True Detective and Philosophy E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 353

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Investigating the trail of philosophical leads in HBO's chilling True Detective series, an elite team of philosophers examine far-reaching riddles including human pessimism, Rust's anti-natalism, the problem of evil, and the 'flat circle'. * The first book dedicated to exploring the far-reaching philosophical questions behind the darkly complex and Emmy-nominated HBO True Detective series * Explores in a fun but insightful way the rich philosophical and existential experiences that arise from this gripping show * Gives new perspectives on the characters in the series, its storylines, and its themes by investigating core questions such as: Why Life Rather Than Death? Cosmic Horror and Hopeful Pessimism, the Illusion of Self, Noir, Tragedy, Philosopher-Detectives, and much, much more * Draws together an elite team of philosophers to shine new light on why this genre-expanding show has inspired such a fervently questioning fan-base

Leseprobe

The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series

Series editor William Irwin

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, and a healthy helping of popular culture clears the cobwebs from Kant. Philosophy has had a public relations problem for a few centuries now. This series aims to change that, showing that philosophy is relevant to your life—and not just for answering the big questions like “To be or not to be?” but for answering the little questions: “To watch or not to watch South Park?” Thinking deeply about TV, movies, and music doesn't make you a “complete idiot.” In fact it might make you a philosopher, someone who believes the unexamined life is not worth living and the unexamined cartoon is not worth watching.

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TRUE DETECTIVE AND PHILOSOPHY

A DEEPER KIND OF DARKNESS

Edited by

Jacob Graham and Tom Sparrow

This edition first published 2018

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Graham, Jacob editor. | Sparrow, Tom, 1979– editor.

Title: True detective and philosophy : a deeper kind of darkness / edited by Jacob Graham, Tom Sparrow.

Description: Hoboken : Wiley, 2018. | Series: The Blackwell philosophy and popculture series | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017014278 (print) | LCCN 2017028324 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119280798 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119280828 (epub) | ISBN 9781119280781 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: True detective (Television program)

Classification: LCC PN1992.77.T79 (ebook) | LCC PN1992.77.T79 T78 2017 (print) | DDC 791.45/72--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014278

Cover Design: Wiley

Cover Images: Guy © 4x6/Gettyimages; Texture © TothGaborGyula/Gettyimages; Forest © odebala/Gettyimages

Contents

Introduction: Welcome to the Psychosphere

Part I “It's All One Ghetto, Man … a Giant Gutter in Outer Space”: Pessimism and Anti-natalism

1 Why Life Rather than Death?: Answers from Rustin Cohle and Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer's Pessimism

Why Not Suicide?

Schopenhauer on Compassion

Rust's Doubt

Rust's Conversion

Notes

2 Grounding Carcosa: Cosmic Horror and Philosophical Pessimism in True Detective

“This Is Some Halloween Shit”

“It Means I'm Bad at Parties”

“Time Is a Flat Circle”

“The Light Is Winning”

Notes

3 Hart and Cohle: The Hopeful Pessimism of True Detective

What Pessimism Is and Is Not

Pessimism, Freedom, and Truth

Pessimism and Hope

Notes

4 Loving Rust's Pessimism: Rationalism and Emotion in True Detective

“Boundaries Are Good”

“This World Is a Veil, and the Face You Wear Is Not Your Own”

“I Consider Myself a Realist”

“Was January the Third, My Daughter's Birthday, I Remember”

“She Saved Me from the Sin of Being a Father”

“I Was a Part of Everything that I Ever Loved”

Notes

Part II “We Get the World We Deserve”: Cruelty, Violence, Evil, and Justice

5 Rust's Anti-natalism: The Moral Imperative to “Opt Out of a Raw Deal”

Rust Cohle as an Anti-natalist

Rust's Scattershot Philosophy of Anti-natalism

Benatar on Anti-natalism

Returning to Cohle's Life Is an Inherently Bad Proposition

Notes

6 Where Is the Cruelty in True Detective?

Knowing Cruelty

Embracing Suffering

Two Sufferers

Affirmation or Death

Notes

7 Nevermind: Subjective and Objective Violence in Vinci

“Subjective” and “Objective” Violence: Life in Vinci

Frank Goes Straight

The World We Deserve vs. the World We Want

“The Story's Told, with Facts and Lies …”

