Being without Loss vs The Loss of Being, a conversation

Capable:

Something quick on this,

"Thought relates to Being in traditional metaphysics
only through the ideatum, that is, something external to thought, (rather this extrinsic
datum be given to us as desire in the Deleuzian univocity, the narcissistic regression to all
encompassing infantile omnipotence in the Freudian scheme, labor to the species-essence
in Marx, or the Absolute/God in its purest categories of that metaphysics, etc.) something
external to the immanent nullity or nothingness underlying man's incomprehensible
subjectivity, an extrinsic datum or singular-voice to which the Truth of Being is reduced
univocally, though through which I would reconceptualize the active participant daemon
as the external factor (which Heraclitus claimed, while external to man was that alone
through which man realized his own human essence) by which man achieves what man
is- achieves his ethos or Being, to organize the Heraclitean distinction implied by the
formula of ethos anthrops daemon. But, to recall that comment of Gregory of Nyssa,
because man's nullity abysally reflects the nullity of God in whose image he was formed,
the transcendent operates as both internal and external to thought. It is only this liminal
participation of immanence within transcendence and vice versa through which the world
of created things or beings might be conceived in the Loss of Being and perfection, that
man's ethos or being can be united to his daemon or action as the animal that is concerned
not with its nature or that nature's hypostasis but with the fulfillment and realization of
that nature as a lived experience and participation in Being, in ousia without hypostatic
conformation to univocal reductionism, as Voegelin said, allowing this refusal of directly
equating thought and Being so that a movement beyond the mental limit of univocity
might be made, insofar as univocity is simply that unity of thought and Being, or geist
and Being, in Hegelian terminology, as is achieved by incorporating the external factor
within the idealist system (equivalent to Totalization) by reducing the multiplicity of
Being's expression to its singular mental impression.” -Parodites

I see God as a representation of this "nullity" which nullity I refer to in part as the self-inexpressibility and self-irreducibility of consciousness, the fact that what we call consciousness emerges but cannot return to that from which it emerges, similarly to your ideas of stages of progression of development of infantile subjectivity; because of this there is always a sense of nothingness, that "abyss" you mention, at the bottom of our self-experience. But this sense of nothingness is not a literal nothingness, because there indeed do exist mechanisms and structures and drives and logics and all that working way down there past our ability to see them, because our self-experience is like a telescope rather than a microscope, hence why we (most people anyway) tend to point it outward rather than inward. If we fine-tuned it as a microscope by really achieving full philosophy and poetry and psychology then we could indeed see into that "nothingness" and a whole new world would open up to us in that. This is the hidden universe of meaning, a deeper buried reality hidden even inside the mental universe as such, because it isn't only biological and such factors that are working in the depths but actually metaphysical factors too, pure logics which we could grasp in our ideation if we could approach them, see them, and find a way of understanding that in our existing language.

I can see a daemonism or polarity between these two ideas of Being, as Being with Loss and Being without Loss are both ideological positions, as I see it anyway. Neither one is actually the truth, because in the wider tectonics there is always going to be some layers of absence and some of presence, which stack up on each other and which depend relatively for their existence upon the perceptive powers of those subjectivities, beings, that happen to have been formed up within those complex layers and tectonic plates, so called. Being itself, it has no absolute Presence and no absolute Loss, because I don't believe there is such a thing as "Being" absent beings, and if there is then it would simply be a pure logic disembodied from anything and existing wholly by virtue of necessity, as the true meaning of metaphysics simply as "logic itself" and the totality of that logic-itself stacked like Russian dolls in all directions; a kind of hidden metaphysical foundation underlying everything and which structures and forms every phenomenological occurrence (material or otherwise) in existence. I place a huge amount of priority on logic and on a being's ability to apprehend logic directly, such as we humans can do whereas other animals apprehend logic indirectly by responding to it. We do that too, but we also understand and act preemptively.

So because of all that I can also see both sides of this self-apotheosis thing of the ethos anthropos daemon as how Being is trying to complete or edify itself as either "slave or master" on the one hand or "...." (not sure what to call it) in your own system. ...

Need to go now, will write more later.

Parodites:

" I can see a daemonism or polarity between these two ideas of Being, as Being with Loss and Being without Loss are both ideological positions, as I see it anyway. Neither one is actually the truth, because in the wider tectonics there is always going to be some layers of absence and some of presence, which stack up on each other and which depend relatively for their existence upon the perceptive powers of those subjectivities, beings, that happen to have been formed up within those complex layers and tectonic plates, so called. Being itself, it has no absolute Presence and no absolute Loss, because I don't believe there is such a thing as "Being" absent beings"

Being with and without Loss are two metaphysical positions. A metaphysics unfolds from a specific epistemological foundation,- since that foundation is completely different for the two, two different metaphysics follow. An ideology is a set of normative doctrines that are held to for precisely non-epistemological, that is, political matters.

Being is ousia, the matter of matter. It is what makes matter- matter, as opposed to non-matter or spirit. If there is no Being, there is nothing to distinguish matter from spirit. And dualism is necessary to develop any philosophy of nature, of individuation, of any dynamic process or unfolding. Which means without Being, the entire differentiation that makes all of our concepts make sense breaks down. (Which is what happened through Marx unintentionally rendering Being meaningless in the materialist-dialectic). Metaphysics posits a singular extrinsic datum that it then univocally reduces all beings to, it reduces all Being to a single true mode of Being, in order to equate mind and Being at the most abstract level, the abstract level at which totalization and absolute knowledge are attained. It does this because since the Ancient Greeks, the idea that Being is the matter of matter, is what makes matter matter, could only be thought of as: Being is what all beings share, Being is the thing that all matter in all its forms has in common, so you can reduce everything to it. That was the significance behind Thales claiming that the universe was made of water and that all matter and all forms of matter were merely a different form of water, as silly as it might sound, nobody had thought of the idea that all matter had a commonality you could use to univocally reduce everything to, to reduce everything to a single mode of Being: when Thales did that, when he posited water as that common mode or shared Being, he separated logos from mythos like I said in the previous message. Mythos didn't have a problem with a plural or multivocal episteme, but once logos was separated- because logos was formerly grounded in the mythic instantiation of Truth Plato in fact recognized, it cannot ground itself, it cannot self-ground; logos became a vicious circle that had to posit an extrinsic datum, one outside of itself, that it could then use as the univocal mode to which all the universe was to be reduced, so that it could then recreate that universe within itself and totalize all knowledge as absolute-- thus Hegel.

Marx, inverting Hegel, chose to reduce Being to the process of dialectical materialist unfolding itself, Nietzsche took the idea of force as the univocal factor to reduce to and created a philosophy in which metaphysics self-annihilated itself in the Will to Power, a contest of force against force that expressed the pure affirmation of a Being no longer synthesizable with other concepts, since that required inserting negation into the original thesis of Being to get the dialectic process unfolding, and the two of them together are where Deleuze got the idea of positing Being itself as pure difference. The whole gender is a social construct thing comes out of that line of thinking.

I regard the nullity underneath human subjectivity as an actual nothingness, a true immanence separate from the physical world and material history. (I will state why, but that is one reason why one of my priorities is defending the category of pure reflection and repositioning philosophy as an analytic modality that can answer questions about man's subjectivity and experience that pure psychology, biology, and economics cannot.) Because the transcendent nullity of God reflects man's immanent nullity, God is both internal and external to thought: the equivalence of thought and its external factor is what drives the dialectical reduction to univocity- that single extrinsic datum is the "one voice" that all (b)eings- that Being itself is reduced to, typically God in metaphysics. But that univocal reductionism, the typical metaphysics and religion, is the main thing I am attacking. Once the transcendent is recognized as both internal and external to thought, you cannot reduce Being down to a single extrinsic datum and reproduce the whole universe within the system of absolute idealism, nor, in the Marxist inversion that attempted to strip the transcendent from the dialectic, can you prevent concepts from growing more and more nebulous as they are reiterated through series of dialectic progressions until they just become meaningless, which is what happened when Marx tried to trace the dialectic of labor in order to get to some idea of a Utopia. Once the transcendent is recognized as both internal and external to thought, that is, once the liminal participation of immanence within transcendence and vice versa is conceived, a movement beyond univocal reductionism can be made, and Being can be expressed in more than one voice, can be articulated with a multivocal truth, which is what epistemes are, the ontic, immanent, and transcendent episteme, are simply a plural identity of philosophic truth, they represent three different but equally meaningful Truths- Being can ultimately be articulated as the boundary upon which a co-creation is made and the world generated out of that liminal participation of immanence and transcendence within one another.

The reason why it became necessary for metaphysics to equate thought and Being, is because Aristotle accidentally connected them in an inescapable way when he formulated the four causes- because that schema connected, inseparably, phenomenon and Being. Just replace phenomenon with mind, thought. Because of that, there could be conceived no Being without a phenomenal expression, and no phenomenon without a coincident Being. My metaphysics does not have that limitation, which is why I recognize an actual immanent nullity underlying subjectivity: ie. a phenomenon that has no coincident Being, no material correlate. That is what consciousness is in my system- a phenomenon that is not connected to or co-related with Being, and has no material analogue, hence the immanent nothingness underlying it (Just as God has no phenomenal correlate, in my metaphysics: that is what I mean by his transcendent nullity reflecting man's immanent nullity. Hence also my use of the concept athesis- pre-ideational mental contents that exist prior to the thetic arrangement of Being. The transcendent nullity is God having no phenomenal expression in Being/the material universe, with the immanent nullity underlying man's subjectivity being a phenomenon lacking any co-relate in Being, ie. matter.) I go over these ideas here:

1. The Aristotelian metaphysics indirectly posited, through the schema of the four causes, an inseparable link between phenomenon
and Being (ousia, substance), as between activity and the soul, ie. the entelecheia. This linkage signifies the breaking off of athesis
and an imputation of Being's imperfection, insofar as Being depends thereby on phenomenal expression in order to reveal itself as
aletheia: in other words, it is because of this original Aristotelian premise, that the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic in its modern form
inherited a significant limitation in that there can be no phenomena without Being, nor any revelation of Being without phenomenon.
It is for that reason that modern philosophers, all working out of that metaphysical foundation, have such a problem with the notion of
qualia, for it is precisely "a phenomenon without Being", which describes the athesis of human reflectivity, that is, the internal reality
of subjective consciousness. To state the problem inherent in the Aristotelian schema of the four causes in other words: phenomenon
and Being, that is, appearance and Being- or better still, Becoming and Being, and moreover the human shaping or erotic poiesis, to
speak again psychoanalytically, of Becoming (techne) and Being, must be eternally separated. Stiegler points out as his central thesis
that the interfusion of these two finally occurs in the 18th century, obviously with no slight assistance from the Nietzschean
philosophy, however, without any notion of the Loss of Being, this fusion took place as one between techne and ontology, effecting
what he calls a state of "permanent innovation," the elevation of man's techne to the ontic itself, the seizure of ontos or Being as an
image of infinite technological mastery over a finite materia readily conformable to the "aimless finality" Capitalism posits within
itself, or that perpetual economic growth coincident no less with the Aristotelian kinesis toward the perfection of human happiness as
the perfection of the polis. As Stiegler himself points out, the permanent innovation thereby effected leads to the opening of expanded
international marks, with the magnification of competition across the spheres of enterprise and globalization as an inevitable
consequence. Globalism finally renders the task of organizing society at the level of the nation-state impossible, necessitating the
existence of some international body to take account of and manage, in some sense supra-legally, the grossly accumulating debts and
risks of those expanded markets: culture, therefor, becomes impossible, at least in the classical sense of the word. The dissolution of
essential identity- that is, culture, into a world-culture and the paradoxical intensification of the identity of local groups at the
marginalized periphery within the now fragile statehood and of extra-local groups at the global periphery of an ongoing technological
emancipation, creates both an internal and external socio-political tension that quickly becomes impossible to navigate.
Neurology defines only material correlates related to our objective existence, but the entire purpose of philosophy is found in
explaining experience in terms of experience itself, that is, self-reflectively-- that is, in relationship to an internal reality characterizing
our conscious life as distinct to the inanimate material conditions for it. Offering neurology as an explanation for experience offers no
insight in terms of that internality, it is like offering a chemical analysis of the dyes used in the construction of the Mona Lisa as an
explanation for what it is. That would be useful, as a matter of objective science, in properly restoring the Mona Lisa given the
deteriorating effects of oxidation, as the correlates offered by neurology would be useful in removing safely, a tumor- however,
neither offer any new insight regarding that internal reality which distinguishes our conscious life from the rest of the known
universe.

Human beings alone are self-reflective, and this quality is responsible for the separation of consciousness from the purely physical
reality around us, because this self-reflectivity creates a kind of internal reality that nothing else in the universe has. That internal
reality is responsible for the qualitative dimension of conscious life. We are conscious of qualitative experience, that is, we are
separated from the purely physical universe as willful agents, agents in possession of a kind of freedom of will, because human
consciouses occupies this internal reality that all physical objects lack, an internality generated by its own unique capacity for selfreflectivity.

Pure mathematicians tend to look down on physicists because the world the former describes is a level of abstraction higher than the
physical world that applied physics treats. They describe events and objects that don't exist physically but which do "exist" at a higher
level of abstraction than physics does- it is simply a different state of existence. And then the philosopher comes: philosophy
describes things at an even higher level of abstraction than pure mathematics- at this highest level (which I call an episteme: my
philosophy relies on breaking things down into these abstract levels in order to get to an episteme (instead of using a Hegellian
dialectic to get to a synthesis toward the Absolute) we describe- existence itself, and all possible worlds in all possible states of
existence (Being, ousia) at all possible levels of abstraction, (the ontic) simultaneously. This view I owe to Pierce's idea of the Triad
and Dyad. So when you use neuroscience to describe the phenomena I bring up, you are not speaking at the necessary level of
abstraction and it is like, to use my favored analogy once more, answering the question of what the Mona Lisa is by offering a
compositional analysis of the dyes used in it instead of an aesthetic theory comparing it to other works made in the era or its relation
to the tradition of European art history more generally, etc, or any other theory that would take account of the internal reality of
human consciousness that I mentioned in the first sentence, without which the true, internal and intentional existence of this artifact
cannot be described. Phenomenology is the branch of philosophy that is most focused on that internality itself, many in that field
having come up with various systems for representing the unfolding of this internal reality, however my own philosophy is quite
different in its approach in being based on these levels of abstraction, as phenomenology relies on the Hegelian dialectic (which I
rejected) to describe that unfolding of cognition's internal reality within time.

Having mentioned a few of those levels, the leap to the highest level of abstraction is where the religious elements of my thought
come to bear. God is a level of abstraction beyond even that arrived at by philosophy, an abstraction beyond the abstraction of Being
itself, ie. existence beyond any particular state of existence. God isn't something you believe or don't believe in. It's something you
understand or you don't.

Not subscribing to phenomenology, (due to its reliance on Hegelian logic) my word to designate this internal reality is athesis,
drawing no less on the Socratic notion of the Intelligible which, borne solely in the mind, offers an ideational content prior to the
introduction of negation into the thesis of Being, gradually brought into focus through the destructive reconciliation and self-negating
processes of the Platonic, aporetic dialectic, which correspond to the formula "reduplication of the negative within athesis". The
Platonic Form designates simply that fully cohered, revelatory content. Both the idea of the Form and its origin in the Socratic
Intelligible was apparently lost to philosophical scholarship for the last 2,000 years. Because the Intelligible form is engendered by
and within the mind alone, as representative (representative in the sense of all beautiful objects being beautiful only because they
share in the resplendence of the Form of Beauty itself, following the famed Platonic argument) of this interior dimension of self-reflective
consciousness, it is properly designated by the concept athesis: self-evident in its reality, prior to any dialectical synthesis of
the subject-object division.

----

So there are three epistemological premises and three possible metaphysics;

Traditional metaphysics. Being, since Thales, is the thing all beings have in common, it is what makes matter matter as opposed to something else. A datum extrinsic to thought is posited as the univocal factor to which all being can be reduced as a single mode of Being, so that, once that reduction is made, the entire universe can be recreated within thought on its basis- recreated as a totalization of concepts, as absolute knowledge in Hegel's words.

Dialectical materialist "metaphysics." After Nietzsche, Marx, critical theory, any stable idea of Being is lost, like all other concepts, gender, etc. The inverted dialectic Marx used always destabilizes concepts when it is carried through enough iterations. So Marx and Deleuze and critical-theorists aren't really practicing philosophy. By using power as a singular mode to univocally reduce being to Being, Nietzsche maintained his status as a philosopher even though the underlying logic of the metaphysics he used and had been used leading up to him was self-destroyed and could not be carried further afterward. He was the last possible philosopher of that particular metaphysics which Thales began.

Me. Instead of Being formulated as the commonality of beings that can offer a singular mode through which everything can be univocally reduced to absolute knowledge, Being is formulated as what all being struggles toward, a mythopoetic unity as in Holderlin or the symbol without hypostasis in Voegelin, meaning- what the primogenial duality of Nature (Schelling) expresses tragico-poetically (Holderlin) in the ontic ruptures (Vico) which man, through the mythos, once populated with deities, and which, in the particular being called man, in the re-instituted mythologos, expresses itself beyond that tragic poeticism as the liminal participation of immanence and transcendence within one another.

Capable:

Parodites wrote:: " I can see a daemonism or polarity between these two ideas of Being, as Being with Loss and Being without Loss are both ideological positions, as I see it anyway. Neither one is actually the truth, because in the wider tectonics there is always going to be some layers of absence and some of presence, which stack up on each other and which depend relatively for their existence upon the perceptive powers of those subjectivities, beings, that happen to have been formed up within those complex layers and tectonic plates, so called. Being itself, it has no absolute Presence and no absolute Loss, because I don't believe there is such a thing as "Being" absent beings"

Being with and without Loss are two metaphysical positions. A metaphysics unfolds from a specific epistemological foundation,- since that foundation is completely different for the two, two different metaphysics follow. An ideology is a set of normative doctrines that are held to for precisely non-epistemological, that is, political matters.

Yes, but I am using the term 'ideological' not to mean moral, political or pathological-psychological but rather to mean an idea which elevates the idea-as-such, qua idea, to the status of reality which commits an error of ignoring what is underlying and causing that reality, what the idea itself actually indicates. I don't think ideas are themselves "real" with respect to the underlying causes and logics which structure them, for the same reason and to use an analogy as how a word is not real (not as real, or not real in the same way) when compared to that meaning and concept which it indicates. Words merely symbolize and represent something, that is how I see all ideas too. An idea is a "glorified word" or rather, a kind of non-worded semi-linguistic plus semi-image-based symbolic representation of... something else.

That something else is the key for me. In most cases it is a combination of fact, logic, and meaning. These are what are most real for me - facts, logic and meaning. So I would say that Being with or without Loss is, being an idea, a symbolic representation of something rather than a literal reality. Like how no one with a sane mind would mistake a word for the actual reality to which the word points, likewise I would classify philosophical positions or ideas as "ideological" if they make an error of acting as if the position or idea itself is THE reality. This is why people mistake the idea of God for an actually literally existing man in the sky, or disembodied conscious spirit or whatever. But I suppose my use of ideological as a term is non-standard. But like I was saying, I don't think any kind of "Being" actually exists; what exists are facts, logic, and meaning (meaning is the interpretation of facts+logic from the perspective of a valuing-capable being, a subjectivity that has its own "being" unto itself by virtue of the such and such sort of thing which it is, i.e. what its structures are, what are its needs, what are its capacities, what have been its experiences, and how does all of that merge and blend together productive of a single moment of consciousness.

Parodites wrote:: Being is ousia, the matter of matter. It is what makes matter- matter, as opposed to non-matter or spirit. If there is no Being, there is nothing to distinguish matter from spirit.

I distinguish it as follows: "matter" is a near-meaningless or at least obfuscating term that gets people confused because they tend to think of physicality or substantiality vs. not having either of those, i.e. matter and spirit, but in reality anything that exists must have some kind of structure AND must have some way of differentiating itself against other things and holding itself in existence as whatever it is, otherwise it would not be able to exist as what it is, therefore matter or physicality is, to me anyway, the fact that beings "touch" other things, there is some kind of contact either tangible or otherwise (ideas also contact each other and are therefore "material" too, but this is not tangible in the same way that two physical objects contact each other). So there are different kinds of touching/contact and as tectonics would say, two things can touch or contact only in so far as they are each sufficiently similar to one another in all the ways required such that this kind of encounter is possible to begin with. Some things are simply too different in scale, scope, or structure/substantiality so that they do not really encounter one another at all. Certain kind of electromagnetism just passing through physical objects without any effect on either one, for example, could be an example of that. Also a physical (so called) object like a cup cannot encounter the idea of a cup that I have in my head, except through me as the intermediary vessel between the two and my physical actions affecting the cup when I touch it. So my hand moving to touch the cup is an action within the tectonic ontic scope of the cup, and since my hand is connected to my mind wherein the idea of a cup has been neurologically instantiated, it is possible for the idea to encounter or contact the cup but only indirectly, through many intermediary steps.

So for me, matter doesn't mean anything except whether or not two things are similar enough to be able to encounter each other in some kind of contact which affects them; if this occurs then we can say that the two things are "matter" to one another, they "feel" one another. We experience this for ourselves usually as the sensation of touch.

By the way I think this is a great conversation and I would like to post it somewhere here at BTL if you are fine with that. We could continue the discussion there or here, but I like to have a record so I can examine it later, or others could weigh in if they want to.

Parodites wrote:: And dualism is necessary to develop any philosophy of nature, of individuation, of any dynamic process or unfolding.

Sure, but for me dualism means what I described above, not a kind of absolute duality such as between matter and spirit so called, but the kind of gradated differentiations of scope, size, substantiality and type which either allow or disallow two things to come into encountered contact with one another. Things are different but not absolutely different, even in the furthest extreme; just because two things cannot encounter each other directly doesn't mean they cannot encounter each other indirectly, through many steps such as in my hand and cup example.

Parodites wrote:: Which means without Being, the entire differentiation that makes all of our concepts make sense breaks down. (Which is what happened through Marx unintentionally rendering Being meaningless in the materialist-dialectic).

Yes exactly, but with Marx his error was to reduce consciousness to materiality, when in fact I would reduce materiality to consciousness. "Materiality" is just an expression of logical and factual operations instantiated in a "natural world" (grown up from the subatomic through the atomic and up and up until we get to living organisms). But at the bottom of all of it is the entire vast structural foundation of logic as such in combination with the structural foundation of facts as such, which foundations the natural or material world exists at the behest of and to represent/work with. Nothing in the material or natural world could exist except for following and unfolding with regard to these logic+fact foundations. So Marx just reversed it, and Hegel had it wrong too since there is no "Absolute" because there is no absolute dialectic or opposition between matter and spirit, there is no true dualism and Hegel lacked a tectonic theory and a value ontological theory to be able to explain all this without appeal to constant reductions to merely linguistic expressions, i.e. Hegel contributes to the emergence of analytic "philosophy" because he is unable to avoid false reductions of concepts to words, and of (in my use of ideological per the above) meaning to ideology.

Parodites wrote:: Metaphysics posits a singular extrinsic datum that it then univocally reduces all beings to, it reduces all Being to a single true mode of Being, in order to equate mind and Being at the most abstract level, the abstract level at which totalization and absolute knowledge are attained. It does this because since the Ancient Greeks, the idea that Being is the matter of matter, is what makes matter matter, could only be thought of as: Being is what all beings share, Being is the thing that all matter in all its forms has in common, so you can reduce everything to it. That was the significance behind Thales claiming that the universe was made of water and that all matter and all forms of matter were merely a different form of water, as silly as it might sound, nobody had thought of the idea that all matter had a commonality you could use to univocally reduce everything to, to reduce everything to a single mode of Being: when Thales did that, when he posited water as that common mode or shared Being, he separated logos from mythos like I said in the previous message. Mythos didn't have a problem with a plural or multivocal episteme, but once logos was separated- because logos was formerly grounded in the mythic instantiation of Truth Plato in fact recognized, it cannot ground itself, it cannot self-ground; logos became a vicious circle that had to posit an extrinsic datum, one outside of itself, that it could then use as the univocal mode to which all the universe was to be reduced, so that it could then recreate that universe within itself and totalize all knowledge as absolute-- thus Hegel.

