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What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

So wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in section 341 his book The Gay Science in 1882. It describes the implications of one of Nietzsche’s central ideas, the Eternal Return, which posits that we are fated to live out our lives over and over again, with every detail exactly the same. Nietzsche, whose life was marked by profound suffering, is asking here whether we would be destroyed by this knowledge, and suggesting that we should live in such a way that we would actually desire this.

What would my answer be if this demon came to me in my loneliest loneliness and revealed this information to me?

I would fucking revel in it.

One of the ways I pay the rent is by working as a composer and musician for theater and dance productions. It’s something I’ve been taking time off from since before I started the whole Satanist Reads the Bible project—I had had a busy year and got burned out on it—but back in December I got an email from one of my music mentors asking if I wanted to join in as a musician on a production of a piece of musical theater called Shockheaded Peter. It’s based on a German children’s book of cautionary tales called Der Struwwelpeter in which various misbehaviors on the part of the children result in disaster and death. I played a drum kit made partially out of garbage along with an upright bassist and an accordionist, and it’s been a highlight of my career and one of the great privileges and joys of my life. I’ve been training as a musician for about 25 years now and have performed hundreds of shows, and this show has both demanded and demonstrated my highest capabilities as a musician, performer, and human being. It’s been difficult work that’s pushed me to my limits but I’ve loved every second of it—it’s one of those experiences that has made the Eternal Return worth it for me—and it’s brought up some questions regarding philosophy and theater, some of which I’ll be exploring here.

Philosophy poses many philosophical questions: what is a performance? How does artistic performance relate to the performative aspect of everyday life? How should a performance—or a work of art in general—be evaluated? What counts as an artistic achievement? Just to name a few. This is hardly surprising; there is an intimate historical link between philosophy and theater, as both originate, at least within Western culture, among the Greeks. Nietzsche himself was strongly influenced by theater, wrote his first book (The Birth of Tragedy) on the subject, and returned to it many times throughout his work. I’m not going to address all of the relevant philosophical questions here, much as I wish I could, but I wanted to illustrate how rich theater is as an object of philosophical study.

I find the question about “achievement” interesting in particular. I stumbled on that angle of theater when I was researching for this piece on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. We often talk about “artistic achievements”, for example, and I certainly think my work towards the project and the theater company’s collective work counts in that regard. And since I’m taking the satanic angle on this I think it’s particularly relevant. In my recent work, I described pride as a satanic value (“Satan As a Moral Exemplar,” 2020), and pride—or, at least, pride that one would recognize as being properly grounded—arises from achievement.

So what exactly is it that constitutes an achievement? The philosopher Gwen Bradford discusses the subject in her 2013 paper “The Value of Achievements,” which argues that achievement is intrinsically valuable.

In order to start the discussion on that, we have to start with a grounding in the philosophical field of value theory. Value theory is exactly what it says on the tin: inquiry into the nature of what is valuable, what is of value to us as humans. When we talk about things being good or bad in the most general sense, we’re speaking of values, though it is possible to speak of more specific values, like ethics, where not just good and bad but right and wrong come into play. Some things are intrinsically valuable, which is to say, they’re valuable in themselves, without any need for further justification. Happiness, for example, is often taken to be an intrinsic good. Happiness is valuable not because it furthers some other end, but simply because it is valuable in itself. Those things which are valuable because they further some other end are said to be instrumentally valuable. For example, a hammer is instrumentally good because it allows one to build a house, which is instrumentally good because it provides shelter, which is instrumentally good because shelter promotes happiness, which is intrinsically good, and that’s where the chain ends. Which is not to say that happiness cannot also be an instrumental good, but such justifications are not required for an intrinsic good to be valuable.

Achievement, according to Bradford, is an intuitive concept that analysis reveals be a process resulting in a product, with the product having been competently caused by the process—it can’t just have come about by accident, in other words. And the difficulty involved in the process has a direct relationship to its being recognized as an achievement.

Bradford argues that achievement is intrinsically valuable because it is difficult. This is not to say that there aren’t other factors in the intrinsic value of an achievement—for example, the value of the product—just that difficulty at least is something that makes achievement intrinsically valuable. Any difficult activity requires effort, exertion of the will, which is something Bradford describes as a characteristic human capacity. A characteristic human capacity is a human capacity that is either unique to humans, or essential to human nature, or fundamental (meaning, oriented towards a goal which is near-universal or near-inevitable for humans). So writing would be an example of a characteristic human activity, as would the construction of cities, and, though Bradford doesn’t mention this, plausibly particularly negative capacities as well, such as the waging of large-scale industrial warfare. That’s somewhat beside the point, though, and in any case Bradford specifies that those capacities which can result in achievements must be “plausibly worth developing” (2013, p. 213). Exertion of the will definitely still fits.

