Prince and the Nihilation of Norms

Vincent J. Curtis

24 April 2016

I’m in the midst of reading several works by Jacques Maritain.  They are: Existence and the Existent, as well as The Rights of Man and The Natural Law.  Maritain was a Christian philosopher, which means he was of the Aristotelian-Thomist Scholastic tradition, with a special interest in philosophical theology.  He was French Roman Catholic, but he was not hostile to humanism or to modern-day existentialism, insofar as these philosophies did not conflict with Catholic theology.  (Indeed, the point of Existence and the Existent was to make the case that St. Thomas Aquinas was an Existentialist, though a far different one than the modern day version.)

In the course of Existence and the Existent Maritain gets into St. Thomas’s theories concerning good and evil.  Evil is the privation of good, and a person does a good act beginning with the First Cause of God as a shatterable impetus, followed by an act of the human will under that impetus.  A good act is the product of the intellect’s consideration of the rule, and then the shatterable impetus gives way, or fructifies into, the unshatterable impetus of God, and goodness results.

An evil act is the product of the intellect’s non-consideration of the rule – which Maritain describes as an act of nihilation, a nihilation of the shatterable impetus of God as first cause– followed by an act deficient in being, which God permits.  Insofar as the act lacks being, it is evil.  God’s unshatterable impetus can never result in non-being, or evil.

For example, a lie is an evil act, and the non-being consists in the non-being of truth in the statement uttered.

The idea of nihilation is interesting in respect of the death last week of the musician Prince, apparently of a drug-overdose.  Personally, I found Prince’s act to be repugnant and I paid him no heed over the course of his career.  But what struck me was the coverage of his death by Fox News anchor the wholesome Megyn Kelly.  Why would someone as apparently wholesome as Megyn Kelly give the likes of Prince the full hour-long tribute?  She seemed actually to have liked his work.

So, why would someone wholesome like Prince’s act and work?

In coming to grips with this question, I’d like to start with why they should not.  And the place to start is the nihiliation of norms.  At 5’2” tall and of slight build, Prince was a runt.  He portrayed himself as a sexually ambiguous come-on, always with the seductive look and make-up.  You couldn’t tell whether he was vamping up a gay sexuality, or this was his way of getting girls.  This act of his was a nihilation of sexual norms.

Next is a brief assessment of his work, which was by accounts prolific.  He was a talented musician who could play many instruments.  Kelly mentioned specifically his work, “1999” and “Little Red Corvette” as classics and favorites of hers.  I watched the videos of his performance of these pieces in concert, and then read the lyrics.  On the written page, the lyrics are base drivel.  They don’t really say anything, and are written in a pseudo-ghetto patois.  There is nothing in them that appeals to the rational nature of man, but much to his animal nature.  The baser instincts of man is where one finds the broadest appeal, and that may explain why these songs could appeal to so broad an audience.  (He sold 100 million albums over his career, apparently.)  Clusters of words contribute to the musicality of the pieces, such as a rhythmic “little red corvette” and “party like it’s 1999” which do not carry the overt appeal to sex that is carried in the verses.  Through repetition in the chorus, one gains awareness of these phrases; but base appeals to sex hide amidst the musical sound in the performance of the verses.

Thus the lyrics of a typical Prince musical piece nihilate the norms of decency, though that may not be readily apparent.  The casual listener may not be aware of what is actually being said in the piece (and being intellectual drivel there is little reason for the intellect to pay attention), which may explain why a casual listener may not be particularly offended if things like decency mean something to that person.  Other nihilation of the norms of decency can be seen in many official photographs of his, for publicity and otherwise.

Prince’s voice was also lauded in his many tributes for its range and versatility.  Frankly, I don’t hear it.  The amount of sound contributed by his voice is small compared to the instrumentation in his performances.  His voice was a small instrument in the overall combination of instruments.  He was certainly no Pavarotti, no Phil Collins, and no Frank Sinatra in terms of vocals, whose voices were the primary instruments and carried the songs.

