Goth Philosophy - Beyond the Appearance

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I have browsed existing discussions surrounding Goth, but it seems few bother or understand the actual Philosphy, that is, the deeper aspects that goes on beyond the surface. There are Goth Catholics, so is there harm in understanding beyond the words ‘just a phase’?

To get started, this blog post is quite informative, and I would like members’ constructive intellectual (name removed by moderator)ut on it.

http://ultimategothguide.blogspot.com.au/2010/12/shortish-history-of-philosophy-of.html?m=1
 
This isn’t a discussion on philosophy in a full-blooded sense. Maybe one could argue it’s about aesthetic… But even that is very thin.

This reads like someone who is trying to project history on a very modern style phenomenon. Gothic Romanticism, Gothic architecture, and the goth subculture today are very different things linked only by superficial tropes that this person seems to be mistaking for something deeper.

I’m curious to know what YOU think “goth philosophy” is. Why you think it’s anything more than a popular subculture.
 
That is an interesting question.

From my perspective, Goth, and the larger ‘Dark Culture’ was always an intellectual pursuit, one that questioned modern society. Many people focus on music, fashion, and that’s perfectly valid because society needs the arts like literature as an important means of communication, but from an intellectual & even spiritual pursuit, it is about critical thinking, the pursuit of knowledge, seeking meaning beyond the scopes of what is considered mainstream and having an appreciation for what one discovers.

For example, within Goth/Dark Culture, its more acceptable to be a funeral director who pursues alternative understandings on death, from the cultural norms societies view life & death to advocating for more positive outlooks on grief, funeral etiquette and honest ethics within the funeral industry. A goth would be somebody who embraces alternative understandings on matters most others refuse to accept or address. That’s not to say they glorify in it, its that when death happens they have a better grasp on it.

While not a Goth herself, a good way to understand the being Death Positive and why a goth may be attracted to it is researching Caitlain Doughty, woman behind Ask a Mortician.

A goth is someone who may study crime & the psychology of the mentally ill or criminals not because they glorify or condone such but because they desire to understand & discover aspects of humanity that the trivializing reality TV & sexualized Hollywood mainstream would shriek themselves over.

Lastly, the goth may be the church goer who spends their time fascinated & inspired by world religions, wanting to find meaning & answers in an untainted, openmind.

The mindset of Goths, and the lives they are drawn to is the Philosphy, or the open ideas, of the goth. It’s about art, intellect and spirituality in a non-conforming, accepting format. From intriguing thought processes on the science of mortuary and medicine, to the humane desire to help humanity by researching the dark pits of the human psychology the goth mindset is born.
 
I also have these two resources as well and I can always add more if it provokes civil discussion 🙂

I recommend looking into the podcast known as Cemetery Confessions & looking into the wider roots of goth, known as Dark Culture which is an umbrella term that incorporates more.
 
I mean, maybe! I’ve known a lot of goths over the years and it’s mostly people who are in to dark imagery, spooky things, and the color black. I don’t find much intellectualism behind it. Fascination with death, darkness, monsters (real, imagined, emotional, mental, whatever) I find comes more about through cultural impacts.

For instance, after the American Civil War there was a huge increase in the thinking of and dwelling on death in the US. Death suddenly was on everyone’s mind, and invaded literature and art. The same thing happened in Europe after WW1. And you can see it during the Plague years in Europe.

I’ve never heard any philosophy of goths that try to approach metaphysics, or epistemology, or logic. I think, if anything, goth subculture touches philosophy most in the vein of Nietzsche - that it stems from the emotional rather than the rational. That it appeals to sensations and feelings instead of from thinking. But again this would be more or less just the aesthetic.
 
I’m from the US and I’ve known a lot of goths. My hometown happened to have the main goth club for the city in it for years.

I don’t see any harm in understanding goth as long as you don’t get fixated on any goth practices that the Church would frown upon. For example, reading a book about vampires or fortune tellers, and dressing up like one to go out is probably okay; actually drinking somebody’s blood (most goths don’t do this but a handful do), or holding seances to try to call up the spirits of the dead, is probably not okay.

