Now it's looking a little monstrous, isn't it?
It’s hard to define a monster. Think about it, there are so many things we can think of as monsters. From James P. Sullivan to a ten-legged fire-breathing rhino to a pedophile to racism…
I took a course on monsters once. I loved it. We discussed so much and yet… at the end of the course all of the participants had a different concept of what a monster is. At the time, when confronted about this the professor said something along the lines of:
That’s the whole point of the course. I can’t define a monster for you. Not even the philosophers we've read can. My intention here is that you give the subject some thought and draw conclusions, no matter what they are. What's important is that you get something out of this.
For me it’s still a little complicated, but it's really fun to give some thought to the matter so I did get something good: I now often reflect on monsters and what comes with them.
About an hour ago—after facing a really bad case of writer’s block and reading this—I decided to work on a story I’ve been trying to continue that involves… you guessed it: monsters. Now, I didn’t reach a breakthrough with that one but it did get my gears turning. Can we find monsters everywhere? In everything?
“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster, when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you.” – Friedrich Nietzsche.
Now I have not yet read ‘Jenseits von Gut und Böse’ but that phrase is quite famous and definitely catches the eye.
The first part is a quite obvious, yet deep. Nietzsche points at one of the main problems of mankind: an obsession can lead us to become what we vehemently reject—like a pacifist blowing up a building to send a message against war or a preacher who resorts to sins to spread the word of his religion. We are all vulnerable.
The second part to me shows an idea just as complex as the first one. ‘When you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you’. What is it that the abyss watches in us? Can it see our humanity? So, maybe, and I could be terribly wrong here but… what if the abyss–the monster we fight–gets some humanity out of us too? Can we find a monster in every human, and a human in every monster?
What about you, who took the time to read this? In a few words. Could you share with me what comes to your mind when you think of monsters?