Letheia and Aletheia

About Truth and Pure Negation(ivity).


The fact that the pre-Socratics had each developed an entirely separate intellectual
universe for themselves without ever infringing upon one another's territory and inciting
an argument, while the Socratic mode of philosophy was distinguished by continuous
argumentation and exchange, points to the fact that the former actually occupied the same
conceptual sphere and shared a common immanent ground to their philosophizing, and
that they were thus actually in agreement about the most fundamental matters. This
immanent horizon of meaning, as spread itself throughout the firmament of each of their
isolated universes, was that of erotic passion, that the Truth was Beauty and that Virtue
was their intermarriage, a passion which indeed survived the Socratic revolution and even
became codified as the name we now recognize- not sophist, but philosophist, or lover of
wisdom.


Philosophy is said to be the art of dying, the wisdom for dying best: insofar as Eros
should be the angel of philosophy, the kingdom of this angel is none other than death, and
our philosophies so many images of death. Eros wants, above all else, to seize upon the
very heart of solitude; love wants to build within the house of time and matter an absolute
privation, a latitant reprieve of stars and moonlight; a gentle loneliness and a hiding place
in which to enjoy the beloved and declare to himself and to her, no less by the most
eloquent patefactions and monologue, the morning of his soul and all the secret fury of its
movements, whereinto no other eye could ever see nor whisper broach upon the
undiscovered depth of mute creation, and herein lies one of the greater mysteries of love,
namely that this heart of solitude- the very flesh of the moonlight for which it so
desperately longs to brave the darkness and penetrate into the "center that will not hold",
as into the core of matter and tabescence, of time and decay, is none other than Death, and
that, sadly, we can take nobody into the fold of death save for our own selves, as a poem
of Andrew Marvell confesses: "the grave is a fine and private place, but none, I think, do
there embrace." This primal erotic compulsion, this move toward death, is, perhaps, the
basic template of the movement of philosophy. Philosophy has in any case always been
and will continue to be a matter of Eros, and therefor the ideas of philosophy- as useless
and vagrant as they may have been, vanishing over the brow with the fanciful self-indulgences
of nature's youngest, but no less proudest poet- man; rather we call to mind
the idea of God, Beauty, Truth, or Virtue, nonetheless, by constituting something whose
object at least exceeds the scope of this our errant sojourn in the heart of matter, as
swallows up the greater part of our will and our life, accomplished what all love
accomplishes: it revealed to us something of what we are, and made known, if only by the
slightest intimation and preliminary sketches, the potential we human beings, as a race- as
a form of existence, possess. Love awakens the lover to his own strengths, as no other
passion or state of mind can, and, because philosophy has served as the mysterious
element within which man has beheld himself in ideal, sub species aeternitatis- as
immortal and creative soul, so has it been said to rest upon the frail wings of the little god
Eros, who may, perhaps, have as little hope of carrying the dawn-star of these imaginative
horizons on his back as the butterfly does; the little god who, while not fully divine, and
hardly an Olympian, did nevertheless share somewhat in the sacred mysteries of the old
pantheon. And who knows what the fate of man should be, whose destiny is certainly a
matter of the strength of his erotic pathos- for while Eros, in the later myths, is
represented as nothing more than a demigod- a mere prankster whose amusements sewed
the bonds of love among the heavens, in the most ancient strains of the Greek genius and
in the eldest myths to have survived, he is given as one of the most powerful of all beings,
indeed one of the primordial forces of creation, along with Chaos and the Night. I have
compared the butterfly and Eros, and this is because I had in mind while writing this a
passage from Guyau which seems to me now even more appropriate to venture: "The
truth is found in movement, in hope... A child saw a butterfly poised on a blade of grass;
the butterfly had been made numb by the north wind. The child plucked the blade of grass
and returned home, holding his find in his hand. A ray of sunlight broke through, striking
the butterfly’s wing, and suddenly, revived and light, the living flower flew away into the
glare. All of us, scholars and workers, we are like the butterfly: our strength is made of a
ray of light. Not even: of the hope of a ray." It was the luxury of those before us to
mistake the frozen butterfly for the petals of the flower, and they had unknowingly taken
the sleeping god with them and deep into the heart of man- but now we must turn our
prize into the sun and see if the winged god Eros has frozen to death in the night of our
unconsciousness and apathy, or if he should surprise us and, startled back into life, fly
again into the dawn. One, as Lessing said, kills the rose by picking it and taking it home,
as if to save it from the coming storm now overhead: "Eine Rose gebrochen, ehe der
Sturm sie entblättert." We require as Guyau said- hope, for all the tomes of philosophy
seem ossified to the majority of human beings now, and the original wellspring of
imaginative passion seems to have closed up before them, and with that man's
transcendent horizon. Underneath this multitude of ironies, as constitute our mere
phenomenal consciousness, the external features of our philosophy, along with our
pseudo-skepsis and the unfettered despiciency of a pure intelligence, there still sleeps the
child of the heart and the whole idyll of memory, with the tireless faith afforded by the
mere fact of existence, as in the reality of love, hope, and truth, which may take a greater
measure of the centuries, or, in the passage of time, a more worthy confirmation than may
be boasted of by the stony column of the world, upon these our elegant monuments and
memorial allections wrought out of the broken earth, upon the granite and the metal that
were no more certain than dust and sand, for even Heraclitus admitted time was but the
child of the aeon, who drew up his thousand worlds before the sea, which would sweep
them all equally away into oblivion. Certainly the child of the aeon shares in this faith
possessed by our own youth and innocence, which has not yet been wholly buried by our
disappointed and mordant intelligence, and therefor draws his fleeting worlds upon the
sand with perfect conviction that they should never disappear into the palpitant issue of
the sea, whose musing cadence has swept away all we were into oblivion, save for our
laughter, whose cadence was its own- whose music was the same as that of the sea, as
rolls along forever, carried into eternity upon the back of Leviathan.


