The daemonic.

I'm a fairly long time friend of aletheia. He has directed me to this forum, and a good first post would be a message I sent him comparing value-ontology with my own project. The self-quotes are all from a book I am writing, Hamartia: An Essay Toward A Speculative Ethic.

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I want to offer a brief comparison between my project and your own. We both, to my mind, are attempting to recover the valuing subject.


I will begin with a sentence from Fichte.


"The positing I, through its most wondrous capacity, holds fast the diminishing accident [an emotion or experience] long enough to have compared it to that which displaces it. [ a succeeding emotion or experience.] It is in this almost always unrecognized capacity that knots together unity out of perceptual oppositions, that intervenes between moments that would cancel each other out, and thereby preserves both; it is what alone makes life and conscious possible."


The positing I, or what I call the empirical ego, or empirical self-consciousness, is the self which consists in the consciousness that there is something that endures through time and experience, as opposed to the transcendental ego or self, which is that which endures. This capacity for the empirical self-consciousness to hold an emotion or experience in memory long enough to be able to compare it to the next emotion or experience is, for Fichte, that which makes the totality of experience conceivable, ie. the transcendental ego. But this capacity, this wondrous capacity as Fichte refers to it, is only possible if the empirical consciousness originates in a passive state, as opposed to an active one: it's capacity relies on a more fundamental incapacity.



I speak of this here:

" Plato and Aristotle agree that philosophy begins in a passive state, as opposed to a creative state, of the soul. This state they call wonder, thaumazein. This word, however, does not simply imply sublime awe, but rather the capacity to intimate the unknown and strange, to recognize some obscure connection between one's self and the foreign. It is in this sense that the Greek poets use it to refer to the gods, for they could intimate something of their divinity, and still further, realize in the image of this divinity something of their own humanity. This obscure relationship between the self and the world, the ego and the cosmos, man and his gods, is the essential relationship which all philosophy has explicated over the centuries. The passivity, then, is not one of impotence, but of pregnancy.


Man can only sustain himself as man by delving into that obscure relationship, which must necessarily silence him, or set him aflame, as was the fate of the Gnostic angel upon re-entering the world of mortals. He is like a character designed by a poet and thrust into the scene of some play, and can hold his personality and identity in existence only by continuing to engage in the play, even though this grants him an incomplete personality and identity, powerless to shape its own fate. In a certain sense he, like the tragic actor, can only maintain his identity by continually denying it. This disturbing quality of the passivity in which genuine consciousness originates, Kierkegaard spoke of in his conception of despair.


Kierkegaard conceives of the self as a synthesis of the infinite and finite, though an incomplete synthesis: he essentially presents a form of Kantianism which lacks the idea of a final synthesis which would inform the unity of the self and moreover serve as something analogous to the categorical imperative by which an absolute basis of the self and of human action could be determined. This lack of an absolute basis for the self and human action is the source of Kierkegaard's despair: for him it is only in god, not within the self, that this basis can be found. He thus stands among all of those beautiful but innocent mystics, granted that his mysticism is articulated in a purely philosophical language and thus serves as a healthy curiosity for all philosophers. We have here, with Kierkegaard, rejected the hope of a completed synthesis, but we have also rejected the hope that in God there could be found any absolute basis for the self and an active power, since only in that obscure relationship between the Gods and man, self and world, can consciousness be maintained, and we cannot degenerate into mystical self-oblivion: the ego, the self's reflexive and empty self-image, the psychological expression of the principle of identity, lives and takes on shape, and becomes pregnant, through the reconciliation of the ego and non ego, through their co-extension along the fundamental spheres of though; the living consciousness in which the ego indwells is eternally bent toward the self's true being, which cannot be absorbed into any dialectical system and stands always outside of thought. The fact that consciousness thereby exists as an endless determination of this true being of the self, not suspended between two infinites as Pascal would lament, but embodying their eternal conflict, and out of joint with himself just as much as the world, is the source of that disturbing quality of the passive state in which man finds himself." - Hamartia





So the empirical ego thrusts itself into a process of reconciliation with regard to its fundamental principles, the ego and non-ego, the infinite moral will or potency and finite time and reality, freedom and necessity. The deeper it thrusts itself into this process, the more powerfully it is able to sustain itself, nonetheless as something incomplete, so that it most posit something not involved in this process of reconciliation: the transcendental ego, the self as such. The empirical self can only exist by the positing of something beyond it, that exceeds it. Men have called this something God, have represented it with different ideas and philosophical systems, but it is simply the absolute subjectivity. This part of my philosophy came to me when reading of a concept elaborated by Schleiermacher and Feuerbach called absolute subjectivity. The former said "Emotions are significant not simply because they are ‘felt’, but because they are inward witnesses and responses to realities other than the self." They used the concept to explain religion in the following way... Man objectified in his Gods these inward witnesses of his own sensations and qualities; they represented the omnipotence of feeling. They represented aspects of human nature freed from time, place, nature.

This "self as such," the transcendental ego, belongs to that transcendental order which values, philosophical and moral ideas, and Gods represent. These values and ideas are not positive objects of knowledge, but merely representative, representations of this order:




"Kant's philosophy is essentially an attempt to relate transcendental and empirical apperception; to unite the original consciousness of man as a particular subject, as a being in possession of a soul, as a self, to the consciousness of this self enduring throughout many changing experiences. He attempted to do what Aristotle had failed to do, namely extrapolate from the conception of the universality of experience the universality of knowledge. This concept of the universality of experience, which is the basic insight of Kantian philosophy; the concept of a totalizing power on the part of human reflection, which realizes its objects in synthetic union, is however antithetical to the form which philosophy must assume. These two consciousnesses cannot be united, but only inter-related, for the simple reason that the former cannot be positively designated as an object of knowledge. " - Hamartia





Philosophy, beginning with Plato, has understood itself as only a representative knowledge, while ethics and morality have in a sense degenerated, in the attempt to be positive objects of knowledge- facts, or sets of particular knowledge, particular virtues and vices. As the ideas of philosophy represent the transcendental order, so I want to establish a new morality wherein values represent the process of analogy by which the empirical and transcendental egos might be and are related to one another. Philosophy is the revelation of the transcendental order to which the self belongs and by virtue of which it has existence, while morality must be a system of relations which allows the empirical ego to grasp its own nature as analogous to the transcendental ego. Morality would thus exert a transformative power rather than a prescriptive one.

This analogizing or transformative power, I call the "daemonic." A Daemon in Greece was a half-god, between man and god, which carried humans from the mortal to divine sphere. Eros or love was, itself, referred to as a daemon. I take this term from Bruno. I offer some formulations of the daemonic, what I conceive to be the fundamental moral reality, here:





"The life of the self is a continual ascent and descent through these different modes of existence, [egoic and nonegoic, freedom and necessity, etc.] a continuous articulation between these two different spheres. Giordano Bruno regarded the self in this way, namely as a kind of expectant disquietude which must continuously articulate itself amidst opposing forces; between the ego and non-ego, freedom and necessity, spirit and flesh, in his concept of love. In love's attempt to spiritualize itself, to overcome finitude, the limitation of bodily existence, mortality, and necessity, it is deceived by the image of beauty and falls only into sensuousness, in which its spiritual ecstasy is annihilated. Thus love is committed to a cyclic process of ascent toward the spiritual and descent into sensuality, which Bruno calls the heroic frenzies. Through love, it is as though the seed of the eternal takes root in time, the seed of the spirit takes root in flesh; the attempt love makes to make itself spirit is not paired to a desire, for desire is already directed toward beauty, nor to a state of inebriation, but rather to the disunion within the lover himself, which expresses itself not through a synthesis of the contrary forces which war within him, but through a continual division of these forces into objective relations between freedom and necessity, truth and beauty, spirit and flesh.


One should recall the words of Aeschylus:


oneirophantoi de penthēmones
pareisi doxai pherou-
sai kharin mataian.
matan gar, eut' an esthla tis dokōn hora,
parallaxasa dia
kherōn bebaken opsis ou methusteron
pterois opadous' hupnou keleuthois.’




Why does Aeschylus use the word "keleuthois" to designate the path which the deceptive images of beauty take in leading man to the sleep of empty, hopeless longing? Both Hesiod and Parmenides used this word when making the point that day and night, sleep and wakefulness, are caught up in eternal alternation, and so pothos or longing, the sleep of love, continually awakens us to eros and the definite object of our longing, and this awakened love must in turn fall back into itself, must sleep.


9.


