You arrive at the auditorium a quarter of an hour early, certain and unshakable in your knowledge of the world and its characteristics. Cartesian scepticism was cast aside with contemptuous laughter, and Humean doubt seemed a touch too hysterical to be taken too seriously, but your friends who told you about this lecture? They told you it was some pretty strong shit. This shit is real, they said, eyes glazed and red with the tell-tale level of sleep deprivation that marks all philosophy students who have had to face, with dawning terror, the unspeakable reality of a deadline.
You note in passing, with a touch of disappointment, that the Kantian Glasses referred to in the flyer are, in fact, metaphorical - and not, as you had hoped, commemorative souvenirs for those in attendance. Taking seat amidst a sea of grey jackets with leather elbow-pads, you are unconsciously aware of your expectations, that the world is as it appears, that effect follows cause, that even if you're hallucinating time must surely exist for it to be possible that two differing states could ever exist (and furthermore, you have the most banal hallucinations known to man). Sadly, as Kant mounts the stage and delivers a sermon on reason and its precise limitations as dry as your sex-life after 12 months in the Sahara, in the meticulously managed prose emerges a new, unshakable truth: You know nothing. Reality is inaccessible as all you have ever known is how to perceive the human experience of an essentially inaccessible world. All you have ever seen is the inside of your own eyes, the noumenal reality is beyond the scope of human experience and we can say nothing of it.
Disconcerting, this seems. Stunned, amazed, you sit in silence reckoning with the certain knowledge that of reality in itself nothing is certain. Lost in your own head, admitting in wry amusement to yourself that that is all you have ever been, you perceive the auditorium again as a public space rather than merely a shared delusion, and realize with a start that Immanuel Kant has been replaced with a young Mr. Hegel. Left and right you turn to find fellow travellers sitting rapt with expressions of attentive incomprehension. Before you stands a man so famous that the task of making sense now falls to his audience. In philosophical circles, Mr. Hegel, as it is said, 'has arrived'. About the only part of his lecture that is intelligible to you is the part where he is crushed by one of the stage lights, a tragic accident in an otherwise pleasant evening.
In a completely unrelated note, in no way affiliated with the events that have just transpired, Herr Schopenhauer arrives precisely on schedule, and must certainly be shocked to discover Herr Hegel's demise, being that Arthur was nowhere near the auditorium at the time it had happened... a lifetime spent following a strict and unchanging schedule is proof enough for that, and the satisfied smirk Herr Schopenhauer sports can be attributed to a great jest expressed by a sharp-witted fellow at supper. Sidestepping the shattered stage-light and muttering some cryptic allusion to the Sword of Damocles, Artur Schopenhauer attends the podium and addresses the audience.
You had been left lost as consequence of Kant's metaphysics, unsure of your place in the world and what could truly be said of it. Hearing what Herr Schopenhauer has to say of it, you feel perhaps you were better leaving it with Kant. Your life is characterised as exclusively an exercise in suffering and misery, doomed to swing between unfulfilled desires and tragic boredom, and you discover it is the unique quality of the human state to be able to experience not only the pains of now, but the dread of the pains to come and the phantom pains of yesterday (and still more, the pains of others and the pains of those who do not even exist). Beyond this human existence of pure suffering, Schopenhauer discusses the nature of the world as it is in itself, a vast striving Will that blindly hungers and consumes itself for it is all that is. A noumenal hydra of stupid, directionless belligerence, a self-destructive beast that always hungers. You feel an intense urge to hug a puppy, and acknowledge that the Mr. Happy t-shirt the MC is wearing displays a degree of unwitting irony that hipsters can only dream of.
After light refreshments, mercilessly free of hemlock (perhaps you should've caught the seminar on Greek philosophy), the fourth and final speaker graces the stage. Nietzsche grants Schopenhauer's contention that the world, far from a Garden of Eden, is in fact a dark forest full of primeval terror, where nature does not bear the countenance of prancing deer, happy hoppy bunnies, and bluejays that perch on the outstretched fingers of Disney princesses. Nature is red in tooth and claw, the prancing deer are eaten by motherfucking bears because bears are bad-ass, and the Disney princess is married off at the age of 14 to a lecherous old Duke because it's politically expedient and God clearly loves a family that marries into a powerful military dynasty. Given the granted harshness of reality, Nietzsche prescribes two teaspoons of cement to help you harden-the-fuck-up in your endeavour to seek your own inevitable and overreaching destruction in order to become something greater than the tame, utilitarian eunuch you would otherwise spend your life as. The desperate flight to escape the suffering of human existence that Schopenhauer proposed is derided, such pessimism is worthy of contempt! The belief in absolutes and categorical imperatives that Kant espoused is merely the shadow of God tainting the supposed rationality of Continental philosophy: the time has come to acknowledge that God is dead, to shatter the tablets of commandments and seek new truths, and acknowledge that nothing has meaning beyond your strength to assert it! Might is right and the world truly is what we make of it!
You're not entirely sure WHAT Nietzsche was actually trying to say, and you're pretty sure there were more holes in his argument than you'd find in the plot of a Michael Bay film (and all the neo-nazis in the audience made you just a little uneasy), but you can't help but feel unjustifiably optimistic upon leaving the lecture theatre.
You stop off at a pub for a nightcap, and spot a familiar face sitting alone at the bar. You can't believe your luck!
No sooner are you sat next to Nietzsche do you discover why he drinks alone. The world is not yet ready for the discussion of his Level 12 Dwarven Ranger, the perfect combination of the Dionysian fury of nature and the Apollonian restraint of the hunter. Over the course of three hours you are subjected to an exhaustive lesson in feat optimisation, a period you begin to mentally refer to as 'The Golden Time' when the begins the awkwardly enthusiastic description of the Ranger's quest to win the heart of the Centaur Queen. Somehow without needing to ask, you know there is slashfic of this already befouling the internet.
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| My axe is +3 vs. Intellectual Rigour! |
Prying yourself away by a clever ruse of singing the praises of narrative-heavy freeform gaming, you manage to escape. You lay down in bed, your head swimming and your sense of reality remarkably untroubled by the string of dysfunctional thinkers you've witnessed tonight. Idly you wonder if it's too late to study commerce...
