too much or too enough

Reading through an oceanic correspondence, I noticed that I had been allowed a perspective on the emotion of philosophy. It was said that emotions are carried by their own history, which is also how the Chinese see it. Such histories are the organs from which the emotions. Theory prescribes an order between the emotions, the way in which they should ideally fuel each other to arrive at a justly angry fire of joy, which holds sway over the pool of other emotions. Herein poetry finds place, and a tranquil melancholy of life which is so dim an empty but yet so inestimable in its moments.

Philosophy of the west is not satisfied with such prudence and it begins to construct out of the poetry a discipline, an edifice of physiology and language that will come to be known far late as the imagination. Within this vast real of possibility and endless beauty, immortality and soul, the philosopher begins anew and sees that life is not thin and ethereal but that the moment stretches on forever in a frenzy that can be calmly beheld in a secret stance, for which the ultimate sacrifice must be put on the alter of effort: peace. Heraklean splendor is an emotion, and peace is found in it but only along a tremendous and severely light joy, I suppose K's Fear an Trembling but a few steps ahead through the doorway.

What I am getting at is that philosophy is itself an emotion that if not annihilates then changes, 'compromises' the earlier emotions,it starts to effectively value them in terms of itself. Sorrow, joy, anger, fear and calm are torn apart for their ingredients, but joy is the most simple in its ingredients, as it burns everything, so it weds itself to philosophy, on which it keeps burning as philosophy raws out sorrow upon fear upon wrath to sustain the philosophical heart, the teacher of humanity in the swamp of fear-of-sorrow...

It also occurred to me that the Superman is the third point needed to dissolve the Freudian polarity, which taken to itself is neurosis. The superman as a concept is the resolution of human neurosis. The ER is the fixation of neuosis on its permanent nature... haha, no. Well.

I've come to think that each man may have a different emotional hierarchy and that emotions may be experienced differently yet called by the same name for linguistic convenience; how can we know what another means when he says joy, or anger, or fear? The inward phenomenology of such experiences is known to us alone who have such experiences. But even if the emotion is mostly the same from one to another person, the order of rank of emotions will vary: over time the various emotions stabilize a hierarchy relation to each other where one emotion will try to follow another in natural succession, one will relieve another's burden, one will potentiate or justify another, etc. And they oppose each other by self-valuing act, so the "sea of affect" as Parodites calls it aggregates into pools. Or whirlpools.

Each "emotion" represents a unique history of the existential nature of humanity, and each emotion is thus different from others. It is somewhat erroneous to refer to all of them by the same label, since they aren't by any means the same thing, not even the same substance in biological or psychological terms. The emotion is dual, consisting of the after-the-fact teleological meaning-substance and causality-power it has over us, this includes all the poetic meaning and perspective embedded to the emotion, and then there is the feeling of the emotion or its character. The character of the emotion is simply what it is, how it feels is what it is "and nothing besides", in so far as a feeling is itself- a aggregate number of distinct physiological responses across the spectrum of the body that all take place at relatively the same moment in response to a given range of stimuli, and when an adequate number of such bodily responses (muscles contract, blood flow increases here or decreases there, adrenaline is released, etc. etc.) all happen simultaneously we feel the sum of them and existentially cohere it all into one single feeling. That feeling is what we call the emotion itself.

Over history and culture different social heuristics, ideas, common experiences, and generic predictabilities have come together to cause a finite number of such cumulative bodily-response states to appear; what we think of as our various emotions. But this is very existential, since it is required a kind of consciousness that is symbolic-abstracting and rooted textually in a cultural substance and history to be capable of fusing all those different physiological responses into a single moment and being able to act as if the sum-effect were "one thing".

If philosophy is an emotion it is because philosophy represents a still-higher threshold of the existentially-human, one that is able to fuse distinct lesser existentials into a single moment of space-time and thus re-configure various feelings associated to those others. Philosophy can take one of two paths here (well there is a third path of radical denial, the "empiricist" path, but that doesn't really count): it can attempt to value this fusing in terms of those materials which are being fused and thus can remain consistent and authentic to its real past and history, or it can attempt to value that fusion in terms against that history and in terms of the idea-object and experience by which the greater fusions are occurring. Great philosophy is possible to either case, but the nature of the philosopher will vary greatly, since the first path opens up mind to existing Being while the second path opens up existing Being to mind. The first path prioritizes what Being is, the second path prioritizes what Being can become. Thus two different existential modes.

A limit: the existing emotions and corresponding rigidified human-existentialities can only endure a certain amount of change and "stretching" to fit new categories and experiences, before the emotion itself begins to break down. This is good news for the second type philosopher, who uses those broken-down pieces to nullify his own human-existential body and create new affect- and action-polarities-logic in terms of his Idea, but is not good news to the first type philosopher who must search into his Idea all those subtler traces and more specific-precise experiential requirements as corresponding situational elements would allow for an edification-progression of the existential without crossing too far against those limits. The first type wants to take care and tear himself to pieces only as needed and in service to existence, the second type wants to brashly tear existence apart as desired in service to a greater-dimension of image, of Imagination.


....I notice that Nietzsche tried to thread the needle and respect both paths, which only means that he himself was made of both causalities-materialities-worlds respective to both types. A tragic fate for him. Also a measure of his potential greatness to work in two opposing directions. In the end, we must come to accept our own nature, we cannot "choose" a type or path-orientation except to choose what we already are and have always been.

Language has become very democratic... It doesn't allow for much subtlety in terms of concreter experiences communicable. This has had the wonderful effect of uniting all worlds under the potential gaze of the philosopher emotion. Much aristocracy is needed because much experience, genomemetic, is needed to apply this psychology onto depth, which from the deeps up is power. But aristocracy itself isn't enough, ordinaryness is essential for the travel a philosophic emotion requires. It is right it is its own emotion, it is well it distance itself appart from its findings from all other emotions, so that its findings or materializations can be accorded proper rank, proper placement in the holder of the emotion's priorities.

