Rust Cohle Was Never Really a Nihilist

The first time I saw True Detective, Rust Cohle looked too happy being gloomy about everything. He had the language skills, the thousand-yard stare, the cigarettes, the strange philosophy ramblings, pretty much everything needed to become a Tumblr quote before Tuesday arrives. His apartment is decorated by a man who just found out about existentialism and has no furniture.

Upon watching the first season again, I find him far more fascinating than “the nihilistic detective.” While the description isn’t completely wrong, it is too simplistic and reduces Rust to an aesthetic of a depressed man saying depressing things while solving depressed crimes. There is more to the character than that. His idea that life is not worth anything is more than just something he happens to think is true. He seems to “require” it.

The more I observe him, the more I become convinced that his philosophy is a way for him to exist which he cannot trust anymore. Rust’s worldview is undeniably intellectual, shaped by philosophy, religion, and the science of consciousness. But it is also machinery.

Consequently, it affects how I read practically everything Rust says. He’s a guy who had to go through a lot of suffering and is now keen on proving how the universe has always sucked. The difference makes Rust such an interesting character study.

In the pilot, Marty Hart is at ease with society and the conventions of life. Rust from the outset is the discomforting one in the room. It is he who could turn an after-work drink with colleagues into an impromptu lecture on consciousness. Marty wants to discuss the case, while Rust wants to discuss why humanity may have been a bad idea.

Ironically, Rust ends up surrounded by family, children, conversation, and food. However, he seems to manage to turn dinner into a funeral experience. When religion comes up, Rust calls human consciousness a “tragic blunder of evolution.”

Now, observe what makes the scene tick. Rust is having a family dinner and ruining dinner for everyone by spouting metaphysics. It’s funny because it’s out of place, but Rust finds it hard to look at consolation ordinarily. Religion, family, optimism—everything that Rust surrounds himself with at Marty’s place is everything which Rust mistrusts.

Therefore, Marty is a type of life which Rust rejects but is unable to shake off completely. He believes in the basic foundations of existence such as family, work, masculinity, and social acceptability, but Rust finds hypocrisy in the foundations. Still, there is hardly anything simple in Marty’s case, and there is nothing uncontradictory about Rust. One man hides behind normalcy while the other hides behind philosophy.

Right from the start, Rust’s philosophy can be found in connection with another individual. In the series, Rust is shown in company with Marty, an individual who reacts to Rust’s philosophy through a mixture of frustration, skepticism, intrigue, and acceptance. Rust requires a stranger to listen to his philosophy, but he requires one who would challenge his ideas too.

Since Marty is far more of an average person compared to Rust, he also acts as the “control group.” Rust may appear perfectly normal had he been surrounded by other morose intellectuals. Put him in the company of Marty, and only then will we get to see just how radical his outlook on life truly is.

Philosophical pessimism is not the idea that certain things are bad, how suffering is inherent in the very nature of being alive. Although True Detective owes much to the school of thought, scholarly examinations have made comparisons between Rust’s way of thinking and Schopenhauer, Ligotti, Cioran, Nietzsche, and many others from the medium of pessimism or anti-nihilism. Nic Pizzolatto cited Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as influences on Cohle’s philosophy.

Rust’s speeches are not a case of the writers randomly throwing philosophical terms into the screenplay. Though, at intervals, it’s how it seems. He has lost his daughter at a young age, and he has then lost his wife. Now, all his pessimistic views seem quite understandable. It does not mean that all of the thoughts Rust has expressed in the series are boiled down to “a sad man loses his child.”

But grief changes their meaning. When Rust speaks about consciousness being an error or existence being a bad bargain, he seems to be a person who has discovered words to describe his pain.

The basis of Schopenhauer’s pessimism is rooted in the fact that conscious entities are built on desire. There is such substance of it is desired; then such of which is desired is attained, one becomes unsatisfied, desires it else, or does not have the chance to attain what he desired. There is never any form of permanent satisfaction at the end of the road.

Rust’s philosophy has a very similar framework. You seek meaning, love, security, children to live, justice, to mean specifically, and reality sets in and tells you how all of such things are not assured. For his grief, rather than telling himself, “The world took away from me what I could not bear to lose,” Rust can tell himself, in essence, “It was obvious to me how the world was terrible.”

