[1st cycle] New beginnings...

When FC and I first began our exchange, I wrote the following in an attempt to begin what will grow into a manifesto of value. We ought to take it as a basis, for either critique or affirmation -- it matters not. What matters is that it is here now, written, recorded. May it be taken in the right direction. I sense that this new idea, value-ontology, will provide us the means for transcending what we have heretofore considered the shores of our knowledge: science. I would like to see this beginning filtered through each of our approaches, changed, stretched, condensed, affirmed, critiqued, leaped from -- in essence: pushed through the engine of our pentad and rendered strong, applicable, relevant, value-able. Let this thread begin, then, in good faith, with the commitment to a slow but productive journey through the desert of self-satisfaction toward the idea that all is will, power, value. A toast, then: let us never cease to overcome ourselves and our teachers, and let us never cease to demand such an overcoming from others, from our ideas, from our world!

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Let us make clear our starting point. We do not ground ourselves in the warning of the coming of the Last Men, nor do we begin with the recognition that the Last Men are already here, but rather: we take as our point of departure the feeling of profound disgust with the fact that the Last Men have colonized our world over, that it is now their world. This is, at its most basic, the difference between Nietzsche's time and ours: he warned against the coming of that most infectious disease; we see it all around us.

And what is the product of the time of the Last Men? Let us be quite clear: it is Equality. Everywhere around us we see the mediocrity of equality, the tolerance of all points of view, no matter how harmful to life, how anti-natural. Since Nietzsche, the world has only further decayed, and we have only become complacent. It is high time to re-introduce passion into philosophy, ambition and poetry into art. The new philosopher will no longer think by turning away from his passions; to the contrary! We think by cultivating our passions, by sublimating them and wielding them for our purpose. In a word: power. The Last Men, of course, know no passion. The only means by which they are mobilized, by which they are moved to purpose, is fear. We are oppressed by a politics of fear that walls us in at every turn, that represses our instinct for ascension, that would like to keep us helpless and impotent. If the most dangerous idea is equality, then the cure, to be sure, can only be a reintroduction of the pathos of distance. The bridge between man and animal has been increasingly shortened; let us lengthen the distance between man and man! Between us and them! Equality has brought with it mediocrity, slavishness, and apathy. Everywhere we look: the absence of ambition, the loss of purpose, the fragmentation of meaning. Perspectivism does not mean that all perspectives are equal. To feel truly powerful, to create the world in such an image: this is our task.

In the summer of 1887, Nietzsche wondered whether we "can we remove the idea of a goal from the process and then affirm the process in spite of this?" [Will to Power, 55]. We no longer ask such a question; rather, we will that it be so. Against the passive complacent happiness of the Last Man, we juxtapose our ideal of an open-ended, ceaseless striving formore, for higher. We have removed the goal -- no end-point, no teleology, no plateau -- and now we must affirm the process: constant, ceaseless over-coming, not only of self, but of institution, politic,society.

For Nietzsche, it was sufficient to pose such questions as problems, to diagnose the decadence he found himself thrown into. For us, this is no longer enough. We must act, and acting means creating. And creating, of course, means destroying. We hail the over-coming of the hegemony of science: for what is science but a new shadow of the old god? Out of the ashes of such a destruction will be the creation of a new science; one that knows no bounds, a critical, socio-psycho-methodological undertaking of the world as we see it. A reintroduction of the ontology of power, for all valuing is willing, and all willing is will to power, for more, for higher. Against the innocuous, impotent mediocrity of the science of today, we juxtapose our philosophy as art, as aesthetics. A re-valuation of ethics on the grounds of such an aesthetics; a re-valuation of meaning out of such soil.

-w/m.

Indeed, as philosophers we must not deplore the passions. But what does this mean? Shall we be only poets?