Yeah, and this is an error too because logic and "mythos" aren't really separate. There is no univocality and it is not possible to reduce everything to one thing, or really in most cases to anything else, because reduction has built into it a kind of skew that propagates errors every time it operates. Reductions must be tempered by the remainders they produce, those remainders must be factored into the original function, like in math. Reduction itself as an operation is flawed because of these remainders which usually are hidden unless one wants to look for them. Hegel or Marx using reduction in the way they do, either toward "spirit" or toward "matter" are both errors.

Parodites wrote:: Marx, inverting Hegel, chose to reduce Being to the process of dialectical materialist unfolding itself, Nietzsche took the idea of force as the univocal factor to reduce to and created a philosophy in which metaphysics self-annihilated itself in the Will to Power, a contest of force against force that expressed the pure affirmation of a Being no longer synthesizable with other concepts, since that required inserting negation into the original thesis of Being to get the dialectic process unfolding, and the two of them together are where Deleuze got the idea of positing Being itself as pure difference. The whole gender is a social construct thing comes out of that line of thinking.

Yeah I agree, it's all just a lot of stupid errors and remainders from philosophers who didn't look closely enough at what they were doing.

Parodites wrote:: I regard the nullity underneath human subjectivity as an actual nothingness, a true immanence separate from the physical world and material history. (I will state why, but that is one reason why one of my priorities is defending the category of pure reflection and repositioning philosophy as an analytic modality that can answer questions about man's subjectivity and experience that pure psychology, biology, and economics cannot.) Because the transcendent nullity of God reflects man's immanent nullity, God is both internal and external to thought: the equivalence of thought and its external factor is what drives the dialectical reduction to univocity- that single extrinsic datum is the "one voice" that all (b)eings- that Being itself is reduced to, typically God in metaphysics.

I would say, the FALSE equivalence of thought and its external factor is what drives the dialectical reduction to univocity. It is possible to find equivalence between them but only in relationship, not in reduction, and it is never absolute equivalence but rather a kind of gradated thing, like I describe in tectonics.

For God being a nullity that reflects man's nullity, transcendent and immanent, I think this is an idea symbolically representing the fact and logic that the relative void inside man, which we feel when we turn out attention inward, can be set up in relation to another void, the one we feel when we turn out attention outward to the world around us. Either way, if we use consciousness as a telescope or microscope, we encounter the far limit beyond which we cannot penetrate with this consciousness, and this limit represents the nullity along with the fact that even what lies within our limits to consciously perceive is almost never perfectly perceived anyway despite being within that limit. There are things we can know in part, and then there are things we cannot know which lie totally beyond our powers of consciousness. So there are two voids, but these two are different from the two voids of transcendent and immanent, because the transcendent and immanent voids are voids of scale or scope plus direction of focus, while the voids of beyond the limit of our powers of consciousness and of the inadequacy of our powers of consciousness to apprehend that which does fall within this limit, are more like voids of ...different category entirely. Consciousness is finite and imperfect in both what it is able to apply itself upon as well as in the fact that there is much to which it cannot even apply itself at all.

Capable (continued from the previous post):

Parodites wrote:: But that univocal reductionism, the typical metaphysics and religion, is the main thing I am attacking. Once the transcendent is recognized as both internal and external to thought, you cannot reduce Being down to a single extrinsic datum and reproduce the whole universe within the system of absolute idealism, nor, in the Marxist inversion that attempted to strip the transcendent from the dialectic, can you prevent concepts from growing more and more nebulous as they are reiterated through series of dialectic progressions until they just become meaningless, which is what happened when Marx tried to trace the dialectic of labor in order to get to some idea of a Utopia. Once the transcendent is recognized as both internal and external to thought, that is, once the liminal participation of immanence within transcendence and vice versa is conceived, a movement beyond univocal reductionism can be made, and Being can be expressed in more than one voice, can be articulated with a multivocal truth, which is what epistemes are, the ontic, immanent, and transcendent episteme, are simply a plural identity of philosophic truth, they represent three different but equally meaningful Truths- Being can ultimately be articulated as the boundary upon which a co-creation is made and the world generated out of that liminal participation of immanence and transcendence within one another.

Yes, however I don't thing there is any literally existing transcendent or immanent. These are, again, just words or ideas we use to grasp something more fundamental, namely something factual and logical. What factually, logically exists? The fact that as I said above tectonically beings both represent/emerge from facts+logic and that beings can only encounter one another if those beings are sufficiently similar to one another. Beyond that, I see nothing transcendent or immanent unless we define transcendent as the total foundation itself of all facts+logic, and we define immanent as the inner and self-realized, tangible to itself (it matters to itself, i.e. is meaningful) sphere of experience (phenomenology) pertaining to and emergent from and in terms of any individual being. The individual being has an immanent aspect to its existence, and indeed everything that exists is to some degree an "individual being", therefore there are as many immanences as there are beings, and we could also define the transcendent in relative terms to these immanences as that particular higher order reflection of the total transcendent foundation which is pertaining to, able to be apprehended by, relevant to and for, and impacting upon, any individual immanence. I like using this kind of terminology and approach better than using anything like what Hegel or traditional philosophy does with their use of "Being" as a kind of absolutized concept. I just do not believe any such Being exists, except in the way I'm describing here.

But your use of Being as the kind of liminal possibilizing emergence into existence is interesting, if I am understanding your use of the term Being here. I think that use of Being is very close to the concept of self-valuing. But I still don't see the use or point in calling this thing "Being". Being is an outdated, metaphysical and ideological term that doesn't really have a place in proper philosophizing because of this obscurantist and obfuscating tendency it has, because it is doing that whole ideological thing I mentioned, namely what the analytics do with words but it does it with ideation as such.

Parodites wrote:: The reason why it became necessary for metaphysics to equate thought and Being, is because Aristotle accidentally connected them in an inescapable way when he formulated the four causes- because that schema connected, inseparably, phenomenon and Being. Just replace phenomenon with mind, thought. Because of that, there could be conceived no Being without a phenomenal expression, and no phenomenon without a coincident Being. My metaphysics does not have that limitation, which is why I recognize an actual immanent nullity underlying subjectivity: ie. a phenomenon that has no coincident Being, no material correlate. That is what consciousness is in my system- a phenomenon that is not connected to or co-related with Being, and has no material analogue, hence the immanent nothingness underlying it (Just as God has no phenomenal correlate, in my metaphysics: that is what I mean by his transcendent nullity reflecting man's immanent nullity. Hence also my use of the concept athesis- pre-ideational mental contents that exist prior to the thetic arrangement of Being. The transcendent nullity is God having no phenomenal expression in Being/the material universe, with the immanent nullity underlying man's subjectivity being a phenomenon lacking any co-relate in Being, ie. matter.) I go over these ideas here:

The word "thought" is like the word "Being", I prefer to be as specific as possible so I tend not to use the words thought or Being. I like words such as idea (in my broader understanding of what an idea is), logic, fact, symbolizing representation, emergence, gradated stages of intermediate connection between things that "matter" to one another, etc... To me, the immanent nullity underlying subjectivity is, again, just the self-inexpressibility and self-irreducibility of subjectivity consciousness to itself, which is just a necessary product of the fact that such subjectivity consciousness is always highly finite and limited in many ways. Because it is highly finite and limited in many ways it cannot totally know itself or trace its own genesis, either in the past or even too far in the present, therefore limits exist beyond which it cannot see, even into itself, therefore it appears veiled to itself in certain ways, and this veiling is the nullity in my view. The transcendent nullity and the immanent nullity would therefore collapse into the same thing, in my system, and only be different in terms of if we are talking about the fact+logical foundation itself versus the individual being-to-self of any given subjectivity consciousness and its own phenomenological sphere of self-value. So I can't really see how there are two absolutely different nullities, certainly not in the sense that these are each "one thing" in a metaphysical way, because I reject metaphysics to begin with as being ideological at root; but I also see that phenomenal experience does indeed have a correlate and connection to materiality, so called, so I cannot agree that "a phenomenon that is not connected to or co-related with Being, and has no material analogue, hence the immanent nothingness underlying it" because the nullity does not arise from any kind of absolute break or disconnect between phenomenon and material, consciousness or material, but rather these are quite intricately entwined and connected to each other in both the way that consciousness arises from the material+experience, and in the way that material only means "arising and emerging from and with respect to the total structural foundation of facts+logic or, more accurately, with respect to certain ranges within that total structure".

Sorry but I have to go now, but I will write more later.

Parodites:

This reply became longer and longer, but I go over why I use certain concepts like Spirit (geist), Being, etc. that you consider outdated, certain points upon which there is no compatibility between my own system and value ontology, and where I think the two do line up. The question of Being as outdated is strange to me, it is the central essence of philosophy as opposed to psychology or science. The question of Being is the highest abstraction, it is the question of how man, in his subjective experience, relates to the world- in terms of that experience. If I defined all the suborgans and the connectome in my brain with neurology I would be defining how subjective experience relates to the world- but not in terms of that experience. Same with psychology, or tectonics, or sociology. The question of Being is related to the category of pure reflection, the Platonic state of passive absorption in contemplation: the question of Being is the question of how man, in his subjective experience, relates to the world in terms of that experience, ie. through pure reflection. It is very difficult to do that, that is why there were so many stumbling blocks in the history of philosophy and it is dead now, with that noble question lost to our culture- not just because of critical theorists, but because the univocal metaphysics that Nietzsche consummated has its own intrinsic instability as disastrous as was that of the inverted Marxist materialist dialectic. Hence when I listed some of my priorities, reconceptualizing the category of pure reflection and resurrecting it was the first item. Why do we need a way to relate our subjective experience to the world in terms of that experience? Because only that form of philosophic knowledge can actually be acted upon and translated into a ethical project. I can't do anything with the knowledge of what my cerebral cortex does, as little as I can with the idea of Freudian neurosis because it is equally outside the content of my subjective experience. I say as much in the first text I will paste, that begins with "Insofar as human freedom is..." But I also wanted to point out that in the mythic era of man, so much of his subjective experience, being organized and formalized in the mythos' multivocal dramatic structure, was made comprehensible to him, that he had no need to question Being- his relation to the world, and did not suffer from what we call in our psychology- neurosis. But because he had no need to question his relation to the world and philosophize, the depth of his own techne, his eroto-poietic creativity and ability to shape the world, remained unknown to him, and he was captive to Nature, subject like the animals to her power.

I define all of what I say here chronologically through my books, specific terms and ideas, etc. One of the main ones is the idea of an epistemological closure, ie. a conceptual opposition that owes itself to an immanent feature of a reality that isn't continuous and smooth as it is univocal metaphysics or the higher abstraction of tectonics. I define three different epistemological closures, which defy the contrary closure of the human subject. It is this epistemological closure and consequent ontic gap (an ontic gap that I called the topos in that book) that is the basis for what I call an episteme, which I first detailed in Namegiving:

Insofar as human freedom is constructed with the aim of arriving at an operative
enclosure of the ontic subject, philosophy has set itself up for failure. This is suggested by
Luhmann when he asks "Does knowledge rest on construction in the sense that it only
functions because the knowing system is operatively closed, therefore: because it can
maintain no operative contact with the outside world; and because it therefore remains
dependent, for everything that it constructs, on its own distinction between self-reference
and allo-reference?" Such enclosures, such responses to the question of being, are
comprehensible and may be said to possess a degree of usefulness with regard to the
clarification of the problematic of effectively mobilizing our human resources in personal
and social life, the problematic moreover of confronting a world process into whose
service we must bring ourselves in order to flourish, only in relation to the question of
being for which they are intended to provide an answer, insofar as that question's given
formulation represents also a clarification of the corresponding problematic of
formulating, coordinating, and organizing the multivalent symbol and image-networks,
the various topoi of human subjectivity, whereby the disparate contents of our shared
experiences as human beings are intelligibly differentiated and translated into the physical
domain of concrete actions and society. Voegelin says as much in the following: “For the
answers make sense only in relation to the questions which they answer; the questions,
furthermore, make sense only in relation to the concrete experiences of reality from which
they have arisen; and the concrete experiences .. finally make sense only in the cultural
context which sets limits to their direction and range." Or, as Bloch phrased the question:
"Our questioning about ourselves is the unique problem, the resultant of all world-problems."
The ontic subject, the dasein of Heidegger for example, which confronts the
question of being, establishes the contrary domain of the failures of the epistemic subject,
so to speak- an opposing sphere in which the problems of the epistemic subject can be
continuously transposed into higher series of questions. Philosophy, whose question
according to Heidegger is precisely the question of being, solves a problem by replacing it
with a greater problem; that is, by aporetically revealing the deeper problem in which the
lesser one is rooted. In short, the answers of philosophy are meaningful only as
clarifications and re-formulations of the questions to which they are given as a response,
for these questions, like moths fluttering against the windowpane of the ineffable,
represent the possible horizon of human consciousness, serving no less, as they do, for a
clarification and re-formulation of the unregulated mass of symbolic materials out of
which the given philosophic framework in which they have been posed has been derived- no
less serving as a way of organizing that rich inheritance of culture with which the
human subject, from the point of departure in a pure confrontation with the world of
Being, comes to develop itself into effective personality. It is merely faith with which the
philosophers have asserted that the domain of the epistemic subject can be wholly
expanded into the domain of the ontic, that the ontic subject can be fully enclosed and
find at last an affirmative basis within the epistemic sphere: Heidegger saw through this,
hence his de-construction of the history of metaphysics. The Hegelian dialectic functions
on the basis that through a reconciliation and union of opposites, by way of the negation
of the negation, the absolute can be embodied in a terminus of thought that always leads
into the affirmative, the ontic successfully enclosed: if reality is rooted in a fundamental
dis-proportion between the epistemic and ontic spheres, then this basis of the Hegelian
dialectic is untenable and must be abandoned. To salvage the Hegelian system, Adorno
brings together Marxist and Freudian concepts and situates within the dialectical process
the unrealized and unattainable dream of humanity, the Freudian unconscious forever
submerged beneath conscious life by material conditionality in the vein of the Marxist
critique, and therefor a dream which in the dialectical process always leads to the
formation of ontological abruptions or closures, things which cannot be actualized by the
dialectic as affirmation- the dialectic, the more extensive it is, always ends up bringing
these ontological abruptions of the world into our universe of dialogue as the distorting
light of apocalypse- hence Adorno's magum opus of philosophic errors, negative
dialectics. This negative dialetic is no less untenable than Hegel's. Movement depends on
duality, opposition, contra-diction, and consciousness depends on movement. The
Hegelian system of dialectical mediation in which dualism is abandoned is not an image
of consciousness, as philosophy is, but merely an image of logic. The movement of
consciousness lies not in the mediation of oppositions within a third term, but in an
orienting stabilization in which one term of the polarity heightens the general oscillation
to the point of reaching into a higher polarity, as the opposition of freedom and necessity
is transfigured in the higher opposition between time and eternity, and that within the
opposition of real and ideal, etc.: the object of thought continually reveals itself as by a
self-recovery from out of the latent energy of this tension, insofar as this energy is
organized in the coordinated efforts of philosophic contemplation. The topoi of the self
lie in these independent stages of polarization, within which a set of possible orientations
is available, a set which is accordingly expanded as the stages are unfolded into their
higher forms.

So you see that here I define the epistemological closure (Heidegger found that he could not enclose the ontic subject but got no further than that for the reasons I gave in all my critiques of him in recent texts) that gave rise to what I later called an episteme, and the fact that the dualism implied by those closures, once recognized as immanent features of reality, are subsumed not by the monon or univocal reduction to one term, but by a higher closure "reaching into a higher polarity" in that text, and its consequent, higher-order conceptual opposition, ie. the next closure, moving from the ontic to the immanent and finally transcendent episteme. Being, in my philosophy, is what these immanent epistemological closures are closures of.

The gradual decay of the concept Being was because the circularity of univocal metaphysics deconstructed itself through Nietzsche and its inversion could not stabilize the meaning of concepts either, in Marx. Yet, Being, like spirit/soul/geist, is a concept filled with thousands of years of authorship- it is quite meaningful, but only when it is interpreted outside of the univocal deconstruction that produced the purely logical gradient (tectonics) on which you define all things in terms of potential interactability. There is no "outside" of or alternative to that, except for my own system. The point upon which our systems are divided is: I have articulated a primogenial dualism as immanent to reality itself, (in Hegel and univocal metaphysics geist is characterized as a nullity or void, a spirit of negation out of which the differentiation of Being and Nonbeing, the whole dualistic scheme, unfolds: for him reality itself is a continuous entity, the epistemological closures are not immanent to it) for which that logical gradient you use cannot be applied.

When I use the word Being it is either in the context of critique of one of those two or I am using it in the sense that I have redefined it:

I define a lot of conceptual oppositions as epistemological closures and ontic gaps that are immanent to reality itself, which is itself the main gap in my own system and the logical gradient you defined self-valuing with and through which you also reduced things to a question of potential interactivity, because, due to the fact that reality itself, in its innermost nature, is not smooth, gradient or continuous, and is in in fact filled with epistemological closures, there are large regions that have no possible mode of interaction- constituting the true or hard dualism I use. "Being" is that which these epistemological closures and ontic gaps are closures of and gaps within. Since I now have a stable concept of Being, the opposition between subjectivity, thought, and mind against Being, ie. spirit and Being, spirit and Matter,- the most immediate conceptual opposition, is sensible again, allowing me to begin reconstructing philosophy from the ground up, on the basis of a different epistemological scheme, ie. the plural or multi-vocal identity of philosophic Truth. Ever since Namegiving I defined a lot of concepts I have been using now, like Ontos- which is the hypostasis of an apparent dualism through synthetic abbreviation or univocity to restore or fill in a symbolic gap that actually owes itself to one of these immanent discontinuities.

Your system would apply to the apparent dualism that results from hypostasis instead of the primogenial dualism that results from these immanent epistemological closures in the structure of reality itself. It is in the nature of a philosophy of multivocal truth, that I would be able to take entire systems and just integrate them, no matter how different they are from one another, within my own, by sequestering them to functioning on the basis of one of the three epistemes- I did that with the entire history of philosophy and Western thought more generally, ie. history, aesthetics and psychology. And that is the power of my philosophy; I can reproduce the logic of any other philosophy within my own, though other philosophies cannot do the same and reproduce the logic of mine. That is why there are so many references in my books, to hundreds of different authors: a secondary goal besides reconceptualizing Being and resurrecting philosophy as an exploration of man's relationship to that Being, and to God, which is what it always was until Nietzsche consummated the instability of the univocal metaphysic, and restoring the category of pure reflection ie. philosophy as an independent (independent from neurology, biology, economics and psychology) modality for analyzing man's subjective life, -- besides those two goals, a third goal is reinterpreting the entire history of Western thought in terms of my new philosophy of Being so that it can be recontextualized and given new life instead of thrown away- which is the goal of the critical theorists I oppose so vehemently.

A lot of words I use, like Being or hypostasis, are used in relationship to a tradition or set of other authors, and to gain specificity in terms of that gradient in your system would mean to lose specificity in terms of my own.

" Yes, but I am using the term 'ideological' not to mean moral, political or pathological-psychological but rather to mean an idea which elevates the idea-as-such, qua idea, to the status of reality which commits an error of ignoring what is underlying and causing that reality, what the idea itself actually indicates. I don't think ideas are themselves "real" with respect to the underlying causes and logics which structure them, for the same reason and to use an analogy as how a word is not real (not as real, or not real in the same way) when compared to that meaning and concept which it indicates. Words merely symbolize and represent something, that is how I see all ideas too. An idea is a "glorified word" or rather, a kind of non-worded semi-linguistic plus semi-image-based symbolic representation of... something else. "

" The word "thought" is like the word "Being", I prefer to be as specific as possible so I tend not to use the words thought or Being. I like words such as idea (in my broader understanding of what an idea is), logic, fact, symbolizing representation, emergence, gradated stages of intermediate connection between things that "matter" to one another, etc... To me, the immanent nullity underlying subjectivity is, again, just the self-inexpressibility and self-irreducibility of subjectivity consciousness to itself."

Thought (any process in consciousness) and Being (a word that has hundreds of books to specify it, and which I use in several specific contexts ie. univocal Being, my own concept of Being, etc.) are specific, (your use of the word idealogical seems very unspecific, it carries many negative associations and the word I've been using, hypostasis, means exactly to elevate to the status of reality, I am very aware that this occurs, only not with all cognitive functions) as are the other related words I use equally specific- Eidos, idea/ideatum, signifier, signified, symbol, tautegory, epistemological principle, and a simple lexical word are all different functions etc. Elevating to the status of reality is what I mean by the use of the word hypostasis, which can apply to some of those functions, and to others (epistemological principles) cannot. Hence I don't take the idea of Being as outdated, insofar as it concerns purely epistemological principles, axioms about what we can possibly know. Again if you use that gradient with self-valuing logic, the concepts of mind and Being break down so pure epistemology does as well and then you would be led to call everything a hypostasis, I just don't use that gradient for a number of reasons- some of which being precisely that they cause things to break down the same way the materialist dialectic did: including itself at the most abstract level.

" In most cases it is a combination of fact, logic, and meaning. These are what are most real for me - facts, logic and meaning."

Because the epistemological closures and ontic gaps between a lot of different conceptual antinomies (dualisms) I have defined as immanent to reality itself, I am led to disagree. They prevent in my philosophy the formation of the differentiating gradient upon which everything is articulated in terms of an interaction in value ontology and demand the restoration (ie. not univocal) of several categories, like Being. The object for which those epistemological closures and ontic ruptures are precisely closures and ruptures- is Being.

I understand that the will to power and its relational affirmative force-force underpinning you further abstracted to realize a purely logical gradient of interactions out of which you articulated self-valuing: if you do that, Being no longer can be defined nor can any dualistic opposition, and what you've said follows. I just didn't, for all the same reasons I've been giving in recent texts for not following Nietzsche himself and mainly because configuring a primogenial duality as immanent to reality itself, would lead me in a very different direction. Also, replace Deleuze's territorialization with self valuing, plane of immanence with that gradient, and his idea of the process of differentiating itself as Being as the basic dispensing with the idea of Being- as even in him the defining of Being as this process of difference itself seemed self-contradictory, for at that point the concept doesn't mean anything. Deleuze was perhaps not far off from what you call self-valuing, but he still remained wed to revolutionary Marxist undertones. The point is I didn't accept the Will to Power or Nietzsche's self-destruction of metaphysics as the self-destruction of either Being or philosophic Truth, but only a self-destruction of univocity began with Thales. Hence I can't accept a lot of what is said here either, which never bothered me really, inasmuch as I would prefer to be independent/alone anyway. There is a way to unite me and value-ontology, insofar as I deal with immanent epistemological gaps in reality and value-ontology erases all merely apparent dualisms and symbolic gaps to define a self-contained formal logic governing how things interact on a field of potential- fields that must be sequestered from one another in accordance with the primogenial dualism and the epistemological closures that are immanent to reality itself- the three epistemes.