Ει ουν φιλοσοφητέον είτε μη φιλοσοφητέον, φιλοσοφητέον, [Man, by virtue of his daemonic nature, must be a philosopher, rather he wants to or not, rather he philosophizes or not.] to speak with Athanasius. We cannot, in the manner of one of the old Greeks, name the world a cosmos and beauty until we have named our own soul a cosmos and beauty; to behold and grasp all the world in an idea we must first have come to know ourselves as one particular being and no other and have had everything good and evil rent from the trembling heart and held, not in time, which diffuses our being like colors from a ray of light, but in eternity, which concentrates it. Every man of genius has believed in the eternal, that belief is the very condition of his vitality and flourishing. Perhaps this belief serves as nothing more than an obscuration of the spirit, which man requires if he is to ascend into the highest possible regions of his genius; perhaps he must find all the earth wanting if, like Cassandra of Ilion, he is to utter things not fit for the earth, but it is always the same, and we become like that angel whose wings were set aflame when he reentered this world, if one can entertain the old Gnostic myth. We suffer upon turning back into ourselves, we suffer from the failure to seize upon that inner motion of the heart's genius, which alone could move us to acknowledge the ideal as fate; the consequence of that strange lust which compels us to embrace obscurity, darkness, and uncertainty, but moreover to prefer this benighted world of the self over that law which strikes against the heart when love, fully matured, overcomes and inspires us to act with proud indifference against the hazards of our mortality. Dei virtutem dei sapientiam, [knowledge, for god, is a virtue] or if one may reverse the old theologian's paradox: yes, and man's sin; or, to reinterpret the account of Genesis, what flowered with the greatest sweetness in heaven is reaped with the most bitterness upon the earth.


Making use of Bruno's account of love, I call the resolution of the disquietude of the self the heroic, and it's return into itself, the daemonic. The daemonic leads to a polarization of the individual through a series of subjective transformations, as he is led to find his place anew in each of the oppositions which have been established between the principle of the ego and that of non-ego. This concept of the “daemonic” I venture as the perfect articulation of the incongruous position of the Pascalian man, as well as that disunion which lives from within man himself." - Hamartia.




Thus I have recovered the conditions and fundamental reality behind the valuing subject, the empirical ego, which Nietzsche failed to do, but without any reference to his philosophy, and outside of any Nietzschean framework. Though, to speak like him, my philosophy/morality is "beyond good and evil" in the sense that all the virtues and vices and systems of value are equally representations of the transcendental order.




"Philosophers have proved incapable of conceiving of good and evil, freedom and necessity, the finite will and infinite creative power invested to man at the same level of moral reality, although Spinoza should be commended for making a brilliant attempt at doing so; one is always the negative expression, or lack, of the other. The fact that the empirical, lived self-consciousness can only preserve itself as an incomplete process, with no final synthesis of its contents which would allow it to grasp its freedom, not as the disparate extension through various transformations in life, but as a singular will and imperative, a categorical determination of its character, in the language of Kant- that is the source of "evil," that is, what the Platonists formulated in the proto-moral conception "akrasia," acting against ones own ethical and rational principle. Insofar as man's fundamental experience as an ethical, moral, or meaning-seeking being is one of limitation and finitude, his fundamental experience as a free being in possession of a will must be one of "sin," of corruption. In the first case man takes freedom as a representative idea, as a representation of the transcendental self-consciousness and ideal ego, but in the second case he must realize this "ethical idea" in some objective specification of knowledge, in order to exercise his will and moral potency; he must realize it in a particular canon of virtues and vices. But as was shown in the previous essay, his moral potency does not truly belong to the will, to his free agency, but rather to his capacity, as an empirical or lived ego, as a daemonic being, to be stimulated by the transcendental ego, that is, to preserve himself as an empirical self-consciousness, as a living ego and in the spirit of daemonism, by positing an ideal representative of the transcendental, toward which he must direct himself, even though the preservation afforded to him in this process is a preservation, a being held in existence, as only an incomplete being, a sinful being, a corrupted and limited being. " - Hamartia

A rich injection of value into this young venture. I will formulate a quick overview of the immediate identifications my mind makes.

Where value ontology works as an abstract logic, wherein fundamental processes may be formulated, here is a concrete psychological approach, already beset with explicitly human meaning.

I already see the framework of a bridge to be built between these logical and psychological paradigms. Your work, what is here, coincides with the theme I have not yet dared to address, I preferred to keep grounding my logic by challenging it over and over. Behind my arrogance there is of course a fear - that what I say might at any time be broken by a superior logic or worse, a flaw in my own. But it has survived and in the meantime the question has remained: if the definition of the verb 'being' is 'self-valuing and valuing in terms of self-value', then what precisely constitutes self valuing, and what valuing in terms of self-value?

Yesterday night it occurred to me that self-valuing must be entire invisible. It can only be inferred from everything one does, and it can not be stimulated directly. (Self-help therapy - "you-are-worth-it!" does not work, as the will to make such a statement departs from the premise that one feels that one is not-worth-it. "Is that all you've got?" should be the exclamation. The acknowledgement of disappointment is crucial.)

The instinct to self-valuing can however be trained, indirectly, it first appears as faith. A more advanced clarity as to how matter stand between the empirical self-consciousness and the transcendental self exists in the state of zen not typically seen in monks as much as in the strong and morally dominant people of an ascending race; the pure clarity of deliberate good expectation. What might be seen as a third stage of mastery is play. From this, art, but also science, and in general the manufacturing good fortune by interpreting the chasm between the reality man and mans sense of reality as 'opportunity' as positive, as real, as working.

Forgive this bland term opportunity (opportunism stands to honor as valuing in terms of self stands to self-valuing), as it is very closely related to value -- it designates the bridge across the abyss of knowledge of good and evil, as taken in the irreconcilable terms you have described. The "product of faith" is a formulated will to rationally/morally arrive at what one irrationally/immorally desires.

Quote :

The daemonic leads to a polarization of the individual through a series of subjective transformations, as he is led to find his place anew in each of the oppositions which have been established between the principle of the ego and that of non-ego.

This accounts well for the paradoxal nature of consciousness, which seeks certainty in unification but stabilizes as the realization of an unbridgeable gap. And this realization is the bridge - as it posits the gap as a lack of moral dynamism.

You have already made clear that morality must be an activity, and activity is per definition creative, making use of actual conditions, sharp, observing -- the first words abstracted from the playful flux must have begun by sharp, actual minds catch-grunts, and down the line, such actualizations of the immediate context into a centralized sense of identity, have evolved into philosophies, all the way up to the scientific paradigm.

We are now at the point of realizing this 'catching' for what it is - its perimeter is secured, truth-creating has arrived at a definition of itself as the opportunistic business of reproducing life itself. Where nature had before only (though already a feat of cosmic proportions) posited itself as good, it now is able to observe that it has done this -- and admire it- now her-self for it all the more! As perhaps nature made beauty because it wanted to reward itself for creating herself against all odds out of her unnecessary absence, thereby making herself even more likely to exist, so now philosophy can ornament itself, reward itself for having produced the concept "truth".

This has been the central task of art - to make nature appear to man, man to himself, as true, viable, likely to exist, in the terms that are closest to honesty.

In general, what is man - that which knows truth, or that is truth? Can one be truth and know it? This knowing-being must go by the exclusive name of philosophy.

You are quite right, self-valuing cannot be stimulated directly. The instinct for it can however be indirectly trained, the ancients did just this.



One of Holderlin’s most beautiful pieces of poetry may be found in the sentence, “If once the divine succeeds through the poem so near to my heart, then I welcome the grave’s eternal silence.” The recognition of something beyond the sphere of the poet’s individuality and experience is the necessary precondition for his flourishing, and the Greek pantheon served in just this way for Holderlin himself as well as for the ancients. Through such a recognition the mortal act is prevented from being closed, and the possibility of the divine announcing itself through it can be entertained indefinitely; through the great symbols of their mythology the ancient Greeks succeeding in transforming the mortal sphere, the domain of “eternal silence,” into a genuine depth, into which one might venture in the hope of discovering some new datum of experience yet to be formulated. Mortality and finite, lived experience for the ancients became a womb, the “secret birth of things,” to cite Schiller, into which they willingly entered when the light of their ideas no longer bore enough of itself to kindle the heart of the poet. It is with this piece of poetic wisdom that Holderlin wrote his tragedy about Empedocles. What I have called the “daemonic,” then, finds its most poignant expression in the birth of poetic inspiration. The light of our ideas has faded as well, and yet we do not know how to conceive of our mortal life in this way, as a depth- only through the recognition of something beyond our individuality and experience, only through the refusal of hypostasizing experience as an absolute, can the circle of mortal life remain opened.

It is not only in a religious sense that one should understand this for indeed all of our truly philosophical ideas, comprehended not as positive objects of knowledge and hypostases of experience, but as representatives of this transcendental order- that order of things exceeding the sphere of individuality and experience, have equally allowed the finite and transitory ego to exist as an open rather than closed circle. The Gods as representatives of this order were imagined when the continuity between the language of ideas and experience had not been precisely delineated through a philosophical vocabulary. We must, now armed with such a language, realize the “transcendental unity of ideas,” through a new morality that aims, not to hypostasize experience and grasp in positive knowledge a series of particular virtues and vices, but rather to fully explicate this continuity; where philosophy exists to represent this transcendental order, morality most exist to mediate the two spheres, the spheres of experience and ideality.

