Towards A Philosophical Politics

Astrology is after all the high priesthood of inequality and suffering. Practice of the art is only possible in the full and growing awareness of the terrible and irresolvable inequality between human constitutions and fortunes. Astrology is largely the study of different types of suffering, and in fortunate cases the discovery of new ways of overcoming.  

Yes, this makes sense, this is the actual hierarchizing agent.  No fictions will be required.

Don't ever forget the question: why would they listen to you?

Until this is answered by Sawelios or anybody else, the only answer is Machiavelli. Cruelty has no legitimacy until it embraces that within itself that contradicts it. Ecce Capitalism.

When I had just discovered Strauss, in 2006, I quoted, and wrote (in Dutch--I'll translate):

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"[According to Strauss,] The "Ancients" were the Socratic philosophers and their intellectual heirs, and the "Moderns" start with Niccolo Machiavelli."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss#Ancients_and_Moderns

So actually, Strauss inverts the terms: a typical case of a (slavish) revaluation of (noble) values. For the genuine ancient philosophers were the pre-Socratics, in particular Heraclitus; modernity actually begins precisely with Socrates. And Machiavelli's philosophy is, as Renaissance philosophy par excellence, precisely a revival of the classical age. (Note: the developments in Greece and Rome were not synchronous. Where in Greece, modernity/decline was ushered in by Socrates, in Rome this only occurred definitely with the christening of Constantine.)

Now in 2013, I wrote:

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As a Nietzsche specialist, the first thing that struck me about [Strauss's "Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy"] was something it claimed about Nietzsche--in fact, the very first thing. The first thing it claims about Nietzsche is that the basis on which he "questioned the communist vision more radically than anyone else" was his disagreement with the Marxian view on specialization: whereas according to Marx "the members of the world society [...] are free and equal [...] in the last analysis because all specialization, all division of labor, has given way to the full development of everyone", Nietzsche "identified the man of the communist world society as the last man, as man in his utmost degradation: without 'specialization,' without the harshness of limitation, human nobility and greatness are impossible" (paragraphs 6-7). What immediately struck me about this claim was that it seemed in blatant contradiction to what Nietzsche himself said about specialization[.]

I'm still neither a Strauss nor a Machiavelli specialist, but I know enough about them by now to qualify my rash remark from 2006. In a fundamental respect, the Socratic philosophers and their intellectual heirs were indeed Ancients, and the Moderns indeed start with Machiavelli. From Thales to Socrates, philosophy came out into the open, where it had formerly kept itself shrouded in the cloak of poetry/religion (e.g., Homer). It became Sophistic, in the highest sense of the word. Modern science is basically Sophistic: Sophism, as distinct from philosophy, is wisdom-ism, as distinct from love of wisdom; likewise scientia means "knowledge", not "love of knowledge": modern science professes science; it distinguishes itself from amateurism.

Now it was Machiavelli who instigated the scientific revolution:

On pp. 144-45 of _Leo Strauss and Nietzsche_, Lampert wrote:

[In his Thoughts on Machiavelli,] Strauss has not judged Machiavelli's effort by its historic desirability and necessity as the movement to crush Christianity's spiritual tyranny; he has judged it only on its intrinsic merits, how it in fact served the long-term interests of philosophy as those interests look to us now. This perspective forces one to reflect on the great invention that tamed Christianity, the comprehensive spiritual enterprise set in motion by Machiavelli and his successors, namely, "the use of science for such inventions," the inventions of warfare. This particular invention of spiritual warfare--the employment of science on behalf of philosophy to overthrow the tyranny of an ostensibly philosophical religion--broke with classical philosophy's understanding of science and resulted in the highest, the most difficult problem, "the fact that man is conquering nature and there are no assignable limits to that conquest" (SPPP 190). This and this alone is the necessity that now spurs philosophy on; this and this alone is the necessity that now renders impossible the good city in the classical sense; this is the unrestraint of a competing regime which now threatens to engulf the regime friendly to philosophy. The Machiavellian strategy succeeded in its one great aim; but by adopting its enemies means and conscripting science into the service of propaganda, it caused philosophy to fall prey to a new tyranny, the tyranny of supposed enlightenment via science. Founding is continuous: that great Machiavellian lesson is carried forward by Strauss. Defense of what was well founded requires subsequent foundings, introductions of great novelties in the service of the original founding.
And how does the continuous founding now display its necessities? We can no longer believe in the beneficence of nature in one of the ways appealed to by the classics, namely, those natural cataclysms which ensure that humanity will not fall final prey to human inventions, those beneficent cataclysms, cataclysms of grace, whose goodness toward humanity consists in their annihilation of civilized human life and the enforced return of humanity to its natural primitive conditions from which the earth can again be repopulated and recivilized. If the experiences of the last centuries have rendered the hope of annihilation and rebirth incredible and forced on us the recognition that humanity could in fact fall prey to its latest inventions, namely, modern ideas about humanity's nature and destiny, then the notion of the beneficence of nature must be restored by being rethought through a return to the fundamental experiences from which it is derived.

