What if Everything was Unspeakably Awful?
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche retells the ancient Greek legend of the satyr Silenus and his unspeakable secret. Silenus was said to be the most ancient, wise, and drunk of the followers of Dionysus, god of wine and divinely inspired madness. His wisdom was known and sought, but he did not share it freely. Thus he was hunted, as the story goes, by a curious King Midas. The king wanted to know what Silenus knew and was willing to do anything to get it. After an arduous hunt through deep forests, Silenus was in the hands of the king and questioned. King Midas asked, “What is the most desirable thing among humankind?”
Midas must have had a philosopher’s spirit. He asked a classic question. “What is good, what do we, or should we, really want?” Yet Silenus resisted and responded, “Why do you compel me to tell you those things of which it is better you should remain ignorant?” Persistent, the king asked again. At threat of force, Silenus exclaimed, “...he lives with the least worry who knows not his misfortune; but for humans, the best for them is not to be born at all… not to be is best… the next to this is, when we are born, to die as soon as we can.” At the end of a quest for knowledge, Midas is chastised for his curiosity and told it’s better to be dead. What moved Silenus to reach his conclusion is unclear. Perhaps he knew something about divine and infernal mysteries. Maybe he had lived long enough to know life was simply suffering. In part, it’s unsettling because our misfortune is unnamed.
Rights / Martin Lopatka ‘Silenus (1st Century AD)’ license
There’s yet another tragedy: Silenus is immortal. He cannot have what he knows to be best. We can guess why he was famed for his drunkenness. Did Silenus and the other followers of Dionysus drink to cope? Maybe their ‘divine madness’ was the result of their ‘wisdom’. Imagine what life Midas might live after his journey. Would he drown his thoughts in drink? Kill himself? Would he tell the truth - to himself, to others?
The story is unnerving because it contradicts a common optimism. Philosophy is the ‘love of wisdom’ - and if you ask someone on the street, they’d likely say they love it too. Idioms such as ‘truth sets you free’ and ‘knowledge is power’ capture this popular view. The alternative, that ‘ignorance is bliss’ haunts our optimism. In fact, it’s the foundation of an entire genre of horror.
Maybe you have heard the term ‘Lovecraftian’ or know its namesake author. If not, you likely recognize the name or at least the image of Cthulhu, a creature Lovecraft invented. H.P. Lovecraft was an early 20th century American author in the genre of ‘weird fiction’ and horror. His style represents a literary tradition which includes authors like Edgar Allen Poe and R.W. Chambers, whose works often feature characters progressively consumed by madness.
Madness is a hallmark of Lovecraftian horror. In many stories, explorers and scientists discover disturbing truths in their pursuit of knowledge. In the story At The Mountains of Madness a group of scholars makes an expedition to Antarctica. There they discover strange alien beings in the ice. The scholars unveil the lost history of this alien civilization that dwarfs, and likely threatens, humanity. Similarly, the protagonists in The Call of Cthulhu discover a malevolent and massive leviathan, Cthulhu, sleeping beneath the sea, waiting to wake up someday and destroy the world. Both tales follow characters in pursuit of knowledge that discover unspeakable horrors at the edge of human experience and understanding. The findings are so tragic that it threatens their sanity.
Other artists have contended that “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”. Lovecraftian horror imagines the opposite. We don’t see the monsters if we don’t look for them. With its leviathans, tentacled beasts, evil aliens, and elder gods it dramatizes the proposition that if we follow our curiosity too far, we won’t like what we find.
Lovecraft expresses the outlook of his horror in a quote too good to abridge:
“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
In idiomatic terms, Lovecraft tells us that ignorance is bliss and that curiosity will either kill the cat, drive it insane, or make it live in denial and develop a drinking habit.
Lovecraftian characters who glimpse the horrors of the universe are much like Midas after interrogating Silenus. They both possess burdensome knowledge. These stories explore a worldview which holds that the universe and the human condition might be - well - awful. The long reach of Lovecraft’s influence is felt today in recent shows like True Detective and Lovecraft Country and films like The Color Out of Space and The Lighthouse. You’ll find similar themes in them exploring how truth can be maddeningly horrible.
So why did Nietzsche share the story of Silenus? It can be read as an allegory for the philosopher’s journey, even humanity's. Nietzsche wrote, “The Greeks knew and felt the terrors and horrors of existence; in order to live at all, they had to place in front of these things the resplendent, dream-born figures of the Olympians.” In this view, culture is a coping mechanism that veils unfortunate truths with a fabricated optimism.
We can imagine the story of Silenus or Lovecraft’s tales as thought experiments. If the truth is that the human condition is awful, precarious, and frightening, how do we respond as individuals and as communities? Nietzsche imagines that to avoid the maddening horror of existence, the Greeks created elaborate fictions. Silenus, doomed not to die, drank. How we ‘ought’ to respond to the horror of Silenus, or Cthulhu for that matter, is a topic all its own. Though it’s worth entertaining the thought: if Silenus is right, what then?