Notes

8 Naturalism, Evil, and the Moral Monster: The Evil Person in True Detective

“Green-Eared Spaghetti Monsters”

“He's Worse than Anybody”

“This World Is a Veil, and the Face You Wear Is Not Your Own”

Notes

9 “But I Do Have a Sense of Justice”: Law and Justice in the Bleak World of Vinci

Law Divorced from Morality

“Call It What You Want, Revenge, Justice … Retirement Package”

“I Don't Know if It'll Make Any Difference, but It Should, Because We Deserve a Better World”

Justice and the Law

Notes

Part III “Everybody's Nobody”: Consciousness, Existence, and Identity

10 A Dream Inside a Locked Room: The Illusion of Self

Life Is a Dream

Eastern Views

Western Views

Pessimism and Nihilism

Transcendence

Notes

11 I Am Not Who I Used to Be, But Am I Me?: Personal Identity and the Narrative of Rust

A Story of Three Rusts

The Puzzle of Personal Identity

Where to Now?

Notes

12 “The Light Is Winning”

Stories to Keep Children Busy

The Family Man

The Poison of Nihilism

The Vulnerable Hold the Antidote

The Head of the Snake

“The Light Is Winning”

Notes

13 The Tragic Misstep: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Last Midnight

The Constitution for Suicide

More than a Biological Puppet

Nature Separate from Nature

“Everybody's Nobody”

Opting Out

“The Light Is Winning”

Notes

Part IV “This Is My Least Favorite Life”: Noir, Tragedy, and Philosopher-Detectives

14 The Tragedy of True Detective Season Two: Living Our “Least Favorite Lives”

Attic Tragedy: “Sometimes Your Worst Self Is Your Best Self”

Dionysian Wisdom or a Philosophy of the Good?

“Sometimes Your Worse Self Is” Just … Worse

A “Good Woman” to “Mitigate Our Baser Tendencies”?

Feminism as the Good

Is Athena Right? Is This Just “My Fucking Problem?”

The Crossing of the Good

Notes

15 The Noir Detective and the City

Philosophy and the City

The Dark City of the Detective

The City Inside

Notes

16 Cohle and Oedipus: The Return of the Noir Hero

The Lack of Cohle and Hart

“You're Obsessed, Just Not with Your Work”

Cohle and Oedipus: The Return of the Noir Hero

Notes

Part V “Time Is a Flat Circle”: Time in True Detective

17 Time Is a Flat Circle: Nietzsche's Concept of Eternal Recurrence

A Purposeless Will at the Heart of Reality

The True Test of Life Affirmation

Finding Meaning in Conflict

The “Lightening” of Cohle's Pessimism

Notes

18 Eternal Recurrence and the Philosophy of the “Flat Circle”

Rust's Philosophy: Pessimism and the Escape from Time

Does Rust Really Believe Time Is Circular?

What Does “Time is a Flat Circle” Not Mean?

Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence

Circular Time as a Solution that Replaces a Pessimistic Problem

Notes

Known Associates

Index

EULA

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

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Introduction: Welcome to the Psychosphere

Jacob Graham and Tom Sparrow

If you're anything like us, you enjoy listening to Rust wax philosophical as much as you like watching Marty balk at the odd shit that comes out of Rust's mouth. When it comes to big questions about value, meaning, truth, and existence, these characters couldn't be further apart. Professionally, on the other hand, they complement each other pretty well: they get the job done, solve the case. For two guys responsible for enforcing the law, however, their moral compasses don't always point them in the right direction. Which is not to say that the officers in Vinci shoot any straighter. Remember that time Velcoro kicked the crap out of Aspen Conroy's father right in front of the kid? Of course you do. It was kind of wrong, but felt kind of right, didn't it? The cops in True Detective can be as twisted as the backroads of the Louisiana bayou and the freeways of Los Angeles. They're defined as much by their deceit, disloyalty, substance abuse, self-loathing, and violence as they are their compassion, duty, and peculiar sense of justice.