Anyone who has something of a poet in him experiences an immediate disgust upon hearing the pronouncement of the Stoical doctrine to deplore the passions, to account of them not even as active and participating forces in the great comedy of the inner life, but as nonentity, as mere corruptions of a more essential nature, namely the intellect, as diseased states of this essential nature and possessing in themselves no real being. But the Stoics viewed their passions in this way because they were nothing like the passions of the poet, nothing like the inventive, prankish, and thoughtful muses that from time to time ventured a word about the solemnities upon which the poetic imagination was continually vexing itself; they were much more violent than the passions which poets are disposed to, not at all thoughtful, and rather tyrannical. They did not whisper into the ear of the stoic the ardent strains of music which the poet hears in them. What does the Stoic really despise then? Ugliness, ineloquence, the inartistic and unpoetic! The Stoical philosophy works simply as a required self-constraint on the part of the man whose passions are too vehement, which the intellect absolutely requires, and a poet would do well to ask himself what really speaks in him- his passions or his intellect, so that, assuming it is the later, for it usually is, he might further ask himself to what extent his poetry has served for him as a Stoicism. He may thereby acquire something that really is nobler than any stoicism, namely the longing to translate his ideas into the lower nature of his passions, he may acquire amore intellectus, to speak with Spinoza, and aim thereafter to educate his passions and teach them to truly speak to him in the language of music and splendid verses, rather than transpose them in the deceptive and artificial beauties of his poetic inventions. Here, however, he can no longer continue to live as a poet, will burn his tragedies as well as his comedies like Plato was said to have done, and become a philosopher.

We long to say "en de phaei kai olesson," [May my spirit depart with the dawn, if the Gods will it so] with Homer, but there is something that calls us back into the dawn's light. No one would doubt the truth of what Leopardi spoke, when he said that even the most tragic art, which offers the image of life's vanity with the greatest clarity, serves as a consolation. This is because such art gains its seductive force and beauty by making conscious to us some obscure vitality which longs to expend itself, but cannot be exhausted in the service of annihilation; this vital power, insofar as it is unconscious, the saint calls sin, through which he is at last led to heaven, the Buddhist calls desire, which gradually effaces his personality in order to grant him the vision of his Nirvana, and the philosopher calls ignorance, which leads him to knowledge. For this vitality can at first only compel a man to kindle his own hell within himself in which to dissolve the image of the world, as Amiel said, or consume him in the play of endless hopes and loves which lack any substance, by making him long to taste of life and passion merely for the sake of life and passion, an ambition which grants him only an illusory life and a kind of passion that can only end in dispirited regret. Love that has grown cold can indeed be revived, but regret cannot accomplish this; the saint can rediscover within himself the image of his God, but not through sin; the philosopher can attain to his ideal, but not through ignorance; the Buddhist can be free of himself, but not through desire. These things suggest to us only a life that has yet to be lived, and which cannot therefor be destroyed, and where great art makes us conscious of this life by taking into its service these destructive elements, as the element of time and mortality, sin and desire, ignorance and longing, it is unable to truly realize it.






We see around us what Nietzsche warned, this goes without saying. But, at bottom, I believe there is a line of disgust that unites all philosophers up to our own time, a disgust upon man. Only now has that disgust fermented in the bowels of human malice long enough to become a "second nature which has overtaken the first," to cite Pascal.




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.


The Old Adam, haunting us ante Vulcanum since our births, cannot be dispossessed in sub Prometheo. Necessarily must Philosophy or the moral character be informed of its lack thereof; to be a true philosopher is to make light of philosophy, to speak with Pascal. The philosopher, who reaches up into his love and his knowledge like a Titan, must be reminded that he but goes from the finite to the finite, that he must learn to become small, that he must die for, while the mandates of our ideal spur us onward, they must have further competition with the living substance of our clay, lest they degenerate into the precepts of a dispirited sainthood. "He that from Cupid's cup of nectar drinks, hath Love uneducated, which for itself competes." It was a small thought of Prudentius, sit Galatea tuae non aliena viae, that the Earth smiles unto every path, for all are sadly engulfed upon the billows of Time, and burnt up in the pother of matter, awaiting as by a silent prayer the passage into eternity. The man who knows this expectancy to a profound degree and has often withdrawn into his heart to reflect in silent prayer before the world, finds in all living things, man and animal, an inarticulate melancholy, which Milton spoke of as the mute creation, or what Spinoza so beautifully described as the desire for all things to proceed in their own being eternally; he finds an insatiability which life bears toward time, not because it would seek to have a greater number of years allotted to the course of its existence, but because time is not its true element.


