Value Ontology and the Ground of human values.

How can one have a concept of freedom when freedom itself, by its very nature, defies all conceptualization? That was one of Schelling's big concerns, and we could ask a similar question: How can we value our selves when the self defies all value-conceptualization? That no idea is adequate to its ideatum, contra Spinoza; that no concept is adequate to its signified, is the major lesson in Schelling's great essay on freedom, and in a similar way we might say that no value is adequate to the self. Schelling thus said that all things find their ground in "that within God which is not God himself," and we can say that all values find their ground and origin in that "within the self which is not the self itself." I have articulated this unreflected part of the self which is none the less constituent of it in my writing about man's daemonic existence.



Nietzsche, too, recognized that no value was adequate and equal to the self which posited it, and that the Will to Power, this positing itself, then was the primary constituent of the self's moral-philosophical reality. He refused to look for a new ground for values, allowed them to remain groundless, and did not recognize any more subtle logic at work in the self, namely the daemonic- the existence of an unreflected, unegoic principle which, in its dynamic interaction with the reflected principle, constituted the moral-philosophical reality of the individual.


This dynamic interaction is nothing less than what has here been called self-valuing, or what one could speak of as self-love. We can see the shallowest example of it when a woman loves her own beauty and body, the corporeal, unegoic, non-reflective part of her self, and thereby appropriates it to the higher order of the reflective self-consciousness, herself thereby rising into a higher order of daemonic reality.


But what are the deeper and the deepest unreflected aspects of the self, how can they be appropriated by the reflective self-consciousness: to what extent can we recognize in the unreflected aspect of the self the ground of our values, our self-love, our self-value? Such unreflected aspects are things like necessity against our apparent freedom, mortality against our eternal aspirations. As I formulate the questions in my own philosophical language: to what extent can the continuity between the empirical and transcendental egos be realized?


These questions are the theoretical objects of the new philosophy I see posed here and by myself, the only philosophy capable of re-grounding morality and human values.

Schelling held that it was inhibition, a limiting, that brings things into creation. The original source of all being, the ground of the Almighty, was infinite, but uncreated, only when something posed a limit to it could things come into existence, for the almighty was thereby forced by this limit to assume a peculiar structure which we know of as reality.

Goethe shows an equal point in his metamorphosis of plants: a plant grows through a series of expansive and contractive movements in distinction to animals for, while it must strive up for the sun, the plant must grope blindly in the dirt for moisture. The plant can grow indefinitely, but it only takes shape, becomes formulated, becomes an organism, because of the limit imposed on its progress through its need for water and light.

Without something to limit the development of the self it can never become structured. We should re-read the works of literature and philosophy through the lens of this metaphor, as if they were developing plants reaching up infinitely toward the sun and the horizon of meaning, but which nonetheless need the ground and its water; which expand and contract randomly, as the night changes to day, as it rains and as it dries up.

In other words, we should look for the unreflected aspect in every self-conscious moral and philosophical idea, and then play the reflected idea or principle upon the newly uncovered unreflected one.

The daemonic being becomes structured, individuated, through the interplay of these two principles within itself, the one limiting it, the other compelling it to expand. Holderlin described a similar situation with his concepts of the aorgic and organic, the spirit and the body, inconceivable nature and nature structured by human thought.

But this structure, in distinction to Holderlin's concept of the self, is self-effacing. The frenzied existence of the daemonic, the interaction of the egoic and nonegoic principles, is continually effacing its own productions. This is why I borrowed the term "daemonic" from Bruno's book "eroici frenzies" to describe my concept of the self: it is a self-effacing, frenzied existence. The final destruction of the self, the final renunciation of the self which Holderlin imagined was the apotheosis of tragedy cannot be accomplished through my philosophy: the height of daemonic existence leads to a dramatic reversal through the attaining of "eroici" or heroism, to use Bruno's terms: what has been called here the act of self-valuing, self-loving, and what I have called the re-instantiation of the unreflected aspect of the self in reflected self-consciousness.

This philosophy then, I think, would attain the greatest power in not offering itself as something for cohering the self in the manner of old morality and philosophy, through prescriptive ideation, not as a tool for shaping one's self and asserting particular values, but as an instrument for grounding the act of self-valuing, as an instrument for grounding the "daemon." It would do this by fully articulating the middle-ground the daemon occupies, by realizing the continuous discourse between the empirical and transcendental within which man, as a daemonic being, continuously takes form and is continuously effaced.


