Politicians

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

We are constantly relating our conscious self to our material conditions and physiology, to other people and our surrounding environment, so that we are constructing an inward universe isolated rather than opened to Being.

And of course Heidegger's defense was that this fact is the result of our being socially normalized and programmed by society to construct self-models, to relate ourselves to ourselves, and that outside of this historical narrative there are other approaches to the question of Being, but I side with Kierkegaard in that this fact is an inevitable, existential result of the structure of the human subject itself, and that history is the inevitable reflection of that subject's gradual self-reflection approaching transcendental, complete specification, a gradation I broke down into topos. (And I don't agree with Kierkegaard on much, but I do on this. I have agreements with Heidegger in other situations. I mostly reject everyone's philosophy, but I have small seeds of agreement in everyone as well.)

The daemon is in some cases my alternative to Dasein, which I use to draw out the symmetry of alienation and the death-anxiety, pre and post reflection:

" This longing for an absent God and for the transcendent, once re-interpreted in the
light of something akin to a Wahlian double-transcendence as well as Holderlin's pre-reflective
division of the subject, here becomes a pre-reflective self-alienation from the
present reflective ego. Alienation, the estrangement of the human ego from Being, that is,
the inoperability of what Heidegger claimed in the name Dasein, for unlike the passive
openness of dasein it demands an active engagement with Being, is but an internal
reflection upon the fact of death in externo, that is, the very nullity of Being itself, the
disappearance of matter into time and its own painful exuberances, and, in a psychic
entanglement which from Freud (ie. somatic and narcissistic regression, one into the
nirvanah-principle the other into thanatos or the death-principle; the annihilation of the
living body and the annihilation of one's connection to the external world) to the most
modern theorists has remained unapproachable to analysis, this demanded activity, for it
is bound internally by the transition into reflective subjectivity, can only be the self-activity
which constitutes the self's own Being in its very alienation from Being. This
self-activity; this entanglement and mystery, I call simply the daemonic."

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

All of this is in the stuff I am writing now for Gnosis. I don't think I've sent you an updated text in a long time, I will do so later today or I will just end up pasting it all here. I haven't including any writing on Moo Ham Head in my book or his ever liberating texts though, as I don't want my actual name to be associated with Islam bashing, we have some goat fu- I mean towel hea- I mean Muslims, near where I live. One shot up the Military Base a few months ago, it was on the national news, walking distance for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hd4OQKA0COU

I've been by there many times. I live in the middle of nowhere, I never imagined we'd get a terrorist attack.

Subject: Re: Politicians Thu Mar 24, 2016 3:50 pm

Parodites wrote:: We are constantly relating our conscious self to our material conditions and physiology, to other people and our surrounding environment, so that we are constructing an inward universe isolated rather than opened to Being.

And of course Heidegger's defense was that this fact is the result of our being socially normalized and programmed by society to construct self-models, to relate ourselves to ourselves, and that outside of this historical narrative there are other approaches to the question of Being, but I side with Kierkegaard in that this fact is an inevitable, existential result of the structure of the human subject itself, and that history is the inevitable reflection of that subject's gradual self-reflection approaching transcendental, complete specification, a gradation I broke down into topos. (And I don't agree with Kierkegaard on much, but I do on this. I have agreements with Heidegger in other situations. I mostly reject everyone's philosophy, but I have small seeds of agreement in everyone as well.)

The daemon is in some cases my alternative to Dasein, which I use to draw out the symmetry of alienation and the death-anxiety, pre and post reflection:

" This longing for an absent God and for the transcendent, once re-interpreted in the
light of something akin to a Wahlian double-transcendence as well as Holderlin's pre-reflective
division of the subject, here becomes a pre-reflective self-alienation from the
present reflective ego. Alienation, the estrangement of the human ego from Being, that is,
the inoperability of what Heidegger claimed in the name Dasein, for unlike the passive
openness of dasein it demands an active engagement with Being, is but an internal
reflection upon the fact of death in externo, that is, the very nullity of Being itself, the
disappearance of matter into time and its own painful exuberances, and, in a psychic
entanglement which from Freud (ie. somatic and narcissistic regression, one into the
nirvanah-principle the other into thanatos or the death-principle; the annihilation of the
living body and the annihilation of one's connection to the external world) to the most
modern theorists has remained unapproachable to analysis, this demanded activity, for it
is bound internally by the transition into reflective subjectivity, can only be the self-activity
which constitutes the self's own Being in its very alienation from Being. This
self-activity; this entanglement and mystery, I call simply the daemonic."

I agree, which is why I propose a deconstructive dissolution of contents at the upper tectonic edges and in anti-eidetic, non-materially-reductive fashion. Proper phenomenology is all about the kind of transcendental approach you mention, it isn't at all historically capitulating or backward looking. I don't agree with for example the phenomenological reduction of an object by dissociating the thetic component or noema and closing off entirely the questions of ontic reality or the non-experiential or pre-conditioned, there is no reason to reduce absolutely in the object until a lowest common denominator of definition is attained-- that is, as I see it, basically meaningless. What I want to do is reduce upward, toward rather than away from the transcendental. For example, if you take an object or concept you can ask probing series of question of it to begin to expose the architecture of meaning and experience behind that object or concept, and this must be done in order to free that meaning maximally -- not free it into some kind of radical minimalist and necessary convergence in a lower order, but rather to free it into its upward dimensions wherein those dissociated, deconstructed inner elements of the object or concept mingle with those of other objects/concepts and begin to merge with greater orders of meaning and experience.

My approach to deconstruction is to use its power of critical analysis by reorienting that power from the downward-regressive to the upward-progressive. This therefore means that no single object or concept can be individually exploded in this manner, because just beginning the process suddenly brings it into intimate contact with so many other things and essences implicitly or explicitly brought into the analytic equations. Dissociation and analysis internal to the object/concept in question actually brings about unifications and integrations within higher orders, and not, as is often the case in positivistic or scientific material reduction, merely isolating one thing improperly from everything else in which it actually does share essences, logics and structures.

To me this is the true meaning of openness to Being; an implicit striving within all life and thought for further transcendent-level unifications and reconciliations of the real contents and essences of all things, a breaking down at the higher level that only further deepens actual realities, and expands possibilities exponentially without removing improperly the grounds that do exist (history, biology etc) but also without enslaving life and thought to those ground categories either. This implicit process is what is meant by philosophy, by spirituality, and Heidegger should have been seeking to make it more explicit and intentional-conscious rather than capitulating to the emptiness of the form as such, supposedly subtracted from all real content. We now have the conceptual and logical/phenomenological tools with which to complete this thoroughly existential science of being.

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

But it must be kept in mind that this is different than what Heidegger was doing, his theory was that human history has created and programmed us with a false orientation to Being- Being-in-Time, by investing to us in a cultural legacy all the different forms and ideas arrived upon by philosophy so far and our various texts, and that there are other orientations to Being hidden behind history in potential, and that the structure of human subjectivity is therefor arbitrary, the structure of our orientation to Being, so that we must mercilessly deconstruct- he used the word de-struct, all of history and all cultural forms, not toward transcendent specification of those forms, but to the end of completely clearing away the lens of history, destroying all given forms, in order to expose in the resulting intellectual vacuum this supposed ancient unity of the natural world in which a new orientation to Being can be conceived for man- which, not being a philosophic orientation, Heidegger could only articulate by appealing to mysticism and art.

"The
memory of Eden, the unity of nature before the fall into sin by consciousness, does not
exist. Instead of a pre-existing unity of Nature, as was supposed in the late romantic
conception to have existed before the initiation of the historical narrative of human
civilization; instead of a return to some passive witness of Heideggerian Being, as was
supposed to have existed before man gained consciousness and introduced the rupture of
negation into things, we have only a kind of sadness and horror to draw back upon,
corresponding as it does in Schelling to the divine being's longing to create itself, and
which, for us, may be grasped in words only as the unthinkable basis of all thought, only
as the remainder which serves to ground the scaffold of philosophy in the gradual
progression form nonrational and anarchic power to rational erotic form and Idea, from
pre to post reflective consciousness, through that gradual unfolding of increasingly
differentiated beings in the mystery of the daemon's terrestrial love and Semelian birth-death
before the genius of the absolute. Negation lies in these differentiations and
tensions of Becoming which continually nullify Being, while the human self is, on the
other hand, the source of the original core of affirmative or positive content for
philosophy, for it stands as the site of the glorious risk by which one term in each series
of differentiations may be taken up and reified within the other, * and through the
progression of this negative reflectivity so it is that tensions of this kind may be
reified and given transcendental specification. The reason that reflection is purely
negative for Holderlin is that the human self is a rupture of original negation into the
unity of nature and all reflection is an attempt to bring that self back into the unity of
nature, while in the view here given reflection is purely negative because the oppositions
within Nature through which the human subject affirms its own discontinuity or
separation from things constitute a continuous self-nullification of Being within
Becoming, of the will of God within human consciousness, that is, what Schelling would
call the self's distinct position within the universe as the being-in-danger, of the being that
can consciously obey or disobey the order of the divinity. The notion of a Heideggerian
dispensation from Being, of a passive revelation of Being to man as would inaugurate a
new political era and revolutionary consciousness, is strictly contrary to this conception of
man's danger, or glorious risk to use Plato's phraseology. If there should be such an era, if
would only arise through a kind of metapolitics in which the spheres of power belonging
to Culture and the State are reorganized in terms of reification and mobilized toward the
retrieval of a new racial identity from out of the dregs of the leveled discourse belonging
to the liberal-secular order of America, as distinguished from the fascism of the German
Reich or any of the various communist attempts in the east. Heidegger of course grounds
his hope of rescuing a primordial relation to Being from behind history and the story of
culture in Holderlin's account of poetic reflection, in which Being itself is grasped, not as
the concretion of any historical essence, but as the force of that very negative rupture into
the order of Nature which the human self constitutes; as a kind of paradoxical
consciousness the force of whose destructiveness might bring the new revolutionary
consciousness and polis into existence. Heidegger mistakenly believes that this
destructive potential can be brought into the service of philosophy and shaped into a new
polis, that it can be controlled and directed."

* Reification of one term in the other indicates that four stage anti-dialectical scheme, in which affirmation is reified in negation and vice versa:

[ We may presently generalize this schema as a sequence of four reifications corresponding to the four elements of the topos which I have delineated already. In essence: instead of affirmation following negation, negation following affirmation, which characterized ancient classical thought in the scheme of dianoia, instead of the synthesis of affirmation and negation in Hegel and Marx, and instead of the self-contradiction of negation through affirmation and vice versa as in Feuerbach and other forms of positivism, there is a four fold series of reifications in which affirmation and negation transcend themselves within one another and as a relation.

1. Negation- affirmation, or the epistemic.

Negation originally lies in the pre-reflective external catastrophe of Being, ie. the disappearance of transitioning forms into the surplus energetics of Becoming: the self-contradiction of the Negation of Being in-itself is the formula of this Becoming. The original category of affirmation is given in the post-reflective human subjectivity for it affirms as an episteme the forms that this negativity within nature swallows up and causes to disappear.

