I had an interesting conversation with a friend a few days ago. He is studying theology and during our chat the following train of thought came to me. Humans, to meet with God, can only do so by being open to divine silence. This is done by transcending the snare of language, the roots of thought. And this can only come about by firstly recognising language as a snare. To my mind, this is essentially what serious religious practices entail — the slow process of freeing oneself from the web of language, creating an opening for the divine.
Is it possible that animals, being bereft of language, have already attained this state, that humans have to work so hard for? Maybe it’s humans who are the last in line for divine attainment, being destined to have to take these long arduous spiritual paths through and beyond the thicket of language. (In a previous post I mentioned the Romantic theory that language is a living being — does this make language a parasite and humans the host…?)
We can imagine, after years of meditation, prayer or spiritual practice, at last a clearing in this thicket opening up. It is empty of words, but populated already with animals, who have been waiting all the time for our arrival as newly-redeemed beings freed from language; at last cured of the sickness that Nietzsche attributed to us, the animal that calls itself ‘human’ — or the animal that language wants to call ‘human’…
The story goes that Nietzsche’s own last action as a sane man was to try and protect a horse from being flogged by its master in Turin. Behind the apocalyptic rhetoric, there is a tenderness and sophisticated morality in Nietzsche’s philosophy that I have always found a bit moving. It is no coincidence that animals feature so prominently in his work. He lapsed into dementia after this episode and spent the rest of his life in an unresponsive state. For us, a key signifier of his madness is of course this unresponsiveness. But like the reticence of animals and writing in Derrida, maybe Nietzsche’s madness was the final attainment of a specifically animalistic silence. Zarathustra was after all emphatic that transcending the impoverished human condition, rising to the state of Ubermensch, was simultaneously a ‘downgoing.
And finally,… two cultural items related to this post that (aside from all of Nietzsche’s work…!) are worth checking out.
Brian Aldiss’ science fiction classic Hothouse, which features a parasitic morel fungus that grows on the heads of its simple-minded human hosts, and bestows eloquence and intelligence on them.
The Turin Horse directed by Bela Tarr. One of my favourite films of the last ten years. It follows the aforementioned Nietzschien horse and its owner, beginning a few hours after the incident that marked the break in the philosopher’s sanity. Minimal and apocalyptic with very little dialogue and way too short at two and a half hours.