Ask a Philosopher: What’s

Up With True Detective’s

Rust Cohle?
Matt Patches Feb. 28, 2014

Photo: HBO

“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in

evolution,” mutters Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle
in his version of ride-along small talk with partner Marty
Hart (Woody Harrelson). While True Detective is heralded
for its slow-burn mystery shrouded in atmosphere as
thick as the bayou, half the fun of an episode is waiting to
see which metaphysical concept Rust will tackle in
monotone soliloquy. Life, death, religion, love, the fourth
dimension, man’s physical self as a conduit for violent
action — Rust has a line for every topic and, thankfully, is
always willing to share. It’s easy to forget there may be
answers at the end of True Detective’s tunnel when
McConaughey continues to drop foggy poeticisms with
such grace.

But do Rust’s nihilistic ruminations reflect a founded

philosophical doctrine or is he spewing pure bunk? Is
nihilism even the right word for it? With vague philosophy
running through its veins, we asked Paul J. Ennis, an
author and academic who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy
from University College Dublin, to help us digest True
Detective’s grand ideas and boil down Rust’s worldview
into something founded in reality. Which may be pointless
— because what is reality anyway?

What makes True Detective a TV show worth

analyzing on a philosophical level?
Rust has a willingness to speak openly about ideas
common to us all, but ones we are usually expected to
suppress. There is a pressure to offer pockets of hope,
redemption, or escape in our narratives, but True
Detective seems intent on withholding that. However,
grim television is not unknown, so I suspect what works
here is just how nihilistic Rust’s pronouncements are; you
simply don’t hear people arguing we should walk hand-
and-hand into extinction on television very often. I’ve
always been of the opinion that when you get down to it,
everyone agrees, in their very bones, with Rust. Or, put
another way, he is not saying [anything some of us
haven’t thought before].

$5 a month for unlimited access to Vulture and

everything else New York

LEARN MORE »

Are there specific scenes or bits of dialogue that

made you realize that True Detective was a show
actually wrestling with philosophy versus simply
throwing around words to sound heady?
His dialogue with Marty in the car. It would have sounded
eerily familiar to anyone who has been exposed to
Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human
Race. [Editor’s note: Early on in the series’ run, shorunner
Nic Pizzolatto gave an interview to The Wall Street
Journal in which he talked in depth about Ligotti.] In
many ways, it’s a paraphrase of the central argument of
that text. However, we witness a generalized pessimism
throughout the interviews. Perhaps the second stand-out
scene in this regard is his meditation on the eyes of
murder victims. The idea that they would have welcomed
it, that they were being released, is a very Ligotti-esque
notion, but one that would have chimed well with many
pessimists. I am sure that to many people that dialogue
may have felt cheesy or obvious, but as a visualization of
what the pessimist ultimately holds — that death is to be
welcomed — it is pitch perfect and signals, to me, some
wrestling with philosophical questions.

However, this only works if you have been through the

mill of these texts. For example, Ligotti buys the
arguments of some contemporary neuroscientists, which
Rust would surely be familiar with, that there is no self
and there is no free will. I see this strain throughout his
monologues that life is a trap, a dream, or a program.
Once you grasp that, and truly believe it, then you cannot
help but see the self as akin to being trapped in a kind of
nightmarish loop. In many ways, the self is the micro-
scale of this nightmare and time is the macro-scale that
he also touches on in terms of a ceaseless loop. There
are some tensions between these positions, but common
to both is the idea that we are puppets at the mercy of
wider forces.

True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto has recently

talked about texts that influenced his writing of Rust,
describing him as an “anti-natalist nihilism.” What
can we learn about Rust as a person informed by
works like Jim Crawford’s Confessions of an
Antinatalist, Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of this
Planet, David Benatar’s Better to Have Never Been?
We would know that he is drawn to the extreme fringes of
philosophical speculation and that much of the material
he is reading is unpalatable to most people. We would
also know that he sought out these texts perhaps after
being dissatisfied with more mainstream mediations on
our place in the universe. He is not at home in the world,
expects nothing from it, and has a fundamental mistrust
of all discourse of hope. It is also likely that he sees
hypocrisy as the norm and is attuned to delusion as the
natural state of the human mind. This is perhaps why he
is so good at soliciting confessions.