As we ride along with Cohle and Hart or Bezzerides and Velcoro, it's impossible not to marvel at the bleak Louisiana and California landscapes. Drenched in shadow, foretelling something sinister, they are populated by masked men, cruel and murderous—the worst kinds of men. Corruption, decay, and degradation touch everything. And yet, we viewers choose to linger in those desolate landscapes, happily pursuing real-life monsters in the squad car of our true detectives, enthralled by the promise of some unforeseen horror. But why do we watch? What draws us in? Do we detect something of ourselves in these worlds? That should worry us. Do we know who we really are? There'd be a victory in that.

We'll leave it for you to decide where you fit in the picture or what makes for a true detective, but we'd like to suggest that detectives and philosophers have something in common—both seek the truth—and that True Detective can teach us a lot about philosophy. Unlike detective work, however, and fortunately for us, the risk of imminent physical harm is low with philosophy. Yet, the stakes are still high, especially if, as Socrates (470–399 bce) said, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Through the eyes of the characters and the stories of True Detective, the squad of authors in this book pull back the curtain on some philosophical ideas more powerful than any cultic demigod or corrupt mayor. By exposing the philosophical roots and contexts of pessimism, our squad uncovers just why Rust is so bad at parties. Examining topics such as good and evil, tragedy, personal identity, and time, they introduce us to philosophers such as Socrates, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Lacan, and Žižek. Ultimately, though, you must become your own detective and figure out the truth for yourself.

So, why should you, dear reader, continue beyond this introduction? Because you have a debt. You owe it to yourself to do some truth detecting, to step back into the forsaken world of True Detective where ominous shadows grow ever darker and stories are told with facts and lies. We're not asking you to make this journey one of silent reflection. We want you to figure out for yourself what you think, to give yourself the philosophical world that you deserve, and to remove the mask from the truth that lives among us, well disguised.

Part I“IT'S ALL ONE GHETTO, MAN … A GIANT GUTTER IN OUTER SPACE”Pessimism and Anti-natalism

1Why Life Rather than Death?:Answers from Rustin Cohle and Arthur Schopenhauer1

Sandra Shapshay

Rustin Cohle, the protagonist of the first season of True Detective, declares that he is “in philosophical terms, a pessimist.” Before we are introduced to him, Rust has already experienced the terrible loss of his two-year-old daughter and the painful dissolution of his marriage. His employment confronts him daily with the horrors of human conduct, where the “law of the stronger” reigns and the strong and sadistic exploit the weak and vulnerable. Throughout season one, we see Rust struggling to find the best, truest response to all this seemingly endemic and unredeemed suffering.

Rust thinks that human consciousness is a “tragic misstep in nature.” The doctrine of “pessimism” espoused by Rust is remarkably similar to the view adumbrated by Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), who holds that (1) conscious life (both human and nonhuman animal) involves a tremendous amount of suffering that is essentially built into the structure of the world and (2) there is no Creator (providential or otherwise) to redeem all of this suffering, by, say, punishing the wicked and rewarding the good.

Arthur Schopenhauer's Pessimism

Schopenhauer is just as attuned as Rust to the tremendous amount of evil in the world, caused for the most part by other human beings. Whereas the “true detective” is nauseated and jaded by the sadistic acts of bayou killers who prey mostly on innocent girls and young women, Schopenhauer is nauseated and jaded by more institutional sources of human suffering in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States that spring largely from pervasive human egoism and, to a lesser but not insignificant extent, malice:

The chief source of the most serious evils affecting man is man himself; homo homini lupus. He who keeps this last fact clearly in view beholds the world as a hell, surpassing that of Dante by the fact that one man must be the devil of another. … How man deals with man is seen, for example, in Negro slavery, the ultimate object of which is sugar and coffee. However, we need not go so far; to enter at the age of five a cotton-spinning or other factory, and from then on to sit there every day first ten, then twelve and finally fourteen hours, and perform the same mechanical work, is to purchase dearly the pleasure of drawing breath. But this is the fate of millions, and many more millions have an analogous fate.2

Additionally, Schopenhauer focuses on the suffering of nonhuman animals at the hands of human beings who view them as mere instruments for their use:

Because … Christian morals give no consideration to animals, they are at once free as birds in philosophical morals too, they are mere “things”, mere means to whatever ends you like, as for instance vivisection, hunting with hounds, bull-fighting, racing, whipping to death in front of an immovable stone-cart and the like.3

Why Not Suicide?