Paradoxically, those experiences, "the experience of philosophical eros" (page 107), arouse the affirmation of the Recurrence.

RECVRRAT·NATVRA·ET·EXPELLATVR·FVRCA

The distinction that Machiavelli allows us to make is precicely the distinction between the soul of what you wrote in 2006 and the historical soul of what you wrote in 2013. Machiavelli says: yes, you can have both.

You can desire the first (simply by remembering it) and work in the second (by remembering the inviability of the first, notwithstanding its will to power coherence).

Nietzschean types think about ancients and moderns as a recurring, or ongoing fight. The battlefield of today does not allow for that fight and, as any Nietzschean type must see himself as superior by virue of the direct knowledge they posses, it follows that they must have the most absolute, clear and cold intention to make of this battlefield the battlefield of the birth of their viability.

This hurts. I don't even know why I say it except I believe I can work with it, and wonder if anyone else can in a different way.

Philosophy today is the only thing that can permeate both worlds and not take party of either but, as I have said, the party of its own continuance in light of one, the other truth and the truth of their coexistance.

The Nietzschean type does not claim to be son of truth, but greatest and most accurate under truth among men. The philosopher needs him, and supercedes him in truth.

Thus, a true paradox (not really, just the cyclical nature of "it"): the philosopher is subservient and superior to Nietzschean ambitions.

Once the Nietzschean type realizes his machiavellian ambition and relationship to philosophy, he also realizes (without much surprise) that the order he seeks would benefit all other healthy types.

Some insight on the problem of our current civilization which any philosophic politics must confront:

(keep in mind for the following what I said with the three sections I put in the thread on daemonic heroicism, namely in the first two passages)


The triumph of subjectivity was constituted, neither by the satisfaction or sublimation of any drive, but by the real-Ego's arrested image-of-thought, that is, by the strength of the episteme or image in which the active, synthesizing procedure, whereby the reflexive drive-formation and man's position within the historico-symbolic order are combined (comparable to the Freudian Id and Superego) in the psychodynamic tension of the erotic fixation, the basic template of the daemonic katabasis and anabasis, or ascent and descent; here the subject enjoys itself before the image of the beloved as before a mirror, in Apollonian submission, to use a Nietzschean phrase, before the pure formula of existence and the rapture of surfaces, though only as a prelude to the Orphic descent beneath the world of forms into the underworld of matter. The psychological difficulty of our modern era is that this prelude to the Orphic drama has been enlarged to the extent that the whole contents of consciousness have been absorbed into the underworld, that is, the unconscious, and the threshold of the real diminished to the point of nearly disappearing in infantile psychic regression: the structure of the reflexive drive-formation, being semiotically organized by a causal series around the real ego as illusory causa sui, is perfectly adapted to the structure of hierarchy as it exists in our model of civilization, which is intended to impress the internal polis of the drives with the most efficient possible topology for achieving the satisfaction of the real and all of our immediate, most primordially egoic hungers and interests. Allowing the drive-formation or libidinal motive-complex to absorb the contents of consciousness to this extent does not then accomplish any return to nature or Rousseauian ideal of a realized and perfected freedom, but simply grants man the illusion that his unfreedom does not exist, as he is blindly taken up into the rank of the presiding social order. With the attenuation of the psychic threshold instituted by the real ego, out of which the stabilization of the internal tension of the bestial drives and the creative impulse for the enjoyment and construction of intellectualized forms of erotic fixation was arrived upon- that is, the daemonic, so has the eroto-daemonic pathos of philosophy been bypassed for a new point of stabilization which has been located for man in that arrived upon between the reflexive structure of the drives and the hierarchic model of society: the mechanisms of society have been granted direct access to the fundamental impulses and substance of life, which is the condition for what we call fascism, while the obverse holds equally true, in that the interests of the most bestial drives have found a way to slip past, invisibly, the network of real social relations, true friendships, true marriages, and true politics- for this network no longer exists, whereby societies once emerged out of a dynamic of group formation from the tribal level, to the level of city, state, and nation-state, in order to formulate new social processes for themselves as the means toward their fulfillment. Societies now form like a protoplasmic soup of amoebae, like a faceless multitude of atomic fragments of personality arranging themselves thoughtlessly around the nucleus that simply commands the largest amount of gravity.


