Parodites' Daemon

Some writings of Parodites from the BTL forum on his conception of the Daemonic worth contrasting. Since there are no comprehensive books on the subject, I thought his writings worth including here. While they are thoughtful and insightful, his attempt to 'ethicize' the Daemonic as an Experientialism is not my path.

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Parodites wrote:

Excess.-- Nietzsche called it Will to Power, Kierkegaard called it despair. I perceive the same underlying concept beneath its names. It is the unresolvable relation between the empirical and transcendental spheres of consciousness, between freedom and necessity, the infinite and the finite, which constitute the self.



The daemonic.-- This is the self's capacity to reflect, that is, represent this excess in a series of conceptual oppositions, ie. relations as a kind of anti-dialectic. For example, the opposition of the infinite and the finite.

Subjectivity.-- This is the representation or reflection of the excess in conceptual oppositions. A kind of 'kenotic' differentiation of the excess. Different modes of life, different ruling passions, are produced as the self orients itself within the conceptual oppositions.

Speculative ethic.-- The experimental and intentional production of such modes of life. Exploration of them. Appraising them against one another.


... Each of the conceptual oppositions created daemonically constitute a different mode of life. The mode and its quality depends on the opposition, one example of a mode is the aesthetic mode of life. The number of these different modes of life that a particular individual can produce depends on the power of his daemonism. Not all individuals are capable of living the same modes of life or living the same number of modes.

A transcendental good is an ideal that roots the individual in that opposition wherein his daemon comes to a rest, is exhausted. Most men are not rooted in this way, and so we have the daemonic frenzy, the repetition of the same modes of life, a kind of psychological stunting. Their self is fragmented in this way throughout the modes and they must continually re-orient themselves within the conceptual oppositions which it has created.

Philosophy endows us with the concepts with which to exhaust our daemonic nature. A speculative ethics as a particular way of philosophizing would aid one in finding out the ideal by which to comprehend the final orientation of one's daemonism, namely by comparing and clearly differentiating the different modes one has lived through, becoming more conscious of them. Hence I call it the transcendental good rather than transcendental ideal: it is realized through a valuation, a speculative ethic. The Eternal Recurrence was Nietzsche's transcendental good."

Quote :

"Ultimately, a new morality, the defense of the category of the Absolute, a defense of the category of truth, a re-imagination of Plato, the overcoming of Nietzsche, a non-religious answer to Kierkegaard's problem of despair- these are among my central goals."

Quote :

"The phenomenon of nihilism is not what ails our time. I have discussed the division of empirical and transcendental reason. The consequence is that transcendental and empirical reason both destroy themselves when divided. The modern Christian blindly refuses truth and reduces his God to a mere father figure instead of the obscura dei and fulcrum of poetic and philosophic perspectives on his life, and the circle of reason, in the words of Hamann, spins itself into skepsis and mere self-destruction. Look at the recent bullshit debate between creationists and atheists like Dawkins. The materialism and "religion" in these debates are both trivial vapid shit, false shadows of empirical philosophy and transcendental philosophy alike. It is not merely that we lack values today, we lack the capacity to value.

The Greek self was an antagonism which was temporarily, that is, daemonically, stabilized by means of artistic and philosophical creation. Their Gods were expressions of their high degree of daemonism. The Judaeo-Christians re-interpreted the self as an irresolvable contradiction between the mortal and divine aspects of the body and soul, and the excess became an absolute lack or longing which could only be satisfied in the image of God. Their singular God was something entirely different, psychologically.


My work is about defending the category of the Excess, re-actualizing the concept of the absolute and truth, and re-integrating the two modes of reason."

Quote :

"My philosophy is essentially concerned with fusing and reconciling "immanent" and "transcendent" ethics.

What is an immanent ethics? Think Spinoza, Schelling, Nietzsche.

As Deleuze said about Spinoza, he believed neither in courage or faith but in joy and vision. He proposed a substance with infinite attributes, an inner plane, and defined- in accordance with that, the basis of moral valuation as determining the mode in which attributes are given to this internal, infinite substance. Bad is any mode of life that would lead to an "inadequate idea."

" “What is the mode of existence of the person who utters a given proposition?” asks Nietzsche, “What mode of existence is needed in order to be able to utter it?
Rather than “judging” actions and thoughts by appealing to transcendent or universal values, one “evaluates” them by determining the mode of existence that serves as their principle. A pluralistic method of explanation by immanent modes of existence is in this way made to replace the recourse to transcendent values: in Spinoza and Nietzsche, the transcendent moral opposition (between Good and Evil) is replaced an immanent ethical difference (between noble and base modes of existence, in Nietzsche; or between passive and active affections, in Spinoza)."


Transcendent ethics? Think Kierkegaard, Eriugena, etc. An ethics that appeals to the absolute, to something that exceeds the boundary of subjective, lived existence, and makes use of transcendent conceptual oppositions- good and evil, necessity and freedom, etc.