2. Negation- negation, or the ontic.

Negation is now transposed into post-reflection and becomes an affirmation of Being within Time (the ontos); this new affirmation of temporality is transposed into pre-reflectivity and becomes the pre-reflective affirmation of the human ego, specifically the real-ego. Death anxiety appears. Epistemic-ontic topos arises in the form of Ancient Greek consciousness, the flame of Eros, whose height lies in the Apollonian denial of death through artistic forms and philosophic abstraction, outgrowths of death-anxiety. Capitalism appears as the economic analogue to death denial, though in a primitive form. The technological dream of immortality, which is the dream of capitalism, now seen in the form of genetic engineering and AI, actually comes from this place in the Greeks, they also had theories of the automaton, robotic lifeforms, etc.

3. Affirmation-Negation, or the immanent.

The pre-reflective affirmation of the human real-ego is combined with a post-reflective negation of this ego's defining limits within the Godhead, as limits of the flesh, our finite human powers, etc. Immanence appears as the divinity-within-man, the immanent divine, through which man transcends himself as real-ego into ideal-ego or spirit. Here alienation appears to consciousness finally within post-reflection. The ontic-immanent topos arises with ancient Jews and the Abrahamic religion with an economic analogue in utopian communal society, seen in miniature in many monastic communities and turned into an economic hope by Marxists.

4. Affirmation, affirmation, or transcendence.

Lies in a pre-reflective affirmation of human alienation, his misplaced immanent divinity, combined with a post-reflective affirmation of the presence of death in the world, through which materiality destroys itself in the apotheosis of Becoming into Being, creating heroic-daemonic love. This is not yet a stage that has been fully reached, it is intimated by Christ at the immanent-transcendent topos. Once it is fully reached it will also have unknown sociological-economic parallels. ]

This model charts the movement of the human self pre-reflectively alienated in a state of danger in the face of a contradictory, anarchic world, in whose mirror it cannot find itself, after the manner of Schelling's universe I mentioned in the fist passage, to a human self grounded through reflection in the recognition of death, in a materiality which destroys itself rising up to transcendence. Psychologically it describes the symmetry of alienation and the death anxiety, but it also describes how concepts develop through the reification of affirmation and negation, so that sociologically it represents a certain model of historical development, one very much opposed to dialectical materialism as well as Heidegger's idea of history. The pattern of history is symmetrical in it to the pattern of humanity's self-reflection.

Subject: Re: Politicians Sat Mar 26, 2016 1:16 pm

While I spend more time thinking about what you wrote, and it does require a lot of thought on my part to truly grasp this, I was thinking about the idea you raised if male and female nature, that philosophy has been a project of articulating and developing masculinity but there isn't really a corresponding attempt by females to articulate and develop femininity (to attempt to paraphrase what you said). I've done very little writing and thinking about this subject of an inherent or essential difference in the nature of male and female, partly because it is so difficult to try moving in that direction without taking on errors and stupid ideas that are out there where people have assumptions about "what it means to be a man" or "what it means to be a woman", but also because I still believe in the partially socially constructed nature of these, I think that masculine and feminine are not absolutely divorced from each other but are like partially abstracted-differentiated components of a single nature: human nature. Some people have more human nature than others, just like some people have more of a split in their human nature to polarizing toward one gender rather than the other (that gender-polarity is stronger in some people's particular instantiation of human nature than it is in others).

In some people that division is stronger than in other, i.e. some people have less of their other gender half, or hold more strongly to their own gender differentiation. I also see these ideas of what it means to be a man vs. a woman do change over time, but I agree with you that they are not changing absolutely. It is more like the mold is expanding or being pushed out, without actually breaking. So I really want to explore this idea and we should devote some serious work to articulating these differences of gender both as they might apply in your sense of genetic-biological absoluteness as well as in the opposite or alternate sense as they may apply as socially constructed, arbitrary, or based on history and norms (not necessarily a bad thing, or wrong, but at least not entirely philosophically grounded, not properly psychological-ontic in the same way). What interests me is how ideas and realities of gender could move around between the poles of [absolute <----> arbitrary], or [necessary <----> contingent]. It has to be a combination of both, but even more interesting to me is that it doesnt really matter so much where on that continuum it happens to fall at any given point in time or space; what matters most is the existential and larger proper reality, the truth-participation of the idea, i.e. what is its deeper essence, toward what does it contribute and in what does it participate, and to what degrees is it flowing from larger truths, from the future, from greater tectonics, and how much is it able to pass larger ranges of possibilities for new or improved (more philosophical, more sane, more rational, more emotionally diverse or less pathological, more honest, more joyous, more will to power, etc.) realities into our present existence?

Those questions of meaning and future are far more interesting and important, to me, than trying to pin down exactly where on the continuum of necessary vs. contingent any particular gender/sex idea or moment or configuration might be.

As I said, I have not done much work at all on this, but here are a few speculative things I have written trying to explore this idea of male vs female nature, from a philosophical angle...

Subject: Re: Politicians Sun Mar 27, 2016 5:19 am

Parodites wrote:: But it must be kept in mind that this is different than what Heidegger was doing, his theory was that human history has created and programmed us with a false orientation to Being- Being-in-Time, by investing to us in a cultural legacy all the different forms and ideas arrived upon by philosophy so far and our various texts, and that there are other orientations to Being hidden behind history in potential, and that the structure of human subjectivity is therefor arbitrary, the structure of our orientation to Being, so that we must mercilessly deconstruct- he used the word de-struct, all of history and all cultural forms, not toward transcendent specification of those forms, but to the end of completely clearing away the lens of history, destroying all given forms, in order to expose in the resulting intellectual vacuum this supposed ancient unity of the natural world in which a new orientation to Being can be conceived for man- which, not being a philosophic orientation, Heidegger could only articulate by appealing to mysticism and art.

"The
memory of Eden, the unity of nature before the fall into sin by consciousness, does not
exist. Instead of a pre-existing unity of Nature, as was supposed in the late romantic
conception to have existed before the initiation of the historical narrative of human
civilization; instead of a return to some passive witness of Heideggerian Being, as was
supposed to have existed before man gained consciousness and introduced the rupture of
negation into things, we have only a kind of sadness and horror to draw back upon,
corresponding as it does in Schelling to the divine being's longing to create itself, and
which, for us, may be grasped in words only as the unthinkable basis of all thought, only
as the remainder which serves to ground the scaffold of philosophy in the gradual
progression form nonrational and anarchic power to rational erotic form and Idea, from
pre to post reflective consciousness, through that gradual unfolding of increasingly
differentiated beings in the mystery of the daemon's terrestrial love and Semelian birth-death
before the genius of the absolute. Negation lies in these differentiations and
tensions of Becoming which continually nullify Being, while the human self is, on the
other hand, the source of the original core of affirmative or positive content for
philosophy, for it stands as the site of the glorious risk by which one term in each series
of differentiations may be taken up and reified within the other, * and through the
progression of this negative reflectivity so it is that tensions of this kind may be
reified and given transcendental specification. The reason that reflection is purely
negative for Holderlin is that the human self is a rupture of original negation into the
unity of nature and all reflection is an attempt to bring that self back into the unity of
nature, while in the view here given reflection is purely negative because the oppositions
within Nature through which the human subject affirms its own discontinuity or
separation from things constitute a continuous self-nullification of Being within
Becoming, of the will of God within human consciousness, that is, what Schelling would
call the self's distinct position within the universe as the being-in-danger, of the being that
can consciously obey or disobey the order of the divinity. The notion of a Heideggerian
dispensation from Being, of a passive revelation of Being to man as would inaugurate a
new political era and revolutionary consciousness, is strictly contrary to this conception of
man's danger, or glorious risk to use Plato's phraseology. If there should be such an era, if
would only arise through a kind of metapolitics in which the spheres of power belonging
to Culture and the State are reorganized in terms of reification and mobilized toward the
retrieval of a new racial identity from out of the dregs of the leveled discourse belonging
to the liberal-secular order of America, as distinguished from the fascism of the German
Reich or any of the various communist attempts in the east. Heidegger of course grounds
his hope of rescuing a primordial relation to Being from behind history and the story of
culture in Holderlin's account of poetic reflection, in which Being itself is grasped, not as
the concretion of any historical essence, but as the force of that very negative rupture into
the order of Nature which the human self constitutes; as a kind of paradoxical
consciousness the force of whose destructiveness might bring the new revolutionary
consciousness and polis into existence. Heidegger mistakenly believes that this
destructive potential can be brought into the service of philosophy and shaped into a new
polis, that it can be controlled and directed."

* Reification of one term in the other indicates that four stage anti-dialectical scheme, in which affirmation is reified in negation and vice versa:

[ We may presently generalize this schema as a sequence of four reifications corresponding to the four elements of the topos which I have delineated already. In essence: instead of affirmation following negation, negation following affirmation, which characterized ancient classical thought in the scheme of dianoia, instead of the synthesis of affirmation and negation in Hegel and Marx, and instead of the self-contradiction of negation through affirmation and vice versa as in Feuerbach and other forms of positivism, there is a four fold series of reifications in which affirmation and negation transcend themselves within one another and as a relation.

1. Negation- affirmation, or the epistemic.

Negation originally lies in the pre-reflective external catastrophe of Being, ie. the disappearance of transitioning forms into the surplus energetics of Becoming: the self-contradiction of the Negation of Being in-itself is the formula of this Becoming. The original category of affirmation is given in the post-reflective human subjectivity for it affirms as an episteme the forms that this negativity within nature swallows up and causes to disappear.

2. Negation- negation, or the ontic.

Negation is now transposed into post-reflection and becomes an affirmation of Being within Time (the ontos); this new affirmation of temporality is transposed into pre-reflectivity and becomes the pre-reflective affirmation of the human ego, specifically the real-ego. Death anxiety appears. Epistemic-ontic topos arises in the form of Ancient Greek consciousness, the flame of Eros, whose height lies in the Apollonian denial of death through artistic forms and philosophic abstraction, outgrowths of death-anxiety. Capitalism appears as the economic analogue to death denial, though in a primitive form. The technological dream of immortality, which is the dream of capitalism, now seen in the form of genetic engineering and AI, actually comes from this place in the Greeks, they also had theories of the automaton, robotic lifeforms, etc.

3. Affirmation-Negation, or the immanent.

The pre-reflective affirmation of the human real-ego is combined with a post-reflective negation of this ego's defining limits within the Godhead, as limits of the flesh, our finite human powers, etc. Immanence appears as the divinity-within-man, the immanent divine, through which man transcends himself as real-ego into ideal-ego or spirit. Here alienation appears to consciousness finally within post-reflection. The ontic-immanent topos arises with ancient Jews and the Abrahamic religion with an economic analogue in utopian communal society, seen in miniature in many monastic communities and turned into an economic hope by Marxists.

4. Affirmation, affirmation, or transcendence.

Lies in a pre-reflective affirmation of human alienation, his misplaced immanent divinity, combined with a post-reflective affirmation of the presence of death in the world, through which materiality destroys itself in the apotheosis of Becoming into Being, creating heroic-daemonic love. This is not yet a stage that has been fully reached, it is intimated by Christ at the immanent-transcendent topos. Once it is fully reached it will also have unknown sociological-economic parallels. ]

This model charts the movement of the human self pre-reflectively alienated in a state of danger in the face of a contradictory, anarchic world, in whose mirror it cannot find itself, after the manner of Schelling's universe I mentioned in the fist passage, to a human self grounded through reflection in the recognition of death, in a materiality which destroys itself rising up to transcendence. Psychologically it describes the symmetry of alienation and the death anxiety, but it also describes how concepts develop through the reification of affirmation and negation, so that sociologically it represents a certain model of historical development, one very much opposed to dialectical materialism as well as Heidegger's idea of history. The pattern of history is symmetrical in it to the pattern of humanity's self-reflection.

