Ethics of Depth

Depth and negativity.

Inexpressable... They express. The ethics of depth and ensuing negativity is never to write or read a word at its word. To apply depth and negativity to the most absolutist of terms, to the seemingly deepest of concepts.

This ethics is foremost to building. But its very inertia commands care... Depth has been around as method now for over 100 years and has yeilded some fruit. Let us not pretend, in the building of a system or the hunting of wisdom, that negativity is a floor. It is precicely the abscence of a floor, and our ethics commands an awareness of what has already been given as foot and hand-holds.

If a concept feels absolute, we are tumbling in the depths with no holds, worse, no awareness of our need of them.

Let's call nihilism: the worship of tumbling without awareness of tumbling, and spiritual suicide the same with awareness.

Yeah I agree, I see it much the same way. I came upon the idea of depth for its own sake as a replacement for the idea of truth for its own sake, because ultimately I could not remain in any plateau for long, no matter how profound it was I always ended up leaving it behind.. because there was a further-removed, more significant perspective to find. Every experience that spoke to me of truth spoke as a reversal of some other previous truth, or if not a reversal than a further deepening and widening. I eventually realized the psychological method I was using was depth as such; "truth" can mean many things, different thing, all or none of them true, as the case may be - but depth means only one thing. It is a fucking standard, man. At least one sure one I've found.

Depth into reality, or into lies, or into the surface, or into the deep depths... we can pick and choose. Truth itself is a mask for depth. Truth cultivates (a) depths in us by letting us not know this is what we are doing, thus truth works with nature and reality to build slow things, but sure things. That is an assurance we can hold to, in our own abyss, from time to time if needed; but as philosophers obviously those methods cannot be our own. (or maybe they can)

My ideas have exploded out of me and annihilated my previous positions, values, emotions; my desires and will, my hope, my love, all of this has become at one time or another sacrificial material to a need that took a long time to formulate itself in language. Ive had to witness the destruction of the things I cherish more than my own life, many times over, until I was forced to stare into the heart of value and find an ember there which burns with such intensity of love that essentially is hard to distinguish from hate. Things close in on each other. The need I mentioned is something there is no name for, except the absence of names, it is the condition of conditions, or the concept of concepts as I think Parodites once called truth; the idea of depth as such, depth for its own sake rather than truth for its own sake. Obviously that idea contains a contradiction, since depth "for its own sake" means nothing as depth is always a depth-process probing into and through substance, matter, reality, truth, objectivity, positivity, life, whatever. Depth is like consciousness in this way, conceptually-speaking: depth in terms of something, just like consciousness of something. These ideas are essentially meaningless by themselves, which is what makes them so fucking powerful, because despite that they can actually take on a subsistence and meaning of their own, which is eminently existential and psychological; basically we can only know how to talk about these things "in themselves" once we have learned in what sense they are never isolate and always refer beyond themselves.

I think we can avoid the nihilism and spiritual suicide. I think that because I know it. Because it's funny, that even if we wanted to go that route, and like me you've probably tried it, ....we cannot. Something won't allow it. We are not given the luxury of falling apart, of truly breaking down, as seems to happen to so many others. Our "hell" is the fact that we exist necessarily. Although I couldn't tell you how or why that is, what separates us in this way from others. Why can't we break? Is this strength, or something else? I don't really know.

Lol, it's depth.

Yes, it's depth, which is, in my experience, a result of honesty. Honesty is a fate. It is a taste, something from which you can not escape if you are born with it. The same thing that makes me suffocate when I'm in a group of people trying to 'simply have fun', I can not bring myself to reach that point beyond the loss of faith (how often I haven't lost that fickle thing) which is the active will to nothingness, which is required to abandon philosophy an it's prospects.

Pezer you make it clear that we have been going too fast though, with our projection of concrete 'success' - my Jupiterian ascendant forces me often to approach the ravine when others see no possible way across it, and sometimes my eagles wings fail to appear when I jump - and I want nothing more for our project than stability. If it helps you at all, we should 'back down' a bit from the politics, let the plans stand there but take some more time to prepare.

I knew 4 years ago we were setting out on a trail that at the very earliest ends in 2023.

I have spiritually 'fallen to my death' so many times I have lost the fear of it, but this is not just. It is not a good, refined contrast to the courage; courage requires fear. I feel compelled to take your evident fear as a sign that I should not completely disobey or disband mine, yet.