The immanent qualities in human nature, in man himself and in his human powers, and the transcendent objects (God, eternity, etc.) toward which these powers are directed and, in being so directed, take on true shape and articulation.... these two sets have never been united. This problem is the problem of the West, it is the Occident itself. The Asiatic philosophies are all immanent moralities, there is very little transcendence in them. In the west have both practices been cultivated and their pregnant disparity finally become enunciable. I am so enunciating it. Only with such a morality can a true philosophic conception of what exactly "man" is be arrived at.

The immanent ethic originated out of what I call empirical reason, with the pre-Platonic Greeks, and the transcendent morality was fully realized with the Abrahamic religions. Nietzsche finalized the immanent morality, Kierkegaard finalized the transcendent one, and Kierk. was foreshadowed by Schelling and Eriugena. Of course there are many rungs in that ladder, but I have isolated those three main ones. I am more or less reconstructing the history of philosophy with my conception of the self as a daemonic being as a heuristic principle, and formalizing all of it in accordance to the paradigm of immanence and transcendence."

Quote :

"The Dionysian of Nietzsche is a pure excess, in which tragedy is dissolved into comedy, and comedy absorbed in tragedy. The Daemonic is a psychological phenomenon whereby that excess is articulated through what I call "conceptual opposition," a non-dialectical process. Nietzsche only figured out the logic of the excess itself, he did not (to my mind) make it to the logic of the daemonic, and consequently misunderstood a great deal about the Greeks, the religion of Abraham, and the struggle between those two conceptions of world/man. He was only able to oppose to the Dionysian the idea of the Apollonian, the idea of the creative will imposed upon the excess in order to shape it, as a piece of clay. This stunted perspective locks Nietzsche into a continuous formation of identity, by way of the Apollonian, and consequent dissolution of that identity in the Dionysian excess. He later grasps this process under the catch-all term Will to Power, which necessitates his view that all values are expressions of a particular quanta of strength. We still do not have in any of this an excess that is neither after reflection as a contradiction or before reflection as an agon or Nietzschean struggle-- we need an excess that, rather, serves as a category of reflection. A category in the Aristotelian sense: just as Aristotle's categories inform the horizon of being, so the categories of reflection inform the possible horizons of thought. In my philosophy however values are re-realized as "ethical ideas," ideas in the Platonic sense, objectifications of the excess attained by daemonic philosophy, that is, conceptual oppositions."

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Quote :

"What real domain can the human being claim for itself, when its most vital existence is found in the correspondence between the finite and transcendental spheres, when- to speak with Hippocrates, it finds in all men something divine, and in all divinity something of its humanity? This daemonic nature is the alien intelligence with which the will operates and is not itself a master; the symbols of myth and the host of philosophical ideas, as the most profound exertion of the human will, have not evolved by some merely inventive poet to represent an arbitrary reality of his own design, but have evolved rather out of this daemonic nature, in the pre-reflective state in which the poet recognizes something outside the border of his own experience and is in this way opened up to the deeper life. These symbols and ideas, like the eternity of Nietzsche, or the Prometheus of Aeschylus, are not linguistic in the same way that our common speech is linguistic, for they originate in the daemonic nature which is the precondition of human self-consciousness, and as such represent things not yet able to be fully articulated by the self-conscious human being; the myths and philosophical ideals are all true, for there is a human being to debate rather or not they are true. They are the precondition of human self-consciousness, the mere fact that we can debate them signifies their truth.

The contradictions and disputes among philosophers arise from a spirit philosophizing out of something other than the spirit of daemonism, something other than that middle-position and pre-reflective state which opens up the sphere of the mortal being to the immortal sphere.

The ancient philosophies were all spontaneously engendered through the daemonic, they served as a horizon through which the self-consciousness could take shape. They served as a limit to what could be expressed in human tongue.

And this is one of the greatest of mysteries. Language can only evolve when something has placed a limit to what can be expressed; there must be a limit placed upon language before language can evolve. Language only makes sense when it begins through a passive state, that of the daemonic being which has been opened up to "the deeper life." I can only speak the word "man" when the word "god" has served as a limit to the former conception. So on and so on, down to the first word, so to speak.

Philosophy, as that essential thing which a daemonic being does, as the fundamental nature of a daemonic being, (the only one we know of is the human) is the ground of this mystery."

