Talking to a Philosopher About True Detective -- Vulture

11/08/14 11.35Talking to a Philosopher About True Detective -- Vulture

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2/28/2014 at 6:45 PM 20 Comments

Ask a Philosopher: Whats Up With TrueDetectives Rust Cohle?

By Matt Patches

"I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution, muttersMatthew McConaughey's Rust Cohle in his version of ride-along small talk withpartner Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson). While True Detective is heralded forits slow-burn mystery shrouded in atmosphere as thick as the bayou, half thefun of an episode is waiting to see which metaphysical concept Rust will tacklein monotone soliloquy. Life, death, religion, love, the fourth dimension, man'sphysical self as a conduit for violent action Rust has a line for every topicand, thankfully, is always willing to share. It's easy to forget there may beanswers at the end of True Detective's tunnel when McConaughey continues todrop foggy poeticisms with such grace.

But do Rust's nihilistic ruminations reflect a founded philosophical doctrine oris he spewing pure bunk? Is nihilism even the right word for it? With vaguephilosophy running through its veins, we asked Paul J. Ennis, an author andacademic who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from University College Dublin, tohelp us digest True Detective's grand ideas and boil down Rust's worldviewinto something founded in reality. Which may be pointless because what isreality anyway?

What makes True Detective a TV show worth analyzing on aphilosophical level?Rust has a willingness to speak openly about ideas common to us all, but oneswe are usually expected to suppress. There is a pressure to offer pockets ofhope, redemption, or escape in our narratives, but True Detective seems intenton withholding that. However, grim television is not unknown, so I suspectwhat works here is just how nihilistic Rusts pronouncements are; you simplydont hear people arguing we should walk hand-and-hand into extinction on



television very often. Ive always been of the opinion that when you get down toit, everyone agrees, in their very bones, with Rust. Or, put another way, he isnot saying [anything some of us haven't thought before].

Are there specific scenes or bits of dialogue that made you realizethat True Detective was a show actually wrestling with philosophyversus simply throwing around words to sound heady?His dialogue with Marty in the car. It would have sounded eerily familiar toanyone who has been exposed to Thomas Ligottis The Conspiracy Against theHuman Race. [Editor's note: Early on in the series' run, shorunner NicPizzolatto gave an interview to The Wall Street Journal in which he talked indepth about Ligotti.] In many ways, its a paraphrase of the central argument ofthat text. However, we witness a generalized pessimism throughout theinterviews. Perhaps the second stand-out scene in this regard is his meditationon the eyes of murder victims. The idea that they would have welcomed it, thatthey were being released, is a very Ligotti-esque notion, but one that wouldhave chimed well with many pessimists. I am sure that to many people thatdialogue may have felt cheesy or obvious, but as a visualization of what thepessimist ultimately holds that death is to be welcomed it is pitch perfectand signals, to me, some wrestling with philosophical questions.

However, this only works if you have been through the mill of these texts. Forexample, Ligotti buys the arguments of some contemporary neuroscientists,which Rust would surely be familiar with, that there is no self and there is nofree will. I see this strain throughout his monologues that life is a trap, a dream,or a program. Once you grasp that, and truly believe it, then you cannot helpbut see the self as akin to being trapped in a kind of nightmarish loop. In manyways, the self is the micro-scale of this nightmare and time is the macro-scalethat he also touches on in terms of a ceaseless loop. There are some tensionsbetween these positions, but common to both is the idea that we are puppets atthe mercy of wider forces.

True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto has recently talked about textsthat influenced his writing of Rust, describing him as an "anti-natalist nihilism." What can we learn about Rust as a personinformed by works like Jim Crawford's Confessions of anAntinatalist, Eugene Thacker's In the Dust of this Planet, DavidBenatar's Better to Have Never Been?We would know that he is drawn to the extreme fringes of philosophicalspeculation and that much of the material he is reading is unpalatable to mostpeople. We would also know that he sought out these texts perhaps after beingdissatisfied with more mainstream mediations on our place in the universe. Heis not at home in the world, expects nothing from it, and has a fundamentalmistrust of all discourse of hope. It is also likely that he sees hypocrisy as thenorm and is attuned to delusion as the natural state of the human mind. This isperhaps why he is so good at soliciting confessions.

Nuances dividing these thinkers aside, Id say philosophically Rust considersconsciousness an aberration or evolutionary error/mistake, that he is notconcerned with filtering knowledge according to "the pathetic twinge of humanself-esteem" [to quote philosopher Ray Brassier], and that, as an anti-natalist,he subscribes to the old maxim of "better to have never been born." Better yet,many of these thinkers argue, as Rust mentions, that we should stopreproducing in order to end the cycle of existence.

This worldview is often correlated with self-destructiveness and I would sayRusts fascination with murders, drugs, and the criminal lifestyle flowernaturally from it. Despite this, I do not expect him to be the killer. Its the factthat apparently normal people are killers that, I suspect, intrigues Rust, andsince he knows what he is, the need to act out violently against others is likelylacking. Hes a bad man, but he knows the real bad men wear masks.



Pizzolatto is also quick to refute the notion that Rust is a purenihilist, suggesting that compassion keeps him from being that easyto boil down. Do you see conflict in Rust between nihilism and amore hopeful life philosophy? What makes a true nihilist by thedefinitions of those who shaped the doctrine?Ive not seen it clearly yet, but there are signs of empathy in Rust that is notentirely alien to the nihilistic worldview, given the centrality of suffering,nihilism is pretty empathetic. I would say he is passionate and sensitive tothose he sees as being crushed by various forms of power, which is oftensustained by moral hypocrisy. I wouldnt say hopefulness is quite the rightword, but I would say a nihilist could find drive, if not meaning, fromundermining those with power. We see this in his barely concealed contemptfor Reverand Tuttle (and his intuition that he is a moral hypocrite) and hissympathy for the more honest and flawed former Rev. Theriot.

