Painting by Odilon Redon
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The proof of the distinction between the transcendental subject and the imaginal subject is that the spatial and temporal structure of dreams can never be reproduced exactly through the waking artifices of the transcendental subject. Even David Lynch, as much as he stretches the limits of his medium, can never truly reproduce the dream experience. Why? Because that experience is not mediated through transcendental subjectivity, at least not in its most rigorous and conspicuous form. It is entered into in an entirely different way. Which way is that? Given the intermediary nature of the imaginal, both this and that, neither this nor that—it is entered into in every way, including that of transcendental subjectivity. The imaginal is not privatively other-than transcendental subjectivity, it includes it.
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Eternity embraces all the possible paths of time—but not its pathless detours, not its wandering outside the bounds of possibility. Eternity is the wellspring of possibility, but only time contains also impossibilities.
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Intelligibility is not conceptual. Concepts really become handy for us whenever intelligibility has already been established in advance. It is no accident that Newton was an alchemist and theologian before he was a physicist (and he was, in a way, not just a physicist, but the physicist).
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There are zones intermediate between description and prescription. Take, for instance, the Nicomachean Ethics. Is it a descriptive account of the ethical or a prescriptive one? Neither category is sufficient to it. It is somewhere in between—how appropriate for a book on measure (i.e. the golden mean)! It prescribes in the way that a doctor prescribes—“if you wish your condition to improve, then you must take my medicine”. An “if-then” is, in a manner, descriptive, a “descriptive prescription”. A “descriptive prescription” is perhaps more intolerably demanding and categorical than any other, especially to the degree that it does not seem to prescribe. It does not exhort or demand, but it does make veiled threats.
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The “objectivity” of the transcendental subject, as a neutral inquirer, a detached knower, a “scientist”, is an audacious objectivity. It is an objectivity which interposes itself where it does not belong with an attendant sense of detached irreverence. It is not really detached. Its presence is felt by its environment. Its presence is consequential. Nevertheless, this observer insists on his objectivity, on his detachment. This objectivity really has the force of a carte blanche—“I may act with irreverent detachment in spite of the fact of my attachment”. This irreverence is a precondition of modern science. Scientific impartiality is Promethean partiality. Scientific objectivity is subjective partisanship.
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Active intellection partakes more of the character of knowing, and passive intellection partakes more of the character of being—and yet both, fundamentally, are sorts of knowing and sorts of being. The Gordian knot of knowing and being cannot be unraveled, only cut.
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The dialectical transformation of quantity into quality (as in Marxist theory) is an instance of the break in the circle of hermeneutic—indeed, hermeneutic itself possesses a dialectical structure.
In what sense is the transformation of quantity into quality dialectical? In a number of them (no pun intended). Firstly, it bears mentioning that “quantity”, in this formula, does not refer to some kind of pure quantity but to a quantity of a certain quality, or, put another way, quantity operative within a certain qualitative context. Thus the formula could be restated as: “the transformation of a quantity of a certain quality into a new quality with its own corresponding quantities”. There is a dialectic here, on the one hand, between a quality and the quantities in which it is expressed, a tension which gives birth to a new quality from out of itself, and, on the other hand, a tension between this old quality and the new one insofar as the new one is prefigured in that tension (i.e. the tension between the old quality and the quantities through which it manifests). The specter of communism is a quality concealed and prefigured in the quantities of capitalism.
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Plotinus was a noetic phenomenologist, or a phenomenologist of active intellection; in some ways more of a “seer” than philosopher. He allows the self-disclosure of intellect to be seen as it would show itself to itself. That is also why he is so unsystematic. That is a virtue of his thought. Intellect does not show itself to itself through a system.
“Noetic phenomenology”—intellect taken as phenomena showing itself to itself, and given expression in words (logos) with both symbolic import and discursive structure.
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Time’s paradoxical ground presents itself to us in this way—that the most eminently intelligible form of time is precisely eternity, or the time-less. Time’s intelligibility lies in its not being itself.