Quote :

"My ethics is aimed at rooting philosophy in the element of genuine experience. To let my book speak for itself:

Happiness is a state like that of the sea after it has come to rest in the wake of some violent storm. One must conceal in one's depths some nameless longing as even it does. What most people refer to as their life is nothing more than one long, violent storm, one long raging into the abyss and the sea. It is precisely the most painful emotions that can, after all, be used as their own opiate. The strength of mankind is a deplorable and wretched thing. In the end, our desires never succeed in changing our life, much less this world; it is only our life and this world that have succeeded in altering our desires. All that we have to show for our strength and our struggle has not been achieved on account of that strength and that struggling, but simply on account of the whim of sea. One must turn to the vis contemplativa in order to permit these alterations that life makes to our desires to prove favorable, in order to cohere the law within himself with the law outside of himself. The only question is to what extent one can organize within the harmony of his own nature the harmony of events; the only question is to what extent one can become conscious of one's experience. Experience itself, of whatever romantic cast, and however wondrous, is in itself worthless. If a human being has anything of life in him, no experience will prove capable of coordinating the mass of forces within him, and neither will any act prove capable of organizing them; one is only to live, and concentrate in the narrowest bound of his consciousness the tribe of his loves and experiences, and to therein hold them in their sharpest intensity. One must become toward his heart like that gardener who allows nature to generally take its course upon his plants, but simply introduces a little bit of deliberation here and there, a small part of artifice, in order to beautify everything. That question posed by Hamlet is truly the highest abstraction the human intellect is capable of in the sphere of ethics, and "to be" man's highest good, though Faust would have doubtlessly mistranslated it. As Aurelius said, in this world one can either stand up straight or be straightened; the life we could not live, lives us. Insofar as one learns to truly take consciousness, ceaselessly, of this immutable sense of life, one learns also to take consolation in the realization that everything does, in fact, work itself out, at least within the enlivened consciousness. Perhaps, with regard to our life itself and the course it has taken, not for the best, as most people say, and usually for the worse: but at least it is worked out within us, at least we know that there is and must be an answer to the question we are able to formulate, for otherwise even the question would have eluded us. A question can be a consolation just as much as an answer can."

Quote :

"Plato and Aristotle agree that philosophy begins in a passive state, as opposed to a creative state, of the soul. This state they call wonder, thaumazein. This word, however, does not simply imply sublime awe, but rather the capacity to intimate the unknown and strange, to recognize some obscure connection between one's self and the foreign. It is in this sense that the Greek poets use it to refer to the gods, for they could intimate something of their divinity, and still further, realize in the image of this divinity something of their own humanity. This obscure relationship between the self and the world, the ego and the cosmos, man and his gods, is the essential relationship which all philosophy has explicated over the centuries. The passivity, then, is not one of impotence, but of pregnancy.

Man can only sustain himself as man by delving into that obscure relationship, which must necessarily silence him, or set him aflame, as was the fate of the Gnostic angel upon re-entering the world of mortals. He is like a character designed by a poet and thrust into the scene of some play, and can hold his personality and identity in existence only by continuing to engage in the play, even though this grants him an incomplete personality and identity, powerless to shape its own fate. In a certain sense he, like the tragic actor, can only maintain his identity by continually denying it. This disturbing quality of the passivity in which genuine consciousness originates, Kierkegaard spoke of in his conception of despair.


Kierkegaard conceives of the self as a synthesis of the infinite and finite, though an incomplete synthesis: he essentially presents a form of Kantianism which lacks the idea of a final synthesis which would inform the unity of the self and moreover serve as something analogous to the categorical imperative by which an absolute basis of the self and of human action could be determined. This lack of an absolute basis for the self and human action is the source of Kierkegaard's despair: for him it is only in god, not within the self, that this basis can be found. He thus stands among all of those beautiful but innocent mystics, granted that his mysticism is articulated in a purely philosophical language and thus serves as a healthy curiosity for all philosophers. We have here, with Kierkegaard, rejected the hope of a completed synthesis, but we have also rejected the hope that in God there could be found any absolute basis for the self and an active power, since only in that obscure relationship between the Gods and man, self and world, can consciousness be maintained, and we cannot degenerate into mystical self-oblivion: the ego, the self's reflexive and empty self-image, the psychological expression of the principle of identity, lives and takes on shape, and becomes pregnant, through the reconciliation of the ego and non ego, through their co-extension along the fundamental spheres of though; the living consciousness in which the ego indwells is eternally bent toward the self's true being, which cannot be absorbed into any dialectical system and stands always outside of thought. The fact that consciousness thereby exists as an endless determination of this true being of the self, not suspended between two infinites as Pascal would lament, but embodying their eternal conflict, and out of joint with himself just as much as the world, is the source of that disturbing quality of the passive state in which man finds himself." - Hamartia

So the empirical ego thrusts itself into a process of reconciliation with regard to its fundamental principles, the ego and non-ego, the infinite moral will or potency and finite time and reality, freedom and necessity. The deeper it thrusts itself into this process, the more powerfully it is able to sustain itself, nonetheless as something incomplete, so that it most posit something not involved in this process of reconciliation: the transcendental ego, the self as such. The empirical self can only exist by the positing of something beyond it, that exceeds it. Men have called this something God, have represented it with different ideas and philosophical systems, but it is simply the absolute subjectivity. This part of my philosophy came to me when reading of a concept elaborated by Schleiermacher and Feuerbach called absolute subjectivity. The former said "Emotions are significant not simply because they are ‘felt’, but because they are inward witnesses and responses to realities other than the self." They used the concept to explain religion in the following way... Man objectified in his Gods these inward witnesses of his own sensations and qualities; they represented the omnipotence of feeling. They represented aspects of human nature freed from time, place, nature.