Nuances dividing these thinkers aside, I’d say

philosophically Rust considers consciousness an
aberration or evolutionary error/mistake, that he is not
concerned with filtering knowledge according to “the
pathetic twinge of human self-esteem” [to quote
philosopher Ray Brassier], and that, as an anti-natalist, he
subscribes to the old maxim of “better to have never
been born.” Better yet, many of these thinkers argue, as
Rust mentions, that we should stop reproducing in order
to end the cycle of existence.

This worldview is often correlated with self-

destructiveness and I would say Rust’s fascination with
murders, drugs, and the criminal lifestyle flower naturally
from it. Despite this, I do not expect him to be the killer.
It’s the fact that apparently normal people are killers that,
I suspect, intrigues Rust, and since he knows what he is,
the need to act out violently against others is likely
lacking. He’s a bad man, but he knows the real bad men
wear masks.

Pizzolatto is also quick to refute the notion that Rust

is a pure nihilist, suggesting that compassion keeps
him from being that easy to boil down. Do you see
conflict in Rust between nihilism and a more hopeful
life philosophy? What makes a “true” nihilist by the
definitions of those who shaped the doctrine?
I’ve not seen it clearly yet, but there are signs of empathy
in Rust that is not entirely alien to the nihilistic worldview,
given the centrality of suffering, nihilism is pretty
empathetic. I would say he is passionate and sensitive to
those he sees as being crushed by various forms of
power, which is often sustained by moral hypocrisy. I
wouldn’t say hopefulness is quite the right word, but I
would say a nihilist could find drive, if not meaning, from
undermining those with power. We see this in his barely
concealed contempt for Reverand Tuttle (and his intuition
that he is a moral hypocrite) and his sympathy for the
more honest and flawed former Rev. Theriot.

I don’t see it as a conflict, but I can see how Pizzolatto

would be worried about viewers seeing it that way.
Regarding the true definition of a nihilist I don’t think
there is one and nihilists are actually pretty hands-off as
writers. Certainly the likes of Cioran or Ligotti tend not to
debate other thinkers. It’s always been more a disposition
or attitude than a doctrine. After all why not ‘live and let
live’ when you barely believe in life anyway?
Would love to hear your thoughts on a few specific
lines, like Rust’s profession, “I consider myself a
realist, but in philosophical terms, I’m what’s called a
pessimist.”
It’s something I’ve had to say myself many times.
Basically, in a non-academic way, I consider myself just a
brute “realist” in the classic sense of seeing the world in
a very blunt, cynical manner. However, in academic
philosophy the term realism has many different senses
and, to avoid confusion with them, pessimism is used as
an alternative.

Do you see Rust’s actions or way of life reflecting his

“realist” attitude?
I would say that Rust’s pessimistic realism is expressed in
his suspicion toward institutions — the police
department, organized religion — and toward the
narratives people build around themselves. In the latter
case, he expects people to be mired in self-deception,
and that allows him to dig deeper behind the masks they
wear to obscure what is really going on. However, there is
a price to pay for this and we see that such a bleak
understanding of the world can also result in the
recklessness that forms part of his character. The
austere, stoic lifestyle he lives, along with the drinking, is
absolutely a result of thinking along these lines. Perhaps
the moment this is clearest is when he realizes, whilst
watching television with his girlfriend, that such a life is
just not for him. He just can’t buy into it anymore. This is
why I think the “I know what I am” line is so important.