Because I found a way to define the dualism and conceptual oppositions in univocal metaphysics as immanent to reality itself, reality as a series of epistemological closures and ontic gaps, I was able to redefine Being multi-vocally: as that which these closures and gaps are closures and gaps of. The multivocality lies in the fact that the truth of Being can be articulated across three main epistemological closures that are immanent to reality, ie. the three epistemes. Your system would apply to any dualism that isn't immanent to reality itself in my view, and there are many apparent dualisms that are not truly immanent and result from hypostasis of incorrect cognitive functions that I mentioned a few paragraphs ago.

^ Only in that context can one understand what I said here:

By submerging Psyche into Nature, [This part I get from Schelling who refers to this as
the Remainder, speaking of it in terms of the daemon returning a particle of the divine
invested to it to the Godhead by submerging itself into the night of the unconscious, an
unconscious he represents by nature itself- to do this it descends through the opposing
forces of Nature to arrive at the Ground] what Holderlin calls destructive reconciliation
occurs, which he figures in the image of Empedocles: destructive reconciliation of the
finite to the infinite, flesh to spirit, man to Nature, Nature to god, freedom to necessity,
etc. Unlike Aristotelian/Hegelian catharsis, which tragedy concludes with to educate the
moral sense, the destructive reconciliation speaks to what Holderlin viewed as both tragic
pathos and philosophic potency: the tragic pathos is unrestrained philosophic potency- the
tragic pathos is the pathos of philosophy, through which the heroic telos of human nature
is met with in the great sacrifice instead of a cathartic redemption for the purpose of
morally educating us: that great sacrifice of Empedocles throwing himself into the fires of
mount Aetna to receive through death- through reconciliation and subsumption with
Nature in that fire, an instant of inspired illuminance. By submerging Psyche in Nature,
psyche's contents are reified and fill in the ontic ruptures of Nature's order- [this depends
on Holderlin's idea of boundless oblation] for Nature, in both Holderlin and Vico, is
composed of irresolvable tensions and a primordially dualistic reality, due to the fact that
they recognize the Loss of Being toward which Nature struggles for reality: out of this
closure of the ruptures in Nature's order, the Gods appear directly in Holderlinian
ekstasis, as intuitions of that lost Being. So it is not that the Gods are just manifestations
of unconscious psychic forces: the submergence of psyche in Nature reifies the contents
of psyche within the ontic ruptures of a primogenial duality and the Gods appear from
this glimpse at "radical non-differentiation" through the radical differentiation of that
dualistic, fragmented Nature, a nature that cannot be put back together without this
element of deity.

So the mythos is not a mere "image-space" in Benjamin's language, nor a collective reservoir of archetypes as in Jung. The mythos is created by man reifying the unconscious elements of his subjectivity, psyche, within these ontic gaps- epistemological closures immanent to reality itself, in order to capture his subjectivity in a comprehensible form before philosophy and psychology arose. That is what mythos is. Thales separating mythos from logos was due to his beginning a univocal reductionism that hypostasized the conscious thinking and deliberate element of man (as opposed to the unconscious one or psyche's role in the mythos) as an equivalence with a univocal mode of Being to which all beings were reduced- the Cartesian transcedental subject was eventually produced out of that. When I speak of mythologos I mean, a multi-vocal philosophy of Being, as the mythos was multivocal but lacked a concept of Being and thus submitted man to Nature, while Thales' metaphysics gave man a concept of Being which allowed him to overcome nature and begin to understand his own techne or ability to shape that nature into what he wanted, but it was univocal and circular, condemning man to what later became the seizure of ontos as human techne itself, a fusion of ontology and techne that demanded eternal technological and economic perfection.

"I distinguish it as follows: "matter" is a near-meaningless or at least obfuscating term that gets people confused because they tend to think of physicality or substantiality vs. not having either of those, i.e. matter and spirit, but in reality anything that exists must have some kind of structure AND must have some way of differentiating itself against other things and holding itself in existence as whatever it is, otherwise it would not be able to exist as what it is, therefore matter or physicality is, to me anyway, the fact that beings "touch" other things, there is some kind of contact either tangible or otherwise (ideas also contact each other and are therefore "material" too, but this is not tangible in the same way that two physical objects contact each other)."

in reality anything that exists must have some kind of structure AND must have some way of differentiating itself against other things and holding itself in existence as whatever it is, otherwise it would not be able to exist as what it is

But exist means, be a part of the temporal process of unfolding in which any gradient or possible interaction could be expressed between things. A thing can "be" and yet not exist, which would mean it doesn't need to have a structure in that sense, only quality.

But defining matter in terms of a gradient of possible interactions (which sounds similar to how the plane of immanence functions, with the possibility to touch/interacting being called re/territorialization) is of little use to me since I conceive of nature as a series of noninteracting antinomies,- ontic ruptures as I learned to see it from Voegelin, Schelling, Holderlin, Bruno, and Vico- the five that shaped my philosophy of nature. Expanding the Will to Power into a purely logical scheme in which you define such a gradient, which is what I take self-valuing to be, is simply not the road I took, and seems similar to how I interpreted what Deleuze did, ie:

Because Marx is a total inversion of Hegel and he begins with the flow of evolutionary material history, for him the extrinsic datum is precisely that material, and the univocity of Being is articulated as a plenitude of different modes (thus Deleuze's idea of Difference itself as univocity or Being) representing the numerous configurations of social forces impressing themselves upon us, upon Mind, in order to disunite the species member or individual from the species-essence. That "plenitude of modes of Being" is the basis upon which Deleuze further developed his deterritorilization/territorilization concept, and the idea of that very plenitude itself abstracted and hypostasized is the precursor for the idea of a Body without Organs, an emancipatory configuration or embodiment of knowledge that deterritorializes configurations that limit it like "gender". (gender as social construction) It is no less the basis for the idea of the plenitude itself as Being, considered as the plane of immanence or pure difference in his words,- a field with internal potentialities that get unlocked and discharged as individual beings materialize themselves upon it as multitudinous intensities, and, as intensities, interact with one another in terms of Force against Force, in Nietzsche's language, to either deterritorialize configurations upon this field and open up further potentialities or to be territorialized by them- by which he means, reduced to their "socially imposed" gender and respective gender norms, etc. Deleuze's interpretation of the Will to Power was a will, not to the projective territorializing power of the socially oppressive configurations "colonizing" regions on this field, but a will to the power of the field itself, to the immanent plane, to difference itself as Being: hence, for him, the Will to Power was the force capable of total deterritorializing of the potentialities of this plane of immanence so that a full emancipation of the creative individual might be assumed, beyond all gender, racial, class specifications. The equivalence between thought and Being, presupposed by the metaphysics of Being without Loss, implies a singular mode of Being through which thought, by a series of reductive iterations of the dialectical process, recreates its external datum or ontos within itself, just as the Absolute is recreated within the movement of Geist, in order to achieve the encompassing idealist system,- in order to achieve the "thinking about thinking" characteristic of this metareflective mode of philosophy. With desire supplemented for the Absolute, desire as a generative force participant on that immanent plane, the iterative process of the dialectic, once inverted, is raised to an infinite power and becomes what Deleuze calls repetition, which reproduces the plenitude of modes of Being out of the flow of material history as immanence, and moreover an eternal recurrence of those forces configured upon the plane of immanence in such a way as to free up emancipatory potentiality.

"For God being a nullity that reflects man's nullity, transcendent and immanent, I think this is an idea symbolically representing the fact and logic that the relative void inside man, which we feel when we turn out attention inward"

That isn't what I mean by void, it is not something you can directly feel or intuit. There is nullity in the Lacanian sense as the barred subject, in the Cartesian sense as the nullity of the transcendental subject which knows only its own existence, etc. I use it to refer to the nonequivalence between mind and Being. (subjectivity and Being are discontinuous, non-equivalent, there is no possible tectonic or connection, they signify one of the immanent dualisms)

" But your use of Being as the kind of liminal possibilizing emergence into existence is interesting, if I am understanding your use of the term Being here. I think that use of Being is very close to the concept of self-valuing. But I still don't see the use or point in calling this thing "Being". Being is an outdated, metaphysical and ideological term that doesn't really have a place in proper philosophizing because of this obscurantist and obfuscating tendency it has, because it is doing that whole ideological thing I mentioned "

I don't accept that your use of the word ideology can be applied to things like epistemological principles. Since I do not accept that such a gradient can be defined through logical priority, in terms of the conceivable interaction of things upon it, (like a plane of immanence) and I do not accept either univocal metaphysics or Marxism, then I must re-think the concept of Being to resolve the hard dualism in my philosophy of nature, because the same reasons I give for not following Nietzsche through Deleuze and then out into the purely logical gradient of interactions upon which you have developed self-valuing, still basically apply. Being is liminal in the sense that Nature expresses something through those discontinuous antinomies, ontic ruptures- the hard dualism and oppositions and epistemological closures, (that for which they are precisely closures and ruptures) that cannot be articulated by univocal reduction and synthetic abbreviation: immanence (the discontinuity between subjectivity and (b)eings) and transcendence (the discontinuity between (b)eings and God) participate within one another through that limen, expressing three thresholds at which one crosses into the other, ie. the three epistemes. The three express the plural/multivocal identity of Truth.

Capable:

Parodites wrote:: This reply became longer and longer, but I go over why I use certain concepts like Spirit (geist), Being, etc. that you consider outdated, certain points upon which there is no compatibility between my own system and value ontology, and where I think the two do line up. The question of Being as outdated is strange to me, it is the central essence of philosophy as opposed to psychology or science. The question of Being is the highest abstraction, it is the question of how man, in his subjective experience, relates to the world- in terms of that experience. If I defined all the suborgans and the connectome in my brain with neurology I would be defining how subjective experience relates to the world- but not in terms of that experience. Same with psychology, or tectonics, or sociology. The question of Being is related to the category of pure reflection, the Platonic state of passive absorption in contemplation: the question of Being is the question of how man, in his subjective experience, relates to the world in terms of that experience, ie. through pure reflection. It is very difficult to do that, that is why there were so many stumbling blocks in the history of philosophy and it is dead now, with that noble question lost to our culture- not just because of critical theorists, but because the univocal metaphysics that Nietzsche consummated has its own intrinsic instability as disastrous as was that of the inverted Marxist materialist dialectic.

I agree entirely, except for the use of the concept or term of Being, because Being necessitates univocity, that is quite literally what it means... one thing, one Being for all things. Not "what is the being of any particular being?" which is a question I would obviously welcome and think is very useful and essential, but to simply reduce the beings of all beings to a singular "Being" seems, to me anyway, to basically invite if not outright necessitate the metaphysical reduction to univocity which you and I both disagree with.

I don't see the point in using a term that is already designated as "one thing" and not only that but is also designed as this one-thing to be applied to everything. I think we should ask about the being of a particular thing, or class of things if possible; we can speak of more universal things too, but for me that is, again, just three components: fact, logic, and meaning.

Fact is simply whatever happens to exist and however that happens to be the case; what is real, existence as such, expressed or encountered and understood in this purely factual sense. "It is a fact that..." is a very unique and different kind of statement than other statements. To reach that level of being able to conceive of such things is important for life, because prior to that level life is just acting secondarily to factual states rather than comprehending them and thus gaining the ability to get out in front of them and countermand or encourage them as that life-form sees fit.

Logic is simply necessity, relationally and the structure of that, i.e. if/then, either/or, modus tollens, etc. This is also essential for obvious reasons, for life to understand, because just like facts (and facts and logic are not the same) life will only act secondarily in terms of logic but not be able to assume logic unto itself until such life is able to actually grasp what logic is.

Meaning is simple "why do I care" to either a fact or a logic, or to anything really, an experience, whatever... meaning is basically the motive-power, the "it matters" (I read this as also "material", that something becomes "matter" to a being to whom said thing means something). So meaning is closer to where we might seat will (another outdated and metaphysical concept or term that I dont like), or subjectivity or subjective experience. But in reality I think we need the full picture of all parts and all levels to really grasp and articulate what is going on. We need physics, biology, all that, psychology and history and linguistics and then we also need to abstract up to the level of those three things which I think are fundamental and which , in tandem, replace concerns of Being, will, spirit, etc.

Parodites wrote:: Hence when I listed some of my priorities, reconceptualizing the category of pure reflection and resurrecting it was the first item. Why do we need a way to relate our subjective experience to the world in terms of that experience? Because only that form of philosophic knowledge can actually be acted upon and translated into a ethical project. I can't do anything with the knowledge of what my cerebral cortex does, as little as I can with the idea of Freudian neurosis because it is equally outside the content of my subjective experience. I say as much in the first text I will paste, that begins with "Insofar as human freedom is..." But I also wanted to point out that in the mythic era of man, so much of his subjective experience, being organized and formalized in the mythos' multivocal dramatic structure, was made comprehensible to him, that he had no need to question Being- his relation to the world, and did not suffer from what we call in our psychology- neurosis. But because he had no need to question his relation to the world and philosophize, the depth of his own techne, his eroto-poietic creativity and ability to shape the world, remained unknown to him, and he was captive to Nature, subject like the animals to her power.

I definitely agree with all of this. Except for the term or concept of Being, of course. I still cannot see how we can even use the idea of Being without necessarily also using the idea of univocity. Being itself means "one being for all beings". The being of something, that is a question I can get behind, and if we want to phrase that as "the Being of something" then that is ok with me. It's just that, again, the terms seems to lend itself much too much to mysticism, ideology, analytic linear reductive approaches, religious approaches, etc. But we do agree on the content here, we just disagree on the main term.

Parodites wrote:: I define all of what I say here chronologically through my books, specific terms and ideas, etc. One of the main ones is the idea of an epistemological closure, ie. a conceptual opposition that owes itself to an immanent feature of a reality that isn't continuous and smooth as it is univocal metaphysics or the higher abstraction of tectonics.

Well I can't say that tectonics in hits higher abstractions would say that it is an immanent feature of reality that it is continuous and smooth. I do think there is connection across all levels but that connections tends toward locality, and often the connections or "gears" between layers and levels are choppy, erratic, imperfect; in fact they are usually like that. Logic, fact, and meaning coming together in one domain, one being, one life, or one purview is not really going to be a kind of perfect spirit or whatever, it is going to be a kind of chaos. A minimal necessary binding between many different substances and forces and perspectives and capacities and all that, minimum necessary in order to bind that said being into its momentary existence. I wouldn't posit any kind of smooth continuity, but I would say there are no absolute ruptures. To have an absolute rupture would not make sense to me, any more than causa sui or sui generis would make sense, which to me it does not.

There is chaos theory explaining how non-reducible events can emerge from very chaotic systems, but those are still causal even if that system itself, even if any other system in theory too, could never actually trace the intricacies of that emergence. But to claim there are absolute ruptures would be to claim there is... nothing there, or a kind of hole in reality. I can't see reality as having holes like that. But again I do certainly see that beings are to a large extent self-irreducible and self-inexpressible, which to me is largely what produces the nullities and, these limits are just there because of the finitude and imperfection of beings, which is easy to understand according to fact, logic, and meaning. And just natural law really.

If tectonics is anything it is certainly not a univocity. It is perhaps the expressions of non-univocity par excellence, because it seems to preclude any possible univocal 'oneness' or God/Being type of metaphysical stance. Everything is always reducing, but not in the materials way rather in a phenomenological way and in all directions at once, in and out, left and right, up and down, forward and backward in time, etc. I would never subscribe even the possibility of a single "Being" that could apply to every being in existence, except maybe a kind of most basic logical structural formation which is required for what we call perspective to appear, the ability to have a point of view upon whatever is around oneself and impacting upon oneself; a rock doesn't really do that, well it does but that perspective is fractured up into every individual molecule of the rock, there is no unifying or centralizing factor and no factor of memory capacity so the rock can only respond according to the individual logics of its molecules in relation, and those relations can never add up to something like a perspective. But in life we see it differently, life is formed up according to logical structures and principles such that a perspective or point of view is generated, and I think this is key. Perhaps this could be the only "Being" that I might agree to, but its certainly not something we can precisely describe yet, only in the abstract or more theoretical level by knowing that somehow this is the case.

Parodites wrote:: I define three different epistemological closures, which defy the contrary closure of the human subject. It is this epistemological closure and consequent ontic gap (an ontic gap that I called the topos in that book) that is the basis for what I call an episteme, which I first detailed in Namegiving:

Insofar as human freedom is constructed with the aim of arriving at an operative
enclosure of the ontic subject, philosophy has set itself up for failure. This is suggested by
Luhmann when he asks "Does knowledge rest on construction in the sense that it only
functions because the knowing system is operatively closed, therefore: because it can
maintain no operative contact with the outside world; and because it therefore remains
dependent, for everything that it constructs, on its own distinction between self-reference
and allo-reference?" Such enclosures, such responses to the question of being, are
comprehensible and may be said to possess a degree of usefulness with regard to the
clarification of the problematic of effectively mobilizing our human resources in personal
and social life, the problematic moreover of confronting a world process into whose
service we must bring ourselves in order to flourish, only in relation to the question of
being for which they are intended to provide an answer, insofar as that question's given
formulation represents also a clarification of the corresponding problematic of
formulating, coordinating, and organizing the multivalent symbol and image-networks,
the various topoi of human subjectivity, whereby the disparate contents of our shared
experiences as human beings are intelligibly differentiated and translated into the physical
domain of concrete actions and society. Voegelin says as much in the following: “For the
answers make sense only in relation to the questions which they answer; the questions,
furthermore, make sense only in relation to the concrete experiences of reality from which
they have arisen; and the concrete experiences .. finally make sense only in the cultural
context which sets limits to their direction and range." Or, as Bloch phrased the question:
"Our questioning about ourselves is the unique problem, the resultant of all world-problems."
The ontic subject, the dasein of Heidegger for example, which confronts the
question of being, establishes the contrary domain of the failures of the epistemic subject,
so to speak- an opposing sphere in which the problems of the epistemic subject can be
continuously transposed into higher series of questions. Philosophy, whose question
according to Heidegger is precisely the question of being, solves a problem by replacing it
with a greater problem; that is, by aporetically revealing the deeper problem in which the
lesser one is rooted. In short, the answers of philosophy are meaningful only as
clarifications and re-formulations of the questions to which they are given as a response,
for these questions, like moths fluttering against the windowpane of the ineffable,
represent the possible horizon of human consciousness, serving no less, as they do, for a
clarification and re-formulation of the unregulated mass of symbolic materials out of
which the given philosophic framework in which they have been posed has been derived- no
less serving as a way of organizing that rich inheritance of culture with which the
human subject, from the point of departure in a pure confrontation with the world of
Being, comes to develop itself into effective personality. It is merely faith with which the
philosophers have asserted that the domain of the epistemic subject can be wholly
expanded into the domain of the ontic, that the ontic subject can be fully enclosed and
find at last an affirmative basis within the epistemic sphere: Heidegger saw through this,
hence his de-construction of the history of metaphysics. The Hegelian dialectic functions
on the basis that through a reconciliation and union of opposites, by way of the negation
of the negation, the absolute can be embodied in a terminus of thought that always leads
into the affirmative, the ontic successfully enclosed: if reality is rooted in a fundamental
dis-proportion between the epistemic and ontic spheres, then this basis of the Hegelian
dialectic is untenable and must be abandoned. To salvage the Hegelian system, Adorno
brings together Marxist and Freudian concepts and situates within the dialectical process
the unrealized and unattainable dream of humanity, the Freudian unconscious forever
submerged beneath conscious life by material conditionality in the vein of the Marxist
critique, and therefor a dream which in the dialectical process always leads to the
formation of ontological abruptions or closures, things which cannot be actualized by the
dialectic as affirmation- the dialectic, the more extensive it is, always ends up bringing
these ontological abruptions of the world into our universe of dialogue as the distorting
light of apocalypse- hence Adorno's magum opus of philosophic errors, negative
dialectics. This negative dialetic is no less untenable than Hegel's. Movement depends on
duality, opposition, contra-diction, and consciousness depends on movement. The
Hegelian system of dialectical mediation in which dualism is abandoned is not an image
of consciousness, as philosophy is, but merely an image of logic. The movement of
consciousness lies not in the mediation of oppositions within a third term, but in an
orienting stabilization in which one term of the polarity heightens the general oscillation
to the point of reaching into a higher polarity, as the opposition of freedom and necessity
is transfigured in the higher opposition between time and eternity, and that within the
opposition of real and ideal, etc.: the object of thought continually reveals itself as by a
self-recovery from out of the latent energy of this tension, insofar as this energy is
organized in the coordinated efforts of philosophic contemplation. The topoi of the self
lie in these independent stages of polarization, within which a set of possible orientations
is available, a set which is accordingly expanded as the stages are unfolded into their
higher forms.

So you see that here I define the epistemological closure (Heidegger found that he could not enclose the ontic subject but got no further than that for the reasons I gave in all my critiques of him in recent texts) that gave rise to what I later called an episteme, and the fact that the dualism implied by those closures, once recognized as immanent features of reality, are subsumed not by the monon or univocal reduction to one term, but by a higher closure "reaching into a higher polarity" in that text, and its consequent, higher-order conceptual opposition, ie. the next closure, moving from the ontic to the immanent and finally transcendent episteme. Being, in my philosophy, is what these immanent epistemological closures are closures of.

But what are they closures of, I cannot see that. The closures are, in my understanding so far, the fact that rather than take a conceptual opposition to a higher stage of its inherent or implied polarity we just rest at the level of the opposition itself, call it a day, and take the existing level of the polarity as given reality, therefore no thinking beyond that given impasse is possible. Therefore the closure would be a kind of inability to see what lies more broadly and more finally, more completely, behind existing polarities in our conceptions, the real reasons for these remain obscure to us and we mistake the polarity itself, in the moment, for the entirety of its possible structure or logical-metaphysical structure thus we miss the bigger picture and reduce our conception to a smaller level than it ought to be at.

So in your system then, Being is a way of expressing all of the hidden logical-metaphysical substance which we have not yet encountered because we are stuck in lower level polarizing opposition of conception? In that case I can agree with you, I see it that way too, but I just didn't even call that thing "Being". I like how you appropriate the term Being for this, though, that is really interesting. If I am understanding you correctly, of course.

I still would not agree though because Being (or the being of any given being; that which a being is) is always going to be a lot more than simply what it does not yet know, what thresholds of higher understanding of itself it has not yet reached. I don't think we can define the being of a being solely in terms of that which it has not yet risen to yet in its self-knowledge or subjectivity stature of possible experiential self-relations as philosophy for example is as you say the expression of the relation of being to outside existence in terms of that being's subjectivity experience as such (my paraphrase)... I like your use of Being here, but I don't think I would call it Being, rather I would call it a key aspect of the being of a being but not the entirety of that being of a being, for various reasons such as for example that a thing is not refuted or found wanting merely because it is imperfect or not the absolute highest expression of itself; something being finite is not a mark against that thing, for the simple reason that finitude exists for a reason and is quite necessary and that fact, meaning, and logic can all exist and can also all come together in higher-order conscious subjectivity life experience in such a way even that this life experience is able to apprehend these three things and begin to reformulate itself in terms of them, and the sheer fact that this is even possible despite all of the finitude and limitation and getting stuck in the lower polarities of conceptual oppositions seems to me anyway to demonstrate that we cannot simply define a being's being as that which it has not yet rendered open to itself by virtue of penetrating maximally into its own epistemic closures.

