The Wisdom of Catastrophe

The Wisdom of Catastrophe is The Thinking Press's flagship forthcoming work: a treatise standing at the crossing of Jung and Nietzsche, taking catastrophe and nihilismThe view that no value or meaning is built into existence itself. The treatise takes this as a starting condition to think from, not a conclusion to argue against. as its starting conditions rather than problems to be argued away.

It asks what survives of the will toward the good once the easy consolations are gone — not as an abstract question, but as something the book tries to work through on the page.

Its movement runs from the first onset of nihilism as it is lived, through the collapse of inherited values in a culture and in a single life, to the hardest confrontation of all, with the capacity for destruction that lives within each of us; and on toward what catastrophe demands if it is not to be wasted: resolve in the face of time and death, the transformation of the wound into meaning, renewal, and the question of whether meaning, once lost, can return, asked in the light of Nietzsche’s eternal returnNietzsche's thought experiment: imagine living this exact life over again, endlessly, and ask whether you could will it. The treatise asks the same of meaning itself..