The pathos of philosophy.

One must distinguish the act of recollection from that of mere memory. The poetry of recollection, the genuine pleasure in it, lies in embracing ones own works and deeds, in taking responsibility for them and in recognizing the past as truly constitutive of one's personality. How is such a thing accomplished? That would be a great piece of knowledge with which to bless our youthfulness, for in this lies the passion and the beauty of old age. The man who recollects absolutely is infinitely creative; absolute recollection opens unto a future in which an endless host of eventualities, be they comic or tragic, mingle inseparably. For the man who possesses an absolute power of recollection possesses also the absolute power of synthesis, since in fact recollection is a synthesis, and is capable of bringing to light only memories that have been integrated into a totality as self-consciousness: it is itself the production of self-consciousness. Yet, the more one recollects, the more this synthesis is allowed to bring forth, the more transformations this self-consciousness undergoes, and thus the more difficult it becomes to recollect, since the self must re-orient itself within the totality. In fact, however, each of us constitutes such an impossible power, insofar as we love: hence the wisdom of the ancients, that philosophy begins in love, in Eros, and that all knowledge is recollection. Love, rather it is inspired by truth or by a woman, grants us the opportunity to bathe once again in that primevous spring, that from which the self first emerged in its paucity and which, now fully enlarged, it must return into, which is to say it invigorates the daemonic, the inner disproportion of man, to resolve itself. The man in love wants to call up from within himself his whole life, in order to relate it to the loved one, he wants to translate all of his self-consciousness into consciousness of the beloved, just as the philosopher wishes to relate all knowledge to truth, and this absolute synthesis engenders the thought of some future at once absolutely vague and absolutely distinct, in which this love is somehow consummated, or in the case of the philosopher, the thought of some truth at once absolutely distinct and absolutely indistinct, in which all ideas are conjoined in their preternatural unity, in a totality, be it in the vein of Spinoza or Hegel. But the synthesis being carried out within us, which has now become an excess, an infinitely productive power, at last rises up against to meet this future, and cannot embrace it, so that the totalizing procedure of thought becomes an operation which introduces ceaseless differentiation into the inner life. It can here do one of two things: either it rejects this future as alien and hostile to it, becomes mere vagary, uncommitted to anything but itself, and realizes itself in its sensuality and temporal aspect, or it equates itself to it, it equates itself to this vague and yet distinct hope for the eternal and the true, it becomes that hope and matures into philosophy. Sensual love is merely the negative expression of the excess, an excess that can only communicate itself destructively, because it desires to communicate the infinite root of the self and the procreative synthesis; ideal love is the positive expression of the excess, which is capable of concretizing its language because it has restricted itself to the expression of the finite dimension which it occupies in relation to the excess outside of it, the eternal. The pathos of the former is the genius of artists, sometimes called melancholy, while the pathos of the later is that of "philosophy."

Recollection then as active memory, contents of memory introduced again actively into the syntheses of mind productive of a moment of consciousness. Memory then would be a stasis, a storage-house for previously experienced sensations-as-information. This would imply that even memory must have attached to its contents a meaning, a meaningfulness, a value. Information which enters into the subject through some sensory or reflective-cognitive process is always-already meaningful, having been positioned with respect to the subject after the manner of valuation, of a being-valuable. This is also therefore a being-interpreted with respect to oneself, which now means, along with Kant: being interpreted with respect to the implicit faculties of mind and body which ones already possesses, which are, in sum, those that can be said to bring about the subject as a more or less singular, unified activity/process. These "filters" allow the subject to continually constitute and re-constitute itself in light of what it already is, becoming 'denser' as more and more information is accumulated within it. This accumulated information, already interpreted in some basic manner -- i.e. memory -- then may enter into higher-order processes of cognitive and/or affectigve synthesis whereby this information is re-interpreted, some of its meaning and value is re-cast with respect to new conditions, contexts, needs and utilities, and a new distilled or synthetic product is produced. In this way valuation cycles on the same 'level' of being, recollective re-synthesizings of already-interpreted information; the subject is recycling itself. This attains an almost alchemical meaning here, lead being transmuted into gold over time, as information is progressively processed more and more through the 'subjective nexus' of being. Assuming the subject has in place the proper "lenses" and "filters" it is over time coming more and more into focus. Assuming that these are not existence or out of focus, the subject merely circles endlessly around and within itself, diffusing its potential for development and consolidation, becoming more or at least not less arbitrary with time.

