Painting by Odilon Redon
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When trying to understand the success of the Russian revolution, or any revolution in general, there is a tendency to isolate and identify the single agent responsible for the revolution’s success—e.g. the Bolsheviks in Russia. However, it is far more likely that multiple agents and tendencies work in tandem to produce such a result, whether they consciously cooperate or not, even if this co-operation was entirely inadvertent. Would the success of the Bolsheviks have been possible without the groundwork laid down by the narodniks? Did the popularization of Tolstoyan ideology contribute to the receptiveness of Russian society to Bolshevik ideas? The implication here is that the success of the communist revolution was not the exclusive product of a vanguard party, but of “populism” and a vanguard party working in tandem—again, regardless of whether that working in tandem was the product of consciously coordinated organization or not. The idea that a revolution only requires a vanguard party operating according to the “correct line” is, in other words, an error. Why do socialists not apply their co-operative ethos, applied in the midst of active struggle between the agents of that struggle, to their “intellectual” assessment of history? All history must be seen co-operatively, even if that co-operation takes the form of antagonistic or agonistic struggles. Even antagonistic parties co-operate, in some sense, and toward some end, inadvertently. Co-operation is not just a factor of social organization but a principle of temporal intelligibility. Contradictions co-operate. The capitalists will sell us the rope on which they will be hung.
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The key to uncovering the artistic element in politics is to understand the role of the arbitrary in governance. The zones to which arbitration is open, as opposed to those zones pertaining to fundamental and practically ineffaceable historical structures, are a sort of nothing. They are an empty space into which we can insert “whatever we like”, as an artist might onto a canvas. Note that “arbitration” which also has the sense of mediation in a conflict, but which I use here to mean an arbitrary decision, is an emptiness that occurs between the crevices of society, between the points of tension. Wherever already-determinant class and social structures hold sway, there is not much room for the arbitrary. It is between these structures that we have an open field. Where exactly is this “between”? Between one class and another, in the zones over which neither has fundamental and historically determined sway. History has not adjudged either one class or the other sovereign over this zone. Therefore, it is left to whoever holds sway over the polity to dispose of it as he pleases. And, given that this zone occurs between classes, the arbitrary, here, is also a zone of arbitration, in the usual sense of that term. The arts themselves, in the customary forms that we have inherited (letters, plastic arts), are such a zone. They are artisinal in their form, and the class of artisans has fallen to the wayside through industrialization. That is, an empty space has been opened up where the artisans, as a class, used to reside. This space has been opened to re-interpretation, to being re-fashioned according to the image of new classes, namely, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Likewise, religion, too, is such a field. The priestly class, in terms of their position in the process of social re-production, has been replaced by an “intellectual” strata. Religiosity is a field of struggle. If the proletariat do not seize it (and in that respect, a “freedom of religion” respected from a distance is insufficient, as is “state atheism”), it will be seized by bourgeois tendencies. I say “tendencies” because even in the absence of a bourgeois class, such tendencies toward the re-institution of private property can reassert themselves and project their ideological accretions onto a field of religious aspiration. Religiosity does not disappear through modernity—it becomes a nothing, a highly particular nothing with socially and historically tangible contours, a space to be contested.
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Liberation from the “bourgeois family” begins, not by “abolishing” the family, as through some kind of arbitrary policy enforced from without. Such liberation begins through the provision of bonding organizations outside of the family, initiating individuals into a different sort of family, into “social-family” groups (as opposed to biological family)—worker’s organizations, possibly with an initiatic structure, such as the futuwwa guilds of the Middle Ages, can be taken as an example. Moreover, to a degree, such institutions already exist through public education, and other outlets. We already possess the stuff of liberation. We do not need to seek any novel thing outside of our horizon. The seeds of abolition are already here. It is the present form of the family which needs arbitrary enforcement in order to prolong its own existence.
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It is very easy for people to admit that, under capitalism, state officials and bureaucrats are just the tools of the ruling bourgeois class, and rarely agents of some kind of autonomously political agenda. Yet, many of these same people have difficulty admitting this with respect to socialist states, maintaining that somehow the state officials constitute their own separate class ruling over the workers, rather than mere tools of the ruling class (i.e. the workers), much as under capitalism.