A necessary step would be in realizing the extremity and depth of daemonic existence: mortality, death. Only from the standpoint of absolute loss, of death itself, can a true philosophy begin. Out of it is born the "mens heroica" or heroicism that will instantiate the discourse between the two spheres itself, constituting a being capable of self-value, capable of weathering the continuous frenzy of its existence as a daemonic being.


Such a philosophy is the great tragic poem, the voice of the not merely broken hero, but the hero defiant in its fate. It is the voice of the sufferer beyond the pangs of all loss and desire, beyond even mourning the death of God, no longer cognizant of any God, dead or living, the voice of identification with the universal tragedy and therefor alone capable of affirming itself as precisely the tragedy's voice, as the recording spirit which passes over the waters and the earth. It is the voice belonging alone to that being that can love itself, for it is the being that alone knows itself, comprehends out of all the animals its daemonic nature, and is therefor also the voice belonging alone to that being that can love the world-- that world which is nothing less than the middle ground, the "middle shrine" as Sophocles named the earth, which is the dwelling place of the daemon, of the being that is born and dies, is created and is effaced, knows itself, and in the next breath knows nothing, is nothing, which perishes in its own glimpse and image of eternity.


From this standpoint of absolute death, which I paint as the origin of philosophy, my own philosophy was born. I described it to Capable in a PM once:

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If you're interested in my life, my experience, I can venture a word about it. I feel like speaking of it.


I cry often. I have cried much of this day. Not because of my pain, it rarely bothers me, not emotionally anyway. I saw a bug on the ground. And I cried. To speak with the poet Barbier, I see a thousand suns at work, reflected in the dew a' top a blade of grass, upon their own dawns. Eternity speaks to me through every life I see, even an insect makes me cry. I'm crying right now. I'm not sad, I'm not happy either. It is... only the passing, temporary feelings, like sadness and happiness, that we can put into words. The enduring states of the soul, these we cannot speak of. No, we can say nothing of those, that fundamental tension invested to the structure of our passions, the real constituent of our life. But if I had to venture a metaphysical thesis with regard to this world, I could only compare it to one monstrous, bloody altar... all the world a great altar upon which every living thing must be sacrificed and is continually being sacrificed, to what? To the Gods, the Gods who should have been. Alfred de Vigny penned some lines of similar import, which I took as a quotation to begin Hamartia:

If it is true that in the sacred Garden of the Scriptures,
the Son of Man said what we see reported;
mute, blind and deaf to the cry of all creatures,
if Heaven abandons us like an aborted world,
the just will oppose disdain to this absence,
and will answer from now on with only cold silence
the eternal silence of the Divinity.

Thus it is this cold silence I find in things. I found it in that bug this morning. In all the greatest philosophy I also find it, every genius has, in the end, proudly resigned himself to this cold silence. I wish that the word "love" was loud enough to ring out through this silence, but it is not. I have been shouting it all my life. We, as human beings, can hear it as well as that bug can. Which is to say, not at all. I find a great solace in my understanding of the Greek perspective on nature:

"The ancients, especially in the case of the Greeks, found in nature a relief from their humanity, from the impulse toward knowledge, beauty, the true, and the good, which continually burdened them. These drives have grown cold for us, and it is in nature that we aim to reawaken them, as though by a kind of intoxicant. To be relieved of one's humanity- what a noble pleasure! Perhaps man once went before his gods with the same longing in his heart."
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Out of that cold silence with which we return the silence of the divinity, philosophy learns to speak.

Parodites wrote:

How can one have a concept of freedom when freedom itself, by its very nature, defies all conceptualization? That was one of Schelling's big concerns, and we could ask a similar question: How can we value our selves when the self defies all value-conceptualization? That no idea is adequate to its ideatum, contra Spinoza; that no concept is adequate to its signified, is the major lesson in Schelling's great essay on freedom, and in a similar way we might say that no value is adequate to the self. Schelling thus said that all things find their ground in "that within God which is not God himself," and we can say that all values find their ground and origin in that "within the self which is not the self itself." I have articulated this unreflected part of the self which is none the less constituent of it in my writing about man's daemonic existence.

True, but how might a singular value or valuational capacity ever be adequate for/by the whole of one's inner life, being? Uncountable valuations come together to form the substance of a single moment of consciousness, and if this were not problematic enough, the deep and vast summational history/mnemosyne of this consciousness stretches backward into darkness and obscurity, is largely unknowable because it cannot sufficiently be recalled back into the active moment of inter-relational sensation-consciousness from which it initially, in that now remote past moment, was given birth.