As you identify here, recollection is also the power of imagination; the possibility of the future not only represents, but truly is the reality of the past. In this way we understand that futurity is nothing but already-embedded implications and as-yet-underived elements from within the "present", which is to say from within memory/past (already-having-taken-place experiences). This already-having-taken-place is a re-hashing, a recycling of "energy", forms on all levels of existence. The subject embodies this process within itself, focuses it and turns it into a mechanism for self-production and self-perpetuation. I.e. "self-valuing" as we understand it, the mutual and simultaneous creations of subject and object within and for each other. Futurity then represents the horizon for this self-valuing/s, this subjective 'structure of being', this form-al collection of forms: futurity is nothing but the direct apprehension of the very conditions extant to, for and of oneself, a higher-level abstraction and derivation of causes, which is also of course an extracting of trace elements compositional of previously-attaining experiences. The subject recognizes itself in its future, as Heidegger says of Dasein, it is the being which becomes what it is.

The oppositions which you identify must function as basic focusing lenses and collective mechanisms which gather under themselves, as per a "set" which includes its elements, all manner of lesser sensations and informational relations. By this proecss of conception and abstraction common elements and logics emerge to grant to these higher-order oppositions a quality, a character, a way or mode of being. As many of these oppositions emerge as agglomerative syntheses of the more chaotic whirlwind of temporary and fleeting passions, sensations, images -- "thoughts" and "feelings" -- we get to the "cognitive faculties" as Kant calls them, more or less constant or consistent mechanisms whereby information is processed through relatively stable flows and pathways, producing variable results which all nonetheless bear a consistent 'mark' upon their nature. This mark translates into a degree of similarity of effect. The cognitive faculties produced by the synthetic-cognitive oppositions of consciousness are then those by which the subject "recycles itself" most saliently before itself, in the interplay and (re-)interprtation of sense-encountered and remembered experiential contents. The value judgments of a subject are produced here, and we can see the chain of reasoning which stretches first from the subject back into its more productive faculties of consciousness, from these back into the synthetic-cognitive oppositions, and then from these back still further into the myriad "chaos" of more or less temporal/finite affective reactions and impulses. These impulses, appearing on a plane of sensation which represents a spectrum randing from 'pleasure' on one end to 'pain' on the other, are the "flux" of consciousness and its largest contents of memory. Once these are "recollected" they raise through the progressive states of refinement and distillation until they directly inform the highest levels of cognition and affectation, under the forms previously mentioned.

The subject is constructed out of these implicit-structural forms, but the information which passes through them is not only variable and distinct, but also retroactively able to alter the structures themselves, changing, re-coupling and de-coupling flows, adding or subtracting, multiplying or dividing relations. I would call this here "philosophy", which is really only the realizing of the already-present productive and sustaining mechanisms and structures of consciousness upon a higher and more self-cognized, self-informing level of the "subject" "itself", with respect to its most-"singular", salient and effective collective emergences -- philosophy then as the becoming-less-arbitrary of the subject. Life has produced this possibility evolutionarily, latent within life and slowly cohering within mammalian forms, possessing as they do a more complex and dynamic-productive brain/CNS system (more memory and more ability to recall it as informing an imaginative possibility -- more distance between sensation). Humans have now actualized this possibility in a previously untold manner, largely through evolutionary and historical accident has been produced the being for whom all "accidents" are no only longer arbitrary or chance encounters. This is man as the 'teleological animal'. Now all manner of ideas and linguistic and social markers and symbols are constructed by man to represent this inner "daemonic" dynamic of which he in his "consciousness" and "subjectivity" are most realized before himself. As you identify, this is a restricting of langauge to the finite dimensions, a making-appear of the oppositions under conceptual comprehension. I agree this can mainfest, gather together into channels more or less "empirical" or "transcendental/ldeal" -- the "artistic" channels or "philosophical" channels, at a higher-order level of manifestation and comprehensivity, as orientations tending toward either the empirical or the transcendental/ideal. Through art man experiences creation and higher-level interpretation and organization based around the sensual-"physical" and emotional oppositions; through philosophy man experiences this edification and "throwing into relief and contrast the constitutive oppositions themselves" based around conception, reason that gathers to itself all that is "below", prior-to itself, which includes among other things, art.