In short: politics is outdated as a concept, because the social mechanisms around us have been granted direct access to the fundamental life-impulses as the libidinal threshold and boundary to drive-formation has become too attenuated, given the fact that the hierarchic organization of social processes has succeeded in bolstering the false semiotic narrative of the real ego, whereby it instantiates itself within consciousness as the illusory causal center of the whole super-structure of libidinal-motive complex, that is, of the causal-reflexive organization of the drives. While there are those, like us, who have escaped this disease of modern life, nonetheless the majority of mankind are infected with it. However, all problems can be fixed, modernity is not an exception.

Maybe this was necessary, them giving us the freedom necessary to really liberate them, that is, gift them the world in all its worldly promise. To allow them, past their inequity, to see, referring to Capable, their smallness, with the smile they have been frightened for millenia wouldn't happen.

Actually, this works as a framework for my machiavellian claim. Maybe Machiavelli looks a lot more holistic hors de christianity. In any case, I will take this with me for further digestion. It seems to me I refered to some of its conclusions talking about the ancient hierarchy of metaphor and its processes, though mine was more intrinsically political and this analysis more clinical, 'state of fact.' I remove the underlying realities observable today to give a little more space to some of the potentials percievable from a more communal standpoint.

That is, this analysis views the problem from the individual out, the less complete one I eschewed before views it from the conflicts between individuals in, as a polititian must (I think on this Sawelios would agree).

If the societal structure functions perfectly, or almost perfectly today to satisfy individual drives of the animal flux (allow me to shorten it this way, I am aware of its incompleteness), it is an evolution of a drive within the ancient communal structures, of the effect of enjoining in conflict that filters blind satisfaction of emerging instincts from the community of communication. But this only shows that the larger process it depends on, cooperation through sympathetic conflict resulting in hierarchies, is still at work and useful.

The very fact that we sidestepped is part of the hierarchical process that is willing itself through this constant metaphoric creation. The daemonic consciousness, even the eroto-daemonic, flickers when left alone to an individual. Will to power is the most coherent way I can conjure to explain how a future is possible from this state, bottom-up building. If a perfect creator existed, degeneration would be a final stage; being that there is none, it is a begenning stage.

More concretely, I think Venus allows quite well for the drives to be realized in the otherwise ephemeral satisfaction of emerging drives through modern structures, which often are at least derived of something quite beautiful, and Mars allows the creative potential this structure provides to be seized upon. I'm still warming up to this.

One other thing on this, for indeed the social structure functioning "almost perfectly" is key:


The impossibility of fulfilling the psychological representation of the real- the impossibility of the narcissistic-regressive self; the absurdity of the dream of this self, in which it stands eternally sated and fulfilled, is the very guarantor of the mode and language of this representation and of pure psychology- psychology divorced from transcendental reflection and left merely to the theoretical edification of what those out of Adorno's hopeless school named regressive desublimation; it is because the dream of Western civilization and of Europe, which awoke into its own unconscious and sleeping self through the looking-glass of the idea of the American dream, is in its core devoid of meaning, incomprehensible, and so full of the madness which wreathes under the feigned mask of sanity, that there appears to us a certain language in which to articulate the contours of what in ourselves exists as a core of penia, an original lack, underneath the voluptuous flesh of poros or excess- the overflowing abundance of the society enriched by capital, smartphones, and television. This impossibility of representing in a positive-theoretic model the regression of the real-ego into infantile narcissism and bestial satisfaction- into the post-psychological last man, more or less functions as a kind of self-negating signification- a simulacra of a simulacra in Baudrillard's terminology that points, not to anything within the social structure within which it appears as a signifying and fully operant register of value, but to a meaning-surplus latent in the autonomy of its own operation, to something unaccounted for in the system it is a part of and to, moreover, the fact that its negative residual imagery continues to perpetuate itself within the dream of the unconscious only because the social structure in which that unconscious has been rendered palpable, directly opened up to the influences of the mechanisms of culture and socio-political control, as well as formulated and cartographized, is incapable of reproducing itself without the aid of something still somewhere alive within the kingdom of the subjective- is incapable of, by its own powers, achieving a self-consistent integrity and actually constituting itself as Laclau put it. The dream of the regressive self is meaningless; therefor, only the pure science of theoretical psychology can articulate the language of its representation, insofar as this project reduces its object to a meaningless confluence of social atoms and historical detritus.


In short, yes there is hope for upbuilding, namely in that yet unaccounted for by the the empty or self-negating signifier of the regressive ego and the subject of pure psychology.

First, to understand the necessity of the meaningless positive, we must understand this massive masked bestiality you reffered to, wherein the subject we want to save lies. For it is this magnificent beast that human has most wanted to be, and it is through showing it nature, gods and wisdom that it is civilized rather than by arriving at some discrete understanding of its nature (good and evil's raison d'etre).

