The Identity of Experience

The science of being as a study in subjectivism, which has taken on fully logical form with value ontology, is approached on a higher level of organization, of more detail, of more possibility for contradiction, in the terms devised by the psychoanalytical schools. I believe all psychoanalysis revolves around the mutual requirement of the terms identity and experience.

As humans, most of our time we spend in avoiding experiences. In our seeking-out of what we aim to experience, we are shifting and sneaking along the invisible walls facing us from every direction but the one we seek to disclose - the walled off area of "the real" is however constantly accessible, these walls can be broken down with the force of intent. The lack of this intent is precisely what makes us effective as prolonged identities, which leads finally in complex beings to what we can begin to call experience.

The identity of experience is experience accepted into the being as its being. The same mechanisms that cause experience, also perform a lot of activity going on that is not 'owned' by the organism. Freud goes into this as a repressed - suggesting that the identity of this experience is already 'the name of the subject', but actively kept away from its consciousness. I would propose that we address this differently - as 'untranslated affect', affect not yet interpreted in terms of the particular self-valuing.

Psychoanalysis is not the art of retrieving experiences to consciousness, but to identify physical affect as experience. This is always done after the fact, also when there is no 'repression', or what I would call simply an insufficient power to identify in terms of self - the delicate dove-like beauty of the self to itself facing very dangerous and compromising affect, "raw" affect, which can not be specified, categorized in 'true terms' as Spinoza has it - pleasure or joy (laetitia), pain or sorrow (tristitia)and desire (cupiditas) or appetite. *

A manipulation is needed to incorporate the experience, to give it an identity, to add this experience to the identity of the being, to value it on terms of the beings valuing. Psychoanalysis is such a manipulation. Another one, much faster and therefore more dangerous and potentially destructive is Occult "pathworking". This is the business of setting up the conditions for translating raw affect into imagined sensory experience, by entering a state of lucid dreaming armed with the intention to disclose whatever formlessness is pressing on the walls of the being into apparitions, beings the being itself is able to face as itself - and proceeding to enter the dungeon of the unidentified with the clear aim of translating all that is into experience. And there are other manipulations.

In general, I would categorize all such manipulations as the Dionysian arts, to which possibility a systematic suspension of judgment is required, and the being comes into contact with its own boundaries - its walled-in-ness becomes its walled-ness, in other words, instead of the cells core, its membrane is the identity of experience. Such experience is not merely mortal but mortality itself.





* wikipedia: Affect (Latin affectus or adfectus) is a concept used in the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and elaborated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. For Spinoza, as discussed in Parts Two and Three of his Ethics, affects are states of mind and body related to (but not exactly synonymous with) feelings and emotions, of which he says there are three primary kinds: Subsequent philosophical usage by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and their translator Brian Massumi, while derived explicitly from Spinoza, tends to distinguish more sharply than Spinoza does between affect and what are conventionally called emotions. Affects are difficult to grasp and conceptualize because, as Spinoza says, "an affect or passion of the mind [animi pathema] is a confused idea" which is only perceived by the increase or decrease it causes in the body's vital force.

"When an inner process can not be integrated it is often projected outward. The notion of a materialized psychism opens a bottomless void beneath our feet."

Capable speaks here of unidentified affect, belonging to none of the three Spinozaean categories.
It appears logical that that raw affect, inner force which can not be identified in terms of the self-valuing, is projected (as a projectile) towards the Other - that which is explicitly unidentified -- or quasi-identified as the Other - that which has no right to exist.

Rights are an extension of identification.

It is a reality that people(s) are simple not able to bestow rights on those with whom they can not identify. Human rights is an invention of genius, a great artifice, worthy of my respect, although I respect that they can be logically refuted. The principle offers an identification based on a purely aesthetic identification -- the form of the human body, not its interior identity, i.e. the language it speaks/thinks, its ethics, its frame of action, its type.

A great assumption is made -- that all those organisms which can be identified as of the same "species" - a term, not a reality of experience/identification, communication -- are in fact "the same". In reality however, man A is more alike to dog A than man A to man B, and this expresses itself in identification. What is shared in identity is experience. Such has historically been the foundation of culture - a shared frame of experience equals a shared identity predicates lawmaking, which is consensus and trust.