The emotion of truth is what I talking about. Of 'revelation', because truth itself isn't an emotion, Im talking about the emotion that directly engages truth. Emotions are a remnant of instinct, my daemonic process seems to engage what used to be thresholds as almost lines to walk, balance - the borders between the emotional states, to nimbly balance oneself on them is a path that allows me some freedom from the necessities; it is aimed at the futural now, yes, the hand at the curtain of apprehension, the ritual before the fight, the setting of the stage - and yet it has taken me a long time to ground this perspective in historical 'blood', root, truth. The superman is a root to a thought, a final cause to a will... the father of people who come before him.

Capable and me having been talking about what emotions are. My basic position is that what we call our emotions and our human nature in general has changed over time, and thresholds I call topos or places represent new configurations of the basic psychodynamic of the real and ideal ego out of which our emotions descend, that is, a new daemonic enfoldment. Each time one of these plateaus is crossed, through Hellenistic religion to Judaism to Christianity, some of the older psychology is lost because it cannot be any further cognized and the experiences and emotions that characterize it represent the limitations of man to forces of nature and time, while the part of it that indeed reflected something immanent to subjectivity is further mobilized toward the ideal, towards a more complete awareness. The psychic role of Fate in the Greek mind for example was lost when Judaism was arrived upon, as it reflected limitations of the Greek subjectivity in its confronting reality, while the Eros of the Greeks was preserved and further developed, for it reflected hidden aspects of the human subject; it was further developed even more in Christianity, which has not yet exhausted it.

Beautifully clear. Am I to take you own philosophy as a continuation of the Christian path, when you say that it has not yet been exhausted?

It wouldn't be correct to classify a daemonic philosophy by a particular stage in the development of the daemonic consciousness, or of a society or people, since the philosophy spans all stages real or possible. Similarly Christianity can't be considered a continuation of the Greek path or Judaic path since there is no "path" because Greek, Judaic and Christian reflect stages of a wider development and are not reductive to each other as if in a temporal sequence. The only thing which these various stages are reductive to would be truth, or we can say, the ideal.

Daemonic consciousness is the unfoldment of various partializing stages or topoi as Parodites' term, each topos is representative of a given range and saturation of the real with ideal-spaces that have managed to win reflection within the living world. Life is the slow, gradual saturation of the world-existence with ideality, which means with truth. Humans as a whole could be categorized as representing a massive tectonic plane within which multiple topoi-stages are unfolding and have unfolded, but that human-plane itself is also only one "meta-topos" within the larger world-history of nature and Earth as a whole span of 4 billion years or whatever and includes also all the future self-aware species or technological/AI and human-AI synthetic life forms that will probably eventually develop. Since nature and the first organisms congealed from out of the non-living substances of the Earth it is all connected, all part of one massive tectonic super-evolution. The key principle underlining the continuum is excess and "a-causal" differentiation associated to an excessive unfoldment whereby ideality (or factuality, or truth) are represented materially with increasing scope and precision.

The will to power principle and natural selection are also important factors. Will to power occurs because excess-unfoldment from the ideal and into the real produces fractures in existing tectonics, partializing differentials that by definition cannot be reconciled to each other except by to continue that same daemonic fracturing process even more; therefore each 'moment' of an existing topos (each individual, or species group, culture, etc.) will be defined in terms of certain expressions of the real-ideal while other moments are defined by different such configurations of real-ideal, leading to a "war" of perspectives as "values" are discharged from every tectonic threshold-encounter of moment to moment, in a kind of derivative frenzy of dialectic will to power out of which the real dimension of nature takes shape.


Now in terms of emotions, an emotion is a concentrated living history of part of a given topos, as per that "fusion" (like with unlike) of real-ideal and pertinent to the larger more stable encounter-patterns that have most allowed individuals or "moments within the topos-field" to cohere with regularity over time. Consciousness and the real naturally gravitate to consistencies in this way, the real stabilizes itself within the larger ideal-flux which flux results, again, from the fact that each individual or moment will always express a somewhat different configuration of the real-ideal.

An emotion like joy, sadness, fear, expectation-anticipation, or anger is quite literally a living history for the pathways of stable recurring tectonic flows of longer-term daemonic configurations of real-ideal, which means of the body and the mind, of physical and non-physical in how physiological responses in the body (hormones secretion, neurotransmitter release, blood flow patterns, musculature contractions, etc.) occur in stable-recurring patterns and groups in response to a more or less consistent range of symbol-encounter: thee individual encounters a certain symbol or symbolic experience, and these physiological responses are triggered en mass, the result being a conscious experience of both at once- we have on the one hand a sum of all those body feelings' proprioception which taken together actually feels like one larger feeling instead of many smaller ones, and on the other hand we have that sum-feeling taking place only within certain understandable and consistent patterns of symbolic perception encounter. Those two "epi-phenomena" taken together is what an emotion is. This is why emotions are so rooted to our human meaning and wider experience, and why philosophy only undercuts emotion at its own expense, or as I've said many times because that philosophy is only a reflection of pathological elements (certain emotion-orientations and "blockages", or faulty wiring in the real-ideal) anyway. Yet philosophy (reason) tends to undermine emotion, because of the one-sides emphasis placed on rationality as objectivity thus projects the individual self outside of its own former real-ideal orientations as it is trying to find new orientations. So emotions for the philosopher maybe keep losing and rediscovering themselves along ever-changing tectonics.

Capable wrote:

It wouldn't be correct to classify a daemonic philosophy by a particular stage in the development of the daemonic consciousness, or of a society or people, since the philosophy spans all stages real or possible. Similarly Christianity can't be considered a continuation of the Greek path or Judaic path since there is no "path" because Greek, Judaic and Christian reflect stages of a wider development and are not reductive to each other as if in a temporal sequence. The only thing which these various stages are reductive to would be truth, or we can say, the ideal.