This "self as such," the transcendental ego, belongs to that transcendental order which values, philosophical and moral ideas, and Gods represent. These values and ideas are not positive objects of knowledge, but merely representative, representations of this order:

"Kant's philosophy is essentially an attempt to relate transcendental and empirical apperception; to unite the original consciousness of man as a particular subject, as a being in possession of a soul, as a self, to the consciousness of this self enduring throughout many changing experiences. He attempted to do what Aristotle had failed to do, namely extrapolate from the conception of the universality of experience the universality of knowledge. This concept of the universality of experience, which is the basic insight of Kantian philosophy; the concept of a totalizing power on the part of human reflection, which realizes its objects in synthetic union, is however antithetical to the form which philosophy must assume. These two consciousnesses cannot be united, but only inter-related, for the simple reason that the former cannot be positively designated as an object of knowledge. " - Hamartia

Philosophy, beginning with Plato, has understood itself as only a representative knowledge, while ethics and morality have in a sense degenerated, in the attempt to be positive objects of knowledge- facts, or sets of particular knowledge, particular virtues and vices. As the ideas of philosophy represent the transcendental order, so I want to establish a new morality wherein values represent the process of analogy by which the empirical and transcendental egos might be and are related to one another. Philosophy is the revelation of the transcendental order to which the self belongs and by virtue of which it has existence, while morality must be a system of relations which allows the empirical ego to grasp its own nature as analogous to the transcendental ego. Morality would thus exert a transformative power rather than a prescriptive one.

This analogizing or transformative power, I call the "daemonic." A Daemon in Greece was a half-god, between man and god, which carried humans from the mortal to divine sphere. Eros or love was, itself, referred to as a daemon. I take this term from Bruno. I offer some formulations of the daemonic, what I conceive to be the fundamental moral reality, here:

"The life of the self is a continual ascent and descent through these different modes of existence, [egoic and nonegoic, freedom and necessity, etc.] a continuous articulation between these two different spheres. Giordano Bruno regarded the self in this way, namely as a kind of expectant disquietude which must continuously articulate itself amidst opposing forces; between the ego and non-ego, freedom and necessity, spirit and flesh, in his concept of love. In love's attempt to spiritualize itself, to overcome finitude, the limitation of bodily existence, mortality, and necessity, it is deceived by the image of beauty and falls only into sensuousness, in which its spiritual ecstasy is annihilated. Thus love is committed to a cyclic process of ascent toward the spiritual and descent into sensuality, which Bruno calls the heroic frenzies. Through love, it is as though the seed of the eternal takes root in time, the seed of the spirit takes root in flesh; the attempt love makes to make itself spirit is not paired to a desire, for desire is already directed toward beauty, nor to a state of inebriation, but rather to the disunion within the lover himself, which expresses itself not through a synthesis of the contrary forces which war within him, but through a continual division of these forces into objective relations between freedom and necessity, truth and beauty, spirit and flesh.

One should recall the words of Aeschylus:

oneirophantoi de penthēmones
pareisi doxai pherou-
sai kharin mataian.
matan gar, eut' an esthla tis dokōn hora,
parallaxasa dia
kherōn bebaken opsis ou methusteron
pterois opadous' hupnou keleuthois.’

Why does Aeschylus use the word "keleuthois" to designate the path which the deceptive images of beauty take in leading man to the sleep of empty, hopeless longing? Both Hesiod and Parmenides used this word when making the point that day and night, sleep and wakefulness, are caught up in eternal alternation, and so pothos or longing, the sleep of love, continually awakens us to eros and the definite object of our longing, and this awakened love must in turn fall back into itself, must sleep."

Quote :

"Ει ουν φιλοσοφητέον είτε μη φιλοσοφητέον, φιλοσοφητέον, [Man, by virtue of his daemonic nature, must be a philosopher, rather he wants to or not, rather he philosophizes or not.] to speak with Athanasius. We cannot, in the manner of one of the old Greeks, name the world a cosmos and beauty until we have named our own soul a cosmos and beauty; to behold and grasp all the world in an idea we must first have come to know ourselves as one particular being and no other and have had everything good and evil rent from the trembling heart and held, not in time, which diffuses our being like colors from a ray of light, but in eternity, which concentrates it. Every man of genius has believed in the eternal, that belief is the very condition of his vitality and flourishing. Perhaps this belief serves as nothing more than an obscuration of the spirit, which man requires if he is to ascend into the highest possible regions of his genius; perhaps he must find all the earth wanting if, like Cassandra of Ilion, he is to utter things not fit for the earth, but it is always the same, and we become like that angel whose wings were set aflame when he reentered this world, if one can entertain the old Gnostic myth. We suffer upon turning back into ourselves, we suffer from the failure to seize upon that inner motion of the heart's genius, which alone could move us to acknowledge the ideal as fate; the consequence of that strange lust which compels us to embrace obscurity, darkness, and uncertainty, but moreover to prefer this benighted world of the self over that law which strikes against the heart when love, fully matured, overcomes and inspires us to act with proud indifference against the hazards of our mortality. Dei virtutem dei sapientiam, [knowledge, for god, is a virtue] or if one may reverse the old theologian's paradox: yes, and man's sin; or, to reinterpret the account of Genesis, what flowered with the greatest sweetness in heaven is reaped with the most bitterness upon the earth.

