In the introduction to Tristam Shandy’s Penguin edition, Christopher Ricks writes:

“Tristram Shandy is the greatest shaggy-dog story in the language….But there were voices saying that the book was obscene, or pointless, or deficient in everything that a novel ought to provide. The fact that pointlessness was one of Sterne’s points, that he was out to flout and taunt humdrum expectations – this meant little.”

Ricks calls the the sublimeness of literary art and its moral purpose a mere ‘humdrum expectations’ and goes on to prattle, like Sterne, for several pages basically saying nothing at all meaningful.

It appears Ricks is looking so hard for meaning in a place where meaning is lost. Indeed, even Sterne’s fellow crazyman, Nietzche (I hate writing his name, so idiotically difficult to remember whether c comes before z? It’s probably also the only name like in this world.):

The fake philosophaster Nitche boy writes:

“The reader who demands to know exactly what Sterne really thinks of a thing…must be given up for lost.”

Oh really? I think crazyboy Nitch is the one who is truly lost, as is the uneducated clown Sterne.

It’s as if, the crazies and the loonies are just normal enough to recognize a kindred spirit, someone who operates on the same or similar frequencies.

I won’t go into clown Sterne’s work as this is not a book review (I could not read past page 2, as it felt like mental diarrhea by a clown who very likely was unaware he was prattling.).

But I want to take up Ricks’ ‘clever’ Zhuangzification (where he must have read Zhuang Zi’s ‘uselessness of usefulness’ in translation.)…

Is there a point to pointlessness? If we provide this question the cognitive respect it does not deserve (in fact), would we be descending into logical chaos?

To say yes to that empty question, would also mean to agree that nihilism is not nihilistic. The gentle reader can sense the contradiction.

By definition, nihilism is embracing pointlessness. But we are equipped to ask “why?”. This alone destroys the case for nihilism: if we can ask “why?” then there must be an answer somewhere, a purpose, a reason.

Nihilists do away with this answer. They exhort impressionable naive folks into ’embracing a sort of freedom from knowing why’, which can be appealing only to those who are extremely depressed.

This is how cultists recruit sad souls.

There is no such freedom, in fact. The bird hiding its head in the sand in the hopes of not escaping the coyote looking for it will discover to its demise, sooner or later, that not seeing does not equate becoming invisible. Or invincible.

Semantic breakdown occurs when you say: “this thing can go up and down at the same time”. Not it does not. It will, if it breaks into two pieces, with some explosive force, but then it is not longer the complete thing itself.

Just because someone can put together sentences does not mean the sentences are guaranteed to have meaning. Right? Do I make sense?

Once upon a time I was once asked to teach “Western Philosophy” to a group of Far Eastern (let’s not label) architecture majors for two weeks. I entered a classroom that was packed with over 400 students.

I did sense some disappointment upon entering though, which was becoming familiar after years; apparently, it appeared to some in attendance that a brown (non-White) man could not teach “Western Philosophy”. So they decided to prove it.

I was first asked whether I was a theist or not. Upon knowing my answer (yes, Muslim), one of the students asked me this:

If God (Almighty ج) is omnipotent, can He create a rock he cannot pick up?

The greenhorn naive boy had a look of triumph on his face, holding his chest forward as if his question were an intellectual achievement in its own right. He expected me to slip here, of course, since the question was ’too hard’ to answer.

As the good reader has sensed by now, this question is yet another example of semantic lunacy. I asked the boy:

If someone said: “you are going to visit Thailand yesterday” what would you make of that?

The boy didn’t understand me and said so. I replied:

“I went home tomorrow”. Does that make sense?

He said no, it wouldn’t, the grammar is wrong. I said:

The very definition of omnipotence disallows nonsensical questions like that. It’s like trying to add one extra number to infinity. But infinity, by definition, cannot be added to. You see the point?

The boy was beginning to sweat but still said I did not address his question. I smiled:

If such a rock can exist that an otherwise Omnipotent Creator Almighty ج cannot lift, then he cannot be expected to have created it as well, since the very sentence “cannot lift” contradicts omnipotence.

But the Beloved Almighty ج can create anything and do anything within logical bounds of language. If we don’t respect the logical boundary of meaning in language, we will end up with silly questions such as “but who created God (Almighty ج) ?”.

The problem with this question is that it presupposes the timelessness of time. Time is linear. If A creates B, and B creates C, time elapses. But this linearity also makes us think that before A, there must have been another, a pre-A, and so forth.

But time is bound to space and therefore to creation. Time exists but we can also imagine, although not comprehend, timelessness, and also spacelessness (which is not the same as emptiness, but more like anti-space, what has been called لامكان by Sufi poets and other Islamic scholars and thinkers–where Laa means no/anti and Makaan means place, space, physicality.).

That is, just as black-and-white is the inverse or opposite of colored (for instance, a color TV), it does not mean black or white itself is not a color. In the same vein, we can contrast colorfulness with colorlessness regardless of whether the color is red or black or gray or white.

As a further concrete example, a mirror is colorless (first mentioned by our teacher Mawlawi Rumi Balkhi رح in his Mathnavi-e Ma’anawi, book I) but it can reflect colors without taking any distinct color permanently. If so, it has colors but is not colored itself: an example of colorful colorlessness.

Here semantics does not break down because the logic makes sense. Semantics of the language should follow the deep logic of how things are and make sense–what Descartes (and others) taught us to practice. If it does not logically make sense, semantic gymnastics is useless (this is what sophistry is, then.).

In like manner, the spacelessness of the Anti-Space makes logical sense: our memories reside in a ‘place’ in our a brain but this is not a physical place. Ditto with our souls in our bodies.

The same logicality applies to an existence where there’s no time. It’s difficult to exactly imagine given that we are bound by time and created with it, but it’s not impossible to think of it in terms of logic:

If there is time because there is space, so there can be no time when there is spacelessness. Further, as the Creator Almighty ج created matter and with it time, so this logically requires that there be a pre-time period. Just as time is necessary when there is space/matter, so one can conceive of an existence where there is no time or matter/space as we know it, and perhaps of a different kind altogether.

This difference of kind is visible in many examples around us. Mango and apple are both (can both be called) sweet, but the sweetness differs by taste. We can envisage a different kind of time and space that differs from the one we are experiencing now ‘by taste’, but we cannot imagine it the same way a person who has never eaten a mango cannot imagine its taste by mere description no matter how eloquent the person describing it.

Coming to nihilistic remarks, the “point of pointlessness” does not make sense at the logical level even though it sounds ‘clever’ by semi-educated standards. And Zhuang Zi, in his story of the tree that was so useless nobody was cutting it or hitting it with stones for its fruit was most likely making fun of this sort of uselessness.

Because if you read carefully, it also means the fruit-bearing or carpenter-attracting trees are therefore useless (to themselves) because they are useful (to others). He most probably wants to say “useful to who?” and “what kind of usefulness?”.

For instance, a knife is generally considered a useful tool but you don’t want to (can’t really) cut a large tree with it. It’s usefulness is limited to the kind of usefulness it is intended for. Again, the knife is useful to humans (in its own contexts) but as we use it, it becomes blunt (its usefulness becomes useless for itself). So what use is a knife’s sharpness for itself if it only leads to its bluntness?

My point is, there are relativities, nuances, points of view, and logical sensibilities to consider. Simply saying “there is a point to his pointlessness” is a trite overgeneralization that is devoid of logic. If he is pointless, it is a contradiction to say he has a point.

It’s like saying a chaste whore, which phrase stretches the limits of language into semantic nonsense and logical fallacy.