Lovecraft and atheism

luka

Well-known member
Incidentally, there is a third pole which is neither classicist nor romantic, its the visionary, the prophetic.

I can't see any way to usefully categorise HPL as a classicist. I think corpsey is right to see the romantic there.
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and the local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. Only the human scenes and characters must have human qualities. These must be handled with unsparing realism, (not catch-penny romanticism) but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown—the shadow-haunted Outside—we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold.
— H. P. Lovecraft, in note to the editor of Weird Tales, on resubmission of "The Call of Cthulhu"


The conflict in Lovecraft is between the stated aim of an externalised perspective on human affairs ('one must forget that such things as... good and evil, love and hate... have any existence at all") vs. his personal horror at such a state of affairs ("the boundless and hideous unknown").

What's most important in his stories isn't the (supposed) indifference of the universe so much as our (supposed) horror in the face of it.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Incidentally, there is a third pole which is neither classicist nor romantic, its the visionary, the prophetic.

I can't see any way to usefully categorise HPL as a classicist. I think corpsey is right to see the romantic there.

I'm talking more about how he saw himself and what his own literary and artistic tastes bent towards. He loved Classical antiquity and the poetry, art and architecture of Enlightenment Europe but he had no interest in the Middle Ages and he hated anything that smacked of 'Victorianism'.

I guess his attachment to Providence and the other bits of New England that he loved so much could be called romantic, with a small 'r'.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
That brings up the huge and complicated question of what romanticism with a big R means - since it can encompass the spiritual 'Lines written above Tintern Abbey' and cynical 'Don Juan'.

Romanticism was both an optimistic repudiation of and pessimistic acknowledgement of the damage the Enlightenment did to God and to man's newly degraded place in the cosmos.

At least, this is what 'sublimity' means to me. Not just awe, but terror.

And that's where I'd link this aspect of Lovecraft to Romanticism. Not just monsters lurking in the dark, not even evil emissaries of Satan, but monsters (gigantic, dwarfing human scale like the Alps) representing cosmic meaninglessness!

EDIT: Not suggesting Lovecraft was consciously Romantic, only that his appeal has something in common (For me) with the sublime.
 

vimothy

yurp
good thread, mark in ultra-landian mode in the OP. he was in a tough spot though, wasn't he - since he'd picked up nick's nihilism but not his (weirdly optimistic) capitalistic-AI theology.

Of course, life has no meaning. But neither does death
 

droid

Well-known member
Obviously (and sadly) Mark isn't here to tell me himself but I wonder how sympathetic he was to Lovecraft's atheism/nihilism, and - if he was - how he could square that with political activism. After all, if we're all nothing but electrons deluded by egotism, what matters it if Tories are destroying the state infrastructure?

You're missing the liberatory aspect of Nihilism, Camus/Sartre being the obvious touchstones. If everything is meaningless than there is there infinite space to create meaning. Radical freedom.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
EDIT: Not suggesting Lovecraft was consciously Romantic, only that his appeal has something in common (For me) with the sublime.

That's fair, I mean Lovecraft was all about the 'sublime'; it's just that for him, as an atheist and virtual asexual, it was a very different kind of sublimity from the two main kinds found in capital-R Romanticism, i.e. God and erotic love.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
You're missing the liberatory aspect of Nihilism, Camus/Sartre being the obvious touchstones. If everything is meaningless than there is there infinite space to create meaning. Radical freedom.

.....

The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
This is the Nietzschian project. How to assert meaning, when there are no external references beyond one's own self?

That's what he's grappling with in Thus Spake Zarathustra and others places as far as I understand him - "Behold, I teach you the Overman! The Overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Overman shall be the meaning of the earth!"
 
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vimothy

yurp
One of Nietzsche's keenest readers was H. P. Lovecraft. The genius of Lovecraft was to have constructed a fictional system which, however fantastic, was utterly devoid of supernaturalism and which was unstinting in its rejection of the Aristolean-theistic-vitalistic conception that life, and particularly human life, is of special value. Like the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Lovecraft retreats from Nietzsche's priapic vitalism (what, as John Gray says, is Nietzsche's hymning to the efflorescent creativty of life if not Christianity in another form?) to Schopenhauer's withering pessimism.

.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
"Radical freedom" can mean radical freedom to be a complete cunt, of course (at the risk of stating the obvious). It's not necessarily "radical" in the sense of "progressive".
 

droid

Well-known member
How does that work? If everything is meaningless then creating meaning is impossible.

Everything is meaningless in terms of external meaning. Purpose is a mental construct created by the individual, not something bestowed by the gods or fate.
 

vimothy

yurp
purpose is an illusion, in other words - in the radically materialistic-nihilistic view - a self-deceptive hangover from our religious past
 

vimothy

yurp
none of which is compatible with the idea that the individual can create meaning or imbue the universe with it
 

droid

Well-known member
none of which is compatible with the idea that the individual can create meaning or imbue the universe with it

Of course it is. You can still walk towards a mirage even though it's not real. Nietzsche 101 again.
 
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