Phoebe Bridgers is having her moment. Only three years after her first solo album and with successful collaborations between, Bridgers released her 2020 album, Punisher, to critical acclaim and popular enthusiasm. There is meaning and emotion in this album that is helping folks cope during an uncommonly fractious election year exacerbated by the stress and loneliness of quarantine.
But to pretend that Punisher occupies its own particular space is to grossly overlook the zeitgeist of the broader modern era. Bridgers’ moment is the moment she has inherited from nearly two centuries of popular philosophy. Right in the middle of the album, ‘Chinese Satellite’ is a track that evokes the thought of two of the 19th century’s greatest thinkers and a common ambivalence between materialism and meaning; the song is a tragic continuation of the modern drama in an album fit to bursting with it.
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In The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche declared that God is dead; that was in 1882. The consequences of this statement are still materializing 138 years later, in large part due to the fact that very few people take Nietzsche’s corresponding philosophy seriously, comprehensively. But to be fair to a world that still gladly embraces the lingering shadow of God’s waning presence, it would seem that Nietzsche himself had difficulty maintaining the anarchy of a philosophy devoid of anything transcendent.
Nietzsche posited that if man could completely renounce God, his energies or spirit or purpose could build up within him and rise ever higher. Whatever Nietzsche thought this anthropomorphic goal was, it does not fit easily into the logic of his own renunciation of the divine. It turns out, that when you reject the transcendent elements of humanity and the universe, there is not much left on which to argue.
Nietzsche was very clear:
God is dead… Let us beware of thinking that the world is a living being… We have some notion of the nature of the organic; and we should not reinterpret the exceedingly derivative, late, rare, accidental, that we perceive only on the crust of the earth and make of it something essential, universal, and eternal…
The astral order in which we live is an exception; this order and the relative duration that depends on it have again made the possible an exception of exceptions; the formation of the organic. The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos – in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms… it does not observe any laws either. Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature… Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type…
When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds?
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Random House, 1974
In 2020, these divine shadows still darken our minds. Scientific enterprise is built on a conception of universal laws, which Nietzsche rejected. Meaning is necessarily developed within a system, which Nietzsche rejected. We live and hope to improve life because we feel that there is something worth working toward, a thing that transcends our local life and our passing generation: justice perhaps, or love. Nietzsche rejects these too.
If life is merely another form of death, few are disassociated or dispassionate enough to treat their own life or the lives of others as if death were the same thing. We want something more, but this desire for life is overwhelmed by the general death that spreads out in the wake of God’s death. It may be rare to encounter someone whose words and deeds (the measure of earnest belief) reflect a total abandonment of the divine, but our partial renunciation is bad enough.
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With the lyrics of ‘Chinese Satellite,’ Bridgers is well within this general modern perspective, which prefers the secular and the scientific against the spiritual. With Nietzsche, the song’s speaker defaults to the assumptive knowledge that there is nothing transcendent. Some people may pretend to believe in or perhaps suspend their disbelief in the spiritual, but reasonable people do not act so irrationally.
Took a tour to see the stars
but they weren’t out tonight,
so I wished hard on a Chinese Satellite.
I want to believe.
Instead I look at the sky, and I feel nothing.
You know I hate to be alone.
I want to be wrong.
Long ago, it could have been reasonable for a common person to go outside at night and look to the stars to find the divine, something that literally transcends the material of earth. Modern man is not so naively fortunate. However, it is a bald-faced lie to say that we have stopped looking. We might take a tour in LA to see the other-worldly beauty of Hollywood stars. Or maybe we will look to our light-polluted skies where we can only see the height of man’s technological achievement. Either way, we want to believe that maybe we can create our own transcendent meaning. We do not want to live in a world that feels so empty. We have thoroughly convinced ourselves that our current scientific understanding explains the universe well enough, if not comprehensively, but what an unsatisfying thing to be convinced of. We want to believe in more. We cannot, but we would love to be proved wrong.
Here is where our second 19th century mind comes in, one that was more willing to admit these pesky human considerations, compulsively so. Fyodor Dostoevsky released Notes from Underground in 1864, 18 years before The Gay Science was published, in full view of the modern disposition that Nietzsche formally ushered in with his notorious proclamation. Dostoevsky saw where modern thought was trending, but would not abandon man’s humanity in deference to man’s reason. We have to admit that his approach does make some sense; what is man’s reason if not a part of his humanity?