I realize now I also drew heavily here from your comments in your other topic on the summary of your philosophy. What I wrote above is more or less an interpretation of that 'basic set-up', whereas here we speak of excess subsequent of this already set-up condition and its role in the inner conscious life of man. Suffering and pleasure, the conceptual oppositions, these act as a basic ground from which flow excesses, outpourings or the effects of the as-yet-unsynthesized diametrical oppositions, the "anti-dialectics". Thus this unresolved state is what produces the excess to begin with, and as you say, the subject amazingly creates itself through its own self-created inability to create itself (to paraphrase).

I see that you are right about how the attempts at higher synthesis break against an impossible/ imaginal future expectation and hope. I must also agree that you are right about how this breakage and subsequent withdrawl manifests in two ways, either by rejecting this future hope, or by idealizing it further and associating it with oneself, grounding oneself within the object of it. However, I am as yet less convinced that this former method and response must be characterized by "becomes mere vagary, uncommitted to anything but itself, and realizes itself in its sensuality and temporal aspect". Can you elaborate more on this? Is not your ethics itself a way to unite this differentiated subject through direct apprehension of the daemonic center? Does this really require the image-object of an "eternal hope"?

That "eternal hope" signifies the breakthrough into a new series of conceptual oppositions in which to orient the self. The opposition is no longer between time and the eternal, but between the eternal and one's realized self. You must affirm yourself in its eternal aspect. That is the philosopher's pathos. It is for this reason that the Greeks were mystically annihilated in union with the eternal order of nature, most especially the Stoics. Following my philosophy though, you would realize a transcendental ideal at this stage to solidify your self as an immutable identity, held firmly within its final orientation, fulfilled daemonically and no longer having to undergo the suffering of the "frenzies" to use Bruno's language, ie. by realizing this ideal as one's good, through a speculative ethic. To use another one of my favorite phrases in Bruno, you here become a "mens heroica," a "heroic mind," leaving time, death, and the world beyond you- not rejected and repressed, but "overcome."

I speak of this stage in the process in the following way in the book:






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Poets all know the wonder of limitation and confinement, for a melody cannot begin to come into existence until meter, form, and ultimately silence has defined its boundary. Equally, one cannot form any idea of life without appealing to its boundary, death, which signifies not merely the end of corporeal existence but also the fact that this world, with all its stars and milky ways, is as nothing, for life in all its multiplicity cannot explain much less engender itself: it has need of death in order to come into existence. If death, then, is that boundary of life without which it could not come into existence, then life is, equally, the limit of death, into which it may not ever enter. Insofar as the daemon mounts heavenward, insofar as man aspires to an ethic, to an ideal, he is cohered in the determinacy of his act; insofar as he makes his descent to earth, insofar as he luxuriates in beauty and in pleasure as an artistically creative being, he is rent apart in also being made subject to desire, time, and death. The ideal, as the locus of this transformation, becomes more articulate the further man mounts and the lower he falls, until ultimately it is time, desire, and death themselves that must be cohered in the image of the ideal, namely through the determinacy of a certain act: the eternalizing of the world, the taking into consciousness the full scope of creation, which is called philosophy. Man's individuality he experiences only as brief flashes of light against the abyss out of which he is composed, only through the determinacy and coherence of the act; to lay the entirety of this individuality into life as a whole would require perfect will, perfect determination, and the perfection of the will is only possible in the complete consciousness of the ideal, in the coextension of the ethical and artistic selves, in the annihilation of the image of time in eternity, the image of the eternal in time. The moral self feels itself limited by sin, that is, the remnant of the aesthetic self within it, while the aesthetic self feels itself limited by those forces from which it is forced to draw its procreative energy, namely time, death, and desire; at best they can annihilate those respective vestiges of one another that persist within them. The philosopher, however, recognizes his limit only in the ideal; thereby form is endued to his aesthetic life, and pathos to his moral existence; he ceaselessly apprehends the unity of his self-consciousness in the multiplicity of his passions, and the unity of his passion in the multiplicity of his self-consciousness, that is, the unity of his aspiration.