But still I am interested in whether Parodites considers Christianity to be unexhausted also in terms of its philosophical 'fuel'. I a asking so directly, bluntly perhaps, because I always intuit a depth in Christianity that I can not personally explicate very well. It is clearly not yet exhausted in terms of its power to hold sway over people, but is this relevant to us? It would be, in some way.

Parodites says that by the development of man into of Judaeo Christianity, a greater depth was found, a depth that could harbor a more complete immanent transcendent process, if I use the terms correctly.

Quote :

Daemonic consciousness is the unfoldment of various partializing stages or topoi as Parodites' term, each topos is representative of a given range and saturation of the real with ideal-spaces that have managed to win reflection within the living world. Life is the slow, gradual saturation of the world-existence with ideality, which means with truth. Humans as a whole could be categorized as representing a massive tectonic plane within which multiple topoi-stages are unfolding and have unfolded, but that human-plane itself is also only one "meta-topos" within the larger world-history of nature and Earth as a whole span of 4 billion years or whatever and includes also all the future self-aware species or technological/AI and human-AI synthetic life forms that will probably eventually develop. Since nature and the first organisms congealed from out of the non-living substances of the Earth it is all connected, all part of one massive tectonic super-evolution. The key principle underlining the continuum is excess and "a-causal" differentiation associated to an excessive unfoldment whereby ideality (or factuality, or truth) are represented materially with increasing scope and precision.

The will to power principle and natural selection are also important factors. Will to power occurs because excess-unfoldment from the ideal and into the real produces fractures in existing tectonics, partializing differentials that by definition cannot be reconciled to each other except by to continue that same daemonic fracturing process even more; therefore each 'moment' of an existing topos (each individual, or species group, culture, etc.) will be defined in terms of certain expressions of the real-ideal while other moments are defined by different such configurations of real-ideal, leading to a "war" of perspectives as "values" are discharged from every tectonic threshold-encounter of moment to moment, in a kind of derivative frenzy of dialectic will to power out of which the real dimension of nature takes shape.


Now in terms of emotions, an emotion is a concentrated living history of part of a given topos, as per that "fusion" (like with unlike) of real-ideal and pertinent to the larger more stable encounter-patterns that have most allowed individuals or "moments within the topos-field" to cohere with regularity over time. Consciousness and the real naturally gravitate to consistencies in this way, the real stabilizes itself within the larger ideal-flux which flux results, again, from the fact that each individual or moment will always express a somewhat different configuration of the real-ideal.

An emotion like joy, sadness, fear, expectation-anticipation, or anger is quite literally a living history for the pathways of stable recurring tectonic flows of longer-term daemonic configurations of real-ideal, which means of the body and the mind, of physical and non-physical in how physiological responses in the body (hormones secretion, neurotransmitter release, blood flow patterns, musculature contractions, etc.) occur in stable-recurring patterns and groups in response to a more or less consistent range of symbol-encounter: thee individual encounters a certain symbol or symbolic experience, and these physiological responses are triggered en mass, the result being a conscious experience of both at once- we have on the one hand a sum of all those body feelings' proprioception which taken together actually feels like one larger feeling instead of many smaller ones, and on the other hand we have that sum-feeling taking place only within certain understandable and consistent patterns of symbolic perception encounter. Those two "epi-phenomena" taken together is what an emotion is. This is why emotions are so rooted to our human meaning and wider experience, and why philosophy only undercuts emotion at its own expense, or as I've said many times because that philosophy is only a reflection of pathological elements (certain emotion-orientations and "blockages", or faulty wiring in the real-ideal) anyway. Yet philosophy (reason) tends to undermine emotion, because of the one-sides emphasis placed on rationality as objectivity thus projects the individual self outside of its own former real-ideal orientations as it is trying to find new orientations. So emotions for the philosopher maybe keep losing and rediscovering themselves along ever-changing tectonics.

By and large Christianity is an emotional religion - it is indeed emotion that philosophy has trouble locating and justifying, and a road such as you take, to trace its working in these surgical ways, is powerful, bit it is also a road too dangerous for me to take, because indeed thought about emotions do much to destroy these emotions, and to me eotion is required for truth, because truth to me is directly tied to the notion of selfvaluing, an the notion of selfvaluing is, per truth, directly tied to myself, which means, to emotional nature. I am fearful of going deeper than truth than I can truthfully verify, if that makes any sense.

I consider emotions purely as I encounter them, an I notice that their nature changes as my heights increase. As they change, different factors begin play a part in them, which causes the the change again - an yet the same chemicals are being used. The being simply revaluates those chemicals and those patterns to produce the 'sensation' that best mirrors the ontic state of the self-valuing. But the ontic here as including the transcendent.

As man grows towards a greater comprehension of himself, he necessarily grows toward greater coherence with his cosmic environment. He must grow more electrical and more powerful an learning new emotions. It will never end, likely. We will grow more and more entwined with our own necessity, as our self-valuing becomes conscious of being the one factor that drives all the other factors. Ethics is born out of the naked, unpolished power that one wakes up to when one realizes all actors only serve that to which they lead up - an that it is up to him to say 'the means create the ends' - to him to return nature to nature, to hone out of mans transcendent movements an 'instinct'. That's what I regard as philosophy, and what I try to train in men with my writing and, as clumsily as that goes, videos - Parodites has taught me the fate of the instincts, I respond to that fate differently than he does. I take it as a departure point to bridge the gap bac to the origin of the animal instincts; the Earth. But I know this is a transcendent movement. It can only be scaffolded, upheld, yea justified in terms of aesthetics, which is the perpetuum mobile of the spirit.

Sorry about not being very active on the forum lately, my brain is fried from having wisdom teeth pulled.