This is fascinating, and so if I understand you correctly, there is no absolute basis from which sociological or psychological determinations come except for the human self itself, namely that which this self is, as for example you have outlined it above in the four stages; that sociology and psychology, all social political and economic forms flow out of the fact of this self's structure and development, the heights of relation and self-relation to which it has attained, and basically this leads to an interesting conclusion: Heidegger's approach is wrong for the same reason that the more extreme postmodern critical theoretical or culturally relative approach is wrong, namely is wrong because destroying through all that history of human substance is basically parallel to destroying through the old forms of the self through which the self had passed in coming to be what it is today. There is therefore in this view no hidden Being at the heart of history except for what has always been there already, man and the self as such, its structure, configuration and daemonic mode(s) (of which all the historical ideas, stories, meanings, emotions, cultural forms, etc. are signs and physical-textual recordings), and these can be arrived at just as well and probably a good deal better by an approach that, rather than applying broad strokes of destruction and reductive deconstructions within relativistic paradigms focused on "art and poetry", basically focused on edifications of feelings, instead aims directly at that self and sets it as the standard, cause and meaning for sociology, politics and economy.

If we could successfully wrap all the external forms of the self (namely society, politics and economy) back upon the self we might be able to push the process of the daemonic a step further, perhaps into the transcendent fourth stage. Right now I would think that postmodern deconstructive type approaches are already intimating the fourth stage, because at the far end of Christian secularism all forms are already dissolving into the abysses of non-entity as into both the limits of history and our own limits as subjects, as selves, to cohere an experience or a self out of these dissolving contents. The human world has become massively big, even as it physically shrinks with technologies of connection the meanings embedded to the world expand drastically and combine in each other making exponential increases; making it essentially impossible to pull off any totalizing coherences anymore, one is always intimately aware of the dissolving boundaries of oneself at the edges of one's own possible experiences with the world at large.

So when you speak of integrating death culturally-socially, maybe this can mean finding ways to wrap society, politics and economics back upon the self, short-circuiting these in a kind of self-feeding of essences back upon the core, to both overload the core but also curtail its infinite horizon, to place a limit before it. I have no idea how that would be accomplished, but if it could be, the secular Christian stage of postmodern technological-capitalist liberal humanism would fall apart and something new would have to emerge to replace it.

And literally, the collapse of these forms of economy and politics and society would be a pre-requisite for this kind of stage transition, because these forms have so much power already and are constantly getting more, more power not just to control and determine but to actually rewrite outcomes, histories, meanings, and future possibilities. The stage 3 as you describe it is peaking in a way where it is almost asymptotically slowing down to near-infinite slowness as the elements and forms of this stage are becoming self-sufficient and ontically stable enough to actually resist the pre-reflective Being-time-ness of Becoming which you describe as the basis for the emergence of the first Affirmation. Basically, the completion of the stage 3 self is destroying the basis of the stage 2 self. So even though stage 3 is "perfecting" itself that perfection is at the same time short-circuiting its own philosophical and ontological-epistemological basis, assuming that stage 2 acts as a basis for stage 3, thus we also see nowadays the devolutions of human thought and meaning into the domains of biology or artificial intelligence research for example, the project of eternal life as you said, but is really here mainly a response to the deadening of stage 2 consciousness as stage 3 is peaking in such a way as to over-write and impossibilize existing stage 2 being-time substances, reversing the pre-reflective ground of the self qua affirmation potential and leading to the feedback looping or self-fulfilling prophecy that the more "advanced" progressive modern society becomes in its sciences and its sociological iterations the weaker man himself becomes and the more he "needs" those iterations, therefore pushing the development of stage 3 even further.

-----

On the assumption that my above interpretation is correct, I want to amend my thesis on postmodernism and deconstruction a bit.

Postmodernism reflects or rather indicates/points to a growing strength-impulse in humanity today, that impulse being the kind of extreme deterritorialization and novelty power that is forced into existence by the fact that stage 2 consciousness is dissolving under the peaking of stage 3 consciousness, or said precisely, that "Secular Christian Techno-Capitalist Liberal-Humanist Globalism" is destroying man's capacity to cohere himself as a temporal existential being, that his time relations to meanings are dissolving into abundances of spatialities. In response to this destruction, postmodernism attempts to reassert a standard of strength and right by attempting to embrace new forms for the sake of it and oppose old forms for the sake of it, basically removing contents (rationalities) from forms and thereby attempting to re-establish time possibilities for existential coherence by inverting the given spacial relationships and limits; if the self is dissolving or under assault, they think, we should expose and remove whatever "the self" already means from within the analytics of the power equations themselves, thereby exposing their machinations to raw power and revealing too the hidden mindlessness behind the machine. Then at new world can be created from the ashes of this one, a world build upon different kinds of dynamics and motives-impulses. Similarly critical theory and deconstruction attempt to dig into existing power structures or cultural forms and find out how to blow apart those forms from the inside, to disrupt existing power dynamics and thereby end the stronghold of spatial tyranny against the time-dependent existential being of the self, namely to return the self to a kind of world wherein the self can actually make sense of things by way of successful totalizing self-coherences (whereas Lyotard and others may think that postmodernism is about refusing all "meta-narratives" I actually think it's implicitly about trying to find better ones).

So the problem with this approach is, I think you would say, that that kind of "for its own sake" expressions of destructive power are actually counter-productive to the true basis of the self, which can be found either in our hardwired biology and genetics or also in our established historical facts and past states of daemonic development and overcoming of the errors and things we have already overcome -- namely the physical structure of our organism plus the cumulative history of learning and ideas that allows human babies today to develop in such contexts as to actually be capable of instantiate a stage 3 model. To the extent that deconstruction and critical theory assumes a materially reductive view I agree, likewise to the extent that postmodernity continues to be merely "for its own sake" I also agree, however in the sense that these act as signs for the responses within the self to the fact of stage 3 dominance, I still see postmodernism and critical theoretical deconstruction as useful and good, because they are direct responses to keeping the edges of human existentia open rather than closed, pushing back against the lack of will to power's self-coherence totalizing time-being with its own kind of will to power attempting to create a new world-space where those kind of totalities are again possible -- basically, I don't think the "critiques" and "deconstructions" of postmodern society are all that extreme, in fact I think they are for the large part quite tame and not very threatening at all, even where it comes to things like gender, sex, or family structure. Plus, in the transition from stage 3 to stage 4, much of the old assumptions are probably going to go away, and things will need to be reassessed radically anew and in an open and honest light; in that sense, even the ills of postmodernity/etc. are still pointing to the errors that ought to be made visible so we can reconcile with them at the point of truly moving from 3 to 4 stage. The more knowledge, perspectives, ideas, insanities, all of that the more also will be complete the totalizing synthesis of this Christian-capitalist world, the deeper the analysis will be that turns over the world into something new, which will mean as you say the transition of the self from this present form into a subsequent one.

From the perspective of stage 4 subjectivity, I can see Heideggerian hermeneutics or deconstruction, critical theory, Lyotardian or Foucaultian postmodernist type approaches aren't really a threat at all, in fact the prominence of these are already signs of the success of those deeper realities you speak of, at this point the stage 3 working through itself. But I can also see the danger of possibly aborting stage 3 if some critical mass is not reached, or if some kind of eternal kingdom of techno-ideological control and managed warfare is established on the earth. That seems highly unlikely, and rather the collapses of such attempts will only herald the breaking down of stage 3 into the components of a new stage 4 model. Basically, in my view, it doesnt really matter at all how critical or radical in our thought we want to be, we can't really do any damage to the processes that are already unfolding, and we may even achieve some good thereby (any change we do cause will either be benign from the perspective of the good, or add to the good, it seems). But I would be interested also in what you think about as the process of how stage 3 will move into stage 4, because you have studied the transitions from 1 to 2, and from 2 to 3. You must have some idea of how, out in the 'real world' namely in terms of politics, society, economy etc., this is really going to play out, or must play out if we are not as a species (as you said, a "race") to abort the attempt, assuming you think it possible that the move from 3 to 4 could be aborted somehow.

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

" maybe this can mean finding ways to wrap society, politics and economics back upon the self, short-circuiting these in a kind of self-feeding of essences back upon the core, to both overload the core but also curtail its infinite horizon, to place a limit before it. "

Yes, this pursuit of the subject's self-reflection within history has been the unconscious goal of philosophy and higher culture in general anyways, as I see it, and now, having become conscious of this aim and the four stage process underlying it, it can possibly be brought to completion, and the human subject transcendentally specified, though it is presently beyond my or anyone else's understanding as to how exactly that will happen.

"Basically, the completion of the stage 3 self is destroying the basis of the stage 2 self. So even though stage 3 is "perfecting" itself that perfection is at the same time short-circuiting its own philosophical and ontological-epistemological basis, assuming that stage 2 acts as a basis for stage 3, thus we also see nowadays the devolutions of human thought and meaning into the domains of biology or artificial intelligence research for example, the project of eternal life as you said, but is really here mainly a response to the deadening of stage 2 consciousness as stage 3 is peaking in such a way as to over-write and impossibilize existing stage 2 being-time substances, reversing the pre-reflective ground of the self qua affirmation potential and leading to the feedback looping or self-fulfilling prophecy that the more "advanced" progressive modern society becomes in its sciences and its sociological iterations the weaker man himself becomes and the more he "needs" those iterations, therefore pushing the development of stage 3 even further."

Yes this reversion of the pre-reflective ground sets up the condition for a kind of repetition, also blockading the path to transitioning to the next stage. That's why I fear the unabated deconstructionism of these social justice warrior feminist types, as well as the other variety with Heidegger's followers- it only accomplishes a further blockade to achieving the next stage. The transitions can never be actually stopped or rendered dead, but a repetition of early transitions can take place that costs a lot of time. All the earlier stages were unconscious emergent functions, the human self's struggle to become self-reflective mirrored in the lived pattern of history, but the fourth transition must and will be a conscious intentional undertaking, so nothing that applied to the earlier transitions can apply to the one to come. Also, these four stages correspond to the development of the only psyche and subject I have access to, namely the male one. I do not know the structure of the female self-reflecting subject. Perhaps, in order for one of the genders to finalize itself and attain the fourth stage, it has to be alongside the other gender having progressed in its own struggle to that point as well; perhaps the fourth requires the interaction of both genders as a complete humanity.

Just got a refill from my doctor so I will write a longer response in a bit. Quickly on gender. I have nothing but respect for females. My friends were almost always female, the people that were most important in my life were females, etc. Save for you and Fixed I don't even like talking to my own gender really, I prefer girls. A male or female virtue can express itself as vice quite easily, for example we can call to mind the idiot showoff guy who does something deliberately stupid to try and impress people and ends up hurting himself, but then we must recognize that this higher male capacity for taking risks is also responsible for loftier things, like getting in a tin can and blasting off toward the moon, or detonating the first nuclear weapon, etc. Things that seem weak in a female could in another circumstance be strong. For this reason neither gender is any greater than the other, or any less. In all higher mammals nature has constructed a psychic balance of power which we call a gender, and when the two forms it takes, male and female, understand one another- and only in humans do they seem to misunderstand, so it is that the species thrives. One day females will have a philosophic and cultural legacy as developed as that of males, and the genders will reach a new understanding of one another, and will love one another in a different way, in a better way than perhaps they do now. You can only love the person you know, after all, and vice versa maybe. Diotima, a woman, awakened the philosophic passion of Socrates, a tale in which I recognize my own personal history.