Back at psychoanalysis - retroactively one learns to trust the affect that is 'repressed'... - to speak with the trauma in a common tongue, so that one can effectively agree that it exists. Agreement, this is what is created when a true Word appears. And this appearance is a physical act, a speaking.

Here has been a flaw in philosophy hitherto -- being must be interpreted as given. But what, in such a case, does "given" mean? Certainly not the predicate of something else, which gives. At best, it gives itself. But to what? To what but to itself?
Does this make sense? Not much - what is more sensible is to say that I give it, as itself, to itself, which is what I amount to.

Arrangement of potentiality --
life is largely strategy, being is observingness, intelligence, rising to the occasion, seizing opportunity - it is not an objective fact - it is the bold activity of which only the very few are capable of embodying entirely. These are the agents of evolution - in every species these arise.

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Does this make sense? Not much - what is more sensible is to say that I give it, as itself, to itself, which is what I amount to.

Identity, in a sense incorporatingness-as-such, a certain agglomeration of force/s-relations attaining in the being of this agglomeration [possible architecture: a/the most sufficiency of the widest necessity of its conditionality?] a 'center of force' or intertial gravity. This characteristic of the quality of the "degree of unification" serves to indicate the potency-vitality of identity, but not the being of it, which rather is the "root" incorporatingness that (emergently) attains and then reciprocally-reflexively begins to re-define and re-shape that from which it arose, begins to work on itself by taking into itself, changing as it changes.

"What I amount to" as "that I give it, as itself, to itself": this formulation of identity (human - but also not only human?) as a phenomenon which is a giving of the very given itself, that by which given is given or known/asserted in its givenness. Are we only an "amounts to something" in the sense that we take, are able to take ourselves, this amounts to, as given, as a givenness-as-such which is also a givingness? Could this be why/how we give the given of the given/s around us, or at least construe otherness essentially ("correctly" or otherwise) under an image of a being-given?

We are philosophical beings, humans, all of us engaged with/in processes of cross-territorial re/interpretation and re/incorporation -- integration and extagration. That by which this takes place (i.e. the "world") might be said to be our being. This "takes place" itself might be said to be our identity. The being of this "takes place" itself might be said to be, perhaps, givenness-as-such. Or at least it is possible that thus far this is the only/best way for us to understand/conceptualize this being.

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Arrangement of potentiality --
life is largely strategy, being is observingness, intelligence, rising to the occasion, seizing opportunity - it is not an objective fact - it is the bold activity of which only the very few are capable of embodying entirely. These are the agents of evolution - in every species these arise.

Being then as potentiality and thus that which conditions this potentiality as the being of this being. What is that by which this conditionality, abstracted from its embedded situatedness, is conditioned? We might understand this as givenness, as the very possibility for and of being from within being itself. This becomes feasible in the sense that this being reciprocally participates in its own existence-creating: through the simplest fact of its existence (as a being, as being) is another being or perhaps another "level of this already being" called also into existence, the existence of which hinges upon - and ONLY upon (?) - the simple fact of its "parent" "being's" being existing. What might this reciprocality, reflexivity, relatedness-as-such (abstracted out from its embedded situatednesses) be understood as, other than as a givenness which is also then and therefore a givingness?

Here we come face-to-face with identity [id-entity], with the unifying "principle" (frame, ground) of experiencing (which also then serves as a principle of differentiation from within experience/s). Interesting how this identity itself has its own being, and yet this being is to some extent irrelevant from the perspective of that which is experientially forged through and by the existence of this identity! In this 'to some extent irrelevant' we see the function of givenness, being given. And in the relatedness of this being to (the being/s of) what it experiences - deeper more genuine contact, powerful consciousness, imagination, creation, envisioning, knowing - we can see how this relatedness/experiencing occurs more essentially as under a form of a givenness, of a giving of that which is already itself a being-given to/for/by itself alone (even if only "by us" is this realized/known or "made real"/attaining to a relevancy).