I dont see it as a conflict, but I can see how Pizzolatto would be worried aboutviewers seeing it that way. Regarding the true definition of a nihilist I dontthink there is one and nihilists are actually pretty hands-off as writers.Certainly the likes of Cioran or Ligotti tend not to debate other thinkers. Itsalways been more a disposition or attitude than a doctrine. After all why notlive and let live when you barely believe in life anyway?

Would love to hear your thoughts on a few specific lines, like Rust'sprofession, "I consider myself a realist, but in philosophical terms,I'm what's called a pessimist."Its something Ive had to say myself many times. Basically, in a non-academicway, I consider myself just a brute "realist" in the classic sense of seeing theworld in a very blunt, cynical manner. However, in academic philosophy theterm realism has many different senses and, to avoid confusion with them,pessimism is used as an alternative.

Do you see Rust's actions or way of life reflecting his "realist"attitude?I would say that Rusts pessimistic realism is expressed in his suspicion towardinstitutions the police department, organized religion and toward thenarratives people build around themselves. In the latter case, he expects peopleto be mired in self-deception, and that allows him to dig deeper behind themasks they wear to obscure what is really going on. However, there is a price topay for this and we see that such a bleak understanding of the world can alsoresult in the recklessness that forms part of his character. The austere, stoiclifestyle he lives, along with the drinking, is absolutely a result of thinking alongthese lines. Perhaps the moment this is clearest is when he realizes, whilstwatching television with his girlfriend, that such a life is just not for him. Hejust cant buy into it anymore. This is why I think the "I know what I am" line isso important.

Rust has a strange relationship with religion. He seems to loatheorganized religion, badmouthing the "authoritative" God and sayingthat "certain linguistic anthropologists think religion is a linguisticvirus.Religion as a linguistic virus is derived from a number of linguisticanthropologists, but more importantly for this scene, the idea was popularizedby Richard Dawkins (the theory of memes). It is someone Rust would, ofcourse, channel when faced with a religious audience. I suspect in many waysRust is often reading other people through the lenses of this anthropologicaland evolutionary perspective. It allows him distance to analyze othersaccording to their specific delusion. He often seems to test Marty at a very base,evolutionary level when it comes to masculinity and tellingly often comes outon top.



How would you describe Marty's personal philosophy family-oriented, religious, black-and-white sense of good and evil, yetsomeone prone to vices in contrast to Rust's? When doesphilosophy become a conversation about ethics?Marty is a classic moral hypocrite albeit precisely the type of person who keepssociety from collapsing. In many ways, he is just the Everyman and he carriesout his "duty" in an extremely predictable way almost as if he got marriedjust so he could move on to have affairs as the next step. I dont quite think itsa philosophy so much as he has just soaked up ideas of how to be a man andtries to live according to them (without reflecting on it all too much as hesenses where that leads).

Do you see Marty as a character designed to challenge Rust'sphilosophical POV? Or confirm it?Marty reads to me as a pragmatist who tries to navigate life by a series of codesof conduct. Not always good ones men have codes for misbehaving. I dontthink it is designed to challenge or confirm Rusts philosophical view so muchas act as a blunt contrast to it; by having such a "normal" Everyman besideRust, it intensifies his weirdness, almost like the "straight man" you find incomedy shows. However, I cannot be sure here that I am not reading Martywell since to me he, rather than Rust, is the weird one!

Time is a very important concept in the show, on macro and microlevels. In episode five, Rust ruminates on time being "a flat circle,where events will continually repeat over and over again. Is therebasis for this science-minded philosophy? He seems to be discussing the idea in two distinct senses: one is, and here I amno expert, M-theory derived from theoretical physics that he discussesexplicitly with the detectives. The more subtle existential angle he is touchingon is the "eternal recurrence of the same" that Nietzsche introduced. There, theidea, and it is found in older traditions, too, is that the greatest horror for us isnot to die, but to live the same lives on repeat for all eternity. In Nietzsche, thisnotion is designed to shake us up out of our passive lives. The challenge being,to paraphrase, whether you would be willing to carry on as you do if you knewit would all happen again (eternally). Its a thought experiment, but somepeople read it metaphysically. For me, that particular scene seems designed tostress how easily he gets lost in his head more than something that will relatevery directly to the story line. However, it reconnects up to Rusts commitmentto the fact that life is but a dream/nightmare not in some flowery sense, butthat the far grimmer awareness that structurally consciousness has thecharacter of an elaborate continuous, but determinate in duration, fantasy.

How do you see the concept of evil playing out on the show?This is tricky for me because I dont believe in the concept of evil and suspectRust does not technically believe in it either. Its a very religious concept andfor a pessimist would be seen as a word that obscures complexity. I honestlycannot say at the moment whether the show is going to end up as an expressionof the inherent "evilness" at the heart of people, but I admit that woulddisappoint me. My hope is that the sense of supernatural foreboding foundthrough the show will be explained, if it is at all, in a realist manner. That is tosay, it will be the result of a human mind, which is already the darkest thing innature. As Rust tells us in the car, consciousness is an aberration from nature.

If Rust's beliefs about the world turn out to be true, how do youimagine the events playing out?I would say that given Rusts pessimism coupled with the slightly disturbedatmosphere he finds himself in, he is sure to discover increasingly unsettlingthings. I genuinely cannot imagine how it will end, which is an amazing feeling,but I would say that I believe we will discover that the "cult" is a cover for awider network (and not just Tuttle) and that a large amount of powerful peopleare implicated. This would neatly blend two types of paranoia found in the



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Talking to a Philosopher About True Detective -- Vulture