Now, what of space? Which form of space is eminently intelligible? Is it, analogous to what was just said regarding time, the space-less?—but space precisely already is the “less”, an absence, that which is not there. In this case we might suggest that it is the “center”. Centrality is the most eminently intelligible form of space, and it is also a something, unlike the nothing of space. So, space first becomes intelligible for us as something other than itself, as a center point, as a something rather than a nothing.
Hence, time and space are the “supreme paradox”. They are the “supreme paradox” insofar as they are eminently and primarily known only as something other than themselves, and insofar as they are somehow entangled with one another. We know a lion by its lion-ness, but we know time through the time-less (“pure change” is not knowable as such) and space by the center point (= the space-less principle of space).
“The Great Year”, refers to precisely this paradoxical entanglement. “The Great Year” refers to time as the all-encompassing space of things, the space which always refers things back to their “original positions”, their positions in reference to the center point. In returning to origins, time obviates itself—it ceases to be change, and becomes an eternally preserved image. Thus, it is the spatial center (space-less principle of space) which is the precondition for temporal return (i.e. the timelessness of time). Things could not return to their “original positions” without a (central) reference point to determine said positions. Nor could any position be considered “original” were it not for time as the precondition of departure and return. Time is the crucible which “proves” the centrality of the center, its priority and originary character. An image which is fixed for all time could be arbitrary. Temporal return shows the necessity of the original image.
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Rationality is what makes man less animal—that is, also, less than an animal. Rationality, man’s distinctive feature, is a nothing. Like the Daoist sage, man's superiority likes in obscurity and retreat.
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The “mystic”, the traditionalist, the metaphysician says: “You, man, are nothing. The world is nothing. Only God is”. The communist metaphysics says: “Yes. That is man’s greatness. That is the world’s ‘justification’. Nothing. The imaginal nothingness of the world is greater than Being, encompasses Being, is unvanquishable and enduring, powerful, fecund, and creative”. One cannot vanquish nothing. That one does not even need to vanquish nothing, is neither here nor there. It impossibly asserts itself. Neither does one have to justify nothing. It is nothing which does the justifying, that is, transcendental subjectivity, rationality, judgment.
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The self-evident (whose bare-bones or abstract form is A=A) is that which is constrained to draw attention to its own evidentness, thereby casting doubt on itself—it still requires evidence. It is mediate, but a closed loop of mediation, which is as close to being immediate as one can be without being immediate. The hermeneutic circle (closed loop of mediation) is an approximate image of immediate intellection. Its circularity, however, is purely virtual, posited only “in theory”, and in retrospect (retrospection—that is to say, returning to the past in thought in order to close it in as a circle). In practice, the circle always shows itself to be broken.
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The Word is Symbol as a symbol of intelligibility.
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The self-sacrificial act of “bearing the cross” is the act through which man submits himself to the fundamentally intelligible structure of things, to the Logos, i.e. the cross which qualitatively maps out the universe, orients its qualitative directionality. What, then, is man sacrificing when he submits to this Logos? Precisely the unintelligible, the stupid, and, most fundamentally, the paradoxical, the power which transgresses intelligibility—that is, we sacrifice science, development, progress.
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Anglo philosophy is a cybernetic system for processing a continental input (Cartesian subject). They’ve just been churning away at it ever since.
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Heidegger surpasses the transcendental subject in the direction of passive intellection, that is, Dasein’s being-in-the-world. Marx surpasses the transcendental subject in the direction of social life, social existence. In what respects do these differ? In what respects do they overlap? We must ask just how this social life is conceived. It is conceived according to a revolutionary epistemology which, rather than sinking below (passive intellection) or rising above (active intellection) the transcendental subject, stretches that subject beyond the ordinary limits of its operation. Thus, in Marx's eminently modern framework, it is the transcendental subject that continually surpasses itself, socially and historically. The problem is that Marx only stretched that subject in the downward direction (toward passive intellection, at the limit of “species being”). For the Marxist framework to be complete we must also stretch the transcendental subject in the upward direction, toward metaphysical contemplation, and through the social use of symbols. Indeed, if Marxism is to be made fully Promethean, it must not only stretch itself toward these poles, but seize them as its instruments.
