The Death Drive vs. The Great Attractor

What goes for the intellect goes double for the will. That is to say, if the intellect is ordered to the true, the will is ordered to the good, so a bad will takes down the intellect with it. Which is why intellectual dishonesty is a sin against both the good and the true. 

Even supposing something is true, the will must assent to it. It must desire and even love the truth, but it can certainly prefer to live in the comfort and safety of fantasy, delusion, and ideology. 

Leftist willpower can even transform math into an expression of racist oppression. But math oppresses everyone equally. My will was perfectly ready to assent to it, but the intellect fell short. Or, the will was lazy, but at least not depraved. I didn't pretend 2+2 = white supremacy.

The events of Genesis 3 appear to have resulted from a bad will, especially if we begin with the Serpent, who certainly knew the truth but willfully propagated the lie. What was Eve's excuse? Perhaps a weak will, but what was Adam's excuse? A weaker will, I suppose. 

Like Homer Simpson, our one weakness is that we're weak. 

This next chapter in The Philosophical Approach to God is on the ascent to God through the dynamism of the will, which presupposes "an a priori orientation toward the good as such." It "is written into the very nature of the will as dynamic faculty before any particular experience of an individual good." 

Removing this transcendent object is like removing the object of the intellect, for like any dynamism, it is only rendered intelligible by its end, which "can be nothing less than the totality of the good." This involves "a pre-conceptual 'background consciousness,'" or "anticipatory grasp"

of the good as somehow present in its depths [of the will], magnetizing and attracting it, luring it to actual fulfillment of its innate potentiality by distinct conscious appropriations of actually existing concrete goods. This is what it means to live volitively in the horizon of the good.

So, the Great Attractor is what renders the dynamisms of both will and intellect intelligible, and this Attractor is one:

A totally unrelated multiplicity of final goals would fragment the unity of the dynamism into an unintelligible, unintegrated multiplicity of drives. 

For example, this is what happens when diversity for its own sake is elevated to the object of the will. Just as "my truth" is no truth at all, "my will" equates to the amoralism of a Nietzsche. It is a blind willfulness that is

ordered precisely toward a non-existent final goal; an active potency ordered toward nothing proportionate to its potentiality; an innate drive toward nothing.

This being the case, "the whole of human life takes on the structure... of frustration and absurdity." 

It reminds me of Freud's death drive, which is (HT Gemini) "a fundamental instinctual drive towards death and destruction. It is often expressed through behaviors such as aggression, repetition compulsion, and self-destructiveness." It seems questionable that such a drive could actually be innate, but Freud nonetheless posited it to account for such destructive and self-defeating clinical phenomena.

Freud proposed the death drive (Thanatos) as one of the two primary instincts that govern human behavior, the other being the life drive (Eros). In his 1920 work, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," Freud famously stated that "the aim of all life is death." This suggests that the ultimate tendency of all living organisms is to return to an inorganic state. 

It is as if death is the telos of life. But prescinding the question of whether or not it is innate, is there not something that looks like a death instinct that afflicts man? If so, it must be the mind parasite of all mind parasites, which again reminds me of original sin. 

Oddly, it reminds me of the self-destructive lead singer of the Doors, Jim Morrison, who openly embraced Nietzshe's nihilism. Just last night I read how, when he contracted syphilis, he considered the upside:

Most people would be scared, or at least upset, if they contracted a potentially lethal STD, but Jim was excited to feel closer to all those disease-ridden nineteenth-century poets and painters and philosophers he idolized. He confided to me that he was going to let the disease go untreated so he could experience what it was like to go insane.

Now, that is commitment. 

He got pretty seriously ill, but he stuck to his guns for a while. Until the pain of urinating got to be too much and he finally went to a doctor (Krieger).    

More generally, the book is full of stories that document what might as well have been a death drive. And of course, in the end, he -- or the death drive -- prevailed, and he successfully returned to an inorganic state by the age of 27.

Kurt Cobain, another illustrious member of the 27 Club, was the same way:

Cobain's lyrics often explored themes of pain, alienation, and a desire to escape from the harsh realities of the world. A desire for the oblivion and comfort of the womb could be seen as a metaphorical representation of wanting to escape this suffering. 

In any event, "whether we like it or not we are committed by the dynamism of final causality built into our nature to affirm implicitly the actual existence of the Infinite Good." But each human is free to reject this telos, and "No logical argument can force me to choose one alternative over the other." Nevertheless,

the luminous fullness of meaningfulness draws me with the whole spontaneous pull of my nature toward the real existence of the Infinite Good as a magnet fully adequate to, even exceeding, the profoundest imaginable reaches of my capacity for love. Full intelligibility lies only this way.

Again, it is as if the infinite positive plenitude of Celestial Central is mirrored by a kind of empty plenitude in man, which is

an image of the divine infinity in silhouette -- in reverse so to speak -- within man, precisely in his possession of an infinite capacity for God, or, more accurately, a capacity for the Infinite, which can be satisfied by nothing less. 

This negative image points unerringly toward the positive infinity of its original, and is intrinsically constituted by this relation of tendential capacity 

In short, "our dynamism for the infinite turns out to be a remarkably eloquent reverse image and pointer toward God as He is in Himself, beyond all possible finites."

So, how does this all work out in practice? We'll save it for next time.