Yet, the golden names of eternity and silence are only handsome tabernacles in which they are enshrined but hardly cherished. Well might the Ancients make Silence a god, or speak of the seventh day of silence, for it is the element of all creation, at once the origin of all Sadduceeisms and Phariseeisms, wherein at once the Manhanaim-dance of this World is comprehended. Though, never-minding the Amyntas, let us not complain that we have "fallen out of our own youth," for if silence were made a God by the ancients, it is at least, for us moderns, a splendid muse.


In all poetry, religion, art, society, it is only error which, like the mortal Shulamite, grows tired and perishes; under this lies a Muse which is immortal, for she steeps her wisdom and her beauty in silence. Hosts of polities, sciences, and schemes of government ascend to the pure firmament of Plato’s ideas, and those hosts of ethical theories, philosophies, and moralities which have been judged unworthy, descend into the depths of archaism and superstition, all upon the ladder which no man dreams of, whereon even the greatest of social Homers nods.


... That which from the beginning of the world no philosopher has beheld in spirit, no virtuousi of the court of David hath ever heard, has no scholar of Pliny and no Plato made discovery, nor in the concessions of an Ammonius Hermiae were any of the Greek Scholiasts afforded the origin of things. To paint our little holm of time with a gleam from some strange circumabage in the eternal, we must recognize that the end of Man is in vitae mortalis honorem and in the works of life, never thought, though man find therein his beginning; be thou a worthy Aristaeus and pursue bees. Hast thou considered Earth, the middle-shrine, as Sophocles well names her? Under the tribulation of Time, with all spiritual destitutions belonging to it, has man's mortal longings, in the telluris inutile pondus [useless loam of earth] of his Heart, endured peaceably.


The Prometheus Vinctus of Aeschylus is a deceptive image of human fate, for it is not merely with pain but with injustice that man feels himself oppressed. Yet, the image of mortality and time assume an almost poetic loftiness for the lofty imagination, while it tortures a mind accustomed to the pangs of regret, fear, and unsatisfied longing.


Courage has its illusions no less than fear. Yet, since life must be our Abelmizraim in death, to be presently alive were to lay obscure in the chaos of Prae-ordination, and night of our fore-beings, as Browne says. Hunger, longing, and need were established for us before birth itself, and of high vanity you will endeavor, while here on Earth, to be rid of them them, at best making Alcmenas nights out of adversity. Natura parens unica Fortuna noverca est; from the womb of nature, to the care of fate, as Scaliger sings. Sleep has an aurea mala, or golden tongue, like Theon says, and sings therewith unto us.



... "Afforded no dawn, we have but the smouldering wick of fancy, and the living only dream. Those who love dream happily, and the virtuous dream great things, sometimes glorious and sometimes terrible in their aspect- as are the deeds and follies of men, but the wise, in their gentle calm, dream peaceably, until the long night is done."

To be impassioned means to value strongly. It requires that one has a strong (perhaps surplus) self-valuing to translate into valuing and is able to make an accurate translation. The type of passion, e.g. more or less refined, depends largely on the language one has to translate, the type of values one is able to recognize and substantiate. The philosopher has the most accurate language, he can translate his self-valuing into the most remote and thereby desirable, valuable values with the most far-reaching consequences – he approaches most closely the capacity to “create out of nothing”.

All valuing is a re-creating and thereby a creating. It is the cause of any particular state, any state of being. Most valuing happens instinctively, things are sequentially re-created in recurring themes because that’s the way these things have come to work. But there is a deviating, "higher" valuing, of a type that is somehow disconnected from what we may call natural apprehension, that does not happen automatically as prescribed by functionality, but involves a notion of the thing that values, an apprehension of the apprehending, an image of the self-valuing. This notionality is the engine of what we are used to know as consciousness. Valuing in its terms is the activity that serves to enforce the idea of identity to the entity, it is the substance of the notional identity.

“I choose, therefore I am”. The function of culture, of surplus-value, of luxury and fashion in all its forms. The cultivation of choice-providing enables humans to place themselves in the world in notional, not instinctive/natural terms. It enables them to make themselves selectable on terms of their conscious choosing, and as such can be seen as a means for nature to gain a greater level of control in its selection process. It adds a dimension to the selectivity – not only do specimens select each other for procreation, but specimens select properties of themselves to be highlighted in order to be seleced by the type of specimens that they imagine in terms of their notional self. And up until now, the most prestigious object of fashion has been morality.