Self-valuing is the correspondence between these two spheres. Holderlin enacted this correspondence when writing about the death of Empedocles (Empedocles wanted to prove he was an immortal God by jumping into mount Aetna, and as he did so, he perished.) One can only accomplish this by recognizing something that exceeds one's own personal existence, (for Nietzsche, eternity) an excess which represents an order to which the self that is bearing recognition actually belongs. Nietzsche had to recognize an eternity beyond the sphere of his own empirical, lived existence in order to finally recognize himself as an eternal being, in order for the empirical and transcendental aspects of his ego to finally correspond.


But everything about our modern world and the direction that science and philosophy have taken seems bent on “closing the circle” of mortal life, on annihilating any possibility of mediating the transcendental and empirical spheres of the ego.

What real domain can the human being claim for itself, when its most vital existence is found in the correspondence between the finite and transcendental spheres, when- to speak with Hippocrates, it finds in all men something divine, and in all divinity something of its humanity? This daemonic nature is the alien intelligence with which the will operates and is not itself a master; the symbols of myth and the host of philosophical ideas, as the most profound exertion of the human will, have not evolved by some merely inventive poet to represent an arbitrary reality of his own design, but have evolved rather out of this daemonic nature, in the pre-reflective state in which the poet recognizes something outside the border of his own experience and is in this way opened up to the deeper life. These symbols and ideas, like the eternity of Nietzsche, or the Prometheus of Aeschylus, are not linguistic in the same way that our common speech is linguistic, for they originate in the daemonic nature which is the precondition of human self-consciousness, and as such represent things not yet able to be fully articulated by the self-conscious human being; the myths and philosophical ideals are all true, for there is a human being to debate rather or not they are true. They are the precondition of human self-consciousness, the mere fact that we can debate them signifies their truth.


The contradictions and disputes among philosophers arise from a spirit philosophizing out of something other than the spirit of daemonism, something other than that middle-position and pre-reflective state which opens up the sphere of the mortal being to the immortal sphere.


The ancient philosophies were all spontaneously engendered through the daemonic, they served as a horizon through which the self-consciousness could take shape. They served as a limit to what could be expressed in human tongue.



And this is one of the greatest of mysteries. Language can only evolve when something has placed a limit to what can be expressed; there must be a limit placed upon language before language can evolve. Language only makes sense when it begins through a passive state, that of the daemonic being which has been opened up to "the deeper life." I can only speak the word "man" when the word "god" has served as a limit to the former conception. So on and so on, down to the first word, so to speak.


Philosophy, as that essential thing which a daemonic being does, as the fundamental nature of a daemonic being, (the only one we know of is the human) is the ground of this mystery.

Parodites wrote:

I'm a fairly long time friend of aletheia. He has directed me to this forum, and a good first post would be a message I sent him comparing value-ontology with my own project. The self-quotes are all from a book I am writing, Hamartia: An Essay Toward A Speculative Ethic.

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I want to offer a brief comparison between my project and your own. We both, to my mind, are attempting to recover the valuing subject.


I will begin with a sentence from Fichte.


"The positing I, through its most wondrous capacity, holds fast the diminishing accident [an emotion or experience] long enough to have compared it to that which displaces it. [ a succeeding emotion or experience.] It is in this almost always unrecognized capacity that knots together unity out of perceptual oppositions, that intervenes between moments that would cancel each other out, and thereby preserves both; it is what alone makes life and conscious possible."


The positing I, or what I call the empirical ego, or empirical self-consciousness, is the self which consists in the consciousness that there is something that endures through time and experience, as opposed to the transcendental ego or self, which is that which endures. This capacity for the empirical self-consciousness to hold an emotion or experience in memory long enough to be able to compare it to the next emotion or experience is, for Fichte, that which makes the totality of experience conceivable, ie. the transcendental ego. But this capacity, this wondrous capacity as Fichte refers to it, is only possible if the empirical consciousness originates in a passive state, as opposed to an active one: it's capacity relies on a more fundamental incapacity.



I speak of this here:

" Plato and Aristotle agree that philosophy begins in a passive state, as opposed to a creative state, of the soul. This state they call wonder, thaumazein. This word, however, does not simply imply sublime awe, but rather the capacity to intimate the unknown and strange, to recognize some obscure connection between one's self and the foreign. It is in this sense that the Greek poets use it to refer to the gods, for they could intimate something of their divinity, and still further, realize in the image of this divinity something of their own humanity. This obscure relationship between the self and the world, the ego and the cosmos, man and his gods, is the essential relationship which all philosophy has explicated over the centuries. The passivity, then, is not one of impotence, but of pregnancy.


Man can only sustain himself as man by delving into that obscure relationship, which must necessarily silence him, or set him aflame, as was the fate of the Gnostic angel upon re-entering the world of mortals. He is like a character designed by a poet and thrust into the scene of some play, and can hold his personality and identity in existence only by continuing to engage in the play, even though this grants him an incomplete personality and identity, powerless to shape its own fate. In a certain sense he, like the tragic actor, can only maintain his identity by continually denying it. This disturbing quality of the passivity in which genuine consciousness originates, Kierkegaard spoke of in his conception of despair.

This passivity I would call an essential unknowability unto oneself, the disappearing self within oneself. We might call that passive which is not yet capable of harnassing its own indeterminateness toward some projected and protracted end-use. That this 'obscure relation' between finite and infinite, constrained and limiteless objectification and perception is that middle-ground wherein, necessarily, the play of forces surfaces to condense, distill out a more or less common element, a 'summational movement' deriving from the movements both up and down, in and out, yet wholly reducible to neither. And due to the unknowability, the void of self-disappearing which arguably is the impetus for the emergence of the transdendental sense itself, this summational movement also cannot be reduced to the supposed union of empirical with transdendental.

The incapacity of the 'empirical', the inability for an erected structure of total self-enclosure necessitates, where this inability comes to directly and sufficiently inform the more central functionalities of consciousness in its multitude of manifestations and modes - in other words in man, who has become a consciousness sufficiently conscious of, responsive to, itself in terms of itself - the fabrications of exteriorities into which displaced machinic operations may be put, failing as they do to find anything tangible, "empirical", substancial to couple with/in.

So not only have we traced the origins of the trancendental fabrication, but we (you) have also posited this as the medium-framework by which the sustaining-maintaining of inner experiences ("an emotion or experience") is made possible; i.e. if the empirical consciousness lacks the incapacity for grasping-holding sensations long enough to effect sufficient comparison to what came before and what comes after, then the transcendentality can find no point at which to hook into this empirical relationality, the middle ground is obliterated. Man's consciousness grew up from ape to the extent of becoming self-definitive and self-sensing enough that the void of unknowability became know to man; when this void came to be known to consciousness it fractured the unity of this consciousness, broke open the (superficial semblance of) connective-temporal continuity of conscious experience/s. This created the possibility for the transcendentality to take over the role as "connective tissue" via positing an-other exteriority. Additional to all the other utilities of this positing, of central importance here is that we get a increase of the empirical capacity to relate across time without sacrificing its awareness of the void. Void is sustained because temporality effected and becomes that by which positions are more essentially posited and projected (of course this transcendentality always ultimately wraps back onto the "empirical consciousness", onto the affective-intensive conditions and environmentally-interposed movements comprising the psyche in its actuality).

Quote :

Kierkegaard conceives of the self as a synthesis of the infinite and finite, though an incomplete synthesis: he essentially presents a form of Kantianism which lacks the idea of a final synthesis which would inform the unity of the self and moreover serve as something analogous to the categorical imperative by which an absolute basis of the self and of human action could be determined. This lack of an absolute basis for the self and human action is the source of Kierkegaard's despair: for him it is only in god, not within the self, that this basis can be found. He thus stands among all of those beautiful but innocent mystics, granted that his mysticism is articulated in a purely philosophical language and thus serves as a healthy curiosity for all philosophers. We have here, with Kierkegaard, rejected the hope of a completed synthesis, but we have also rejected the hope that in God there could be found any absolute basis for the self and an active power, since only in that obscure relationship between the Gods and man, self and world, can consciousness be maintained, and we cannot degenerate into mystical self-oblivion: the ego, the self's reflexive and empty self-image, the psychological expression of the principle of identity, lives and takes on shape, and becomes pregnant, through the reconciliation of the ego and non ego, through their co-extension along the fundamental spheres of though; the living consciousness in which the ego indwells is eternally bent toward the self's true being, which cannot be absorbed into any dialectical system and stands always outside of thought. The fact that consciousness thereby exists as an endless determination of this true being of the self, not suspended between two infinites as Pascal would lament, but embodying their eternal conflict, and out of joint with himself just as much as the world, is the source of that disturbing quality of the passive state in which man finds himself." - Hamartia





So the empirical ego thrusts itself into a process of reconciliation with regard to its fundamental principles, the ego and non-ego, the infinite moral will or potency and finite time and reality, freedom and necessity. The deeper it thrusts itself into this process, the more powerfully it is able to sustain itself, nonetheless as something incomplete, so that it most posit something not involved in this process of reconciliation: the transcendental ego, the self as such. The empirical self can only exist by the positing of something beyond it, that exceeds it. Men have called this something God, have represented it with different ideas and philosophical systems, but it is simply the absolute subjectivity. This part of my philosophy came to me when reading of a concept elaborated by Schleiermacher and Feuerbach called absolute subjectivity. The former said "Emotions are significant not simply because they are ‘felt’, but because they are inward witnesses and responses to realities other than the self." They used the concept to explain religion in the following way... Man objectified in his Gods these inward witnesses of his own sensations and qualities; they represented the omnipotence of feeling. They represented aspects of human nature freed from time, place, nature.