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The symbolic and dialectic are intimately related. The ever-present double-nature of the symbol is rendered temporal through dialectic, made into a dynamic binary. Both symbol and dialectic share in this double-nature of the Logos—the symbol is Logos proper, in its permanence, and dialectic is a dynamic “through-logos”. Logos-proper pertains to intellect, and through-logos (dialectic) pertains to—ratiocination? Ordinarily, yes. In most cases, dialectic does not extend its reach beyond the marketplace of concept mongering. A Marxist dialectic, is one that critically surpasses the ideological limits of appearance. Marxism is not only scientific, but technoscientific, a science in social and historical practice.
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The transcendental subject is crafty, cold, manipulative—in a word, Promethean.
Is there a “spiritual ascesis” which does not exclude the transcendental subject, or a prototype for one? Perhaps only the Greeks furnish something like this in the Platonic tradition. There is, after all, something rather crafty in the Socratic dialectic, and one of the mythic exemplars of the Greeks was Odysseus the crafty one, together with the myth of Prometheus.
Obviously, however, this “crafty spirituality” of Platonism is only a prototype at best, as compared with the eminently crafty spirituality that is emerging through communist modernity.
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The law of identity is the essence of the Moirai—it is the principle of demarcation. In demarcating something, in distinguishing something through circumscription, I am saying “this is this”. “Primordial thisness” does not require demarcation, but is simply “ready-to-hand” (in a manner of speaking). In demarcating some primordial this, I am this-ing the this. I have made thisness not only an existential encounter, which it always already was, but have made thisness into a mental-rational power. Demarcation is thisness as verb ("to this"), and what this-ing acts upon is always this as noun ("the this"). To demarcate is to this the this, i.e. demarcation says “A=A”, rather than just letting “A” be.
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To move beyond metaphysics (in the historical and developmental sense) does not mean to leave it behind. When we leave metaphysics’ native domain behind, we carry metaphysics with us. It is precisely metaphysics which moves beyond itself, by disguising itself as something other than itself.
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The symbol is not only a feature internal to hermeneutic, but hermeneutic in general. A symbol can be interpreted allegorically, anagogically, etc. The symbol is purely and simply the Word in all its possibilities of “hermeneutic action”. It is the ground of any hermeneutic, just as “nothing” is that which breaks the circle of hermeneutic (that is, which breaks the symbol) and renders it truly dynamic. Symbol cannot be simply identified with the “whole” internal to a hermeneutic, since whole is meant in more than one sense, and the symbolic sense does not pertain to “hermeneutic” as we generally understand this.
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Of all the modes of time, futurity is nearest to nothingness—and hence nearest to man, whose nature is nothing. The future is not yet.
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How Shaktism and Advaita are reconciled: the most subtle power of all is non-power, the no-thingness of non-dual realization. When power ceases to be itself it extends its power infinitely.
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Without the nothing (over which dialectic contends), the dialectic is nothing (i.e. it lacks a raison d’etre). Dialectic has no meaning apart from this nothing. It is nothing without the nothing.
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Plato was the first philosopher of stupidity, the first philosopher to give it primacy in his thought. Stupidity shows up as central in his thought in two ways, in content and in method. In content, stupidity shows up as the unintelligible (or, if you prefer, “supra-intelligible”) Form of the Good at the heart of his metaphysics of intelligibility. In method, stupidity shows up as the primary mechanism of dialectic, the Artemisian emptying of wisdom which is productive of wisdom.