Making use of Bruno's account of love, I call the resolution of the disquietude of the self the heroic, and it's return into itself, the daemonic. The daemonic leads to a polarization of the individual through a series of subjective transformations, as he is led to find his place anew in each of the oppositions which have been established between the principle of the ego and that of non-ego. This concept of the “daemonic” I venture as the perfect articulation of the incongruous position of the Pascalian man, as well as that disunion which lives from within man himself." - Hamartia.

Thus I have recovered the conditions and fundamental reality behind the valuing subject, the empirical ego, which Nietzsche failed to do, but without any reference to his philosophy, and outside of any Nietzschean framework. Though, to speak like him, my philosophy/morality is "beyond good and evil" in the sense that all the virtues and vices and systems of value are equally representations of the transcendental order.

"Philosophers have proved incapable of conceiving of good and evil, freedom and necessity, the finite will and infinite creative power invested to man at the same level of moral reality, although Spinoza should be commended for making a brilliant attempt at doing so; one is always the negative expression, or lack, of the other. The fact that the empirical, lived self-consciousness can only preserve itself as an incomplete process, with no final synthesis of its contents which would allow it to grasp its freedom, not as the disparate extension through various transformations in life, but as a singular will and imperative, a categorical determination of its character, in the language of Kant- that is the source of "evil," that is, what the Platonists formulated in the proto-moral conception "akrasia," acting against ones own ethical and rational principle. Insofar as man's fundamental experience as an ethical, moral, or meaning-seeking being is one of limitation and finitude, his fundamental experience as a free being in possession of a will must be one of "sin," of corruption. In the first case man takes freedom as a representative idea, as a representation of the transcendental self-consciousness and ideal ego, but in the second case he must realize this "ethical idea" in some objective specification of knowledge, in order to exercise his will and moral potency; he must realize it in a particular canon of virtues and vices. But as was shown in the previous essay, his moral potency does not truly belong to the will, to his free agency, but rather to his capacity, as an empirical or lived ego, as a daemonic being, to be stimulated by the transcendental ego, that is, to preserve himself as an empirical self-consciousness, as a living ego and in the spirit of daemonism, by positing an ideal representative of the transcendental, toward which he must direct himself, even though the preservation afforded to him in this process is a preservation, a being held in existence, as only an incomplete being, a sinful being, a corrupted and limited being. " - Hamartia

Quote :

"Why was it bad for man to eat the fruit? Was the fruit itself bad? How could it be, if it came from God? Eriugena said that the form which the fruit assumed was good, but that only man's reaction to it was bad. Like a drug. The drug in itself, in what it promised, in its beauty, was good... But when man consumes it, it disorders him, puts him out of joint with his own essence... intoxicates him. What was one, in man, the soul, is disintegrated, made dual, and turned into parts, under the intoxicating influence of the tree of knowledge. This is the origin of his disunion within himself, which Pascal speaks of most eloquently, the abyss which is pregnant with good and evil. The knowledge of good and evil is not contained in the fruit, it is the consequence of the fruit. In God all is united, God's knowledge is not particular, God bears knowledge without losing sight of the totality. But when man takes the fruit, it breaks down his soul into particular passions and pieces of knowledge.

... This dis-organization of his original nature is the intoxication, the corruption, evil. Man comes to see the world no longer as a totality and unity, but as broken and fragmented, in time.

The fruit of knowledge can by eaten angels and Gods, for everything is united in them. But when man consumes it it decomposes his unified nature into a series of particular things, introduces the order of time into nature, and dis-integrates reality into the fleeting parade of individual moments and things we live in now. In this sense "evil" is not real, it is only an effect, in man. Thus Eriugena makes the strange claim that man's expulsion from paradise was an expulsion from human nature itself.

... Eriugena shared a conception of God with Spinoza, God as a primordial substance with infinite attributes. For Eriugena this implied that anything that could be said about God was true, considered from different modes in which these attributes might be said to be or not be. The very fact that an idea can be clearly articulated indicates its truth. Again, only the individuating and decomposing force of the human intellect is responsible for see things in a negative designation, as non-entity, non-existence. Here we have the first glimmering of a speculative ethics. He says that the amount of interpretations of the bible is like the innumerable colors in a peacock's tail, that knowledge is infinite, and he delights in this idea. This perspective also contains the richest conception of the the inner disunion within the self, the "inner wound" within it that divides it into an ego and non-ego, a particular individual personality and the world. Eriugena transfers this disuinion of individual existence to the divine substance itself, dividing that substance into natura, through the categories of being and non-being, analgous to the finite and infinite which express themselves through man's inherent disuinion, constituting the four divisions of nature. Body and mind are not united, nor opposed, for him.... bodily existence and passion is one mode of the infinte substance, thought is another, their relation expressing at first the metaxy within the individual between the finite and infinite, mortal and immortal soul, and then the one in which the substance is expressed as natura, as nobeing and being, perishable world and imperishable God.