This "self as such," the transcendental ego, belongs to that transcendental order which values, philosophical and moral ideas, and Gods represent. These values and ideas are not positive objects of knowledge, but merely representative, representations of this order:




"Kant's philosophy is essentially an attempt to relate transcendental and empirical apperception; to unite the original consciousness of man as a particular subject, as a being in possession of a soul, as a self, to the consciousness of this self enduring throughout many changing experiences. He attempted to do what Aristotle had failed to do, namely extrapolate from the conception of the universality of experience the universality of knowledge. This concept of the universality of experience, which is the basic insight of Kantian philosophy; the concept of a totalizing power on the part of human reflection, which realizes its objects in synthetic union, is however antithetical to the form which philosophy must assume. These two consciousnesses cannot be united, but only inter-related, for the simple reason that the former cannot be positively designated as an object of knowledge. " - Hamartia

The passive state as the inability to more fully reconcile two opposing spheres of conscious experiencing, an essential incapacity for unification. This strikes me as perhaps nothing more than a necessary distancing of organic parts from each other, being as they are separate and incapable of becoming-one. The necessity of time-space separation between those which are other than each other, regardless of the extent of their mutual co-relationality, being, particularly with respect to the vastly deep and intricate relations attained between these spheres of consciousness, perhaps the sufficiency of these very spheres themselves. As you write later, language must be limited, subject to limitation in order to grow. So it is with all things, no form can attain to a limitlessness, and where it is not cognizant, influenced by its limits it swims in a sea of ineptitude and arbitrariness, disconnected from its actual conditions (and the conditions of its own possibilities) in reality.

Unlike Kierkegaard I do not lament the separateness of the "consciousnesses", the fact that man is a being-machine composed of separate functionalities and spheres of experiencing-determining. As the immediate knowledge of man's own essential unknowability penetrated into his consciousness it became necessary to posit with respect to this void, this incapacity. Why? Because to not have done this would have been for man to stagnate at the pre-self-conscious level, for knowedge of void to have acted as an absolute barrier to further growth. Man ingeniously (naturally) found a way (adapted) around this problem, found a means to continue growth in the face of the severe implications steming from the direct knowledge of the void. We can understand and appreciate this adaptive process which has given birth to man as he is, to the "schizophrenized" "bi-polarized" consciousness that divides functions among the various parts of itself, not sparing any function from this division, even the highest (most emergent-summational). Philosophy needs to learn to function within this intermedial space, learn to exist as the possibility for a bridge across the otherwise (with respect to otherwise transcendental visions of absolute unification) incommensurate.

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Philosophy, beginning with Plato, has understood itself as only a representative knowledge, while ethics and morality have in a sense degenerated, in the attempt to be positive objects of knowledge- facts, or sets of particular knowledge, particular virtues and vices. As the ideas of philosophy represent the transcendental order, so I want to establish a new morality wherein values represent the process of analogy by which the empirical and transcendental egos might be and are related to one another. Philosophy is the revelation of the transcendental order to which the self belongs and by virtue of which it has existence, while morality must be a system of relations which allows the empirical ego to grasp its own nature as analogous to the transcendental ego. Morality would thus exert a transformative power rather than a prescriptive one.

Yes, morality as the "philosophy" (the self-experience) of the empirical ego, where traditional philosophy serves as that of the transdendental ego. You see this as a bringing-down-to-"earth" (to the actual lived reality of the subjectivity) of philosophy? Ethics serving as the anchor by which philosophy is grounded to "the world"?

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This analogizing or transformative power, I call the "daemonic." A Daemon in Greece was a half-god, between man and god, which carried humans from the mortal to divine sphere. Eros or love was, itself, referred to as a daemon. I take this term from Bruno. I offer some formulations of the daemonic, what I conceive to be the fundamental moral reality, here:





"The life of the self is a continual ascent and descent through these different modes of existence, [egoic and nonegoic, freedom and necessity, etc.] a continuous articulation between these two different spheres. Giordano Bruno regarded the self in this way, namely as a kind of expectant disquietude which must continuously articulate itself amidst opposing forces; between the ego and non-ego, freedom and necessity, spirit and flesh, in his concept of love. In love's attempt to spiritualize itself, to overcome finitude, the limitation of bodily existence, mortality, and necessity, it is deceived by the image of beauty and falls only into sensuousness, in which its spiritual ecstasy is annihilated. Thus love is committed to a cyclic process of ascent toward the spiritual and descent into sensuality, which Bruno calls the heroic frenzies. Through love, it is as though the seed of the eternal takes root in time, the seed of the spirit takes root in flesh; the attempt love makes to make itself spirit is not paired to a desire, for desire is already directed toward beauty, nor to a state of inebriation, but rather to the disunion within the lover himself, which expresses itself not through a synthesis of the contrary forces which war within him, but through a continual division of these forces into objective relations between freedom and necessity, truth and beauty, spirit and flesh.


One should recall the words of Aeschylus:


oneirophantoi de penthēmones
pareisi doxai pherou-
sai kharin mataian.
matan gar, eut' an esthla tis dokōn hora,
parallaxasa dia
kherōn bebaken opsis ou methusteron
pterois opadous' hupnou keleuthois.’




Why does Aeschylus use the word "keleuthois" to designate the path which the deceptive images of beauty take in leading man to the sleep of empty, hopeless longing? Both Hesiod and Parmenides used this word when making the point that day and night, sleep and wakefulness, are caught up in eternal alternation, and so pothos or longing, the sleep of love, continually awakens us to eros and the definite object of our longing, and this awakened love must in turn fall back into itself, must sleep.

As we can never reach a state where one "half", one side of the equation of self-subjectivity - world or heaven, finite or infinite, real or imagined - is annihilated, being as they are each conditions of and for the other, man thus far fluctuates between these as his desires lead him now up, then down. It does seem centered around desire, longing, but we might conceive of the more essential-foundational movements (e.g. love) as being derivative from a less developed "desire" and more so a direct manifesting of structurality itself, of the conditions of this internally-divided (two-part) consciousness. If so then love becomes not only the most powerful attempt at unification but also the best way inside the divide, in terms of direct sensing. So the task of philosophy, and of your ethical project, is to further delimit this inner divide and objectify its conditionalities toward the end of effecting new couplings between empirical and transcendental "egos" (qualified-aggregate form/s of constancy of experiencing/s) such that we begin to develop representational understandings (analogies, metaphors) of these spheres of consciousness - of the conditions of the empirical ego - rather than, as ethics (and an unfortunate amount of philosophy as well) has tranditionally been known to do, arrogantly and arbitrarily impressing artificial impositions from without which have little or no substantive bearing upon that which is actually being impressed-upon?

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9.


Ει ουν φιλοσοφητέον είτε μη φιλοσοφητέον, φιλοσοφητέον, [Man, by virtue of his daemonic nature, must be a philosopher, rather he wants to or not, rather he philosophizes or not.] to speak with Athanasius. We cannot, in the manner of one of the old Greeks, name the world a cosmos and beauty until we have named our own soul a cosmos and beauty; to behold and grasp all the world in an idea we must first have come to know ourselves as one particular being and no other and have had everything good and evil rent from the trembling heart and held, not in time, which diffuses our being like colors from a ray of light, but in eternity, which concentrates it. Every man of genius has believed in the eternal, that belief is the very condition of his vitality and flourishing. Perhaps this belief serves as nothing more than an obscuration of the spirit, which man requires if he is to ascend into the highest possible regions of his genius; perhaps he must find all the earth wanting if, like Cassandra of Ilion, he is to utter things not fit for the earth, but it is always the same, and we become like that angel whose wings were set aflame when he reentered this world, if one can entertain the old Gnostic myth. We suffer upon turning back into ourselves, we suffer from the failure to seize upon that inner motion of the heart's genius, which alone could move us to acknowledge the ideal as fate; the consequence of that strange lust which compels us to embrace obscurity, darkness, and uncertainty, but moreover to prefer this benighted world of the self over that law which strikes against the heart when love, fully matured, overcomes and inspires us to act with proud indifference against the hazards of our mortality. Dei virtutem dei sapientiam, [knowledge, for god, is a virtue] or if one may reverse the old theologian's paradox: yes, and man's sin; or, to reinterpret the account of Genesis, what flowered with the greatest sweetness in heaven is reaped with the most bitterness upon the earth.


