“Life Is No Argument!” Reflections on Meaning, Art, and Experience

“Life is no argument,” Nietzsche argued. Because an argument is in language. And language, like consciousness, is only a surface. The reflections on a pond touch neither the clouds above, nor the life that thrives below. But our thirst for meaning is so unquenchable that we perpetually fail to comprehend our predicament—of being stuck in the liminal space between language and experience. Worse still, our endlessly talking heads prevent us from coming to terms with the transformative powers of the body, which lie dormant within the cultural cages in which we prison them.

The body, understood non-dualistically, is both the grounds and the instrument of knowledge, but also a hostage. The whole of western philosophy, Nietzsche suspected, has been “merely an interpretation of the body, and a misunderstanding of the body.” As a result, knowledge has flown away to conceptual abstractions and idealist dreams, if not also metaphysics and other-worldly phantasies. Our task then, as the artists of our own existence, is to “remain faithful to the earth”—and bring knowledge “back to the body” in order to explore its inexhaustible possibilities towards a life-affirming moral and political economy.

Based on anthropological observations of the symposium sessions, this closing lecture will reflect on the contemporary possibilities of an artistic orientation towards life itself, which, as Nietzsche would argue, is the only way to build “rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart.”

Oğuz Erdur (TR/US)

Born and raised in Turkey, Oğuz studied economics, environmental sciences and sociology at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, following which he received a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University. Since 2009, he has been teaching at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, offering courses on anthropology, archaeology, art, writing, the Middle East, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Oğuz is the author of Stone in Love: Seduction of the Orphan Past, a work of poetry and photography that seeks to recreate reality as a surreal montage. More recently, he delivered a TEDx talk titled Is Love Universal?, where he deconstructs biological and metaphysical approaches to love using a Nietzschean perspective and socio-cultural theory. 

See the collection below for a glips of Oğuz's photography.