Basically, I see that fact, logic, and meaning as well as the conflux of these three in interesting and supportive and mutually beneficial ways all climbing upward upon the continuum of being, do not actually need any kind of perfection of disclosing the maximal penetration into epistemic closures which exist by virtue of the finitude, imperfection and chaos of existence. Maybe beings are indeed this slow climb up that ladder and are destined to totally tear the veil back and remove all such closures, penetrate absolutely into them and maximize the self-knowledge and all possible applications of it, but that is a long way off if it is even possible and I would not be able to call that Being itself. Although I can see why you could have that perspective, it is a really interesting point of view, one that reminds me a little bit of Hegel's Absolute Spirit as the inevitable perfection of existence in the Divine, only that you aren't operating by the same method as Hegel did, but you do seem to be pointing to the same sort of direction and endpoint of a perfected state wherein no closures exist anymore, because Being itself has been defined as that which is closed off under the topoi... although you aren't really Hegelian here either because you aren't, as far as I can tell anyway, saying that life will or ought to rise above all the topoi and leave them being in a kind of absolutely perfected divine state, rather you seem to be articulating the most basic and fundamental or essentially existing topoi, what they are and how they function and in what larger system of relation and progressive constructions they are set with respect to one another, in order to view subjectivity as a kind of meta-relation between the various topoi. There is no one topoic state to be achieved, rather there are different possible relations between the different topoi, with a corresponding episteme to each topoic level.

“Parodites” wrote:: The gradual decay of the concept Being was because the circularity of univocal metaphysics deconstructed itself through Nietzsche and its inversion could not stabilize the meaning of concepts either, in Marx. Yet, Being, like spirit/soul/geist, is a concept filled with thousands of years of authorship- it is quite meaningful, but only when it is interpreted outside of the univocal deconstruction that produced the purely logical gradient (tectonics) on which you define all things in terms of potential interactability. There is no "outside" of or alternative to that, except for my own system.

I would not class my idea of tectonics anywhere hear the whole Marx, Hegel, Nietzschean systems. Tectonics isn't this kind of reductive deconstructive approach, the best way I've been able to explain it in terms of traditional philosophy is as an opposite method of Husserl's eidetic reduction. It is eidetic expansiveness, a kind of reduction upward, if that makes sense. A reverse flow of time, which is sort of what consciousness is anyway, or a breaking of time from within time to introduce something non-temporal into temporal existence, i.e. conscious subjectivity beings such as ourselves who are capable of apprehending facts, meaning, and logic directly and therefore, on the basis of this capacity, we are able to be reformulated in our own beings by virtue of these facts, meanings and logic directly rather than only indirectly as is the case for the rest of the natural world. Again, the logical gradation between tectonic layers is by no means smooth or continuous, it is deeply fractured, broken up in small ways locally and large ways globally, and there is no overarching Being or God or whatever that could come in and act as a universal medium of relation or exchange; there is no oil in the gears, so to speak, and only beings themselves must negotiate and grind up against each other endlessly in order to produce what are always at best partial reconciliations between each other, but these partial reconciliation are basically required because they go on to form the entire tectonic plate-structure itself, the society for example, the species, the shared experience, the ways in which certain constructions of facts, logic and meaning all three come together in a present moment as a such and such particular kind of being, etc.

“Parodites” wrote:: The point upon which our systems are divided is: I have articulated a primogenial dualism as immanent to reality itself, (in Hegel and univocal metaphysics geist is characterized as a nullity or void, a spirit of negation out of which the differentiation of Being and Nonbeing, the whole dualistic scheme, unfolds: for him reality itself is a continuous entity, the epistemological closures are not immanent to it) for which that logical gradient you use cannot be applied.

If I am understanding you correctly, the primogenial dualism that is immanent to reality itself, which you have articulated, is the fact that subjectivity consciousness is built upon different epistemes and these epistemes cannot communicate to each other because they each have different types of truth, and that each episteme is actually a topoi or gap based on the fact of its own inability to raise itself, the various conceptual polarities which it already is, to yet even higher and more complete levels?

If that is the case, then I would need to work this into tectonics, but I can see how it could be done. My idea is not one of logical gradient in line with Hegel or Nietzsche or anyone else I have ever read. There are many dualisms and many unities, but none of them is absolute, none of them is universal and none of them is necessary in the strict logical-metaphysical sense. It is just that, the way life is and existence operates requires a degree of finitude, imperfection etc. as well as simple distance between things, not just physical distance but distance in time, distance between types, scopes and scales of operation and possible experience, etc., and these distances act like dualisms when an entity is able to act in terms of that which is so distances but is not able to actually unite those distances in a way that would entirely close them together again without that distance being there. It isn't like, in being highly conscious, we can actually rewrite existence itself. Things will remain distant in those many ways I indicated, and more I am sure, regardless of whatever beings might evolve and develop into existence which are themselves capable of understanding and acting in terms of those distances.

“Parodites” wrote:: When I use the word Being it is either in the context of critique of one of those two or I am using it in the sense that I have redefined it:

I define a lot of conceptual oppositions as epistemological closures and ontic gaps that are immanent to reality itself,

But why are such epistemological closures and ontic gaps immanent to reality itself? That is what I do not understand.

Let me think on this and I will respond more to the below soon.

Edit,

“Parodites” wrote:: which is itself the main gap in my own system and the logical gradient you defined self-valuing with and through which you also reduced things to a question of potential interactivity, because, due to the fact that reality itself, in its innermost nature, is not smooth, gradient or continuous, and is in in fact filled with epistemological closures, there are large regions that have no possible mode of interaction- constituting the true or hard dualism I use. "Being" is that which these epistemological closures and ontic gaps are closures of and gaps within. Since I now have a stable concept of Being, the opposition between subjectivity, thought, and mind against Being, ie. spirit and Being, spirit and Matter,- the most immediate conceptual opposition, is sensible again, allowing me to begin reconstructing philosophy from the ground up, on the basis of a different epistemological scheme, ie. the plural or multi-vocal identity of philosophic Truth. Ever since Namegiving I defined a lot of concepts I have been using now, like Ontos- which is the hypostasis of an apparent dualism through synthetic abbreviation or univocity to restore or fill in a symbolic gap that actually owes itself to one of these immanent discontinuities.

Your system would apply to the apparent dualism that results from hypostasis instead of the primogenial dualism that results from these immanent epistemological closures in the structure of reality itself. It is in the nature of a philosophy of multivocal truth, that I would be able to take entire systems and just integrate them, no matter how different they are from one another, within my own, by sequestering them to functioning on the basis of one of the three epistemes- I did that with the entire history of philosophy and Western thought more generally, ie. history, aesthetics and psychology. And that is the power of my philosophy; I can reproduce the logic of any other philosophy within my own, though other philosophies cannot do the same and reproduce the logic of mine. That is why there are so many references in my books, to hundreds of different authors: a secondary goal besides reconceptualizing Being and resurrecting philosophy as an exploration of man's relationship to that Being, and to God, which is what it always was until Nietzsche consummated the instability of the univocal metaphysic, and restoring the category of pure reflection ie. philosophy as an independent (independent from neurology, biology, economics and psychology) modality for analyzing man's subjective life, -- besides those two goals, a third goal is reinterpreting the entire history of Western thought in terms of my new philosophy of Being so that it can be recontextualized and given new life instead of thrown away- which is the goal of the critical theorists I oppose so vehemently.

Yes I see what you are saying here, but what I do not understand is what makes these particular few closures you identify so special, so universal, so necessary? Precisely on what basis and for what reason do you conclude in these particular gaps are literally absolute gaps in reality as such? I agree there are gaps everywhere, but I have explained why such gaps exist, i.e. the finitude and imperfection of existing things, the chaotic nature of existence, the self-inexpressibility and self-irreducibility and self-irreconcilability of a being to itself, etc. I think that any gaps that we can identify I am able to explain in those terms, explain the reasons why those gaps exist. And because of that, of those reasons and how we can understand them, I cannot see how such gaps are at a higher order level such as the gaps you are claiming exist at.

Many things can interact that could not otherwise interact, through something like consciousness, philosophy, etc. This does not somehow sew up those gaps themselves, but it builds another layer of existence atop the gaps, uniting them at a higher more comprehensive level and building something new into existence in terms of those formerly disunited and distanced things, but this does not really unite or undo the gaps themselves; and as I said there are many, many gaps, and I cannot see why the ones you identify are different from the others or why they are entirely necessary in themselves, as being immanent to reality itself as you said.

What about reality is it that makes these epistemic closures, the fundamental gaps you identify as the topoi, actually immanent to reality itself? This is what I do not yet see.

Also, the idea of an absolute or necessary gap seems to go against the idea of causality. By the principle of sufficient reason, everything that exists has reasons which were and are sufficient for its existing, and it cannot not be asked of any thing in existence "why this thing and rather not something else?". I am finding it hard to wrap my head around the idea of immanent gaps in reality, because these would seem to have to be non-causal in nature, because if they were caused by something in reality then they are not really immanent gaps in reality, they are just another kind of causation working within and as a part of reality itself, even if that particular sort of causation, for whatever reason, isn't able to relate itself to other kinds of causalities around it, which by the way is one aspect of tectonics that I have talked about before namely that sometimes two things which have such different causalities cannot actually relate causally to each other in ways that would be understandable to those things themselves, i.e. in the terms of their respective causalities. A good example is the randomness of where the next rain drop will land on my driveway; there is no way to predict where it will land, and yet wherever it lands it was entirely causally necessary that that particular rain drop landed there, and yet from the causal perspective of the sidewalk, of the raindrop, or of my viewing these things there is no actual reason or causality as to why it hit where it did.

So called random events like that occur all the time, merely because two or more things are so far removed from one another in their respective causalities that those causalities cannot interpret, in terms of themselves, any encounters between each other. So that is a kind of immanent gap, I suppose, one that tectonics explains as occurs when two or more things are sufficiently far enough removed from one another's respective causalities and yet manage somehow to come into contact with each other.. this would basically reduce away the meaning level and leave only logic and fact, but even the logic here reduces to the individual things themselves, because the intersection of those two things in relation cannot actually be interpreted backwards into the terms of any of those things which are interacting in that way.

Will read and reply to the rest soon.

Parodites:

"But to claim there are absolute ruptures would be to claim there is... nothing there, or a kind of hole in reality. I can't see reality as having holes like that."

"If I am understanding you correctly, the primogenial dualism that is immanent to reality itself, which you have articulated, is the fact that subjectivity consciousness is built upon different epistemes and these epistemes cannot communicate to each other because they each have different types of truth, and that each episteme is actually a topoi or gap based on the fact of its own inability to raise itself, the various conceptual polarities which it already is, to yet even higher and more complete levels?"

Not quite. Essentially, reality itself is not enclosed- it is constituted as a series of epistemological closures (limits of knowledge that imply a plural identity of truth instead of univocity) and ontic ruptures. Because of that, when we try to relate ourselves to that reality in terms of our lived, subjective experience, we find difficulty, with the nullity of man's consciousness I refer to owing itself to the fact that our subjective reality- is continuous. It is a continuity on top of a discontinuity, and so it cannot perfectly conform to or align with it- that is the underlying nothingness that stifles our attempts at philosophy. As to why I believe this, or posit that there are closures immanent to reality itself- therefor epistemological closures, is because I did away with the absolute connection between phenomenon and Being I mentioned with Aristotle:

[The Aristotelian metaphysics indirectly posited, through the schema of the four causes, an inseparable link between phenomenon
and Being (ousia, substance), as between activity and the soul, ie. the entelecheia. This linkage signifies the breaking off of athesis
and an imputation of Being's imperfection, insofar as Being depends thereby on phenomenal expression in order to reveal itself as
aletheia: in other words, it is because of this original Aristotelian premise, that the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic in its modern form
inherited a significant limitation in that there can be no phenomena without Being, nor any revelation of Being without phenomenon.
It is for that reason that modern philosophers, all working out of that metaphysical foundation, have such a problem with the notion of
qualia, for it is precisely "a phenomenon without Being", which describes the athesis of human reflectivity, that is, the internal reality
of subjective consciousness. To state the problem inherent in the Aristotelian schema of the four causes in other words: phenomenon
and Being, that is, appearance and Being- or better still, Becoming and Being, and moreover the human shaping or erotic poiesis, to
speak again psychoanalytically, of Becoming (techne) and Being, must remain equivalent. Stiegler points out as his central thesis
that the interfusion of these two finally occurs in the 18th century, obviously with no slight assistance from the Nietzschean
philosophy, however, without any notion of the Loss of Being, this fusion took place as one between techne and ontology, effecting
what he calls a state of "permanent innovation," the elevation of man's techne to the ontic itself, the seizure of ontos or Being as an
image of infinite technological mastery over a finite materia readily conformable to the "aimless finality" Capitalism posits within
itself, or that perpetual economic growth coincident no less with the Aristotelian kinesis toward the perfection of human happiness as
the perfection of the polis.]

That absolute connection between phenomenon and Being became the absolute connection (equivalence) between thought and Being in Hegel's dialectic, and that is the univocal in its essence. So the first epistemological closure is just that: the one between phenomenon and Being. The episteme is an abstract model of the closures, (the three epistemological closures, the three epistemes all taken together, I invoke with the word athesis) models of them as liminal to one another, with the ontic episteme modeling this first closure. Being becomes that within which these ruptures- are ruptures, and therefor not a passive quality shared between all beings, a singular mode all beings can be univocally reduced to, but an active creativity that these beings participate within, which Holderlin represents with his idea of mytho-poetic truth: Being as the object of a kind of empty longing of beings, of the creation itself.

That is the main point, the misreading of Being. Being only implies univocity because of the project began by Thales, and consummated by Nietzsche's self-destruction of univocity. Being is conceptualized there as a passive quality that is shared by (b)eings, that all beings can be reduced to. But I have read Being as an active creative entity that all beings participat within. Being is a concept that represents man's relationship to the world, both the world as individuals and as a whole, in terms of his own subjective experience of that world. If it is defined as a passive commonality in the manner of Thales then yes it does imply univocity, but I have conceived it as an active creative entity that implies plurality, a plurality I model with what I call epistemes, each of the three representing one of the immanent closures to reality as an epistemological limit, hence the word episteme.

Then this is combined with the idea of the "self-sublation of the real", the other side of my positing closures immanent to reality itself, therefor epistemological closures:

It is through Pandemos, that is, the immanent or Real, that Urania, the Ideal, is glimpsed-
Pandemos is the murmurring spring of blood and tears, of corporeal beauty and power, in
which it is witnessed, but it is in this spring that its image is also lost, as was Narcissus'
vision upon the weight of his own tears, which recalls Solger's radicalization of
Schelling's tragic sublation, which we might reforumlate here: because it is through
immanence that transcendence is both acheived and lost, a tragic sublation is formed that
opens up merely finite desire for the transcendent, in the sense of Leopardi's noia or
object-less longing, to its own negativity. In this reproduction of its own negativity as
object, the need for representation is met with at a breakthrough behind the strictures of
the dialectic.

Opposing the general theoretika of Hegelian synthesis, Kierkegaard imagines stages of existence in a
manner quite analogous to the topos; a tragic, irreconcilable contradiction is met with, and, in Kierkegaard, the tragic element of this
contradiction must be sublated by a leap of faith in order to develop the next existential stage, from the aesthetic to the ethical spheres
of existence, from the ethical to the religious. Here, however, pains are taken in the preservation of that tragic element and instead of
a leap of faith to take us into the next, higher polarity of contrasting elements, ie. the next agon of existence and series of
contradictions, we have a reproduction of that stage or topos' own negativity as an object of thought: this negative idea reified as
ideatum represents, in Solger's terminology, the tragic's sublation of itself in the real: in this Solgerian line of thinking, nature
becomes the embodiment of the contradictory elements through which the tragic sublation is achieved, the universe of the flesh
reifiying the existential contradiction rather than operating as a mere member in it, with the logos of the natural order in turn
originating itself at the terminus of the mythos, - ie. because our destiny is eternity, so it is that we must die, for that destiny lies
beyond the temporal order of this stunted, irresolvable nature. In Schelling nature is seen the same way, but the tragic again is
sublated by the ideal rather than the real- the daemon returns the particle of the divine will that was invested to it into the night of the
unconscious, beneath nature, and back into the godhead or mythic wellspring, reordering the positioning of the two contradictory
elements so as to reconstruct their relationship in reflection and subject-objectivity, for, in Schelling, evil is merely that particle of the
divine will insofar as it is hoarded and stored up by the daemon in matter, a kind of inversion of the divine potency, or a
metaphysically inflated egoism inherent in the material void itself which God left behind after contracting his divine radiance in order
to create a space in which to hold the world, an egoism whose memory persists in matter as the regressive impulse of the daemon and
which Nietzsche mistakenly championed as the Dionysian joy of the un-sublated Will to Power. Because the Return can never be
fully completed, that is, because the return into the mythic night of Schelling can never completely extinguish the sense of the tragic
or close off the space of the Real as in Nietzsche's version of the return, (psychically equivalent to Freudian guilt becoming the wound
from which motive force is originated with the loss of primary object) nor wholly close off the space of the ideal and allow the tragic
itself to become deified in Dionysian exuberance, (equivalent to Lacan's circulation of object-less desire around the negative core
upon which the personality structures are constructed) the concept of the Pandemic may be used to mark off a sphere beyond
Dionysus and Apollo: the primary loss is imagined here neither as the Dionysian struggle to break through Oedipus and bring
ourselves into existence as our own father and mother nor the Apollonian dissolution of form in power, but as the Pandemic loss of
itself in face of Urania, with an extension beyond Schelling as well in that the reordering of the positioning of the opposing elements
is expanded (this possibility is the episteme) with each transition into a new topoi, by means of a reordering and re-concatenation of
the multiple equivalent to Straussian silence in the mytho-logos or the silence of Platonic aporia after the conclusive fulfillment of
dialectical reason, so that a new negative object is reproducible by means of the epistasis, the typus of psychic reversal, with each
stage leading up to the final reproduction of the negative object in reification. The Pandemic loss is also seen as the loss of the pure
Affirmation, the self-defeat of individuality struggling towards universality, while the potentiation of the opposing elements making
up the tragic corresponds to the philosophic plurality (in which the individuality must annihilate itself in assuming the mantle of the
All) at odds with the Hegelian unity of the absolute.

This conceptualization of the Pandemos can be happily organized by constructing a dialogue network with Solger, Schelling,
Nietzsche, Machiavelli, Eckhart, Theophilus, and Climacus, whose essential structure will here be offered. Since the object of human
destiny lies beyond the finite, the conatus or longing for eternity both destroys matter and reveals its essence, its beauty, extracting its
Form and the semina motuum for the soul's ascent like Solger's sublation of the tragic in itself, of the Pandemic, sacrificial dissolution
of the finite in the finite struggling for the infinite. But this revelation must become habitual will in Eckart's language: the creative
potential or Machiavellian virtu it invests to us as precisely that Theophillian paradysi species or an image of paradise, imprinted on
the will in the philosophy of Climacus like an erotic-mortal prototype for the divine agape, (which allows us to theoretically establish
a reference point for the divine, "a new center for the garden") in order to survive the epistasis or reversal of love's "passion brought to
event" and the conquering antidrome in order to become a constitutive feature of psychic existence, must be transformed from mere
instinct into participant will, bear the living saeculum and demarcate the invariable, for, just as Eckhart defines a typical, momentary
will in which inspiration temporarily crosses the limen of transcendence, and a greater habitual will in which the creative instinct can
possibly be solidified and transformed into action, we might say that there are equally two kinds of activity: some acts demarcate the
invariable and give measure to the boundless, while in others, like the unsublimated discharge of the sexual instinct, to refrain
Holderlin's lament, all yearning vanishes across the shore of the boundless into the infinite. In terms of the daemonic progression, the
ascending frenzy of the heroic cycles gradually accomplishes this "habituation" of inspired genius. Carrying the paradysi species or
Theophilus' image of paradise as a Climacusian erotic-mortal prototype for divine agape, as the true "eikon" for godly tragedy, man
becomes capable of demarcating a new line for the boundless, thereby preventing "all yearning from vanishing into the infinite" in the
merely human or comical madness of the phantasia. Like the immediate dissipation of the sexual energetics through the bare act, as
opposed to the visionary state induced by its heroic frenzies, creative-artistic redirection, and sublimed gestation, so this yearning
thereby rescued from dissolution of the inspired state becomes, through the habituated will, the virtu which empowers amore, and the
amore which empowers man to designate an object beyond conventional moral obligations and the given social contracts, and
delivers eros to that strength out of which nations and new faiths are founded, out of which the contradictory elements of the
existentia are potentiated by entrance upon a new tops.

Capable:

I think desire raises us to the stature of a destiny, perhaps our own destiny or a sort of species destiny, a destiny of type, a potentiality that it is possible for us to aspire to; but desire is not sufficient to achieve destiny, to set us in a higher circle of fate, so when we have desire we must supplement it with something else if we want to get to that higher circle which is a kind of experiential type or subjectivity mode, and I think we can feel this intimately when we have strong desires, we can feel and experience first hand in the moment how these change our mode of subjectivity or self-relational proprioceptive aspect of sentient consciousness. How we "feel to ourselves" is what I am really interested in, this is a phenomenological interest also because I link this subjectivity mode proprioceptivity of sentient consciousness to the phenomenological eidetic anti-reduction or "explosive tracing" of meaning in all directions and which must therefore be contained somehow, so that the need for containment necessitates and gives birth to the means to do that, albeit imperfectly. And as certain kinda of phenomenological elements within us are exploded at different times, and over time the accumulation of these and the effects of them, means that the old containers or ways of limiting and directing, delimiting really, the phenomenological explosive series of subjectivity consciousness in its self-experience of meaning requires that the prioprioceptive modes associated to that given subjectivity consciousness and its self-experience at the moment are going to change and become outdated, simply because they were designed under different conditions or maybe even because we become overly habituated to them, which is one of the secret tragedies of age and why people go through mid life crises and cheat on their spouses and all that, well one reason anyway.

Sexual desire is an easy example to use of when desire functions like this. And when sex occurs and the sexual desire is abated, although this can be either full or partial abatement, there is left over the faint stirrings of a new kind of mode of subjectivity, a new type of proprioceptive alignment within the 'soul', so to speak, and if we let this newness wash over us and work itself upon it without trying to stop it or hold fast against it to our former modes, then desire in that sense has achieved its purpose. But what is that purpose specifically? We can't really know, not immediately or exactly or completely, not even with a concrete experience like sexual fulfillment or falling in love with someone new for the first time, or any of the other massive desire-based subjective experiences that form the upper boundaries of what desire really is and to what extent it can function and work its powers upon us. But the successful fulfillment of such massive desires along the lines of their own logic and without attempt to refute or counter that logic, is a firm basis for what I think causes or grounds subjective apotheosis and progressive development over time into different modes and powers and arrangements of our being which in turn affects our outward projects and extensions of ourselves, our actions and all that.

This, "this fusion took place as one between techne and ontology, effecting
what he calls a state of "permanent innovation," the elevation of man's techne to the ontic itself, the seizure of ontos or Being as an
image of infinite technological mastery over a finite materia readily conformable to the "aimless finality" Capitalism posits within
itself, or that perpetual economic growth coincident no less with the Aristotelian kinesis toward the perfection of human happiness as
the perfection of the polis."