Oddly, it is reassuring in its own way. If the universe is inherently indifferent, Rust’s troubles are proof of the theory. Particularly, it is an intriguing aspect of his pessimism and prevents him from being surprised. Optimism makes you vulnerable. If you believe that life is good, tragedy is an interruption and shouldn’t have occurred, and if you believe that life is bad, tragedy is confirmation.

Disappointment will not come from any failure since it has become inevitable through his theory. His philosophy becomes a sort of insurance. Since he has already expected the worst-case scenario, he has paid his premium and cannot be surprised by anything. However, there is one thing which costs money. At the same time, such a worldview, which is supposed to protect from disappointment, creates problems for attachment. If all is temporary, attachment is dangerous, and if consciousness is wrong, then love is another one-trick pony.

Rust could explain anything away with his theories. However, explanation does not equal healing. His theory of consciousness treats the “self” as something vague. Humans act like there is a solid “self,” existing and navigating it, but there is only consciousness, biological instinct, memory, desire, and socialization. It makes his philosophies take on a little bit scientific outlook. “Sadness is an expected outcome of a biological process” is very Rust.

The man rationalizes emotions in such an overwhelming fashion, and there is virtually nothing left except reasoning. Virtually, since the series insists that the supposedly non-existent self is able to feel pain, Rust’s understanding of self is related to the suspicion he feels about the idea of social acting. If a person is created, the roles he acts in front of others can be considered created too, such as father, husband, cop, Christian, model citizen, decent fellow, etc. What intrigues Rust is the gap between the terms and actions.

The detective probes into the discrepancy between appearances and truth. In such respect, the upstanding family may be hiding abuse, the church may hide corruption, the law may be protecting criminals, the citizen may be committing acts of shocking violence, and the man who claims to love his family may be betraying them. Rust’s philosophy comes from the same impulse: Do not trust appearances.

Moreover, suspicion is a great quality for a detective. Marty gets people socially; Rust gets them diagnostically. Marty can see the way things should appear, and Rust can see how it is leaking through the act. The reason why Rust is attracted to the ugliest parts of the investigation is that he thinks of how the facade is not trustworthy at all. The pessimism of Rust turns him into a suspicious person, but he finds connections because he believes there must be connections.

He re-examines his evidence. He thinks about how the initial conclusion was definitely incorrect, and researches the psychology of murderers because he thinks about how humans can do things they do not want to be able to do. Rust’s worldview tells him how people are unreliable. His work proves him right every day. However, there is an ethical question that his work raises for him. If people are just machines, programmed by evolution, why does he feel like he needs to care about killing each other?

However, if Rust was really convinced of his nihilistic beliefs, why is he bothered so much about the victims, does he keep on working while he can quit, chase a case which has been taking up so many years of his life, get angry at people who are exploiting children, put his life at stake, and continue searching for the truth and keeps shattering his perception over and over again? Simply put, Rust is not a nihilist per se.

Surely, nothing has any real meaning, but he recognizes pain as having such a kind of weight. As many contradictions make up the core of his character, the metaphysics of Rust is that nothing matters, and the actions of Rust is there are things that matter so much he will ruin himself in trying to stop it. The contradiction is the character.

If the universe lacks any meaning, it does not mean that cruelty is automatically allowed. The lack of meaning does not mean that suffering will disappear. On the contrary, Rust’s preoccupation with suffering seems to indicate otherwise. He can believe that the universe does not care and cares regardless of it. It is very easy to make an opposition like:

• Marty = conventional morality
• Rust = nihilism

However, he claims to be a family man who always cheats on his family. He believes in the correctness of marriage, but he sleeps around with various women and does not hesitate to cheat on his wife, and wants to live the life of a respectable man while acting contradictory to such ideals. On the other hand, Rust denies any morality but acts according to its principles. He helps the victims, tracks down predators, does not take anything for granted, and is ready to face unpleasant truths.

Rust breaks the rules, but keeps finding himself caught up in the morality of the rules all the same. Each one of them calls out the hypocrisy of the other. Marty’s conventional morality is shown to be weak since he is unable to live by his own rules, and Rust’s unconventional and pessimistic attitude is proved to be flawed since he is equally unable to live by his own philosophy; between two kinds of hypocrisy.