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The idealistic radical's aspiration to storm heaven, and the aspirations of the maintainers of order, prosperity, and stability are not incompatible—they are one and the same in Babel. Babel storms heaven by uniting man and constructing a stable social edifice.
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Pessimism is petty bourgeois. Pessimism is the affect of decline, and decline is part of the class character of the petty bourgeoisie. They are a holdover from the past, slowly withering away. Optimism belongs in an accidental fashion to the haute bourgeoisie, and in an essential fashion to the workers. The bourgeoisie, under capitalism, are an ascendant class, but their ascension is parasitic, drawing on the power of workers to raise themselves up. The working class is the class of social power, of constructive forces, the class of tremendous world-building powers—the class of optimism and ascent par excellence.
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A “middle path”, the moderate position—too often these are merely the deferments of the need to make a choice. “There is a middle road between A and B” says the one not willing to commit to either A or B for the time being, but for how long can he defer? At the same time, it is out of the actually existing middle that we make a decisive choice. The historical and social world, as such, is a “middle”, a space wherein contradictory tendencies intermingle. We cannot leap out of this middle and assert an ungrounded radical posture except in a purely virtual way.
Capitalism, the center position on the political spectrum, is the deferral of real commitment to a choice in human destiny. The accumulation of profit is a kind of displacement activity, a way of keeping busy in familiar procedures and avoiding a long term and intelligible view of one's social and historical situation. A counter-assertion of utopian aspiration, ungrounded in the capitalist middle, or of feudalistic reaction, is a purely virtual stance. We must find the decisiveness which is already germinating in this middle region, namely, communism.
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The American buffalo or bison should be adopted as a symbol of socialism in North America, for the following reasons:
The repopulation of the buffalo in the wild, after near extinction, represents the rejuvenation of North America under socialism.
The near extinction of the buffalo represents the tragic element of American history, vis a vis the indigenous populations—something which must never be forgotten. This is not a tragedy in any final sense. The buffalo is not extinct, and neither are the First Nations, whose struggle has carried on to the present.
The buffalo is a genuine homegrown symbol that will have appeal to the patriotic.
The buffalo, and the task of restoring nature, will also have appeal to the ecologically minded.
The buffalo is both a symbol of strength and of peacefulness. It is not a predator. Neither is it weak or helpless.
It is also a symbol of socially beneficial competition (referring to the butting of heads between male buffaloes), that is, agonism rather than antagonism.
They move in herds, as a collective.
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To a certain degree, the vanguard party reserves questions of theory and knowledge for an “elite” of revolutionaries, and makes its public task to engage in practical agitation and organization among the masses. Today, perhaps, what we need is a kind of “cultural revolution” at the level of “fundamental symbols”, organizations dedicated to transforming the basic ways people think about politics and society. With social media and the internet, dissemination of these new ways of seeing things is more possible than ever. Every frame of discourse needs to be challenged, every unconscious presupposition which works for the benefit of capitalism must be rendered an unconscious presupposition working for the benefit of socialism. The goal of these new organizations will be to modify the axis about which all our thought revolves. It is not so much psyche-logical warfare as noetic or noelogical warfare. Intellect conditions our thought, whether actively, passively, or “indirectly”. To precess the axis of intellect is to bring about the spontaneous and reflexive occurrence of new intellections, or rather, since communism as such is the truth of the present historical and social juncture, a more lucid condition of intellection in general. The victory of communism is a victory of truth.
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Does the transition from industrial capitalism to imperialism, the transition from the reign of “actual capital” to the reign of “fictitious capital”, represent an advance, of sorts, or a regression? I think one could argue that it, on the whole, represents an advance in our understanding of money, of its plasticity in shaping the social sphere. That the result of this transition has been so devastating to the fabric of civilized life only testifies to capitalism’s inability to process this tremendous power. This power, like an nuclear energy source, is deleterious when not properly handled and contained.
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There is a divide within the left between those who merely want to give working people moderately improved or tolerable conditions, and those who want to give them power—and with such power the working masses can greatly exceed mere well-being.