Bradford’s paper is explicitly a development of the theory of perfectionism, a general account of the intrinsically good as being the excellent exercise of our characteristic human capacities (2013, p. 215, working from the 1997 book Beyond Neutrality by George Sher). Going off that, what we have so far is that achievements involve difficulty, difficult activity requires exertion of the will, which is a characteristic human capacity, which according to the perfectionist account of intrinsic value, is intrinsically good, and so achievements are intrinsically good by virtue of their difficulty.

As I said, Gwen Bradford aims in her paper to develop perfectionism and so takes it as a given, and I’m not familiar with whatever justification George Sher provides in Beyond Neutrality, but I find it difficult to argue with. Questions of intrinsic value are relative to our perspective as human beings; these questions concern what is good for us in particular, and so their answers derive from what it is to be human in the first place. Given this, it seems self-evident that the excellent exercise of our characteristic human capacities is intrinsically good. I think this account of perfectionism and Bradford’s account of achievement are especially helpful because they strongly inform how we should live our lives: We should strive to overcome challenges. We should struggle against adversity. We should attempt things that are difficult. And I’ll make my strongest recommendation for the 1990 book Flow by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as a practical guide for approaching life in terms of the enjoyment that arises from difficulty and achievement.

These characteristic human capacities can be thought of not only in general terms—in terms of those capacities that are unique, essential, or fundamental to humans in general—but in terms of my own unique, essential, or fundamental capacities. In other words, what are the capacities that are unique, essential, or fundamental to who I am as an individual human? My capacity as a musical performer certainly meets those criteria. Obviously I’m not the only musical performer in the world, but there are styles of musical performance on each of the instruments that I can play that are uniquely my own. This is part of what the philosopher Charles Taylor called individualized identity, in his essay titled “The Politics of Recognition,” which appeared in the 1992 book Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited by Amy Gutmann. My individualized identity is the identity “that is particular to me, and that I discover in myself.” Taylor pairs this with the ideal of authenticity, which is the ideal of “being true to myself and my own particular way of being” (1994, p. 28), which Taylor derives from the work of literary critic Lionel Trilling in his 1972 book Sincerity and Authenticity.

It’s easy enough to argue for authenticity as being an intrinsic good: if the excellent exercise of our characteristic human capacities is good in general, it must be good in particular as well, and what is authenticity if not the excellent being of oneself? Taylor states something to this effect in his essay:

There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s life. But this notion gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life; I miss what being human is for me. 1994, p. 30

But I would also argue that authenticity is a satanic virtue.

In my most recent essay, “Satan As a Moral Exemplar,” I described several virtues derived from various narratives of Satan, such as those found in the Bible and in Milton. In each narrative I examined what it was that Satan did and why, as well as why that action could be externally justified as moral. We can add authenticity to that list in virtue of Satan’s rebellion against God. Despite God’s superior power, Satan chose to be true to himself rather than submitting in blind obedience to God. I morally justified the rebellion itself in the aforementioned essay, and this is something that can be seen as well in the narrative of Iblis in the Qur’an, which I described in the essay “Satan in the Qur’an” (2019), drawing from the work of professor of comparative religion Whitney Bodman in his book The Poetics of Iblis (2011).

Now consider that artistic creation is essentially a process of manifesting value judgements: in creating a work of art, one aims to create something good rather than something bad, and it’s very common for people to talk about and understand art in this value-based way. We talk about good movies and bad movies, argue about which is the best band or the worst band in a particular genre, and so forth, and these are all value judgements. A bad work of art is, all other things being equal, essentially a failure—badness is both a necessary and sufficient condition for a work of art being a failure, unless we’re talking about the value of the artwork’s specific metacharacteristics such as its commercial success—and a good work of art is essentially a success (and an achievement, if the process was sufficiently difficult), again, considering it only in terms of its artistic value and not in terms of its commercial or popular success. The subjective aspect of the appreciation of art is not a problem here; the artist might acknowledge or even intend that some of those who experience the finished product will consider it to be bad, but the artist is certainly aiming for it to be considered good by at least some of its audience and in the artist’s own eyes as well.

Consider as well the association between godhood and creation (and if any proof of this is needed, just do a google search for the word “creation” and see how many results are related to religion). If we proceed from the standard Christian interpretation of the second creation narrative in Genesis, we find that our capacity for evaluation—the process of making value judgments—is essentially a gift from Satan. After Satan tempts Adam and Eve to eat from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, God says, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil” (3:22, NRSV). The capacity for evaluation—which is certainly characteristically human—is required for the godlike act of creation, and the Bible draws that parallel to value knowledge explicitly. The book of Genesis reiterates this connection several times: in Genesis 1, after several of the specific creative acts involved in the process of creating the world, God sees that what was created was good. Also consider that, in Hebrew, both moral evil and evaluative badness are referred to by the same word (רע, ra`) (H7451—Ra`—Strong’s Hebrew Lexicon (KJV), n.d.). This has the ironic implication that a Christian can only say that “God is good” or speak of the “Good Book” because of the actions of Satan.