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His aspiration, ie. that "eternal hope."

Parodites wrote:

I speak of this stage in the process in the following way in the book:






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Poets all know the wonder of limitation and confinement, for a melody cannot begin to come into existence until meter, form, and ultimately silence has defined its boundary. Equally, one cannot form any idea of life without appealing to its boundary, death, which signifies not merely the end of corporeal existence but also the fact that this world, with all its stars and milky ways, is as nothing, for life in all its multiplicity cannot explain much less engender itself: it has need of death in order to come into existence. If death, then, is that boundary of life without which it could not come into existence, then life is, equally, the limit of death, into which it may not ever enter. Insofar as the daemon mounts heavenward, insofar as man aspires to an ethic, to an ideal, he is cohered in the determinacy of his act; insofar as he makes his descent to earth, insofar as he luxuriates in beauty and in pleasure as an artistically creative being, he is rent apart in also being made subject to desire, time, and death. The ideal, as the locus of this transformation, becomes more articulate the further man mounts and the lower he falls, until ultimately it is time, desire, and death themselves that must be cohered in the image of the ideal, namely through the determinacy of a certain act: the eternalizing of the world, the taking into consciousness the full scope of creation, which is called philosophy. Man's individuality he experiences only as brief flashes of light against the abyss out of which he is composed, only through the determinacy and coherence of the act; to lay the entirety of this individuality into life as a whole would require perfect will, perfect determination, and the perfection of the will is only possible in the complete consciousness of the ideal, in the coextension of the ethical and artistic selves, in the annihilation of the image of time in eternity, the image of the eternal in time. The moral self feels itself limited by sin, that is, the remnant of the aesthetic self within it, while the aesthetic self feels itself limited by those forces from which it is forced to draw its procreative energy, namely time, death, and desire; at best they can annihilate those respective vestiges of one another that persist within them. The philosopher, however, recognizes his limit only in the ideal; thereby form is endued to his aesthetic life, and pathos to his moral existence; he ceaselessly apprehends the unity of his self-consciousness in the multiplicity of his passions, and the unity of his passion in the multiplicity of his self-consciousness, that is, the unity of his aspiration.

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His aspiration, ie. that "eternal hope."

And it is then that the image of eternal hope functions as a means of cohering the subject on this "philosophic" plane of his daemonism. Of course then we also see the limit to which this coherence is subject: the inability of a certain kind of self to fully cohere here, namely that self which makes use of images of the eternal in an unknowing, unacknowledged or semi-unconscious manner. The effect of these images can be obtained, in part, even where the image is employed largely unthinkingly. This unthinking, unacknowledged quality then becomes the limit of a more total coherence, which would necessarily include within its comprehensivity also the use and function of this eternal image itself.

If it is indeed true that the daemon must (attempt to) cohere itself into such a unity, which as you say involves "ceaselessly apprehends the unity of his self-consciousness in the multiplicity of his passions, and the unity of his passion in the multiplicity of his self-consciousness", then this daemon experiences a certain strange flux or pendulum swinging as it occilates between the "higher" and "lower", between deriving some use-value from that which it cannot name (objectify with respect to itself, i.e. consciously self-value) and subsequently losing some of this use-value when it comes into a greater capacity for such objectification/valuing, or rather experiencing this attainment of greater capacity as such a (marginal, partial or total) loss. This is so because when the image of the eternal is broken apart and placed before the valuing subject, which is to say when it becomes objectified, the subject stands in relation before this object, and can thus no longer completely cohere within the object, the object can no longer function to adequately draw the subject before itself as a whole. The image of the eternal becomes fractured when this image, as image, is placed before the (progressively becoming-more-powerful) consciousness, which must now see itself as essentially separate from this image.

