A History of the Apocalypse

I've long intended to write a book with this title, so I'm not surprised that several people have already beat me to it.  Since my own version will obviously never exist, I propose to follow in the footsteps of the great Stanislaw Lem and just give a brief summary and review of this non-existent book.  This only seems like a tangent to our discussion of Nietzsche & Philosophy.  In fact, the thesis of my forthcoming non-existent book is a direct application of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, and the fourth chapter of Deleuze's book (From Ressentiment to Bad Conscience) is clearly an attempt to (further) systematize Nietzsche's "most systematic book". (NP, 87)

I realized this morning, while reading that stentorian apologist for our current religion of growth, that the essence of apocalyptic thinking is actually quite straightforward.  The idea of the apocalypse is a perfect expression of the will to nothingness -- nihilism.  It flourishes amongst those who consider their times degenerate, and it expresses a desire (consciously or not) for those times to end.  Apocalyptic thinking stems from a desperate desire for change coupled with a perception of its impossibility.  It's the final refuge of a life or culture that has exhausted all its forces of creation and re-creation.  As a result, whatever the new mystic state believers imagine to follow the apocalypse, the important point is that the only way there is through death, through a total sweeping away of the degenerate, but nevertheless tenacious, structure of the present times.  The apocalypse is a curious case of life trying to renew itself by destroying itself, a paradox which accounts for the fact that, while the focus is always on the impending doom, we actually long for the apocalypse as salvation.  This paroxysm of fear contains a secret joy.  The world deserves to end.

Or as Nietzsche put it: "Life against life" (NP, 96).  Apocalyptic thinking is the purest expression of the ascetic ideal that he examines in the third essay of the Genealogy of Morals.  The ascetic ideal is the symptom of a sick, exhausted, and suffering life reduced to a will to nothingness -- but this is still a will!   As Deleuze points out countless times, even the negative will is a still a will to power.  The only force that can be turned against life as a whole is a particular type of life; the world beyond is always fabricated to serve ends within this world.  This is why the ascetic ideal always plays such an ambiguous role in Nietzsche's thinking.  On the one hand, it is the great enemy that he tracks through all its various incarnations -- Judaism, Christianity, Platonism, Science, even Atheism (GM, 3.27).  On the other hand, he can't help but admire the inventiveness of a type of life that at first seems to have painted itself into a corner.  And not just admire it -- it often seems as if the ascetic ideal is for Nietzsche not only a necessary step in some abstract path of spiritual development, but the very core of his own experience, as if the enemy he were fighting were really himself, or his own shadow.  He himself is, after all, heir apparent to the long tradition of degeneration that he believes characterizes the entire history of Western culture.  And yet he is uncompromisingly hard on the decadence he discovers within himself.  It would be hard to find a life more dedicated to the ascetic ideal of philosophy than Nietzsche's.  The man literally thought himself to death.  But at the same time it would be hard to find any greater critic of the self-denying "virtues" embodied in this ideal.  He understood the drives beneath this ideal of renunciation so thoroughly, that he ended up using it for precisely the opposite purpose from the one it normally serves.  Nietzsche makes the ascetic ideal a means by which a powerful and active life cuts into itself and destroys the negative within itself, rather than the endpoint of a diminished and reactive life trying to preserve itself at its lowest level.  As we've seen now many times over the past year, he takes nihilism all the way to the limit where it overcomes itself.  He lives through his own apocalypse.

Nietzsche understood, having lived it himself, what consti­tutes the mystery of a philosopher's life. The philosopher appro­priates the ascetic virtues - humility, poverty, chastity - and makes them serve ends completely his own, extraordinary ends that are not very ascetic at all; in fact. (SPP, 3)