I've written a fair bit on the sexes, my latest thoughts on the subject:

---

It is the transformation of the beloved into an eternal image of artistic reverence or
philosophic idealism which characterizes man's eroticism as an outgrowth of the death-anxiety,
while the union of sexuality and eroticism within femininity presents itself as an
incorporation of the Hadean potencies of death and decay themselves into the psychosexual
exchange as a kind of libidinal economy: psychoanalytically, the woman steals the
life-essence from the male in order to use it to fuel the genesis of the newly forming being
within her, the child, bringing it into existence through the same potency that sews the
poison of death and degeneration within the male. Women were the first pharmakon.
Indeed, part of the mystery of women is that the garden of the female body seemingly
offers us both the fruit of knowledge and that of life at once. The fruit of the tree of life is
sexuality, the organic materiality of pleasure, while the fruit of the tree of knowledge is
eroticism, which typifies the constructed masculine universe of artistic beauty and
philosophic forms, or the whole culture-labor of the West. The mysterious quality of
femininity lies, in other words, in the sexualization of eroticism and the eroticism of
sexuality, as through a fetishization of nature itself, which defies the whole masculine
psychodynamic. This is why man must desire before moving on to enjoyment, as through
a kind of psychic release which merely obscures a deeper reconnecting with something
apparently lost in the fixated object, while women continually move from enjoyment to
desire and back to enjoyment, mirroring in the reflective unity of affects the organic unity
of the corporeal form and mentally regulating the surplus-energetics of primogenial
nature as still lives through them, which was deadened in man with the awakening of
Eros to the Apollonian ascent into Idea and Form. Femininity is the daemonic, in other
words; masculinity, the erotic. Yet, love itself is ever the eroto-daemonic. The fact that in
their deepest pleasure they thoroughly enjoy a slight particle of pain, and contrariwise- something
which no woman would deny, though one must always forgive the happier
doveship of mere girls, speaks to their dual nature as female, to that within them which
wishes to command and to be commanded, to that within them which inspires the Orphic
enchantments of man and our philosophy, along with all the charm of language, as only
through their distant silence and questioning visage's searchless light, or to their mysteries
in general, and a duality as is discovered in the world rather than within themselves,
rather than within that interior struggle as it is with men; it speaks to the knowledge and
the life in them, between which the serpent of the masculine must discover that fruit
around which to coil itself and thereby introduce separation, as into what would be
whole- that is, to introduce sin and innocence, and the whole descent from the garden.
The mystery of pleasure is the mystery of femininity, which is the mystery of flesh and
death, of the flower and the flame, of the rose, moonlight, and love; that obscure
connection between pleasure and pain which, in the strongest of cases, seems to convert
the one into the other. The masculine contains, however, in addition to the serpent, the
Promethean type, and the fire upon whose principal the possibility of change and
transformation was achieved for humanity, which "reorganizes within the death instinct a
new point of departure for the processes of life and eros".

The sexes divided through sociological history, and through individual processes owing to the way we relate to our own material forms: our material forms and their functions as males and females are different, we relate to them differently, and different psychic structures develop. Also the difference in our pure biology causes more separation.

My basic theory of sexual differentiation is a combination of psychology and psychoanalysis.

" Indeed, part of the mystery of women is that the garden of the female body seemingly
offers us both the fruit of knowledge and that of life at once."
- A Glorious Risk, Essay Two: On the Psychological Principle of the Daemonic.

Man is born as a kind of negative value in the libidinal economy I mentioned in this passage, a recycled residuum of the paternal descent in the Oedipal complex, and has something to atone for psychically: he feels he must reinvest his potency so to speak by impregnating somebody, and in this way possibly make up for the sins and deficiencies of the father. Death, in female primordiality, is an integral correspondence with the height of ecstasy in the flash of birth-death in terrestrial love and the exuberance of nature, while it becomes an anxiety in man over the cessation of the exiled ego. Man epitomizes his own universe- the universe of the ego, and stands alone in that universe, while women are each born into an ancient matronage whose line extends from the old mother cults, the first world religions, in which females were seen as half divine, because they gave birth and men did not. Man's purpose is to break the influence of that ancient half-animal matronage and the earth-goddess over his own consciousness and split the tree in the Garden of Eden in half, dividing the fruit of life from that of knowledge and beginning the project of Western Civilization, like the Luciferian serpent:

" The fact that in
their deepest pleasure they thoroughly enjoy a slight particle of pain, and contrariwise- something
which no woman would deny, though one must always forgive the happier
doveship of mere girls, speaks to their dual nature as female, to that within them which
wishes to command and to be commanded, to that within them which inspires the Orphic
enchantments of man and our philosophy, along with all the charm of language, as only
through their distant silence and questioning visage's searchless light, or to their mysteries
in general, and a duality as is discovered in the world rather than within themselves,
rather than within that interior struggle as it is with men; it speaks to the knowledge and
the life in them, between which the serpent of the masculine must discover that fruit
around which to coil itself and thereby introduce separation, as into what would be
whole- that is, to introduce sin and innocence, and the whole descent from the garden."

- Ibid.

In completing that, he man less finds himself:

"surrendering up to the false identity of creation, to the bare totality, the
single individual which his ego constitutes, that by the power of this dispersion he might
truly add something to the very idea of life, in this the fruit of his estrangement and
longest exile, to bear a stark check upon and break with the fixity of things, at last
reintroducing the design of the individual into nature itself as it were, upsetting those
relations long-forged in the broken equivalence of power..."

- The End of Namegiving.

It is by "sacrificing the single individuality which his ego constitutes" that man, through an internal, reflective struggle conquers the external feminine, that is, nature and death, thereby formulating a mythologos from out of the mythic consciousness and the new logos as was brought into existence through his eroto-philosophic performances with the Orphean lyre- with the aesthetic form and the abstract Idea. Nature- the broken equivalence of power, having in this way been destroyed and overcome through the masculine-Luciferian aspect, allows for the transformation of the (hu)man's sexuality and psyche, as regards both man and women, which is still being carried out by Western civilization. Women, through our civilization, which stripped them of their primordial pseudo-divinity, as they possessed in the earliest religions, have not become masculinized, nor have men become feminized, but rather the daemonic femininity and the erotic masculinity have been combining into the eroto-daemonic which we experience as various forms of modern romantic love- this pathos being very different from the primordial sexualities experienced by more ancient forms of humanity.

Human nature, that is, the eroto-daemonic, moves, in man, from the death-anxiety toward alienation, while it moves from alienation toward the death-anxiety in women- alienation from their pseudo divine role in the lineage of earth-mother cults. While the death-anxiety expresses itself as a longing to hold on to form in man, to apotheosize the beloved in the Apollonian imagery, it expresses itself in women as the need to reconstitute the whole libidinal economy by means of sexual reproduction: females do not find their psychic origin in their father as men do with their mother, while their mother represents merely another modulation of the goddess-figure in the ancient religious chorus as they themselves are and thus no true point of origination, which is found more properly in nature itself, in the painful surplus-energetics of birth and death whose savage exigency of need, supplanted consciously by the order of civilization, still echos in the hollows of their sexuality, as was in the distant past once coaxed into rhythm and melody under the mandate of magical ritual and earth-worship. Alienation expresses itself in man as the exile of an ego through which the bare totality might be glimpsed, abstracted, and reintroduced as the individuality forgotten by the natural world, in which the species alone is reckoned, while in women it is found in their inability to formulate psychically their true origin in either the mother or father.

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

Also, another potential avenue of research with regard to incorporating death.

Death exists both as an actual event, our physical disappearance from the universe, but also as a structure constitutive of our identity and subjectivity- as our mortality.

There is a potential here to apply meontology or the metaphysics behind negation and nothingness to ethics instead of Being. A negative ethics, that begins on a fundamental re-evaluation of ethics itself. The ethical question has always been, how do we live a good life in spite of death and suffering? But we must accept death and suffering, not as the problem to be overcome through ethical analysis, but as a datum that must be reckoned with insofar as it makes ethical action impossible for human beings. We could assume the Good to be an impossible category, and create a new ethics that aims to indirectly specify the transcendent, that unattainable Good, through a configuration of ethical negations, just as the Christian mystics talked about the unspeakable nature of God by talking about everything God was not. Thus a new negative and transcendental ethics would not arrive upon a specific set of actions and a material good, but rather an incorporation of death as constitutive structure in psychic life and subjectivity; this constitutive structure of Death is the structure of incompatibility or asymmetry between the Good and Action, between the ethical and life in general, and can be truly incorporated only through the transcendent toward which the asymmetry points through the contours and self-destroying material of lived existence, in which the Being which Heidegger mistakenly sought behind history is then discovered, rather than through a passive dispensation, only through the painful danger of acting in a universe in which it is paradoxical and impossible to act ethically. Acting in the full dwelling of this paradox and impossibility for ethical action, through a negative ethical evaluation of the kind I describe, would then be the transcendent orientation to Being at the fourth stage, as opposed to the epistemic, ontic, or immanent orientation. This new ethical mode is heroic-daemonic love, the metaphysical and philosophical completion of the mythical Christian agape in which the fourth transcendent stage was intimated by Christ but not attained.

Subject: Re: Politicians Sun Apr 03, 2016 11:01 am

Death does not bear upon ethics or the good, as if the fact of something's finitude were a strike against it in some fundamental way. Ethics/morality reduces to the study of being, to reality and what it means to exist, which is an existential and phenomenological question as much as a scientific one. The good flows from the facts of what kinds of beings we are, as such and such a thing and not another, from the massive shared history of meaning that reaches deep not only into our ideas and cultural forms but also into our instincts and our genetics, since these were crafted in response to social facts and demands, which themselves must always conform in the final analysis to larger situations of truths. I do not believe in the assumption that the good is impossible, nor that one cannot act ethically. Action is the realizing of an equation of the self dealing with many variables and reconciling these together to produce an outcome -- what we do, say, think, feel, believe, motivate. An entire massive tectonic existential-phenomenological operation is constantly taking place of which we are a small outpouring, a point of realization to speak logically, or a kind of "Form" to see it metaphysically. Humans deal with things they cannot possibly know (e.g. their ideas and feelings of God) because those ideas and feelings are real and have meaning, even if the image in this case (God) or other cases isn't functioning at the same categorical level.

Asking if God, ethics, the good, asking if these are real or not is committing a categorical mistake. Death is a fact of this kind of existence we have, just like is the fact that we need to drink water and ingest nutrients to stay alive, or the fact that I cannot fly myself to the moon, or the fact that it is easier to empathize with another human than it is to empathize with an insect. There are countless such facts whose confluence speaks to the pure form of existing of 'human being' however we want to conceive that, and regardless of the differences we want to admit or not into that being. Mortality is simply a fact, the negative expression of the fact of what it means to be a material form existing in space and time, dependent and conditional and subject to decay and change. But that fact by itself has no fundamental bearing upon ethics, morality, the good, the self; simply because these would still exist anyway even if we were immortal. Hypothetically, just assume for a moment that you found some way to be immortal, that say your body would not age or get sick, and assuming you weren't in an accident or something you could theoretically "live forever"... first of all the absurdity of that is obvious, that the earth doesn't live forever, that our technology is nowhere near advanced enough to match that kind of immortality, and even if we had such technology the galaxy itself isn't immortal either. We aren't even talking about immortality, we are talking about a very very very long life span, at best. Second, in that hypothetical imagining of yourself as immortal, what does that change about your perspective on the good or ethics/morality? Surprisingly, it doesn't really change anything at all. The nature/structure of "what the good means" or "what ethics or morality mean" or "what it means to be the self which you are" is not fundamentally altered by the hypothetical case that you suddenly stop aging and will never die.