Underground, the narrator of Notes, would not denigrate the power of man’s reason. In fact, he claims to be a great respecter of intelligence and learning. He does, however, temper this respect with a wholistic understanding of what it means to be human:
Reason, gentlemen, is a fine thing, that is unquestionable, but reason is only reason and satisfies only man’s reasoning capacity, while wanting is a manifestation of the whole life – that is, the whole of human life, including reason and various little itches. And though our life in this manifestation often turns out to be a bit of trash, still it is life and not just the extraction of a square root. [italics mine]
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Random House, 1993.
The narrative portion of Notes from Underground goes on to show that the narrator is far from a strictly logical character, allowing an overdeveloped sense of personal pride to lead to the most irrational string of decisions, often contrary to equally irrational intentions. But even if we cannot say that Underground is consistently logical, he is unwaveringly human.
The most significant contributor to Underground’s flaws is his unfounded confidence in his intelligence. His imperfect and circular reasoning keeps him chasing his tail and never progressing far in one direction. While he is still introducing his perspective, Underground states that he envies those who are able to quiet their minds well enough to act with simple assurance. He claims, “consciousness, in my opinion, is man’s greatest misfortune.” The more conscious the man, the argument seems to go, the more unfortunate.
Dostoevsky’s character looks at the brute facts of the material world that Nietzsche found so unarguably fundamental, and he struggles to accept them. He sees life as some sort of maze, inevitabilities as walls; he runs circles around it all, trying to contextualize and explain away whatever he can. He claims that he is disingenuous compared to one who can accept the facts easily. Of this man, he says:
Such a gentleman just lunges straight for his goal like an enraged bull, horns lowered, and maybe only a wall can stop him. (Incidentally: before a wall, these gentlemen – that is, ingenuous people and active figures – quite sincerely fold. For them a wall is not a deflection, as it is, for example, for us, people who think and consequently do nothing; it is not a pretext for turning back, a pretext which our sort usually doesn’t believe in but is always very glad to have. No, they fold in all sincerity. For them a wall possesses something soothing, morally resolving and final, perhaps even mystical.)
The thinking person, the deeply contemplative person, is someone who will have a harder time moving forward into simple action with simple conviction. She will be constantly reimagining her situation and reforming her self-image. This is the kind of person the song’s speaker is when she sings, “I’ve been running around in circles pretending to be myself. Why would somebody do this on purpose when they could do something else?”
Underground answers the question: no one would live this way if she could live another way. He says of his ingenuous counterpart, “I envy such a man to the point of extreme bile.” The contemplative person is cursed with a consciousness that is formed from suffering and perpetuates suffering, an imagination for unlikely possibilities and a knowledge of how foolish we are kicking against the goads.
Still, I do not want to be [the ingenuous man] on those conditions in which I see him… Man will never renounce real suffering, that is, destruction and chaos. Suffering – why, this is the sole cause of consciousness… still man loves it and will not exchange it for any satisfactions. Consciousness, for example, is infinitely higher than [brute fact].
So again, why would somebody live like this on purpose when she could do something else? The answer is that she wouldn’t; she can’t do something else. She is compelled to use the intelligence and contemplative nature she has. There would be no way to quiet the thoughts that swirl around in her mind. She struggles to find satisfaction in her own successes, her own self-conception, but heaven forbid that she would dismiss her concerns insincerely.
The speaker opens ‘Chinese Satellite’ reflecting on her felt insufficiencies, finding a handful of songs she loves and lamenting the fact that she did not write them. She goes on to drown out the simple blessings of nature with these songs on repeat, wearing them out by overplaying them. Her dissatisfaction is not easily quelled as she hears the songs over and over, but like Underground, she leans into the suffering, fully conscious of her pain. And slowly the pain subsides as the meaning in the songs (and in her listening to them) disappears in the repetitive and mundane. Though it is painful, there is something in her that wants this.
Underground tells us that “wanting is very often, and even for the most part, completely and stubbornly at odds with reason.” Bridgers nods in assent.
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The second verse opens on a scene where the speaker and a loved one are counterprotesting some evangelical cause associated with the sanctity of human life. Her second refuses to affirm a transcendent spirituality. He says, “I think when you’re gone it’s forever.” The speaker agrees intellectually, as the thoroughgoing atheist must, but now that he has passed, she cannot easily maintain her disbelief.
But you know I’d stand on the corner
embarrassed with a picket sign
if it meant I would see you when I die.
Sometimes when I can’t sleep,
it’s just a matter of time before I’m hearing things.
Swore I could feel you though the walls,
but that’s impossible.
I want to believe
that if I go outside I’ll see a tractor beam
coming to take me to where I’m from.