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The question of transhumanism’s direction of unfolding, whether another step toward the expansion of the human or toward the subhuman, depends largely on political sovereignty. Under the direction of human beings, that is, under the direction of the working class, the transhumanist project (in a loose sense of the term) is bound to take a positive and expansive direction. Under the leadership of the bourgeoisie, transhumanism is bound to tend toward subhumanism. The question of political sovereignty should not be underrated. As Aristotle says, politics is the master-science. The ruling class always remakes the world in its image—a human class makes a human world.
Applying this same line of thought to previous transhuman revolutions (e.g. invention of agriculture), what can be inferred? Agriculture, under the direction of the aristocratic class, that is, the class of the masters-slave dialectic, the class of obedience and command, led to the production of slave-men, slavish thought.
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Political representation must reflect political power—otherwise what is being re-presented? As long as the working class lack a real power base in a possession of the means of production, there is no real political representation that is possible for them. Concrete presentation at the site of production precedes representation at the commanding heights of the state.
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Capitalism is “psychic Platonism”, wherein the capitalist, who lacks the substance of an individual producer, takes on the form of one, bringing the goods of social production to the market place as if they were of his individual making. He has the form of an artisan and the substance of a money-lender.
The social substance of labor, today, demands a social form of labor. Platonism necessitates communism.
Capitalism is new wine, in old wineskins.
Note: “psychic Platonism” is a concept that was briefly popularized on Twitter through the writing of a rather obscure blog.
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Class consciousness is a recognition, it is re-cognitive. One cognizes again, on an explicit and theoretical level that which one already cognizes in an everyday, semi-conscious way regarding class struggle. The tensions of the workplace are given a theoretical reformulation, which not only clarifies their character, but expands their scope—a day to day struggle, in this way, can become something colossal and revolutionary.
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The worker’s state does not abolish institutional political forms (Heaven) in favor of civil society (Earth). The worker’s state (Babel) spans Heaven and Earth. To storm heaven is not to abolish it.
Babel is built from the ground up, and its very construction is the revolution. The building up of self-sufficient worker’s organizations, those organizations which will take over after the smashing of the bourgeois state, is the primary revolutionary act, the social edifice below which supports the institution of proletarian dictatorship from above.
The tower of Babel represents the intermediary zone spanning Heaven and Earth, but also encompassing and including them. Heaven and Earth are not abolished, but subsumed into its Empire.
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The “huckstering” that Marx criticizes in his essay On the Jewish Question is not “the problem”, as far as capitalism is concerned. On the contrary, though such huckstering can be a nuisance, there are good reasons for a controlled deployment of this nuisance, to direct it and give it some scope of action in society.
Marx calls for an abolition of religion in the name of science, and religion might well be an obstacle for science—but not for technoscience. For technoscience, religion furnishes just one more material to act upon, one more depth to plumb, one more instrument to use. It is only mere science (or scientism) that needs religion abolished. Scientism is the opiate of the intellectuals, just as merely sentimental religiosity is an opiate for the masses.
Abolition of religion and emancipation from it, both of which Marx calls for, are conflicting goals. One cannot be emancipated from something which is abolished, which no longer exists for one. Emancipation from religion can only mean that one has power over religion, rather than being under its power. Emancipation from religion is the technoscientific emancipation of religion from the grip of Zeus—it is to put religion under man’s subjection. It affirms, practically, that the sabbath was made for man and not man for the sabbath.
Marx opposes politics to theology as if they were separate categories, but (a la Schmitt) politics is theological. The theology of technoscientific socialism is Promethean rather than Olympian.
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The birth of the USSR was a moment of decision (a “crisis” in the original sense of that word). We must all choose sides in the global struggles which have since ensued. No one is free to be non-partisan. What were formerly the political struggles of contending states have become the struggle of mankind. This historical moment opens up to a genuine human apocalypse. That is, not a “destruction” of humanity, which is not the original meaning borne by “apocalypse”, but a revelation of human power, of what concerted human effort is capable of attaining. The Paris Commune was mere foreshadowing. The USSR “planetized” the scope of proletarian dictatorship, the struggle to institute it, to retain it, and to affirm its already present “seeds” within capitalist society. The USSR manifested proletarian dictatorship as a planetary reality. Together, the USSR and the PRC demonstrated the capacity of this dictatorship to triumph over the capitalist war machine. It is no longer just a question of the proletarian class' ability to win concessions through union struggle, for instance, but of the ability of their dictatorship to transform the social and historical (indeed, even ecological) landscape of the planet.