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Reason is the nothing between intellect and sensation. At its most threadbare, its least “solid”, it appears to us as discursive reasoning. This is reason in its proximity to active intellect. At its most stupid (and therefore, in a sense, its least threadbare; its most fleshy and vital), it appears to us as “common sense”. This is reason in its proximity to passive intellect and to sensation (hence, “common sense”). Common sense has the characteristic of appearing very solid and earthly, at the same time that it is vacuous and superficial. “Common sense” is a type of nothing by virtue of this vacuity, its stupidity.
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Reason is the domain of hermeneutic circularity. This circularity dissolves in the “downward” direction, as being-in-the-world through the hermenoetic sphere of “care” (Sorge), and is overcome in the upward direction, as active intellection through the hermenoetic sphere of contemplation. This circularity is not self-applied, i.e. it is not something which reason applies to its own domain. Circularity is the perspective of reason as applied to the earthly (being-in-the-world) and heavenly (metaphysics) domains. That is, hermeneutic appears “circular” when reason ventures to interpret that which is other than itself, by reducing it to itself, re-making that which it interprets in its own image, or, rather, in the image that it wishes for itself. What then if reason dares to look upon itself? Then it discovers the horseshoe structure of hermeneutic, that the circle is broken and that reason itself is that break. If other philosophers, such as Kant and Hegel, who have tried to turn reason back upon itself have failed, it is precisely because they expected that what reason would find would itself have to be something reason-able. What reason realizes, however, is precisely the irrationality of itself with respect to what it rationalizes. This realization is the transcendental subject’s awareness of its own impossibility, of its “imaginal heroism” as voyager through intermediary seas, between this and that, yes and no. This is the Promethean seizure, by transcendental subject, of metaphysics in its two modalities—passive (Heidegger; phenomenology = ontology) and active (“Traditional metaphysics”). The transcendental subject, no longer viewed as passive receptacle of sensations, but as the revolutionary entanglement of theory (assimilable to metaphysics) and practice (assimilable to Heideggerian “care”), becomes a Marxist revolutionary, a Promethean hero.
Thus, there are two transcendental subjects—transcendental subject as “scholar”, as “philosopher, i.e. the transcendental subject as cosmopolitan, and transcendental subject as Promethean hero, as revolutionary, i.e. the transcendental subject as “second ontopolitan”.
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Paradox is not that which just is passively beyond belief, but the active always exceeding the limits of belief. Paradox continually transgresses belief, at the same time that it remains its ground.
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Even if atomism, in the strict sense, is “false”, nevertheless we must have a grasp on the metaphysics of atomism—because we are all always already atomists, in any case. Analysis, which break things down to their constituent parts, must end at some point, because there is always a point where we, individually, or at the level of worldview, must stop the process of breaking down, and arrive at a smallest element—that is, arrive at what will constitute the atom peculiar to that worldview. Analysis goes down as far as you like, and no further than one is inclined. At some point one always encounters one’s atom, and we have “always already” reached that point, implicitly or explicitly.
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Pragmapathy, too, is a metaphysics, but not in the post-Cartesian sense. It is a metaphysics in the sense that Guenon understood this term. It is a symbol which orients, which renders intelligible, which opens up the world of manifest things to its own peculiar mode of intelligibility. It is a Promethean metaphysics.
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Transhumanism, as we ordinary use the term, is a quantitative extension of the human. Traditionalism is transhumanism as qualitative extension (“higher states of being”). Both are transhuman, though traditionalism is transhuman eminently and essentially, and “technological transhumanism” is transhuman in an inferior and accidental sense. The relation between technological and traditional transhumanism is analogous to that between the indefinite and the infinite.
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Another commendable aspect of Nietzsche’s methodology: his critique of the feeling that one needs to prove one’s ideas, in a scholastic and academic sense, or in the sense of the philosopher’s rigorous logical-deductive armor. Nietzsche shows us that we can more or less dispense with such a “need”. We must identify the contexts in which “proof” has its real home, not transpose it everywhere like a wandering beggar. This, in a sense, puts him in some proximity to the traditional conception of metaphysics, which is not concerned with mere discursive truths, but demands to taste that with which it concerns itself.