I see this as just necessary, as the image of perfection and the corresponding strivings in reality for such perfections are just logical expressions of the inevitability of the fact that this thought or idea, and its associated effects 'in reality' represents the idealized perfected form of those aspects of our world and experience to which that ideal applies, in this example here of either polis or of techne. I can't see it as a fundamental detriment or error of any kind, even at its upper bounds of the stupid technophilia sort of transhumanist nonsense, it is all just aspects of the general ideal which is expressing a natural and necessary trend in how things progress. Progress does climb up and up and doesn't really stop, because time always moves forward and always builds on what came before, looking forward to the new possibility and attempting to expand itself in every way possible which is the true meaning of the will to power, in my view. And I would explain this, being's self-expansive impulse rooted in time as forward momentum in constant progressive striving, as the imperfection, finitude, self-irreducibility and self-irreconcilably of being such that every being is both a mystery to itself as well as the solution to that mystery, a lived realized solution that it already grasped, but imperfectly, and therefore any single action or moment of being contains that conflict producing a drive based on the different thereby, this drive acting like a "will to power" or a will to empower oneself through one's own actions and effects, to seize the machinery of one's own experiences and the very templates of experience as such in order to conceive the world, subjectivity experience as a whole phenomenologically rendered back unto said subjectivity itself, in such a way so that more of that self-puzzle of being to itself can be solved. In order to do this we first work through many unconscious stages, we are basically trying to do this before we even know that we are trying to do it; we learn from our experiences because we didn't know them, and we learn from our own actions and words because we didn't know or intend them either, they surprise us either for good or ill and we take away some knowledge from this, and by virtue of this gained knowledge, the knowledge itself being of this inherent relation between ourselves and our own outward projections of ourselves into phenomenological reality, we come a little bit closer to being able to consciously reflect this problem of the self-puzzle of our own being. But it is a bit like a Rubix cube because once you make a move the other side changes, so we are always shifting and comparing backward and forward in time, trying to find that one perfect certain configuration that maximizes the self-apotheosizing (to butcher that word) self-edifying potential of our own being and which in so doing that will be known to us by the fact that our proprioceptive self-sense of our own being, the type or mode or way in which we feel ourselves as this such and such a being which we are, will be something more expansive, newer, more grounded, contain more light within itself, more hopefulness and a broader and deeper component of happiness and the sense of fulfillment of some span of our own destiny requirement, even if we cannot really put any of that into words.

So it becomes a "moral" or psychological, philosophical question as to how we deal with that endless progressive striving tendency in the human world, in ourselves, in life and nature, in everything basically; because of entropy, nothing could exist unless it embodied this endlessly progressive striving capacity at least a little bit. I obviously dont want to fuse with AI or achieve the communist utopia or any of that nonsense, but such things are indeed... non sense, just empty erroneous interpretations of the overall ideal itself, which does not itself bend to such absurdities.

So I can't really see the capitalist expansion of techne and ontos combining together, or the political expansion of the idealization of the perfection of the polis, as anything but a natural expression of how subjectivity consciousness simply works. As Heidegger pointed out, we are technology, we are formed up and made by the technologies we have made, language for example, actual physical technology like this computer as another example. it is just a matter of achieving the optimal balance in this with regard to all I said above about desire, destiny, subjective apotheosis, phenomenological meaning-stability and all that. The more we can posit at the abstract level some perfection and ideal toward which to aspire, even in the negative, even when this is problematic which it often is, this is just a sign that we are operating at that higher level which required prior consciousness to overcome certain unconscious functions but now, this new level being largely unconscious by virtue of its newness to us, we are required to elevate the nature of our struggle and aim higher into this new sphere of activity so that we can ultimately bring it, too, this higher threshold, into consciousness. So perhaps you and I are talking about the same thing, more or less.

So back to my first idea in this PM, with what do we supplement achieved or realized desire in order to place ourselves in a higher stage of relationship to our own destiny? I think this thing which we use to supplement is a kind of passivity, like in my book DFIOS I identified different passive aspects of consciousness and showed how these are basically necessary to remain in passive states, and this can be explained in reference to this stuff about desire in the simple way that we are not yet adequate to these powers of desire or powers of proprioceptive self-expansion and self-edification of the subjectivity conscious movement into its own circle of higher destiny, and because we are not adequate yet in these ways we must remain passive before these movements else we will spoil and arrest them. So we supplement desire with a kind of silence, or trust in ourselves and in the desire process (and also with trust in others which forms social links, my whole social webs idea), and in the changes in our own self-subjectivity modes and see how the entire phenomenological realm is shifting around us and we find comfort in this, because it is indeed a kind of stability. Every time I have experienced something like this it has been accompanied by this feeling and certainty of increasing stability and comfort, also deep happiness, and so it is easy to trust in those sort of experiences. But we must also supplement with a kind of slowing down of time, so we give the space and time needed for these new changes to work themselves upon us and really change who and what we are. And since all thought, ideation, conception, etc. and all philosophy ultimately occurs upon the foundation and groundwork of the personality, which is to say upon the whole subjectivity consciousness self-sentient basis of experience which produces its corresponding modes or proprioceptive possibilities in which it immerses itself existentio-phenomenally, this is by no means irrelevant or shallow to consider these changes in mode as occurring at the deepest parts of ourselves and with the widest possible outcomes and consequences for us, for our philosophies and for our very lives.

Parodites:

This, "this fusion took place as one between techne and ontology, effecting
what he calls a state of "permanent innovation," the elevation of man's techne to the ontic itself, the seizure of ontos or Being as an
image of infinite technological mastery over a finite materia readily conformable to the "aimless finality" Capitalism posits within
itself, or that perpetual economic growth coincident no less with the Aristotelian kinesis toward the perfection of human happiness as
the perfection of the polis."

I see this image of perfection is just a logical thought made inevitable by the fact that this thought represents the idealized perfected form of those aspects of our world and experience to which that ideal applies, in the example of either polis or of techne. Progress does climb up and up and doesn't really stop,

----

When man represented his subjective experience to himself in the mythos' dramatic structure, he had no need to question his relationship to the world- the height of abstraction characterizing what we call philosophy. The question of Being was thus not raised- there was no philosophy. But the central point is Thales' separating logos from mythos when he used water as a univocal mode of Being that all of nature could be reduced to, which allowed man to question his relationship to this world- Being is simply the signifier of that level of abstraction and thus a concept as viable now as it was 2,000 years ago, hence:

[ I also wanted to point out that in the mythic era of man, so much of his subjective experience, being organized and formalized in the mythos' multivocal dramatic structure, was made comprehensible to him, that he had no need to question Being- his relation to the world, and did not suffer from what we call in our psychology- neurosis. But because he had no need to question his relation to the world and philosophize, the depth of his own techne, his eroto-poietic creativity and ability to shape the world, remained unknown to him, and he was captive to Nature, subject like the animals to her power.]

When that project was began with Thales, philosophy was born. The question of Being is the question of man's relationship to the world, nature, to beings- this question is handled univocally in Thales' wake, yes. That question never needed to be asked in the mythic era because the mythos perfectly organized man's subjective experience, reifying psyche or his unconscious elements in the order of Nature herself. In that pseudo garden of innocence though, because he never needed to question his relationship to a nature that perfectly represented and conformed to his internal world, his subjectivity,- because the question of Being never arose, man was still subservient to nature. He did not know his own techne, his ability to shape that nature. It perfectly conformed to his inner life, why would he need to shape it into something else? Only after logos is separated from mythos can that question arise, and in that- man discover his own techne and the potency of his eroto-poietic creativity, which I speak of as the tragic pathos, in that essay I wrote on Holderlin's Empedocles. So this is all very subtle and nuanced. I reject univocal metaphysics but without it man would have never shattered his bonds to the order of nature and discovered the power of his techne, his ability to shape nature. Unfortunately, univocity concluded with the seizure of that techne as Being itself- in an ontos or image of Being which we articulated as the object of infinite technological growth, an absolute or unlimited techne completely equivalent to the Being that it shapes. With the immanent closures in my philosophy, such a perfect hold over Being is impossible- that infinite techne(logical) expansion is impossible. So this is my central philosophical problem: mythologos. How to reunite mythos and logos without bringing man back into subservience to nature, how to reinstitute mythos while taking account of the immanent epistemological closures of logos.

This problem is, essentially, a matter for the first of my epistemes, the ontic. I have finished the four volumes of my main project now, I just have to edit them. A new one is dawning, I will treat each of the three epistemes in isolation. The first book in this series will address the ontic episteme and detail and also this central problem associated with it: the mythos, separation of logos, univocity, and then a restoration of the myth logos.

Capable:

" It perfectly conformed to his inner life, why would he need to shape it into something else? Only after logos is separated from mythos can that question arise, and in that- man discover his own techne and the potency of his eroto-poietic creativity, which I speak of as the tragic pathos, in that essay I wrote on Holderlin's Empedocles. So this is all very subtle and nuanced. I reject univocal metaphysics but without it man would have never shattered his bonds to the order of nature and discovered the power of his techne, his ability to shape nature. Unfortunately, univocity concluded with the seizure of that techne as Being itself- in an ontos or image of Being which we articulated as the object of infinite technological growth, an absolute or unlimited techne completely equivalent to the Being that it shapes. With the immanent closures in my philosophy, such a perfect hold over Being is impossible- that infinite techne(logical) expansion is impossible. So this is my central philosophical problem: mythologos. How to reunite mythos and logos without bringing man back into subservience to nature, how to reinstitute mythos while taking account of the immanent epistemological closures of logos."

Since nature abhors a vacuum I think that the more technological progress spikes off toward the infinite climb of exponential growth, the more humanity will find itself forced to progress itself in other ways such as moral, cognitive, philosophic etc. simply because nature (natural law, logic) will not allow there to exist such a massive gap between the level of technology we have and our ability to use that technology. The greater the danger the greater need for the solution, to paraphrase Holderin, and so I think the runaway progress of technology will not so much stall or slow down but humanity is going to experience continued abruptions and chaos and radical changes in his psyche and personality level, manifest in his politics and social relationships, to break up the old "proprioceptive" elements of delimitation of the habituated modes of subjectivity phenomenological experience I was talking about before, and allow these to grow and stretch to better match the growing technological power at our fingertips.

For example, smart phones. These are hugely changing how people act and interact, how they process information, how they read, consume, etc. Some of these changes are "bad" but that only provides impetus, motive-power to change in the better ways, to create more self-responsibility either on the individual level or the group level. So it is all connected, and while there are huge risks and will be great negative consequences from exponentially increasing tech, I don't think it can or will or ought to be scaled back in its rate of development, rather I think it will primarily do two things, 1) spur that kind of upward grown in human nature I was just talking about, and 2) push itself outside the bounds of our currently closed planet and out into space, as well as more and more into cyberspace, and also more and more into mentality space. So in terms of (2) technological growth is just a form of capital growth and will, necessarily, increase human labor power so much that this labor power and the value it produces so exponentially more than the work we put into it is going to need new outlets. Those outlets will be discovered and they will be created. So while all that is going on, humanity as a whole and on the individual level, probably on the genetic level too, is going to also be stretched and growing to better match this technological climb. Because as Heidegger said, we are formed by our technologies, at least as much as the other way around (us forming them).

To the question of how to reunite mythos and logos in such a way that does not close Being in univocity, this is simply and exactly what I see as the ideal of philosophy as such, simply is truth-seeking for its own sake. This is why I don't like the term Being and I would prefer to use the term truth, because I see truth as the ultimate idea which encapsulates those three fundaments I mentioned, namely logic, fact and meaning. Truth is all three, in every possible way separately and individually since truth is just "whatever happens to exist, in whatever ways it happens to exist, for whatever reasons it happens to exist, at any and every possible scale and location and time". When I set this idea or image of truth above myself and work underneath it I am able to unite mythos and logos in immediate ways, locally in my own self-experience and which stretch out beyond me into wider avenues. For example I was able to see all that social webs stuff which was very illuminating for me, also to conceive this idea of tectonics, and also to understand at least some of your own philosophy which at first was daunting and almost impossible for me to do. I can also understand any philosopher whose book I pick up and begin to read, within a very short time modeling his entire philosophy in my mind and there is no need to finish reading the book since I see his philosophical position and where he resides in the wider architecture of the mental universe, so called, within truth basically, and also therefore can see how that relates to others who reside in other positions within truth.

Eventually this can lead into more spiritualistic, religious, esoteric or occult directions of course, supernatural stuff, and it has a little for me when I used to meditate and had some very tangibly real experiences doing that, also a few psychic sort of experiences that convinced me there is indeed some level of existence that we associate to the so called spiritual realm, which to me just must be a kind of more attenuated and subtle level of nature and causality at work alongside and somewhat removed from our own, and which cannot really be understood either by modern science, philosophy or religion since most of what we know or think of all that "spiritual" stuff is probably wrong, and much of it is demonstrably nonsensical. Also there are quite dangerous cults that work with such things and I have been careful to avoid them, and will never associate to any such thing. But the point is that a kind of reunification of mythos and logos I think is possible in our current ideational possibility and linguistic technology, for example in yours and my philosophical approaches and how we can dialogue between them, and this would then need to incorporate more cutting edge science and then united all together in that it would need to become meaningful, "moral" or basically assert itself at the level of personality influence and seem interesting and "cool" to other people. So it would need to first subsume cutting edge science and also logic, synthesize all this, produce the highest possible and most complete philosophy of all, and then render itself into simpler versions of itself in order to appeal to less philosophically capable or interested people. Turn itself into a series of images basically, which could stack upward so that the more philosophically capable and interested someone is the higher up he is able to go on that image-ladder to perhaps eventually achieve actual philosophy. In this way a kind of decline toward the earth from the philosophical heavens, so called (lol) would be possible to infuse more truth into human life and into the world as a whole, and I think this is what the major religions achieved. The religions are just philosophies, very complex syntheses of ideation, science and logic at the time and then converted into images, in their case allegorical stories most often, so that the truth or substance of these philosophies could be experience by non-philosophers as what we now call religion.

I don't want to create a new religion but I wonder if we could create a new literature. A kind of fiction-nonfiction blend that isn't religious but succeeds in creating that ladder downward of images from philosophical heights to the world as such. This would require great writing skill to make it all work and be appealing to a wide range of people. But it could definitely be done. I think modern literature has replaced religion and religion is basically outdated, except that literature does not have the same scope and historical depth as religion therefore cannot totally supplant religion yet; however, with films and gaming today we can see how "literature" (the act of creating fiction) is improving in that position relative to religion, so that someday soon this whole film/gaming/literature complex, assuming it stays largely in the hands of humanity itself and not dissolved into elite technocratic such as everything being ground out by one single Disney-ish corporation or whatever -- basically if we can still have this deep linkage between the human soul and the film/gaming/literature complex (fiction as a whole) then I do think this can replace religion in due time, and this would be a good thing. It would also allow for the co-existnece of mythos and logos since that is precisely what good fiction is.

Also, I had updated that line you quoted in your last PM, from my previous PM, to "I see this as just necessary, as the image of perfection and the corresponding strivings in reality for such perfections are just logical expressions of the inevitability of the fact that this thought or idea, and its associated effects 'in reality' represents the idealized perfected form of those aspects of our world and experience to which that ideal applies, in this example here of either polis or of techne. " to be more clear.

edit, in addition to literature film and gaming there is also music, which deals directly in the subjective modes of proprioceptivity and therefore indirectly deals with or in the question of mythos and logos together.

edit, what i was saying about new literature... thus spoke zarathustra is a prototype of this. so is the best contemporary fiction and film also capable of achieving an early stage of this kind of philosophy edified fiction nonfiction blending that is already opening outlets for people to abandon religion because religion isn’t any longer the only game in town when it comes to synthesizing mythos and logos. and i see the best fiction avoids appeal or reduction to univocity, for example Haruki Murakami’s novels or Neal Asher’s novels which well express and root themselves in polyvocality over univocality.

Parodites:

This is the essential definition of my concept, episteme:

Reality is discontinuous and filled with ontic ruptures. But our reflective subjectivity through the circular lens of a logos now disconnected from mythos- is continuous. So after we shatter our bond to nature and question her as well as our place in her by abstracting and questioning Being, these ontic ruptures take on the form of a primogenial dualism that this logos must resolve- namely by positing an extrinsic datum that it can use as a univocal mode to reduce all (b)eings to so as to recreate them- so as to recreate the entire universe within itself as what Hegel called absolute knowledge, a perfect equivalence between the transcendental subject and the world it brought into question. This resolution is essentially, a circular inscription of Being without Loss on the part of logos. Having explained the failure of that project, I then look to these ontic ruptures in a different light. The primogenial dualism they take on for logos I re-articulated as a series of liminal boundaries between one ontic rupture and another- thus these ruptures are reformulated as epistemological closures. These closures are simultaneously limits to knowledge (a limit to knowledge in the sense that the contents of one episteme can in no way be synthesized and univocally abbreviated with that content from a different episteme, hence the plural identity of truth) and liminal boundaries to the ineffable, that is, boundaries to this Being, to Being as an active creative-destructive participant toward which reality strives instead of the passive extrinsic datum on whose ground logos separated from mythos reduces all of the universe-- this new idea of Being toward which reality strives, fracturing and fragmenting itself in the process, for Being in my philosophy is that which these ruptures are ruptures within- broken through the tragic-poetic striving of Nature, a striving I call- the Loss. These epistemological closures are- epistemes.

" Since nature abhors a vacuum I think that the more technological progress spikes off toward the infinite climb of exponential growth, the more humanity will find itself forced to progress itself in other ways such as moral, cognitive, philosophic etc. simply because nature (natural law, logic) will not allow there to exist such a massive gap between the level of technology we have and our ability to use that technology."

In the era of mythos, before philosophy, man had no reason to question a Nature that perfectly conformed to his subjective experience, so even though he did use rudimentary technology, he had no abstract conception of techne, his ability to actually change nature fundamentally and affect materials. So technology progressed, but so slowly that by the time a change happened, man had changed in turn, and had reorganized his experience through the mythos. Technology moves so fast now, its evolution, that human culture cannot keep up with it, and that leads to the whole dissolution of the nation-state, loss of culture to world culture, globalism, etc. But I believe with a new philosophy, that could be changed.

A larger concern is this, why I use the word Being and think it important.

" To the question of how to reunite mythos and logos in such a way that does not close Being in univocity, this is simply and exactly what I see as the ideal of philosophy as such, simply is truth-seeking for its own sake. This is why I don't like the term Being and I would prefer to use the term truth, because I see truth as the ultimate idea "

I use the word Being because the ideal of philosophy as truth implies a difference between the mythic truth and the logical truth that were separated by univocal reductionist metaphysics. The Truth of myth, of our lived experience as organized by the mythos, the truth of logos-the truth of Being, the truth of man's place in Nature, and then the truth of mythologos. There are three Truths, hence the three epistemes; in my philosophy truth has a complex plural identity that is necessary to relate a continuous subjective experience to a reality that is discontinuous and filled with ontic ruptures, primogenial dualisms, etc.

The state in which nature conformed to man's subjectivity owed itself to the fact that the mythos' primordial multivocal dramatic structure allowed man to reify his unconscious element, ie. psyche, in Nature itself and her ontic ruptures,- to reify his psyche as the Gods, that old pantheon which then poured out of Nature and these ontic ruptures back into man's soul in divine ekstasis. I like Jung but I have a far more radical idea regarding the nature of the mythos and the Gods, as for me they are not simply residual archtypes but actual living entities in a sense, not buried in man's unconscious brain, but in this reification that once organized human society before man raised the question of Being and began philosophy. Holderlin's chief goal was to "reawaken" those Gods by reverting back to that state of nature, ecstasy, and innocence. He had the concept of boundless oblation: when man's subjectivity is perfectly conformed to nature through the mythos, man has no neurotic repression or pathology, and his will is expressed without impediment. But we only have basic accounts of the Greek myths, and the mythos was far more than that, I mean it includes so many social processes, initiations, the mystery schools like Eleusis, so we do not actually know how the ancients reified psyche and used the mythos to represent their subjective experience in conformation to Nature- Holderlin did go mad trying to do so. And besides, I do not wish to return to such a state of nature or abandon our technology. I only wish to point out that man had no reason to question his relationship to nature and the external world or his place in it, because he was in this state of boundless oblation and freedom, and because of that he never discovered the eroto-poietic energies, that is, his techne or ability to shape and change that nature. Once mythos and logos were separated due to Thales discovering univocal reduction, only then he began to question that Nature, his place in it, and consequently discovered his techne. I use the word Being to denote the shift between the mythic era and the logos, with the concept of Being representing the move to this higher abstraction (philosophy) in which it became possible for man to question his own being and Being itself- his place in the universe, and the universe in relation to him. As I write here:

" From that Doric intuition the mythos appeared, that fertile and
infinitely creative wellspring of consciousness in which the human Word grounds itself in
its own operative capacity. Schelling says that Nature "stupified" the Doric mind, and
from this induced silence or passivity of thought, the Gods appeared: the mythos in
essence arises as an autofiguration of man's place in nature and nature's place in man- as
cosmos. That is what the Gods are, living symbols: the gods are liminal boundaries upon
which the sensible or real crosses over into imaginative or ideal- upon which the
transcendent crosses over into the immanent. Levi-Strauss calls this the break in
consciousness needed to bring about representative power or logic- the logos, the
complimentary faculty to the mythos. "

So first, I use the word Being to denote the higher abstraction man questions nature from, as distinct from the mythic era in which man had no need to philosophize and question a Nature perfectly conformed to him. Univocal reductionism led to self-destruction up through to Nietzsche, but- it was necessary.

And I use Being in one other way. Since reality is composed of ontic ruptures- that is, since reality is not continuous, smooth, and gradient, there are epistemological closures that cannot be synthetically abbreviated by univocal reduction: these closures are immanent to reality itself. But subjectivity and the reflectivity that enables our subjectivity to question and place itself in relation to Nature, is continuous and smooth: it cannot be aligned to or made equivalent with nature, not logically- only mythically. So Being is what these ontic ruptures are ruptures within. It is not the passive shared commonality that Thales and Hegel used to articulate a singular mode to which all beings could be equated: in my philosophy, Being is a destructive-creative object toward which all (b)eings (toward which Nature) strives, burning, fracturing and self-consumed by these ruptures and closures. That is why I call my philosophy, a philosophy of the Loss of Being. That striving is what the loss is.

You said that if there are immanent ruptures, discontinuities and dualism immanent to reality itself- that you could not imagine such a gap, where there would be nothing. But I am saying: those ontic ruptures, which pose difficulty to us in the form of epistemological closures that force us to articulate a complex plural identity of truth in the wake of univocity's catastrophe because they cannot be synthetically abbreviated,- those ruptures are not empty spaces in reality, they are ruptures within something, ruptures of this world of fragmented (b)eings within Being: within what that word represents, ruptures within a thing we cannot express in language directly, which we can only represent tragico-poetically and mythically-- Being. The Being posited here is not the passive shared element to which all (b)eings can be univocally reduced: it is an active creative-destructive object within which our reality ruptures and spills forth discontinuously.

The first episteme is the ontic episteme. An episteme itself as I went over awhile ago, is my word for one of these epistemological closures that prevent univocal synthesis and cannot be connected through logis- an episteme signifies a liminal boundary between one of these discontinuous ontic ruptures immanent to reality itself and another, and hence one of the voices of the multivocal plural identity of philosophic truth. Through the ontic episteme, which was come upon after Thales severed mythos and logos, man grasped Being as a guiding image of thought- that guiding image I call, an ontos. Each pre-Socratic had their own unique ontos. But of concern here, the ontos man forms represents the continuity of human logos and reflective subjectivity seizing a discontinuous nature: the circular logos once separated from mythos posits an external datum because it cannot ground itself, being circular, as it was once grounded in mythos, and uses that datum as a singular mode to which all of nature, to which all (b)eings can be reduced.