With this in mind, I will elaborate on the new category of truth, as should serve for a new
source of philosophic inspiration, and whose corresponding logic should re-instantiate the
much needed art for genuine idea-creation and the transmission of philosophy's heroicerotic
daemonism.


Another shared grounding within the supra-Sophistic mode of philosophizing is that of a
belief in the underlying symmetry of self-consciousness and worldly consciousness, or the
matrix of passivity as Sloterdijk called it- or, as Maine De Biran said of it, "The activity
in which man thinks of himself is only another mode of the same cognition which
estranges and distances him from himself: every act of thought steals us away from
ourselves, and so the result of trying to think about ourselves and come to know ourselves
ends in us forgetting some part of ourselves, in that strange and inexplicable contradiction
of philosophy"; the belief, in other words, that those who took up the commandment of
Delphi and journeyed inward, in the mould of classical hermitage as is given in the
towering and shadowy figure of a Heraclitus, a Parmendies, or even one of the solitary
biblical prophets, would discover a basis upon which the inner and outer worlds could be
brought into alignment- a basis that had, since the beginning of the philosophic tradition,
justified both the aretaic life of practical virtue and the life spent in the mode of
transcendental reflection, political apatheia, in the cloister of books, and in the theoretical,
imaginatively occupied existence of a technical philosopher- and this justification for the
each of them accomplished with the other. Nietzsche again and again gives us to
understand that he has lost any connection to this ground of philosophy, as most in our
era also have- to the shared heart of inner consciousness and objective experience, from
which there might be developed an adequate idea of truth, for he continually calls to mind
the fact that reason and the progress of thought have called into question our necessary
falsehoods, that is, delusions necessary for the constructions of our subjective life.
But, in our language, it can now be said that this symmetry of beings, and with them the
world of the interior self and exterior reality, has been finally rediscovered as a notion
corollary to the asymmetry of Being itself, in the fact of "Being's being unequal to Being
and any particular being or beings": as an idea directly following from the category of
pure negation and monadological identity, for the new category of truth established
thereby appeals equally to the inner and outer world, providing us with the point of
contact with the external, with the real and the general enthesis of an existential burden,
as is so desperately needed by philosophy.