I am in the process of exhausting Christianity and moving into a new stage, which like Capable said does not follow the one before it causally, but represents the formation of a new subjectivity that cannot be reduced to the Christian subject. In a similar way to the Christian subject existing more deeply than the Jew, and the Jew moreso than the Greek.


As I wrote:


Yet, by uniting their wills to the will of universal creation and destruction, as
in the orgiastic ritual and the Saturnalia, so it was that the Greeks- at least the pre-
Platonic or Hellenistic Greeks, protected themselves from the agapeic rupture of the
transcendent into consciousness, fortifying their real-ego from the collapse necessary in
the transitional orientation to the ideal in whose higher species of daemonism, namely the
eroto-daemonic, Judaeo-Christianity arose, which brought with it a more pregnant and a
generally deeper subjectivity, inspired with the concept of an existential burden not only
to God but to the universe of Being and to life itself, the later exampled in man's having
been given dominion- which means responsibility, over the Earth. The Greeks were
capable only of utilizing the basic impulse of life, namely the sexual instinct, to whose
phenomena belongs the reproduction and continuation of organic existence, as a means to
bringing themselves and their own will into accordance with the universal will,
daemonically recombining within their own erotic pathos the self-destructive longing of
the flesh for flesh and the supra-abundance of life's primordial energies, as typifies the
socio-cultural function of the orgiastic rituals which provided the basis of what we now
call festivals- they were thoroughly incapable of recognizing the existential burden of a
moral universe.


Nietzsche did not truly understand Christianity let alone surpass it, in my view. His genealogy of morals is a mind-numbingly superficial explanation of comparative religion, and Kierkegaard is far more relevant to the question of Christianity. Nietzsche had greater strength when talking about the individual psyche rather than the psychodynamics of periods in history or whole religions.

About emotions. Animals do not have emotions, they have a continuous stream of affect (which I have always referred to as reflexive)- nature organizes the nerve tracts in the brain in a purely causal formation of recurrent sequences, and every time the animal responds to something this causal structure is simply outputting this sequence, as though the whole body and nervous system reacts at once as a primordial organo-affective unity; in man, because reason destabilized this structure by introducing discontinguous, acausal states of consciousness, a base threshold of affect potentiation was developed- our real ego or immediate sense of self: affective energy that crosses that threshold (Nietzsche, unable to see beyond it, called the threshold the Will to Power) is not integrated into the reorganized linguistically-coded (ie. semiotically reinterpreted by being referred to the psychic center of the real ego) neural sequences we as humans create with our neocortex, and through which a psychic unity can be sustained as a smaller partition of the much larger affective surplus of the whole body out of which the animals react. These partitions of that affect-surplus preserve the ego's fortification against disintegration in excessive psychic forces, and we internally feel them as emotions, each of them having a basis in particular organizations and sequences of partitioned affect as Capable says. Part of what philosophy does, is allow us to see through the illusion of this psychic center or real ego, and utilize more expansive states of discontiguous consciousness in order to develop larger partitions of that affective energy which was pushed outside of experience by the libidinal threshold: emotions that are realized in this way I simply think of as higher emotions, and each new topos, from the Greek to the Jew to the Christian, brings with it an enlargement of the domain of this psychic partitioning of the affective surplus (this is why as you said the nature of your emotions change as your heights increase). I said this in a slightly different way here:


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Affect in itself is pure quality and is boundless, while the reflexive organization of affects in animal life has coordinated it to produce reliable nerve tracts that create behaviors beneficial to survival. Human cognition destabilized this structure of causal chains of reactive affective discharges, and to compensate the real ego was evolved to preserve a feeling of organo-affective unity; the brain reifies itself as an object of consciousness by establishing a basic liminal threshold, transforming the infinite potential of the primordial vital impulse, of pure quality, into a formal, limited continuum- emotional experiences are sequences of affect that can be organized on this continuum and registered by the conscious mind as an intensification of the ground state in which the brain has reified itself as our sense of being a self, as the real ego, while affective events that exceed its potential excited state are simply pushed into the unconscious. In this way the feeling of organo-affective unity is reconstituted and maintained, which fortifies us psychologically against the threat of dissolving forces and death. Philosophy, by reorienting the real ego with the ideal, allows the underlying primordial impulse, from which the affective series are produced for the real ego as small partitions of what is actually boundless quality, to be brought into the conscious mind; the immanent subject in this way achieves transcendence and the real ego is transformed into the ideal ego, whose range of emotions and possible states of consciousness is without limit.


Emotions themselves are degenerations and re-partitions of the reflexive, primordial, affective-organic unity that stretches throughout all animal life and represents the primal energetic potential of the body itself, of what it means to be an organism- the original vital urge; a kind of degeneration like that of James' bicameral mind and what you describe with mental disorders- a degeneration that was produced by the conscious mind which needed to semiotically reorganize the internal world of the emotions and sensations so as to reconstitute that feeling of organic unity which was destabilized by humanity's first awakening to transcendence and the symbolic order by referring everything to a centralized and immediate sense of selfhood, the Real ego. Only a small amount of that emotionality and inner world can be referred and consciously directed toward that Real ego, while most exceeds the threshold established by it and passes into the unconscious, which is not simply a storehouse of repressions like in Freud. Man is in other words confined by a subjectivity that dis-associates him from his Ideal, eternal ego; our emotions are simply unincorporated remainders of malformed processes of a cognition that, above all, my philosophy- insofar as that philosophy is not merely apprehended theoretically, but actively pursued and lived, is intended to re-construct. Our emotions and their totality- our subjectivity, are just a kind of libidinal closed circuit which our conscious mind, our immediate and Real ego- the finite subjectivity, utilizes so as to set up a blockade or threshold between itself and our inherited, animal, evolutionary vestiges-  even more, between itself and the forces of dissolution and matter to which those vestiges are vulnerable and opened up- the hard and bitter earth behind everything human as you put it. These emotions of ours- and our affects in general, be they pleasurable or painful, along with that finite, real ego to which they belong and semiotically attach themselves- whose principle Nietzsche called the will to power, are but the shadows of a higher nature that can be truly arrived at only by daemonically transcending one's self into the Ideal ego- a higher nature before which the meaning of the thing in itself is accessible, a cognition that operates outside of the normal limitations of the human brain and all that inhibits it, as time and matter and the finite, subjective universe of our unawakened emotions do: this is the goal; the most internal, esoteric, and defining purpose behind my writing. The philosopher- the one who has reoriented his affective energy with the Ideal ego, certainly feels, but he does not feel "emotions," at least not what we refer to with words like anger or pain or happiness or jealousy.