Like every other subculture/ lifestyle, there are some people who really get seriously into goth from a philosophical or historic point of view, and others who just like the clothes or the music. It’s been my experience that subcultures as a lifestyle tend to be taken more seriously in the UK and Europe than they generally are in the USA. That’s not to say that there are no “serious” goths in USA, but people are often pretty flexible or broad in their interests, and goth might be just one of several interests or lifestyles or fashion/ music preferences that they simultaneously practice. Goth also got really broad over time and not everybody who’s into it is all fascinated with medieval cathedral architecture or Victorian mourning practices anymore. They might be into space aliens or David Bowie or steampunk more than they are into history and philosophy.
 
florin1 said:
Being closer to death and dark things makes you more depressed and anxious, more disconnected from the world of living human beings. It is a choice, of course, but that’s a choice I cannot actually embrace.
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I think you’ll find the effect varies depending on the person. Western culture often forgets that death will come for us all sooner or later. A lot of people - like me - who had very dark experiences earlier in life tend to be drawn to that sort of subculture, in part because it can be more accepting of such things (although that gets better as you get older anyway).

Remember, things like the Capuchin Crypt are also part of our faith.
 
florin1 said:
Being closer to death and dark things makes you more depressed and anxious, more disconnected from the world of living human beings. It is a choice, of course, but that’s a choice I cannot actually embrace.
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I pray for the Poor Souls in Purgatory every day. That’s about as close to “death and dark things” as one can get without actually crossing over. It doesn’t make me more depressed and anxious, more like the opposite.

Also, many of us who have lost loved ones and believe in the afterlife like to feel some connection to them. Yes, it makes one feel slightly disconnected from the living, but it also creates a greater awareness that this earthly life is transitory and will be over quickly, and that there is another phase of life coming after this one…the same things the Catholic Church teaches.
 
Melancholia is actually defined as a contemplative state not an active one. When you are sad when you cry you cry, you are sad and the tears just shatter you. When you are melancholic you actually do not necessarily cry, you look at your sadness from outside.
Goths are more like melancholic. It is contemplating as an outsider what you feel. Sadness may induce self-destructive thoughts more often than melancholia that is inactive, just looking.
The Church teachings discourage melancholia and extreme sadness but this maybe it’s another story.
Psychologists claim melancholia is a negative feeling, it feeds upon itself and hence is endless. Sadness on the other hand is active, it is based on action, it demands a conclusion to those feelings. Like Yin (melancholia) and Yang (sadness).
Goths aren’t suicidal but they may become passively aggressive because they are so detached from their own selves and others.
Just my 2 cents. :hugs:
 
The Beats, or Beatniks, of the 1950s. The Hippies of the 1960s, and I knew some and understood their thinking. The Punk scene in Detroit. I was part of that, and knew a few of the ‘leaders’ in the subculture. Then the Goths. All of these subcultures are examples of rejecting and experimenting, for their own reasons. The problem is: Most of them grow up and become adults, and realize their experimentation phase was just a phase.

Speaking generally, belonging to a subculture involves detachment and some outward expression of identification, like how many safety pins can you attach to a leather jacket near the zipper edge? Answer: a lot. It also involves a kind of tribal kinship. Example: I was at one of the punk night spots (the entire place was lit by one one 5 watt bulb, except the dance/band area), and I was sitting next to two young ladies who knew I was part of the tribe, and then two suburban types wearing average clothes walked in: “Oh no! Tourists!!” Other girl: “It’s like someone walking into your bedroom!” Now they were dressed in beautiful clothes combinations with bangles, and I felt like an anthropologist that had found a hidden tribe in the middle of the city. I got why some were into melancholy, but this was mostly playing dress-up on the weekend. I could not go to the parties because I knew how much bad/wrong stuff was going on at those.
 
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Thinking on death can be a very good thing to do.
It matters how one goes about it.
Live to die a good death.
 