We could speak of morality as emerging in part as a response to human awareness of death and the suffering and loss this entails, certainly. But that is but one small part of the genesis of morality and not even the primary one -- morality arose in response to human's becoming able to deal with meaning directly, and with facts directly, as opposed to simply dealing with material conditions through rote sense perception. We respond directly to the fact of something or to the meaning behind it, and as it turns out, tectonically speaking, facts and meanings in these ways mount endlessly and we can never possibly exhaust them; the more we think, the more there exists to think about, just as the more we push into and perceive or become aware of the meaningful the more meaningfulness exists to us and beyond our given point to find with further awareness and perception.

True philosophy isn't about our ideas or our concepts, but about our becoming sensitive to meanings and facts. Interestingly, this is something that philosophy has largely failed at. The really interesting philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger to some extent Wittgenstein do attempt to deal with this proper avenue of philosophy, to really push into being as it is and as we are become aware of it, as it affects directly, but those efforts are still undertaken from within the traditional framework of philosophizing, which is basically an artificial structure of reason and 'belief' that sets itself up to replace the more true structure of meaningfulness and fact-ness. And it is the case that we are in fact formed directly from the meaningfulness and fact-ness, these categories constitute the higher sense of our true being as far as we are able to tell at this point, and so a true philosophy would actually deal with life directly and render life eminently and intimately livable to us, rather than isolating us from life through false assumptions of concepts that are designed to replace authentic existence and the good with some structure of artificial responsiveness or base novelty-pleasure seeking entropic utilitarianism.

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

" replace authentic existence and the good with some structure of artificial responsiveness or base novelty-pleasure seeking entropic utilitarianism"

You've misunderstood my last post.

I am not suggesting anything even similar to utilitarianism; what you mean by artificial responsiveness I do not know.

When you say that death does not bear upon ethics, that seems insane to me. As I mentioned in the last post, Death does not refer simply to the fact that something will cease to exist; it is a rich structure constitutive of subjectivity itself, a sickness unto death as Kierkegaard called it. It is not a simple fact like I have to eat or I have to sleep. Even if I was physically immortal, Death as a structure through which my subjectivity organizes itself would still exist as a psychological datum. In fact, as a sickness unto death, despair only makes sense for an immortal being at least in soul; we are sick unto death, that we do not attain to death is irrelevant: if I was immortal I might suffer and want to die, and that wanting to die is death itself as a lived organizing principle for subjectivity. In terms of my own philosophy: the human Self does not have a relation to Being in Heidegger's sense, for this world is just a structure of self-negating tensions of Being within Becoming: the Self is the affirmative core and Being, it rather has a relation to non-being, to nothingness, and this is its limiting constitution- this relation to nonbeing is death, and the world as a series of tensions of Being within Becoming is only a mirror of this death which the self tries to read itself out of, a mortis imago in Ovid's phrase, always failing to do so, leading to its alienation and separation from things, from nature and from other selves, other people. We experience mortality and death continually while we live, it is the terminal border around our life that gives it a shape and a structure and a reality. Without a boundary there would be nothing to separate me from anything else, I would be an amorphous protoplasm: death is that ultimate boundary. It gives shape not only to me personally but to all living things and to the universe or ontos itself. The idea that ethics would reduce to the study of Being, rather than to the study of the human subject's constitute structure, which is a structure of limitation, mortality, and despair, also seems insane and nonsensical. A true ethics must be an ethic of that structure's limit, of our mortality's limit,- the limit describing the asymmetry between life and the good, of immanence and transcendence, of man and god, and the paradox of acting in a world and toward a Being for which there can be no ethical relationship: the topos of transcendence, the incorporate of death, lies in this dangerous act, this glorious risk, this paradoxical participation in the Good, which nobody has attained yet.

That Nietzsche and Heidegger approach philosophy as a relation to Being is true, and one of the main reasons I reject them in all their fundamental premises. One of the main ideas in my philosophy is that Being is Becoming's self-negation, the original source of negation as opposed to the human self's affirmative positing, so that Being does not remain merely as an inarticulate mytho-poetic positing as in Holderlin but as something like Schelling's unconscious remainder which he accounted for in a philosophic universe in which the mystery of non-being was finally grasped, and is such a Being as can never be derived as an object of philosophy. Philosophy is not an open-ness or awakening to Being, it is the heroic-daemonic love through which the human self mobilizes the tension of non-being, negation and nothingness within Being for its own Becoming, surpassing the ontos and material universe and arriving at transcendence, a moral reality beyond the scope of any mere action: a morality of non-being or ethics of negation, something that nobody has yet conceived. Love is not an act, and it is the highest moral datum of all. Non-being, nothingness, is for me like what Schelling called the night of God, the anarchy of the preternatural cosmos, into which the human Will must descend with the residuum of the divinity which it has gathered from out of the self-destroying world of materiality; non-being rests at the back of history, not Being as in Heidegger, and it exists there clouded by danger, despair, and horror, and the human self is the only object in nature that can utilize the tensions within the world to recognize itself in its own discontinuity and separation from things,[this recognizing is what I call reflectivity/reflection]- it is the only thing that can return into the night of non-being with that slight particle of genuine Being which it constitutes in its solitude and alienation, and, in returning to this anarchic source in nothingness, conquering in the process its death-anxiety and fear of nothingness, [psychologically incorporating Death as in my last post] and by bringing back that particle of its own Being [source of original affirmation] as the offering of heroic-daemonic love, (something beyond the ethics of any mere finite act; this love and offering is the end of a negative ethic) so it is that the human self alone can form a tonal center for the entire scaffold, and out of these tensions within Being mobilize the daemon toward that which it could never attain through materiality, namely toward transcendence, through the horrific depth of non-being. Thus my formulation of alienation and the death-anxiety opens up from the psychological to the philosophical, with a morality of nonbeing, an ethic of negation, being logically consequent.

You cannot, through any mere act, return that affirmative core of Being which your human self constitutes in its uttermost solitude and alienation, into the night of nonbeing in order to provide The Ground not only for ethics and a metaphysics of the good but for philosophy in general, but only through death, a genuinely incorporated lived death, can that be done. This is all the latent meaning of Christ's agapeic transformation through death. Until all this is gone through and that sacrifice of heroic-daemonic love is made, there is no such thing as authentic existence as you call it, and the Good is impossible; this sacrifice is the only thing that can be called good, for only through this transcendent topos is the mystery of nonbeing concluded within the mystery of the self and heroic love and the scaffold of Being finally cohered and made whole at the fourth stage of affirmation-affirmation, in which all elements of negation or nonbeing have finally been purged. This relation to the primordial night, to nothingness, to nonbeing, ( a relation I call simply Death) is not only a relation of moral import, it is the only thing that morally has any meaning.

The horror of nonbeing shines through even the brightest of human acts until then, even through Christ's divine death, and there is no authenticity or Good, there is no morality that can hide nothingness beneath the thin film of pitiful being stretched out over the abyss, no passive witness or equally pathetic and ridiculous poem for Heidegger which nothingness does not terrorize into desperate activity, no WillltoPower for Nietzsche that can reach the Ground and provide a point of departure for philosophy, no conatus or self-desiring for Spinoza or Deleuze that can fix the boundary of Being against negation.

Goethe preferred to call the mysterious quality, that is, the immortal energetics of surplus
underlying our apparently logical and conscious behavior, or the Freudian instinctual
reservoir, simply, the daemon- a power which, in Schelling's philosophy, becomes a kind
of cosmic property, to be grasped as the inarticulate melancholy of nature, which infuses
every blooming flower with the longing for God, toward which it sprouts forth carrying
an offering of something left over of the primal will, the remainder as Schelling calls it,
which it would like in gratitude to return to the creator, wherever he may be. Yet there
exists in that order of nature no power that can give this back, for in nature there exists no
power capable of katabasis or a re-descent into the ground of its own Being, a fact easily
defensible even from the Aristotelian physis of energeia within the temporal continuum:
it is only in man that eros appears, that demigod who is capable of embracing the past,
grappling at the margin of futurity, and clearing the passive mantle upon which we are
denied, in Kierkegaard's language, immediacy, or who in fact is capable of creating Time
in the first place, within which Being might be revealed, though not by the passive
revelation of a dasein as in Heidegger, for time itself is its own active creation, which
bears simply the structure of distortion consequent to its alienation from itself and Being;
eros, who, combining himself with the daemonic, accomplishes the task of organizing the
surplus-energetics toward the absolution of the divine. The eroto-daemonic, in the heroic
frenzy, returns the self again and again back into the primality of will in order to carry its
remainder through the energetics of surplus into another step toward the creator, that it
may be returned to God by the only true prayer that has ever been uttered, which is love- for,
as Unamuno said, love is a contradiction if there is no God: this oscillation is
responsible for the Platonic duality in Eros between suffering and joy, between tragic
corporeality and inspired frivolity, between the division of the self through self-alienation
and the integration of psychic life through the fusion of self and beloved. The stronger
Eros becomes, the more it dooms itself to failure, on the side of alienation and somatic
regression into the death-anxiety, while, in its weakness, the surplus energetics or
daemonism is allowed to overcome the fixation of Erotic passion, which is mistakenly
referred to as the reality-principle in Freud, through an infantile regression into
narcissistic fantasy.

For more than 10 years this has been by conscious philosophical aim, this heroic-daemonic sacrifice of love, to return the particle of genuine Being which the human self alone constitutes into the primordial night of Nonbeing and thereby form the Ground, a point of departure out of which philosophy might solidify the hierarchy of things out of reflectivity and bring forth a World from out of the self-nullifying tensions which the world amounts to now. This world, unmade as it is on the image of the firmament above us, has before seemed to me a heaver burden than the stars; if we are dashed against them by fate and turn to dust, at those moments I feel as though they could be dashed against our own world and fall to ash. But not only when this world seems greater, not only when the heavens seem small and powerless, would I whisper my own name and hers into the stars, but even when the firmament seems most terrifying, powerful, and eternal.

Two whispers.-- The star now beaming forth in that little corner of the firmament is
irrevocable, it is deathless and absolute, not because it has endured for billions of years,
nor because it will endure for billions more after us, after all our race is extinguished,
after our works in word and stone are lost, but rather because it lived but once- because it
is alone in dominion of its little corner of the sky; alone, in that moment for which a birth
of so many billions of years is even insufficient. So it is that in our nothingness there is a
faint glimmer or two, a ray of light, a love and an idea, a lonely star of the heart presiding
over the unknown kingdom, a strange irrevocability to everything human- precisely
wherein we are most ephemeral, precisely where some perfect act was seen through but
once, precisely where a beautiful moment was enjoyed knowingly in our lives as a
triumphant "but once...", for which no eternity might have prepared us. The heart
commends its faint whisper to the heavens, that it might meet the stars which it knows it
shall never reach, though in turn it sometimes seems as though the starlight were just as
hopeless in its lust to meet our heart and enter into its night and abyss; as though our heart
were as far away from them, as they from us, and all the universe were a vanishing
whisper over the brow of our dying, little, human earth. I take account; I have for myself a
few such moments which life has granted me to cast out as whispers to the stars, let them
fall on their hopeless way into the void, let these whispers die in hopeless flight to the
stars as they will and must, it is fine; I cast them up to the firmament even if it is to their
doom. For it is equally certain, that the starlight will never pierce my heart, the stars will
surely burn out and lose their course before their rays have sounded the deep of my heart,
before the starlight's whisper ever sets fire to the lips of the night of my existence and
pours into my heart its chiding annunciations of human vanity, that reminder of our
nothingness. Two whispers then! This moment, and that star; man, and all the universe!
Two whispers lost into the self-same night, swallowed up into and annihilated in one
another; gathered by the same love, the same abyss!