---

So: Just as univocal metaphysics- the metaphysics of Being without Loss, culminated in the fusion of techne and ontology, this metaphysics of the Loss of Being culminates in: a fusion of ethos and ontology. Where the question of Being, in univocal philosophy, elevated man to the abstract position where he broke the chains of Nature's order and learned to question her and his place in her, thereby discovering his techne or ability to change that Nature, though in his obsession ended up hypostasizing that techne as Being itself and replacing Nature with this object of infinite technological and economic perfectibility that fully shattered any connection between mythos and logos, so it is, that, with my conceptualization of Being as this ineffable liminal object for which the ontic ruptures in Nature that I articulated with the idea of an epistemological closure or episteme, man learns to, from that same vantage of abstraction whose height we call "philosophy", imbue his actions with ethical significance- he not only questions Being, his place in nature, but he,- humanity, understanding Being as this ineffable object within which the ontic ruptures occur, and what reality, in its fragmentation and discontinuity, strives for, longs for self-consumingly, organizes that eroto-poietic creative energy behind his techne toward the transcendent, investing to that abject longing of Nature- to pothos, eros, that is, direction, moving through the three epistemes or epistemological closures. As I said, they are both limits to knowledge and limen to the ineffable, these epistemological closures. Hence I bring in my philosophy of Eros here:

This problem is a more succinct formulation of the glaring ambiguity of the
Platonic doctrines in that man's essence in the pure passivity of the contemplative state,
which implies an essentially complete and perfect self in recognition of the transcendent
vision through which it grasps that very perfection and wholeness, and man's essence in
the pure activity of the erotic struggle of poros out of penia, that is, out of an immanence
of lack and a fundamentally incomplete and bereft self, seems to be held simultaneously:
the teleology of man's ethos and therefor his essence- the essence of anthropos, being
located in pure contemplation and the passivity of such a state, ascending toward the
perfect radiance of the Form of Forms, is in strict contrast to texts like the Symposium, in
which we are given to understand that it is Eros, Eros in which the very height of human
activity is realized, who encapsulates the heroic telos of human nature, with man
presented as rhapsodic and divinely inspired lover, with Eros setting into motion the
whole schema through which man finds himself directed toward and at last brought into
unity with the perfect object of contemplation. The re-insertion of the Heraclitean daemon
between the two terms here brought up, ethos and anthropos, is highly suggestive of what
was said at the beginning of this book: that the problem is not so much a paradox as an
impasse. This opposition, brought into clearest focus by comparing the account of man
given in the Phaedrus and Symposium, when conceived as "a reduplication of the
negative within athesis", finds a solution in the recognition of the Loss of Being, and the
self-sublation of (b)eing struggling toward Being, of the Real, of a "primordially dual
reality" brought into harmony with the contemplative vision and the transcendence of
Being though by means of "destructive reconciliation", through "aesthetic praxis" of its
Loss to the differentiated world of Nature.

In terms of the limitation to mortal knowledge they force us to bear that I mentioned, they let us understand what Plato actually meant with the word thaumazein or wonder, why he said philosophy begins with it: that wonder is a state of perplexity at the limits of these epistemological closures, which, in their very imposition of those limits to our knowledge, provide the boundary to that ineffable Being toward which all (b)eings strive: that state of wonder is then a pregnant state, a kind of womb. The epistemological closure challenges us and we wonder at it, we bear a self-sublation of the Real in this immanent discontinuity in reality, but in that wonder we find the even greater wonder, beyond any pursuit of our survival like the animals and even beyond simple scientific curiosity, as each episteme also provides a boundary to the other- this excess or womb fills us with wonder as well, as we work our way toward the transcendent. We inherited from our evolutionary past this neurology- our brain, and it is no wonder that we have acquired reason enough to master our environment. But why are we the only animal to realize these epistemological closures, or more properly- the discontinuities immanent to reality itself which we (I, Tyler) articulate as these closures in the pursuit of knowledge. I must bring up this passage again:

Insofar as human freedom is constructed with the aim of arriving at an operative
enclosure of the ontic subject, philosophy has set itself up for failure. This is suggested by
Luhmann when he asks "Does knowledge rest on construction in the sense that it only
functions because the knowing system is operatively closed, therefore: because it can
maintain no operative contact with the outside world; and because it therefore remains
dependent, for everything that it constructs, on its own distinction between self-reference
and allo-reference?" Such enclosures, such responses to the question of being, are
comprehensible and may be said to possess a degree of usefulness with regard to the
clarification of the problematic of effectively mobilizing our human resources in personal
and social life, the problematic moreover of confronting a world process into whose
service we must bring ourselves in order to flourish, only in relation to the question of
being for which they are intended to provide an answer, insofar as that question's given
formulation represents also a clarification of the corresponding problematic of
formulating, coordinating, and organizing the multivalent symbol and image-networks,
the various topoi of human subjectivity, whereby the disparate contents of our shared
experiences as human beings are intelligibly differentiated and translated into the physical
domain of concrete actions and society. Voegelin says as much in the following: “For the
answers make sense only in relation to the questions which they answer; the questions,
furthermore, make sense only in relation to the concrete experiences of reality from which
they have arisen; and the concrete experiences .. finally make sense only in the cultural
context which sets limits to their direction and range." Or, as Bloch phrased the question:
"Our questioning about ourselves is the unique problem, the resultant of all world-problems."
The ontic subject, the dasein of Heidegger for example, which confronts the
question of being, establishes the contrary domain of the failures of the epistemic subject,
so to speak- an opposing sphere in which the problems of the epistemic subject can be
continuously transposed into higher series of questions. Philosophy, whose question
according to Heidegger is precisely the question of being, solves a problem by replacing it
with a greater problem; that is, by aporetically revealing the deeper problem in which the
lesser one is rooted. In short, the answers of philosophy are meaningful only as
clarifications and re-formulations of the questions to which they are given as a response,
for these questions, like moths fluttering against the windowpane of the ineffable,
represent the possible horizon of human consciousness, serving no less, as they do, for a
clarification and re-formulation of the unregulated mass of symbolic materials out of
which the given philosophic framework in which they have been posed has been derived- no
less serving as a way of organizing that rich inheritance of culture with which the
human subject, from the point of departure in a pure confrontation with the world of
Being, comes to develop itself into effective personality. It is merely faith with which the
philosophers have asserted that the domain of the epistemic subject can be wholly
expanded into the domain of the ontic, that the ontic subject can be fully enclosed ...

""Does knowledge rest on construction in the sense that it only
functions because the knowing system is operatively closed, therefore: because it can
maintain no operative contact with the outside world; and because it therefore remains
dependent, for everything that it constructs, on its own distinction between self-reference
and allo-reference?"

Placed in context with the rest of that text, what am I saying? I am saying that the continuous existential substrate on top of which we have developed our knowledge as operatively closed, does not hold- and this operative closure of that substrate from Being is required for univocal metaphysics, in which logos, torn from mythos, posits that extrinsic datum through which it reduces all Being to a singular mode, a modality with which it recreates a phantom of the universe within itself as absolute knowledge- as an operative closure. The internal epistemological closures of our knowledge, which I use to articulate a reality that is immanently discontinuous and filled with ontic ruptures and gaps, imply a radically different substrate of knowledge, a series of epistemes whose limits also provide the limen to the transcendent.

----

I forgot to add that in my view tectonics would apply to all the contents of each episteme, but- each episteme is closed off from the other, in accordance to the immanent discontinuity of reality; epistemes pose a limit to knowledge in their abruption of the operative enclosure of knowledge itself as a tectonic scaffold.The body of knowledge cannot be fully enclosed, so the internal epistemological closures that reflect the immanent discontinuities of reality create an existential matrix that must be worked through subjectively, moving through each ontic rupture to the next, from each episteme to the next, as poros overcomes penia within the Platonic metaxy of Eros, organizing the eroto-poietic creative energies behind techne through the greater liminal participation of immanence and transcendence within one another. As to why I posit the immanent discontinuity of the Real that necessitates epistemological closures to a body of knowledge that cannot achieve operative enclosure, well I went through all that in the last message, in the text that mentions allo-reference, etc. I mean to add this after this paragraph:

Reality is discontinuous and filled with ontic ruptures. But our reflective subjectivity through the circular lens of a logos now disconnected from mythos- is continuous. So after we shatter our bond to nature and question her as well as our place in her by abstracting and questioning Being, these ontic ruptures take on the form of a primogenial dualism that this logos must resolve- namely by positing an extrinsic datum that it can use as a univocal mode to reduce all (b)eings to so as to recreate them- so as to recreate the entire universe within itself as what Hegel called absolute knowledge, a perfect equivalence between the transcendental subject and the world it brought into question. This resolution is essentially, a circular inscription of Being without Loss on the part of logos. Having explained the failure of that project, I then look to these ontic ruptures in a different light. The primogenial dualism they take on for logos I re-articulated as a series of liminal boundaries between one ontic rupture and another- thus these ruptures are reformulated as epistemological closures. These closures are simultaneously limits to knowledge (a limit to knowledge in the sense that the contents of one episteme can in no way be synthesized and univocally abbreviated with that content from a different episteme, hence the plural identity of truth) and liminal boundaries to the ineffable, that is, boundaries to this Being, to Being as an active creative-destructive participant toward which reality strives instead of the passive extrinsic datum on whose ground logos separated from mythos reduces all of the universe-- this new idea of Being toward which reality strives, fracturing and fragmenting itself in the process, for Being in my philosophy is that which these ruptures are ruptures within- broken through the tragic-poetic striving of Nature, a striving I call- the Loss. These epistemological closures are- epistemes.

Defenders of the Earth wrote:: Parodites:

"But to claim there are absolute ruptures would be to claim there is... nothing there, or a kind of hole in reality. I can't see reality as having holes like that."

"If I am understanding you correctly, the primogenial dualism that is immanent to reality itself, which you have articulated, is the fact that subjectivity consciousness is built upon different epistemes and these epistemes cannot communicate to each other because they each have different types of truth, and that each episteme is actually a topoi or gap based on the fact of its own inability to raise itself, the various conceptual polarities which it already is, to yet even higher and more complete levels?"

Not quite. Essentially, reality itself is not enclosed- it is constituted as a series of epistemological closures (limits of knowledge that imply a plural identity of truth instead of univocity) and ontic ruptures. Because of that, when we try to relate ourselves to that reality in terms of our lived, subjective experience, we find difficulty, with the nullity of man's consciousness I refer to owing itself to the fact that our subjective reality- is continuous. It is a continuity on top of a discontinuity, and so it cannot perfectly conform to or align with it- that is the underlying nothingness that stifles our attempts at philosophy. As to why I believe this, or posit that there are closures immanent to reality itself- therefor epistemological closures, is because I did away with the absolute connection between phenomenon and Being I mentioned with Aristotle:

[The Aristotelian metaphysics indirectly posited, through the schema of the four causes, an inseparable link between phenomenon
and Being (ousia, substance), as between activity and the soul, ie. the entelecheia. This linkage signifies the breaking off of athesis
and an imputation of Being's imperfection, insofar as Being depends thereby on phenomenal expression in order to reveal itself as
aletheia: in other words, it is because of this original Aristotelian premise, that the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic in its modern form
inherited a significant limitation in that there can be no phenomena without Being, nor any revelation of Being without phenomenon.

this view doesn’t seem at odds with my own, because i would also say that being (which is to say the being of a being, of an entity in question - since i don’t subscribe to any idea of ‘Being itself’) is to a degree and necessarily so self-inexhaustible, self-irreducible and self-inexpressible. those are basic tenants of tectonics. we simply cannot probe ourselves absolutely, because the probing capacity (subjectivity, mind, knowledge, and memory) is not adequate to that from which it emerges nor i nterms is which it relates itself externally as a kind of phenomenal attempt at entelechia. indeed, being requires a being for and of which being is a being, just as phenomena requires a being which is itself phenomenally capable. i wouldn’t speak of phenomena, being, or knowledge on their own since these don’t exist on their own, they are emergent properties of the logic, fact, and meaning of beings. and beings are a kind of self-vortex self-valuing structure.

aletheia (disclosure, wakefulness) implies for whom and in terms of whom and how and why. athesis implies lack of univocity in any universal or metaphysical sense. i agree to this.

Parodites wrote:: ]It is for that reason that modern philosophers, all working out of that metaphysical foundation, have such a problem with the notion of
qualia, for it is precisely "a phenomenon without Being", which describes the athesis of human reflectivity, that is, the internal reality
of subjective consciousness. To state the problem inherent in the Aristotelian schema of the four causes in other words: phenomenon
and Being, that is, appearance and Being- or better still, Becoming and Being, and moreover the human shaping or erotic poiesis, to
speak again psychoanalytically, of Becoming (techne) and Being, must remain equivalent. Stiegler points out as his central thesis
that the interfusion of these two finally occurs in the 18th century, obviously with no slight assistance from the Nietzschean
philosophy, however, without any notion of the Loss of Being, this fusion took place as one between techne and ontology, effecting
what he calls a state of "permanent innovation," the elevation of man's techne to the ontic itself, the seizure of ontos or Being as an
image of infinite technological mastery over a finite materia readily conformable to the "aimless finality" Capitalism posits within
itself, or that perpetual economic growth coincident no less with the Aristotelian kinesis toward the perfection of human happiness as
the perfection of the polis.]

but this is just a side effect and not an ontological postulate. not even in theory in philosophy would it be posited that man is literally this fusion of being and techne to the point where being and techne are supposed to be one thing. capitalism doesn’t actually posit an aimless finality, that’s just a marxist code meant to misdefine capitalist logic (the logic of ownership and property, individualism, and freedom).

philosophers do have a problem with qualia, because they are stuck inside the marxist sort of materialism that assumes everything must be reducible to a material or physical, so called, correlate when in fact “A=A” and that reduction isn’t needed. tectonics would say that emergent logic with partial ‘reductions’ in all directions well explains it, much more so than does materialism.

the fact is that we are using techne to ground ourselves in reality and to value, that is simply what and how we are. techne itself doesn’t even exist, is just another of those misleading terms i call ideological. why really exists is streams of being-valuing-acting that flow from beings outward and inward with respect to that being, as attempts to ground and to know and to secure-expand said being. these naturally form agreements and disagreements with the similar streams of other beings, compromises and disputes, ie capitaliam. it’s just the way it is. i see no possible alternative except to try and close up being in itself in marxist-metaphysical death traps. which would be anti-philosophical in the extreme, i.e. anti-human, anti-life, anti-reason. against truth.

Quote :: That absolute connection between phenomenon and Being became the absolute connection (equivalence) between thought and Being in Hegel's dialectic, and that is the univocal in its essence.

I don't disagree with Hegel's idea that such an equivalence is possible, just that we have achieved it, certainly that he had achieved it.* Clearly he did not. Philosophy goes so far beyond what Hegel has to offer, but he and Nietzsche both posit the adequacy of though to reality, just in very different ways. Hegel treats it as if reality is just an extension of thought in the eye of some god-Absolute, it's all just the same (universalist univocity in the reduction of phenomena to "Being") while Nietzsche treats it as if a single operative term, "will to power", can mediate everything to everything else. Both approaches are wrong, I think we agree on that. But I do think that thought itself is adequate to the task of achieving the equivalence, which would require the highest kind of philosophy imaginable, one that fuses logic, fact, and meaning along with experience and subjectivity, science, mythos, etc. I think we also agree on that, maybe. It isn't really a universalist univocity, it is more like a tectonics or a VO approach, and your own philosophical system which posits the epistemic closures that nonetheless mediate themselves in and through and as human consciousness in terms of stages of subjective apotheosis of the daemonic all the way up toward the heroic-daemonic which has, in that higher level, purged itself of errors and achieved summative knowledge and power as simply what is called ethics. The collapse of all the separate philosophical categories and fields into a single field, like a universal field theory of truth. I think this is quite possible, and also that this is what philosophy has always been aiming for. But this kind of summative philosophy is by no means a kind of Hegelian or Nietzschean universality univocal reductivism. Quite the opposite, I would call it more like a super-Husserlian anti-eidetic Idea. An Idea that remakes man totally in the images of truth, which is basically what is happening already anyway except, as you say, subjective experience is not adequate to the epistemic closures underneath that subjectivity because our experience is continuous while reality itself is discontinuous. **

Those discontinuities are always being sewn up together to one degree or another, that is basically what I see "life" is. Heroic daemonism alongside the summative philosophy and science would achieve the maximum possible sewing up of the discontinuities and thus also see the emergence of the highest, greatest possible subjectivity. But this is all just Idea, it is the Idea just as the human mind is the idea/s it has of itself. An idea does not mean "simply in our heads" but it means that a certain logic+fact+meaning structure has, as a factor of truth, been able to be recognized and understood by a being, in this case us as humans, enough to reinforce itself upon that being and change that being in its own terms, which also already implies that said being already contains sufficiency number of aspects of that idea to begin with, at least in pre-requisites.

Quote :: So the first epistemological closure is just that: the one between phenomenon and Being. The episteme is an abstract model of the closures, (the three epistemological closures, the three epistemes all taken together, I invoke with the word athesis) models of them as liminal to one another, with the ontic episteme modeling this first closure. Being becomes that within which these ruptures- are ruptures, and therefor not a passive quality shared between all beings, a singular mode all beings can be univocally reduced to, but an active creativity that these beings participate within, which Holderlin represents with his idea of mytho-poetic truth: Being as the object of a kind of empty longing of beings, of the creation itself.

We long for completeness, we long for what we desire which is an expression of what we are. But finitude cannot be truly overcome, so even the Heroic Daemonic subjectivity would still be subject to finitude and the laws of reality, even if it had already figured out many ways of surpassing or bypassing many of these. And to elevate perfection and infinity as an ideal is also a mistake, not only because it is actually impossible to achieve but because it warps the entire projects of subjectivity and of philosophy. So the first closure for me would be that opposition between subjectivity as longing-desire to achieve the total freedom from all of its limitations and finitudes when in reality this is impossible. Therefore this first closure can be overcome by understanding the impossibility of that posited goal or ideal, and accepting ultimate finitude while also never giving up the fight against it. Maybe this is analogous to your own first closure of the ontic, as between experience and Being as you say, since "Being", to use your term, represents ultimate finitude while experience contains within itself this hidden striving for the ideal of infinity. Let me know if you think this is on par with your view.

Quote :: That is the main point, the misreading of Being. Being only implies univocity because of the project began by Thales, and consummated by Nietzsche's self-destruction of univocity. Being is conceptualized there as a passive quality that is shared by (b)eings, that all beings can be reduced to. But I have read Being as an active creative entity that all beings participate within. Being is a concept that represents man's relationship to the world, both the world as individuals and as a whole, in terms of his own subjective experience of that world.

Yes but we cannot reduce this entirety of Being to "his own subjective experience of that world" because in philosophy, science, objectivity (language etc) we are able to actually get outside of our own subjective experience and see things as they are. This is what I think I disagree with the most here. I do not think this idea that Being as active creativity, which I don't necessarily disagree with in itself, should be framed as reduced to in terms of its own subjective experience of. That's not how I see experience working. Subjectivity and experience are, again, just terms we use and should not be used ideologically as if they are a reality unto itself, as if the term is a magical marker of something and that's that. No, I see words as merely sign-posts. So I actually see subjectivity and experience as meaning something quite literally, each with a different meaning, and literally in reality the words themselves are nothing but a little symbol that can communicate something of this actual literal reality as we try to understand it as it is in itself.

Yes we must move through our own vantage to achieve any understanding, but experience itself does not reduce to subjectivity anymore than it reduces to objectivity. These are just sign-symbol markers of the polarity between self-focused and other-focused, when in reality there are tectonic universes inside and between each of these. There is no absolute polarity between subject and object, at least not in my view. Subjectivity is something about objectivity, objectivity is something about subjectivity, and the more we take that relation, which is us, to the highest levels possible the more we fuse them and see how they are aspects of one thing. But this also risks losing subjectivity because the glue holding it together can be undone by too much objective intrusion, just as we risk losing objectivity when we retreat too much into our own subjectivity and act like subjectivity itself is the ground.

Quote :: If it is defined as a passive commonality in the manner of Thales then yes it does imply univocity, but I have conceived it as an active creative entity that implies plurality, a plurality I model with what I call epistemes, each of the three representing one of the immanent closures to reality as an epistemological limit, hence the word episteme.

I like positing it as active rather than passive. But I still do not see it as any kind of Being per se. No universal commonality, but indeed there is a pluralism to everything, simply because "to be a thing" means always already to be "many things". Nothing is simply one thing, although everything is also itself; the error here would be to assume the A=A means "one-thing-ness" when in fact it just means that to be a thing is to be a many-thing-ness = [the same] to be a thing is to be a many-thing-ness, or "you are what you are; things are." In my view anyway.

Quote :: Then this is combined with the idea of the "self-sublation of the real", the other side of my positing closures immanent to reality itself, therefor epistemological closures:

Can you define the self-sublation of the real, how you are using this, what it means here?

Quote :: It is through Pandemos, that is, the immanent or Real, that Urania, the Ideal, is glimpsed-
Pandemos is the murmurring spring of blood and tears, of corporeal beauty and power, in
which it is witnessed, but it is in this spring that its image is also lost, as was Narcissus'
vision upon the weight of his own tears, which recalls Solger's radicalization of
Schelling's tragic sublation, which we might reforumlate here: because it is through
immanence that transcendence is both acheived and lost, a tragic sublation is formed that
opens up merely finite desire for the transcendent, in the sense of Leopardi's noia or
object-less longing, to its own negativity. In this reproduction of its own negativity as
object, the need for representation is met with at a breakthrough behind the strictures of
the dialectic.

Lately I am having a difficult time with even the Real and Ideal terminology. I just see things directly, literally, in pure logic and fact and meaning arrangements. The words are helpful as sign-posts and markers, but I have to do a lot of interpreting from your language to my own to try and see what you're saying. I don't mind, and never have minded because this is always enlightening for me, but it is difficult sometimes. So let me try to interpret this above paragraph into my own language, tell me if I am correct that this is what you are saying:

We long for the transcendent (the ideal of perfection, non-finitude, subjective apotheosis) because of our own immanent imperfections and how we are aware of these imperfections thus being aware of them naturally forces us to question how to turn them into perfections, to overcome what we see as limits or errors, however we are not adequate in our immanent or subjective-lived conscious experience to this question, therefore we simply posit the question itself as the problem, and turn the question or rather the longing-desire under the question and which is the cause of the question's being questionable to us to begin with, into the image that we then organize ourselves against and in terms of, therefore achieving only a partial transcendent possibility because while we may come to understand the question itself in a better way we aren't actually able to deal with the actual error or limit itself. Also, we can fall in love with the question qua question, mistaking it as THE object of thought, and lose or damage transcendental possibility entirely.

Not sure if that is quite what you were saying. But again, I don't posit any kind of absolute division or polarity between immanent and transcendent. To me they are just aspects of a greater tectonics, emergent qualities that we are seated in and participate in. Immanent lived Real-ity versus transcendent Ideal-ity are just terms to me, they have no literal meaning, they are just like "cup" and "spoon", words or terms we use to be able to speak about something that has its own literal existence. We can easily reduce together cups and spoons into the same category if we want to, or we can keep them in separate categories, but whether we move them into the same category or keep them in different categories has no actual bearing on the things themselves, because what is of those things themselves includes both the being able to be moved into one category and the being able to be kept in two separate categories, as well as many more things, interpretations, aspects, uses, definitions, scopes and degrees of existence, etc. I simply cannot reduce the meaning of a term to the term itself, which probably makes me an anti-poet or something. I don't really know. I am always acutely aware of the imperfection or relative limitation of terms and words when it comes to the actual reality and existence which those words and terms are intending to capture.

Regarding the substance here though, I agree that we can mistake the question for the problem itself, we can treat as ultimate Object the mere fact and phrasing of our particular vantage upon what is ultimately a problem in itself, and therefore lose ourselves relative to the problem but still think we are working on it because we are continually refining our linguistic approaches to how we deal with and articulate the question. I see that most of philosophy falls into this trap. It is basically that whole thing of people talking about something rather than actually saying something. So I think we agree here. Maybe.