Given this grim view of the human condition, it makes sense to raise the question of suicide: Why not put an end to one's life, in order to escape from this ultimately senseless vale of tears? Throughout True Detective, Rust struggles with “letting go” and, regarding the last episode of season one, “Form and Void,” the creator, Nic Pizzolatto, explains that the episode “represents the dilemma Rust walked for some time: why life rather than the opposite?”4 Rust thinks that our “programming” (in Schopenhauer's terms, the “will-to-live”) “gets us out of bed in the morning” but that it would be better, all things considered, to “deny our programming” and walk ourselves “hand in hand into extinction” (“The Long Bright Dark”). Thus, Rust enunciates his in principle embrace of suicide.

In this positive attitude toward suicide, Rust actually parts ways with Schopenhauer, which is surprising since the philosopher is one of the most famous pessimists in the history of Western thought. In fact, Schopenhauer regarded suicide as a “futile and foolish act.”5 What accounts for this divergence?

Schopenhauer's Answer

Schopenhauer does not discourage suicide out of philosophical optimism: he doesn't think that this is the best of all possible worlds, as Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) does; neither does he believe that the world must get better because of a necessary rational structure, as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) holds; nor that the world is a self-justifying divine cause, as Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) argues. Also, he doesn't see life as a gift, to be thankfully accepted. Schopenhauer is convinced that the world is and will always be full of unredeemed suffering, for nature involves an internecine struggle for existence rather than a “peaceable kingdom” of animals living largely in harmony. And he is convinced that much of this suffering will go uncompensated in this life, as the sources of suffering seem to outweigh the sources of happiness and tranquility. Above all, he is an uncompromising atheist who holds that there is no providential God to redeem all of this suffering in an afterlife.

It might be surprising, then, that Schopenhauer thinks suicide is a “futile and foolish act.” Perhaps, like Rust, Schopenhauer should embrace suicide. For the nature of the will-to-live is ultimately blind, senseless striving and suffering for no particular end. Yet the reason Schopenhauer rejects suicide is that suicide does not negate but rather affirms the will-to-live, for the person who would die by suicide desires life; it's just that the individual is unsatisfied with the conditions on offer for their particular life. Within this logic, suicide is foolish because it prevents a person from attaining the highest wisdom and the true inner peace that would come from actual renunciation of the will-to-live. Thus, Schopenhauer writes, suicide is “an act of will” through which “the individual will abolishes the body … before suffering can break it.” He thereby likens a suicidal person to a sick person who “having started undergoing a painful operation that could cure him completely, does not allow it to be completed and would rather stay sick.”6 There is only one remarkable exception to his overall view on suicide: death by voluntary starvation. At the highest levels of asceticism, the negation of the will-to-live can attain such a point where “even the will needed to maintain the vegetative functions of the body through nutrition can fall away.”7

Rust's Answer

Returning to True Detective, we see that Rust struggles with many of the same issues that occupy Schopenhauer. For instance, though Rust embraces pessimism and resignationist tendencies, as evidenced by his rather ascetic lifestyle and in principle embrace of suicide, Rust does not actually resign himself from life. He is, after all, the eponymous “true detective” and throws himself assiduously into the task of solving the ritualistic rapes and murders and bringing the perpetrators to justice.

So what really motivates Rust to spend most of his waking life (and he doesn't seem to sleep all that much) attempting to solve these crimes? Is it the intellectual puzzle? Is it compassion for the victims and potential new victims? Is it a thirst for justice?