Making use of Bruno's account of love, I call the resolution of the disquietude of the self the heroic, and it's return into itself, the daemonic. The daemonic leads to a polarization of the individual through a series of subjective transformations, as he is led to find his place anew in each of the oppositions which have been established between the principle of the ego and that of non-ego. This concept of the “daemonic” I venture as the perfect articulation of the incongruous position of the Pascalian man, as well as that disunion which lives from within man himself." - Hamartia.

Yes, this is all beautifully said, and how you define the opposition is wonderously useful and inspiring. We have a platform from which to grasp these transformations of sorts which are the basis of an evolving and expanding subjectivity. The condition of the eternal for such expansion-growth - the direct manipulation of the horizons and substantive fabrications of this eternality therefore the condition of the possibility for self-grasping and self-directing one's own transformations of consciousness. This is very "occult" at heart: we set the limit of ourselves, against ourselves, in order to generate resistances productive of new evolutionary potentials; we explore further definition along the edge/s of certain horizons of our being in order to effect better representational analogies between the internal mechanics of these limits and that which is most limited by them. This is philosophy as powerful, conscious utility.

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Thus I have recovered the conditions and fundamental reality behind the valuing subject, the empirical ego, which Nietzsche failed to do, but without any reference to his philosophy, and outside of any Nietzschean framework. Though, to speak like him, my philosophy/morality is "beyond good and evil" in the sense that all the virtues and vices and systems of value are equally representations of the transcendental order.




"Philosophers have proved incapable of conceiving of good and evil, freedom and necessity, the finite will and infinite creative power invested to man at the same level of moral reality, although Spinoza should be commended for making a brilliant attempt at doing so; one is always the negative expression, or lack, of the other. The fact that the empirical, lived self-consciousness can only preserve itself as an incomplete process, with no final synthesis of its contents which would allow it to grasp its freedom, not as the disparate extension through various transformations in life, but as a singular will and imperative, a categorical determination of its character, in the language of Kant- that is the source of "evil," that is, what the Platonists formulated in the proto-moral conception "akrasia," acting against ones own ethical and rational principle. Insofar as man's fundamental experience as an ethical, moral, or meaning-seeking being is one of limitation and finitude, his fundamental experience as a free being in possession of a will must be one of "sin," of corruption. In the first case man takes freedom as a representative idea, as a representation of the transcendental self-consciousness and ideal ego, but in the second case he must realize this "ethical idea" in some objective specification of knowledge, in order to exercise his will and moral potency; he must realize it in a particular canon of virtues and vices. But as was shown in the previous essay, his moral potency does not truly belong to the will, to his free agency, but rather to his capacity, as an empirical or lived ego, as a daemonic being, to be stimulated by the transcendental ego, that is, to preserve himself as an empirical self-consciousness, as a living ego and in the spirit of daemonism, by positing an ideal representative of the transcendental, toward which he must direct himself, even though the preservation afforded to him in this process is a preservation, a being held in existence, as only an incomplete being, a sinful being, a corrupted and limited being. " - Hamartia

The valuing subject then being that which exists in terms of the conditions of its own self-valuing, the conditions imposed upon itself by itself. Clearly this occurs most in the most "developed", internally complex being, e.g. man. The "void of unknowability" representing the ultimte threshold for self-valuing in that self-valuing can never truly (directly) value ONLY in terms of its "just itself", being as it is both essentially unknown (closed) before itself in its being as well as being a largely contingent manifestation of its embedded situatedness within "the world". Neither can this self-valuing get control of this world nor of its own eternally escaping mnemosyne. In man then we see the highest synthesis of the possibility for self-valuing projecting from within the constraints of these world-conditions. As man continues to operate within the intermedial space between his projected-imagined self-valuings and his concrete-actual self-valuings (valuing with respect to either the cohesive-interpositional fabrication/s of images of unity or the emergent structural-architectural embodiments of his more functional-reactionary biological-psychological being) he experiences his own expansion, his own "controlled schizophrenization" that can never stray too far too fast just as it can never cease expanding altogether.

I will write out a longer response to you soon, for at the moment I am withdrawing pretty badly from opiates. I have been here before, when my seemingly faithful muse, opium, shows me its graver aspect. But all pain surges up from within one's self, and is never, nor can ever be, the product of a merely external influence... so nothing can prepare one for it, for pain. In pain there is an alien presence which everything in your nature tries to reject, to push away, but it cannot, for this alien presence is someone connected with you, its life is in fact your own life.


You are quite right, my ethics is aimed at rooting philosophy in the element of genuine experience. To let my book speak for itself:



"... The only man that has ever appeared before the eyes of the philosophers is the man in a sickly, diseased state, the man enraptured with idealities, upon whose imagination plays the whole throng of human fancies and manias. The man who has cloistered himself up beyond the influences of such things never enters into their considerations, for it could only be a philosopher who had been spared such a fate, never a man. We lack any concept of a true and vital struggle with illusion, of a vital and human struggle in which philosophy may perhaps at one time have found its origin. "


This vital struggle with illusion... is what morality should have been.

So the task of philosophy, and of your ethical project, is to further delimit this inner divide and objectify its conditionalities toward the end of effecting new couplings between empirical and transcendental "egos" (qualified-aggregate form/s of constancy of experiencing/s) such that we begin to develop representational understandings (analogies, metaphors) of these spheres of consciousness - of the conditions of the empirical ego - rather than, as ethics (and an unfortunate amount of philosophy as well) has tranditionally been known to do, arrogantly and arbitrarily impressing artificial impositions from without which have little or no substantive bearing upon that which is actually being impressed-upon?
----

Yes, precisely.


And now, I venture to the modest servants of the God Asclepius. Doctors....

I am tempted to use this for a reversal of values 'certain' and 'potential'. Now that the real-world, experientially human definition of potentiality has been given as the space between the divide of transcendent and empirical, we may consider this invisible field of potentiality as the certainty, and the limits between which this space exists as the potential. In other words, we suspend the visible and the seeing, in favor of the primacy to a synthetic experience as the benefactor of the entire delineated spatiality - in this a sense of natural ethics is acquired -- first incidentally, through cultivation and writing, formulating creating sediment. This works as a penetrating influence both on the transcendent experience and the empirical ego, who now find a limitless space to experiment, rooted in a new meaning -- no longer the basis of certainty, but the means to experience.

Where we have always sought experience, we will be able to cause it. Our influence on the empirical world as directly on the cognitive process, no longer via 'verification' through a model of objectivity.

This experience is at first assumed, as in strictly postured mediation - it is in any sense not a given. This is how it is alike to morality - it is active, flows forth from posture of the organism to its experience, in which two principles that may go by a thousand names are observed: rootedness/balance/endurance, and openness/willingness/ concentration. I think that these two refer to respectively the transcendental and the empirical.

We agree then, that morality can only be trained indirectly, as an instinct, a "tendency to be in the position to judge".

I just got back from the doctors, with 60 10 mg Norcos. Vicodin. That, to me, means the freedom to think and write, the freedom to be.




"Where we have always sought experience, we will be able to cause it. Our influence on the empirical world as directly on the cognitive process, no longer via 'verification' through a model of objectivity."



Yes, exactly!


I have been trying to connect my two separate projects. My theory of consciousness and my ethical project. This causing of one's own experience I formulated in the following terms:







" The great pregnancy.-- Primitive life which could only respond in an immediate way to stimuli would have remained on the earth for only a short while, for a more refined life endowed with what we call "consciousness" had to arise. These new forms of life gained the capacity to react, not immediately to an external stimulus, but mediately, to an internal world, by engendering a mental affect, a "thought" which, in this context, is only a kind of reflex. "Thinking" is only this mediation carried to further and further extents. With this consciousness, behavior was rigidified into instinctual organizations of mental affect, what we call impulses or drives. What we call a behavior, a reaction, is only the reconstitution of certain mental affects, by means of a reflex- namely, that reflex or fundamental schema of consciousness introduced by the development of primitive sensation in response to primitive stimuli: it is the induction of a certain chain of mental causes and effects which nature, experience, and memory have rigidified into hierarchy and organization. This reconstitution is the basis of all consciousness, which is to say, of all stimulation. Egoic consciousness, however, that self-consciousness peculiar to man, has emerged out of this reflexive organism, as its highest power, in accordance to which a new means of organizing the affects has been realized.