... For Eriugena, a passion is the finite and mutable revelation of the eternal aspect of a thought, a thought is the infinite and immutable revelation of the finite aspect of a passion. That is his concept of theophany. Goodness consists in following through the series of theophanies to the final mode of being, in completely realizing the eternal thought in the passions and the finite passion in thought, in other words, it consists in philosophy.

He seems to think that... anything we could possibly say about "God" is true, given what mode we conceive of it in, ie. any piece of knowledge we venture about the divine nature is true either as the finite aspect of a passion in the infinite and eternal mirror of some thought, or it is the eternal and infinite aspect of some thought "shown in a glass darkly" in the seductive semblance of some human passion. .... Ethics becomes the soverign philosophy, the science of articulating ideas. The ontology [study of being] of ideas, moral and philosophical."

Quote :

"We later civilizations . . . we too know that we are mortal.

We had long heard tell of whole worlds that had vanished, of empires sunk without a trace, gone down with all their men and all their machines into the unexplorable depths of the centuries, with their gods and their laws, their academies and their sciences pure and applied, their grammars and their dictionaries, their Classics, their Romantics, and their Symbolists, their critics and the critics of their critics. . . . We were aware that the visible earth is made of ashes, and that ashes signify something. Through the obscure depths of history we could make out the phantoms of great ships laden with riches and intellect; we could not count them. But the disasters that had sent them down were, after all, none of our affair.

Elam, Ninevah, Babylon were but beautiful vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds had as little significance for us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia...these too would be beautiful names. Lusitania too, is a beautiful name. And we see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all. We are aware that a civilization has the same fragility as a life. The circumstances that could send the works of Keats and Baudelaire to join the works of Menander are no longer inconceivable; they are in the newspapers. That is not all. The searing lesson is more complete still. It was not enough for our generation to learn from its own experience how the most beautiful things and the most ancient, the most formidable and the best ordered, can perish by accident; in the realm of thought, feeling, and common sense, we witnessed extraordinary phenomena: paradox suddenly become fact, and obvious fact brutally believed.

I shall cite but one example: the great virtues of the German peoples have begotten more evils, than idleness ever bred vices. With our own eyes, we have seen conscientious labor, the most solid learning, the most serious discipline and application adapted to appalling ends.

So many horrors could not have been possible without so many virtues. Doubtless, much science was needed to kill so many, to waste so much property, annihilate so many cities in so short a time; but moral qualities in like number were also needed. Are Knowledge and Duty, then, suspect?

So the Persepolis of the spirit is no less ravaged than the Susa of material fact. Everything has not been lost, but everything has sensed that it might perish.

An extraordinary shudder ran through the marrow of Europe. She felt in every nucleus of her mind that she was no longer the same, that she was no longer herself, that she was about to lose consciousness, a consciousness acquired through centuries of bearable calamities, by thousands of men of the first rank, from innumerable geographical, ethnic, and historical coincidences.

So -- as though in desperate defense of her own physiological being and resources -- all her memory confusedly returned. Her great men and her great books came back pell-mell. Never has so much been read, nor with such passion, as during the war: ask the booksellers. . . . Never have people prayed so much and so deeply: ask the priests. All the saviors, founders, protectors, martyrs, heroes, all the fathers of their country, the sacred heroines, the national poets were invoked. . . .

And in the same disorder of mind, at the summons of the same anguish, all cultivated Europe underwent the rapid revival of her innumerable ways of thought: dogmas, philosophies, heterogeneous ideals; the three hundred ways of explaining the World, the thousand and one versions of Christianity, the two dozen kinds of positivism; the whole spectrum of intellectual light spread out its incompatible colors, illuminating with a strange and contradictory glow the death agony of the European soul. While inventors were feverishly searching their imaginations and the annals of former wars for the means of doing away with barbed wire, of outwitting submarines or paralyzing the flight of airplanes, her soul was intoning at the same time all the incantations it ever knew, and giving serious consideration to the most bizarre prophecies; she sought refuge, guidance, consolation throughout the whole register of her memories, past acts, and ancestral attitudes. Such are the known effects of anxiety, the disordered behavior of mind fleeing from reality to nightmare and from nightmare back to reality, terrified, like a rat caught in a trap. . . .

The military crisis may be over. The economic crisis is still with us in all its force. But the intellectual crisis, being more subtle and, by it nature, assuming the most deceptive appearances (since it takes place in the very realm of dissimulation)...this crisis will hardly allow us to grasp its true extent, its phase.