I too share a veneration of human subjectivity and emotions, but I differentiate the affective potential of the real and the ideal ego. The emotions and even senses themselves which are commonly experienced are simply formal partitions of a much larger organo-affective unity and storehouse vitality- partitions with which the real ego reconstitutes itself as immediate and existing, fortified against the intrusion of the material basis of the body and the dissolving forces to which it is subject- that is, death, for they are partitioned through the brain's application of an essential schema, whereby all change in the affects gets falsely reinterpreted as a modulation of intensity with regard to a basic ground state, (ie. the real ego, which does not actually exist) a schema made possible by or perhaps directly following the emergence of rational cognition in man. So I do not mean to abandon the emotional self, but to reorient the ego with the Ideal so as to reintegrate into conscious experience that larger affective storehouse from which the real ego has been estranged; I mean to reintegrate all the affects that have been pushed out of consciousness by the dynamic of the real ego. That unconscious- this store of unincorporated affects which have exceeded what I always call the libidinal threshold, replace the fragile and egoic emotions of the real with more complete and comprehensive affective states. The emotions of the real ego are just points on a continuum with a beginning and end, just like the continuum of colors, and that high and low point is a measure of threshold potential beyond which things get pushed into the unconscious, while the emotional continuum itself represents the causal-reflexive series with which the brain reconstitutes our feeling of immediate presence continuously by referring all affective states to a measure of intensification of a basic potential excitable state- a state which is what we feel as our self, that is, our real ego; if you enlarge or even remove that threshold, the low and high points, and turn the continuum into an infinite line going in one direction into the beyond forever, (ie. toward the transcendent ideal ego outside of time) then new affective states can be arrived at- new emotions that are produced, not through the affective partitioning supporting the real ego structure, which is always a very small piece of the body, but produced rather by the body itself in toto, as a whole, with the ego in this way shifting from the real to the ideal. It is only through the symbolic order and philosophy that one can destabilize that threshold and look beyond the false semiogenesis with which the brain reinterprets all sensation and affect as a modulating intensity on a basic ground state, on the real ego. One essentially "thinks the body into consciousness," or transforms the organo-affective unity now pushed into the unconscious, upon which the thin film of the real-ego or immediate self drifts, into philosophy. As I explain it in A Glorious Risk:


By reorganizing the psychodynamic processes in relation to the ideal ego, one thinks the incomplete libidinal closed circuit that is the real ego, along with the body itself which it has attempted to shield itself from, into that mysterious diaphanous element, an expansive field of potential representing the excitability, not of the small, fragile ground state, but of the body itself, that is, the whole organism- all that it feels and has not ever felt. Everything that has been felt and thought by man is a small glimpse of what can be thought and felt in this way, through that "diaphanous element" or spiritual body to borrow the phrase from Novalis.


Emotions are simply the reorganizations of sequences of affect- of neural impulses, so as to create partitions of the primordial organic-affective unity that succeed in modulating the basic state of potential excitement created by the brain that I call the real ego, from which firstly our immediate sense of self emerges; there is an infinite sea of recombining affective sequences, and the brain uses rational cognition to isolate a very small number of them that it can utilize and reorganize to reconstitute itself as an object of consciousness- fortified from the dissolving forces of creation and death to which the physical body is subject- reconstituted as real ego. But if you look beyond the falsity of the real ego and reorient with the ideal, you can reorganize that essentially infinite combining and recombining storehouse of affects into an equally infinite number of new emotions and affective states.


The easiest way I could say it would be that the emotional responses of the real ego like love, happiness, grief, etc. are essentially distortions of the much larger affective surplus that was pushed into the unconscious, and this larger affective surplus is capable of being configured into emotions that also simply fall outside the normal range of human feeling and have no distorted equivalent in normal perception; there is a higher equivalent to each of them (love, joy, grief, etc.) for the ideal ego, and one can expand the real-emotions into their higher ideal equivalent as you were saying you have been doing, but there are also emotions producible through the surplus affect that have no equivalent in the domain of real ego. Each unfolding of the topoi and new daemonic plateau, each new configuration of real and ideal, as from primeval man to the Greeks, then to the Jews, and then to the emergence of Christianity, has carried with it a deepening and a transformation of subjectivity and a releasing of some new part of that buried surplus affect, as, for example, with Christianity there became available to man certain experiences and emotions that were simply impossible to conceive of from within the Greek mind. The basic task of my philosophy is to provide the means to fully submerging and releasing that surplus within the subject, whose fulfillment would be a mens heroica, the heroic mind.