All this to say that artistic creation and achievement elevate me, in a very literal way, to the status of a god. That’s unavoidably self-aggrandizing, but I think that it’s an entirely honest account and faithful reading of godhood and value judgement as they appear in the Bible, which is a core cultural document for Western civilization regardless of its historicity.

Of course, while there are certainly plenty of other musicians who could have performed this show very capably, none would be able to play it exactly as I do (and such would certainly be seen as inauthentic in any case), and so my performance expresses my unique and original self—my authentic self—which is both intrinsically valuable and satanically virtuous. On top of that, it makes me godlike, and being that personal attainment of godlike characteristics necessarily signals the excellent exercise of human capacity, it takes on another dimension of intrinsic value, and of satanic virtue as well since my creation is an expression of my authentic self.

But my achievement in this project certainly does not exist in a vacuum. Elsewhere in his essay, Taylor describes recognition as a vital human need that, given what he calls the dialogical character of life, is integral to our individualized identities. In describing this dialogical character of life, Taylor says

We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression. For my purposes here, I want to take language in a broad sense, covering not only the words we speak, but also other modes of expression whereby we define ourselves, including the “languages” of art, of gesture, of love, and the like. But we learn these modes of expression through exchanges with others. People do not acquire the languages needed for self-definition on their own. Rather, we are introduced to them through interaction with others who matter to us. 1994, p. 32

There’s the appreciation and recognition of the audience, of course, but one of the great things about theater is that it’s a home to all kinds of people who don’t fit neatly into traditional societal roles. Early on in the process of this production, I borrowed a piece of equipment from the show’s music director to use for the podcast. One of the other cast members saw it and asked me what I was using it for. After a bit of back and forth on the matter, it came up that I’m a Satanist and I’m doing a podcast about Satanism (among other things). I had no reason whatsoever to fear that my being a Satanist might be a problem for anyone involved in the production, and indeed that was exactly the case. The person I was speaking to asked some relevant questions (whether I was affiliated with the Church of Satan or the Satanic Temple, for example), and that was the end of it. I’ve continued to enjoy their full respect as an equal member in the production, without issue. The person for whom I was directly working was in on the Satanism thing as well, and was apparently sufficiently fine with it to offer material support by way of lending me equipment. Granted, this was someone who has known me for a long time, since well before I called myself a Satanist, but the point stands regardless that these were people around whom I felt comfortable being my authentic self.

These are people who matter to me, people whom I greatly respect, highly skilled artists and performers, each one of them fully godlike in their own individual performances and as part of the greater product of the show itself. It’s been a huge privilege to work with every single one of them, and not only is my interaction with them and recognition by them another way of discovering, developing, affirming, and celebrating my individualized identity, it has also allowed me to vastly expand my own capacity by joining it with theirs, as the product of this process is something far greater than I could ever achieve on my own.

I’ll conclude by urging my readers and listeners to attend some theatrical performances themselves. It’s a very different medium than the more popular narrative art form of film, but there’s a reality to it that I think is particularly valuable. Not that film doesn’t have its own advantages, but a theatrical performance is really happening in a way that film just isn’t. Things can and do go wrong, and even when they don’t, the very fact that they could gives each performance a potent liveness and even a hint of danger. What’s more, while the same film can be experienced multiple times—which is certainly advantageous in some respects—a theatrical event is a one-time occurence. Even if one returns to see the same run of a theatrical performance, there will be, at the least, nuanced differences between each show.

It’s an art form that I believe is important to support, and the artistically adventurous among my audience may even wish to see how they might participate. It’s challenging work but, as I’ve demonstrated here, there is a great deal of value in it.

I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.

Works Referenced or Consulted

Bodman, W. S. (2011). The poetics of Iblis: Narrative theology in the Qur’an. Harvard Theological Studies, Harvard Divinity School : Distributed by Harvard University Press.

Bradford, G. (2013). The Value of Achievements: The Value of Achievements. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 94(2), 204–224. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0114.2012.01452.x

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2009). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience (Nachdr.). Harper [and] Row.

Goffman, E. (1990). The presentation of self in everyday life (Nachdr.). Doubleday.

H7451—Ra`—Strong’s Hebrew Lexicon (KJV). (n.d.). Blue Letter Bible. Retrieved March 10, 2020, from https://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/gen/1/1/s_1001

Hamilton, J. R. (2019). Philosophy of Theater. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entriesheater/

Nietzsche, F. W., & Kaufmann, W. A. (1974). The gay science: With a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs (1st ed.). Vintage Books.

Satan As a Moral Exemplar. (2020, February 29). A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/satan-as-a-moral-exemplar/

Satan in the Qur’an. (2019, November 16). A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/satan-in-the-quran/Taylor, C. (1994). The politics of recognition. In A. Gutmann (Ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the politics of recognition. Princeton University Press.