The cultivation of notional value creates a ground between the being and its natural values. A bufferzone between man and nature, withinin which he may operate as himself instead of simply operating a self, effectively separate from the automatic process of being-projection => valuation-integration. What is cultivated here is the phenomenon of interest. The literal meaning of inter-esse, being in beween, serves as a reminder of the mediating space the term is meant to refer to here.

When we say that something is interesting we mean that we attribute to it the possibility of being valuable to us in one or another way. A value-attributing is approached but value is not made definitive, the object is not manipulated into function, does not truly become a singular object to a focussed subject. This operation of suggesting but postponing integration causes a physiological response, it brings about strong neural activity, a sense of readiness. Over the course of time this sense of readiness-to-value, this finding-interesting, has become solidified in the human nature to the point of becoming a value itself. Postmodernist art is collection of objects created to remind man of this being-interested, to stilumate this neural activity, this subtle but potent stimulus below the surface of his consciousness, this readiness to value. Consumer-culture exploits this readiness by replacing objects of value with objects that appeal to the appetite for the power to value.

As the sensation of readiness to value becomes a value, it is fixed, and therefore it loses its original quality of actual readiness. Its potential to mobilize self-valuing toward the integration of a particular object is neutralized, or rather trapped, contained in-itself. As a sensation is given a specific positive value, the forces of which the sensation is composed are restricted to serve this function, to amount to this particular constitution. In this way the entire phenomenon of “superficiality” is constructed. The intermediary ground between self-valuing and value takes the lead in giving the directions, in determining the course of selection, and whatever is selected is selected on the ground of it being not directly realizable into value, of its role in continuing the indecisive state of experiencing appetite, of being interested. Anything that is directly of value is “uninteresting”, “boring”. However, because this is not consciously realized, the being thinks that it is seeking a proper value, and interprets its acquisitions in these terms, which amounts to integrating this boredom into its realm of being. Lack-lusting, depression follows acquisition of objects-of-interest. Fashions and with it moralities become agents of disinterest. One becomes engaged in disinterestedness. This is the contemporary moral high-ground.

Of this peculiar deviation of focus from the actuality of values to the the state of being interested by great groups of civilized humans, more ruthless, “primordial” self-valuings can logically profit. Individuals and groups that are instead of interested simply uncompromising will to power can, if they possess insight into their opportunity, obscure what they are doing entirely by presenting themselves as "an issue". By rousing interest, by creating polemic, by suggestion choice of perspective on the matter, the element is made almost untouchable to the interested, “sophisticated”. Presently at its height, the paradigm of interested sophistication is however beginning to crumble, and will to power slowly becomes visible for what it is. The primal/effective becomes acceptable, enters into the “epoch of truth”. This is neither necessarily progress nor regress, all depends on how this primality is interpreted, given direction, placed into context. By placing a reality into a context, the context in which it is placed becomes the world. What will now be the world depends ont he context we can evoke to harbor the will to power.

In the twentieth century, philosophy has acted on the stage of interest. Arousing the feeling that something interesting is being presented, that the mind is stimulated, passed for profundity. Especially creating the sensation that this being-interested refers to Truth has been effective in convincing people that an idea is consequential. The notion of actual/direct/real value has been obscured by the valuing of the sensation of the capacity to choose. In the course of this process, mans passions have been dispersed. This is why "the Last Men know no passion". The language in which our self-valuing may translate itself has become a gibberish, a chitter-chatter, a broken arrow. The passion of the philosopher of the future is (per definition) a true arrow, which means that his language must be clear, definitive, object oriented, departing not from sophisticated interest, but from a pre-notional primordiality.

Saying that language must be clear is not to say is that it must be simple or that the ideas should be effortlessly assimilated. On the contrary – reading philosophy must draw more energy from the readers potential than he is used to – it mus tap into the very thing that gave rise to this notional self-consciousness in order to erase, overwrite, re-create this consciousness. Philosophy must unleash a river of energy into the consciousness and reshape its tracts. For that it must go to the well.