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The Vanguard Party is a revolutionary elite. “Revolutionary”, here, is assimilable to the epistemological sense of “beyond the dichotomy of cognition and action”. The revolutionary elite is not susceptible of being strictly identified with a hieratic elite (i.e. the gnostic elite, the elite of knowledge), nor is it an aristocratic elite (i.e. the militaristic elite, the elite of action), but is in some sense comparable with both. They unite what was severed after the “golden age”—the original “hamsa” caste, the priest-kings. However, this elite is not one of passive “ruling over”, but one of fighting in the front lines, of bearing the brunt of the burden. They are, in other words, not Olympian, but Saturnian—recall, it is Saturn, the god of labor, that rules over the golden age. The vanguard are foremost in service, not in lording over the institutions of communist society. They are an elite that “rules” without ruling—a “wu wei vanguard”.
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The point is not for the workers at such and such an enterprise to have ownership and executive power over that enterprise, but for all the workers, at all the enterprises within a given society, to have collective ownership of and executive power over all those enterprises. However, it is one thing to merely say “they have power over all the enterprises”, and another to actually effectuate it. We need an efficient means for effecting that power. Just as the bourgeoisie uses professional managers and government apparatuses to effect their rule over production (they cannot micromanage all aspects of society on their own), so the proletariat must devise means of effecting their own rule. Proletariat forms of social management will differ in many respects from bourgeois management, but nevertheless, the need for effective means of social organization and administration persists. At the same time, it strikes me as unlikely that the means of effecting such management can be “evenly distributed” in some ideal fashion. That “every cook will learn to govern” is one thing, and that every cook will at all times participate in governance is another thing.
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The main and distinctive feature of the “panopticon” is not the eye which sees all, but the territory which is rendered all-seeable. The main thing is that our territory itself is rendered into something easily viewed, and that all that which is not easy for detection must be excluded from the social space. That is, human existence has been leveled for the convenience of the Cartesian subject. Thought itself, too, has been leveled, flattened, into a sterile discursivity. Thought can be easily represented in an abstract instant, encompassed at a glance, schematized, diagrammed, classified, but it lacks volume and distinct taste. Such flattening of thought is presented as a triumph of reason and science, but it is in fact nothing else but the cowardice of reason and science. Every stage in the Hegelian development of “spirit” is the generation of another excuse to dance around intelligible concretion. It is a theodicy of reason's cowardice.
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There is a certain degree of correctness in Kant’s conception of man treating man as an end in himself—it is in its imperative content that he errs. There is no such “binding” imperative to do so. It is, in a sense, “proper” for man to treat man primarily as an end, but this should be looked upon not as an abstract imperative forcing itself upon us, but as the symptom of certain conditions. We should try to understand what sorts of conditions promote this mode of behavior and which conditions tend to exclude it. Capitalism, naturally, tends to exclude this way of seeing one’s fellow man; excludes it “in advance”, as it were. Ultimately, to treat humanity as an end in itself, in a rigorous sense, means also to create the conditions which foster such treatment spontaneously. So long as it remains merely a “duty”, the prevalence of an insufficiently developed sociality is evidenced.
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“Socialism breaks out of the circle of history. History begins with socialism”—but what does it mean to break out of the circle of history? Do cycles disappear from history and nature? No. Socialism instrumentalizes the cyclicality of phenomena in the direction of linear and planar expansion. Moreover, “man is never really in the circle, but the circle in him”—socialism only awakens man to his already prevailing standpoint outside of the circle of history, that is, to his ontological emptiness as the break in the circle. It practically affirms the Renaissance conception of man (a la Mirandola) as empty of essence, rendering this theological conception (its framing in Mirandola's writing is certainly theological) into a technoscientific one, and thereby extending its scope to a social and historical field, not only as individual self-cultivation (the Renaissance “genius”) but as collective organization and activity.
