Lack

This powerful idea I became more intimately aware of as a consequence of something Parodites wrote. Lack here means substance as lack, positive substance that exists and is as it is only or largely because of a lack of something else.

That politics is simply a lack of "philosophy" seems evident to me. It is in part correct to see politics under the various lenses of instinct, group psychology, social cohesion, historical mandate, whatever, but ultimately these "positive" causes are themselves conditioned by the larger, overall lack which is the paltriness of the human being's mind. Human consciousness is more lack than excess, perhaps 10% real substance is an overstatement; all of that negative lack, that void caused by an inability and unwillingness to seek truth and reality, to seek adequately into causes and that instead merely seeks the lowest energy state of convenient delusion and denial, is acting as a substance in man and world. This substantial lack creates the ripe environment for all of those other "positive" or natural causes.

I suspect each such cause is also its own particular substantial lack. This seems to be how the mind works: reality imposes, real causes are encountered and product affect and response in the mind, but a confusion sets in, a confusion of being unable to articulate these effects adequate to the reality of them, so that the self is divorced from its actual experience and consequently generates an illusion in which it's ideas now rest, as intellectual and emotional entropy. Over time that entire glut of entropic illusion and denial becomes so large that the self experiences things largely through this unreality, and becomes entirely divorced from what it is actually experiencing in terms of the reality all around it. There is a hugely complex and subtle inter-woven state of quagmire and confusion in the human being because of this, as aspects of biology, chemistry, physiology, psychology, and mentality each form layers of cause/effect reality in our experiences and each such layer with its own degree of "necessary error". Natural mediatings between these spheres results in further errors and "will to denial".

If this is the basic ontoepistemic state of the human self, which in most cases it is, then what is the human world? The world is precisely an expression and manifestation of that state. Properly speaking we could include every natural force and positive substance along with this basic state of lack and confusion in order to produce a total understanding of the world, which would include all politics, religion, social morality, economics, science, pathology and cogent awareness alike. For practical purposes that would be extreme difficult to enumerate with precision, but we can be aware this is the fact and reality of these things and we can focus on the inner state of void and confusion from which so much "positive" human and world substance come.

I dare say every human reality and experience could be subjected to this sort of analysis, in order to assist revealing its hidden reality and true nature. This is philosophical articulation of substance, delimitation with recourse to truth and to a wider reality appeal than what is "typical" even for higher thinking or more profound, honest feelings.

The self is the basic historical, psychological, ideational, political category. As such a category the self is unitary, yet its parts and inner structures interact with real conditions of experience to generate "the world", in similar manner (to apply a perhaps somewhat ill-suited or potentially misleading analogy) to how light passes through a holographic plate and a 3D image is generated as a result.

Lack is an invention of abundance to create an unfolded dimensionality of abundance. Life results of this artificial lack - 'time' - the progression of the seasons. In our sphere this lack is represented by the moon, which circulates the waters and creates life out of temporary lack of substance, increased will to self-value, readiness to a 'leap of feaith' into darkness where a mortal life lies.

The mere sacrifice to order, the deliberate life that cuts into Life, releases an immense thrust of energy. This energy has been harnessed by the organic miracle of maximal complexity, which requires its own fundamental existential lack within its own scope of things - it knows it is mortal, therefore it knows the universe endlessly vast, and therefore its mind explodes in seven hells and then finally into the Daemon itself.

The ultimate justifications of this created lack is sex, but also art.
Art is the spilling over of nature of mind, sex is the spilling over of nature of instinct.

The two are orthogonally opposed in the maximal sense of will; will is the tension implicit in instinct used to its maximum. Will is the harnessing of carnal drives for the sake of harnessing them - merely because the drives offer themselves to be dominated or suffered, the instinct to dominate them follows from the will to power.

But to not merely dominate them, but juxtapose them to being itself -- this is philosophy-pure, the love of the madness that precedes wisdom and follows from it - the accurate estimation of mind itself, which is completely intoxicating and all consuming.

The mind consists of many different hells. The combination of all hells into one is the eye of the Daemon, the spirit of freedom by voluntary suffering.

The Mind originally as torment, that is wholly justified -- torment from which the World as we Know it is formed.
Suffering unto life, which means that all life is free to do as it pleases -- 'karma' only concerns fear, and is also known as 'regret' -

the Wheel of suffering is the Zodiac of Mind, its phases are manifold and its nature is progressing opposition. All occult science is the balance of oppositions, the creation of space, power, clarity and concentration in between the ground and its fruit, the self-valuing and the temporary suspensions of self-valuing like hunger and pain, the nature of sacrifice, to which all Gods owe their substance.

Power in life is easily acquired through sacrifice. There is no easier way.

And I would add that it's nearly impossible to maintain this elevated perspective except by feeding it with equally elevated works/writing or with our solitude. I often find myself fragmented in the world and only the inertia of my own project and reading keeps me from losing that 'hard edge of truth', because quite simply that edge is not needed in the world and is rather a liability there.