[Further questioning then: to what extent are the differences here, between the implications arising from either being itself as a being-given or those arising from a being-given as only a being of certain beings (us) which structurally attain certain configurations of relatednesses and embedded situatednesses, meaningful, relevant? What are the various utilities to positing either ex ante or ex post facto here? Maybe more importantly, can we yet effect a possible synthesis even here, on this now higher level? (Edit: answer: yes, through the use of value-ontology we seem able to formulate these principles and elements conceptually-logically).]




Edit: additionally, to give credit where it is due, this intriguing "When an inner process can not be integrated it is often projected outward. The notion of a materialized psychism opens a bottomless void beneath our feet" is a line by Carl Jung, from his Flying Saucers, I believe.

Capable wrote:

changing as it changes.

This principle is learned by Shamans. Death-rebirth, the consciousness of flux-depth-power, vortexes of identity around which a society gravitates. Shamans are the "black holes" of the galaxies in which men live - meaning "centers too intense to perceive"*. We circle around what we can not stare in the eye. The terrible in strength is what gives life its structure. (This is why America exists as it does, and why the power of the state must remain a terrifying and disruptive factor until all human life has organized itself around the core of the death-rebirth machinery, the magical power of the invisible center/)

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"What I amount to" as "that I give it, as itself, to itself":

A Heideggerian giving, as opposed to serving a Platonic "given-ness". Our things flow from us, we are centers of their revolving-existing - existing is revolving, losing meaning is collapsing into the source is disintegrating. A thing becomes junk, attribute to nothingness, when it loses its capacity to revolve by the "gravity" of value to the core.

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this formulation of identity (human - but also not only human?) as a phenomenon which is a giving of the very given itself, that by which given is given or known/asserted in its givenness. Are we only an "amounts to something" in the sense that we take, are able to take ourselves,

Interesting, yes I like this - we are given as soon as we are taken - and there is no one to take us but ourself. We can be taken by others but this means disintegration when it is not serving our own taking-our-givenness. Consuming being. This adds a 'hedonistic' aspect to the ethics that may follow from value ontology. That would help to make it accessible as therapy. Modern therapy is in part hedonistic, indulging. We consume our psyche.

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this amounts to, as given, as a givenness-as-such which is also a givingness? Could this be why/how we give the given of the given/s around us, or at least construe otherness essentially ("correctly" or otherwise) under an image of a being-given?

And so also a being-there-to-take.
This is how "good karma" can be seen - if one has a tendency to give, to 'create the world' if one "bestows", the world attains a nature of being-to-take. That means that one is a master of ones fate. If one takes what happens to be given one steals it, and it transforms. This is why pure political initiatives get corrupted by followers, why politics only work to constructive aims where there are conspiracies, and never when there is dictatorship of the vote.

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We are philosophical beings, humans, all of us engaged with/in processes of cross-territorial re/interpretation and re/incorporation -- integration and extagration. That by which this takes place (i.e. the "world") might be said to be our being. This "takes place" itself might be said to be our identity. The being of this "takes place" itself might be said to be, perhaps, givenness-as-such. Or at least it is possible that thus far this is the only/best way for us to understand/conceptualize this being.

Can we identify this in corporeal terms? A universe of symbolism mapping given-ness, the world as a web of threats originating in subjects - a fabric of histories, with crossings of perspectives as wars and cultures -- this "monster of energy" - yes, the dragon thou shalt is made of a great number of potential "I wills" and at root made possible by "I am".
The transformation of the spirit of Zarathustrian man is a collapsing inward of the self-valuing. Courage is needed to move beyond the skin of the dragon and to embody its will. To become part of the dragons inner world means to dissolve the dragon in ones own world. To become invisible in ones workings, to become "deep" - to command, to become an enigma.

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Arrangement of potentiality --
life is largely strategy, being is observingness, intelligence, rising to the occasion, seizing opportunity - it is not an objective fact - it is the bold activity of which only the very few are capable of embodying entirely. These are the agents of evolution - in every species these arise.