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One who founds his politics on the friend-enemy distinction, has no friends, only enemies. A prior grounding factor is needed, a broader intelligible conception of history and society, through which we can judiciously employ the friend-enemy distinction. Without such a prior factor, anyone could be any enemy, for any reason—there is no prior intelligible context which explains how friends and enemies are generated and maintained, or how such distinctions are dissolved and transcended. Communism does not premise itself on an eternal conflict of classes, since each given class configuration, along with class society as such, is a historical contingency. A politics of race or culture posits race or culture as transhistorical factors which are directly assimilable to a friend-enemy distinction, if not an indirect positing of the very same distinction—that is, to premise politics on “civilizational spheres” is implicitly to frame politics in terms of the civilized and the barbaric, that is, friends and enemies. A politics of cross-civilizational cooperation is but the fostering of potential enemies. We might say “you have your culture and I have mine. I respect your culture, and you respect mine”, but, at the present historical juncture, one always utters such banalities through gritted teeth, whenever we affirm such a cultural tolerance and cooperation apart from a principled proletarian internationalism. Proletarian internationalism is the grounded guarantee of our cross cultural contacts, the basis for making such contacts in a way that is not arbitrary, in a way that makes sense. Proletarian dictatorship is the precondition of the “friendship of peoples” that we so frequently see depicted in communist propaganda. Politics does not in truth begin at the level of cultures, and therefore not at the level of friends and enemies. A prior structural intelligibility, in the form of social re-production, which, in historical terms, is the trajectory which birthed class society, is the primary nexus which makes sense of cultural conflicts. The continuity between such a theory of social-reproduction (as in Marxist theory) and a “perennial metaphysics” is also relevant, as two manners of accounting for the intelligibility of cultural form without submitting to any culture-centric relativism, but this a subject which will have to be entered into elsewhere.
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“Religious freedom”, too, is only one among many merely abstract freedoms of the liberal state. Only the socialist state can make religious freedom concrete by wresting dogmatic authority out of the hands of ecclesiarchs, and granting us creative power over the imaginal. This it must do proactively by engaging in “religious” projects of construction, art, and administration. There is no real religious freedom under the liberal state. The most dominant dogmas monopolize the imaginal space that shapes our psyche. Protestant and Catholic modes of thinking, for instance, predominate among even the secular, irrespective of whether one has any direct affiliation with these Churches. One is not free to think un-Protestant-ly, except by great effort and only in exceptional cases. Only socialism can gradually make real imaginal liberation possible by acting on the material (and material includes the “stuff” of the imaginal) bases that produce ways of religious thinking and feeling. It submits religiosity to technoscience.
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It is erroneous to consider that something which, in terms of its abstract structure, can be expected to continue indefinitely, simply will continue indefinitely—that is precisely what abstraction entails, namely, indefinitude. Yet, that which is examined with the aid of abstraction is not itself something abstract. Its manifest characteristics, then, will depend on its actual (as opposed to abstract) character. For instance, capital as a historical force can be expected to transform in ways which abstract theory cannot account for, and it can be expected to have an actual historical terminus. Just because the theory says “capital is transnational, and the fall of one elite will only lead to the rise of another” does not mean that such an abstractive consideration regarding abstract capial will actually apply to historical capital; e.g. the actual end of capital, historically, may simply require the end of Anglo-American capital as its sufficient condition, even if this is “techinically” inadequate from a theoretical standpoint. Put another way, the collapse of one historically instantiated form of the capitalist class may be the particular domino that knocks down the whole system in general.
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When Reason looks back upon itself it does not see something reason-able, but something irrational with respect to what it rationalizes. There is no common measure between Reason and the reasonable, only between two reasonables—that common measure? Reason itself.
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Every concept is a peculiar nothing, a nothing molded with its own particularities. Thus, conceptual artifice is a technical modification of nothing toward technical ends, the production of discursive technology from out of nothing.