Negation (not nothingness, for that is an onto-theo-logical-metaphysical postulate) has
always been conceived as the negation of something, and therefor the positivity of
negation has remained unthinkable- that is, negation transfigured, suspended, and
logically incorporated into its episteme and self-image; negation saturated with its own
concept. The traditional dialectic of negation and affirmation has thus forestalled the
immanent hypostasis of the transcendent- for, in that dialectic, negation is always
differentiated from the affirmative upon the one conceptual sphere of dialectical synthesis
around which the ontic is logically integrated in the false image of Being as the totality of
beings in what Heidegger liked to call the onto-theological, that is, as the Parmenidean
universe or the Spinozan deus natura, so that it [pure negation] has never itself been able
to serve as the ultimate concept-sphere and plane for the philosophic differentiation of
concepts and the formation of discontiguities which it actually constitutes, whereupon the
inequality and internal tension of Being, out of which Being negates itself in the
principium non identitatis of A><A, could work out its own excess without ontological
distortion, for traditional metaphysico-ontology is synonymous with the dialectic of
affirmation and negation: this would have the appearance of a freed philosophical
impulse, which eternally generates new concept series in a tireless creative outpouring
from out of the ground of pure negation, through which the daemon heroically ascends
into its transcendent horizon as ideal-ego and remotest discontinguous reification of
subjective contents. Both Hiedegger and Nietzsche, while seeing through the false
construction of metaphysics, did not grasp the internal logic of the ontic: the inequality
and self-negating core of Being, the Platonic esotery that there is no Being behind beings
and that Being is undefinable due to its asymmetrical property; that the passivity of
transcendental reflection in which Heidegger grounded philosophy as a silent opening up
to Being is actually the active hypostasis of the immanent as transcendent horizon, and
that what Deleuze solidified out of both of them and called immanence "in itself" is quite
impossible, for it dissolves the conceptual tension of the immanent-transcendent and
obscures once again the inequality of Being with itself and with beings: their respective
systems amount to nothing more than what Sloterdijk called the vertical dimension
without a metaphysical attractor or God, for they still utilize the ontic concept-sphere as
the immanent ground of their philosophy, though instead of logically incorporating it as
the traditional metaphysic of affirmation and negation had done, that is, by differentiating
negation and affirmation instead of carrying out the differentiations of ontic datums upon
the plane of negation itself, so have they attempted to hide the reality of Being's self-negating
character and asymmetry by consolidating particularity into the universal- that
is, by affirming the horizon of the subject- which I call the episteme, as the subject itself,
or what Heidegger calls Dasein, grounding consciousness in the passivity of
transcendental reflection in which man is rendered transparent and opened up, somehow,
to an undefined and perhaps undefinable Being. In order to pass beyond their deficiencies,
the truth as the category of pure negation must be firmly established, firstly by developing
a language in which pure negation is in itself utilized as the primal concept-sphere and
immanent ground of thought upon which philosophy differentiates its contents, and
secondly by developing a monadological theory of identity, with which the definition and
the contours of identities upon this primal concept-sphere may be sustained in the
irresolvable agon of conceptual oppositions and negations, for formerly philosophy used
Hegelian dialectic, (which allows the negation of a thing to be identified with the thing
itself, reducing all to particularity and then re-inscribing this as the totality, much like the
method of Descartes as Feuerbach notes) to resolve questions of identity and this
obviously requires resolution of the conceptual tension through absolute synthesis within
the dialectic of negation and affirmation, immanence and transcendence.

Nietzsche was the first to use this negation actively against the philosophy of affirmation-negation. Certainly, it blew up in his face and blinded him. Blinded by the overwhelming negativity contained in the loneliest of scriptural bubbles. Even this he was aware of and, in his holy negativity, his "a priori," celebrated!

