[2Wycked]

I've long been considering an ROK post on HBO's series, True Detective.

Obviously, the character of Rustin Cohle is my primary interest. Pastabagel at The Last Psychiatrist has this interesting note about faith:

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Cohle asks in Ep. 5 "Why should I live on in history?" It's an odd line, especially when in episode 1 he tells Marty that he "lacks the constitution for suicide." But he also meditates on the cross (as an atheist), "contemplates that moment in the garden, of allowing your own crucifixion." But by 2012, Cohle has changed. He's resigned himself to ending his own life, but only after settling this debt- doing what he owes. One last act of compassion before giving up the only thing he has. His life. And once he's willing to do that, then he can do all the things in his life that require selflessness, courage, etc (i.e. things that require faith). You have to accept the infinite so you can make the right moves in the finite.

The highlighted quote interests me greatly.

At the first level, what is the nature of faith? Pastabagel suggest his definition in the subsequent paragraph:

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And when he does this, when he resigns himself not to his fate but to his eternity of endlessly repeating, at that moment he will actually have faith, because that's when he proves he believes in the eternal. Only after doing this last good thing does he believe that he could stand the idea of an eternity of rerunning his life, because he knows at the end, he's fulfilled it. "Nothing is fulfilled--until the end."

Pastabagel goes on to reference Kierkegaard and his insistence that men -- in order to truly have faith -- must resign themselves to the eternal so they can make the correct moral decisions in the world of the finite.

I'm struggling with this because of a few reasons: what exactly counts as faith, why is faith necessary for these higher order moral (ethical?) imperatives and how does this fit in with mainstream religious/moral approaches to life?

Cohle has a quote in the series that is telling, I think:

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Someone once told me, 'Time is a flat circle.' Everything we've ever done or will do, we're gonna do over and over and over again.

While it never is directly addresssed, Cohle had a two year-old daughter who died in their driveway and it is implied that Cohle and his alcoholism lead to her death. He first talks about this at a dinner with his partner's family, while his partner is taking a call. This exchange firstly suggests how out-of-touch his partner is with his family, but the point here is about how Cohle relates to that. His shield of indifference is attacked directly when forced to talk about his failure of a family.

In the last episode, Cohle confronts the serial killer that has haunted his soul the entire series. He was heavy into drugs earlier in his life and he has a drug-induced flashback in the fight, when he sees the entire universe spill before his eyes. He and his partner kill the serial murderer, but not before Cohle suffers severe injuries.



Cohle awakes in a hospital, alone. His partner had his family meet him and care for him; Cohle awoke alone in a room. Cohle eventually confesses he saw the light -- he saw his daughter across the pond of eternity -- and he realized that nihilism was nothing more than his defense against confronting reality. He says that he "sees the light" and that "nothing has been fulfilled -- until the end," and the end here is his abandoning of his nihilism.

Frankly, I've never been all that good at philosophical posts (I emailed cardguy about this series and he said, 'It sounds pretentious as fuck') but I am fascinated with the concept of faith and what it portends for human thoughts/behavior.

Specifically, why do the concepts of courage and selflessness require faith? Does it require us to believe that faith means that we believe in world beyond our mortal comprehension? Does faith require us to believe that our acts speak to eternity -- that what we do echoes in a flat circle? Or does true faith revolve around our belief that the world is fundamentally good, evil or morally ambiguous?

What exactly is faith?

Since Cohle was trying to overcome his hand in his daughter's death, could faith simply be the belief that humans can atone for their bad acts? In Cohle's invocation about humans committing acts again and again for eternity, is he talking about atoning for the death of his daughter? That -- like the Greek myth of Sisyphus -- he will spend his life solving murders of women and children to atone for the deaths he caused his family?

This quote by Pastabagel stuck with me:

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You have to accept the infinite so you can make the right moves in the finite.

Does a man have to accept -- on faith -- the concept of eternity to achieve higher levels of awareness or actualization?