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Two Learning to Swim
- Fordham University Press
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68 Is that the point? Pointlessness. Is that us, pulling on our boots, preparing to trudge off in pursuit of pointlessness, in pursuit of no longer being in pursuit of anything? The suggestion that we may solve the problem of life’s point by embracing pointlessness is an easy mark, maybe even self-defeating: the paradox of trudging boots. But consider swimming. Hegel mocked the pseudo wise resolution to learn to swim before going into the water. In the right frame of mind, it can appear that learning to swim is simply impossible. Either you can swim, or you can’t. If you can swim, you can. If you can’t swim, you’ll drown. So learning to swim is impossible . And yet all over the world, children return from their swimming lessons alive, and better swimmers too. Hegel was counting on our recognizing the obvious mistake: Between swimming and drowning there is a space within which the children play, and learn to swim. With any luck, the easy assault on pointlessness will succumb to a similar sort of critique. And so it is: Between life’s having a single point, and life’s having no point, there T w o Learning to Swim But to want to have cognition before we have any is as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus to learn to swim before he ventured into the water. —G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic Learning to Swim 69 is a positive conception of pointlessness that evades the paradox of trudging boots. We are already familiar with the negative conception of pointlessness that delivers us to nihilism. Here, from the middle of the 1880s, is how Nietzsche characterizes it: From time immemorial we have ascribed the value of an action, a character, an existence, to the intention, the purpose for the sake of which one has acted or lived: this age-old idiosyncrasy finally takes a dangerous turn—provided, that is, that the absence of intention and purpose in events comes more and more to the forefront of consciousness. Thus there seems to be in preparation a universal disvaluation: “Nothing has any meaning”—this melancholy sentence means “All meaning lies in intention, and if intention is altogether lacking, then meaning is altogether lacking, too.” (Nietzsche [1901] 1967b, #666) Nietzsche is providing one genealogy of nihilism. So long as our life in this world had a purpose, a meaning, a point, there was a reason to go on living. But if our life were without purpose, meaning, point, there would be no reason to go on living, not even to help those who come after us. If our life is without purpose, there is no reason to feel good about working for our children or our children’s children, for if existence is pointless, then it is pointless, and not just pointless for us. If existence is pointless, then working for the good of others is spending one’s pointless time on earth pointlessly stockpiling canned goods so our children will be able to spend their pointless lives pointlessly stockpiling canned goods for their children, and so on. This is the full-fledged negative version of pointlessness. In the face of such pointlessness, dying soon is only second best. However, in the same paragraph, Nietzsche observes that what is needed is a “more rigorous critique” of the concept of purpose. The negative result I just recited presupposes that if existence were to have any value it would have to have a purpose. But this leaves the notion of purpose untouched. If we came to see purposes themselves as artificial segmentations of the continuous process of existence, then this melancholy, negative version of pointlessness would evaporate. Nietzsche continues: “One must understand that an action is never caused by a purpose; that purpose and means are interpretations whereby certain points in an event are emphasized and selected at the expense of other points, which indeed, form the [44.200.77.59] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:03 GMT) 70 Learning to Swim majority, that every single time something is done with a purpose in view, something fundamentally different and other occurs;1 that every purposive action is like the supposed purposiveness of the heat the sun gives off: the enormously greater part is squandered; a part hardly worth considering serves a “purpose,” has “meaning”; that a “purpose” and its “means” provide an indescribably imprecise description, which can, indeed, issue commands as a prescription, as a “will,” but...