We too would blow up, if we hadn't forced our imaginary friends into the present. And if the french had not finally reclaimed their philosophical post as enemy proper.

But enough about enemies of the past. This is earth shattering. We have an epistemic ground.

Yes, this is the overarching logic and ethos, the point in which the two have become a singular eye. It is the reason why value ontology works as a generator of positive truth and the context in which it recognizes itself as life giving. It is now also clarified that it can not do so directly; it merely self-generates as truth, but the active truth-seeking and gathering occurs necessarily outside of its epistemic boundaries; these boundaries are only solidified after the excess has condensed into consequentiality, which in turn solidifies into the furthering of the process of the self-identifying entity, conscious experience, which offers only the options of gradual growth or crisis, and can in this deliberating, tentative capacity not endure the absolute presence of Being; Dionysos serving a means to superhuman endurance here, as the form that allows man to walk across his own horizon, an experience which leaves no trace in memory, as it does not pertain to historic, accumulative time, but only to the infinitely expansive ideality of the moment, in which every pain can be endured. This apex point where the asymptotes of coherence (being) and duration (time) come together is the state where orgasms originate, hence also the orgasmic experience of nirvana, 'the void', the perfect coherence of the ideal and the empirical through the annihilation of 'flat duration' and the approximation of truth in a true experience of the pure consequentiality of time - in - excess, and thereby the limit to entity, and its proper form, as is represented by e=mc^2, and standardized for logical operation in value ontology. The two are related, and as Capable says the way for VO to become embedded in man is likely through science, where the proper logic of the monad is adopted as the proper science of particles, and we will begin to observe the true nature of coherence, an peer into the excess no longer as through a glass darkly but directly at the eternal lightning that it is. The ancient Hebrews referred to a state of being face to face with god leading to immediate destruction, and there are more stories about climbing the ladder too fast, which in those prephilosophical days meant climbing the ladder at all. The rungs are made of philosophy, and now its deems we've come face to face with god. The question now is indeed, what do we say? Or rather, how do we speak to him at all?

In the case of standing face to face with god the relation is asymmetrical in the most elementary way; what we say to god is what god tells us we are; in which capacity we are both truth and time. We can only ascend to god in particulars. That is what Nietzsche understood. Philosophy is the hound that smells its star. The word being turned into flesh, but the flesh also must be consumed, affirmed in negation. This points to why we have to negate the idea of self in order to self-value best ; "I am not you" means in this language "I love you", so to speak - truth emerges from fact in this way.

The day I realized people don't function under the paradigm of negation as love, I gradually started going crazy. I still don't understand it, only under a higher divine negation can I bear it and I celebrate it. I can work with it.

Can gods not be philosopher in-deed.

Hopefully, this god will die someday too and people will negate all around, but I will probably be harshly punished for so ambitious a thought. Let's start by fullfilling god's negation, we'll see about the rest later.

Thank you deeply, Parodites. You have flawlessly provided sanity to the most noble need to bleed I know.

"It is now also clarified that it can not do so directly; it merely self-generates as truth, but the active truth-seeking and gathering occurs necessarily outside of its epistemic boundaries; these boundaries are only solidified after the excess has condensed into consequentiality, which in turn solidifies into the furthering of the process of the self-identifying entity, conscious experience, which offers only the options of gradual growth or crisis, and can in this deliberating, tentative capacity not endure the absolute presence of Being"


Yes this is why in one thread I mentioned that truth as pure negation is only the engine of philosophy, not philosophy itself or its fuel, which are positive and outside the epistemo-ontological boundary of the theory of monadological identities, or value ontology.