The higher existential subjectivity which the present canon of emotions represent as you say, they do represent, but they represent it to consciousness as a distortion within the domain of the real ego confined- distorted, by time and finitude; that existential universality-potential of the immanent subject is the true possession of the ideal, and can only be fully developed in orientation to the ideal- that is why the subjectivity and emotional depth of the Christian man was more developed than that of the ancient Greek. The new emotions I am talking about are further exposures of the underlying immanent subject that simply exist as far beyond the Christian type of man as the Christian exists beyond the Jew and the Jew beyond the Greek. The Romantic love and its emotion first appeared with Christianity so it is a good example to take, and it combines Judaeo-Christian psychological concepts of transcendence, divine ecstasy in relation to the monotheistic God, the fusion of two separate souls, etc. with the historically older emotion that the Greeks discovered- Eros. My sense of this emotion however is very different and involves a fusion, not of eros and agape or divine transcendence in one object, but of eros and hope, courage and dissolution and death, as two beings reach out for their different perfect forms in the heaven of ideas along side one another, though still marked with separation upon the earth in which they dissolve and which had denied their attempts at completing themselves in mortal life, in which nothing ever finds fulfillment or is seen through to its end. I describe this emotional experience here:


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I think my only point of disagreement is that the "unconscious" can be mobilized in such a total way, the affective surplus freed into dynamic consciousness outside the bounds of a real ego filtering/limiting. I don't know how ideality could live in that way, as thought, or as a self, because thought and selfhood are measured by the intersection of both real and ideal, the inside and outside perspective of conscious and unconscious. Without a real ego-threshold to draw affect into organized acting and effecting a common body and perspective, without the "illusion" of being a self or real ego, how would consciousness or subjectivity make any sense? Wouldn't these simply vanish back into a kind of animal pre-conscious immediacy in the moment kind of awareness, if the irreconcilable dynamic of real and ideal were transcended by way of re-orienting the real self entirely to the ideal?

The real ego has made a reality for itself and this is what most people experience as their existence, and these human existences have much room to be expanded and deepened toward truth, certainly, but this is not by extension to say that the real dimension is fundamentally flawed in so far as it is composed of false or distorted emotions and ideas that must be totally overcome, reconstructed absolutely in terms of the ideal only. What would life even look like if that were to occur? Non-human animals are immersed totally in the present moment and sensory environment, they don't have "facts" but they have awareness, they react with pure reflex and to me that is what it would mean to get rid of a real ego to replace it with direct assumption of the ideal ego itself: the real is the outside perspective from ideality that is required to make ideality possible to manifest itself in existence, and also the real ego is the storehouse for all of the accidental or coincidental development of human social reality and shared meaning, including a lot of how thought and ideas work, and the means of regulating the body-feelings into coherent emotional states. In short I don't see that real can ever be adequate to ideal, or that ideal can ever be adequate to real; I see progress and philosophy's goal as to continue to refine toward the ideal that in man which is able to be refined in this way, to expand the sphere of his ideal consciousness and emotions as you say but not with an end-goal of somehow transcending the real absolutely. Pure brain+AI minds in jars linked to computer networks is the only way I can see an idea of pure transcendence of the ideal making any sense: man would need to totally leave his body behind for a virtual or artificial environment rooted in computers and cybernetics so as to lose entirely his ability to feel his body, all of the body-related feelings and 'instinct memory' which the body contains genetically as information passed on from evolution and man's social history would need to be erased in favor of migrating cognating thought and ideation of a factual nature into pure virtual awareness as immersion in the immediacy of such a computer/robotic environment devoid of the earth, devoid of the body, devoid of any physical sensation of pleasure or pain and of any memory of these. Such an abstract "mind in a jar" could probably reach the kind of transcendent ideality where no real ego-threshold holds sway over the manifest of ideas, but in what sense could we even say that such a consciousness is composed out of a "sea of affect"?

The excess is an earthly excess, the mind derives from the body's excess in combination with encounters to the ideal-factual, which in fact the body indirectly represents in a structural and formal nature by virtue of evolution and history; getting rid of the body or of the real ego, qua real ego, would actually get rid of the whole cumulative historical life-project which had been the evolution of nature and into humanity whereby such an unconscious history the ideal is in fact reflected and made to manifest in reality, as man's implicit categories of consciousness and physiological structures by way of how the libidinal threshold determines which experiences get conscious reflection and which are shunted off into the larger unconsciousness as you have pointed out. Or maybe I'm not well grasping this aspect of the philosophy, the psychology of the heroic mind -- have you developed a detailed accounting of the mens heroica yet? This does seem like one of the next areas we really must explore.

What values? Self valuings that can. What self valuings can?

Telos. The ideal and the real make sense only if they are valuable to that which can value, that is, that which can value what isn't yet valueable. To get rid of ideality, or reality, we would need to be convinced that the result of either would be valuable beyond what was valuable before it, and with a teleological aim that evilly whispers the suggestion of a whisper which is: "more..." No, not more. What is more? Simply movement in value.

The philosophical emotion is the telos that grasps value crisply and is able to even consider what doing without ideal or without real would bring in terms of value. But it is an emotion and a telos because it will not do either until crisp value is discerned teleologically preferable. Philosophy without bias is no philosophy at all, and that is what emotion indicates.

The ideal is the dimension of eternity, truth, and "fact", totally opposite the subjective dimension of the real ego, however it is the ideal that is the truly living one of the two egos-- this is a critical point I think is hard to grasp at first. Real can only live because it is partitioning ideal contents' intrusions into its own spaces, the real is what shapes the ideal into an individual, time-space limited form; think about ourselves, what is most living and truly existing for us? It is that of ourselves which is the mind, which reaches to and from the eternal; it is "love" and the whole life which is itself nothing but the continuous work of love, as Parodites said. This isn't a sentimental notion, it speaks to how truth manifests in concrete form with real effects and consequences.

Our values are the result of points of contact, tectonic fracturing, between real and ideal. A value is the product of an implicit determination-judgment of perspectival interpreting given pre-existing context and categories in which judgments are able to take shape. That high level of perspective is only possible because the self is made out of two opposite and irreconcilable substances, the real and ideal, or body and mind to be crude about it: if we use value as the fundamental principle of the self's psychology then we will achieve what Nietzsche achieved with the principle of the will to power applied in the same manner, a collapse of the transcendent dimension into the immanent dimension as Parodites called it, but at least with the improvement of the concept of value over will we have an innate joining recognition of ideality with reality, truth with untruth, fact with act, objective with subjective; but value naturally and necessarily pre-supposes the daemonic setup, which pre-supposition is part of its great functional power, yet it would prevent analysis from descending any further into the psychological self than this level of given presupposition.