Prince was obviously not secure in his musical performance in concert.  His acts seem full of fireworks, light shows, and amazing (and destructive) acts of physicality including jumping from heights onto the stage floor.  These things certainly contributed to the overall sense-experience of the show for the audience, for not only were they entertained by sound but by sight and by shock.  The music was not, apparently, enough of an appeal in Prince’s mind, and he resorted to the tricks that so many other modern musicians do also to gain and hold audience appeal.

The result of his dangerous jumps from heights (in high heels) was that by the age of 40 he was in need of hip replacements.  Many members of his bands left because they too suffered from physical ailments.  His ultimately fatal addiction to pain killers may have arisen as a result of the pain he suffered as a result of his concert performances.  One might label this a nihilation of physical norms.

Another sign of his nihilation of physical norms were his body piercings.  He appeared once on the interview show Larry King Live with what looked like half a pound of ear piercings.  I bet they hurt to get done and to be put in.

There is a famous episode in which he demonstrated a remarkable prowess with the guitar, and then at at the end he contemptuously tossed the guitar over his shoulder, to no one in particular. Presumably, the guitar was broken.  This act was a nihilation of value.

Prince had a contract dispute with Warner Brothers, and to gain revenge he changed his name from Prince to “The Artist, formerly known as Prince” and an unpronounceable cypher was designed as representative of his new name.  This would be a nihilation of identity combined with a nihilation of sensibility, since the cypher was unpronounceable and without meaning.  Not even Prince tried to give sound to it, and so the “The Artist, formerly known as Prince” became his name.  For a while.  Until he changed it back.  Because the unpronounceable was too weird, and bad for business.

The nihilation of so many things can be mildly interesting and mildly entertaining to the casual listener.  As Aristotle observed in The Art of Rhetoric, the mass of people are base, and so long as they aren’t the ones being harmed (at least immediately) they are beguiled by base things, such as the nihilation of sexual norms, decency, physical well-being, identity, value, and sensibility.

As the center of this storm of nihilation, Prince felt the need to live this life of nihilation full time.  As a result, he never had real friends around him.  Oh, he had friendly people around him, but no real friend as Aristotle described them in The Nichomachean Ethics.  He had no one around him to tell him to slow down, to get real for a while, and to stop hurting himself.  (If someone around him did say this, he probably would have driven them away.)  Nihilation results in an absence of being, that is, something containing evil, and nihilation of norms was Prince’s act, that by means of which he drew attention to himself, the quality of his work being insufficient in itself, by his own reckoning.

Norms are the standards of good, and Prince was into nihilation of norms.

In the end, the nihilation of his physical well-being led to an addiction to painkillers, and the overuse and misuse of these led to his demise.  His prior addition to nihilation led to his having no real friends who might have tried to stop his self-destruction.

The result of Maritain’s analysis of God’s shatterable and unshatterable impetus and the nihilation of God’s shatterable impetus by mans’ willing the intellect to not consider the rule, is that man is solely responsible for evil in the world, not God.  Weep not, then, for Prince, for his nihilations were his own, and they were what was good for his business.

So, why would someone apparently wholesome be downcast and sad over the death of Prince?  Well, it may be a sign of baseness in the apparently wholesome person.  It may also be a sign of the non-consideration of the nihilation presented to them as a fan, a listener, or an audience member.  Nihilation may be entertaining and pleasant in some way.  Lacking being, the act may lack disquieting reminders of what good is.  The acts may simply not be taken seriously.  Appeals to the animal nature of man deliberately aim to avoid engaging the rational nature of man, and the intellect is where serious consideration is found.

Thus a tinge of baseness combined with failing to seriously intellectualize what is being made sensible before one (a case of nihilation of the intellect) account for why an apparently wholesome person would be sad and downcast over the death of someone who made nihilation the center of their creative career.

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