Rust’s philosophy suggests that goodness is an illusion, yet they begin acting against it. The biggest irony here is how both require each other because individually none of the philosophies is sufficient. Marty needs Rust’s skepticism, and Rust needs Marty’s connection. Marty ties Rust to the world of people, and Rust saves Marty from getting too comfortable with his lies. Both of them irritate each other for that reason, and each of them has what the other does not have.

At first, the murder appears to be a terrible but understandable act, but it broadens out. Symbols connect to other symbols: victims to institutions, past killings to present ones, revealing civilization’s darker foundations. The horror lies in the fact that the murderer might not be an isolated incident.

Church, school, police department, rich family, politician, criminal cannot ensure moral security. Under the cover, there is violence, and Rust has been suspecting it all along. Hence, the case proves the validity of his worldview, but such proof can be dangerous. What a detective seeks is evidence, and what a pessimist needs is confirmation. Both are provided to Rust. The deeper he delves, the more the world agrees with him. According to Pizzolatto himself, Rust’s worldview has been influenced by his story, with Rust possessing a confirmation bias.

Rust is a broken man who sees the world in a certain way because he has experienced a certain thing. He is smart, sensitive, and often right, but being right about awful things doesn’t mean his worldview about everything else is right. At the same time, the show is smart enough to make sure he can be both right and wrong.

After the acts of violence and the revelation about the children, Rust is confronted with the idea of “time is a flat circle.” It comes from Ledoux and fits in with his philosophy, but Rust identifies it as an allusion and brushes it off. It creates the impression of metaphysics colliding with a brutal crime scene. Sure, the notion is cosmic, bleak, and pretentious enough that you may be tempted to toss a philosophy textbook at the TV, but see what set him off on such a tangent.

After all, he has come face to face with the ghastly evidence of man’s inhumanity to man. It’s a theory born out of the crime scene. Often, Rust’s philosophy is created in the context of suffering. The concept can be seen in relation to Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence, though Nietzsche never used the exact words. According to philosophical criticism of the show, Rust puts an unmistakably negative spin on the concept. Of course, eternal recurrence as espoused by Nietzsche is not about everything happening eternally.

While it is an ordeal, how could you affirm your life when you knew how you must repeat it endlessly, and affirm existence without reference to the ultimate redemption? Rust understands eternal recurrence as a curse, but Nietzsche wants to transform it into a test. While Rust hears the notion of eternal recurrence and wonders: “What if everything repeats itself endlessly?” For Nietzsche, the question becomes: “What if you had to affirm everything nonetheless?”

As Nietzsche may be considered an obvious figure in the connection between Rust and Schopenhauer’s pessimism sees suffering as part of structure. We are motivated by our desires, and desires provide us with dissatisfaction. It is clear from modern analysis of True Detective, how the structure is present in Rust’s monologues, when he denies reproduction, desire, and meaningfulness of the ego.

In The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Ligotti offers a pessimistic outlook about consciousness and existence, and his effect on Rust’s monologue has been talked about widely. Pizzolatto has admitted Ligotti to be an influence on his work but has refused to acknowledge how he copied him. For him, consciousness itself might be the issue here. We have the capacity to realize we suffer but not enough power to end the suffering, and create stories to make sense of our existence and conveniently forget we created the stories.

Rust shows how humans use illusions to feel better, only to create one himself. In the form of pessimism, his illusion is indeed very paradoxical, but it does make perfect psychological sense. The optimism illusion suggests how things will most likely work out in the future, but Rust could not see that, and the pessimism illusion says how things were not ever going to get better anyway. It was much easier for him to cope with.

If you assume institutions will fail, the failing of institutions will confirm your view. Likewise, if you assume love will die, the dying of love will confirm you. The viewpoint becomes unfalsifiable, and Rust has to refrain from believing in things which can hurt him. However, the trouble with fortresses is how they keep enemies out and friends in.

By making himself ever less able to trust the idea of better, Rust has inoculated himself against disappointment. Beneath the philosopher, there is the mourning father. The philosopher can say how dying is just a biological process; the father knows he is talking about losing his daughter; the philosopher can say attachment is an illusion; the father knows his daughter’s face; the philosopher can say consciousness is an error, and the detective does not give up on the victims.