At times it seems that it is merely the intellectual challenge that motivates Rust. This recalls Schopenhauer's own expressed reason to devote himself to philosophy: “Life is an unpleasant business; I have resolved to spend it reflecting upon it.”8 Yet, what preoccupies Rust's mind and takes up a good bit of wall space in his barely furnished apartment is reflection with a specific practical aim—namely, to solve the crimes in order to prevent future victims and to bring the perpetrators to justice.

Thus, Rust seems not just motivated by the intellectual puzzle but also by a morality of compassion and justice. After all, his aim is not merely to solve the crimes but also to apprehend or otherwise stop the perpetrators. Further, these moral motives get to the heart of Rust's espousal of pessimism in the first place, for he is—unlike how Marty often seems—acutely sensitive to the sufferings of others and—again, unlike Marty but in line with Schopenhauer—rejects any theological story of redemption for all of this suffering.

What I want to suggest, then, is that Rust's own practice belies his stated pessimistic views. It is not just “programming”—the will-to-live, egoistic striving—that gets Rust out of bed in the morning; rather, it is the sense that if there is to be any kind of redemption it has to be earthly, in the form of prevention or alleviation of suffering, and in bringing criminals to justice.

Schopenhauer on Compassion

Surprisingly, Schopenhauer at certain points in his writings seems to recommend the general, compassionate, and justice-seeking path that Rust takes in True Detective. Especially in his underappreciated essay “On the Basis of Morality,” Schopenhauer recommends acts of justice and loving-kindness in response to the myriad sources of misery. For example, he praises the British nation's spending “up to 20 million pounds” to buy the freedom of slaves in America.9 He also champions the proliferation of animal protection societies in Continental Europe, recommending English newspaper reports to address “the associations against the torture of animals now established in Germany, so that they see how one must attack the issue if anything is to come of it” and he acknowledges “the praiseworthy zeal of Councillor Perner in Munich who has devoted himself entirely to this branch of beneficence and spread the initiative for it throughout the whole of Germany.”10

Finally, Schopenhauer recognizes that the work of civic organizations, especially in securing legal change, can bring about real moral change and reduce suffering. Again, with respect to the animal protection movement and laws against animal cruelty, Schopenhauer writes, “Everything adduced here gives evidence that the moral chord in question … is gradually beginning to sound in the occidental world.”11

Schopenhauer opposes all forms of suicide, except the redeeming ascetic one, because suicide robs a person of the highest wisdom regarding the apparent futility of life. However, the hopeful ethics of compassion that Schopenhauer also espouses looks like a second-rate option. On the traditional reading of Schopenhauer, he holds that it is better to go beyond willing and therefore beyond compassion as well to a real renunciation of the will-to-live, if one can. Only in renunciation is the patient truly cured of the rather absurd scourge that is the will-to-live. Yet, the rationality of the choice between compassionate action, on the one hand (action that tries to improve the world), and resignation, on the other (inaction that constitutes a redemption from the world), hinges on whether there are good grounds for hope.

Rust's Doubt

Returning to True Detective, we see Rust doubt whether there are good grounds for hope. The task of preventing and alleviating suffering as well as bringing a measure of justice into the world is onerous. It also threatens to seem futile given the large numbers of murders and disappearances, and the rampant cruelty and degradation inflicted especially upon children, teenage girls, and women throughout the series. This sense of futility, it seems, overtakes Rust in the interim between “solving” the first crime introduced in the show and the second spate of similar murders.

During this hiatus, Rust has indeed opted for resignation as a response to pessimism. Although he does not have the constitution for outright suicide—as he says to Marty—he is nonetheless doing a pretty good job of drinking himself to death. He has essentially retreated from the world into a dark bar where he can engage in almost nonstop anesthetization through the bottle, until a spate of new, similar murders awakens him from his resignationist slumber, resparking his intellectual curiosity as well as his compassion and sense of justice.