As long as we conceptualize the notion of freedom or valuation as the requirement for summational enclosure and capture we set ourselves up for failure. We can move from a perspective of overt, "ex ante" necessity into a perspective of a sufficiency that directly projects necessity where it looks - a sufficient necessity. I think the middle ground of the daemonic which you articulate provides a conceptual grounding-point from which such a shift in perspective can occur.

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Nietzsche, too, recognized that no value was adequate and equal to the self which posited it, and that the Will to Power, this positing itself, then was the primary constituent of the self's moral-philosophical reality. He refused to look for a new ground for values, allowed them to remain groundless, and did not recognize any more subtle logic at work in the self, namely the daemonic- the existence of an unreflected, unegoic principle which, in its dynamic interaction with the reflected principle, constituted the moral-philosophical reality of the individual.

Indeed, the ground which Nietzsche failed to see, Nietzsche's error, has now been identified.

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This dynamic interaction is nothing less than what has here been called self-valuing, or what one could speak of as self-love. We can see the shallowest example of it when a woman loves her own beauty and body, the corporeal, unegoic, non-reflective part of her self, and thereby appropriates it to the higher order of the reflective self-consciousness, herself thereby rising into a higher order of daemonic reality.


But what are the deeper and the deepest unreflected aspects of the self, how can they be appropriated by the reflective self-consciousness: to what extent can we recognize in the unreflected aspect of the self the ground of our values, our self-love, our self-value? Such unreflected aspects are things like necessity against our apparent freedom, mortality against our eternal aspirations. As I formulate the questions in my own philosophical language: to what extent can the continuity between the empirical and transcendental egos be realized?

We can, I think, recognize the ground of this "self-valuing" as most essential where it is least necessary with respect to the higher synthetic consciousness, the "middle ground" or sufficient interactivity. What you posit as the two spheres of thought I conceive slightly differently, and with respect to time, as the summational past leading up to the edge of the present moment, and the present moment itself, which itself also of course exists with respect to its past/s. The interactivity here being a co-relating of differing types of (terms of) experiencing, different inner spaces and realms from which sensation/s occur and to which sensation/s return. Thus I see self-valuing as a metaphor that encapsulates a broader understanding of the (inter)activity leading to the content/s and structure/s comprising the middle ground.

Thus the potentiality, the threshold for this middle ground would be to "value", project-encounter, insert itself within and assert itself with respect to, its bordering sphere/s with respect to itself, to reinterpret-revalue its own otherness in terms of itself. Of course this, as far as we can tell, is not theoretically possible in completion, but can only be achieved with a partial success - the conditions of one's consciousness being subject to an endlessly receding and eternally escaping past. Thus we arrive at the sufficiency of the duality of the spheres of consciousness, its division into separate if even mutually dependent parts, as the impossibility of total self-knowing combined with the necessity of mutually-dependent and co-conditional relationality across these spheres being the very necessity of consciousness itself. As long as it exists, it must exist as it is, in some manner or other, and can never not-be itself just as it can never be itself. This tragic possibility for consciousness seems escapable only to the extent that we successfully posit conceptual understandings by which the being-structure/s of this consciousness can be largely encountered-known, thus effecting the greatest and smoothest, most useful possible inter-connections across these spheres, and the largest possible middle ground.

So we might proclaim the aim of philosophy firstly to free the middle ground unto itself, and then to assist with the expansion of this middle ground with respect to that by and to which it is itself conditioned.

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These questions are the theoretical objects of the new philosophy I see posed here and by myself, the only philosophy capable of re-grounding morality and human values.

Yes, morality and values posited from within this sort of new ground and philosophy would be radically different from all previous moralities and values. The destruction of these previous being a sort of abstract metaphorical understanding for their sublimation, extraction and re-appropriation into a new potentiality, which is to say a re-grounding of what-was into a new what-is. In the absence/decontextualization of the sphere of past conditionality would open up the necessity for a re-orienting of present toward future, of actual toward a new potency and possibility seated less in past potentialities and more in yet-to-be potentiality-projectings, imaginings, vision.

