Ground of the new philosophy

Some fragmentary thoughts on what is to be a ground/ing for the philosophy of the future.


1. Consciousness, World, Self.



Consciousness


There exists a range of adequate compensatory self-stimulations and regulations which sustain the self to its experience and possibility which are for that self adequate; these as secure our experiences in a more or less self-grounded way and, in the case of the philosopher, also in line with his ideas and with the central theme of his life. Men achieve these various modes and stages of adequate self-relation largely unconsciously, indeed what has been called the unconscious is just this self's very adequacy. If the concept of endurance has so completely escaped the notice of both men and philosophers it is only because inside this concept and the intimate sense for it lies hidden an equally intimate understanding of one's own particular method and means, the entire 'psychological compendium' of the self; it is not to truth that this need seeks to return man as the sum of him, it is only to himself and that "one idea" of his nature that would be capable of embracing that need. Science spans world and philosophy, attempting by virtue of that partiality to render something of the latter knowable to the former but only blinds man to both as every desire, natural inclination or "will" in him is progressively neutralized and externalized until the world itself has become the empty and idealized reflection of some new god and "identity" under which man and philosopher are now made to live, rather or not they know it or would wish to live in this way. With technology man shrinks in direct proportion to the expansion of his powers of control and pleasure; consciousness gained on the one hand becomes quite necessarily consciousness lost on the other and no truth, no desire, no lust or longing, no grand ideal or historical task is able to rescue man from the failing and self-ruin that has slowly crept upon him and supplanted itself for what would otherwise have been his character, his love and his ethical possibility. The great malaise, cynicism and "depression" of the modern technological era is no accident but is a direct consequence of that modern method: not that knowledge itself is ruinous, but that the particular methods man had been employing for the last several thousand years have culminated today in successfully externalizing the self with respect to its own experience and possible, possibilizing existence.

What has replaced the experience of endurance is a more complete and unfathomable sense of despair and longing, a longing unable to be sated by any of man's frantic activities, pleasures, loves, novelties; by any of his "will to power"; philosophy itself, having attended to its highest state either in this idea of will to power or in that other idea, the whole "scientific" order in which all phenomena rather "physical" or "psychological" are supposedly encompassed and therein somehow raised together into a final image and world, attests to this state of unsated and unending longing for the impossible—men do not wish to endure, only to persist in their present state provided change is not required. Death becomes the mortal enemy of this sadly conscious and "ideal" creature, an ultimate terminus in which his ideas and his feeling can find no foothold, no pleasure, no sanity. We see the insatiable drive to novelty and pleasure-power seeking coupled with an impossibility to face the end of things, even of just this one single life, and consequently observe everywhere the doubling-down of that self-same frenzy, the proliferation of every conceivable means of causing life and the given experience to hold off the end as long as possible. To suck in desperation the very last bits of meat from the marrow of existence, this more than anything else characterizes the modern nature.

For such a nature no concept of endurance is possible, for this concept requires equally an eye for the end of things as for their beginning, a sense for the completion of a passion, an impulse, a task or life that is absolutely required if a thing is to be made to "endure" in itself at all. Any "will to death" is equally unnecessary as any fear of it, only a sense for death as necessary player in the overall schema of a being or a life is required, and that form which is made to enjoy in its own nature most of all will naturally draw around itself all possible tectonic thresholds of additional experience and reality to enable a lasting impression and effect, it will in short accomplish "without effort" what all men and philosophers, all moralities and truth-desire has only aspired to: it will truly live, will truly endure as itself and no other thing and consequently call to all the rest of existence that it too would do the same.

The world does not need this truth, this comprehensiveness, neither does the natural world, the instincts or society need it; only man needs it, only man is constituted with respect to this possibility of living a higher and more complete kind of life. Thus only man may suffer on account of its lack, in proportion to that lack and to the extent that he is a man and not merely a slightly acculturated, slightly more domesticated beast. Upon this implied pathos of affliction has the real task of philosophy taken shape, as yet inexpressible, although the excess latent to such natures makes itself felt undeniably and comes to define that singular law by which such more rare men live. This feeling, this "negative drive" had yet to impregnate man with a new dawn, has yet to serve as that endurance and certainty of vantage and vitality on which becomes possible an equally complete, non-pathological living, although such more affirmative and eventual manifestations are already incipient here or there, already quietly beginning to take shape.


World

"Material" and "immaterial": the new gods, equally imaginary as the old, which the collected thoughts and efforts of man have presently come to require. Only as man continuously "reverses" his idea in this essentially subjective error—just as the modern forms of this error have reversed and replaced those still-older forms—will cause be given for a new truth, for a new "order of error", to appear before him.



Self


Our clear, specific values rather these be a goal, a desire or an idea must be secondary and not placed essentially before the totality of our experience for, being narrow and defined, these values are unable to hold to themselves at the high regions of the self's more complete activity; each value better takes its impetus from our drives and the cooperative force of our instinct than from the more general and specious powers of thought and to the extent our values represent to us states of passion or inspired sentiment this is especially true. The self is the generalized form of self-value and cannot be made subject to specific values, just as no emotion can be held entirely in those objects in the presence of which it is first expressed—the self is that which conditions our values, our passions, our ideas, and never simply what has emerged as conditioned by these.

The exception to this rule is when a valuation becomes more general and reflects this totality of self directly, broadly encompassing consciousness in a singular 'idea' of it, namely in the case of philosophy. The philosopher allows himself to become conditioned by his values, rather or not these are philosophical in nature, and consequently experiences a growing impoverishment of those ranges of his thought, passion, activity that are unable to become assumed under his one idea; these others are quite simply too particular of forces to become secondarily energized by virtue of the cognitive apparatus, not being "of the body" alone but rather indicative of both the mind and its physiological, phenomenological roots. Thus the philosopher must grapple with himself in order to learn the limits of his own living consciousness, those strangely varied and egotistical shades of his soul must be sounded out not in his thoughts but just as they are, negative spaces where reason sees little but feels much. Each individual drive and instinct in us, each particularly concretized quantum of our self-valuing experience must be discovered and found out in this careful, quieter way—those philosophers who have no sense for this, who lack a more artistic touch find it impossible to capture the complete range of themselves and so become mad in some idea or valuation-mechanism as happens to captivate their reason long enough to act as a Lethe by which they may forget themselves, may forget the need to ever remember that once they wept before the high mountain and mystery of themselves, which sentimentality and passion had once served as the birth of their reason.

Our human consciousness is like a mosaic whose individual colors and images may only be beheld as sum, or individually only in terms implicit to the whole from which they derive their wider meaning and position. Self-denial, much like the self-penitence and mortifications of the flesh of the monks, or the severe self-austerity of the ascetics, is just a negative recognition of this basic fact of life, of that nature moving everywhere back and forth, up and down within itself from particular to general and back again; it rests in the whole when the parts are functioning effortlessly to themselves and it rests in these parts only when the one idea, the entire body of gathered self-value has given cause for these parts to persist without also distorting them beyond their measure and capacity to contain that disorder.