But in the final instance there is absolutely no reason for fear - precisely because things thing, philosophy, is so ruthless and strong as to grab us by the bootstraps every time we try giving up, it is not 'up to us', but 'up to it'. As your breath taking and breath giving poetries of the last days show (I haven't commented much directly on them but I was more than once sitting in front of my computer silently just enjoying a sentence over and over) the fear is only something intensifying the significance, not something that refers to the feebleness of the undertaking. I think we are all quite often weak in the face of the power, or vision, or love by which we are infected; how could it be different? What grounds do we have to stand on to not be weak or afraid? The particular fear and weakness we feel is probably something that could be compressed and distilled and brought out as a form of freedom to which our deepest souls are addicted, but which is too dark for the more conscious and conformed parts. We are called, that much is sure, and part of us is always wondering where the call comes from and where it will lead us - but as the years have passed, I have seen it proven that the call is not empty or a misleading echo, but that it constantly leads to earth. That is, possibly, in the end what is is, the call of philosophy: the voice of the Earth itself. The great other whispering in a tone that only the true will recognize as music. The opposite to the pied piper, she calls no rats and children but those who were already listening for a cue to leave the blind procession.

It is storming, it is dark, now and then a lightning-bolt illuminates the field. This is the condition. It just so happens that I like rain and lightning, and that I hate signposts - instead of these fixed pointers in a dead world, there are the signs given off by fellow travelers.

My fear of the project is a fear of doing things myself, of loneliness. It is the kind that most likely benefits most by friends hurrying me along, tying me to the mast.

No, the one that really scares me is the project of philosophy, what we are undertaking the other thing for. That is the one that really stops me cold like a lightning blasting a few feet in front of my walk. If lightning is of Gods, it is beause no measure of human courage can stop the stopping or the coldness of it.

And yet, perhaps here also the cure is to hurry eachother along, tie eachother to the mast.

The lightning invariably has one effect on me, a feeling of having been passionately kissed, a promise of a violent union. Philosophical insights have the same nature. The fright is due to the truth if it, which is that there is no back from them. One you're wedded to these ideas, that's it.

Do you know how many people prefer death to the unknown of philosophy? It is only because they are not proud enough that they do this; the lightning is like a test of pride. This is Thor, the basic aesthetics of order in the chaos, the sign that there is such a thing as order, as power, in the storm.

This is what you see in places like ILP, or other philosophical gatherings under the banner of commonality - fear of the storm, hatred of it, fear of pride, hatred of pride. And of course pride isn't served from a menu. It needs to be hunted down, prepared on the spot of the kill -

what am I saying -- it is hard, because in the moments I have been confronted with the fear, I didn't talk or write about it, I just suffered it long enough to see how it was devoured again. The fear ultimately serves as fuel for the flame that evokes it.

People often think that great conquerors speak of fears and fragility as a poetic tool so that their subjects can relate to their godly destinies in some way.

The hilariously beautiful truth is that they mean it in the most honest, childish way. The greatness of their venture makes them feel free of modesty, of acting great. They only keep acting in as far as the venture necessitates it.

Power is maybe the one thing that removes the last mask: revealing only a tool to ones greatest conquests.

I posted a thread of my own about this- Letheia and Aletheia, I had forgotten about this one or I would have put it here.

Pezer wrote:

Depth and negativity.

Inexpressable... They express. The ethics of depth and ensuing negativity is never to write or read a word at its word. To apply depth and negativity to the most absolutist of terms, to the seemingly deepest of concepts.

This ethics is foremost to building. But its very inertia commands care... Depth has been around as method now for over 100 years and has yeilded some fruit. Let us not pretend, in the building of a system or the hunting of wisdom, that negativity is a floor. It is precicely the abscence of a floor, and our ethics commands an awareness of what has already been given as foot and hand-holds.

If a concept feels absolute, we are tumbling in the depths with no holds, worse, no awareness of our need of them.

Let's call nihilism: the worship of tumbling without awareness of tumbling, and spiritual suicide the same with awareness.

I think that, in a way, if a concept feels absolute, we are not so much tumbling it the "depths" but rather rolling around in shallowness. To see a concept as "absolute" is not having the awareness to see other more valid perspectives...like being written in stone.
Philosophy is like indra's net.