No one can say what will be dead or alive tomorrow, in literature, philosophy, aesthetics; no one yet knows what ideas and modes of expression will be inscribed on the casualty list, what novelties will be proclaimed.

Hope, of course, remains -- singing in an undertone:

Et cum vorandi vicerit libidinem
Late triumphet imperator spiritus.

But hope is only man's mistrust of the clear foresight of his mind. Hope suggests that any conclusion unfavorable to us must be an error of the mind. And yet the facts are clear and pitiless; thousands of young writers and artists have died; the illusion of a European culture has been lost, and knowledge has been proved impotent to save anything whatsoever; science is mortally wounded in its moral ambitions and, as it were, put to shame by the cruelty of its applications; idealism is barely surviving, deeply stricken, and called to account for its dreams; realism is hopeless, beaten, routed by its own crimes and errors; greed and abstinence are equally flouted; faiths are confused in their aim -- cross against cross, crescent against crescent; and even the skeptics, confounded by the sudden, violent, and moving events that play with our minds as a cat with a mouse . . . even the skeptics lose their doubts, recover, and lose them again, no longer master of the motions of their thought.

The swaying of the ship has been so violent that the best-hung lamps have finally overturned. . . .

What gives this critical condition of the mind its depth and gravity is the patient's condition when she was overcome.

I have neither the time nor the ability to define the intellectual situation in Europe in 1914. And who could pretend to picture that situation? The subject is immense, requiring every order of knowledge and endless information. Besides, when such a complex whole is in question, the difficulty of reconstructing the past, even the recent past, is altogether comparable to that of constructing the future, even the near future; or rather, they are the same difficulty. The prophet is in the same boat as the historian. Let us leave them there.

For all I need is a vague general recollection of what was being thought just before the war, the kinds of intellectual pursuit then in progress, the works being published.

So if I disregard all detail and confine myself to a quick impression, to that natural whole given by a moment's perception, I see . . . nothing! Nothing . . . and yet an infinitely potential nothing.

The physicists tell us that if the eye could survive in an oven fired to the point of incandescence, it would see . . . nothing. There would be no unequal intensities of light left to mark off points in space. That formidable contained energy would produce invisibility, indistinct equality. Now, equality of that kind is nothing else than a perfect state of disorder.

And what made that disorder in the mid of Europe? The free coexistence, in all her cultivated minds, of the most dissimilar ideas, the most contradictory principles of life and learning. That is characteristic of a modern epoch.

I am not averse to generalizing the notion of "modern" to designate certain ways of life, rather than making it purely a synonym of contemporary. There are moments and places in history to which we moderns could return without greatly disturbing the harmony of those times, without seeming objects infinitely curious and conspicuous . . . creatures shocking, dissonant, and unassimilable. Wherever our entrance would create the least possible sensation, that is where we should feel almost at home. It is clear that Rome in the time of Trajan, or Alexandria under the Ptolemies, would take us in more easily than many places less remote in time but more specialized in a single race, a single culture, and a single system of life.

Well then! Europe in 1914 had perhaps reached the limit of modernism in this sense. Every mind of any scope was a crossroads for all shades of opinion; every thinker was an international exposition of thought. There were the works of the mind in which the wealth of contrasts and contradictory tendencies was like the insane displays of light in the capitals of those days: eyes were fatigued, scorched.... How much material wealth, how much labor and planning it took, how many centuries were ransacked, how many heterogeneous lives were combined, to make possible such a carnival, and to set it up as the supreme wisdom and the triumph of humanity?

In a book of that era -- and not one of the most mediocre -- we should have no trouble in finding: the influence of the Russian ballet, a touch of Pascal's gloom, numerous impressions of the Goncourt type, something of Nietzsche, something of Rimbaud, certain effects due to a familiarity with painters, and sometimes the tone of a scientific publication...the whole flavored with an indefinably British quality difficult to assess! Let us notice, by the way, that within each of the components of this mixture other bodies could well be found. It would be useless to point them out: it would be merely to repeat what I have just said about modernism, and to give the whole history of the European mind.

Standing, now, on an immense sort of terrace of Elsinore that stretches from Basel to Cologne, bordered by the sands of Nieuport, the marshes of the Somme, the limestone of Champagne, the granites of Alsace . . . our Hamlet of Europe is watching millions of ghosts.

But he is an intellectual Hamlet, meditating on the life and death of truths; for ghosts, he has all the subjects of our controversies; for remorse, all the titles of our fame. He is bowed under the weight of all the discoveries and varieties of knowledge, incapable of resuming the endless activity; he broods on the tedium of rehearsing the past and the folly of always trying to innovate. He staggers between two abysses -- for two dangers never cease threatening the world: order and disorder.

Every skull he picks up is an illustrious skull. This one was Leonardo. He invented the flying man, but the flying man has not exactly served his inventor's purposes. We know that, mounted on his great swan (il grande uccello sopra del dosso del suo magnio cecero) he has other tasks in our day than fetching snow from the mountain peaks during the hot season to scatter it on the streets of towns. And that other skull was Leibnitz, who dreamed of universal peace. And this one was Kant...and Kant begat Hegel, and Hegel begat Marx, and Marx begat. . . .