Rust takes action. A true nihilist could just say that life is without any sense and go away wherever they want, but Rust says that life has no sense and becomes obsessed with catching a killer. It is quite funny how Rust decides to devote his life to making sure the murderer is caught. Rust’s notebooks symbolize the paradoxical combination of feelings, making notes, gathering evidence, and remembering names.

Rust looks for links, pieces together the past, and does everything which one needs to do when individual existence is important enough to be recorded. In Rust’s stance, the individual self is an illusion. As a detective, he does not allow victims to remain nameless and unknown, crimes to become numbers on paper, and institutional apathy to become the last word on the issue. Therefore, if the universe does not care, someone should.

Rust’s methods are far from being clean. He intimidates people, lies, threatens, manipulates, and his brutal nature lies beyond the comfort zone of the usual morality, but it is the brutality with which he uncovers the secrets which people hide away from him. Since Rust is not a typical hero, at least, that is how the series never tries to portray him. Rust is messed up, fixated, brutal, unbearable most of the time, but serious, and different from being morally pure.

He is unable to get over his preoccupation with suffering, death, what people are capable of doing to each other, and getting over looking. In one confrontation, he commands his target to “Don’t look at me. Look at the television.” It illustrates his character’s role in the show. Constantly, Rust makes people look at what they do not want to see.

The cosmos is indifferent, with no inherent sense of justice. Rust’s flaw is believing he understands nothingness by staring into it. Everybody is putting on an act. Marty is putting on the act of the good family man, the religious figure is putting on the act of righteousness, the institutions put on the act of legitimacy, and the criminals put on an act too. Everyone puts on the act of a being who isn’t what they really are.

The man who does not depend on anyone sees the world more clearly than anyone else, and it may very well be the greatest illusion of all, have the tendency to sound like an example of the superior intellect of the character. Definitely, Rust is the smartest man in the room. For sure, but the closer we observe, the more we realize Rust’s intelligence is a shield and allows him to analyze everything but himself.

Because if the pessimism has been in part a defense mechanism, acknowledging it will be equivalent to acknowledging how his philosophy, which has taken him years to build, is personal, and what Rust despises most about his philosophy is that it may be personal, because he wants his philosophy to be universal. If the world is bad because Rust suffered, he must accept the prospect that his philosophy may be wrong.

Maybe it is a wound speaking. In the last episodes, eventually, Rust’s investigations lead him to the truth that lies behind all the spirals, ceremonies, missing kids, and testimonies. The darkness which he has been trying to describe for years is right before his eyes, and Rust almost dies. The near-death experience does not turn him into an optimist by such magical power—Thank God. Such a sudden change of character would have been absurd.

Rust experiences things that defy his worldview: disintegration, connection, and a darkness unlike anything he had imagined. His entire intellectual self-identity revolves around certainties. He is certain that consciousness is an error, meaning does not exist, death is better than life, and humans are programmed.

Right off the bat, Rust does not try to explain it away. That is growth: doubt, vast for someone convinced that life is oppressive and consciousness is nothingness. Beyond the void, Rust finds himself able to envision it. To express the doubt, the final conversation with Marty provides the terms light and darkness. The result is hesitant acknowledgment. The darkness may be immense, but is it all there is?

It is why, I think, Rust’s story arc is about learning where his nihilism stops. If the end of the series had just said, “Rust was wrong. Life is beautiful after all,” everything about the series would be absurd sentimentality, but the series doesn’t do it. The universe is still scary, the crimes are still horrific, the victims are still dead, and the institutions are still broken. His daughter doesn’t come back to him, his marriage isn’t fixed by a miracle, and his past hasn’t been washed away.

The difference is how the connection between Rust and the lack of an ultimate answer has changed. Rust no longer feels the need to have the darkness as the last word. It is far more humble and far more persuasive. Camus starts from the very problem that Rust knows only too well; human beings crave meaning, order, and explanation, but the universe does not always offer any. It leads to the absurd, but it does not mean resignation.

In its stead comes the question of how to survive without making yourself believe in the illusion of certainty. Rust starts the series unable to accept such uncertainty. He demands an answer. His answer is pessimism. By the time the series is over, he accepts his lack of an answer. Nonetheless, it is a small change but a huge one. What changes is man’s reaction to the lack of certainty.