Quote :: Opposing the general theoretika of Hegelian synthesis, Kierkegaard imagines stages of existence in a
manner quite analogous to the topos; a tragic, irreconcilable contradiction is met with, and, in Kierkegaard, the tragic element of this
contradiction must be sublated by a leap of faith in order to develop the next existential stage, from the aesthetic to the ethical spheres
of existence, from the ethical to the religious. Here, however, pains are taken in the preservation of that tragic element and instead of
a leap of faith to take us into the next, higher polarity of contrasting elements, ie. the next agon of existence and series of
contradictions, we have a reproduction of that stage or topos' own negativity as an object of thought: this negative idea reified as
ideatum represents, in Solger's terminology, the tragic's sublation of itself in the real: in this Solgerian line of thinking, nature
becomes the embodiment of the contradictory elements through which the tragic sublation is achieved, the universe of the flesh
reifiying the existential contradiction rather than operating as a mere member in it, with the logos of the natural order in turn
originating itself at the terminus of the mythos, - ie. because our destiny is eternity, so it is that we must die, for that destiny lies
beyond the temporal order of this stunted, irresolvable nature. In Schelling nature is seen the same way, but the tragic again is
sublated by the ideal rather than the real- the daemon returns the particle of the divine will that was invested to it into the night of the
unconscious, beneath nature, and back into the godhead or mythic wellspring, reordering the positioning of the two contradictory
elements so as to reconstruct their relationship in reflection and subject-objectivity, for, in Schelling, evil is merely that particle of the
divine will insofar as it is hoarded and stored up by the daemon in matter, a kind of inversion of the divine potency, or a
metaphysically inflated egoism inherent in the material void itself which God left behind after contracting his divine radiance in order
to create a space in which to hold the world, an egoism whose memory persists in matter as the regressive impulse of the daemon and
which Nietzsche mistakenly championed as the Dionysian joy of the un-sublated Will to Power. Because the Return can never be
fully completed, that is, because the return into the mythic night of Schelling can never completely extinguish the sense of the tragic
or close off the space of the Real as in Nietzsche's version of the return, (psychically equivalent to Freudian guilt becoming the wound
from which motive force is originated with the loss of primary object) nor wholly close off the space of the ideal and allow the tragic
itself to become deified in Dionysian exuberance, (equivalent to Lacan's circulation of object-less desire around the negative core
upon which the personality structures are constructed) the concept of the Pandemic may be used to mark off a sphere beyond
Dionysus and Apollo: the primary loss is imagined here neither as the Dionysian struggle to break through Oedipus and bring
ourselves into existence as our own father and mother nor the Apollonian dissolution of form in power, but as the Pandemic loss of
itself in face of Urania, with an extension beyond Schelling as well in that the reordering of the positioning of the opposing elements
is expanded (this possibility is the episteme) with each transition into a new topoi, by means of a reordering and re-concatenation of
the multiple equivalent to Straussian silence in the mytho-logos or the silence of Platonic aporia after the conclusive fulfillment of
dialectical reason, so that a new negative object is reproducible by means of the epistasis, the typus of psychic reversal, with each
stage leading up to the final reproduction of the negative object in reification. The Pandemic loss is also seen as the loss of the pure
Affirmation, the self-defeat of individuality struggling towards universality, while the potentiation of the opposing elements making
up the tragic corresponds to the philosophic plurality (in which the individuality must annihilate itself in assuming the mantle of the
All) at odds with the Hegelian unity of the absolute.

If I am understanding you properly here, the idea is that we are in a tragic state (because we are going to die and understand this fact, and because we cannot achieve the summative perfection in transcendence that we long for in desire as escaping as an excess from our relationships to our own naturally-occurring finitudes) and that this tragedy is parried in part by raising ourselves to higher stature of subjectivity and truth, in other words we take a leap of faith that we can indeed summatively rise over and conquer the tragedy and by acting as if we can do this, we jump up another order of subjective existence by learning how to think and act beyond the constrains of that particular level of subjective entrapment in the error-itself (the tragic) which we had formerly been in; then, unlike Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, your system not only allows and encourages this kind of leap but also does so in a way that does not assume the overcoming of the error against which one is leaping in faith, therefore the error or tragic element is preserved not unconsciously as in Kierkegaard's, Hegel's and Nietzsche's systems for example but is preserved consciously in your own system. Because it is preserved consciously we are able, upon leaping, to take better cognizance of where we were, where we are now, and where we can go next, basically positing the entire Ideality or tragic-leaping-thing which we might call subjectivity-itself in its many capacities, structures and power as the ultimate goal or reality end-point which can be posited as Object of reflection or of thought rather than merely existing in the background as a kind of shadow of our own being. Doing this then allows us a better kind of sublation because we are able to assume more of the fragmented contents into ourselves and reunify them in better more complete ways, because we have the proper Object in mind. So the tragic is only partially sublated by other philosophical systems but can at least in theory be totally sublated in your own system, i.e. in the greatest kind of philosophical struggle of subjectivity after its own essence and nature, understanding and accepting its own being and the contradictions therein including the one between the longing-desire for non-finitude and the understood reality of inescapable finitude no matter what we do.

Quote :: This conceptualization of the Pandemos can be happily organized by constructing a dialogue network with Solger, Schelling,
Nietzsche, Machiavelli, Eckhart, Theophilus, and Climacus, whose essential structure will here be offered. Since the object of human
destiny lies beyond the finite, the conatus or longing for eternity both destroys matter and reveals its essence, its beauty, extracting its
Form and the semina motuum for the soul's ascent like Solger's sublation of the tragic in itself, of the Pandemic, sacrificial dissolution
of the finite in the finite struggling for the infinite. But this revelation must become habitual will in Eckart's language: the creative
potential or Machiavellian virtu it invests to us as precisely that Theophillian paradysi species or an image of paradise, imprinted on
the will in the philosophy of Climacus like an erotic-mortal prototype for the divine agape, (which allows us to theoretically establish
a reference point for the divine, "a new center for the garden") in order to survive the epistasis or reversal of love's "passion brought to
event" and the conquering antidrome in order to become a constitutive feature of psychic existence, must be transformed from mere
instinct into participant will, bear the living saeculum and demarcate the invariable, for, just as Eckhart defines a typical, momentary
will in which inspiration temporarily crosses the limen of transcendence, and a greater habitual will in which the creative instinct can
possibly be solidified and transformed into action, we might say that there are equally two kinds of activity: some acts demarcate the
invariable and give measure to the boundless, while in others, like the unsublimated discharge of the sexual instinct, to refrain
Holderlin's lament, all yearning vanishes across the shore of the boundless into the infinite. In terms of the daemonic progression, the
ascending frenzy of the heroic cycles gradually accomplishes this "habituation" of inspired genius. Carrying the paradysi species or
Theophilus' image of paradise as a Climacusian erotic-mortal prototype for divine agape, as the true "eikon" for godly tragedy, man
becomes capable of demarcating a new line for the boundless, thereby preventing "all yearning from vanishing into the infinite" in the
merely human or comical madness of the phantasia. Like the immediate dissipation of the sexual energetics through the bare act, as
opposed to the visionary state induced by its heroic frenzies, creative-artistic redirection, and sublimed gestation, so this yearning
thereby rescued from dissolution of the inspired state becomes, through the habituated will, the virtu which empowers amore, and the
amore which empowers man to designate an object beyond conventional moral obligations and the given social contracts, and
delivers eros to that strength out of which nations and new faiths are founded, out of which the contradictory elements of the
existentia are potentiated by entrance upon a new tops.

So this is about how to dip into the infinite without either losing finitude (losing ourselves, our vantage-possibility upon infinitude) or losing infinitude in the end-point euphoria of a desire completed and which therefore retreats back into non-problematizing. Basically, we have this problem where we are finite beings with an infinite destiny or ideal, because we can comprehend truth, and therefore our own relationship to infinity or truth becomes problematic too, and we must find a way to hold this relationship in existence in perpetuity so that it does not collapse into mere desiring which would, upon attaining a moment of transcendent vision or experience, retreat back into non- or pre-desiring, but we must also maintain the relationship in such a way that we do not simply dissolve ourselves, that is to say our finite subjective nature, in our own image-experiences of the infinite-transcendent because this would annihilate us in a way that would render the relationship to the transcendent or infinite no longer possible. One way to overcome this problem is to habituate ourselves to transcendental reflection or thought over time, bit by bit, so that we can use longing-desire but not allow the yearning or relationship itself to the transcendent, our own reflection as it were, in its higher elements and spheres, to be able to be reduced to longing-desire in the physiological or psychological sense, and so that we can maintain a sort of continuous creative-thinking power?

* i would add that the position of holding that thought is ultimately adequate to reality is the basis position of philosophy and as such cannot be abandoned if we want to avoid sliding into all forms of stupid errros like materialist reduction, analytic philosophy, radical skepticism, mysticism etc.

** and also add that subjective experience is also discontinuous and realittvunder subjective experience is also continuous. it’s not that subjective experience is only continuous and it’s sub parts ‘in reality’ or ‘reality itself’ is only discontinuous, that would be a simplified view. any sense in which subjective experience is continuous also holds for reality, as the continuities and discontinuities are always partial products of larger systems with many parts working together tectonically to produce relative stabilizations and relative destabilizations. i would say that continuity and discontinuity are effects of self valuing, or simply facts of how existence itself works. something can be and always is somewhat continuous and discontinuous both in-as itself as well as to-for itself.

Tower Posts : 791 ᚠ : 856 Join date : 2011-12-11

" If I am understanding you properly here, the idea is that we are in a tragic state (because we are going to die and understand this fact, and because we cannot achieve the summative perfection in transcendence that we long for in desire as escaping as an excess from our relationships to our own naturally-occurring finitudes) and that this tragedy is parried in part by raising ourselves to higher stature of subjectivity and truth, in other words we take a leap of faith that we can indeed summatively rise over and conquer the tragedy and by acting as if we can do this, we jump up another order of subjective existence by learning how to think and act beyond the constrains of that particular level of subjective entrapment in the error-itself (the tragic) which we had formerly been in; then, unlike Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, your system not only allows and encourages this kind of leap but also does so in a way that does not assume the overcoming of the error against which one is leaping in faith,"

Yes in essence. Recently, I focused on this summative heightening of subjectivity out of the tragic-pathos by conceiving of a series of logical progressions, of what I call universal-tragic forms, which capture this progression as a mythic organization of man's existential totality, the summative experience itself. That totality is a mythic precursor the episteme is to replace, but that is for the essay following this one about the tragic forms. I will just state the diagram first and then the text concerning it:

Schiller developed a universal tragic form based on Prometheus, Holderlin did so on Empedocles. But I've notice a more comprehensive pattern by relating those two forms, as ancillary to my main goal in the essay. It will be necessary to first read the text below, which details how Empedoclean relates to the Promethean tragedy in Schiller, and then there are two more universal tragic forms I determined though haven't written of yet, (Attic and Dionysian) and the four of these logically connect in a progressively comprehensive sequence from one another. Attic tragedy is the oldest, it is a form in which the tragic hero is silent, the chorus speaks for him most of the time, Aeschylus, etc., it represents man's unconscious defiance and elemental, inarticulate self-assertion. Dionysian tragedy is what Nietzsche thought of as the universal form, it is of course, mirroring the excesses of Nature, conforming the will to her to share in, become an embodiment of, her power. After you read the text, the pattern that emerges in bringing together these four universal tragic forms is:

Attic tragedy-Dionysian tragedy-Promethean-Empedoclean

Attic: Raw/unconscious defiance against fate /Sensuous Sublime
Dionysian: Conforming that defiant will to nature, mirroring it / ecstatic reconciliation (sensuous, Pandemic Beauty)
Promethean: Intellectual/conscious defiance against fate / Ecstatic Sublime
Empedoclean: Submerging that will in nature, annihilating it / destructive reconciliation (celestial, Uranic Beauty)

The actual text:

2.

On the Mythic Organization of Man's Existential and Absolute Totality in the
Universal-Tragic Forms.

Observing the fact that, although the gods themselves had become merely objects of
ridicule for a people whose faith in them had been wholly forgotten, the statues of those
great Gods were still paid deference and bowed to, Schiller gives us to understand that
remarkable sentiment: "As noble art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead
of it, fashioning and awakening us by her inspiration." However, perhaps this gives us
more to understand about the nobility of the Gods, than the nobility of art. The question
of Being, realized by the univocal reductionism of nature which broke man's chains to her
order, as formulated in the self-questioning that respectively severed man's connection to
mythos, that is, in man's questioning the role he has in Nature, implies a questioning, no
less, of the eroto-poietic, creative-destructive potential to shape nature that man began to
discover within himself while following this questioning through: that is, his freedom.

The Promethean daemonism of Schiller's tragic formula, as it is invoked in Balthasar's
Apokalypse, (in distinction to Holderlin's Empedoclean daemonism and analysis of the
tragic-pathos) in which Nature is given to man without any hope for reconciliation, gives
us to understand that the absolute totality of man's own nature, of the naturans humanum,
is consequently permanently occluded from any purely philosophical analysis, and
reduced to the confused telos of a limited existential totality- of a telos that can "master
the All" in Schiller's words, and achieve freedom, only through the Zeitewigkeit in which
we "disperse ourselves into the finite in order to enjoy the infinite as sensuous-aesthetic
object". The main criticism of Schiller is that this existential totality to which man is
limited by the burden of Fate, (insofar as an absolute totality of human nature toward
which we might develop our will would be required to lift the Promethean burden of fate)
and no less by a nature forever sitting Sphinx-like upon him, cannot be united to the
idealist or transcendental specification which makes up the other half of Schiller's work,
so that we are left with a seemingly untenable Zeitewigkeit or "sensuous-eternity" in
which the play-drive overcomes the sense and form-drives, not by means of synthetic
abbreviation of them to any univocal mode, but my means of that pseudo-mystical
"dispersal" Schiller could not properly define. If he can be faulted in the line of thought
developed in this book for anything, it would only be that. Following the philosophy
presented here, the deviation from univocity is certainly no fault, and in fact his assertion
of dispersing ourselves into the finite in order to enjoy the infinite as sensuous-aesthetic
object, seems to speak to the Loss of Being, if only embryonically. In fact a cursory
relationship can be drawn up amongst these ideas by relating Schiller's Zeitewigkeit to
Schelling's gestige Korperlichkeit, [spiritual corporeality] that is, to the pothos of nature
and a materiality which exceeds the capacity of the sensuous body and thus represents in
that destructive excess a form of the death, the "apocalypse of the corporeal rind" at the
height of ecstasy, into which we "disperse ourselves into the finite", for it suggests no less
a corporeal spirituality, that is, a desire that exceeds the materiality in which it was
originated by our natural endowment and our senses and thus an excess requiring
sublimation, or in Schiller's vocabulary, the production of the sensuous-aesthetic object as
spiritual enjoyment of the infinite and eternal. However, to truly illuminate the
Promethean daemonism of Schiller, that is, this pairing of existential and idealist
(transcendental) categories in his work, it will be necessary to develop the episteme as an
ineffable boundary through which the idea of a liminal co-participation of immanence and
transcendence can be arrived at in detail,- a task for which a comparison of Eriugena and
Schelling, the consummate thinkers of Medieval and German idealism respectively, will
prove decisive.

In Balthasar's reading of Schiller, we are given to understand that, in attempting to work
out the interplay of diesseits and enseits, that is, life on this side of "Holderlin's infinite
shore" and the other, or the telos of physical existence in sensuous fulfillment and a life
beyond the grave, in an immortality whose fulfillment might be realized only in the final
revelations of man's spiritual existence,- the analytical extensions of Schiller's two
fundamental human drives as arrived at by his attempted transcendental psychology and
the question of the potential of human life and destiny as opposed to their reality and
inevitabilities, Schiller is able to come to no satisfying reconceptualization of an
Aristotelian eudaemonia, that is, a synthesis of the two forms of fulfillment belonging to
human essence, ie. sensuous happiness and metaphysical illumination,- a synthesis which
would in any case submerge us once again from the heights of our transcendental
psychology into a speculative and empirical one, and we are left instead with two
existential totalities which together somehow make up the telos of human essence.*
Grasping human freedom as a matter of inner consciousness before any political
concretization or merely ethical praxis, in the Wallenstein play Balthasar turns our
attention to, Schiller again does not fall into the trap of Aristotelian speculation and lose
his appreciation for the necessity of a transcendental specification of the existential
totality, the question becomes one of Hellenic or Gnostic redemption: is the teleological
fulfillment of that freedom a matter of immanently negotiating the impositions of Greek
Fate, of a daemonical urge latent in matter itself, of a blind hunger as threatens to
swallow us up in the extremum of tragic ecstasy and annihilation, which we bear with
chains and vultures and with which we must bring our own will into accordance in order
to echo the Stoic kosmos and assume for ourselves the Prometheian power, that form of
power with which we might mediate man and universe, polis and heavenly kingdom,
earth and heaven, or is the telos of that freedom to be located in the Timaean cosmogony,
in the love-visions of the Dantaean mystery schools, in a pervasive gnosis out of which
the material limits to human freedom are subsumed by the fearful necessity of the stars
above? In these two possibilities, Schiller is attempting to hypostasize one of the two
existential totalities implied by his competing drives toward sense and form as the
absolute telos of human essence, as an equillibrium and connection between finite and
infinite in the final existential totality, through what Kierkegaard would have called the
aesthetic sphere of existence, within which the will operates in a dark harmony with the
daemonic, ineluctable urge of material and bears the charge of Greek fate, finding its
perfection in the sensuous and in the beautiful, in all that the aesthetic mode of life would
suggest and nothing of the greater meaning implied by the ethical sphere in which
Schiller works out the second solution, as a matter of subsuming our material limitations
in terms of a higher metaphysical necessity. Balthasar of course offers the idea of
Christian grace, a formulation of the third sphere of existence that Schiller did not seem
to address, ie. the one which Kierkegaard would have called the religious sphere, for he
imagines that the transcendental specification of man's existential totality, in which the
operative closure of his telos could finally be discovered, is to be realized only by it.
However, it may not be an operative closure of that telos which we should be looking for,
but a restoration of the mythologos.

* This is exactly the situation noted in the resultant asymmetry between the Phaedrus and Symposium, with two existential totalities
being formed in passive contemplation and in active eroto-poiesis.

Schelling above all others attempted to work through the "abortive semiosis of the
generative moment of speech itself" and the epistemological closures following the
metaphysical deadlock of this perilous conjunction of particular and universal, that is, the
co-incidence of these two existential totalities in the explicit formula of human freedomof
a human freedom whose dialogue was sustained only implicitly in Schiller and Platoof
human freedom and, moreover, that system through which "the ineffable character of
the primordial contact with Being might be limited and therefor become articulable", and
within which freedom must, though by its nature it defies systematization, accordingly be
limited as well, in order to paradoxically express itself, for it is just that limitation which
seizes an image of freedom as the in-itself of Being, an extension of the aesthetic totality
implied by Schiller and the Symposium's eroto-tragic agons that Schelling more
cryptically alludes to with his notion of the primordial ourgias of forces, and this by
means of an image of Being as the for-itself of freedom, that is, as an extension of the
obverse ethical totality found in the Phaedrus. Schelling's attempt engulfs him, and the
oscillation between these two competing objectifications of human telos overruns his
available materials, leading him back into the trap of synthetic abbreviation and
dialectical reduction of this fundamental antinomy, with Heidegger venturing about
Schelling's work the only critique he could- that such an attempt was impossible, and that,
without surprise, Schelling had failed. What Schelling was attempting to do was just the
goal toward which I have set my own heart with the model of the episteme- namely, to
formulate a plurality within which the particular and universal, the immanent and
transcendent,- within which freedom and system, are provided identity with equal priority
and significance, that is, are equally granted a place within that multi-vocal plural identity
of philosophic truth. It must be admitted that every philosophy that has been developed
thus far has unconsciously formed and privileged one of these two existential totalities,
whose basic asymmetry, though echoed in every era since, only first appeared in Plato,
most pointedly in the two contrasting accounts of human nature and the telos of man's
essence as they were depicted in the Symposium and Phaedrus, the one locating the
object of that telos in the category of pure reflection and the total passivity of the
contemplative state, and the other finding it in the eroto-poietic agons of the creative
impulse.

Holderlin speaks of Empedocles as a son of nature's ourgias or fury of violent oppositions
and no less a son of the violent oppositions between nature and his own art, an art through
whose eroto-poietic agons with the world the world had itself appeared before him, for he
had so intimately consolidated this ourgias and multiplicity within himself that, in order
to understand the very unity he embodied as immanence, (not, as Rosenzweig would
charge, through a mere aesthetic prototype of the ego developed in order to recover, by
means of an imitative cosmos, the idealist system in the absence of any logical self-identity)
he had to plunge into Aetna and be destroyed, thereby resolving a tragic form
that, without this, would collapse into the Promethean tragic form explored by Schiller, in
which the irreconcilability with Nature prevents any transformation of the unconscious
unity, a unity which is therefor reduced to the competing existential totalities, as limited
by the charges of Greek fatum. Empedocles had to resubmerge himself in Nature just as
the philosopher plunges unity into multiplicity, knowing into unknowing and eros into
pothos so as to sustain, as I had mentioned- the flight of his soul and re-emergence into
unity, as through that "dispersal into the finite",- so as to resurrect this immanent,
unconscious unity or corporeal spirituality, to continue drawing on Schelling,- as
conscious unity or spiritual corporeality, and thereby achieve the necessary sublation to
free the universal from the particular and realize his immanence as an immanence of the
transcendent.

In exploring these two universal forms of tragedy, the Promethean as devised by Schiller
and the Empedoclean by Holderlin, we must also call to mind the Attic and Dionysian
forms, which I believe complete a pattern implied by the other two. The Attic tragedy
develops the category of the sensuous as sublime: the sensuous, as the primordial opening
of the self to the world, of the ego to existence, contains within itself that unconscious
element of the non-ego, of that materiality upon which the ego's enjoyment of its own
embodiment and sensuous capacity, as no less the realization of its own sphere of unique
powers, is dependent, as serves to bring it under the spell of Fate and which the Attic hero
violently expunges from himself in erotic fury, not as a simple tension within Identity that
would, in the Heideggarian analysis, swallow up the ontological within the category of
the ontic, any question of essence into the question of existence, and the horizon of Being
into the horizon of Dasein, but as an elemental self-assertion of the Self in its
independence from nature, mankind, and God: the silence of the Attic tragic hero, and the
Satyr-mask raised to represent it, expresses this, for it is a silence in which the
unconscious self-determinacy gathers itself as a hieroglyphic of its material analogue and,
not yet joined to spirit as either unconscious or conscious unity, expresses through the
defenseless rupture of the ego in multiplicity and its undiminished transparency in Nature,
as by means of the sorcery of an Adamic name-giving and purely evocative, imagistic
language mirroring the world in the tapestry of names as opposed to merely describing it,
a space for the true outline of things to reveal itself, not in aletheia, but in the "sensuous
sublime" upon which the absolute and symbolist forms of poetry, in the modern era,
atavistically resuscitated. The spontaneous or elemental self-assertion of the Attic hero in
erotic fury is, through that silence, perfectly conformed to the obverse, that is, to the ego's
transparency and receptivity to nature, so that the poetic language that evolves in the
works of Aeschylus seems to align with the language of a poet like Rilke for whom the
maintenance of this dual role (which Rilke called "the heart-work upon the images stored
inside us) was also important. Separated by so many centuries, we can observe in both of
them a kind of "absolute poetry", a total permeance of the corporeal, for which Aeschylus
is now thought of as so obscure in comparison to a Euripides, in which the names of
things become the very things they are describing, in which the tautegorical logic (which
Schelling used to describe the relationships of essences characteristic of the mythos)
predating the further refinement of aesthetic representation articulates the objects of
language as arising from the very confluence of forces they seemingly resolve into
articulate forms, and in which the poem itself becomes the object of its own poeticising,
as in Rilke's torso. Yet, this total permeance of the corporeal, as not yet joined to spirit,
while it does offer a space for the true outline of things to reveal itself, nonetheless bears
the finitude of that corporeal element through whose violent expulsion the ego has both
declared itself in spontaneity and elemental or unconscious self-assertion as well as
opened the refuge of heart-images, that is, the space for the true outline of things to reveal
itself, and in that finitude, typifies the tragic formula of the Attic hero, for this signature
of the finite threatens to destabilize the dual-role implied in the Rilkean heart-work and
Aeschylean silence, inasmuch as "we will never be able to capture the cadence of the sea
in any song" and bring into harmony the rhythm of our heart-work and that of the world-heart,
for whose intonation we possess a love too human, and a heart too mortal, a heart
that must die, to cite Pindar- a love too imperfect, yet not imperfect enough to bear malice
with the Gods, or for "hearts that stir in images only, hearts for which no vision at last
fulfilled might prove inspiring, and want to glimmer only around the edges of things" to
trace the shadows of things beyond their whispered forms, to finish Pindar's line.