The handful of goths I know are much the same as any other subgroup. Some are -er- odd, most just embrace some aspect of that culture and are trying in their own way to live good lives. As a really great leader is said to have said “who am I to judge”. There does not need to be and problem in living a Christian lifestyle and superficially enjoying goth culture.
 
edwest211 said:
Speaking generally, belonging to a subculture involves detachment and some outward expression of identification, like how many safety pins can you attach to a leather jacket near the zipper edge? Answer: a lot.
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Well, if you’re an old punk then you likely realize that as people get older, they may well keep the mental lessons they learned from their subculture while they may ditch the wardrobe trappings or only put them on a couple times a year for reunion show night. I’m an old punk myself and at the ages that me and my peers are, and with most of us having “responsible jobs” or even careers now, we rarely dress up (assuming we can even fit in those type clothes we wore at age 21 when none of us had a lot of food money) but we all agree that punk is first and foremost an attitude. The lessons I learned from the few years I spent as a young punk have stayed with me all my life.
 
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I didn’t learn any lessons. My years with the punk scene showed me nothing worth emulating. Living in an alternate reality was fun in small doses, but the world outside of that was day to day to life. It was about beauty and fashion and looking different. I mean a beautiful girl with a proper mohawk is still a beautiful girl, but it went too far in some cases: the drinking, the drug use, the casual sex and, in one case, a young lady I knew separated from and divorced her husband. Who was a really nice guy, and me and him both missed her. But, during her wild punk years, she did not want to be Suzy Homemaker. It was about music and clubs and look how beautiful I am and my husband doesn’t understand me. I mean the atmosphere was intoxicating but then the smoke cleared…
 
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I’m sorry you didn’t have a more positive experience with punk. I was a few years after the initial wave but well before Green Day if you know what I mean. My lifestyle was pretty close to straightedge in that I did almost no drugs (a friend’s mom gave me about 10 very mild diet pills once when I was trying to lose weight, that was it) and did not drink alcohol till I was 21 and then only very rarely. My friends have ended up all over the place. Some of them became responsible spouses, parents, authors, news correspondents, lawyers, artists, engineers, professional musicians or roadies for big name bands, Some of them had some respectable blue collar jobs. Some died of a disease like cancer that wasn’t related to their lifestyle. And some of them, including my closest friend, drank and drugged themselves into an early grave.

I was going to regular Mass almost every Sunday back when I was a punk. The vast majority of the punks in my town were raised Catholic and I think it stayed with all of them to some degree even if they stopped practicing.

Lots of water under the bridge since then, but I wouldn’t trade those years for anything.
 
It was sad to watch people become drones. To act and behave according to the instructions they received. “This will be cool, this will be fun.” In the end, a lot of broken lives, or on their way to anti-punk lives which went against what they briefly embraced. Some did become “average” people too. It was an elaborate ongoing party that had an end. And after my punk friend and tribal leader, left town, I was done with it.
 
You can get a chicken and egg thing sometimes. People who already feel like they don’t belong are drawn to subcultures like this.

I suspect in general people who get older and are attracted to subcultures tend to tone it down. You’re very likely to find me nowadays in black slacks/skirt, a nice dark top, and a lace bat necklace or something. (Yes, my hair’s dyed too, but that’s not terribly obvious.) Some of it’s also time - I have had many times where getting out the door to work on time with some sort of reasonably healthy lunch along and enough time to put gas in the car is more important than doing makeup.

Of course, at least for me, I also found that as I got older, people around me were a little more ok with being different too. So I don’t think it was all just me changing - I think as I got to where my peers were also adults, some of the issues I had with people around me turned out to have been issues with children being childish. Now that I’m not hanging out with teenagers, no one really cares much past that I can put on appropriate clothing for work and do my job well.
 
In my experience, most goth types suffer from either depression or bipolar disorder, myself included. I think there’s something therapeutic about it. Like it takes your inner feelings and makes them external so you can move forward with your life. I don’t think it’s some kind of deep philosophy that people chose to live their life by, but more of a coping mechanism.

These days my goth tendencies are relatively minimal since I’m an adult, wife, mother, business owner, I have far too to many other things to worry about. But you can bet in the fall and spring, when my depression is the worst, if I paint my nails it will be black and if I put on makeup then eyeliner is going on a little bit thicker.
 
Being someone that’s been mistaken for goth more times than I can count, I’m not sure what the philosophy behind it would be. Sometimes, I just like to wear black and listen to music. Actually, I rarely ever wear black, save for black slacks. I’m curious how the modern word goth is related to ostrogoths and Visigoths.
 
I will have you know I look awesome in black, thank you very much! And my cat matches my clothes, naturally.

☺️
 
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