Rust has a strange relationship with religion. He

seems to loathe organized religion, badmouthing the
“authoritative” God and saying that “certain linguistic
anthropologists think religion is a linguistic virus.”
Religion as a linguistic virus is derived from a number of
linguistic anthropologists, but more importantly for this
scene, the idea was popularized by Richard Dawkins (the
theory of memes). It is someone Rust would, of course,
channel when faced with a religious audience. I suspect
in many ways Rust is often reading other people through
the lenses of this anthropological and evolutionary
perspective. It allows him distance to analyze others
according to their specific delusion. He often seems to
test Marty at a very base, evolutionary level when it
comes to masculinity and tellingly often comes out on
top.

How would you describe Marty’s personal philosophy

— family-oriented, religious, black-and-white sense
of good and evil, yet someone prone to vices — in
contrast to Rust’s? When does philosophy become a
conversation about ethics?
Marty is a classic moral hypocrite albeit precisely the
type of person who keeps society from collapsing. In
many ways, he is just the Everyman and he carries out his
“duty” in an extremely predictable way — almost as if he
got married just so he could move on to have affairs as
the next step. I don’t quite think it’s a philosophy so much
as he has just soaked up ideas of how to be a man and
tries to live according to them (without reflecting on it all
too much as he senses where that leads).

Do you see Marty as a character designed to

challenge Rust’s philosophical POV? Or confirm it?
Marty reads to me as a pragmatist who tries to navigate
life by a series of codes of conduct. Not always good
ones — men have codes for misbehaving. I don’t think it
is designed to challenge or confirm Rust’s philosophical
view so much as act as a blunt contrast to it; by having
such a “normal” Everyman beside Rust, it intensifies his
weirdness, almost like the “straight man” you find in
comedy shows. However, I cannot be sure here that I am
not reading Marty well since to me he, rather than Rust, is
the weird one!

Time is a very important concept in the show, on

macro and micro levels. In episode five, Rust
ruminates on time being “a flat circle,” where events
will continually repeat over and over again. Is there
basis for this science-minded philosophy?
He seems to be discussing the idea in two distinct
senses: one is, and here I am no expert, M-theory derived
from theoretical physics that he discusses explicitly with
the detectives. The more subtle existential angle he is
touching on is the “eternal recurrence of the same” that
Nietzsche introduced. There, the idea, and it is found in
older traditions, too, is that the greatest horror for us is
not to die, but to live the same lives on repeat for all
eternity. In Nietzsche, this notion is designed to shake us
up out of our passive lives. The challenge being, to
paraphrase, whether you would be willing to carry on as
you do if you knew it would all happen again (eternally).
It’s a thought experiment, but some people read it
metaphysically. For me, that particular scene seems
designed to stress how easily he gets lost in his head
more than something that will relate very directly to the
story line. However, it reconnects up to Rust’s
commitment to the fact that life is but a dream/nightmare
— not in some flowery sense, but that the far grimmer
awareness that structurally consciousness has the
character of an elaborate continuous, but determinate in
duration, fantasy.

How do you see the concept of evil playing out on the

show?
This is tricky for me because I don’t believe in the
concept of evil and suspect Rust does not technically
believe in it either. It’s a very religious concept and for a
pessimist would be seen as a word that obscures
complexity. I honestly cannot say at the moment whether
the show is going to end up as an expression of the
inherent “evilness” at the heart of people, but I admit that
would disappoint me. My hope is that the sense of
supernatural foreboding found through the show will be
explained, if it is at all, in a realist manner. That is to say, it
will be the result of a human mind, which is already the
darkest thing in nature. As Rust tells us in the car,
consciousness is an aberration from nature.

If Rust’s beliefs about the world turn out to be true,

how do you imagine the events playing out?
I would say that given Rust’s pessimism coupled with the
slightly disturbed atmosphere he finds himself in, he is
sure to discover increasingly unsettling things. I genuinely
cannot imagine how it will end, which is an amazing
feeling, but I would say that I believe we will discover that
the “cult” is a cover for a wider network (and not just
Tuttle) and that a large amount of powerful people are
implicated. This would neatly blend two types of paranoia
found in the show: the religious, supernatural fear of
Satanic ritual cults and the anti-authoritarian pessimistic
intuition that moral hypocrites are always covering up
some misdeed or another.