Is the price of attaining a greater philosophic coherence of the daemon (i.e. the daemon's becoming a 'true subject' in the sense of a single entity rather than (as is the case with most people) a loose conglomeration of shifting and largely arbitrary entities/subjects/states) a total loss of all subjectivity before the image of that within which this daemon is unified, is given into higher-order self-objectification? (e.g. Nietzsche and his Eternal Return?) ...This daemon which wishes to cohere itself must set before itself a higher limit, a limit able to act as boundary for the sum of its being. This seems like it would set off an "arms race" of greater and greater degrees of objectification, creation of "conceptual oppositions" through which the daemon experiences greater and greater self-unity and the "derivation" of what is able, more and more, to be included within these oppositions/objects.

"This daemon which wishes to cohere itself must set before itself a higher limit, a limit able to act as boundary for the sum of its being. This seems like it would set off an "arms race" of greater and greater degrees of objectification, creation of "conceptual oppositions" through which the daemon experiences greater and greater self-unity and the "derivation" of what is able, more and more, to be included within these oppositions/objects."






That limit I call a "transcendental good." It is a philosophical ideal, a transcendental ideal, which has been weighed against others through a speculative ethic and recognized as exhausting an individual daemonically, meaning it creates a final conceptual opposition, it exhausts an individual's storehouse of concepts so that he can no longer proceed daemonically through the repetition of those subjective states which he has lived through.



What serves to limit you, however, may not limit me. As I have said, people have different degrees of daemonic reality. Some concepts are realizable for some people that others cannot realize, no matter how much they think. One side of philosophy is "concept creation," as Deleuze says... The other side is the use of these concepts to explode the excess at the basis of the self into a series of conceptual oppositions which are cohered daemonically as particular passions, "pathos," subjective states, ie. differentiations of the excess. When these two philosophical impulses meet in a full logic of the daemonic, as I have created, it will revolutionize philosophical creativity, creating an "arms race" as you said, for the limit of man.

Parodites wrote:

One must distinguish the act of recollection from that of mere memory. The poetry of recollection, the genuine pleasure in it, lies in embracing ones own works and deeds, in taking responsibility for them and in recognizing the past as truly constitutive of one's personality. How is such a thing accomplished? That would be a great piece of knowledge with which to bless our youthfulness, for in this lies the passion and the beauty of old age. The man who recollects absolutely is infinitely creative; absolute recollection opens unto a future in which an endless host of eventualities, be they comic or tragic, mingle inseparably. For the man who possesses an absolute power of recollection possesses also the absolute power of synthesis, since in fact recollection is a synthesis, and is capable of bringing to light only memories that have been integrated into a totality as self-consciousness:

This is how I think of dreams - I imagine that the image of the narrative and all its subservient imagery processions and hierarchies is assembled at the moment of waking up, as if from "a dream". REM may simply be the opening of registers, filling a mixing-pot of stirrings, relaxing nerves, until it is frozen into a logical form of perceived symbols and their imagined relation at the apprehension of the outside world and its physiological demands. Similarly we can address a waking moment in which we withdraw a reference to suit an apprehension as a "waking up". The more comprehensive the narrative we wake up from we manage to construct, the deeper ingrained in our physiology the world we wake up in to. I imagine this waking up becomes unbearable as its comprehensiveness exceeds what is presently available as a medium for man to exist. There is no rule against poison because the whole world is poisonous - the remedy is simply the circumvention of the destructive effect by finding a use for the agent. Conscience is an inner compass, which is deeply sabotaged once we uphold to an objective moral authority. To have a conscience toward moral authority - one can, once one has accepted it, not reject it without being forever caught in its sphere. One must learn to smile at it, somehow make it part of the dance, make it weird but appealing, honest to the first impression it made. Then once can extract powers from it, the subjection of a former teacher, breaking the idol, integrating the divinity by rearranging it. All this can only find an outlet in a narrative, a form of play that has as its first purpose to "be evil". Possibly art is in its core evil, and in great art evil is shown as in its ultimate consequence good.