He has reached a point where he knows it, which is much harder. Maybe you can understand the horror for what it is without making it the sum of your experience, more believable when delivered by Rust. For such reasons, to me, the ending should be seen as “hopeful pessimism.” It may seem like an unnecessary classification until you examine Rust, but I will pretend otherwise.

However, both are not the same. Rust achieves hope, and it is infinitely more difficult for him. Optimism comes easily if reality appears to be benevolent. Hope takes into account that reality isn’t necessarily so. Rust spent years preparing for the dark. The last piece of his philosophy is knowing darkness doesn’t necessarily mean revering it, and he no longer regards suffering as the only available information about existence.

Another possibility exists here. Maybe what terrifies Rust is the presence of meaning itself. The presence of meaning entails obligations, and entails vulnerability. Meaning gives you something to lose. Rust’s nihilism is what saves him from all of it. Nothing is important, so nothing can really hurt him, but, of course, everything hurts him. Ironically, his philosophy stops him from acknowledging his attachment.

According to him, life is a mistake, but he cannot cease to care about the people who have been ruined because of such a mistake. The self is an illusion, but he keeps his own memories as proof. Consciousness is a burden, but he employs consciousness in order to study suffering. Life has no meaning, yet he spends his life seeking justice. His actions reveal the person behind the philosophy.

For Rust, extinction is always better. His language to express his views shows how he thinks creating a new consciousness is not right because it brings suffering. Academic studies analyzing Rust’s character have found a similarity between him and Schopenhauer in terms of pessimism. However, Rust’s beliefs are different from those of Schopenhauer concerning such matters, such as suicide and the refusal of the will. After all, Rust’s obsession with death never turns into submission. He survives, investigates, continues the case, and moves towards danger.

Like a man trying to disappear, he will not allow anyone else to disappear without any repercussions. The contradiction says more about him than anything he could ever say himself. Maybe what Rust’s connection to death is the absoluteness which death brings. Death is absolute, does not need to be interpreted, will not disappoint you, and will not betray you. Life will, and Rust has never trusted it.

Moreover, there’s no awakening for him to know how beautiful life is. He makes the decision how life is worth living. For Rust, it is everything. Thus, every victim defies indifference. What Rust does in secret contradicts his claim that nothing matters. While he denies meaning on the metaphysical plane, he gives it on the action plane.

What Rust seeks is to find out if there is any meaning to life. On the other hand, Rust keeps on constructing meaning through his actions. He pays attention to victims, remembers details, pursues justice, risks his own life, and does not allow the horror to be kept hidden. If meaning is not an aspect of the universe of how humanity is given and constructs itself, then perhaps Rust has been doing so all along. He just does not choose to recognize it as meaning. Intellectualization is a truly human aspect of Rust’s character.

It’s the emotion in a suit. Rust frames everything philosophically, distancing himself from it emotionally. He can say: “I’m not afraid of losing another person,” “The loss of my daughter was just an illusion,” or “There is nothing wrong about people suffering.” While it may be philosophically intriguing, it is also evasive.

The question now is one of what Rust is using it for, and it seems the answer is: So as not to say, “It hurts.” Possibly, finally, he feels it. He can’t turn immediately into a debate. Rust now has to describe it through emotion. Warmth, love, darkness, contact—Rust is finally living existence. It is the reason why Rust’s most quoted phrases are less interesting to me than his actions. It is too easy to quote Rust.

You can make his quotes black, include a picture of Matthew McConaughey looking off into the distance, and all of the people who post on the internet become little existential philosophers, but there is a risk. The quotes can define the character, and the reason why Rust is an interesting character is that his actions run contrary to his quotes. His monologues reveal his beliefs, while his story reveals his actions, and the contrast is what gives it to his character depth.

His daughter is important, the case is important, and the fact that he keeps coming back is important. He has a philosophy of “nothing has meaning,” but he himself seems to be asking why he cannot stop looking. There is a wonderful completeness about turning a pessimist into a detective. After all, the role of the detective is to distrust appearances. The role of the philosopher, at least in one traditional sense, is to doubt assumptions, but it has an inherent problem.

Combined, you have Rust Cohle. Exceptionally, he is skilled at finding the dark because he is prepared mentally to see the dark. However, at such a point in the series, it questions whether you could look for the dark for too long and start mistaking dark for everything around him, and it is really the main problem that Rust has. Yes, he does, and there is plenty of it. The issue here is that he cannot see anything else but the dark anymore.