Being then as potentiality and thus that which conditions this potentiality as the being of this being. What is that by which this conditionality, abstracted from its embedded situatedness, is conditioned? We might understand this as givenness, as the very possibility for and of being from within being itself.

A not-yet-givenness, a potential, a void even - void as space.
In any form a givenness may arise around a void, like a castle is built around a room.
the "hearth" at the center of this room is that which has been called by the most loving and admiring names, which I will not utter, as they are not my words - - but this hearth is the completion of the given-ness of the room, the crown on the work of which the wall-building was the physical part and the room-conceiving the 'philosophical' part, the thinking-building serving 'dwelling', the being itself.

Men gather around fires. Words can also be fires, around which walls are built to contain the words in spaces where men dwell. Men will no be guided where no fires are made. Good philosophy is a torch. It creates the will-to-dwell, which is the will to think and build. Religion is a damp torch emitting only smoke, and the will to sleep. Myth has been a healthy torch in many cultures but we have moved beyond the possibility of myth - myth points to the past, (our) philosophy points to the future. For the rest they are in a sense the same; they make of man a given-to-take. They make man possible to himself, as man, as Dasein.

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This becomes feasible in the sense that this being reciprocally participates in its own existence-creating: through the simplest fact of its existence (as a being, as being) is another being or perhaps another "level of this already being" called also into existence, the existence of which hinges upon - and ONLY upon (?) - the simple fact of its "parent" "being's" being existing. What might this reciprocality, reflexivity, relatedness-as-such (abstracted out from its embedded situatednesses) be understood as, other than as a givenness which is also then and therefore a givingness?

Intention. We can only recognize the 'eternal parent' of this givenness as something real, present in us. On this level we have to abandon the abstract and create 'occult experience' - knowledge beyond language, 'it-ness'. We can approach this asymptotically, and become wiser and more powerful along this line and feel more justification, more certainty than one would ever imagine passible when certainty is understood as logical truth, instead of knowing by being.

"God" is the measure in which this certainty is recorded by 'prophets'. The divinity can always grow, become greater, stand farther from the populace. It is never 'already there'. It is the measure in which consciousness attains to its root, and this measure depends on the quality of the consciousness aside from its inward attaining as well as on the penetratingness of its inner gaze. So sacredness exists in two axes - worldly quality and the drive pertaining/attaining to what Nietzsche called the ascetic ideal. We can not formulate a definition, we can only point to the means to attain a greater depth of knowing/being. For this is the purpose, the telos - to enable, increase, potentiate -

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Here we come face-to-face with identity [id-entity], with the unifying "principle" (frame, ground) of experiencing (which also then serves as a principle of differentiation from within experience/s). Interesting how this identity itself has its own being, and yet this being is to some extent irrelevant from the perspective of that which is experientially forged through and by the existence of this identity! In this 'to some extent irrelevant' we see the function of givenness, being given. And in the relatedness of this being to (the being/s of) what it experiences - deeper more genuine contact, powerful consciousness, imagination, creation, envisioning, knowing - we can see how this relatedness/experiencing occurs more essentially as under a form of a givenness, of a giving of that which is already itself a being-given to/for/by itself alone (even if only "by us" is this realized/known or "made real"/attaining to a relevancy).

Whatever we identify as given, is separate from our identifying it. Only when the identifying becomes inseparable from the given-ness do we attain clarity. An overwhelming beauty is the result.

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Further questioning then: to what extent are the differences here, between the implications arising from either being itself as a being-given or those arising from a being-given as only a being of certain beings (us) which structurally attain certain configurations of relatednesses and embedded situatednesses, meaningful, relevant? What are the various utilities to positing either ex ante or ex post facto here? Maybe more importantly, can we yet effect a possible synthesis even here, on this now higher level? (Edit: answer: yes, through the use of value-ontology we seem able to formulate these principles and elements conceptually-logically).]