The destabilization of the Attic tragic-form opens up the space for the Dionysian as
explored by Nietzsche, the tragic-form in which the elemental self-assertion of the ego in
spontaneity and the pure receptivity of that ego's "silent" reflection of nature in the
sensuous-sublime of material transparency are exploded, extroverted, and fully
externalized, so that, no longer restricted to the finite horizon of human interiority, they
are instead externalized in that form of tragedy whereby the human will mirrors itself in
the ourgias of Nature in order to become a heirophant of her power in ecstatic
reconciliation of man's mortal finitude to the infinite. While the Promethean tragedy
internalizes that infinite by introducing the first intercession of spirit to corporeality and
thereby articulates a concept of fate in which man's infinite capacity is restricted by nature
and barred from expressing itself in that freedom through which human nature could be
totalized as absolute, the Dionysian tragedy draws the potency of its expression in that
ecstatic self-annihilation of man's finite will in the infinite as glimpsed through the veil of
Nature, as is torn away by the god Apollo with which Dionysus places himself into that
creative-destructive cycle typifying the eroto-poietic agons and the generartive force of
human eros, now firmly rising from its pothic origination in nature. We then see the
logical series of the universal-tragic forms.

So man is basically gone through raw unmediated resistance and excess against his fate, once he understood death and life back in pre-history; then to identifying himself and also therefore this excess of his with the natural world, i.e. paganism, which allowed him to instantiate it and moderate/deal with it somewhat better also therefore corresponding to an idea of the sublime, i.e. first religious notion; then moves to developing still more that distance between himself and things, increasing the sublime distance i.e. rationality and develops intellect as a result, or just a sense of himself as coherent entity or individual bound to fate in a non-natural or non-immediate (more transcendent) sense; then he basically says fuck it and throws himself into a volcano because he recognizes there is no hope and nothing beyond the veil which he has torn open first against the imminent knowledge of death and life, then against himself and others in this knowledge by deifying nature, then against nature itself in the exploration of intellect, and finally realizing there is nothing beyond since the intellect basically destroys the mythopoetic logos by bringing it back full circle to itself in a way that short-circuits that mythological operation, a kind of hermeneutic self-destruction?

What I am really interested in is the mytho-logos itself and why we need it. As I said in a previous message, literature and film and music have basically taken the place of religious mythology in our culture. I am very glad for this. I think we now take into our own hands the creative active power of religious circumscription and mythopoetic articulation, basically telling meaningful stories. No more do we need to recite these verbatim from the past, or read them out of an old dusty religious tome, we are actually making it ourselves. The only price to pay for this power was to disbelieve in the literal truth of the stories we tell, since now we call them "fiction"... but in fact, these stories are quite real, which is why and how they work at all.

So we can abandon all storytelling that is non-fictive in nature but still just a fucking story, like the bible and koran or whatever else, and wholly embrace fiction in literature, film, music, and active storytelling to each other, also in philosophy and poetry. Writing is basically the heart of human creative potency-willpower but this writing should be tied into action so it does not degenerate into decadence and unreality, so it does not merely dissolve across the limen of the transcendent as you were saying before, but remains firmly grounded in our own subjectivity.

I don't like religion, I think it is fucking stupid. But I understand why it exists. So as I was saying, I am very glad that we are moving past religion and into the age of taking the power of this kind of mythological storytelling into our own hands. This would be an abruption of the fourth stage of the tragic subjectivity you mention, a stalling of the Empedoclean stage because instead of throwing ourselves into the volcano because we must perish for lack of any true meaning in the false reality of the tragic, and our own powerlessness before it i.e. before nature which had formerly held all of our dreams and powers, either directly as pagan natureworship (all the way up from that to the 'green' ecofascist tyrants and global warming groupies of today) or indirectly as our resistance to "the natural" via the will to intellectuality, now we can actually take the power of "nature" (life, reality, law-logic and unfoldment) into our own hands. Humanity can therefore have a bright future, but only if it says fuck off to religion and nature-worship either in the positive (pagan idealism, new agism) or negative (cold intellectualism of self-hatred of life as selfvalue) and takes this power into its own hands. We don't need no fucking myths, we need the goddamn truth. Reality itself is plenty full and saturated with meaning, experience, images, ideas, feelings, possibilities and future, all that, so that we can stop with the fucking stupid ass story-telling that pretends to be non-fictive (all religions), and I think this is basically where people are at right now.

Tower Posts : 791 ᚠ : 856 Join date : 2011-12-11

* i would add that the position of holding that thought is ultimately adequate to reality is the basis position of philosophy and as such cannot be abandoned if we want to avoid sliding into all forms of stupid errros like materialist reduction, analytic philosophy, radical skepticism, mysticism etc.

---

Indeed every form of philosophy that has ever been advanced, Leftist or not, from Hegel to Kant to phenomenology, rests on the presupposition of thought being adequate to reality, with philosophy in turn being given form, specifically, through the intentional and consciously directed cognition that produces knowledge framed in terms of this equivalence. But that is the point: not that cognition is not adequate to reality, but that we don't have a theory of cognition, a theory of directed and intentional cognition- of subjectivity, and that this is required to accomplish the true goal of philosophy, of representing subjectivity to itself- something that the mythos once did for man. We have psychology, neuroscience, etc. but as I pointed out somewhere else, these cannot be taken as a basis for intentional directed cognition or as any ethos upon which to act on the part of the very subjectivity that is supposed to be creating this edifice. So none of those systems can resolve the telos of man's confused existential totality.

Now, the first attempt at representing subjectivity to itself is given in the symbol of Psyche, as opposed to "the pre-Socratic imitations of the sameness of being and thinking, and of the logos of discourse with the logos of being." Voegelin goes on to say of Psyche, interpreting it as a symbol for the depth itself, that it served to represent the primal experience of Transcendence that, in my work, prompted the emergence of ontos, and, in both of us, leads to a process of differentiation as the symbolic network grows to accommodate a more and more encompassing subjectivity: the ontos is an image-of-Being as a guiding image-of-thought, a unity that through reflection is submerged into the very multiplicity it generates in order to re-emerge as conscious unity distinct from unconscious Depth, as the victory of Eros over Psyche. The category of pure reflection, which characterized the pre-modern and specifically the Platonic approach to analyzing the nature of man on a purely philosophical basis, as opposed to our having shifted that task to the psychologists, was of central importance to the endeavor because it is the observation of this process of differentiation itself that served as the inductive basis whereby the likes of a Heraclitus or a Thales or a Parmenides developed their unique procedures (ie. an episteme) for extracting insights about the process whereby equivalent experiences are generated in response to transcendence, with the first of these insights being granted in the symbol of Psyche, or the Depth.

[ On a more differentiated level, the observation of the process has induced Heraclitus, Aeschylus, and Plato to develop the symbol of a “depth” of the soul from which a new truth of reality can be hauled up to conscious experience; and their symbol of the “depth” has been preserved as an insight, through a long chain of equivalents, to the contemporary depth psychologies and psychologies of the unconscious. This depth of the soul, however, is experienced by the Hellenic thinkers as a depth beyond articulate experience. It can be expressed by the symbol “depth,” but it does not furnish a substantive content in addition to our experiences of God, man, the world, and society, of existential tension, and of participation. ... Though the experience of depth does not add to the substantive content of the experiences and symbols whose equivalence is our concern, it has a content peculiar to itself: it conveys insight into the process of reality from which the equivalents emerge. ]

Due to that depth beyond articulation, he goes on to say:

[ Hence, we must avoid the fallacy of imagining the depth as an area whose topography can be explored by a science not bound by the limits of our experienced truth of reality. Neither must we populate it with the archetypes of a collective unconscious, nor endow it with libidinous dynamics, in order to gain by fornicatio fantastica an absolute which a critical analysis of experience will not deliver.]

The systems of thought like psychology or neuroscience alone, when applied to this problem of representation- the distinct philosophical problem, can accomplish nothing more than fallacies of that kind.

I categorize that directed cognition which philosophy has always been based on as reflectivity, and propose a new complimentary category based on a re-reading of Plato and my own metaphysics- Representation.

My philosophy is not based on intentional, directed and conscious cognition, not on reflectivity or on the positive knowledge constructed on its account in equivalence with reality. It is based on that later category, Representation. Accordingly "knowledge" is a product of reflectivity constructing various regulative and theoretical schema out of positive data, whereas Truth- philosophic Truth, (as opposed to materialist-scientific knowledge) is a question of Representation, and does not depend on any regulative schema drawn from positive knowledge within consciousness, but on an essence or Platonic eidos independent from that consciousness. Hence the three different epistemes in the multi-vocal plural identity of Truth: that is, three different forms of representation, three distinct ways of representing Truth. (this function as a mode of representation was the real meaning of the Platonic form, in my interpretation of him) The Platonic Form and Episteme both work to shape a summative deepening of the human subject through the inductive noesis of transcendent Order in relation to the Absolute as opposed to the deductive dianoesis of material-scientific fact or the dialectical synthesis of univocal reductionist metaphysics/dialectical-historical materialism. Voegelin is one of the few to come close to reframing the problem of philosophy as the problem of representation, which in his writing was put like this: Man experiences the Transcendent, but from within his finite subjective horizon, so that this experience creates a sense of "Order", both within that subject, between subjects, and between the subject and the world,- an order that is captured through symbols and which deepens as one experiences the transcendent more fully. This is further extended by my writing on the immanent-transcendent limen.

The "theory of cognition" in terms of a symbolic representation of subjectivity to itself is essentially identified by Voegelin here:

[ The first fallacy to be avoided is the hypostasis of experience as an absolute. If we understand symbols in spite of their differences as equivalent because, as we have said, they are intelligibly engendered by the same type of experience, the experience is in danger of becoming the resting point in our search for constants in history. This resolution of the problem would be tempting, but it is untenable. For the constant experience, in order to be identified, would have to become articulate, and once it has been articulated the result would be a symbolism claiming to be exempt from the fate of being one more historically equivalent truth. We would be back to the system to end all systems—Hegel’s solution. ... If we want to avoid this unhappy end, we must extend the differences of the symbols into the engendering experiences and, consequently, speak of the equivalence not only of symbols, but of experiences as well. ]

This theoretical framework for determining "equivalent experiences", that is, the experience of transcendent order as represented in one set of philosophical symbols and an equivalent experience of that order in a different set of symbols, in a different representation, is a requirement for negotiating the impasse met with in man's two existential totalities.

Reflectivity ends up reifiying man's existential-totality, creating the two irreconcilable totalities I wrote of recently. They can each be reconciled to the Absolute, through either the movement of drang or geist, but not to each other, setting up the condition for the emergence of the tragic-pathos, for, given this, it is not possible to describe subjectivity in terms of that subjectivity- it is not possible to represent our own internal life, our own subjective existence, to ourselves, in the determination of equivalent experiences of transcendence and the symbolic networks with which those experiences produce Order. The two existential totalities, while each of them can be reconciled to the absolute, are not equivalent: that is the impasse, and the problem of philosophical representation. How to configure and represent them as a whole- this is the task.

This is why the problem of philosophy is the problem of representation- how to represent man, in this tragic relationship to the Absolute, given that confused teleological suspension of human essence, as was allegorized in the myth of Epimetheus at the head of my essay, On Reflection and Representation.

Parodites wrote:: * i would add that the position of holding that thought is ultimately adequate to reality is the basis position of philosophy and as such cannot be abandoned if we want to avoid sliding into all forms of stupid errros like materialist reduction, analytic philosophy, radical skepticism, mysticism etc.

---

Indeed every form of philosophy that has ever been advanced, Leftist or not, from Hegel to Kant to phenomenology, rests on the presupposition of thought being adequate to reality, with philosophy in turn being given form, specifically, through the intentional and consciously directed cognition that produces knowledge framed in terms of this equivalence. But that is the point: not that cognition is not adequate to reality, but that we don't have a theory of cognition, a theory of directed and intentional cognition- of subjectivity, and that this is required to accomplish the true goal of philosophy, of representing subjectivity to itself- something that the mythos once did for man. We have psychology, neuroscience, etc. but as I pointed out somewhere else, these cannot be taken as a basis for intentional directed cognition or as any ethos upon which to act on the part of the very subjectivity that is supposed to be creating this edifice. So none of those systems can resolve the telos of man's confused existential totality.

Now, the first attempt at representing subjectivity to itself is given in the symbol of Psyche, as opposed to "the pre-Socratic imitations of the sameness of being and thinking, and of the logos of discourse with the logos of being." Voegelin goes on to say of Psyche, interpreting it as a symbol for the depth itself, that it served to represent the primal experience of Transcendence that, in my work, prompted the emergence of ontos, and, in both of us, leads to a process of differentiation as the symbolic network grows to accommodate a more and more encompassing subjectivity: the ontos is an image-of-Being as a guiding image-of-thought, a unity that through reflection is submerged into the very multiplicity it generates in order to re-emerge as conscious unity distinct from unconscious Depth, as the victory of Eros over Psyche. The category of pure reflection, which characterized the pre-modern and specifically the Platonic approach to analyzing the nature of man on a purely philosophical basis, as opposed to our having shifted that task to the psychologists, was of central importance to the endeavor because it is the observation of this process of differentiation itself that served as the inductive basis whereby the likes of a Heraclitus or a Thales or a Parmenides developed their unique procedures (ie. an episteme) for extracting insights about the process whereby equivalent experiences are generated in response to transcendence, with the first of these insights being granted in the symbol of Psyche, or the Depth.

[ On a more differentiated level, the observation of the process has induced Heraclitus, Aeschylus, and Plato to develop the symbol of a “depth” of the soul from which a new truth of reality can be hauled up to conscious experience; and their symbol of the “depth” has been preserved as an insight, through a long chain of equivalents, to the contemporary depth psychologies and psychologies of the unconscious. This depth of the soul, however, is experienced by the Hellenic thinkers as a depth beyond articulate experience. It can be expressed by the symbol “depth,” but it does not furnish a substantive content in addition to our experiences of God, man, the world, and society, of existential tension, and of participation. ... Though the experience of depth does not add to the substantive content of the experiences and symbols whose equivalence is our concern, it has a content peculiar to itself: it conveys insight into the process of reality from which the equivalents emerge. ]

Due to that depth beyond articulation, he goes on to say:

[ Hence, we must avoid the fallacy of imagining the depth as an area whose topography can be explored by a science not bound by the limits of our experienced truth of reality. Neither must we populate it with the archetypes of a collective unconscious, nor endow it with libidinous dynamics, in order to gain by fornicatio fantastica an absolute which a critical analysis of experience will not deliver.]

The systems of thought like psychology or neuroscience alone, when applied to this problem of representation- the distinct philosophical problem, can accomplish nothing more than fallacies of that kind.

I categorize that directed cognition which philosophy has always been based on as reflectivity, and propose a new complimentary category based on a re-reading of Plato and my own metaphysics- Representation.

My philosophy is not based on intentional, directed and conscious cognition, not on reflectivity or on the positive knowledge constructed on its account in equivalence with reality. It is based on that later category, Representation. Accordingly "knowledge" is a product of reflectivity constructing various regulative and theoretical schema out of positive data, whereas Truth- philosophic Truth, (as opposed to materialist-scientific knowledge) is a question of Representation, and does not depend on any regulative schema drawn from positive knowledge within consciousness, but on an essence or Platonic eidos independent from that consciousness. Hence the three different epistemes in the multi-vocal plural identity of Truth: that is, three different forms of representation, three distinct ways of representing Truth. (this function as a mode of representation was the real meaning of the Platonic form, in my interpretation of him) The Platonic Form and Episteme both work to shape a summative deepening of the human subject through the inductive noesis of transcendent Order in relation to the Absolute as opposed to the deductive dianoesis of material-scientific fact or the dialectical synthesis of univocal reductionist metaphysics/dialectical-historical materialism. Voegelin is one of the few to come close to reframing the problem of philosophy as the problem of representation, which in his writing was put like this: Man experiences the Transcendent, but from within his finite subjective horizon, so that this experience creates a sense of "Order", both within that subject, between subjects, and between the subject and the world,- an order that is captured through symbols and which deepens as one experiences the transcendent more fully. This is further extended by my writing on the immanent-transcendent limen.

The "theory of cognition" in terms of a symbolic representation of subjectivity to itself is essentially identified by Voegelin here:

[ The first fallacy to be avoided is the hypostasis of experience as an absolute. If we understand symbols in spite of their differences as equivalent because, as we have said, they are intelligibly engendered by the same type of experience, the experience is in danger of becoming the resting point in our search for constants in history. This resolution of the problem would be tempting, but it is untenable. For the constant experience, in order to be identified, would have to become articulate, and once it has been articulated the result would be a symbolism claiming to be exempt from the fate of being one more historically equivalent truth. We would be back to the system to end all systems—Hegel’s solution. ... If we want to avoid this unhappy end, we must extend the differences of the symbols into the engendering experiences and, consequently, speak of the equivalence not only of symbols, but of experiences as well. ]

This theoretical framework for determining "equivalent experiences", that is, the experience of transcendent order as represented in one set of philosophical symbols and an equivalent experience of that order in a different set of symbols, in a different representation, is a requirement for negotiating the impasse met with in man's two existential totalities.

Reflectivity ends up reifiying man's existential-totality, creating the two irreconcilable totalities I wrote of recently. They can each be reconciled to the Absolute, through either the movement of drang or geist, but not to each other, setting up the condition for the emergence of the tragic-pathos, for, given this, it is not possible to describe subjectivity in terms of that subjectivity- it is not possible to represent our own internal life, our own subjective existence, to ourselves, in the determination of equivalent experiences of transcendence and the symbolic networks with which those experiences produce Order. The two existential totalities, while each of them can be reconciled to the absolute, are not equivalent: that is the impasse, and the problem of philosophical representation. How to configure and represent them as a whole- this is the task.

This is why the problem of philosophy is the problem of representation- how to represent man, in this tragic relationship to the Absolute, given that confused teleological suspension of human essence, as was allegorized in the myth of Epimetheus at the head of my essay, On Reflection and Representation.

VO.

It's already done.

Philosophy is finished.

But cleary it isn't possible to merely understand it. It must be embodied.

This is what I have resolved, in the greatness of my heart; with me ends the philosopher as neutral bystander. From me onward philosophy is being itself. And so human being proper is born.

So this makes of philosophy a selection mechanism, as Nietzsche envisioned it would become.

Clearly it can't be what it is without also resolving the standing conflicts between the various branches of science, to begin with, the one between QM and Relativity.

In fact this leaves us with just one comprehensive thinking, there is no longer a difference between the sciences, or between science and philosophy. There is only truth, to which a mind is either adequate or not.

Capable wrote:

Parodites wrote:: I forgot that I wanted to draw attention to one thing, as it was added today to an older part of the text. The opening paragraph for the second section on the Universal-Tragic forms, it brings up a central point that is attended to more in the third section: the very act of "Representing" Truth in this specialized sense of the term brings us into a new relationship with that Truth, just as the very act of symbolizing the Depth (originally symbolically represented as Psyche in the Hellenic mind) brings us into a novel existential orientation to it and "augments" its meaning for us on the basis of an augmentation of the meaning of our continuity with it,- for the observation of the calling forth of the symbol to reflective consciousness, as marks off the liminal boundary of that continuity between intentional or directed cognition and unconscious depth, that is, the calling forth of the mode of philosophical Representation, confers insight about the process whereby representation differentiates itself in the symbolic network, thereby generating thought in the very state of wonder and proliferating multiplicity that it ceaselessly deconstructs, negates, and renders at a Loss, both indemnifying and paralyzing thought, through that insight into its own affinity with the depth, in the image of its very movement- as Ontos, the image of Being as the guiding-image of thought.

Damn that is very cool. Thought basically deconstructing everything it thinks about, but simultaneously also recreating what is being destroyed or lost due to the fact that thought, in its own operation, relates or relays itself to itself through its own operations since it is so intimately aware of its own process, since that is basically what thought is , awareness of the process of "thought". That definition seems circular but really isn't. Thinking is a self-relational process, it is self-relationality. This is why we think about what is already a part of ourselves, and why we first need to make things a part of ourselves by experiencing them via the senses or some other way, in order for us to be able to represent them.

So if I think about the substance which thought thinks about, as this substance being a kind of meaning-ness or web of substantiality, the true content, then thought pushes itself into that and either acts with indifference to the changes it causes in the substance/meaning or it deliberately damages and breaks apart the substance/meaning, but at the same time thought is leaving little traces of itself behind, because the sheer act of doing this breaking apart is also substantial and meaningful to us, which is why we do it at all (why we think at all) therefore thought is actually a kind of intermediate process whereby substance/meaning is transitioned from one type to another type, i.e. from the type it formerly was prior to being thought-of to a type that has the scattered germs or seeds of being-thought-of contained within itself. This would imply or seem to indicate that this post-thought substance/meaning is endued with glittering fragments of representationality namely that substances and meanings are now able to be more accurately or completely or differently represented in themselves and to each other and to us, the mind behind this all, and this could possibly imply a greater degree of truth or accuracy or ability to act, but it could also imply the opposite of these too. it would depend on the substance/meaning itself and how well integrated it was with everything else prior to being thought through.

But thought is just this exploratory process of self-representation and will carry itself out in other ways if we choose not to think about things. This also links into Value Ontology because of how self-valuing indicates this same kind of process of self-representational activity and tendency where basically every facet about a being can be understood as some kind of self-representation that being is having to and for itself, negotiating that with the world around it. The degree to which that being draws the world into itself and uses the world as a limit and arbiter of its own self-values, would be the degree to which that being is "not alive", conversely the degree to which that being limits the world's intrusions upon itself and begins to form up its own internal structure of valuing thus necessitating not simply becoming a cog in the world around it but a negotiating force and power with and against the world, would be the degree to which said being is "alive". At least this seems plausible to me at the moment of only just having this idea.

I would add too that thought not only breaks apart and deconstructs but it adds to and combines, however to achieve that latter process it must find things that are limited, lacking, or broken apart; it must have some material able to be added to something or able to be unified somehow. So thought identifies what is limited, lacking, or fragmented and works on recombining these, just as thought also identifies what is unified and works on breaking these apart. But what is the purpose of this thought process, why is it doing all this?

It is doing it because thought is the exploratory (truth-seeking) process of self-representationality taken to the nth degree. Thought is simply an emergent property or emergent effect naturally produced secondarily by the fact that the substances and meanings which are brought together formative of "the mind" or "us, you and I, the 'self'" by virtue of neurological sophistication capable of locating such substances and meanings within itself in this manner thus bringing them together and amplifying them and creating new derivative combinations of them simply by virtue of their proximity and sheer number, as well as of how they logically relate to one another when forced together like that, naturally and spontaneously generate this higher-order, nth degree manifestation of the basic exploratory truth-seeking process which process we might just call "reality".