Out Went Horror Vacui: On No Longer Being Afraid of the Nothingness of the Void

That the ascetic ideal has meant so many things to man, however, is an expression of the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui; it needs a goal – and it will rather will nothingness than not will. – Am I understood? . . . Have I been understood? – “Not at all, my dear sir!” – Then let us start at the beginning. – Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality

With the magical keyword “freedom,” we run wholeheartedly into the void, without being afraid of nothingness. Nietzsche has seen this event from a slightly different angle, focusing on a different point, but having a similar significance: resentment of the world of body-forms, the desire for the radical alteration of the senses, the unlimited praise of sensuality. He made his point clear by the example of Wagner, through the life of the artist: Wagner the musician, who laughs at himself, who has made a deliberate parody of the tragic; Wagner, who gave himself to the void, who despised life, and with his works exemplified a satyr play, the crudest form of the ascetic ideal, at the end of his life. Becoming old is when one remains without goal, without an aim to be filled, nothing being dear to one’s heart, but the limitless feeling of the will of nothingness. This occurs through enthusiastic effluences, which are the triumph of sensuals over body-forms, finally ready to fly into fluxing transcendence, with actual self-denial and self-annulment, for the sake of the highest sensualization, becoming the void, to be one with a metaphysical space devoid of body-forms, a space so low in the presence of matter that it creates a vacuum, that sucks up any substance that it can reach.

These substances are the effluences, which are escaping from the body in peak moments of liminality, like love or death, themselves vibrating of wavelength. Effluences are nothing more than the manure of the body, as Nietzsche noted, neither good nor bad, just the fertilizer on which it grows. The void should not be desired, wavelength should not be evoked by artificial means, sensuals should not be an exclusive goal of man, as they are chaotic. Nevertheless, the enthusiast’s life is a longing for the vacuum, so confidently that he is starting to make contact with reality and is slowly transforming even reality to his own will, thinking that what is possible is also necessary. When real life is getting under his influence, and he is gaining an unlimited mastery over it, its nature and inhabitants are drowned into the attractive power of the pure sensuals of the vacuum, eliminating all the other possible and realistic choices for living, except for the voided existence. When someone drowns, their head is under water and they cannot breathe, this is why the sensation that our everyday life is under the conquest of the void.

At this moment of transformation, things, objects, and their reality start a voiding process themselves and become transcendental, “straight out of the ‘abyss’, as the latter’s most unique, original, direct revelation” (Nietzsche, Genealogy, 77). Such transformation gives sensuals and their inciters, the spiritualized agents, an unprecedented rise in value and influence, where everything else is falling into the process of passing out of use or usefulness: they are becoming obsolete. At the same time, the spiritualized agents are becoming oracles, magicians, secular priests, the ones who can deal with their hypnotized objects through the pure internal dynamism of the vacuum. The most characteristic signs of their omnipresent metaphysics are depersonalization and universalization, typical signs of absurdity, a growing cleavage from reality, when gaps between body-forms are made to work, instead of the linear continuity (filiation) of body-forms, as a kind of second-order generation. In this irresistible, ongoing change body forms do not stand alone by their inner power and coherence anymore; instead, the void works on them, and so we just become mediums, pure instrumental means for the transcendental, in order to evoke as much sensuals as possible for the sake of spiritual effervescence.

Universalization becomes complete by the annihilation of characters, which does not reflect the real world, but speaks the language of the medium. Whatever it is, it is straight out of the void: ecstatic, painful, or suffering, always a mouthpiece of enthusiasm for the transformation of nature, for mastery over the world. We are all blinded and transformed by the dazzling sensationalism of the vacuum, often without hope for returning to normality, where the wonderment of the void finally fades. Nothing remains after this second generation, just the void. It implies a new genesis that despises our corruptible, organic, carnal, and mortal body, our only chance for living through, once and forever, the concrete felicity and independence for which every being has a birth-right, and a natural defense in their body-form. In accordance with this, there is only one possible world, which is the real world, having a unique significance in real life, with its vital mutual coordination between living things. A different logic appears with the void, where everything that is transformable will necessarily have to be realized and incorporated into the void, by the single fact that the void is out of space-time-form, a self-transforming fecundation. Itself is an entity out of reality, an entity made of desire for desire.

The voided ones are empty, they are spectators in the drama of life, instead of being participants in it. But they have the genius of seediness, taking so much out of life. We might suppose that they have a suppressed life in their formlessness, ambiguity, ill-conditioned morality, and silly looking, which seems to have artificially dried or preserved up for centuries, into a state of propagating the void, for which they have the only natural claim. In reality, this is not likely to be so; their shabbiness will be the reason for their success over tenacity and truthfulness, and seediness will become the new norm of life, flowering everywhere in Art, Design, Furniture, Politics, and Society: their poor, decaying flowers becoming the seed of transformation. Their offspring, their progeny is dematerialization, disincarnation, hybridization – with all characters, buildings, and landscapes lent a convincingly grubby life, thickly covered with ingrained dirt and soot, caked in radiation and bewilderment.