How small we all appear in that mirror, the mirror of the starry vault. How much
nothingness do we seem to be, in the image of the stars. Yet in the mirror and the image
of our heart, how small are they! These two whispers, one of death and the other of love,
have since my earliest memories spoken to me with equal urgency; one of them upon this
ear, the other upon that ear, never joining in a single voice. Sometimes I cannot tell which
of these two whispers is speaking to me at the time; sometimes I cannot tell rather it is the
stars that burn us away into ash and dust, or it is we who bind and hold the light, and burn
them away, we who carry their spent ash into the folds of the night with the sigh of that
love which alone fills all the darkness and the universe. It is what happens once in all
time that speaks for all time, not what endures the longest. So it is that the star, not
because it shines for ten billion years, but because it is born once in all time, and those
wondrous moments here for us upon the earth, which we cast out whispering into the
deep, are equally heirophants of the irrevocable, though we perish and those stars go on.
What mystery of mortal immortals and immortal mortals, to use the phrase of Heraclitus;
what a mystery, that both the dying and the undying are equally just images of the eternal.
Such moments remind me that we, the stars, and all life are "a slow death in the eternal."
It is in accordance with the contrasting expansive and contractive, the unifying and the
isolating properties belonging to everything we have of hope and longing, that the Siren
of beauty, in the first case, seduces man, along with all the kindred sons of mortality, with
the song of love- that wondrous song by which we are drawn aloft to glory, pain, and to
madness; that wondrous song, by which we are compelled to brave the shores of oblivion,
with whose chords the heart is stirred into living fervor and in whose call the riddle of the
world is championed in spite of all our ludicrous folly and philosophy, though she slays
us with her silence; though she brings us to ruin, not with the fury of the covetous heart,
but with the unmoving and still image of our Venus, of our ideal, or with the indemnified
memory of the cherished dead which, being unable to return any of our warmth, being
unable to return our breath or our touch, leaves us behind on the other side of the Lethe to
devour our own hearts in secret, with eyes transfixed upon the grey waste of the beyond,
whose ancient deserts we long to attain, for we feel them to be perfect semblances of
ourselves, we who somehow feel ourselves more satisfied and at greater peace before the
prospect of nothingness than before the image of all we dreamed of, loved, and had once
given the secret of our life. What seems most mysterious about our life is man's capacity
to complete within himself the innumerable, nascent and as yet incomplete images among
which he lives and out of which the world is alone constituted; images which, after
having worked out their own salvation within the individual, allow him to thereby deny
the very nothingness that he is with precisely that about himself which is most ephemeral
and transient, with that about himself which is most akin to nothingness; images which
allow him to thereby create so many sanctuaries of the imperishable within the very heart
of time; the mystery that all of these incomplete images must reach for and achieve their
moment of perfection within the human breast, lest they be lost forever, and that when
one of them succeeds in doing so how the mighty stars seem to burn away and to recede
into the darkness, which once had threatened our meager human destiny; the mystery that
true happiness is found only in recognizing these glimpses of the eternal from within
time- the indestructible element of the self in Kafka's phrase, while at the same time
refusing to seize upon and hold them still against that current of the changing and the
perishing, which would aim to renew the order of creation; instead to whisper them into
the stars, throwing them into the burning heavens, allowing them to blow away with the
dust of one's hours and one's days and be carried along by the dawn-song of the first bird
to spread his wings into the horizon. Atque diurna, nocturna Dei tempora sunt, as in the
Epidorpides of Scaliger- all the heavens and the earth have passed away in the night of
God, and no sun has ever risen; but how mysterious indeed is it, that in peculiar moments
of this sort, when one such image and moment reaches toward its perfection in the human
heart, it seems as though man had broken through and out of time from within time itself,
as though all the heavens and the earth had passed away in the morning of the soul, and
no star had ever yet risen. The finality of death truly succeeds in piercing the heart, not
when it convinces us of the nothingness and the vanity of existence, but when it moves us
to recognize and to love this indestructible element in ourselves, these images brought to
their moment of perfection and completed in our pain, while desisting from holding upon
them, preferring to whisper them instead into the stars.

And elsewhere, about this incorporating of death:

Everything beautiful in this world grows up in darkness against the thorns of life, and we
can only see those beautiful things when we too grasp beyond these thorns and this
darkness, and cleave to the dawn with them. To love and hope at once, is all the wisdom
of life. The sea, the stars, the face of a beautiful woman- everything worthy of the name
of beauty longs for eternity, longs to be completed in eternity, and throws itself into the
dawn to be held there if for only a moment, after which it is then dissolved in the morning
of the world; the heart, too, must wish to sing out its melody into eternity and therein
complete itself, must throw itself into the dawn with hope and with courage, to burn away
alongside them and receive in that instant the only complete intimation of them which it
will ever possess.

Subject: Re: Politicians Mon Apr 04, 2016 1:59 pm

This, "rather than isolating us from life through false assumptions of concepts that are designed to replace authentic existence and the good with some structure of artificial responsiveness or base novelty-pleasure seeking entropic utilitarianism" was not a reference to your philosophy, but to the tradition and history of philosophy thus-far, the commonness of it beyond what is in fact good and true in this tradition and history, as I alluded to Nietzsche and Heidegger's attempts that were somewhat (not perfectly) aligned to this true and good philosophic striving, and of course your philosophy which continues that work beyond even what they created.

"Artificial responsiveness" to me, in this context, simply is a reference to how, as I said "the traditional framework of philosophizing, which is basically an artificial structure of reason and 'belief' that sets itself up to replace the more true structure of meaningfulness and fact-ness"; how most 'philosophy' is playing around with concepts and beliefs and trying to find new ways of stacking these together, like Legos, to create something that can give cause for that philosopher to achieve something like a psychological respite from himself, and from the larger world. Self and world are massive impositions of responsibility, and we intuit this fact and based on that intuition or intimation, half-conscious at best, the philosophers sought out to find a stable ground, to create the image of something that, by erecting that image and then basically sitting around staring at it continuously, they could abdicate that responsibility for living and for being themselves, which means for becoming living and becoming that which one is, and could be. Philosophy in this traditional sense is just a science of exploration of various modes of creative religiosity.

Your philosophy is not about that sort of thing, as I am sure you know the high respect I have for your work. Same with Nietzsche and Heidegger and some others, they were motivated by the truth and so their 'image-structures' which they created were partly artificial as I described above, but also partly sincere and authentic, a kind of self-struggling to break through the image-need of self-worshipfulness that is the base of the method of psychological self-abnegation of one's responsibility for living and being, which responsibility is an eminently personal, complex-subtle and difficult thing and basically consists of an open-ended upright nature in access to those truths which are at all times "above and below" us. And interestingly, the more we expand that nature in access to truth, the more possible truths above and below us also come into existence and become possible for us to relate to; so being in this sense is literally endless and mounts toward the infinite and eternal even if it will never hope to achieve infinity or eternity because, of course, the more being there is the more there also is for being to become.

The reason that I reject the idea of death being integral is because death is but the limit of an act, a life, a feeling, it is the reference to as you said the terminus point and boundary without which we would be formless "protoplasm" with no clear edge between us and anything else; death reinterpreted in this way as the essential and essentializing limit is certain the case, and this case functions both directly (automatically, unconsciously, structurally) and indirectly (consciously, in our ideas, as understanding) in our own selves, and the former directness I associate to the realm of meanings of our being-selves, the latter indirectness I associate to the realm of facts of our being-selves. In how I see it, meaning comes 'up' from the unconscious-structural levels of existence and creates conditions and situations in which we become filled in by something that grants our existence value, a purpose or a sense of purpose, a will to power, something that is motivating energy and the source of our feelings-become-emotions, while facts come 'down' from the pure firmament of the universal in Platonic reading, namely that the fact of something exists non-materially and immanently to all of existence, as a "second universe" atop this typical material one and which second universe lies there for eternity waiting to be grasped more and more by beings such as ourselves who have finally evolved up to the capacity for being capable of seeing, responding to and comprehending facts as such. The former "directness of meaning" is what I think of as the existential, while the latter "indirectness of facts" is what I think of as the phenomenological.

So my philosophy lays out this "metaphysical" or "metalogical" divide: meaning on the one hand, facts on the other, as a kind of "below and above" which become mingled in high philosophy by the consequence of how meaning becomes also able to be a fact, and facts become also able to produce meaning. Meaning may have been rooted in such things as our genetic dispositions and instinctive body, past social situations and pressures, learning and remembered experiences, hormonal-type changes in feeling-proprioception in our bodies which we experience as a sum and as one thing, namely how our own existence feels to itself; all of that "material" meaning is always-already there, and is the true source or basis for the "existential" sense of our human-being, but then in addition to that we have the entire literally endless realm of Facts which proliferate across the surfaces of this meaningful being and become available to us as a consequence of our capability to think, reason, emote.. to philosophize, which I consider religion, science, and belief all various shades of philosophy in this way. Philosophy proper is the middle-point between ascertaining facts as such and being centered within fields of meaningfulness which facts and fields both always pre-exist ourselves and our own individuated capacity to be situated in that way.

So for me, based on that view as I lay it out, what you call death even in your more philosophical rendering of the idea is simply two things for us: a meaning, and a fact. The meaning of death is how reaching the limit of something feels to us, or how we react or are determined by how these limits are always-already embedded intimately within every thing which we already are or could possibly experience, namely the simple necessity of the finitude of all things (except for meaning as such and fact-ness as such, which are not finite but rather infinite -- meaning is functionally or practically infinite while fact-ness is literally or "mathematically" infinite); death on the other hand is also a fact, which is something we humans discover as a consequence of our being capable of philosophizing and understanding the mortality of all things including ourselves, and contemplating the idea of mortality as such, as you do here in your investigations of the nature of death itself. This is all important, but does not substitute for those two realms of meaning and facts that I mentioned. Those two realms are the basis of being, of the self, as I see it. Death is therefore but one form or mode, or consequence and necessity, of the way in which this being/self exists, as that which it is. Facts correspond to an ascending pure phenomenological realm which we become capable of understanding and in part reorienting ourselves in terms of, meaning corresponds to the descending pure existential realm which we become capable of understanding and in part reorienting ourselves in terms of as well.

Death is like any other idea, material constituent, deterministic necessity, ontological requirement, epistemic formulation or mode of knowing, and is emergent within the larger system of the two realms. So for me, to take any particular idea, even death, and elevate it to a primary position over all the others, certainly to elevate it over the two realms, is a falsification of what we are. Instead my philosophical method would aim to take every idea of all kinds and categories and place it in accordance with all the others, in a kind of superstructure of the self-as-its-ideas with truthful relations to the actual meaningfulness and fact-ness by which those ideas exist, not just to us but in general, not just in the particular but in the abstract; in both the individual and the universal.

