To hell for love

philosophy and magic

To no one’s surprise hell, in RF Kuang’s Katabasis anyway, looks like a student center. Pronounced KUH-TAH-BAH-SIS - a synthesis of Greek words ‘kata’ and ‘baino’ (meaning go and down, respectively) - Kuang’s latest novel showcases a powerhouse philosophical thinker on topics as diverse as logic, paradox, justice, morality and love.

The book also (above all?) tells a love story. Analytic magicians Alice Law and Peter Murdoch journey to hell to ostensibly save their professor’s undeserving soul, but while there rekindle a love for each other instead.

Using their knowledge in analytic magic to escape from several hell traps, Alice and Peter redeem one another and ultimately themselves. Their task is an obvious ode to a distinctly Nietzschean philosophy: to redeem yourself, you must redeem others first.

But Kuang is clear. Analytic magic is not the same as work in philosophy. In one notable moment, main character Alice actually sneers at the study of philosophy with what we can imagine is an upturned nose. Philosophy is puny next to the possibilities presented by analytic magic. So what is analytic magic then? Is it distinct enough from actual philosophy to merit comparison?

At a minimum, there is some strong correspondence between the two. Analytic magic takes philosophical paradox to an extreme, and in doing so, creates openings in the known world. In the novel, these paradoxes are then exploited through magical means by way of chalk spells and ritual rites.

One such opening is a gateway to hell, the journey into which, it turns out, is one and the same as a trip into the past. In that space, Alice and Peter discover that they share a similar set of traumatic experiences, most of which had been delivered at the hands of their abusive professor Grimes.

The pair are in jest over the pain Grimes has visited upon them, exclaiming in turns “what a tyrant,” but also “he was our tyrant.” Tyranny, in Kuang’s telling, sits in the second to last court of hell just before Dis. Her version deviates significantly from Dante, who placed fraud in the 8th circle but the effect is the same. Vice, when left unchecked, leads to total oblivion.

There is no room for Christian apologetics here but we wouldn’t want it anyway. For Kuang, hell is principally “other people” (an incredibly well-placed Sartre reference) and thus entirely immaterial (in that it is co-created in the actual, lived realities of a person’s past).

There is a problem of possessiveness here, but also a problem of authority and obedience; the more arbitrary and absurd the obedience the more analytic magic appears poised to exploit it.

For example, Alice eventually decides that instead of saving Grimes she wants her vengeance upon him over his brutalizing authority. Her position betrays the Nietzschean insistence that overcoming vengeance is the truest path to the creation of a stronger self and a stronger will.

But this is hell, and unlike a damming Christian binary, the characters’ imperfections are features of human life, not aberrations from the same. In this way, Kuang untangles love’s complexity from its pain and makes us wonder whether going through hell is somehow a prerequisite for finding love, not an injunction against it.

For my own, I found analytic magic the most intriguing aspect of the book. I’ve always felt that philosophy, at its best and brightest, is an incredibly magical thing. Only a love of wisdom, that high philosophical ideal, can best support the healthy combining of two separate wills (Kant) while also safeguarding identity and boundary-driven personhood through the demands of logical consistency.

In this way, philosophy (like love itself) can sometimes have the effects of a drug, a topic I explored elsewhere. But as I wrote in that piece, philosophy - very much unlike the drug experience - can and does have the tools to solve for itself.

This is because philosophy doesn’t just platform love, it captures and redirects its energy toward better goals. To hell with all the rest.