Parodites wrote:

This philosophy then, I think, would attain the greatest power in not offering itself as something for cohering the self in the manner of old morality and philosophy, through prescriptive ideation, not as a tool for shaping one's self and asserting particular values, but as an instrument for grounding the act of self-valuing, as an instrument for grounding the "daemon." It would do this by fully articulating the middle-ground the daemon occupies, by realizing the continuous discourse between the empirical and transcendental within which man, as a daemonic being, continuously takes form and is continuously effaced.

Yes. We cannot continue to produce endless machinations of imposed positive contents, we must escape the positive for the negative, we must learn to think in terms of limitation and absence in order to begin to align our possibility of consciousness with the actual productive and sustaining conditions of this consciousness.

I wonder, is the continuous discourse fated to always be continuously given into form only to be continuously effaced later on? Do you not see a possibility for structural, organic/organizing growth of a logical-building from within the middle ground? This possibility for a "new kind of memory", an active memory - a memory which never fades, is never forgotten - seems more potent with respect to the powers of past-conditions extraction into/within the present momentary conditionality than does the "traditional" memory that typically governs the mnemosyne of consciousness. To me, the daemonic seems only weakly articulated when presented as a continuous effacing, and more strongly articulated when presented as a continuous and constantly building/re-membering in which nothing is lost.

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A necessary step would be in realizing the extremity and depth of daemonic existence: mortality, death. Only from the standpoint of absolute loss, of death itself, can a true philosophy begin. Out of it is born the "mens heroica" or heroicism that will instantiate the discourse between the two spheres itself, constituting a being capable of self-value, capable of weathering the continuous frenzy of its existence as a daemonic being.

To be capable of self-value in the sense we mean, of the daemonic, one must certainly be aware of the limitations to which daemonic existence is subject, which includes the synthetic understanding of the limitations of both the "empirical" as well as of the "transcendental". This of course includes awareness of death/mortality. As is included the subsequent knowledge of how this awareness plays upon the conditions of one's past/s, which can be grasped with respect to what extent one has previously been a consciousness attaining to forms of indiscrete or indirect temporal conditioning/s of the various forms/modes of sensation. To climb out from underneath the corpse of the inevitability of mortality supposes one has already murdered this inevitability, including supplanting it with something different where it has been found to reside within a/the condition/s of one's past contents/meaning. And of course in order to afford for this possibility in light of the eternally escaping mnemosyne one must have forged a sufficient quantity and quality of 'middle ground' between the spheres of consciousness in order to, where necessary, posit precisely and intentionally against this "vanishing remainder".

Thus, a sort of spiraling of self-possibility: the progressive overcoming of conditons of limitation, of which mortality is one, leading to the possibility for the progressive further establishment and expansion of the middle ground from which progressive new overcomings of conditions of limitation become possible.

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Such a philosophy is the great tragic poem, the voice of the not merely broken hero, but the hero defiant in its fate. It is the voice of the sufferer beyond the pangs of all loss and desire, beyond even mourning the death of God, no longer cognizant of any God, dead or living, the voice of identification with the universal tragedy and therefor alone capable of affirming itself as precisely the tragedy's voice, as the recording spirit which passes over the waters and the earth. It is the voice belonging alone to that being that can love itself, for it is the being that alone knows itself, comprehends out of all the animals its daemonic nature, and is therefor also the voice belonging alone to that being that can love the world-- that world which is nothing less than the middle ground, the "middle shrine" as Sophocles named the earth, which is the dwelling place of the daemon, of the being that is born and dies, is created and is effaced, knows itself, and in the next breath knows nothing, is nothing, which perishes in its own glimpse and image of eternity.

It stares fully into its own inevitable effacement and nonexistence, yes -- the possibility for providing for a structure here in which being might reside able to "weather the storm", as a "strong self-valuing" sufficiently "freed from mortality" as it continues more and more to "lose itself" within the furthest and most substantial, powerful projections upon the endless potentiality that is futurity with respect to the daemonic. Here we come close to what might be described as the possibility for philosophy with respect to the daemonic, which is of course a round-about way of conceiving of the possibility of the daemonic for itself, its most sufficient conditionality and essence. Whether the dual spheres of consciousness are able to survive the coming to be of this essential being is probably yet to be determined -- it is hard for me to see that any significant amount of work or disclosure has been obtained in the face of this most remote possibility. We must first explicate the daemon, which requires explicating the spheres of consciousness, and then explicate philosophy with respect to the daemon, before we even become capable of sensing this more removed and essential terrain.