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Guenon’s perennial metaphysics is already, at least implicitly, a perspectivist metaphysics, or suggestive of a perspectivist metaphysics. To a certain extent, he does try to reduce all metaphysics to Advaita Vedanta, but nevertheless he does at many points acknowledge the manifoldness of metaphysics, the multitude of its perspectives. He already opens the way to metaphysical perspectivism. It seems that this was already something prefigured in ibn Arabi, especially. The difference, then, between this perspectivist metaphysics and that which belongs to “communist metaphysics” is the way in which the transcendental subject takes the center stage in the latter. Communism has a different protagonist, a human protagonist—homo faber.
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The indefinite is eventual infinity, the not-yet-infinite, an always-deferred infinity, an implied-infinity (that is, infinity as an implication, as indirect suggestion, as distinct from a “realized infinity”). Indefinitude is the finger which points at the moon of infinity.
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The more the imitation of a being toward the something, the substantive content of that being, the more this imitation can be termed “copying”. The more one’s imitation tends toward the peculiar nothings of that being, the more it can be termed mimesis. Originality in the arts comes about when one imitates nothing (pun certainly intended).
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The hermeneutic circle is a Gordian knot that is always already cut (i.e. a horseshoe).
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Dialectic is through (dia) discourse (logos)—but what is it we are doing “through discourse”? We are doing something (indeed, many somethings) while in pursuit of the nothing.
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One can distinguish between three types of analogy, broadly speaking: symbolic or noetic analogies, poetic analogy, and dry or structural analogies. The last are the most feeble, but they also, in a way, most resemble the first type of analogy (due to the collapse of synthesis and analysis into one another).
Poetic analogy does not present itself in the self-serious manner of structural analogy. One entering into a poetic analogy never has the sense that this analogy possesses rigorous exactitude. It adds flesh, life, and color to that which it analogizes. Structural analogy believes itself to possess an almost scientific exactitude. A typical instance of structural or dry analogy is the hypothetical, which is meant to simulate the overarching “law” of that which it imitates.
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In addition to automorphosis, there is a xenomorphosis—the rendering of something as “other”, as non-self. This non-self is still a kind of posited self-nature, so xenomorphosis is a type of automorphosis, a production of estranged selves, of things which are not my self because a selfhood of their own has been imposed on them. I am my-self and it is it-self.
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Althusser and Heidegger—two inadvertent humanists, humanists in spite of themselves. Heidegger—the humanism of Dasein as Renaissance conception of the human (empty of essence). Althusser—the humanism of the Hermetic dictum “all is Mind” (albeit, not taken in the sense of nous but in the sense of discursive thinking), that is, the priority of structural thought (which is, moreover, a type of imagination), the human faculty par excellence. Two crypto-humanists, the former a Renaissance humanist and the latter an Enlightenment humanist.
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Metaphysical perspectivism, regardless of its “validity” or lack thereof, is a fact. It is something man always already does, is always already capable of. Thus, in the interest of science or knowledge or what have you, it is incumbent upon us to study this fact and produce an account of it. Much like Kant, we first take the actuality of this “phenomenon” as a given, and afterwards work back toward an account of the condition of its possibility (or a phenomenological account of the contours of its real impossibility).
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There is no thing-in-itself, because things are empathic. Things are also in-each-other. Thinghood is never isolated. There is a thing-in-itself, because the intelligibility of individual thing is impossibly isolable. Thing-in-itself is a real impossibility.
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Odyssean Phenomenology: not to “sit back” and allow beings to disclose themselves in their being, but to outwit being, to trick beings into laying bare their secrets, to outmaneuver being. A transgressive and cunning phenomenology—a methodologically perspectivist phenomenology.
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There is no final corpus containing the knowledge of all things, nor will there ever be such a corpus “at the end of history”. On the other hand, there is final knowledge of the All, but this has always already been attained, since it belongs to the operations of the intellect itself. Even here, there are innumerable metaphysical perspectives, and not one “system” that accounts for the All. To merely know the All, however, does not do much for us on its own. It is really no remarkable thing.