The qualia of an experience is directly analogous to a quanta of consciousness, that is, of reflexivity. The instincts, or "drives," to use the language of modern psychology, are not really singular affects, affects with an immediate character. They are organizations of a kind of primordial sensation, a character-less affect, which have been produced by the reflexive coordination of this primitive sensation. In the lower forms of life this reflexivity endows the affect with character, in the form of pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion, and the character of the affect becomes more nuanced in higher life, and in relation to the development of a more complex sensory apparatus. In man, the reflexive organization of mental affect led to his awareness of enduring states of emotion, of sense, and eventually of enduring things, and of himself as an enduring entity. Language and self-consciousness here emerges, as the highest degree of reflexivity. In accordance to this new self-consciousness and language, which eventually became reason, man has begun to organize the affect in a different way, a non-reflexive way. He is organizing it in accordance with his reason. This marks the beginning of modern consciousness, an active organization of the affects, in accordance no longer to the primeval schema of consciousness, but in accordance to conceptions, ideas. Two different modes of consciousness are, as it were, existing side by side in man: the left-over of the older, reflexive consciousness, and this new, active one. To enlarge itself, the active consciousness must decompose the reflexive one. Reason introduced into that structure of man's drives which nature, over the thousands of years, had produced, a disharmony, a breakdown. This turmoil and war among the drives is what we have called our "unconscious." The completely active consciousness has yet to emerge.... An applicable metaphor to describe the reflexive consciousness is memory. Memory relies on the capacity to perceive similiarity among objects; an animal, after eating a fruit that has a particular smell and falling ill, realizes in another fruit that also possesses this smell a danger. The sensuous element, the smell, is endowed reflexively with a qualia, in accordance to the organization of characterless affect or sensation. Once a suffienct store of this affect has been organized, an instinct is produced ... Consciousness itself possesses a metonymic structure informed by this principle of similarity. It produces similarities to establish the contiguity of experience through the reflexive organization of affect until it reaches, in man, the abstract and linguistic, the archetypal. In accordance to these types, the new consciousness, the active consciousness, then decomposes similarity, realizing differences in objects, collapsing the contiguous or metonymic structure of temporal and spatial relationships. Further, it's affects are no longer organized reflexively, but with relation to the various producible types. The human capacity to regard futurity, to plan, and to reason, is essentially a differentiating, a distortion and reintegration of the contents of the metonymic consciousness, its work being essentially the reverse operation of memory. It involves, ultimately, discoordinating the structure of the drives established by the older consciousness. It has not yet gained sufficient power to endow the characterless affect with quality; this new, active consciousness, is incapable of producing passions and drives in accordance to its own principle, that of differentiation. Man does not "feel" through this active consciousness, all of his passions still belong to the reflexive or metonymic consciousness. The structure of reflexive consciousness, of the metonymic consciousness, along with the instincts and various passions which it produced that continue to live through man, are of course erroneous, are of course constituent of a false consciousness, however beneficial they were for animal existence- for the concept of similarity is erroneous. Language, reason, and the active consciousness function on a very different principle, and that human in total possession of this later consciousness has not emerged yet. The passions and drives which live through and exercise themselves upon me, are only so many memories passed down from animal life, which are structured in accordance to a principle, namely that of the similar, which is contradictory to the principle which informs the very language and reason with which I regard the work of these passions and drives.


Perhaps what separates man from the animals is not his intellect, but the fact that he needs this intellect; the fact that, in relation to the other animals, whose various drives have been carefully organized into succession, rhythm, and functional hierarchy, man's inner life is characterized by a contrary state of turmoil, of contradiction and war amongst the drives. It is thought that man could carry on as he does not, purely instinctually, that his "self" is somehow a superfluity of nature. That is not possible. Consciousness arose only to make sensation possible, for the mediation of the inner world which is essentially what consciousness consists in is necessary for sensation to take place, and self-consciousness in the human sense of the word is only this same mediation carried to the highest power. As a result of developing this self-consciousness, man's attempt to accomplish an active as opposed to reflexive organization of the drives in accordance to his language, ideas, and reason, implies the destruction of everything formerly "conscious," implies the destruction of this pre-existing reflexive consciousness, and induces the conflict among the drives.


It is only now that the various impulses of man's nature (the impulse to truth, to justice, etc.) have been isolated and delimited to the extent that their universal turmoil, the universality of the war amongst the drives, and the complete annihilation of this former consciousness can be grasped by those new philosophers in whom it must find expression. Above all else one must keep in mind that it is a superficial conception of the unconscious to regard it as merely a store-house for repressed or forgotten objects of experience, for in fact it is constituted by this conflict among the drives, and is pregnant with a new, as yet unforeseen consciousness, a consciousness developed through the active organization of mental affect and wholly opposed to the reflexive consciousness through which man has to the greater extent operated in the course of his history- a creative, as opposed to “re-creative” consciousness, so to speak. Where it was the task of the older consciousness to organize mental affect reflexively, it will be the task of the new consciousness to exploit the basic schema in accordance to which the reflexive consciousness has transformed the uncoordinated and formless affect- that is, to “think” into this formless affect, producing that effulgence of new passions and unremitting sensation, which flourishes and dies in the same breath, which will one day be called the “self”.


Reason, fundamentally, disqualifies the affects, it disrupts the structure of the affects which qualifies them as drives, as passions, which gives them quality, be this quality pleasant or unpleasant. Spinoza accomplished the most systematic disqualification, reducing the affects to one basic quality, passion, and emotional state, namely joy, and considering all the "bad passions" merely corrupted qualifications of joy. He is an example of what I called the active consciousness. An imperfect example, but an example. Not to disqualify the affects through the hypothesis of a fundamental quality, (for Spinoza, joy, for Nietzsche, power) but by their complete reduction to quantities of consciousness.... (consciousness is only the metonymic structure which qualifies them, which endows them with quality by configuring them as single passions and drives, more consciousness equals more sharply defined affects.) Who has done that? I've elected it as one of my tasks. A truly active consciousness could arise only after this total reduction was accomplished."

And in another place:




"The musical animal.-- The development of human language only becomes comprehensible when one proposes some purely representative language out of which it evolved and eventually adopted the power of communication. It is probable that the first man Adam did not comprehend things in name, but in song. Music is just such a kind of purely representative language, when one regards it in its most essential sense, as an art whose own medium or manner of depiction serves as the depiction itself; music is the primeval nature out of which man first began to take cognisance of the world through his intellectual, abstracting power, rather than his brute sensibility, in which all things first suggested to him their “meaning,” in which every being stood frozen in a moment of revelation and betrayed its form to him, rent open by the entry of his voice. The dream of all poets has been to realize this purely representative language in words rather than in tones, but unfortunately the instinct or need for communication, which grew up within man much later, only after the utility of form was realized, and has thereby been insolubly bound up with words, always makes itself known, and renders this goal unachievable. In music itself this instinct has been exerting a retroactive influence, imbuing mere tone and sound with communicable significance, so that rarely even in this domain does man attain to that state of complete suggestibility which is called "inspiration." We cannot discover this primeval consciousness by realizing it through the analysis of our own music, but in the terms already ventured here one could imagine it as that point at which the consciousness, in its reflexive organization of the affects, first achieved that degree of reflexivity necessary to produce self-consciousness in our human sense of the word, when the enduring forms out of which our experience is constituted began to appear as such, as enduring, as form. That power which has transformed and has been transforming consciousness, that power for actively constituting the mental effects rather than reflexively, in accordance to our language and reason, in accordance to our more refined self-consciousness and the real utility that we find in the apprehension of form, namely logic and communication, will one day be controverted, as the last remnants of the older consciousness are annihilated through the new means of organizing the affects, so that the new state in which man might one day find himself, a purely active consciousness, will be quite analogous to that “musical consciousnesses,” to that absolute suggestibility before the world, in which all things intimated to man their being, which we cannot now imagine. But this new consciousness shall not represent, it will not represent at all, but only create, only declare; this consciousness of absolute communication, of absolute expression and engendering, will be more similar to the older consciousness of absolute representation than it is to our present one, to our now chimaeric nature."

You may notice that I have succeeded in equating consciousness with sensation. Sensation emerges as affect without character, affect yet endowed with quality by the reflexive operations on which consciousness is founded. As I put it here:



"The inevitability of consciousness.-- Why did nature see fit to endow us with a consciousness whose only use, at times, seems to be in allowing us to apprehend our own pain? Why could we not have been slightly more ethereal beings, as whisks of smoke which this world might have stirred for a moment and in the next instant wafted into nonentity? Why must this consciousness preside over us, cleaving to the remotest tremor of hunger or pain, and so needlessly torturing us? Why could we not have been as but images cast in the waters? All would be as it is now, only without this consciousness which convinces us that it is we whose images have been so cast. These questions are attractive in their naivete, yet sensation and consciousness cannot exist without one another, in fact they are simply two aspects of a single faculty. The peaceful, insensitive, oblivious life which nearest approached a merely mechanical existence could not have abided long upon the earth- nature does not rest. These more fortunate creatures, possessing no sense as we understand it, were soon educated with that primeval formulation: Pleasure and Pain. Here consciousness arises. For, rather than behaving out of pure mechanism, as did their ancestors; rather than reacting in an immediate way to the world about them, nearly blind, these new beings could now react reflexively to secondary affects produced upon their inner conception of the world, they could entertain a sensation of alluring or repulsive character. A noxious odor, a sound, an image, a memory; these all became ripe with meaning for the new creatures. This is of great import to the living being, and it is also why, in giving to us those supreme tools of pleasure and pain, we were inevitably cursed with consciousness; consciousness is simply the reflex itself, or is constituted by it at any rate. Sensation and consciousness are fundamentally identical, they are two words describing a single faculty. "

To actively think into the formless affect of sensation, producing new passions, new qualities of affect, endowing the formless affect with quality through reason, qualifying it in accordance with reason.... Is the future of philosophical method. An actual production of experience, rather than impotent reflection on it. This can only take place after the reflexive consciousness, its remnants at any rate, are completely dissolved. We are in a privileged position to do this, seeing as how the reflexive consciousness with all its various passions, with all its various qualifications of affect, as the impulse to justice, knowledge, morality, etc... has been fully delineated by our philosophical predecessors.