I see death as just one more fact of the necessary way in which we exist as this such and such kind of entity, as I said akin to how we need to drink water to survive; drinking water isn't the meaning or fundament of (our) existence but just one small necessity of it, likewise with death, death is not the meaning or fundament of (our) existence but just one necessity of our existence, albeit of course a philosophically larger and more significant one than our need to drink water. Now to how you specifically use death as a deeper indication of limitation and mortality as such and which bears upon all things, yes I agree with your formulation that this death is indeed quite significant and has built itself up as a very important causality within us and as what we are, to the extent that we could attempt to see how the world and the self derive from death in your usage of it; but to me that is only one of many possible ways of establishing a system of understanding, a philosophy, an orientation to existence at large and to our own existence. I agree that all things are mortal, with the exception of those two realms that I mentioned, and with the exception within those two realms of, for the realm of meaning, for how meaning is pre-existent and would basically cease to exist entirely were all of humanity to suddenly cease to exist, or achieve some kind of absolute break with our own history in such a way to effectively erase the meaningful from our being. That is theoretically possible, to basically erase the existential, but certainly not an ideal or something I would advocate for, nor do I think that is very possible to ever happen although with continually advancing technology it becomes again theoretically possible at some future point... however, it would not even be theoretically possible to erase the realm of facts, but again we could achieve an erasing of our capacity to access that factual realm, which would basically just return us to a kind of pre-human mammal existence, again something that is not at all desirable to do (and of course that isn't at all what your philosophy is attempting to do).

Subject: Re: Politicians Wed Apr 06, 2016 9:47 pm

Also more specifically to how you write about death, I am in agreement with your view on mortality being a basis for our manner of being in how we strive for the eternal, to complete things and ourselves in eternity; this is both the way we are already as well as a limit in ourselves that we must "psychologically" overcome, with what you write of as heroic daemonism or heroic love, as the pure category of the heroic as I might call it. When you write for instance the following this is exactly how I see my own philosophical perspective in terms of meaning and facts as I laid out in the previous post,

This is how I feel about it also, and I'm guessing that it is difficult for me to use the term "death" for this purview, that even though we both share or nearly share the same vantage and ideal here I wouldn't use the word death to capture it. That might simply be because I am not heroic enough to deploy that word in that way, I've seen too much of death already in the short amount of life I've lived and death is indeed the ultimate limit of meaning, because meaning is basically about interconnection and the functional or practical infinitude of values-connections that cannot trace within themselves their own endings and impossibilizing thresholds. Typically it is the case that an idea or an emotion experiences its limit in a vague way, as an undefined boundary region lacking substance, as that kind of protoplasm you alluded to. And this very imprecision is due to the fact that the raison d'être of the emotion or idea and its 'psychological being' as an element of our conscious living selves is rooted in the feeling of freedom, in the will to power of feeling that it has no limit. Being unaware of one's own limits is precisely why people feel meaning in their lives, think of how experiences are always more colorful and full of purpose and emotion when we are younger but begin to gray out as we age... youth does not know its own limits, consciousness in youth merges with everything around it as its experiences are basically re-expressions of itself, surfaces on which it sees its own face reflected everywhere. But this is only one mode of being in meaning, there are others. Integrating death represents a mode alternate to the mode of youth, for example, and would require far more capacity to transfer experiences into mentality or emotionality such as by way of philosophy, for sustaining more direct contact with one's mortality and with a larger awareness of the terminating points of one's experiences without the meaning behind those experiences evaporating. Most people use denial not to evade reality but to actually hold themselves in reality, by maintaining unobstructed access to meaning even if the sphere of meaning they have access to is smaller than it would be were they to overcome their denials with knowledge-seeking.

Integrating death would be a method for those who could be able to live their own mortality directly, as philosophy thrusts us intimately into the tiny spaces at the far extremes of our experiences where that shrinking horizon-line space makes us directly aware of our own limits; what we know becomes crystallized for us just as does what we do not know. This isn't a method most people could handle, and such a method would in the majority of cases only succeed in destroying meaningful contact with the good which is as I see it the real and always already being of ourselves, certainly in the sense also of how prior to being philosophers we too were youths, "innocent beings". This former mode of innocence must be successfully reconciled to any later philosophy-become-death-integration in order to avoid a total rupture of our being into a self-historical discontinuation that would effectively provide a psychological blockage to our access to the actual substance and being which we are, structurally speaking. I think what is called nihilism, narcissism or psychosis are forms of that kind of self-historical discontinuation and psychic rupture in the structures of being. Basically, these are all forms of pathology and existential poverty that must be avoided, and the danger becomes even greater for the philosophers who do aim for the highest thresholds of knowing. Truth tries to pull us apart from ourselves, this is a great test of strength and for our own morality to evolve into something able to value and contain non-pathologically both our philosophical and non-philosophical selves for lack of a better way of saying it.

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

My fundamental understanding of death is even beyond it being the limiting factor in our existence. To me death is simply the primal relation we have. We do not primarily have an open relation to Being; humans have a relation to non-being, to nothingness, which distinguishes us from all the animals. Our mortality is not a number of years or the material fact of our cessation- it is this living relation to nonbeing, which is the ground of our capacity to symbolically construct philosophies. This relation to nonbeing, which I call death, is not just man's limiting factor, but also contrarily his generative factor and creative scope. In three points:

1. The world, that is, being in time or ontos, is merely a self-nullifying tension of Being
within Becoming, never attaining to Being itself. This never-attaining is the silence in
response to which man created myth, as in Vico, pairing it by means of the reflective
mytho-logos to the tragic poeticism of Holderlin's imagination which he mistakenly
ascribed to subjectivity: here this tragic language is ascribed to Nature itself, a nature
without unity, just as it is presented in Schelling's universe. Nature itself is then given as
the primordial text of the Myth, and this myth of nature, Being, and time, is written in the
language of tragic poeticism, the language of this self-defeating struggle for Being from
out of the void, the language of this never-attaining silence.

2. Because Nature and the world never attain to true Being, the world of created things is
grounded on nothingness fundamentally; nothingness shines through the world with
daemonic tension in its wholeness and fissures alike, and in all the acts and inactions of
man swallows up the works and misdeeds he has wrought in earthly triumph. This
relation of man alone to the ground in nonbeing is simply death. All beings are caught up
in the tensions of the self-nullification, into which they emerge and vanish as distillations
and partial fractionings of the surplus energetics of nature, whereas man alone can gain a
relation to the fundamental source of all phenomenon in nonbeing and re-enterr the
ground of things at the negatively saturated void with a positive content capable of
upsetting the flat inertia of the system, similar to the positive-creative infinity of Levinas'
primary ethical subject, the mirroring of the subject in another person. The fact of Death,
the fact that nonbeing prevents any human act from ever arriving upon Being, absorbed as
it is in the mythic text of nature, and shines through to unmake all his works, leaves us
with the conclusion that ethics is rendered impossible from that vantage, while the
primary moral reality, namely love, namely this positive heroic sacrifice, demands an
infinite concern, thereby rendering ethics doubly necessary, absolutely necessary in that
one's concern is without limit: paradoxically impossible and necessary, insoluble and
ineluctable, something that cannot and yet must be accomplished,- so the moral universe
opens upon us.

3. This relating to nonbeing takes the place of Heidegger's passive witness of being. This
relating is an active relationship, culminating in the sacrifice of heroic-daemonic love, the
absolute death leading to transcendence. By returning to the ground of Non-being, the self
discovers its own genuine Being in its very alienation and separation from Being, arriving
upon the stage of double affirmation, of affirmation-affirmation, of dual or directional
transcendence in Wahl's phrase, of reification.

In a world ontologically constructed by a series of self-nullifyng tensions that never attain to Being, in a world that lacks the unity of nature Holderlin and Schelling sought, the one in mysticism and poetry like Heidegger and the other in man submitting to the will of God in unknowing like Job did when the whirlwind came, [hence the name of my latest book, Gnosis and Agnosis, knowing and unknowing] so it is that no act can achieve ethical value and add a positive content to the negatively charged void in which all moral equations balance out to the same result, zero. So any ethics would need to be a negative ethic; an ethics of that paradoxical relation to death, impossible yet necessary; an ethics that takes account and bases itself on the idea of man alone being able to heroically return Being, namely his own Being, to the Ground in Nonbeing, achieving transcendence and a point of departure for the whole scaffold of existents, a new unity of nature and the universe through agapeic transformation in death, religiously pre-imaged in Christ's crucifixion as the dawn of the human moral world over the order of the cosmos. Ironically, only in this may there be formulated a philosophically justified atheism, an idea of transcendence without an idea of the God of substance monism. This is what my philosophy always pushed toward, a way to say love and death at the same time, to be able to use one word to mean both.

Subject: Re: Politicians Fri Apr 08, 2016 9:19 am

Ok I see that I didn't fully grasp your usage of the term death, I understand your position better now.

A few points that come to mind.. Death in the way you describe it, as our active relating to non-being, is an assumption at the heart of human methods and not something that could be verified or rationally confirmed; to verify death in your usage, absolute non-being, would logically be impossible for it would require empirically confirming the non-existence of every conceivable being-ness and "more significant realm" of existence such as are hinted at by all the religious-spiritual traditions and man's feeling for the divine. We can easily enough explain those traditions and that feeling within your philosophical approach and by way of affirming the case of non-being, but again that would amount to an assumption on our part, a counter-assumption than the religious spiritual one. Unfortunately we cannot mount to effective certainty simply on the basis of the lack of our experience with anything that might be called Being or "significant super-reality" such as intimated under religious spiritual type views, as has been said that the lack of evidence is not necessarily evidence of lack-- although certainly is an argument in favor of that lack, it could never alone be an adequate one, and would even if it were so require us to ignore a massive history of human experiences with strange and "supernatural" sort of things that cannot be explained. Even if 80-90% of those stories and experiences people have of supernatural stuff turns out to be lies, hallucinations, psychological tricks, that still leaves a large area of space for extra-typical or "more real" kinds of possibilities in which perhaps something like a more significant being could be found. Think of the Buddhists who try to merge their will with universal will, who try to achieve eternal nirvana or lasting truth. It would be a huge assumption on our part to dismiss ALL of these kind of spiritual (so called) experiences even if we are justified in a very strong skepticism about many or most of them.

But that isn't even the primary issue, because regardless of the spiritual assumption or the counter assumption of non-spirituality being is being defined as basically non-ending existence, as a kind of participation in something immortal and lasting. Is this what being is? Whether we accept or reject the possibility of spiritual levels to this universe we need to ask the more philosophically significant question: what does 'being' mean, and why does a supposed larger spiritual type existence or "soul" or whatever somehow seem to intuitively present a possibility for Being whereas our own equally supposedly mortal finitude and non-spiritual existence doesn't? Does Being simply equal "never dies?" I think your philosophy is the only one I've ever seen to tackle these deeper questions head on.

Seeing the world and all existence as non-being could only make sense to me if there is already the idea that being could only mean "eternal, endless existing". Otherwise in what sense is a relation to death and mortality necessarily "non-being"? I made the point a couple of posts ago that I don't see any deterioration in meaning or in what being means simply based on that fact of something's mortality and finitude; death is a given, mortality is a philosophical rational assumption, and to me this doesn't bear upon being at all, as if somehow a thing is found wanting in its existential, phenomenological or metaphysical aspect simply because it doesn't happen to exist forever. The duration of existence needs to be adequate perhaps to account something to being, but beyond that adequacy would contribute to having being or being being only incidentally or non-fundamentally. Taking two things, A and B, assuming both have being and assuming A lives for eternity whereas B only lives an average lifespan (whatever we want average to mean) and we can see that A doesn't automatically somehow possess more being than B, we would need to examine the specific cases of A and B in light of whatever we define being to mean.