I see philosophy properly excludes itself from the world, but equally this lack is substantial to that philosophical mind, so only creates more cause for new reality to appear.

It is easy to understand why most thinkers, why the entirety of academia and intellectualism must abandon this cusp of pure synthetic growth and self-"overcoming". In the sense that life cannot be transformed in the image of our knowledge and ideal our own work becomes something necessarily "vain" and eminently selective. If even we inspire one other person this is probably a monumental achievement. Any influence gained at the cost of advertising ourselves and translating truth downward probably has only a detrimental value, to us and to others. Nietzsche was perhaps very "lucky" to have his connections into the institutions, which secured the eventual dissemination of his work. Otherwise no one would have cared.

There are probably dozens of writers and original thinkers like Nietzsche whose work simply perished. Now in the internet age this is especially true, the institutional control is extended infinitely while the appearance of the "democratization" of knowledge now reigns. And that objective eye as could weigh our place in history, beyond all modern and postmodern horror and implicit standardizing, may not even exist or simply has no choice but to revolve around its supreme truth in eternal silence. Equally any will to deceive man can only end ruinously.

I think the final challenge for philosophy is one of hope.

I don't believe any real talents have been lost to history for that reason. All it takes is one convert, really, and a movement is born. Nietzsche's connections to academia availed him nothing until the very end of his life. His books sold so poorly he had to pay for their production costs himself. But eventually he made a few converts and began to be spread mimetically.


Modern academia is infected with Feminists and postmodern deconstructionists, it's dead. It's an embarrassment to anything that bears the name of philosophy. They have classes like "What if Harry Potter was real." http://firstyearseminar.appstate.edu/what-if-harry-potter-real


I expect I will publish my own work soon, but I still have some loose ends to take care of and a few things I want to write about for it.

About the self being divorced from originality, what Gnostics call the fall into matter:


Did man originally distinguish himself from the animals in raising his head to the heavens, engirdled with stars, because he perceived them, seemingly unattainable, to be a challenge to his own power, because he was the first creature to be moved by disinterested beauty, or because they provoked in him the first stirrings of reflection, prompting him to take cognisance of his position within the order of creation? In truth, these three realizations of human nature; dominion, art, and philosophy, to distinguish after the manner of Baudelaire, are only the later offshoots of the more fundamental condition, the condition of being unfulfilled by the earth, the disconsolate chagrin at one's own material basis, the condition of being so thoroughly dissatisfied with the petty enjoyments afforded by this world. The gentle throng of man's summoned angels, the circle of his loves and his regrets, and of all his hours, washes over him that supernatant lightening bubbled up from the liquid involutions of consciousness which we call memory, and demands not a hopeless fray but an enjoining thread, lest it portray to him an image in which he can find nothing truly of himself and representative of his powers. Yet, that longed for contiguity does not belong to the world of experience, and for want of some encompassing vision man turns to the transcendent order, to the order of ideas. Directing himself toward such a higher idea, his earthly victories themselves are stripped of meaning, though the progression from the one to the other gains poignancy, insofar as it represents the unfulfilled yearning toward the immaterial and ideal. One either longs for or forgets, one either strives for or turns away; either one unites the circle of his experience in the pursuit of the ideal, or relinquishes himself to the play of chance, to the disparate succession of hours, in order to extinguish himself in the manner of a Faust. Equally, both types of human being adhere to the proclamation that we should eat and drink, for death is close; the first one out of hope for the unseen world, as he casts his brow over and beyond the earthly vale of soul-making to use the expression of Keats, while the other does so out of quiet despair, out of stoical acquiescence to the fact that eating and drinking is all that is left to him. There are other voices for this quiet despair, though; art is one, in whose implacable forms the material basis is resolved, in the expressionless and dead face of whose Venus the blood of man is stilled, in whose tragic beauty tragedy is elevated above itself. All the world suddenly grows abundantly beautiful to the dying man, for all the world is dying. Just as the fulfillment offered by dominion, by earthly victory, is subsumed by the transcendental bent, so is artistic pleasure subsumed by self-forgetfulness, by dissolution of actual lived experience in immutable forms. Philosophy, that third offshoot of unfulfilled humanity, is most characteristic of our species and also therefor the most brilliant example of rupture in the order of nature, of a sickly abberation in biology. A being that questions the meaning of the fruit offered for its consumption by nature? The animal's consciousness is situated within nature through an expanding and contracting system of relations, the latent force by which it is compelled now expanded by the satiation of its hunger, then contracted and drawn inward by pain, a kind of dissociative state. Human consciousness, however, like a seed which has shot out its roots too impetuously, proves to be a rupture in the order of creation; his consciousness is not delineated by nature, can no longer properly instantiate itself in that order within which the animal is contained, but flows outward like a lethean spring, in which all the flowering galaxies are thoroughly dissolved. Man knows quite well that happiness is not the highest happiness, nor sorrow the deepest sorrow.