Value is maybe the first philosophical principle of action, of the daemonic self as gively daemonic in its psychology and sociology. Yes, this makes sense to me. But how are we to understand where this given ground comes from and why? We need more existential or "phenomenological" conceptual constructs that develop the logic of self-valuing, namely real and ideal which involves several key concepts such as excess, non-dialectical asynthetic development of difference, and irreconcilability, also the intersection of the spheres of identity through which subjectivity takes shape. The subject and the values will always reduce to each other in this sense, because they are linear along the same plane-level and ouroboros-like. So the daemonic philosophy aims to get below that in order to open up new spaces of potential change and development to life or to "what it means to be a self."

Sure, but what I think what philosophy as emotion aims to make clear is that even this exploration or definition, rather, of self requires a previous starting point, that one doesn't wonder about daemonic processes without needing to for a reason other than it. What keeps philosophy honest, whether it please the philosoher or not, is that he will always be embedded in reasons outside philosophy. Philosophy is the subject of, its object responds to. Even value is simply useful. What Parodites has achieved, I would argue, is comparable to any other world shaking philosophical insight. The danger of such a thing is that it lose sight of its ground, of its use to its weilder, or his necessities.

Perhaps counterintuitively, this alows for the insight to fully take on its own logics, its own weight. We have a distance from it: we need it, it needs nothing. As it takes its own weight, we can reap from it. If we insist its weight is the same as ours, we will never reap anything and also stump its growth. The ideal is not the mind, it is the matterless thing the mind finds. The mind matters.

What value ontology holds, as opposed to daemonic philosophy, is that to find a "why" and a grounding requires as much a reason to be saught as that which prompted the question. Or, not reason, but sifting through reasons, wondering whether it is a question of any value.

Excess the idea is seperate from that which observes it, as you say, irreconsileably, which is not to say that one cannot justify the other.

The reason for the philosophy is rooted in the philosophy itself, since everything is "a philosophy" anyway, by that I mean a process of excess-unfoldment along the horizons of dialectically-possible world parameters. We can ask why this philosophy exists easily enough, we simply examine the philosopher, ourselves. We find right away that we are ourselves representing lack to itself, voids that drive growth, the psychology is incomplete and always pushes beyond itself becoming either more honest or more dishonest in the process, "better or worse philosophy" but either way is always going to be the case, no matter what human were talking about.

We don't invent philosophies because of utility purposes, but because we are already "a philosophy-process" and nothing besides-- philosophy is simply an extension of what we and everyone else already is. Why does it "extend" like that then? Each philosopher has his own life-circumstances by virtue of which he was at one point or over a period of time "accidentally" awoken to the possibility of truth. That insight made living into the flesh of a mind changes the fundamental nature of subjectivity, it begins to align it more to its true nature first in a purely virtual sense and with many errors but eventually in an actual sense too. Only philosophy can heal, every healing or strength of the soul is already a form of philosophy.

Rock on, then.

But I know, because I know lack only exists at the behest of need, that this isn't true.

I look at need as a psychological or biological interpretation of a lack. My cells lack nutrients so they draw these from the blood around them, they "need" the nutrients because fundamentally in their structure there is a lack of them. The fact of the lack was created via natural selection working through genetics and environment, but I don't see that as a telos. To me, telos can only really mean something when we're talking about the ideal, factual or "conscious" aspect that can really orient itself within its own future and possibility-as-such.

In what sense do you mean "this isn't true"? What specifically do you see is untrue?

In addition, I should add that lack is never an absolute basis or ground, but a constituent state that arises from a greater abundance and over-plenty, an excess. The cell is a self-valuing that represents something greater than itself, namely the whole physical process and world/history, natural laws, logic, and all such conditions that have truly made it what it is. The cell is a structure driven by lack, but that specific lack (from which needs arise) was itself produced as a consequence of much more extensive and greater excess-conditions; basically an excessiveness in the environment produced the cell-as-lack, and that excessive component lives on in a deeper sense as was eventually released more and more into manifest existence as life evolved toward complexity and consciousness.

Without need, that lack would be an end, or it would simply continue to make part of the different processes that configured it. Need is telos because that state of affairs that consequence finds itself in suddenly wants, that is, has its own need of consequence, sees itself, values itself, and only thus is appart from the processes that made it be, not sepaate in anything but in telos. Can this be beyond human conscience? I believe we are way too early in our understanding and fullfilling of our own telos to truly be able to ask that.

To me, need and lack are connected in that lack is a state of absence of something, need is a statement of fact regarding a lack. My body is consuming oxygen as we speak and has a continuous need for more oxygen, why is this? Because consumption processes at the cellular level are using available oxygen and they do not stop doing that, therefore on a continual basis more oxygen atoms are required if that process is to sustain itself; there is no reason why the process "should" sustain itself like that, for instance I could stop inputting oxygen into my body and those cellular processes would eventually cease for lack of more oxygen, and I would die. The cause-reason for the continuous inputting of oxygen into my body is found in the fact that I have an autonomic nervous system that regulates abdominal muscles to contract and expand over and over again, causing pressure differentials between my lungs and the outside air, leading to a drawing of air from outside and into my lungs, where capillaries in the lungs' alveoli absorb O2 molecules, this absorption occurring only because the blood that happens to be flowing through those capillaries at that moment is not saturated with oxygen per its potential to be saturated in that way.