But it takes the final, spooky, and frankly nauseating confrontation with evil incarnate, in the form of the “Yellow King,” to show Rust a legitimate path to the affirmation of life, as opposed to what he sees as an intellectually dishonest, optimistic, theological route. After surviving the bizarre melee and shutting down the activities of this serial killer, Rust gains a sense that perhaps his thoroughgoing pessimism is, at bottom, unwarranted. Despite the fact of tremendous suffering and injustice in the world, there are, nonetheless, nontrivial victories for compassion and justice. Additionally, Marty's quasi-reconciliation with his family shows Rust that a measure of forgiveness and understanding can be attained even after a long history of strained relationships. Rust also finds that he can take some comfort in knowing that his daughter did not suffer at the end of her short life.

Rust's Conversion

There are intimations of an afterlife in the final scene of the first season, and some sublime meditations on the starry night sky, to be sure, but in the end it does not seem that Rust's conversion is theological in nature. Rather, I interpret his final turn as resulting from the realization that some degree of affirmation is warranted by the empirical evidence. In other words, he realizes that thoroughgoing pessimism and resignation from life is not an intellectually honest stance to take. In light of his epistemic shift, he might even come to the view that his former resignation might be positively immoral, but Rust's character arc, with the series, ends only with the former, more ecumenical realization.

So, Rust's character throughout the series goes from (1) self-described jaded, wannabe-suicidal pessimist who belies his own self-understanding by energetically fighting crime to (2) one who really embraces that self-description, resigns from life, and aims to drink himself to death to (3) the cautious affirmer of life through compassionate engagement with the world. Rust finds some grounds for hope, and he chooses to continue on the path of compassion and justice, the path to try to improve the world. This prompts the question of whether he ever really embraced suicide in principle, and just lacked the constitution to pull it off, or whether, like Schopenhauer, he perhaps always found the intellectual grounds for such a radical decision to be shaky. At the very least, we can conclude that, as the eponymous “true detective,” he was duty-bound to pursue the evidence—evidence for hope or lack thereof—wherever it would lead.

Notes

1

An earlier version of this chapter originally appeared online at

The Critique.

2

Arthur Schopenhauer,

The World as Will and Representation

, vol. 2, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1957), 578. First printed 1883.

3

Arthur Schopenhauer, “Prize Essay on the Basis of Morals,” in

The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics

, trans. and ed. Christopher Janaway (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 162.

4

“True Detective Season 1: Inside the Episode #8 (HBO).”

YouTube

, March 9, 2014.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE2n-nwiqDs

.

5

Arthur Schopenhauer,

The World as Will and Representation

, vol. 1, trans. and ed. Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), sec. 69, 426. German original:

Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung

(Zürich: Haffsmans Verlag, 1988).

6

Schopenhauer,

World as Will and Representation

, vol. 1, 426–427.

7

Ibid., 428.

8

Rüdiger Safranski,

Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy

, trans. Ewald Iosers (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), 105.

9

Ibid., 218.

10

Ibid., fn. 230.

11

Ibid., 231.

2Grounding Carcosa: Cosmic Horror and Philosophical Pessimism in True Detective

Christopher Mountenay

Like many fans of True Detective, I was somewhat disappointed with the season one finale, “Form and Void.” It was definitely not a bad hour of television, but it undid much of the work that the first seven episodes had done. “Form and Void” both diminished the element of cosmic horror into something more terrestrial and mundane and replaced Rust Cohle's trademark philosophical pessimism with a metaphysical optimism.

“This Is Some Halloween Shit”

Let's clarify what we mean by cosmic horror, supernatural horror, or weird fiction.1 Most horror fiction that the West consumes consists either of familiar folkloric archetypes or completely naturalistic violence. The former is often only frightening to children because the familiarity of, say, vampires and werewolves makes them into easy objects of self-parody for most people. The latter includes subgenres such as slasher films, which rely on scenarios that, while typically outlandish, are at least physically possible. Partisans of this type of horror will argue that it is the scariest since it could “really happen.”