The logic of the daemonic demonstrates how to actually do this, and paints the new morality as precisely this process and task, while the logic of value-ontology indicates what can be accomplished through it, what the potential horizon of this new self-created, self-experiencing being, this new human, is. When these two projects, these two philosophies, are united, we will have the ground for an entire philosophical movement. To be frank, a new philosophical golden age, which will have its poets, saints, politicians, and historians. I do not even think man has begun to live yet.


I have two books that I need to wrap up, and publish. It has been a long, six year journey writing them. Soon...

As I say in the 291st aphorism of my first book, "Towards the good conscience."



"Toward the good conscience.-- It is probable that the greatest human beings were in actuality the most child-like, but also the most courageous; who, by virtue of their courage, found the greatest beauty in emblazoning all their lives with hope's plaintive colors, their greatest happiness in the bountiful enthusiasm of desire. The misfortune is, that in time one of their hopes must be realized, one of their desires attained, in which case their good conscience about things becomes poisoned by reality, which forms only the lowly dregs of a wine that has long since run dry and, in relation to their ardent dreams about life, must always corrupt them. Hence, the great commandment of Epicurean morality to throw off all the dregs of reality, which of course means to throw off reality itself, to dwell silently in one's little garden all life long. A Stoic, possessed by an opposite nature, and perhaps also by an opposite courage; incapable of hoping and desiring with a good conscience, without the birth and death pangs of expectation and dissappointment, aims to so wholly indwell in reality that he forgets how to desire and to hope completely, but with the same final aim as an Epicurean: to maintain a good conscience, only with respect to bearing the truth. These are both quite violent methods toward securing a peaceful breast; have we developed no subtler means of reconciling the ideality and actuality of man, of taming the heart than- Epicureanism and Stoicism?"

I want to think more about the daemonic and the heroic. For now I address those things which point directly to the possibility of creating new methods, whereby a fully active consciousness can be made to emerge.

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To enlarge itself, the active consciousness must decompose the reflexive one. Reason introduced into that structure of man's drives which nature, over the thousands of years, had produced, a disharmony, a breakdown. This turmoil and war among the drives is what we have called our "unconscious." The completely active consciousness has yet to emerge....

If I understand correctly: The subconscious not as "nature" or simply the un-self-conscious, but as the battleground in which reason tries to kill "nature". I interpret this is a reversal of the traditional approach, which has things emerge from the subconscious to be grasped by reason - here reason submerges itself, as a weapon, into the animal consciousness and ravages it, much like industrial man does to his surroundings.

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Further, it's affects are no longer organized reflexively, but with relation to the various producible types.

Yes, an important point here (you have made many) - the human organism is organized by itself teleologically - its instincts are arranged to serve an abstract purpose. The nature of this purpose differs. Religions are invented to the end of setting a cultivating purpose, commerce works to arrange instincts in another way - no generalized goal/method so far, in our time, has proven to arrange the affects in a way that produces a truly happy creature. But man is capable, in some cases, to set for himself such a goal, to arrange his own affects, on an individual basis. These are "free men", in command of themselves. Corresponding with what has been covered above such successful command is indirect. In this case it works by strategically projecting a goal, the attainment of which is not important. The goal serves to arrange the affects in a certain way.

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its work being essentially the reverse operation of memory.

Another practically useful definition. I have before attributed to the human the capacity to re-write memory. The "faculty" doing this is what you describe.

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this new, active consciousness, is incapable of producing passions and drives in accordance to its own principle, that of differentiation. Man does not "feel" through this active consciousness, all of his passions still belong to the reflexive or metonymic consciousness.

I suppose that this is true, yes. To a large extent, perhaps there are already some small exceptions. Perhaps in some humans, the new consciousness is able to produce, momentarily a kind of proto-affect. For the most part you are right, it seems - I notice in myself that the great passion of triumph that should come (that I would expect) from creating a new rational philosophy is entirely absent. It leaves me cool, calm, simply more conscious. We must perhaps actively create, forge such passions as what came before us has forged the instincts.

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As a result of developing this self-consciousness, man's attempt to accomplish an active as opposed to reflexive organization of the drives in accordance to his language, ideas, and reason, implies the destruction of everything formerly "conscious," implies the destruction of this pre-existing reflexive consciousness, and induces the conflict among the drives.

This appears as a very dangerous idea when put raw like this, to which defense I propose that it need not be antithetical to the old consciousness, and its 'ingredients'. Rather, the new, active consciousness will have to make use in every possible way of what presents itself to it as the material of his former nature, the technical possibility of drives, conditions of organic life, chemistry. The only thing that is fundamentally changed is the order of determination - science has to do away with its false modesty, what may also be called its unjustified claim to objectivity. What "is" in man-as-animal is no longer ground, 'canvas', but rather 'paint', material. It need not be erased in order for its hegemony to be broken and its powers placed under the rulership of the new consciousness.

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Above all else one must keep in mind that it is a superficial conception of the unconscious to regard it as merely a store-house for repressed or forgotten objects of experience, for in fact it is constituted by this conflict among the drives, and is pregnant with a new, as yet unforeseen consciousness,

This is a crucial insight. From here on new methods can be devised, and the methods that work the best in what has been considered "treating the subconscious" (imaginative re-creation of the interior world) can be explained, and expanded.

Parodites wrote:

The logic of the daemonic demonstrates how to actually do this, and paints the new morality as precisely this process and task, while the logic of value-ontology indicates what can be accomplished through it, what the potential horizon of this new self-created, self-experiencing being, this new human, is. When these two projects, these two philosophies, are united, we will have the ground for an entire philosophical movement. To be frank, a new philosophical golden age, which will have its poets, saints, politicians, and historians. I do not even think man has begun to live yet.

In the terms we have, the significance of this is literally unspeakable.

" It is probable that the first man Adam did not comprehend things in name, but in song."

And this is how we should attempt to approach ourselves from here-on. Not as regressing back to Adam, but to approach meaning in a more direct way, no longer as that which is waiting for us to pick it up and use, but as that which needs us to exist, and between "us" and "it" this "musical" - which then must be closely related to the daemonic.

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I have two books that I need to wrap up, and publish. It has been a long, six year journey writing them. Soon...

We are honored to have your writing published here. It is fortunate that our two logics are brought into contact. I can not oversee the potential, there is a dark green ocean in high turmoil between here and the horizon. The work of taming this nightly ocean will be done bit by bit, mile by mile. But the end is clear:

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As I say in the 291st aphorism of my first book, "Towards the good conscience."

"Toward the good conscience.-- It is probable that the greatest human beings were in actuality the most child-like, but also the most courageous; who, by virtue of their courage, found the greatest beauty in emblazoning all their lives with hope's plaintive colors, their greatest happiness in the bountiful enthusiasm of desire. The misfortune is, that in time one of their hopes must be realized, one of their desires attained, in which case their good conscience about things becomes poisoned by reality, which forms only the lowly dregs of a wine that has long since run dry and, in relation to their ardent dreams about life, must always corrupt them. Hence, the great commandment of Epicurean morality to throw off all the dregs of reality, which of course means to throw off reality itself, to dwell silently in one's little garden all life long. A Stoic, possessed by an opposite nature, and perhaps also by an opposite courage; incapable of hoping and desiring with a good conscience, without the birth and death pangs of expectation and dissappointment, aims to so wholly indwell in reality that he forgets how to desire and to hope completely, but with the same final aim as an Epicurean: to maintain a good conscience, only with respect to bearing the truth. These are both quite violent methods toward securing a peaceful breast; have we developed no subtler means of reconciling the ideality and actuality of man, of taming the heart than- Epicureanism and Stoicism?"