I want to go home.
Horror: to debase oneself so completely as to join the cause of the Christians. But perhaps spirituality is where wanting inevitably leads.
Again, Dostoevsky performs his duties as sage, preempting the emotionless atheism of Nietzsche and undercutting it. He understands what Nietzsche would call ‘fact.’ The Russian prefers to call it a stone wall:
What stone wall? Well, of course, the laws of nature, the conclusions of natural science, mathematics. Once it’s proved to you, for example that you descended from an ape, there’s no use making a wry face, just take it for what it is. Once it’s proved to you that, essentially speaking, one little drop of your own fat should be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow men, and that in this result all so-called virtues and obligations and other ravings and prejudices will finally be resolved, go ahead and accept it, there’s nothing to be done, because two times two is – mathematics. Try objecting to that.
Nietzsche’s ‘fact’ is Dostoevsky’s ‘impossibility.’ We find similarities between the two. Nietzsche’s fact is more properly conceived of as inevitability, necessity. Fact is fact, not because there are fundamental laws or processes guiding natural phenomena, as science would have us suppose. Fact is fact, not because some eternal and unchanging will inevitably leads to it, as religion suggests. Fact is just fact, an absolute collapse of metaphysical possibility and metaphysical explanation.
Nietzsche claimed there was nothing. Nothing spiritual, metaphysical, material, or properly scientific. Nothing! To engage in the pursuit of the natural laws of science is to believe in the universality of natural law. In this way,
those who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history… it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests – that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine.
In Nietzsche’s anarchic system, one fact establishes infinite impossibilities. Everything that is not is impossible for no reason in particular. Reason, purpose, and cause do not exist in Nietzsche’s atheism. Further, so long as we think and talk about Nietzsche’s system with a reason that transcends these brutal facts, we invalidate it with the reasoning we employ (But don’t feel too bad. I’m pretty sure he did the same thing). No one living is capable of maintaining this philosophy completely. Life in all forms is opposed to it.
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As the title of his seminal work would lead you to believe, Nietzsche was somehow able to find a lighthearted gaiety in his reflections on a life devoid of meaning, purpose, or explanation. He told his reader that true believers in The Gay Science would not find a home in modern Europe; they would find a home nowhere, for belonging implies something more than cold, brutal fact. They were to embark into the void with the excitement of explorers seeking a new world, a new home.
Too often, we moderns set our naïve gaze on the same theoretical horizon, not appreciating how void it remains. We believe that we are basing our hope in science. Very few people toss out the hope of scientific understanding like a real atheist should, as Nietzsche did. Instead, popularizers of science-based secularism say, “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.” Surely the explanations we seek will be found scientifically because science is just so darn true.
We crave the home Nietzsche seemed so eager to leave behind, but we crave it only if it comes with a 100% scientific explanation. Maybe a multiverse will soothe our homesickness. We have been told that is scientific, though evidence remains elusive. Or maybe unimaginably evolved extraterrestrials will fly by, sweep us up with a tractor beam, and let us know that there is more to existence than our disappointing earth-bound, body-bound, sin-bound lives. We have been told that this possibility is scientific too, though it is nothing more than a fairytale without evidence (which is still being sought… ever sought). These farfetched hopes strain the reason we have held so dear, our insistence on mathematical equations that at least touch on the observable. Our flimsy materialist dreams begin to appear far less coherent and less probable than the historical spiritual explanation. But at least they are scientific, right?
Nietzsche would be so disappointed in the modern secularist. He would tell us that these materialist phantoms have their metaphysical germ in the fire of an ancient faith. He would tell us that we are still anthropomorphizing, seeing life where there isn’t any. He would tell us that our modern hopes are still founded on faith, an anemic and revolting one, at that.
Phoebe Bridgers has given us a beautiful and heart-breaking image of the utter deficiencies of our default modern perspective. Nietzsche would reject it. Dostoevsky would reject it. And implicitly, Bridgers rejects it. When we see this, when we truly own up to what we’ve been peddling, maybe it is not so bad to join the evangelicals on the street corner to find the meaning and belonging and justice and love that we so desire.
Or if that is still too distasteful, maybe we should just revisit the Word himself. Maybe the creator of the universe is still more transcendent than we suppose, transcending even the evangelical perspective. Maybe we could yet inherit a heavenly kingdom that will brook no will-to-power nor survival-of-only-the-fittest, no heartless coercion nor alien dominion, no division nor disappointment.
Hopefully our desire for home is not hopeless yet.