More accurately, his journey takes the path of: certainty → contradiction → uncertainty. Initially, Rust is sure: life lacks meaning, consciousness is an error, humans are programmed, death is better, faith is an illusion, the self is an illusion, etc. In the end, there is no philosophical answer for any of it. Rust becomes uncertain, but it is good for him because uncertainty was what was holding him back. It is through his pessimism that he thought he had figured out everything there was about life. The ending forces him to face an idea he cannot understand.

It is growth, because he learns to be okay without it. The darkness persists. If the season ended with Rust gazing at a sunrise with a smile, saying how wonderful life is, then it would fail to do justice to the entire previous narrative. On the contrary, the final scene suggests there is darkness, and there is also light. The presence of one does not negate the other. Rust has seen the next seasons apart:

Either the universe has purpose, or nothing does; either life is worthwhile, or life is worthless, and either hope makes sense, or hope is madness.

In the end, he finds one more alternative. Perhaps hope doesn’t need certainty; you don’t need to prove anything about the world to keep on living, don’t need to know the cosmic importance of your love to continue loving, or don’t need to know whether justice has any meaning in the structure to protect a victim.

In truth, it may be more like existential bravery. In reviewing the season, then, many of Rust’s more telling scenes will not be found in such infamous soliloquies. His insistence on leaving notes, his inability to abandon the case, and his anger at the people who abuse the helpless, the sudden attention he gives things when they connect, the ability to venture into spaces others shy away from; finally, it is his ability to keep living despite everything. The man who proclaims that life is an error continues to act like individual lives are of importance.

Rust Cohle is a man terrified that nothing matters, and who has constructed an entire philosophy around such possibility so he will never again be surprised by suffering. His nihilism protects him from disappointment, but prevents him from admitting how much he still cares, and perhaps Rust allows himself to admit that darkness may not be the only honest conclusion.

For a man who has spent an entire season arguing against the possibility of meaning, after all, I am not sure Rust’s worldview can be reduced to one philosophical label. He is pessimistic in the Schopenhauerian sense, influenced by the anti-humanist horror of Ligotti, occasionally sounds Nietzschean, although his interpretation of eternal recurrence is much more pessimistic, has moments which resemble Camus’s confrontation with absurdity, toys with anti-natalism, flirts with nihilism, and is fascinated by materialism and the instability of the self.

However, because Rust is a character using philosophy, there is a difference. Philosophy, for Rust, is a survival mechanism. He needs a theory that explains why his daughter died, people hurt one another, good institutions fail, cannot trust happiness, and makes his suffering predictable. Pessimism gives him one.

Rust still loves, grieves, hopes, and cares. He does all of such things while insisting that he doesn’t, and the biggest mistake is to ask whether Rust discovers that life has meaning. The show never really proves it. It doesn’t need to. Maybe the more interesting question is whether a person can continue living when meaning cannot be guaranteed. It is a different problem.

Rust begins the season wanting certainty. He wants to know what the universe is, why people suffer, whether consciousness is a mistake, and whether death is preferable to life. By the end, he has something else. A reason to continue asking, and it is enough. The detective solves the murder. He survives, returns to the world, looks at the sky, and admits, however reluctantly, that the darkness is not infinite.

It is a small human decision. Keep looking, and it is Rust Cohle’s real philosophy. Maybe I don’t know whether meaning exists, the universe cares, or suffering has a purpose, but I am still here, and as long as he is still here, he keeps looking.

The interesting thing about him was never how he could explain nihilism. Plenty of people can do it after reading three pages of Schopenhauer and spending an unfortunate weekend alone. The interesting thing is how Rust cannot live according to his own philosophy. His pessimism tells him to withdraw. He investigates. His philosophy tells him that individual lives are illusions. He remembers victims. His worldview tells him that existence is a mistake. He keeps choosing existence. His intellect tells him that hope is probably self-deception.

His behavior keeps producing it, and eventually, after everything he has seen, he allows himself one tiny possibility: Maybe the darkness is real, enormous, will never disappear, isn’t everything. It is enough. Rust’s real philosophy was: If meaning cannot be guaranteed, I will keep looking anyway.

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