Cosmic horror takes the opposite approach. A tale of cosmic horror will typically, but not always, begin with elements that seem “realistic” but then veer into things that are impossible, at least from a rationalistic, naturalistic perspective. Yet what makes these things scary is not that they can occur in the realm of possibility but that they actually alter our understanding of what is possible. The master of this style, H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), in his long essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, describes it as follows:

This type of fear-literature must not be confounded with a type externally similar but psychologically widely different; the literature of mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome. … These things are not the literature of cosmic fear in its purest sense. The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.2

Lovecraft's form of horror is not concerned with “physical fear.” The fear of death, even a violent death, is not what Lovecraft is trying to invoke. Rather, he sees the “oldest” and “strongest” fear to be the “fear of the unknown.”3 Lovecraft fears the “hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.”4

A typical Lovecraft story involves a protagonist discovering some oddity, investigating it, and then watching his world unravel as eldritch horrors are awoken and a secret history of the world is unearthed. The protagonist of the story begins in a state of relative naïveté, not understanding the secret nature of the world and thinking that things ultimately make sense. While Rust is an exception to this trope, Marty Hart, despite his rough exterior, is such a character. In “The Long Bright Dark” he describes himself as “just a regular dude with a big-ass dick.” Marty proclaims his Christian faith and is horrified by Rust's philosophical views. We also see the value that he places on his family and his libido, though the two are at odds. As the season continues, Marty's faith in all of these things is shaken, though perhaps not to the point that one would expect from a cosmic horror story. Though Lovecraft's protagonists tend to be nebbish antiquarians and academics, not all protagonists of cosmic horror tales are squeamish. In fact, some of the best cosmic horror stories of the early twenty-first century, namely those by Laird Barron, feature protagonists displaying Marty's style of machismo. The lesson that they often learn, though, is that even such fortitude is ultimately futile in the face of cosmic horror.5 The best-case scenario in most works of cosmic horror is that the monstrosity that was unveiled goes back to sleep. All too often, though, heroes learn that the horrors they face are not only very real but also deeply woven into their own identity.

The horror is based not around the fear of what the monster can do to us but rather around the very fact that there are monsters. This is what separates cosmic horror from fantasy. A story involving monsters, such as The Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter books, is not necessarily a horror story. A fantasy story typically presents the existence of monsters as a matter of fact. The characters react to the revelation of the existence of ghosts and goblins in the same way that a reader of a science magazine might react to the discovery of a new species of lizard: possibly with interest, but nothing life-defining. The reason is that no new philosophical questions are raised by the existence of the paranormal. If there are talking animals, what does that say about our previously held notion of humans being the sole sapient species on earth? The existence of ghosts should both settle debates and open up new questions about the existence of life after death. Yet, in much fiction, these discoveries are treated in a blasé manner.

Cosmic horror works differently. Even if we may find Lovecraft's beautifully described monsters to be hokey, we must question the role of humans in the cosmos. Lovecraft's monsters are not malevolent. Rather, they are of the mindset that humanity is beneath consideration. Humanity is to them as insects are to us. This goes against the typical religious or humanist doctrines that see humanity as either the highest of God's creations or the pinnacle of evolution. If beings like Cthulhu or the Yellow King do exist, humanity's precarious place is threatened. If things exist that can violate the laws of nature, then how may we trust those laws? Lovecraft's description of these “safeguards” is apt. Modern science has been a candle in the dark, but cosmic horror blows that candle out.

Thomas Ligotti, a living master of cosmic horror, said that “in the right surroundings our entire being is made of eyes that dilate to witness the haunting of the universe.”6 And what is more horrific is that, once one's eyes have been opened to it, no light can chase it away, since “horror eats the light and digests it into darkness.”7 It's not the threat of being taken by the Green Man to be sacrificed to the Yellow King that should scare us when we watch and imagine the world of True Detective. What's truly scary is living in a world where such things exist and in which our very sense of self is permeated with that darkness. Why would someone enjoy such imaginings? The simple answer is that we like to be scared. But Ligotti proposes something darker. Some of us already have the sort of philosophical inklings that someone like Rust has, and by personifying them and making a spectacle of them, as we do when we read cosmic horror, we're allowed to step outside ourselves and enjoy the horror while not feeling it devours us.