We can use it as a grid. This is the greatest problem here - what we have unearthed so far is still invisible to those who do not think as deeply, and will remain so wherever we do not fill it in with 'flesh' - which means, world-implication. The 'key' to this task I see now is that there is a great fulfillment in coupling concepts to their value-root, to their primordial emerging. It is not a 'dry' subject, but a feast of iconoclasm and archaic mythmaking, and when we see how the archaic myths are populated, by what sort of creatures, we can see the value that philosophizing will have to man when he truly sets to shape his world, when fires are ignited around which new thinking-dwelling emerges. We have built the walls, we need to ignite the fire. In this we do not stand separate, absent, but give 'acte de présence' as Lord - this is the only way in which culture grows: by example.

To give act-of-presence means to stand within given-ness as its signifier. It means to give the world to man anew. This can happen on every scale - for the philosopher it is different from a football-player, but the principle is the same. Philosophy is not simply labor, it is also identity. And to make identity felt one requires character, and let this be the very thing that the traditional conception of truth does not allow. All philosophers, in their proclamations about what is universal, have been poseurs, without knowing it they made statues of themselves, testaments to existence. But what type of existence did they testify to? It was, most of the time, rather hollow. No wonder that most of these philosophers were recluses and fools, that no exemplary philosopher has lived since the idea of Truth is Out There came to rule, by hands of Plato, the last thinker who was also a ruler.





*or: realities too significant to be identified.

Why is 'raw affect' dangerous? Because it is outside of the established power of identity, because it pushes one toward the walls (which in sum comprise one's "outward" identity, the form of identity [but not its dynamism]). The affect is this dynamism, more precisely: this churning, moving raw affect is a flux giving-power because it is the source of the need for the walls of identity. These walls exist because they must exist, because they must wall off the affect, "translate" it. Science names this as instintuality and reduces it to the genes and to the common sociohistorical knowledge-base in which these genes express. But the affect is a power, the genes and the instinctuality forged only because the affect, the raw pathological psychial-cellular force of the organism('s various organic 'centers' and their mutual cooperation) has self-valued itself with respect to the limits around which this valuing has cohered (its environment/s) which are, in turn, not only multiple other valuings and self-valuings but also the product and effect of one's own self-valuing activities. A massive, unfathomable world-sociality-causality emerges, Nietzsche's devouring "monster of energy" which gives life ("spins off", produces self-valuing 'cores', nexes of subjectivities) even as it devours life (dissolves these subjectivities). Man calls this moster of energy by the name of "nature", an abstraction-reification of all "natural activity", and science classifies this nature as the product of what it calls "inertia" and "entropy".


Suspension of judgment is willingness to be walled-in. Organisms whose self-valuing apparatus' do not more take into account their own walled-in-ness must value in a more linear fashion, and they tend toward more or less stable and repetitive channels of values-expres​sion("behavior"). More complex organisms are those whose self-valuing apparatus begins to take into account more and more of their own conditionality, limitation, which is to say they enter into subtler relations with self and other. This is naturally "suspension of judgment", a resistance to a tendency toward pre-fabricated (in the language of the existentialsits, inauthentic) 'solutions' (responses) to the 'problems' (situations) with which it is faced. Consistency here breeds organisms for efficiency, and what is lost in power of creativity must be compensated for elsewhere, most commonly in a shorter and simpler generational-reproductive time. Natural selection demands the 'imbalance' be made up for somewhere else, and we get the proliferation of various kinds of organisms: we get a range of organic form with various ratios of 'suspension of judgment' to 'shorter and simpler generational-reproductive time'. Humans, being the known form of life highest on the one end of this scale, naturally balance this out by being the lowest on the other end.

Philosophy is the highest form of suspension of judgment which man has attained to, save perhaps some occult systems with which I am not familar. But these occult systems, powers of direct intention and calling forth the untranslated affect in the guise of potent symbols and beings, ought lend some of this power to philosophy, and philosophy some of it's power to the occult. We might even suppose that identity reflects the philosophic side, while experience reflects the occult side: philosophy is the business of identifying experiences, the occult is the business of experiencing identities. Psychoanalysis then appears as philosophy trending toward the occult.


