General Aphorisms

People, as animals, are simple, and, ultimately, prefer only to know about what comforts them or pleases them, or outrages them; they prefer to know only the immediate day to day affairs of self-satiation. This is why politics easily dominates the private lives of most people because it concerns the everyday trifles of their needs and impulses and shallow biases. Their perspective need not extend further than the fluctuating state of their emotions. Thus, what emotional needs are for a person, is what hunger instincts are to an animal; that which is never satisfied, always desiring, always needing abatement. The ones who dare to think beyond this immediate realm of needs and feelings, never achieves more than a passing glance among the throng of trilling voices; this voice of transcendent reason which speaks, does so with only enough energy to be heard, he simply has no reserve energy, no stamina to be understood or remembered.

The enamored effect of Nietzsche upon the modern masses, tells us not so much about Nietzsche and the ideological devastation he wreaked on logos, but about the importance of appreciating the essence of ideas for what they are as one experiences them for themselves. For there is nothing more tragic than to discover a meadow of flowers and then watch it trampled by a horde of others. Such is the pettiness and stupidity of humanity; to subvert, confuse, convolute, or altogether turn into hysteria, something that, to a temperate mind, is merely an aspect of the world to be known and cast back into the river like a pebble. If certain ideas become popularized, it means only that the effect of their truth has succeeded, not the truth itself. The value of the truth is an intimate private affair, to be passed along in whispers.

Romanticism is a sign that there is a lacking of self, something that has been lost or forgotten and so to imagine it as grandiose or unattainable constructs an objective path that motivates a need for stability, a need to return to a degree of health, equilibrium. The soul has become sick, sick with its own loss of meaning. This defensive method, to romanticize, is to envisage what has been lost, and reconstitute it as something holy, attributing to it a nature of intense power that one believes is in them. This is the individual treating their symptoms with pain medication. It will create dependency, make them sicker, and eventually begin to make them prefer the feeling, and reject the reality.

Philosophy has no subjective or objective. Everything returns to Heraclitus. It can only ever be a becoming of awareness. Absolutist thinking is attractive because it promises a finality to this becoming, and so for one to conceive of ends and beginnings, speaks of a need to lose oneself in the power that there will always be a solution that will soothe their fear, somewhere, out there, the great faith in nothingness.