Man is a fucking wild beast. It came to be in the African Savannah with all sorts of gigantic beasts. I am wild, and sanity is the real insanity, the most dangerous poison. It is not sanity that keeps modern man tied up, it is the addictive process. Any beast exposed to a constant supply of easy go-arounds for its instincts will eventually grow to need this satisfaction. More than we need to feel a real experience appart from the TV, we need to keep the prerrogative behind the magic of a TV. A political philosophy cannot seek to deprive man of his uberinstinctual conquests, but rather to fully appropriate them in a manner allowing for the love and true integration of the beast into social nature, that is, shared bestiality.

The producer of finest elixirs is the beast most fullfilled, never the beast most depraved (denying what is beast in it for fear of supreme violence, itself only a product of its substraction from the equaly violent means of its expression found in societal hierarchical struggle, turning fataly inwards).

Venus is definetly fucking necessary now, and Mars obviously none the less. Let's let us loose on our work, and set us off of ourselves. If there be violence tommorrow, it will be a learned violence.

We gotta expand what the gangstas started, when they evolved from being gangsters, creating space between people and cultivating philosophy in that space. It's still a small space, though the Wu Tang Clan took giant steps, as well as its offspring, specially the RZA who also feels the drive to cultivate philosophy. This means we must sound nothing like them, or any one group.

Another aspect of politicians that should be acknowledged is the ruthless dedication to get as far in the field as possible. This is absolute will to power and only for its own sake, a kind of experiment and curiosity to do whatever is necessary and possible to see how far and high one can climb within the power-structures. This kind of will takes precedence over everything else and is ultimately the primary factor in all decisions.

Most people are not like this, they prefer an easy life with predictability, and not much energy expenditure, not much required of them. Perhaps they want to excel at their job or respective field, or with their family, or in a personal interest or hobby; but the ruthlessness of politicians is unsurpassed. Politics is the field par excellence of the will to power.

Philosophers could never empty themselves into a discipline like that, since such pursuits ultimately have nothing at all to do with truth. At best a philosopher would seek to use or change politics to the advantages of truth, an entirely anti-political will if ever there was one.

The best example of a politician speaking truth was Napoleon on his first assignments. There was a riot that could lead to the downfall of the state, so he loaded a canon, and shot it right into the crowd. No one had eve been this direct before. He understood the meaning of technology, like Bismarck. And war is after all politics continued by other means.

You are right, and the only way a man can get away with politics is if it is a time of extreme danger, constant threat of annihilation. We see how Churchill, an absolute maniac, became necessary when Hitler rose up, just as Napoleon became necessary when after the Revolution had left France in danger. All such crises are also caused by politicians.

The problem is, I see the potential genius of politics as having nothing to do with the kind of ruthless will to power success and rising within the power-structures. Traditional and modern politics is this latter power-lust, "individualism", a kind of experiment and curiosity, ultimately an empty one; but real political genius would be the uniting of formerly disparate, disunited social aspects into the birth of new cultural movements, new possibilities to human civilization. Politics as a means to the expansion of man, but that requires above all a concrete idea of what man is, what he needs, and toward what ought to be aimed by consequence of his existence.

Politics proper has nothing to do with self-preservation, for philosophy always understands that we are already dead anyway, that our lives don't matter. It is only the ideals toward which we strive, the necessities that grip us, the sufferings that we are capable of enduring for the sake of our vision. Politics properly speaking would be an eminent act of philosophy, an act seated out in the world and making use of the social apparatus of every conceivable kind, essentially reformatting humanity in terms of principles not yet fleshed out upon the earth. And knowing all the while that personal ambition and success mean nothing at all. Likewise this individual moment in time, this one culture, politics, governance, values-set, and desires, it is all equally meaningless before one's true ideals.

I've yet to see an example of such a politics. Which is probably why I don't believe in it.

Ideals that can collapse on to the concrete now. Not manifest, like in writing, but collapse... It's hard to explain, but it works.

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Politics properly speaking would be an eminent act of philosophy, an act seated out in the world and making use of the social apparatus of every conceivable kind, essentially reformatting humanity in terms of principles not yet fleshed out upon the earth. And knowing all the while that personal ambition and success mean nothing at all. Likewise this individual moment in time, this one culture, politics, governance, values-set, and desires, it is all equally meaningless before one's true ideals.

I agree more or less, except that meaning is only in the sensation of it, nothing has meaning besides, indirectly, meaning-giving, valuing.

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I've yet to see an example of such a politics. Which is probably why I don't believe in it.

So so I... but this is precisely the reason why I have an interest in believing in it.
I don't like to live up to old ideals. I use their shards to build new ones, jagged, incomplete, paths rather than goals.

Pezer wrote:

Ideals that can collapse on to the concrete now. Not manifest, like in writing, but collapse... It's hard to explain, but it works.

Descartes' summary of philosophy: method upon meditation.