"We consume our psyche", yes this is perfectly correct. With this in mind it is possible to conceive of human history in a positive sense of the progression of this both raw and effective consumption. Philosophy looks outward from within, the occult looks inward from without, but the 'average man' whom has neither philosophy nor the occult stands right in the middle, unbeknownst to him, straddling both spheres, which in truth are the eyes of two abysses. The world is shaped by how it is walled-in. Man is shaped by his world, and shapes it. In his agreements and disagreements man renders himself ineffective to the movement beyond the abyssal history of the (human) world, he is merely a negative presence in this hsitory, but may still retains an effectiveness in the natural world. In contrast, the philosopher or occultist neither agrees nor disagrees and is a proper "suspension of judgment", thus effectuates himself with respect to world-history and becomes a positive element to and for it. In terms of effectiveness in the natural world, this remains to be seen and hinges upon the 'gaps' between the human-human, the human-animal and the animal-animal worlds, and how these gaps are to be encountered-translated.

The affect "is" the organism, if we are to speak of necessity; the translation of this affect, its functionality as reactivity and being walled-in "is" the organism if we are to speak of adequacy. All life is by definition an emergence from this necessity, and is adequate to itself (while it is alive, which is to say until its eventual demise, of course). But only man's adequacy has become a necessity, or, phrased more precisely and in a positive sense: among all known life only man's necessity is no longer adequate. Thus the shaman who has uncovered this ground first, by merely reacting to it, by attempting to draw the adequate back within the realm of the necessary; thus the philosopher, who has firstly translated this ground into a language and object-meaning, which is to say attempting to raise necessity up to the level of the adequate; thus the occultist, who seems most bent on closing the circle of identity and experience, of making the necessary fully adequate and the adequate entirely necessary. In these various modes the affect is encountered and (if it is allowed) re-shapes the organism-system which encouters it, producing disharmony. The form of this disharmony emerged as reason, logic being the form of language (measurement with appeal to quality) and of science (meaasurement with appeal to quantity). Logic gets us closest to the core of self-valuing, to the "natural laws" which constitute the agreements among subjects within a particular world; but the logic of identity-as-experience and of experience-as-identity, and of the various ways in which these interact, entwine, couple, merge and re-emerge, psychoanalysis and the occult being examples already mentioned here, gets us closest. "Pure" mathematics or logic lack the character which you spoke of, for the story must be a part of the knowledge which is to be ultimatedly digested by a self-valuing, living and specific subject, if indeed this knowledge is to be valuable, value-able. Philosophy has indeed made this error, it has not allowed itself to have enough suspension of judgment and it has lacked a positive language in which to develop and express its own nature. But with this fledgling language, of which value ontology is one example, and as you point out also the terms designated by psychoanalysis, we might point to a strange synthesis of the occult and the philosophic if we are to wonder at what form the continued self-disclosure of the human being will take in the future, which is to say what form man's self-valuing appears to be trending toward.

Capable wrote:

Why is 'raw affect' dangerous? Because it is outside of the established power of identity, because it pushes one toward the walls (which in sum comprise one's "outward" identity, the form of identity [but not its dynamism]). The affect is this dynamism, more precisely: this churning, moving raw affect is a flux giving-power because it is the source of the need for the walls of identity. These walls exist because they must exist, because they must wall off the affect, "translate" it. Science names this as instintuality and reduces it to the genes and to the common sociohistorical knowledge-base in which these genes express. But the affect is a power, the genes and the instinctuality forged only because the affect, the raw pathological psychial-cellular force of the organism('s various organic 'centers' and their mutual cooperation) has self-valued itself with respect to the limits around which this valuing has cohered (its environment/s) which are, in turn, not only multiple other valuings and self-valuings but also the product and effect of one's own self-valuing activities. A massive, unfathomable world-sociality-causality emerges, Nietzsche's devouring "monster of energy" which gives life ("spins off", produces self-valuing 'cores', nexes of subjectivities) even as it devours life (dissolves these subjectivities). Man calls this moster of energy by the name of "nature", an abstraction-reification of all "natural activity", and science classifies this nature as the product of what it calls "inertia" and "entropy".