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it is itself the production of self-consciousness. Yet, the more one recollects, the more this synthesis is allowed to bring forth, the more transformations this self-consciousness undergoes, and thus the more difficult it becomes to recollect, since the self must re-orient itself within the totality. In fact, however, each of us constitutes such an impossible power, insofar as we love: hence the wisdom of the ancients, that philosophy begins in love, in Eros, and that all knowledge is recollection. Love, rather it is inspired by truth or by a woman, grants us the opportunity to bathe once again in that primevous spring, that from which the self first emerged in its paucity and which, now fully enlarged, it must return into, which is to say it invigorates the daemonic, the inner disproportion of man, to resolve itself. The man in love wants to call up from within himself his whole life, in order to relate it to the loved one, he wants to translate all of his self-consciousness into consciousness of the beloved, just as the philosopher wishes to relate all knowledge to truth, and this absolute synthesis engenders the thought of some future at once absolutely vague and absolutely distinct, in which this love is somehow consummated, or in the case of the philosopher, the thought of some truth at once absolutely distinct and absolutely indistinct, in which all ideas are conjoined in their preternatural unity, in a totality, be it in the vein of Spinoza or Hegel.

From such conceptions it becomes possible to draw the world inward. Sorcery works in this way on a lesser degree of idealization, it simply uses the power of abstraction, not taking it as a means to truth but to energy. Magic is creating energy from symbols, by assembling two independent measures of energy (the magical act, the juggler ) and juxtaposition them in a symbolic polarity that is then resolved with a willed fusion (the inspired act, the irreducible action) . The release of this fusion then works in the famed 'unfathomable ways' to ones (dis)advantage. Philosophy must do a purer thing.

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But the synthesis being carried out within us, which has now become an excess, an infinitely productive power, at last rises up against to meet this future, and cannot embrace it, so that the totalizing procedure of thought becomes an operation which introduces ceaseless differentiation into the inner life. It can here do one of two things: either it rejects this future as alien and hostile to it, becomes mere vagary, uncommitted to anything but itself, and realizes itself in its sensuality and temporal aspect, or it equates itself to it, it equates itself to this vague and yet distinct hope for the eternal and the true, it becomes that hope and matures into philosophy. Sensual love is merely the negative expression of the excess, an excess that can only communicate itself destructively, because it desires to communicate the infinite root of the self and the procreative synthesis; ideal love is the positive expression of the excess, which is capable of concretizing its language because it has restricted itself to the expression of the finite dimension which it occupies in relation to the excess outside of it, the eternal. The pathos of the former is the genius of artists, sometimes called melancholy, while the pathos of the later is that of "philosophy."

When philosophy knows itself standing in this way to art, it may begin to grasp art, control it and integrate it into its own sublime idealization. To work on art as on marble, that is what it means at first to work on man. It is then only a matter of time before man begins to build his Atlantis - to this end art working on man to give up the fight against evil, pick up the pursuit of the unknown (in essence a reversal of values, masked by the illusive contradiction "known evil" ). Happiness is obsolete once vision is attained - hell becomes a mean to purge the excess of joy, that which can not be reconciled with the world of men. Hell as pride, "the world" as agents to drive and keep the joy in hell by obscuring to itself its true image, psychosis, philosophy, nature turned deeper into its resources of contradiction, the daemonic. Cruelty of the philosopher: the revelation of evil along with the demonstration its final excellent consequence. Valuing "the world" in terms of "itself" - this can mean playing to common desires to fulfill higher ones. It can mean its culmination in the height it can attain as the greatest sum of its parts. It can mean unleashing Dionysos and causing all to suffer and laugh hysterically. But the artist conceives The World less truthfully, and more particularly. The degree of artist and philosopher, a new balancing act, a new opposition? The Daemonic encompasses its own finitude as a pearl. This pearl was a process, unseen - its final end a perfection.