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It is interesting the way we cut down language in order to simplify communication between two people who speak different languages. For instance, if you want to say “Would you like to come inside the house?” you might say “You go inside house?” or “You go house?”.
Another interesting facet is the way technical language develops ever finer specifications aimed at the same objective as the above process, i.e. rendering language universally comprehensible through simplification, in this case, the simplification which cuts away multiple ways of saying things into a uniform way of saying things, which cuts away the parochiality of language, which urbanizes language.
The first example works through simplification in a rudimentary sense, through “blunting” language, and the latter through simplification in a more intricate sense, a fine-tuned precision and standardization, through “sharpening” language. Two opposite procedures aimed at the same goal (neither of which is capable of definitively attaining it). Universality lies beyond the horizon of the cosmopolitan.
The former, in my opinion, is a closer approximation of universality. It aims to divest language of its parts and “reduce” it to wholes. Inevitably, language falls back on gesture and intonation, on its most “primordial” features—but, if this process should continue indefinitely, it would cease to be language at all! It is almost literally universal. It is as though it were trying to reduce language down as far as possible until it consisted of nothing but one expression, one primordial Word.
The latter procedure (technical language) is one of generality, not universality.
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Finitude and res extensa are not synonymous. There are “finities” which are not subject to standardized measurement.
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Aristotle was correct in asserting that “there is no third”—because the third is the nothing, and therefore is not.
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If philosophy is its age comprehended in thought, then the age (or Time) is prior to thought and is its master. From this, two things follow. Firstly, that different philosophies follow each other in sequence through time demonstrates that time is not homogenous and “neutral”, but is suffused with quality. Otherwise, philosophy, which is subject to time, would itself always remain the same. Secondly, it demonstrates that the sciences of qualitative time (since time is necessarily qualitative) have precedence over philosophy. That is, astrology is the master of philosophy, and, given the intellective content of astrological symbols, metaphysics is the master of astrology—but metaphysics is a sort of philosophy; therefore, philosophy is both master and slave of Time.
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When it is affirmed, as in Islam, for instance, that God continually renews the world “moment to moment”, what sorts of “moments” are we speaking of? They are certainly not moments as conceived through homogeneous, rational time. Rather, something more like existential time. Along with this other things may also be signified, such as the integrity of successive “moments” of hierarchical descent from Being down through the manifest world. Another thing which may be signified: God here preserves the very possibility of “moments” as such. That moment is even able to transpire unto another moment, despite the overwhelming presence of eternity (which effaces all temporality), is something which also must be “secured” and “guaranteed”. How is it that we are even able to experience temporality when God’s eternity knows no bounds? This is the mystery indicated by the expression of God’s “renewing creation moment to moment”. The momentary is shielded from obliteration.
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The rational, as we ordinarily know it, is the human emptiness particular to the corporeal world. Even there, within the domain of psyche it loses its hold. Rationality cannot as readily be applied to the emotions. Likewise, in dreams, rationality has very little sway (try, for instance, pulling out a measuring tape and gauging distances within a dream—a futile gesture). This, however, does not mean that rationality, as a peculiarly human emptiness, does not sojourn in these domains under other guises. There must be emptinesses “equivalent” to rationality in these domains, that we can access in order to master them “technologically” and “logistically”, just as rationality facilitates such mastery in the corporeal domain. For instance, self-conscious recollection, as proven in practice, can turn an ordinary dreams state into a “lucid dream”.
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For all intents and purposes, “otherness” (at least as a limiting factor) is a facile superstition which empathy continually transgresses. That said, the perspective of “otherness” is a pertinent consideration from the standpoint of transcendental subjectivity—keeping in mind that it is precisely this subjectivity which produces “otherness” and it is this subjectivity which empathy continually transgresses.
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One of the advantages of reintroducing intellection into philosophy is that it allows for greatly simplifying our expression, though it does not preclude discursive complexity. Indeed, the transcendental subject and its rationality unmoored from intellect acquires an exceedingly labyrinthine quality; e.g. consider the writings of Hegel, Kant, et al.