The well is unshaped, brutal, its beauty is terrifying, its truths are un-worldly. Self-valuing core is not sophisticated, a morality/behavior that sustains this primordiality through time is daemonic, and it breaks all the laws of sophistication, it is "disinterested". How to shape such passion into a world? Only the strongest, hardest, coldest laws may serve to contain this primordial soul. Now that the ancient stone-cast notions of interest that have served as ethics, standards and fashions are being broken, and the magma of direct apprehension has access to the human surface, how to channel this titanic passion that precedes and supersedes the Gods and their codes? What can contain, harbor the rawest most formless substance and make it a world?

To answer this question, consider that, outside of notional identity, this world has always existed as natural apprehension. All animals contain the primordial violence of valuing in terms of self-valuing in all their forms and functions. And the first notions arising in man reflected the terrifying beauty of these forms and functions. Beauty, in fact, was the first notion. But as notions and beauty became consensual, they became weaker and weaker until they became “universal”. And under their yoke man became more placid, as he tried to become more agreeable to the mean. As most sweeping consensus of all, modern science emerged. The surface now fully enclosed the core, man had become perfectly contained in neutrality, "objectivity".

We now reverse our valuation at a new turn of the dialectic we know as history, the ideal, the consensus, becomes known as the danger, and the natural apprehension, the instinctive, the terrifying of our self-valuing is drawn toward and into us as value to our self-valuing, and we are made to "rhyme with ourselves" – we break our ancient heart of stone from the inside and replace our conscience with a pulsating daemon.

This will be our refinement.

What is pathological is the unrefined, raw passional discharge without aim or intended direction – a mere “releasing”. This is every "for its own sake". To act pathologically is to act without aim or goal, to be purposeless at the level of intent and motivation. That this purposeless discharge is immediately appropriated by the organism and directed toward some extant use-value confuses man into thinking that even his "for its own sake" is a necessary player in the grand scheme of his actions and ideals – it confuses even the philosophers that it is necessary to either deplore or “cultivate” the passions in order to reach some higher synthetic possibility and power. Rather the refinement of passion, the education of one’s passions at the hands of reason, higher contemplative articulation and “the artistic” is useful to attain to the point of being able to integrate the passions (pathological discharge) into the total being of consciousness in such a way so that one’s conscious being ceases to be the product of arbitrariness, ceases to be impelled or shaped by any “for its own sake” whatsoever.


To immortalize the passions, be they love, compassion, joy, guilt, or even the pleasure of the “will to power” is to substitute for an ethical possibility a pathological sanction. On this point has even the wiser man become confused, for he has been unable to differentiate between acts done out of a spirit of reasoned prior intention/aim, acts which are purposeful, and acts done as a consequence of the raw discharge of aimless passion, since these latter appear to the unrefined consciousness as attaining to an aim and purpose merely because they serve to energize the already extant physiological and psychological structures. Man renders, after the fact, his aimless passional discharge into an image which appears purposeful because such an image is in conformity and enters into relation with the already-meaningful contents of his prior experience. It is this disconnect between true intention and action, between motive and meaning (between the lack of any real purpose and what falsely appears to man as his motives) that prevents man from attaining to an ethical, rational-sane being.


The goal of our refinement implies an end to every "for its own sake" where this would serve to impel or cause any action, be it an action of thought or deed. He who has become ethically-minded – he who is possessed of a self-responsible consciousness and wider valuational potential, and has become freed from pathological motivations – has ceased to act or not act with respect to his passions. Yet this does not mean one lacks either passion or a certain depth of passion, nor does it mean that one strives to ignore or struggles to will these away. Rather to be ethical means to have contextualized the passions, to have grounded the "animal man" and rendered it into a higher order of language, meaning and use; to have made man purposeful. To be ethical means to know toward what one aims, and why.