The whole process is mechanical and automatic, and it only exists because in the distant past genetic alterations at the behest of natural selection happened to give rise to oxygen-respiration systems in certain organisms. I don't see any telos anywhere in any of that. This oxygen-respiration system didn't evolve because it wanted me to exist, or because it wanted any sort of end-goal at all: it evolved entirely by accident of evolution given the available materials and the extant environmental conditions of the present and immediate past. Evolution had no purpose, no goal and no end, it is a blind stupid process that leaves tailbones and appendixes and webbed feet in humans despite these not being required anymore, and it is a process that kills off most species in the course of evolving a very small number toward a more stable survivable form (stable only in so far as the environment doesn't change too greatly).

Nature doesn't care about making better organisms, just like evolution didn't care about making nature or life or self-aware life. There's no end goal or purpose behind it. Instead, I locate an end-goal and a purpose (a telos) in humanity only, by virtue of how humans became able to negotiate between truth itself and the rest of material-accidental existence: humans learn about abstract concepts and facts, we become able to respond to a state of things and the fact of things rather than simply to things themselves, as the rest of all life does. Humans can understand and thus form complex judgments and extract deep knowledge from reality that was never available to any other life-form before humans. So because of this humans live partly in a "third universe" of ideas themselves, eternal facts, Plato's Forms or we can just call it "the future" that we immerse ourselves into, and this living partly outside of ourselves and into an alternate future-universal existence is what enables us to become teleologically capable life-forms.

That's how I see it anyway.

More so in more interesting and human terms, need is greater and more significant than lack, because need is motivating to produce meaning (existentia): let's say I want to draw a picture because I have some sketching supplies here, and I can't think of anything else to do. So my level of motivation and interest is small and I'm sort of bored just sketching things for fun, but suddenly now someone else actually wants my sketches for some reason, say they are interested in my talent or they simply like me and are interested, or they have their own need for them for some reason... now my motivation and interest level is much greater and I will obtain far more meaning out of the activity of sketching. The other person's need or desire relative to my task is going to infuse that task with greater significance for me, at least in a general sense.

We need each other's interest and desires/needs in order for ourselves to have meaningful experiences, at least again speaking generally, and the other side of that is how we produce desires and needs on our own such as with our personal interest in philosophy. The existing need gives rise to an existential substance in man. The notion of lack by itself cannot account for that.


And furthermore, it is only because of man's ability to live partially in that "alternate reality" of facts, conceptual abstraction, emotions and "third universe" that any of this is even possible. My dog has basic feelings and simple anticipations, thus it is also able to draw some extra meaning-motivation from certain experiences more than others (I.e. it is capable of becoming bored or excited psychologically-speaking), but a dog's level of this will never come close to a human's level of it.

That's right, need hijacks the process and gives it unity separate from its origin within a larger scheme of necessities and processes. This is all I'm saying: lack doesn't exist without need, otherwise why is anything lacking? Lacking what? For what? There is an eternal regression problem, eventually something was needed. Why does your aggregate self refuse to stop the functioning of your lungs? Why does lack care?

An animal may not have the same abstraction processes as a human, but isn't there a difference, too, between a monkey and a crocodile? The problem of value is: what regards value? Only symbols? Or does the whale will itself to be whale-like?

I have things in common with a rock. If either of us is dropped, we fall onto the next closest solid thing between us and the Earth, and our molecules are racked.

The rock shares a value with me. Not to go all dialectical on your asses, but I feel a little weak. What is able to value falling? Is there only one way to do so?

A non dialectic theory then: the philosophical emotion is embedded in value chains that precede it and make part of it, and to struggle with these values already presupposes a valuing of styruggle, a need. Struggle doesn't just "happen." I don't question the daemonic theories, only their genealogy. Lack being reflected onto itself... Somebody needs to do the reflecting. Also, conflicting needs, as evolution is anything but single-minded.

I will post a few other things I have on my mind about this, but really quickly I want to address Capable's inquiry as to the kind of animal state of the pure affective surplus I claim appears after fully orienting with the ideal ego.


The animals do experience the entirety of their organo-affective unity, their entire body and nervous system fires in unison as a single affective flow, while in man the real ego formed to compensate for the disintegrating intrusion of a higher cognition as was afforded by an expanded neocortex and brought with it our emotions as the continuous-intensifications of an immediate, temporally constructed sense of self which serves as a potential excited state and liminal threshold to the truncated and partitioned affect-surplus itself. When man fully reorients the real ego with the ideal, he too will experience the organo-affective unity of his entire organism again- but here is the central difference... man's organism is far more complicated than any animal's, to the point of constituting a phase transition and qualitative rather than merely quantitative advancement beyond their capacity. So if a human were to experience his organo-affective unity it would be very much different than when the animals experience their own: symbols, words, differentiated emotions etc. are all parts of his organic capacity and are datums in that potential unity. This is why the organo-affective unity and surplus of a human would be very different than that which the animals do indeed experience- there is no human being that has ever lived who has experienced it, and I have not either, at least not yet, so I cannot say much more about what it would actually be like, I can just say that, for this important reason, it would certainly be very different than what animals experience.

Though there is definitively a qualitative difference between 'consciousness' of animal and 'consciousness' of man, in the sense that you have described, thee is also a tentatively comparable threshold between reptiles and mammals, cold and warm blooded animals. The difference is this; when a reptile is idle, he lurks, waits for something to respond to, but when a mammal is idle, he plays, has to keep himself occupied. He is too 'spirited' with his hot blood to remain passive. Here, the instincts begin to transform into 'meaning-giving', an it is only in recording meaning and representing it abstractly that humans are almost fundamentally 'estranged' so to speak, in need of a metaphysical coherence, a ring of time or an eternally combusting explosion, or an absolute in any sense - this dis-coherence is indeed absent in animals. And yet - is there not something in the ape that is already man? But this is it; in ape, nature had become so playful as to become serious about its 'self'. It had invented the ultimate plaything. And he was never ever going to share it.

Incipit 'sapientia'.