That negativity of Love you mentioned near the end of your post Fixed Cross I've always thought of as love and love's object both reaching out in longing and hope for their completion and perfect form, which the world of change, fleeting time, and flat duration as you said forever denied and will deny them, as in one of my books:


Human life is a dim sojourn
across the grey vale between one abyss, the abyss of the past, and that of death, upon
which innumerable half-formed and fleeting images dance across the periphery of our
vision, like nymphs in the wild forest that surrounds us, which never stand still amidst the
trees and in the darkness long enough for us to catch their eyes, playfully taunting us,
illuminated like ghosts with nothing more than the star-light to hold their form, in which
the rarer substance of their beauty is suspended as by a kind of ethereal medium; but,
occasionally, one of these images stays with us long enough, even though it were for a
moment just as forestalled, just as brief as any other, only because it reaches out into its
completion and perfect form, which the whirlwind of change and time forever denied it,
at the same time that we reach out for our own, for our own eidos and genius, in the
consummated heaven of forms, as perhaps Plato secretly mis-understood himself in the
privacy of his thoughts, and seems to suggest to us something beyond itself, beyond the
hope toward which both of our lives, our own and the nymph's, are inwardly bent, as
Orpheus and Eurydice, toward the greater hope of life itself, and the love within which
we were both a moment, and which neither of our hearts could hold. Such images, such
suggestions, and the moments that bear their stamp, the orisons of that Nymph in which
our sins are forever remembered, are the only testament we have in the last case of our
dream of immortality, the only evidence that life is couched upon something more than
non-entity, lethe, and the fleeting half-formed images that alone constitute our lives,
images which are neither memories or dreams, and the only defense we can muster
against the mocking stars above us, before which we vainly struggle and die alone in the
universe as so many ephemera in the millenia of unconquered time. The lies that are most
important to us, which we use to protect our most intimate reality from foreign eyes, to
bolster ourselves against the truth, and to hide ourselves away from death, betray us in the
end, for their subject overflows them, what is deepest in us learns to speak through them,
to reconfigure them, to announce itself through them as through signs, and without our
ever noticing begin to indicate, if not to us than to everything else that bothers to look and
to listen, the approaches of our destiny, our imminent fate. You cannot lie about such a
thing, our languages are too under-evolved for that, and are as incapable of articulating a
lie about the dream that we are as they are of articulating the truth of the dream. Lies
and truth are both superficial, they both speak about the half-formed and the newborn,
about mere images- which is all a life, all an existence deprived of essence, can amount
to, as also the essence, the remote atom of meaning, the mathematical abstraction and
disembodied Word, the sign whose signification we did not feel ourselves compelled by
as if to anamnestically recover from the mythos of the glimpse. A mere image, a
photograph, deserves neither the name of dream or memory, truth or lie, essence or
existence. If there is a truth, it isn't an intellectual category. Only the lie can become the
artifact of a pure intellectuality, for you cannot live the lie as you can the truth, at least as
the philosopher understands the truth.


And in another place I use this mutual reaching out and longing of Eros and the object of love as the basis of true action:


Every act is an unveiling and a release of the greatest meaning and
vitality possible at that particular confluence of contesting and agonistic forces out of
which the condition calling for action was engendered, out of which the longing of that
particular moment was recognized in the mournful dawn of our own freedom- an act,
insofar as it is true action and not merely reaction, is the unfolding of the excessive
energies and tension of that agon and confluence of forces into the most beautiful,
expressive possible form, into that form from which power itself seems to drip in
unsquandered richness and life to gleam so beautifully in the sun: every real act is a
creative effort, an autopoietic and transformative undertaking. The moral act is just this:
adding something to the very idea of life.

One, as Lessing said, kills the rose by picking it and taking it home, as if to save it from the coming storm now overhead- Eine Rose gebrochen, ehe der Sturm sie entblättert




Yes the Jews did have that myth of encountering God too soon. One must properly measure one's drink of the divine liquor, by pouring it into and through all the sephiroth or vessels of creation- if one takes it directly, without measuring it in the sephiroth, one likely becomes mad.

I have added two new passages and a few other things to this text.