Ethics does not mean the bland sentimentality, the 'shadow of the passions' that is today mistaken for ethics. Man has confused ethics with the feeling of experiencing an inner resolution of various otherwise discontinuous states within the pathological nexus. This mistaken view has convinced man that what is good is the resolution of these states, a “resolution” which is defined only by the proprioceptive feeling of pleasure which follows from the discharge and reduction of the pain of “internal stress”. What man calls ethics is nothing more than pathological conflict-resolution, internal pain-management; what man calls good is nothing but the feeling of freedom from the internal pain of having to experience passional disharmony. Even the quintessential “difficult or seemingly paradoxical ethical dilemma” is for man only an instinctual struggle to find and follow the path of least resistance through pathological drives-in-conflict. This sort of “morality” man projects upon life itself, under eternal images and language in order to sanction this as ‘the good’ and the very breath and soul of life itself. Yearn as he might, man can find no other image and sublime experience within himself higher than this feeling of pathological catharsis, and man’s spiritual, social and religious notions serve only to further legitimize and cement this animal-instinctual reactionism as what has become baptized as “the ethical” itself. Even philosophy has blessed this escape with the names of truth, conscience and “will”. And thus even here has man yet failed at that task of cultivating that “vital struggle with illusion” – even here does man, whether philosopher, artist, poet, saint or sinner fail to accomplish anything but a reification and reverencing of the illusory at the behest of some small and equally illusory corner of his being.


In contrast to all this, when a truly ethical, which is to say non-moral possibility exists what becomes motivating to/for the consciousness possessed of this is precisely whatever serves this consciousness ‘as a whole’, which means whatever arises from a total activity of this being’s fully-articulated and disclosed contemplation, for its motives have been made clear and its intentions laid bare before itself. When man both recognizes that the passions are purposeless and aimless and refuses to act or not act with regard or recourse to these he has begun to think in a refined manner, to free himself from delusion, to consider the actual good of which he has now earned the right to partake of and further -- he has begun to philosophize, where we understand philosophy to mean truly “to engage reality”.


Man who is unable to act with the full accord of the being of his consciousness, unable to synthesize and attain to a higher order of intentionality in which not only his passions find a suitable coupling and function, acts instead in an arbitrary manner subject to passing interests and fleeting value-judgments. Where man fails to be capable of entertaining the wider swaths of his being, of gathering under a more total sphere of interested inspiration and focused motivation he will instead compensate for this by granting to some small idea or sensation of his an inordinate amount of interest and motive/valuating power. This compensatory interestedness serves to accommodate for the lack of a more total vision and value, it sutures man to “a cause” or to some method of enslavement to ideality. Man becomes able to submerge his entire manner of conscious being at the level of motivation and purposeful aim within a single corner of this being, within even the most fleeting and temporal senses of it. It is not some quality of this sense which alone affords this possibility but rather the potential meaningful interactivity between this sense and the world surrounding man – whether or not he is able, under this fleeting sense, to couple with/in larger clockworks of mechanistic processes and functional relations to broader systems of valuation-captivation. In short, man’s interests and values become religious, political; man becomes able to be motivated, interested by nothing so much as “the political”. We see how this is made possible due to man’s pathological disconnect, due to the ruling of man’s consciousness by his “unchecked animal passions” in all their arbitrariness, discontinuousness and purposeless “for its own sake”. To value under the form of passion, to value with respect to the pathological nexus is to self-value in a way which co-opts ethical reason, which prevents the disclosure of the potential for self-responsibility and a more full comprehensivity of valuing. All that man has built up as interesting, valuable and meaningful is a progressively-greater derivation of this same essential failure. Even man’s heroic images and archetypes, his gods and mythos of power, creation, justice, love, achievement, peace, vitality, hope… these are nothing but the shadows of man’s pathology played out upon the mere vagaries of a disinclined and stifled “rational conscience”, of a being which has yet to become “ethical” before itself and so take charge of its own status and stature with respect to its world/s. To entertain value-as-possibility – which is to say, to retain the ability to value while under the ‘gaze of time’ which everywhere transfixes him – man contrives a 'unity of activity' out of the expressive interplay of which his “identity” emerges and serves to “ground” the potencies of his values. That this unity functions adequately for this purpose of values-mediation belies the fact that this contrivance is merely an erection of fantastical delusions wholly disconnected from the otherwise conscious being in all its “rational apparatus” of implication, powers of decision and motivation-focusing which this contrived identity takes upon itself to mirror and dissimulate in terms of. The fragmentary identity of man remains mysterious, elusive and ungathered because rather than attempt such a gathering man instead contrives irrelevancies and deceptive fictions around which a new “identity” and “conscious perspective” are allowed to grow.