One could argue that Nietzsche, insofar as he reintroduces the senses into philosophy—not in the abstract English manner of “sensory experience”, but allowing the senses to speak for themselves—is almost a philosopher of intellect. This is probably one of the keys to understanding why he feels so momentous and important, despite the fact that his “intellectual contribution” (in the colloquial sense) to the history of philosophy is rather minimal—he is no Kant or Hegel. He was on the threshold of the reintroduction of intellect. This also explains Heidegger's affinity with Nietzsche (though not only this). Heidegger accomplished (on the side of passive intellection) what Nietzsche only implied.
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“Autonomy” is “self-law”, that which determines and delimits a self. Therefore, automorphosis consists always in the production of unifying and determinate laws. Each thing is given some ready made law, standardized in advance, or else is given its own idiosyncratic law. When I say that something is “mine”, I subject it to my law, to my “self” as a law.
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There is no total knowledge of Being (i.e. a “horizontally” exhaustive knowledge of every possibility of Being), but there is a knowledge of total Being (i.e. an intellective “merging” with Being).
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Freedom is literally in-credible—that is, beyond what mere belief can circumscribe. Every belief is a delimitation. A delimitation of what? Not of freedom, for it is the nature of freedom to be free (from delimitation), but a delimitation of us, of that which could participate in this unbounded freedom.
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Plato’s dialectical reasoning is secondary and retrospective. In the first place, he attains to the intellective vision of the “eternal order of things”, and only afterwards does he contrive the machination of dialectical reasoning about it—in order to communicate the incommunicable, by hook or by crook. This is why Plato stands out in the history of sages—indeed, this is why there can even be a history of sages, rather than an eternal chain of anonymous succession, merely the transmission of a “supraindividual” tradition. He was the first Promethean sage, the sage who endeavored to truly bring the eternal fire down into worldly existence (in his case, through the medium of speech). Plato stands out as the deviser of divine technologies par excellence—philosophy.
This “history of sages” is also continuous with the history of non-sagacious philosophy. The latter is dependent on the former, or, put another way, the latter are but footnotes to the former. Sagacious philosophy—Plato, Aristotle, Neoplatonism, Scholasticism. Non-sagacious philosophy—Epicureanism, Atomism, Stoicism, Cartesianism, Kant, Hegel, etc.
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The question of the individuality of human intellects, e.g. as dealt with in Aquinas, is an interesting one. The notion of “individuality”, at its most extreme limit, is not an intellective notion, but a notion of the “rational mind”, that is, of transcendental subjectivity. What, then, makes possible an “individual intellect”, an intellect proper to some individual and no other, seems to be the submission of the intellective to the limits of the transcendental, to the rational. This is, in any case, what it seems to presuppose, or something like it. How is it that the universal intellect could be individualized? Individuality, particularity, belong to the transcendental, to the rational. Thus, the individualization of intellect demands its possible circumscription and enclosing by the nothing of transcendental subjectivity.
In this respect, my positing of “particular nothings” is not as absurd as it seems at first glance—particularity is precisely a property of transcendental subjectivity, that is, a property of nothing.
A paradoxical solution to the dilemma: we each have our own universal intellect. Something like this is suggested by Giordano Bruno and his “atomic souls”.
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The idea of “existential angst” appears facile when inspected from broader metaphysical or cosmological perspectives, but it has a special pertinence when looked at from the perspective of what one might call “the Task”. The Task is the finite horizon of accomplishment proper to this or that particular lifetime. It is the idea of one’s life as oriented around a finite accomplishment of some kind, “tragically” reduced to this Task. From that standpoint, indeed, there is much to be anxious about. We do not have “all the time in the world”, nor all the energy, and the Task is very demanding in both fronts.
The Task promises immortality (“Fame”), but its price is mortality, a consciousness of one’s mortality, as opposed to the immutable consciousness of the sage.
Christianity, especially Western Christianity, seems to parallel this structure in its cult of the saints, especially of the martyrs. The martyr wins immortal Fame through exhibiting their mortality.
The interesting thing is that this very “modern” notion of the Task, in its stark finitude, was already present in the “quasi-traditional” thought of Hellenic antiquity. The ancient Greeks seem to have already been “post-traditionalists”, to have come from out of our future.
thanks for your work