Outstanding. Yes, this garden. My obsessive thinking, from childhood on, has been aimed at making the world subject to the laws of my garden. In this I did not seek to lie to myself about what the world is. On the contrary, I sensed that it is always lying to itself, 'it' here being 'the world at large' - the statistical world, hell of hells. I held it as necessary that what has been called to be the 'spirit of play' and which now you have designated in terms of the daemonic, would be the law of the world, instead of confined between fences excluding the world of politics, common sense, business.

How can this spirit rule? In order to solve this question, value-ontology was formulated - I had to formulate why it must rule. The purity of self-valuing, the solid, philosophical establishment of its primacy, over all the terms now constituting 'reality'. Of course, it does rule, where/whenever true rulership is exercised. The workings of all leadership can be understood by value ontology, and the consciousness of all true leaders or "master-signifiers" as the daemonic. It is the only type of spirit that may properly rule, actively direct, justify a priori its consequences.

Allow me some experimenting. I may be deviating from your definitions as I use your terms. Please step in when I make them unrecognizable.

A meaning of the 'heroic' is beginning to dawn on me, in the terms of leadership I just described. As leadership always requires sacrifice of the objective, an enforcing of the subject-as-art on its less than perfect canvas, there is always a certain danger involved, an 'against the odds', a going-down, the certainty of a compromise - not made my the subject but by fate, between the subjects inner 'structuring' as 'daemon' and the subjects outward 'unraveling' as 'heros' - the modus in which his value is perceived, spent.

There is always this dialectic, a frenzied activity indeed, between the hearts genius and all compromising means to "grasp" this, or "have it grasped" - see it confirmed. Such means can be refined, by the introduction of music, but in this first the essence of the loss becomes more apparent - the tragic. The effect that this tragic, the essence of lost self-valuing (a kind of value-sediment) revealed, has on the spectator is ultimately the value being transferred from the hearts genius of the falling hero to potential new self-valuing, in other subjects.

I have wondered how the mechanism of self-valuing might be spread - it now seems to me that here a reaching-out and risking is involved. But the heroic could not be effective to this purpose if the daemonic is not immediately re-attained. The dynamic between these two is the truly dizzying, the frenzy, the inspiring. By its negation, the 'truth of the daemonic' is exposed, after which it is drawn in again by its affirmation.

"If I understand correctly: The subconscious not as "nature" or simply the un-self-conscious, but as the battleground in which reason tries to kill "nature". I interpret this is a reversal of the traditional approach, which has things emerge from the subconscious to be grasped by reason - here reason submerges itself, as a weapon, into the animal consciousness and ravages it, much like industrial man does to his surroundings."



Yes, exactly. Our consciousness is essentially a metonymic structure... intended to grasp temporal and spatial relations through contiguous impressions. To do this there had to arise a primordial, pre-reflective affect in the conscious animal. This is "sensation." The first sensation was the first moment of consciousness. In the terms I have been setting forth, they are describing one faculty, that faculty which organizes, reflexively, the affects into contiguous impressions. This reflexive organization is essentially the creation of an internal conception of the world by qualifying, endowing with qualia, this primal affect of sensation. Through the metonymic relations carved out by an animal's personal experiences, it learns to associate the raw information of a sense like a peculiar smell- say a poisonous fruit it ate once, with the ill feelings imposed by its poisoned state. This "bad" character of the primal affect, the sense, then, is the qualia. Over time these reflexive organizations play off one another, generating a richer inner conception of the world, and more intense qualia- qualified affects that no longer need an external stimulus to be invoked, are created. These would be analogous to what humans call fears, but in any case as they grow more complex they become recognizable as "passions," as the beginning of a psychology. Eventually this process produced the human consciousness, which is so refined in its inner conception of the world that it is capable of using words, and of reasoning, and has been endowed with the sense of self. In accordance with these things a shift in the structuring of the consciousness began. No longer are our affects being organized reflexively, but rather in accordance to reason, to our thoughts. This has introduced turmoil into our passions, which are no longer held together in the coordinated organizations nature produced, and their war with one another has been deceptively called our "unconscious."

Thus:


"Reason, fundamentally, disqualifies the affects, it disrupts the structure of the affects which qualifies them as drives, as passions, which gives them quality, be this quality pleasant or unpleasant. Spinoza accomplished the most systematic disqualification, reducing the affects to one basic quality, passion, and emotional state, namely joy, and considering all the "bad passions" merely corrupted qualifications of joy. He is an example of what I called the active consciousness. An imperfect example, but an example. Not to disqualify the affects through the hypothesis of a fundamental quality, (for Spinoza, joy; for Nietzsche, power) but by their complete reduction to quantities of consciousness.... (consciousness is only the metonymic structure which qualifies them, which endows them with quality by configuring them as single passions and drives, more consciousness equals more sharply defined affects.) Who has done that? I've elected it as one of my tasks. A truly active consciousness could arise only after this total reduction was accomplished."


This is what I mean by the disintegration of the reflexive consciousness within us, the remnants that it has left behind and through which we feel. Our active consciousness, as Spinoza and Nietzsche's case prove, has never been capable of producing its own passions, of qualifying the affects on its own. The most the former two were able to do is reduce all the affects to one fundamental quality, joy and power, respectively. To grasp all the affects, all the passions, as only quantities of consciousness, as only different degrees of reflexive organization, would allow the active consciousness to finally begin qualifying the primal affect of sensation on its own, producing its own qualities, qualifications of this affect- its own passions.

Fixed Cross wrote:

Allow me some experimenting. I may be deviating from your definitions as I use your terms. Please step in when I make them unrecognizable.

A meaning of the 'heroic' is beginning to dawn on me, in the terms of leadership I just described. As leadership always requires sacrifice of the objective, an enforcing of the subject-as-art on its less than perfect canvas, there is always a certain danger involved, an 'against the odds', a going-down, the certainty of a compromise - not made my the subject but by fate, between the subjects inner 'structuring' as 'daemon' and the subjects outward 'unraveling' as 'heros' - the modus in which his value is perceived, spent.

There is always this dialectic, a frenzied activity indeed, between the hearts genius and all compromising means to "grasp" this, or "have it grasped" - see it confirmed. Such means can be refined, by the introduction of music, but in this first the essence of the loss becomes more apparent - the tragic. The effect that this tragic, the essence of lost self-valuing (a kind of value-sediment) revealed, has on the spectator is ultimately the value being transferred from the hearts genius of the falling hero to potential new self-valuing, in other subjects.

I have wondered how the mechanism of self-valuing might be spread - it now seems to me that here a reaching-out and risking is involved. But the heroic could not be effective to this purpose if the daemonic is not immediately re-attained. The dynamic between these two is the truly dizzying, the frenzy, the inspiring. By its negation, the 'truth of the daemonic' is exposed, after which it is drawn in again by its affirmation.

I would agree with these terms and your picture. The most painful depth of daemonic existence must immediately thrust one into the heaven of heroic philosophy, and vice versa. Modern man has been prevented from attaining that depth of daemonic existence though, as a consequence of the radical divide between the languages of the empirical and transcendental, of experience and philosophy. Hence my new morality, which would aim to reinstate the continuity between these two languages, between the empirical and transcendental aspects of the self, would have as its goal the production of a new heroic philosophy, and new heroic philosophers, a new "mens heroica," to use Bruno's own term, or "heroic mind."

The creation of new, realer passions then! This is necessary now as water is to fish, In terms of what I used to know as enthusiasm, I can hardly breathe in this new space, it is too heavily charged with real possibilities, possibilities for transformation of my environment. So the forging of an at least higher, deeper and wider passion seems to me indeed a necessity, even to express the fact that we have embarked on this journey to open up reality, open it up to its potential, directly, after all this preparation, from reflexive organic learning to the last poems of philosophical yearning for honesty.

What kind of passions may we imagine here? What is felt? Of course, the 'it' of feeling is a sediment of the passion itsefl - but the sediment is needed to begin to institutionalize such deliberate sensation into categories, which must take on a form of context in which the passions may emerge, not of description of what they are.

Pondering, again I come up with the idea that 'our nature' as we perceive it must still be used, though not as a hegemonic drive, but as a pool from which to delve useful elements to fit and sustain the architecture of our drives, the newly attaining form of passion we seek, whereby the world is transformed.

It is my strong believe that whereas the daemonic informs us about what it is that needs to be attained and what it is that is attained, the heroic does not inform us at all, but inspires us to inform ourselves. It draws us outward, it is the tragic fall fo self-valuing emitting the music that beckons others to value the tragic hero as themselves - i.e. value themselves in these heroic terms.

Fixed Cross wrote:

It is my strong believe that whereas the daemonic informs us about what it is that needs to be attained and what it is that is attained, the heroic does not inform us at all, but inspires us to inform ourselves. It draws us outward, it is the tragic fall fo self-valuing emitting the music that beckons others to value the tragic hero as themselves - i.e. value themselves in these heroic terms.

Yes, that's why I titled my book which deals with these ideas, Hamartia. Aristotle's term for the tragic element of the heroic figure.

I don't think Aristotle was in any position to contemplate the Heroic.