The All is always itself, and yet every historical expression of it in myth, symbolism, and metaphysical exposition, differs—truly differs. In other words, the Absolute is merely the instrument of imaginal productivity, and that imaginal productivity is none other than the re-production of that Absolute.
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Emotion is also rational, that is, susceptible of being subjected to a ratio, though this ratio is difficult to quantify. Nevertheless, emotions do come in comparable magnitudes, even if those magnitudes can only be compared through poetic language.
Poetry can be an instrument for plumbing the depth and breadth of non-quantifiable ratios.
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If reality is structured “fractally”, then even a mustard seed’s worth of knowledge suffices for omniscience.
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Marxism was always there, by concealed implication, implanted in the kernel of the perennial metaphysical tradition. This “Marxism” is a Shaktism turned right-side-up. It is concealed also in the symbolism of this tradition. In the image of Saturn's golden age, in the symbol of Solomon's Seal. Marxist hierarchy as the mirror image of Heavenly hierarchy—it is supposed to be a mirror image, not a copy—the Saturnian coalition of the proletariat at the top and the kings of the earth at the bottom. Christ did not say that those who are first shall cease to exist, but that they shall be least.
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The future seems “abstract” and unreal because it exceeds reality, not because it falls short of it. The present is merely real, the past a dream half-remembered. It is through futurity that we render the present more real than itself.
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The search for “the meaning of life” is a negative task, a task of eliminating meanings until all that is left is the meaning that satisfies one—but life is so full of meanings that this is a fortuitous task. Life does not lack meaning, it simply lacks “the meaning”
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The indefinite is the never yet infinite—but “never yet” is a sort of concealed infinity, just as eternity or the time-less is a concealed form of time.
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Quality and quantity intersect at the juncture of “sameness”. Quantity is exchangeable and interchangeable, a homogenized sameness between distinct entities. Quality is a bridge between the entities that share in it, through a "co-participation" in the self-same quality.
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All that Plato did was render Heraclitus “the Obscure” a little less obscure. Plato was a translator of ideas. He devised a technical language and method to render Heraclitus’ ideas, originally rendered in a more poetic and “mystic” expression, more readily comprehensible.
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Nature truly is innocent, but man represents that part of Nature which is more cunning than itself. Insofar as one also outwits oneself, in exercising one's cunning, one remains innocent.
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No thing is superior to the human because the human is nothing.
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An abstract re-presentation of Nature (i.e. science) is not something other than Nature, but the proof of Nature’s real power of presenting itself again as abstraction. Science is Nature.
Technoscience is the self-perfection of Nature’s power to act.
Alchemy, in which theory (contemplative symbology) and practice are undifferentiated, is the parent of both science and technoscience. Recall, the most eminent among the original technosciences, blacksmithing, is in its origins alchemical (see Eliade).
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Time is the eternal recurrence of the new (not of the same). Nature is mimetic. It always repeats itself as something different from itself.
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Science is gnosis in exile from itself—a very fruitful and felicitous exile.
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“Praxis”, in the revolutionary sense, is the Gordian knot of theory and practice.
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Dialectical concepts, or structural concepts, have a tremendous utility in assessing things, in attaining a scientific grasp on our world, but it must never be lost sight of that they are far less real than imagination. A concept is a denatured metaphor, and a metaphor is a species of fantasy, of imagination. Imaginative thought is more tangible and “material” than conceptual thought, but it is through the unreality of conceptual thought, through its pointed application, that we can render reality more real.
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The notion of “essence” does not imply a fixed conception of world, though it is frequently used that way by philosophy. The essential is that which something is susceptible of being “boiled down” to. It is an alchemical procedure, not a fixed substance. Just in how many ways and into how many things something is susceptible of being “boiled down” remains to be discovered in scientific practice.