But in addition to all that (and yes I had another quick point, I was wondering which assumption represents more strength, philosophical depth and courage: the assumption of one's "spirituality" or the assumption of that "spirituality" being only a delusion and not real, that one is in fact eminently mortal) there is another point to consider, which is even more significant and deeper and which you get right to: that the way we are, the way we exist is already a relating to non-being regardless of however we want to come down on the question as to the assumption of obvious mortality vs. an assumption of something spiritual or greater to our existence. Sorry to keep calling it "spiritual" but I don't have a better word for that position, the position whose point of departure is always the idea that the habitual existence we are used to is only one side of our more true selves, that there is some God or soul or something more to this reality in which we are actually participating and to which we will go in some way or another upon our individual deaths. The real issue isn't even that "spiritual assumption" at all (and I agree at least to a certain extent that rationality and philosophical clarity and honesty demand that we refuse to capitulate to such assumptions ( although there is a whole logic here of such assumptions and what they really mean, that needs to be deeply explored and rationally articulated beyond simply being an assumption)), but is about the way we are build as organisms and at the psychological, biological and social levels. You allude to the idea that all life is spun out of non-being and only man achieves the ability to relate to his non-being-ness, therefore only man is able to posit something against non-being, an anti-non-being that amounts to finally something positive in existence. We posit positive substances because we come to recognize and oppose our own non-being-ness, and we do this not because we formulate some "spiritual assumption" or lack thereof, and not because there is or is not some "spirituality" in fact to reality, but instead we do it just because this is how we are made-- nature created organisms that are structurally and logically composed of their relations to the facts of non-being which means more precisely in this case to the facts of how sensations, memories, material forms, meanings and situations are always subject to change, decay and oblivion. Every organism is a dynamic adaptation to a particular range of quasi-certainties in terms of which its individual form evolved, a quasi-certainty that is nevertheless in its fluid and obliviated aspect also encoded to the organism as it's very nature in being able to relate to things only in the terms of how its relations of those types presuppose and take structurally into account the facts of change, decay and non-existence. Namely, an organism is not going to relate to its experiences as if those experiences were immutable or unchanging. We can see examples of this in how living things are primed to be constantly scanning their environments and updating their mental models of things, that assumptions of stability made to aspects of the environment or one's experiences are always being re-evaluated, especially in non-human life.

So that brings up another interesting point of how humans, compared to other animals, formulate far more assumptions of stability and unchange and we end up relying in various ways upon these assumptions of ours. As if our psyche requires us to be able to rest in certainties, to avoid anxiety and cognitive and emotional burnout. This follows Maslow's hierarchy of needs, of course, and it makes sense there is a continuum of being on which organisms mount upward based on their ability to "make certain" to themselves lower thresholds upon that continuum.

I think this all relates to being and the issue at hand of death as relating to non-being, because we need to establish a definition of what being means, or could mean. To me, being is more accurately understood by appeal to those two realms I mentioned, of Meaning and of Fact, which are respectively what we call the existential and the phenomenological (or just logical). Our particular position with respect to those two realms is what I consider "being" to mean. So therefore I don't see too much importance on the longevity of existence of an organism or a life, so much as the quality and structure of it, and the kinds of situations and histories it is exposed to. And because of how I understand being in this way, it is hard for me to come along with the idea that there is only non-being or that we are composed of non-being or of our relations to non-being. I think we are indeed composed of relations to non-being as you say, I can certainly see this, but I also see that we are also composed of our relations to being, to the domains of meanings and facts which both exist prior to, posterior to and beyond us as individuals and from which and in our relations to them we possess what is called being. Notice that I am bracketing the question of any kind of spiritual or supernatural aspect to our existence, in part because I have no real way to directly formulate such an assumption or experience without resorting to blind acceptance of what others tell me, which would be irrational, but also because I don't necessarily consider the question of spirituality or its lack to really bear upon the question of being at all, and I'm guessing that you might agree with me on that. Also you'll have to forgive me if again I am misunderstanding your position in any significant way.

Subject: Re: Politicians Tue Apr 12, 2016 3:54 pm

Back on to the subject of politics and economy, there is this strange push now by EU and US economies to improve (inject capital into) the secondary economic functions of society such as education, welfare, healthcare, under the idea that this investment will somehow spur direct production in primary economic activity-- as if people have forgotten that those kinds of social functions, while very important, are not self-funded. Government is not a business and cannot be run like one, unless we think of the business side as the pure economic engines from which funds are extracted to pay for all the rest of the social functions and systems that can never be economically self-sufficient. The false idea of government (social functions and systems) as business seems to have permeated both the right and the left, as now we have on the right politicians and economists who want to run goverenment as if it were a profit machine and on the other side we have liberal-capitalists going crazy on a kind of quasi-Keynesianism of QE, negative interest rates and the whole bit on the equally false assumption that the economically-secondary social functions could be or become self-sufficient in their own right.

Society draws funds from economy; from where does economy draw funds? From several places: converting raw resources into capital, converting human and machine labor into capital, and "tweaking the systems" (improving capital productive efficiencies, opening up new markets, etc.) that comes from technological innovations. Part of that tweaking is complex economic equations like debt spending and manipulating interest rates and all the various tricky financial tools that are now being worshipped by world leaders. Note that such tools are just that, tools, can must have some basic substance upon which to be applied. A hammer by itself is useless, it cannot create the wood and nails it needs to derive its function. These financial tricks and tools aren't bad, but the worshipping of them for their own sake is very bad. So why is direct economy being ignored today?

Consumer capitalism shifts the focus to commodification, marketing and consumption and away from production. It works both ways: consumption uses up production (capital), obviously, but less realized is that production uses up consumption. Today we have a religion of consumption and the unstated logic of this religion is to curtail production. Why? Because production is an opportunity cost upon consumption. This may not be directly acknowledged but nevertheless that logic is at work. Production (direct economic activity) is being limited for the sake of maintaining an artificially high level of consumption.

Therefore world governments and financial planners cannot acknowledge the imperative for direct investment in primary economic activity (as I outlined the few methods for creating capital above) and must fall back on increasingly scarce and absurd trickery like negative interest rates, austerity and injecting made up money (fiat and debt) into parts of the economy (social functions and systems) that while very important in their own right and even important to the economy cannot create primary base economic activity, cannot substitute for 1) converting resources into capital, 2) converting labor into capital, or 3) tweaking the efficiencies of the system with technology to improve benefit-cost ratios and open/expand markets.

Subject: Re: Politicians Wed Apr 13, 2016 10:53 am

The lack of direct economic production of the secondary sphere of society is due to two things: 1) that social (secondary) economic production tends to produce intangible capital (such as education, or health, or infrastructure, or scientific knowledge, or law and order), and 2) that these goods which the social production produces tend to be immaterial and disperse throughout the economy. The immaterial nature of social goods causes a two-fold effect that prevents these from being primarily economically active; the first stage is how immaterial goods cannot be immediately converted into extra capital by virtue of their immateriality, the second stage is how immaterial goods are unable to be immediately or easily converted into extra capital by virtue of how they are spread around and cannot really be localized.

These may look like the same problem, but they are two distinct issues. Education, to take an example, directly produces a more intelligent labor force, but that labor force must still be economically realized somehow. Likewise, the effects of education are diffuse and spread around the system in all sort of indirect and unmeasurable ways, from people being more able to participate in the exchange and development of ideas to their acting less pathologically and gaining new appreciations of values, which affect how they act, consume, think, and work. In Parodites realization of the split between culture and society, culture is possible to arise because of these secondary immaterial and unmeasurable effects of secondary social economic production -- culture itself is this "unmeasurable" excess of immaterial economic production. Strict primary economic production such as converting resources and labor directly into material products will tend to produce less culture as a side-effect of itself, due to how the primary economic activity is more tightly bound in itself and admits less excess and immateriality, which immateriality is needed to spread around and diffuse across the economy in unmeasurable ways ultimately giving rise to the conditions for culture to appear.

So interestingly, while primary and material economic production is "first" in terms of society, it is only second in terms of culture; when we hold culture as the standard of measure, secondary social economic production is first and primary economic production is second. And of course both primary and secondary economic productions feed into each other, as increased knowledge is applied to resource extraction, making labor more efficient, or improving efficiencies of capital productive processes such as adding machinery and computerization just as in the other direction how the social and cultural alike require to feed continuously from the material capital produced by the primary economic sphere. Knowledge is properly located in the sphere of the secondary social economic activity, which is why this sphere is what leads to the possibility for culture to appear; culture and knowledge proper in this sense are therefore excesses or "remainders" of primary economic production's being made secondary in status to the social. If we were to somehow re-emphasize primary economic production over the social, which is in a way what neoconservatism is about, or if we were to re-emphasize primary economic production over the cultural, which is in a way what neoliberalism is about, this would only shrink the social sphere and thus also shrink the potential of culture. Culture and society may be different, but they are connected at the upper ends of the excess of the primary economic productions. Culture and society feed from primary economic activity, but can never become equated with it.

Another interesting thing I am noticing is that immaterial production is unbound in space and time: you can spread an idea or a digital image or text infinitely and for relatively near-zero energy cost, whereas of course you cannot do that with material products. Immaterial capital is not only spatially and temporally infinite (it can exist in more than one place, theoretically in every place, and at the same time) but is also almost free to produce and distribute. What we call knowledge, education, learning, are really the mechanisms for distributing immaterial capital throughout as many agents in society as possible, or at least that ought to be the goal (however, it is not the goal, since as Guattari points out education has become a capitalistic enterprise and therefore subject to the law of scarcity, which means that only some people can get an education whereas others cannot. This artificial scarcity goes against the natural logic of the distribution of immaterial goods, which as I noted above, is basically a logic of infinite potential and near-zero cost).

So for education, we could set it up in such a way that everyone has access to relatively cheap and high quality learning, where knowledge and ideas are maximally disseminated throughout all levels and areas of society and where nearly everyone is participatory in the process of creation and exchange of ideas, because this is the very nature of what immaterial capital is and can do, it is its true strength and benefit over material capital. But again, even imagining the uplifted and freed immaterial production in this way (already it is being slowly integrated into society in this 'infinite' model, except that so far the only immaterial capitals being integrated in this liberated manner are things like advertising images and memes, namely those immaterial capital which are still maximally useful to material capital production), this would still not take the place of primary and material economic production. Economics needs a dual model: it needs a theory of material production and a theory of immaterial production, as well as a theory of the inter-relation of these. And strictly speaking these two domains of the material and immaterial are quite separate and should be treated differently, neither one subject to the laws, expectations or logic of the other.

Subject: Re: Politicians Sat Jun 11, 2016 9:55 am

I realize now that politics is among the most vulnerable phenomena of human being. Look at politicians, their analyticization is a response to existential traumas of massive scope. Even Trump, a political outsider, is deeply traumatized by the political process' effect on him, when dealing in political substances he can only resort to becoming a self-caricature. It doesn't matter what political beliefs we hold, politics is a deeply pure and noble expression of human being, but one that is always under massive pressure and attack. Here in politics we see an example of the hard kernel of the earth deep in the human spirit actually making use of the pathological-analytic, as a kind of shell that spirit constructs around itself for defensive purposes.

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