"Yes. We cannot continue to produce endless machinations of imposed positive contents, we must escape the positive for the negative, we must learn to think in terms of limitation and absence in order to begin to align our possibility of consciousness with the actual productive and sustaining conditions of this consciousness. "









Yes.


The philosophical instinct that has been stifled, the voice of philosophy that has been silenced, turns inward and becomes guilt, becomes the negative form of reflection which ends up projecting the inadequacies that gave rise to this silence into the systems of cosmic, social, and natural relations. The benumbed conscience of the philosopher, in which the ideals of a society where at one time depicted as active and living presences, becomes the medium in which the forces of society materialize into some definite structure. Thus there are certain events that are so monstrous that, because they defy any theoretical conceptualization, the disparate and unconnected elements of the currently prevalent theories are reinscribed in a totality in order to compensate for the stifled philosophical impulse. For, in this way the appearance is given that the evil is external, an alien presence that has been debarred from entering into the sphere of society, rather than something engendered by forces at work in the given society itself. Events that communicate the philosophical and moral annihilation of particular ideals often accomplish the opposite, the rigidification of the social forces at work in a given time into a system in which the ideals are represented as a totality fundamentally incapable of recognizing any genuine problems. It is impossible for any theory of society as a whole to constitute an organic representation of social forces, namely the truth, since these forces themselves are disparate, unconnected, and violent. If there must be a concept of utopia it must serve as a spur to the philosophical instinct, as a horizon against which the ceaseless emergence of new intuitions of life and social forces may be grasped in their ephemerality, as so many moments in the conscience of man, in order to prevent their materialization into a totality.









I do see the "possibility for structural, organic/organizing growth of a logical-building from within the middle ground? This possibility for a "new kind of memory", an active memory - a memory which never fades, is never forgotten" but it has yet to be attained.

Capable wrote:

It stares fully into its own inevitable effacement and nonexistence, yes -- the possibility for providing for a structure here in which being might reside able to "weather the storm", as a "strong self-valuing" sufficiently "freed from mortality" as it continues more and more to "lose itself" within the furthest and most substantial, powerful projections upon the endless potentiality that is futurity with respect to the daemonic.

This is what I would add to the notion of the heroic as well. We may interpret this either as the will to power of an entity over that which it can not itself experience, or as a being valuing the future of which itself is not part in terms of itself. This is the drive behind the great works of man, e.g. of all truly religious and culturally defining works, cathedrals, narratives -- to imprint ones will, oneself, on millennia. An overflowing self-valuing, seeking to establish outwardly terms that do justice to what it is to itself.

We may interpret this as a kind of madness, as a losing sight of what one is, as a being -- or otherwise as an extension of being itself, of its essence/nature - being extending as influence, power, a (mode/type of) valuing that persists when the original engine of this valuing is no more.

Parodites wrote:

If there must be a concept of utopia it must serve as a spur to the philosophical instinct, as a horizon against which the ceaseless emergence of new intuitions of life and social forces may be grasped in their ephemerality, as so many moments in the conscience of man, in order to prevent their materialization into a totality.

Yes, the utopian, instead of a particular Utopia. In general, "objects" must be rid their quality of metaphysical solidity, and subjects must replace the object as the ground of their thing-ness. The thing itself can no longer be the standard, it must be contingent to the active valuer.

The notion of utopia, when it is vital and fertile, when it interacts with will-power, when it is the apex of a projecting, is an ideation in flux. It serves as a limit to the space that the subject sets for itself to create in, to re-create himself in this "middle shrine". An utopia is the spearhead of a burning desire, never a cool, stable image of a perfect order.

Contrary to a living passion towards the utopian stands the aim to produce directly an utopia, such as held in the form of Stalinism. To have the notion of an utopia-to-be-created as a burden, a task, a debt, instead of an image of glory unto oneself, an inspiration begotten by strength, works indeed as stifling, as an obstruction to existing processes, as a choke hold on any vitality that tries to make a path for itself.

Philosophy must cease to designate directly, it must no longer define "the good" - it must create the conditions for goodness to emerge as very different things in very different perspectives. "Good" returning to what it emerged from, not outlined qualities or things, but simply an aim of a maximally vital state relative to what the organism can attain, good as a condition of strength/growth/ascending, a condition whereby an entity verifies/sustains itself.

Philosophers may do the work of producing examples of such goodness, but never anymore try to describe it in its entirety. Now that being has been defined as valuing, it is clear that once an utopia has been outlined as a thing, fixed, being becomes impotent towards it.