Liberalism

If possibility and necessity are nearly the most potent and powerful categories in which human and "the natural world" daemonic constructs exist, not even like the deepest program but like the very programming language itself, tectonically speaking, then we can look at liberalism as reflecting very significant transitional points within that language, marking the invention of new ways of programming the ether: Necessity is being abandoned wholesale for possibility, and every need unable to be (thus-far) dispensed with becomes the basis for a new expanding series of symbols acted out culturally as vagarious positivistic reformations of older content available for such a transformation; if "any possible over every need" is the unstated emotional-valuational mantra of liberalism (or, "postmodernism-global capitalism") then only those possibilities not already wed to an existing order of necessities must be embraced, to avoid recapitulating the old realities.

In this way a very Nietzschean affirmation: everything revalued before the fire of one pathos, one idea, because that idea expresses as its own self-forming matrix the most possible world-transformations even utilizing evils and goods alike, in true revaluational spirit, as if they were the same. A kind of retuning of humanity's self-valuing from a tonal to a more atonal or polychromatic scale. The easiest path through would be "unreality", except a lot of the old necessity is formed already in the images expressive of unreality (gods, religions, ideology, etc.) so, with great irony that happens to confuse so many philosophers, the new ethos abandons or embraces based in its own standards, and ones that are trying to cohere their own tectonic lines of materiality. In such things it is often more important to stick with a previous postulate than reject it, even if doing so thrusts hypocrisy upon oneself... "Let justice be done, though the world perish".

With liberalism/postmodern-capitalisation we have a self-transforming world appearing before our eyes, as Kitaro might call the self-transforming matrix (of consciousness) as a middle-space between the biological world and the non-biological world or, in his terms too, between the temporal dimension and the spatial dimension respectively. Life is a kind of compromise and middle-space, in which oil and water mix interminably but never combine.

This returns us to the discussions on animality and nature: Man is the mixture of biological and non-biological, nature and symbol, flesh and spirit, instinct and reason, however we want to think about it and these never "combine" in him but only become confused to themselves due to the constant inner strife and impossibility for synthesis. Animals are not "lower" than humans, they are not somehow ranked inferior merely because they do not possess logos, history, culture, philosophy, but instead it is as Nietzsche said about man, that he fulfills nature in himself precisely by being not-natural or more-than-natural himself. The sublimity of the natural is seen most clearly by man, precisely because he is other than this nature yet still bears it within his own soul, and draws life and meaning thereof, and too finds much to love and much respite and inspiration.. his higher qualities example themselves in this way. What it means to be a dog, to feel like a dog, the sensory-proprioceptive and soul-experience of a dog, is something impossible for us to know in a concrete way, but we can know it generally by consequence of knowing what it is not, how it is delimited, and by looking inward at ourselves to find out so much of "dog-life" lives in us too and forming delicate abstracting procedures to take this that lives in us and isolating it, with our 'reason', to look at it with greater purity. I do not feel any less affection or respect for animals than I used to, now that I understand what it means to be animal contrary to what it means to be man -- maybe now I have an even greater admiration and love for them, yes this is quite true. Reality deepens that which moves more deeply into it, we do not need to fear the loss of truths or even our own truths as a consequence to philosophic process, for if we are truthful in that process all reality and being will stand forth and only become more significant and justified.

Back to the socio-politic-economic, as I look at the ways the symbolic order is transforming in the western world today I see a powerful struggle between new and old, which I am tempted to frame in terms of that order itself vs. the' natural' world out of which it evolved, which would require to separate in human history the animal-natural from the spiritual-ideal, the "body" from the "philosophy" to take culture not as one phenomenon or substance but as two, a mutual history and daemonic example. This is incredibly difficult because it represents essentially the same process as philosophy represents to the individual, but to the world and thus for all men, which only magnifies the difficulties tremendously; not only must we take an idea of ours and subject it to philosophical explosion, but if applied to the human world at large and to history we must take an idea and find it out among all the variants, confusions, and stages it has born across relevant space and time, we must look into the morass and vagary of human culture and life in order to find out even what this idea means, what it could mean, given all that chaos and confusion, since only then after we finally know what we are talking about might we take the idea and bring it before philosophy. This has never really been done, it looks like Marx attempted it by creating universal categories with which to interpret a huge scope of human world-thought thereby simplifying that thought enough to make of it a possible object to philosophy -- yet Marx's terms are simplistic to say the least, and derive from a thoroughly un-philosophical spectrum, which isn't to say they are not useful or not "correct" in their own way, but is to say they are limited, petty, and not adequate to the philosophy which would seek to utilize them for the purposes of constructing truths. (I am reminded of Zizek here, who has been drawn so deeply into this Marxist mire of half-ideas whereupon the world looks to be something other than it is, as every event can be explained in the terms of the new system of thought.. despite that this system is not a philosophy and merely calls out to every other thing in the world and symbolically to uplift itself by association, and false appropriation of some quantity of worth, value, or emotional satiety that it must find, inevitably, somewhere other than in itself (again, perfectly exampled by Zizek himself).)

I think postmodernity-capitalist liberalism can teach us a great deal, and is trying to teach philosophy: it is saying to us, Hey! You guys don't know what the fuck you're talking about! Its unconscious revenge-pitch and madness of self attempting to place as such the possible over the actual or necessary, and of course the pretentious, scornful disdain for anything other than its own madness and vanity, all indicates a young creature just barely off sucking its mother's milk and having now for the first time tasted the free air, if only but a taste; this young grotesque thing that does not know itself, that everywhere repels the philosopher or calls him madly into its folds via the route of intoxication to a single stream of ideation whose logic can certainly grip even powerful minds and force them into subservience; all this is a test, a kind of self-crucifixtion of the western world, which means of man himself. We should pay attention to this world around us, precisely most where it makes the least sense and demonstrates an absolutely non-philosophical nature. I think deep things are happening in the earth.