Suspension of judgment is willingness to be walled-in. Organisms whose self-valuing apparatus' do not more take into account their own walled-in-ness must value in a more linear fashion, and they tend toward more or less stable and repetitive channels of values-expres​sion("behavior"). More complex organisms are those whose self-valuing apparatus begins to take into account more and more of their own conditionality, limitation, which is to say they enter into subtler relations with self and other. This is naturally "suspension of judgment", a resistance to a tendency toward pre-fabricated (in the language of the existentialsits, inauthentic) 'solutions' (responses) to the 'problems' (situations) with which it is faced. Consistency here breeds organisms for efficiency, and what is lost in power of creativity must be compensated for elsewhere, most commonly in a shorter and simpler generational-reproductive time. Natural selection demands the 'imbalance' be made up for somewhere else, and we get the proliferation of various kinds of organisms: we get a range of organic form with various ratios of 'suspension of judgment' to 'shorter and simpler generational-reproductive time'. Humans, being the known form of life highest on the one end of this scale, naturally balance this out by being the lowest on the other end.

This is a fitting context for the following excerpt from Nietzsche's notebooks, or "The Will To Power".

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984 (1884)

Greatness of soul is inseparable from greatness of spirit. For it involves independence; but in the absence of spiritual greatness, independence ought not to be allowed, it causes mischief, even through its desire to do good and practice "justice." Small spirits must obey--hence cannot possess greatness.

II. Dionysus

1003 (Jan.-Fall 1888)

To him who has turned out well, who does my heart good, carved from wood that is hard, gentle, and fragrant--in whom even the nose takes pleasure--this book is dedicated.

He enjoys the taste of what is wholesome for him;

his pleasure in anything ceases when the bounds of the wholesome are crossed;

he divines the remedies for partial injuries; he has illnesses as great stimulants of his life;

he knows how to exploit ill chances;

he grows stronger through the accidents that threaten to destroy him;

he instinctively gathers from all that he sees, hears, experiences, what advances his main concern--he follows a principle of selection--he allows much to fall through;

he reacts with the slowness bred by a long caution and a deliberate pride--he tests a stimulus for its origin and its intentions, he does not submit;

he is always in his own company, whether he deals with books, men, or landscapes;

he honors by choosing, by admitting, by trusting.

1007 (Spring-Fall 1887)

To revalue values--what would that mean? All the spontaneous--new, future, stronger--movements must be there; but they still appear under false names and valuations and have not yet become conscious of themselves.

A courageous becoming-conscious and affirmation of what has been achieved--a liberation from the slovenly routine of old valuations that dishonor us in the best and strongest things we have achieved.

Capable wrote:

Philosophy is the highest form of suspension of judgment which man has attained to, save perhaps some occult systems with which I am not familar. But these occult systems, powers of direct intention and calling forth the untranslated affect in the guise of potent symbols and beings, ought lend some of this power to philosophy, and philosophy some of it's power to the occult. We might even suppose that identity reflects the philosophic side, while experience reflects the occult side: philosophy is the business of identifying experiences, the occult is the business of experiencing identities. Psychoanalysis then appears as philosophy trending toward the occult.

Brilliant!
Regarding "philosophy as the highest form of suspension of judgment" - we might say that the philosopher is the one who has turned out best.

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"We consume our psyche", yes this is perfectly correct. With this in mind it is possible to conceive of human history in a positive sense of the progression of this both raw and effective consumption. Philosophy looks outward from within, the occult looks inward from without, but the 'average man' whom has neither philosophy nor the occult stands right in the middle, unbeknownst to him, straddling both spheres, which in truth are the eyes of two abysses. The world is shaped by how it is walled-in. Man is shaped by his world, and shapes it. In his agreements and disagreements man renders himself ineffective to the movement beyond the abyssal history of the (human) world, he is merely a negative presence in this hsitory, but may still retains an effectiveness in the natural world. In contrast, the philosopher or occultist neither agrees nor disagrees and is a proper "suspension of judgment", thus effectuates himself with respect to world-history and becomes a positive element to and for it. In terms of effectiveness in the natural world, this remains to be seen and hinges upon the 'gaps' between the human-human, the human-animal and the animal-animal worlds, and how these gaps are to be encountered-translated.

