Before we can unlock the mystery of Garfield’s nonexistence, we have to turn back the clock. So let’s do that. Before existentialism and phenomenology, before Sartre, Husserl and Heidegger, there was Nietzsche, possibly the most misunderstood figure in modern philosophy. Nietzsche as is well known to us now was also history’s most famous lunatic. Through his writings we get a clear progressive sense of the philosopher’s losing battle with reality. It may not be immediately apparent, but reading Nietzsche’s books in order, there is a sense of a downward spiral and a picture emerges of his slow separation and relinquishment of his body-mind attachment. Part of this reading is projection, because we already know how the life of Nietzsche ends, but the second part is purely inference from the text. By the time he wrote The Antichrist Nietzsche was close to a raving madman. Despite his infirmities, like Louis Wain, Nietzsche continued to work and his persona is still evident in his later texts.
The idea of the antichrist was for Nietszche autobiographical. For all his life he thought of himself as an adversary and saw the figure of the antichrist as imbued with an innate morality that originated from within rather than from without, ontology he favored, because it supported his argument he laid out in The Geneology of Morals. The morality of the adversary ran antithetical to contemporary society and it’s supposed virtues, which Nietzsche theorized was based in resentment. To Nietzsche these social norms were abhorrent and deserved to be broken, destroyed and annihilated. In their stead Nietzsche wanted to erect a new kind of philosophy, un-beset by the restrictive life codes of religion and its priesthood or the resentments of the lower and middle classes. Though as a young man he identified with what he called the ‘life-affirming’ aristocratic morality, filled with permissive and creative, as opposed to reactive energy, Nietzsche would in his later years go on to dismantle this viewpoint as well, while in the throes of early stages of lunacy.
He had his first visionary experience in a fevered state on a convalescence retreat in Sils-Maria, Switzerland. According to legend, it was here that he wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the course of a few days of writing madness, without food, drink or sleep.  For the rest of his adult life he spent nursing visions of himself as Zarathustra, the hermit sage who descended from high mountaintops with his unassailable wisdom to spread among the people. Nietzsche’s calling to teach his own philosophy to the masses dashed on the rocks of reality when he realized that nobody wanted to hear what he had to say as he descended his own mental mountaintop. Worse still, nobody showed up to hear him in the first place. His publisher refused to print the book and when Nietzsche decided to finance his of self-publishing endeavor, he managed to sell only a few copies to his friends and family.
In the wake of Zarathustra’s failure, indifference, rather than ignorance, became Nietzsche’s greatest enemy against which he fought and lost a life-long battle. Reading Nietzsche’s books in succession we witness the philosopher erecting mighty castles and fortresses against his philosophical enemies in one text, only to reverse himself in the next, where he moves on to systematically tear down what he wrote previously. This makes sense when seeing Nietzsche’s works in their totality and in light of his own philosophy of the ‘eternal return’, which he’d go on to embody throughout his writing. Sartre’s ‘perpetual revolution’ is a direct reference and appropriation of this idea. It was that notion that obsessed Nietzsche so much that he dedicated his life to undermining the edifice built by what he called ‘systems builders’, the willing servants of a corrupted morality embodied by the church and state, that anointed, sanctified and perpetuated the return of the same. Time moves forward, people and trends come and go, but moral laws and the institutions that carry them out do not.
And here finally we get to the kernel of Nietzsche’s thought. Throughout his life Nitezsche is locked up in an uphill battle, mostly with himself, his own perceived shortcomings, his failing health, and above all with his fears and doubts. The dirty secret of all human endeavor from art and literature, to science and philosophy, is that when people write books or poems, paint pictures, solve mathematical problems that make a rocket go to the stars, their subject is always themselves. Thus, Freud’s writings on psychoanalysis are in themselves writings about Freud on the subject of psychoanalysis, Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is on the subject of Einstein thinking and writing on the Special Theory of Relativity, and so on. Nietzsche was the first to understand how the self organizes thoughts and emotions around itself and how it perceives itself in relation to its environment. It was this dual relationship between the self as creator of its own experience and the self as created by its environment that ultimately drove Nietzsche insane. What Nietzsche’s philosophy did for his scant audience and what it does for today’s audience, wasn’t so much that it presented a new morality as an alternative to an old one. Nietzsche presented his audience with a guide for navigating the world of modernity in which the individual rather than the collective and family would play a primary role. In Nietzsche’s own conception he was ‘the first man’. His was an uncanny ability to see what was coming just around the corner as the century of the self was about to be born. He saw nothing but existential horror ahead.
Nietzsche was and remains the first and best philosopher of the self. He established the practice so to speak. His critiques of reason, morality and resentment owe their existence to a mind forever locked in a struggle with its own complicated relationship with the self. Whether he knew it or not, Nietzsche was the first true Modern individual, locked into his own thoughts, his ego concerned only with itself, which is also why he was so absolutely allergic to indifference and could not stand when publishers, critics and audiences ignored his work. As a true Modern, Nietzsche spent much of his time in a state of utter loneliness.
Modernity is the expression of a collective loneliness. The rise of individualism birthed a paradigm shift humanity was not equipped to handle. Industrialization and technology made the world smaller and communication faster. Science found humanity to be a speck of dust among the billions of trillions of stars within the space of billions of trillions of galaxies. The newly birthed individual ego was quashed by the enormity of its recent findings. It wasn’t so much that there was so much endless empty space somewhere out there. We would not be able to conquer any of it in our lifetimes anyway. Rather, the most horrifying realization of all, one that drives almost all science and religion today, is that nature, and all of that space, is entirely indifferent, if not hostile, towards us and our existence.