Nietzsche's Last Man is not a man without passion, but a man with all the animal passions that have become disconnected from anything resembling an actual contextualizing and grounding, from anything remotely "rational" or "sane", from anything substantiating and stabilizing other than the ephemeral and arbitrary moral-political forms in which his encounters with the world inevitably manifest. The task of philosophy, for us, is to develop an 'ethical consciousness', a harmonious contemplative-visionary being rather than a disharmonious whimsical-passional being. To this end we liberate ethics and ‘the good’ from all that man has habitually thought of as his (social) morality and free these into the sense of a fully articulated and expansive reason and logos, a higher order of contemplative intentionality and an aimed purposefulness which serves as a refrain and guiding principle for the passions, for the “animal nature” – which situates this nature within a wider gaze and value. In this way does the future open up and merge with the present in the totalizing contemplative synthesis of the ethical consciousness, informing and conditioning all manner of insight, conceptualization, inspiration and motivation. Philosophy has ever sought to recollect most fully and subsequently align this recollection with, in a word, power. But even the mystification and metaphysicizing of power does not serve to break the hold of the "for its own sake" which our notions of power ultimately bow to. With power we now substitute purpose, vision, and we resolve not to confuse the notion of power with that of value. Nietzsche exposed the pathological motives underlying human morality as well as science’s (and philosophy’s) seemingly profound “fidelity to truth”; we are now able to exercise a degree of restraint where Nietzsche was forced to push forward and attack mercilessly. Rather than merely “deplore the deploring of the passions” as a response to and verdict against the Stoical, and rather than upholding an image of the “will to power of the Superman” or “the playful innocence of the Child” (against the resigned moralism of the Camel and the vain hubris of the Lion) we are now finally able to act without regard to disillusionment and instead regard the entire cosmology and inner life of man from the widest possible vantage point. We are become able to situate and value everything that grows somewhere within the fertile grounds of consciousness. We have over-risen both the tragic as well as the vain, the disillusioned as well as the nihilistic moralism of the self-resigned. We are now those who are disgusted only by what is determined to remain of so little value and worth, what has become able to remain so contented and isolate with itself. We are those who maintain our fidelity not to an eternal image or ideal of Truth but instead to the active emergence of truths which attend to the widest possible ranges of scope and value, and we are interested most in what has yet to become valuable to us. And we are those who deplore nothing more than the unrefined and every “for its own sake”.

Where has my passion gone?
Taken in by the expectations of the mass
and sat on with all their weight.
Immobilized

What am I to do but eat the bland factory productions,
that I now eagerly reach for?

Nothing but a chase of a high.

I am a Lost Man, but am I so lost to be a Last Man?

Or am I only lost behind the curtains,
as if laid over a chair to prevent dust,
am I a relic to be preserved only to entertain the Last-ic passers by in an earth of a museum?

Perhaps there is hope;
perhaps this age we are in is of the eye of the storm...
a calm of creativity
we are simply the observant who walk out to see only sooner to be whisked away by the returning hurricane...

Or Is this now to be the home of our children?:
To find things only interesting? :
To consume only the interesting?:
To be ever waiting to have value?:
What is it today but that we are stuck with treasures in a museum curtained to prevent dust, never to see real beauty, to have real value?
Perhaps we are moved by fear of its effect: the fear by the mass mind of the effect on the individuals of the mass.
The crowd moved by the museum tour guide, hurried on by fear, starring, feeding on the fear of the revealing of the truth; the beauty behind the curtain.

Is it that we are old, or cramped on this earth, surrounded by so much knowledge, the age of information, such that it is simply unavoidable that we sit in our own museum? Perhaps it is time that we clean, cleanse of the old and seek harder for the new, move away from the fear of loss of the relics, the old beliefs, and create. For it is with beliefs that our future must be painted.?

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Useless things…

With no ends to gain or beginnings past
We go on without having purpose
By thinking we do, or searching for it

Existence because that is what it is

Poems, songs, communication,
All there to achieve what?
Growth?
There is always greater
And so, all steps are forever less

We walk upon the sphere of life thinking it is flat,
Looking for the end.
We think we are growing closer,
Never to realize that we have already been here,
We go in circles

I am not so short sighted
I see around the life-cycle
And know that it is my backside
I see

To tread any further
Is useless
As are all things
Even knowing that they are
Even despair!