Indeed, to acquire effectiveness in the natural world from a self-created historical perspective/agency is precisely the task with which our type of philosopher is faced. After Plato, philosophers have accepted that their capacity as historical agents came with the price of being vulnerable natural entities, their influence and very sustenance was dependent on political rulers. But with our type, there has appeared a new scale to climb, something that has not existed since Plato made his stabs at politics. The natural human world has perhaps never been less naturally responsive to philosophy as it is now, politics are entirely separated from philosophy, meaning, teleology - so the philosopher must enforce his historical agency in the natural world. We are still at the very beginning of this undertaking. Thus from a disadvantage an impetus to advance is born: the philosopher must become the philosopher-king.

Regardless of whether or not we are capable of accomplishing/becoming this, that is the point to which the political and technological (natural) world has evolved. This is not to say that all philosophers have to ''get out there'' and enforce their will on other people, but they do have to organize in groups of which some fulfill this kind of ''military'' task. In this age of ripe nihilism, where there is no more worldly autority that is not deemed inferior to the mob by the mob, where there is no more ground for teleological reason (such grounds have always been in part superstitious and/or idolatory) this ground must be enforced by the type of human that is aware of the substance of such ground: our type.

It is of the utmost importance that we keep on visibly setting our type of thinking as a standard. Our philosophy must become regal not only in substance but in appearance - it must crown itself.

"Spirit" could, in spite and banishing of the deeply embedded confusion around and by that word, aptly be translated into "self-valuing". By this I mean that it is breath, the necessity, the pulse of life that makes it 'a life' -  a continuous self referent and thus radically limited - phenomenon. A spirit - a one who values his breath in reflection of his breath in - and around. And between in and out, there is a reflection, and upon that reflection, a valuing - experience is identified after the breathing in. To breathe out completely is to enable the experience of identity. That choice still must be made there, This choice is probably at the basis of all profound religious airs - *

After the final, exhausted ssssssssh, there is an expanding, a corner of our soul which is then identifiable - and this is where evolution takes place. Only those who find in their breaths limits the limit that is transcendible, grow upon their soil, their blood, to a new 'word' - a new moral code, a newly discovered form of courage.

Granted, we are not Gods, we can only reflect this metaphors perfection in a few breaths every month perhaps, some of us might attain it once or twice a week - but we can imagine how this, if we are more aware of those breaths in fellow men, hissing us by in the dark, faint shadows of suspected purpose - allows us to reflect, if 'fortune Strikes!', incidentally upon them, and cause - what?

Love is a danger to the soul, why to encounter it deliberately? As with all dangers to encounter it in will of it is to conquer a priori all who do not take this course. Napoleons first breath of Corsican air - his identity superimposed on that experience by time, parents, France - and powerful enemies on the warpath...






[[[[ *the Catholic, fully bathing in the identity, versus the protestant, 'up to the next cycle, the next harvest, the next profit!' Capitalism is made out of a lack of Catholicism..]]]]

The value of this observation I draw as follows:
The particular follow-through of the entity after its identification of its world by drawing in experience, determines not the extent to which he will follow through that particular experience. His identity is reflected wholly of his ethics, his working, warring or simply waking - or on the other hand a wanting, worrying, wrecking 'code' - continuity of action, value-projection by anticipation. Here is the technical definition of 'the power of faith' - the gift of being allowed to project an infinity of value, by the declaring of love for an infinite bestowing virtue.

The problem of religiously inclined people is not that God is dead (he always was 'unchanging'), but no longer great enough. He's not greatly dead, his deadness is puny.
We could change that only by creating a new one. And by God I simply mean the absence of self-inflicted restrictions, physiological moral conditioning, in trade for ones "soul" - ones highest and final love.

What a breath of fresh air if we stopped loving 'humanity' and selected a nature more lofty and less neurotic. Perhaps what we have called "soul" throughout the ages is in reality the same thing as "music" or "a great aesthetic idea" - The things for which certain humans live, for which these humans form a medium - perhaps what we call identity is merely our temporary and imperfect relation to something less conditioned by decay - the soul as something that has to find its way into the world through the vessel of flesh and blood.