Modernity is tied to the idea that individuals are free agents of their own destiny, no longer a part of any sort of visible collective effort. No other ‘text’ in existence demonstrates the existential horror of modernity than the Garfield-inspired comic Garfield Minus Garfield. Begun in 2008 Garfield Minus Garfield follows a lonely Jon Arbuckle in the grips of an ongoing existential crisis. The GMG formula is deviously simple. Take an existing Garfield comic and remove everything but leave Jon. Brutally alone. In space. The effect is startling. We come to the realization of the ‘true’ import of the original comic. If we are to take GMG literally, then in relation to the original, Jon is experiencing not just a mental breakdown due to his utter loneliness, but a kind of existential dread that is difficult to characterize using ordinary language. It is the kind of airborne existential hopelessness that many of us feel at one point or another in our lives, when we wake up sad or depressed for no good reason at all, or when anger overtakes us seemingly out of nowhere.
We Moderns have no easy recourse or a way to handle difficult emotional states like depression, existential or identity crises, especially ones that are protracted or permanent. The typical modern recourse is to escape into drugs, addiction, cycles of abuse and in many cases religion. Again, Nietzsche is paramount on this point and the return of the same. Religion is interesting, because unlike modernity, it actually does have a prescribed program for dealing with existential difficulties. One could argue that religion’s precise purpose was to do just that. Religion was once there to catch us in mid-air and place us aright again. When family and friends are not part of one’s emotional support system, religion often races to replace it with its own program, rules and life codes.
It is therefore interesting that in Garfield fandom and lore, Garfield and Jon have become two widely separate and completely opposite ‘religious’ archetypes – Jon the martyr-savior and Garfield the primordial God-superego. If we are to read Garfield through the lens of Garfield Minus Garfield, and why shouldn’t we, then the characters of Garfield and Odie turn out to be figments of Jon’s imagination. Garfield’s function in Jon’s symbolic order is as an externalization of Jon’s deeply rooted anxiety. Garfield, with his gluttonous habits and lazy disposition represents Jon’s inner desires to be what he thinks he is, a totally free individual, free of inhibitions and able to act according to will alone. He is the Tyler Durden to Edward Norton’s nameless narrator in Fight Club. He is what he is, or at least he hopes to become what he thinks he is he is. Jon’s imaginary self is the embodiment of the Nietzchean ‘ubermensch’.
In reality though, Jon is beset by the modern disease that freedom represents. To the Moderns freedom does not mean the same thing as to the indentured servants, paupers and textile mill workers of 18th and 19th century Industrial England and America. Freedom in the 21st century is a subject fraught and rife with ‘unclean’ political ramifications. Most would rather escape into the secure hands of the state than experience the deep state of indifference that true freedom offers. Freedom presumes a lack of security.
Modernity is in this respect profoundly anti-life and anti-humanist. It reduces individuals into abstractions, data sets, users and customers, which are relevant only to the systems that use them to propagate their anti-humanist work. On the surface these systems seem benign, useful, even beneficial. They have given us streaming on demand, remote therapy sessions and fractionalized banking. Under the skin of the system however, is the body without organs, a disorganized mess with the appearance of organization. Its absolute and final social realization and its spiritual nadir is bureaucracy, the sort that the sickly Franz Kafka used to write about in his absurdist short stories and novellas at the beginning of the 20th century. There exists the same kind of dispassionate indifference in corporate and statist bureaucracy that also exists in nature, and for that matter, in the military industrial complex which drops bombs on civilians with calculated precision and fastidious attention to detail. The horror of this kind of indifference is that in most cases it is accompanied by a surreptitious smile of the bureaucrat, the sort that knows that behind the opaque systems run by even more opaque tech and machinery there is still someone who can push a button to get things done, to stop the drones and carpet bombing or to dismiss a parking ticket.
The indifference of nature toward human suffering is but a smile, like that of the Mona Lisa. This is what the fan artists of another Garfield-inspired project, a Reddit board I’m Sorry Jon, picked up on after Garfield Minus Garfield went viral. They saw Garfield’s smile as something different from what the original comic wished to communicate. His was a smile similar to the Mona Lisa - not a smile, but an ambivalent evil smirk - a shape shifting organism appearing as that which the viewer wishes to see, as if to underscore the banality of the efforts we expend on determining its only and true meaning. Thousands of comics later Garfield’s shape shifted from a cuddly orange tabby to a monstrous figure of  Chuthulian cosmic horror with tentacles spewing out of its mouth gorging itself on Jon’s worst fears and doubts. I’m Sorry Jon takes the original Garfield comic to its absolute perverse and tragic end. Why it is so compelling is still anyone’s guess. What we do know is that forty years of daily Garfield comic strips and billions of dollars in merchandise sales and licensing fees have created a kind of egregore, or tulpa, in the collective unconscious. Garfield, and Jon for that matter, have officially entered into the psyche of the collective, which makes them part of a kind of unconscious public domain, where we are able to do with them what we wish and to manifest through them the best and the worst kinds of attributes of ourselves. And this is happening while Jim Davis is still out there, alive and well. What will happen to Garfield after his author is gone is still anyone’s guess. Nietzsche just might have an answer.
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