So I walk because I have nothing to do
“Why not?”
There is no reason not to,
As there is no reason to

Knowing this is the ultimate strength
Pain is of loss; loss of flesh, energy, mind, love
But what is there to loose?
There is no purpose,
No meaning to life.

We live seeking the answer
And there is not one
Yet, is that not an answer?

You are already in heaven
You must simply realize it
And to realize you are bound to no purpose
Is the ultimate freedom
Life becomes food for your feelings
You choose the flavor
Shit or maybe chocolate with almonds
Whatever you like
Or choose to like

But then, the Last Man cannot realize the heaven they are in,
They cannot will the beauty; They get lost in in meaningless not realizing that meaninglessness.
They are lost to too much need of the more, the more interesting;
Looking for value instead of giving value.
Weather it is because they don’t understand
Or maybe don’t know any flavors they like
It is only lack of wisdom and true understanding that can keep you from your heaven
Weather it be burning in hell
Or flying with angels
----

You must will your own purpose with a passion.

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Poetry is in the eye of the beholder and it is the power of the philosopher to behold all things as poetry. Power to will value to all.

The terms of the question “what is man?” have shifted, the invisibilized claim to a ground in objectivity has been exposed, made visible, called to task. The question, now: not what, but who—“who is man?” And neither does the asker of the question escape its demands. Whereas “what” was once rooted in an a-historic, a-perspectival truth-saying that has since directed the whole course of the tradition of Western thought, “who” concerns itself only with concrete interpretation, with judgment made from a particular place at a particular time, rooted in a particular subject, a perspective. And the answer can no longer be a gesture toward the coming of the Last Man any more than it can be an affirmation of the contemporary proliferation of his type. It is, instead, an unveiling of valuation. An unveiling because value always underlies interpretation, always conceals itself beneath judgment. It is impossible to speak but from one’s own mouth, and so impossible to judge but on the basis of the structure of one’s own values. And these valuations admit of both a typology and a topology. And true enough: every concrete instance of the former will necessitate a detour through the latter. Every value accords with a type, be it high or base, self-affirming or denying, restricting and small or radically open and light--capable of dance, as Zarathustra will say. But every type presupposes a concentration of zones of valuation, a structure and distribution of quantities of force and their corresponding qualities of judgment over a plane of possibility. It is the geography of one’s inner life that makes possible the growth of the type of one’s self-value. And everything happens in accordance with this typology. There is no essence, there is only value. Ethics is meaningless if encountered only on the basis of a “what?” But if we ask, instead: “for who?” we are led to the quality of the valuation that seizes upon the ethical, we are led to a judgment, a perspective, and not to a truth or essence. We are led to the subject that precedes the apprehension of all else.

A thing is only as valuable as the man who values it and possesses only as much value as that man is capable of bestowing upon it. Apart from such a man, from such a valuation, the thing is empty, meaningless. It is lost. And so too is man insofar as he has invisibilized the valuations that underlie and direct the course of the truths he proclaims for himself. But, of course, most valuation happens instinctively, on the basis of an intuition or a reaction. To turn reaction active, to unveil and affirm instinct, to develop an understanding of what has hitherto remained shrouded in smoke and obscured by misguided claims to objectivity, to reintroduce the subject in only the strongest of ways, this is the task of the true valuators, the philosophers of the day after tomorrow—as Nietzsche says. For thought must project ahead of itself an image the structure of which will serve as the logic by which it can proceed. It is only on the basis of this image that thought is rendered capable of thinking. And it is only now that we can begin to see how very misguided this image has become, how deluded and weak. This is surely part of what Heidegger meant when he declared that “we are not yet thinking.” To wit, thought is only as valuable as those values that seize it. Apart from them, it is nothing. We have now unconcealed the valuation that underlies all thought, all judgment and interpretation. We have uncovered the structure of self-valuation that proceeds all will-to-power. What we must do is set forth, cast ahead of ourselves arrows that bear the language of our valuations. We must forge anew an image by which thought might be finally ready to begin its task of thinking. This task precedes all others. The world changes first in the mind of the man that wants to change it.