in the room of a goodness that knows nothing of purpose and utility. As Lee Edelman’s work on uselessness and education claims, teaching need not be invested in the reproduction of this world, in the creation of students for the workplace, or in the furthering of certain political ends—it can be a whyless endeavor.
I do not take it that this means what is useless or whyless is de facto good. War, in some sense, is useless—it is a massive killing of people who would otherwise be useful laborers. Additionally, many luxury goods are useless, they rely on intense labor and extraction which serve no utility. As such, uselessness and whylessness, and this is a point the philosopher George Bataille makes in The Accursed Share, are either glorious or catastrophic. Writing, idleness, leisure, ornamentation, and inoperativity are glorious manifestations of uselessness.
Nevertheless, I found that my why behind teaching and the whys that preceded it were unstable. That is, doing work that was propitious to my why often felt futile, worthless, and meaningless. I was overwhelmed with feeling that my work was purposeless and would not make a difference. In a sense, reading these mystical and apophatic writings allowed me to revel in rather than repress and purge these feelings of purposelessness and inutility. Teaching for the sake of teaching and writing for the sake of writing can be a radical refusal of this world and its compulsive demand to be useful and good for something. My life and work need not be justified by the ends they may or may not achieve. The merits of my writing and teaching are not dependent on their ability to usher in an age of egalitarian politics. Writing and teaching need not even be a labor of love, for a whyless life exists outside of the logics of labor and work, production and reproduction.
In Defense of Circular Reasoning
Perhaps asking ‘why did Robinson jump?’ is the wrong question. And perhaps what I found so striking in the film’s ending was that Robinson’s jump was whyless. There was a plethora of reasons for him to exit the ring and build a better life, but he did not do so. It was senseless for him to stay in the ring and sacrifice his life. I imagine that if Robinson was asked why he stayed in the ring, he would only be able to give a circular and, for many, unsatisfying answer: “I stayed in the ring because that’s what I do.”
We are often too quick to answer for our lives, to justify ourselves and our actions. Medieval mystics such as Eckhart show us how corrosive it is to compulsively account for ourselves, how it is a shame we are told to find and discover a purpose for our lives. Idle, smell the roses, stay in bed embracing your lover, the beauty of a mystically whyless life is that it is good for nothing.