By now a refusal of horror vacui has become the norm in many fields. The vacuum’s depersonalization and universalization attract inside the dramatic sensuals of self-annihilation, victimization, and vindictiveness, which spread their two-vectored appetite by penetrating all body-forms, and instead creating a purely cognitive, disembodied spirit. All these features belong to one type: to the spirit of the medium, the in-between being, who is defeating all natural limits and who – following Nietzsche – is the ‘so-called philosopher,’ the stupid though alert one, ready to disturb and block others from their path to the optimum of life, which gives power and action for the individual:

a ‘so-called’ philosopher – you can be sure of that.’ What does that mean? For we must first interpret this state of affairs: in himself, he remains stupid for all eternity, like any ‘thing in itself ’. Every animal, including the bête philosophe, instinctively strives for an optimum of favourable conditions in which to fully release his power and achieve his maximum of power-sensation; every animal abhors equally instinctively, with an acute sense of smell which is ‘higher than all reason’, any kind of disturbance and hindrance that blocks or could block his path to the optimum (– it is not his path to ‘happiness’ I am talking about, but the path to power, action, the mightiest deeds, and in most cases, actually, his path to misery.

Our inner power is taken away by the mediums; their success and influence are luring us into the void. The best example was the catastrophic Covid prevention policy, the biggest mistake of state policy in our times, yet it is still impossible to evaluate its ends. Indeed, there were no ends, the policy evaporated from one moment to another, without any explanation for all the accumulated and imposed misery, where politics and people became hostage to health security issues, incited by the media. They were both under the constraining control of what Barry Cooper and Marco Navarro-Genie called the “pandemic moral panic” so that the media could force even further acquiescence to its every demand by further penetrating into society, to transform it.

A gem, a unique piece of example that has been cut, polished, and prepared for public use, is the introduction of an ENAC (Italian Civil Aviation Authority) document (see AAM National Strategic Plan, 2021-2030), prepared in 2021, that definitely mentions the Covid era as a speeding starter to the great transformation of man and his society, man and his environment, in order to produce enduring acoustic and visual harm over our heads, by using the media for disseminating a new mentality and generating a new complicity between politics and economics, through a state organization originally created for emergency situations, but now used by private companies for their own commercial reasons:

The pandemic experience and the resulting severe economic crisis have taught us how necessary it is to speed up technological and innovative processes in sectors that can bring about change in the society in which we live. In particular, the transport of goods and people, especially in emergency situations, plays a fundamental role in guaranteeing the right to mobility, which is a key element of civil, political and state society. The country needs more than ever at this time scalable national capabilities for the implementation, operation, and support of the aviation and aerospace community. The crisis has highlighted the importance of social, health and economic costs when the free movement of people, goods and services is severely hampered or even curtailed. The ambition of the European Civil Aviation Authorities is to lead the Union’s new generations through the third dimension of mobility, to build a new paradigm for air mobility. The great challenge of the third millennium will be to direct innovation and the dissemination of related digital tools towards solving the major problems facing contemporary societies, such as urbanisation, pollution, climate change and inequality. The sector of urban mobility of goods and people and its allied industries is going through an epochal upheaval that will lead to the gradual implementation of new integrated and intermodal models of intelligent mobility, both by air and by land, such as to develop innovative and eco-sustainable solutions from which new business scenarios can emerge for the implementation of mobility as a service. All in all, it is necessary to change the current mentality focused on small changes in favour of a radical transformation. The right way forward is to put the greening of air mobility at the centre of the sector’s growth, its digitisation for the modernisation of the entire system. In order for Italy to achieve global leadership in this area as well, it is essential that there be significant coordination and agreement between government action, the aviation regulator, the territories, and industrial development that takes into account European guidelines for the creation of a system that is resilient to future changes. The vision is to hand over to the new generations an urban, integrated and intermodal air mobility that combines imagination, planning capacity and concreteness, within a more modern country in an increasingly European context.

We are living at the bottom of a huge ocean of air, a mass of the atmosphere shared by all of us, but now a new type of trade is taking its claim to be omnipresent in the air, inevitably leading to the overproduction of noise and disturbance. They try to talk us out of our senses, using senseless catchwords and media pressure. They are relying on our feeling of guilt, due to pollution, while putting a new monster on our head. Now, a new paradigm has been opened up: after polluting and inundating the earth, the salvation offered is ever bigger, more extended pollution. As pollution is now recognized as a problem, ever louder voices are claiming a technological solution for a technology-caused problem, that is only bound to make things worse. Totally impoverishing life by the massive demand for airspace for their usage, which is at the same time our acoustic and sensible space. While in many places they are constructing decoy objects to camouflage technological presence, like the case of the satellites, which are hiding between the stars of the night sky, in other places, they try to readjust people to accept their presence, like the ENAC proposed commercial helicopters, a solution for dummies who do not hear or see anymore what is going on few meters above their head.

The aggrandizement of the vacuum is completed by the modification of all natural forms and expressions of life itself: the commercial desire for the void makes all of us into a deaf, insensitive, property-less (Musil) mass. Yet, the strategic plan that only believes in itself has government approval, while in reality it only produces morons, without their wits, the only race which endures the continuous noise of aviation activity near its habitat. Reliability and fidelity, transparency, discretion, and constancy, the cardinal virtues of the common good have been erased, substituted with the “ethos” of a “cut-throat competition,” against everybody/whenever/whatever, for the alchemic purpose of transformation. The strategic plan talks about the necessary changes in the mentality of the society, which are not easy words, if we believe in the decent continuity of life, and not in the áschi̱mos (άσχημος), the Greek word for ugliness, formless, shapeless, that blocks the air, and the possibility of free hearing, breathing, talking.

The desire for vacuum was not completed in Nietzsche’s times, but might be now, with the current support for the Wagnerian praise of sensuals, leaning back to Wagner’s heroes: Kant and Schopenhauer, the ascetic spectators whose pleasures are indifferent, whose power is without meaning, whose goal is without the right to existence, who have only one goal, and this is the nothing.

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