Hamlet hardly knows what to make of so many skulls. But suppose he forgets them! Will he still be himself? His terribly lucid mind contemplates the passage from war to peace: darker, more dangerous than the passage from peace to war; all peoples are troubled by it. . . . "What about Me," he says, "what is to become of Me, the European intellect? ...And what is peace? Peace is perhaps that state of things in which the natural hostility between men is manifested in creation, rather than destruction as in war. Peace is a time of creative rivalry and the battle of production; but I am not tired of producing? Have I not exhausted my desire for radical experiment, indulged too much in cunning compounds? ...Should I not perhaps lay aside my hard duties and transcendent ambitions? Perhaps follow the trend and do like Polonius who is now director of a great newspaper; like Laertes, who is something in aviation; like Rosencrantz, who is doing God knows what under a Russian name?

"Farewell, ghosts! The world no longer needs you -- or me. By giving the names of progress to its own tendency to a fatal precision, the world is seeking to add to the benefits of life the advantages of death. A certain confusion still reigns; but in a little while all will be made clear, and we shall witness at last the miracle of an animal society, the perfect and ultimate anthill."

Quote :

[ Second Letter ]


I was saying the other day the peace is the kind of war that allows acts of love and creation in its course; it is, then, a more complex and obscure process than war properly so-called, as life is more obscure and more profound than death.

But the origin and early stages of peace are more obscure than peace itself, as the fecundation and beginnings of life are more mysterious than the functioning of a body once it is made and adapted.

Everyone today feels the presence of this mystery as an actual sensation; a few men must doubtless feel that their own inner being is positively a part of the mystery; and perhaps there is someone with a sensibility so clear, subtle, and rich that he senses in himself certain aspects of our destiny more advanced than our destiny itself.

I have not that ambition. The things of the world interest me only as they relate to the intellect; for me, everything relates to the intellect. Bacon would say that this notion of the intellect is an idol. I agree, but I have not found a better idol.

I am thinking then of the establishment of peace insofar as it involves the intellect and things of the intellect. This point of view is false, since it separates the mind from all other activities; but such abstract operations and falsifications are inevitable: every point of view is false.

A first thought dawns. The idea of culture, of intelligence, of great works, has for us a very ancient connection with the idea of Europe -- so ancient that we rarely go back so far.

Other parts of the world have had admirable civilizations, poets of the first order, builders, and even scientists. But no part of the world has possessed this singular physical property: the most intense power of radiation combined with an equally intense power of assimilation.

Everything came to Europe, and everything came from it. Or almost everything.

Now, the present day brings with it this important question: can Europe hold its pre-eminence in all fields?

Will Europe become what it is in reality -- that is, a little promontory on the continent of Asia?

Or will it remain what it seems -- that is, the elect portion of the terrestrial globe, the pearl of the sphere, the brain of a vast body?

In order to make clear the strict necessity of this alternative, let me develop here a kind of basic theorem.

Consider a map of the world. On this planisphere are all the habitable lands. The whole is divided into regions, and in each of these regions there is a certain density of population, a certain quality of men. In each of these regions, also, there are corresponding natural resources -- a more or less fertile soil, a more or less rich substratum, a more or less watered terrain, which may be more or less easily developed for transport, etc.

All these characteristics make it possible, at any period, to classify the regions we are speaking of, so that at any given time the situation on the earth may be defined by a formula showing the inequalities between the inhabited regions of its surface.

At each moment, the history of the next moment will depend on this given inequality.

Let us now examine, not our theoretical classification, but the one that actually prevailed in the world until recently. We notice a striking fact, which we take too much for granted:

Small though it be, Europe has for centuries figured at the head of the list. In spite of her limited extent -- and although the richness of her soil is not out of the ordinary -- she dominates the picture. By what miracle? Certainly the miracle must lie in the high quality of her population. That quality must compensate for the smaller number of men, of square miles, of tons or ore, found in Europe. In one scale put the empire of India and in the other the United Kingdom: the scale with the smaller weight tilts down!

That is an extraordinary upset in equilibrium. But its consequences are still more so: they will shortly allow us to foresee a gradual change in the opposite direction.

We suggested just now that the quality of her men must be the determining factor in Europe's superiority. I cannot analyze this quality in detail; but from a summary examination I would say that a driving thirst, an ardent and disinterested curiosity, a happy mixture of imagination and rigorous logic, a certain unpessimistic skepticism, an unresigned mysticism...are the most specifically active characteristics of the European psyche.

A single example of that spirit, an example of the highest order and of the very first importance, is Greece -- since the whole Mediterranean littoral must be counted in Europe. Smyrna and Alexandria are as much a part of Europe as Athens and Marseilles. Greece founded geometry. It was a mad undertaking: we are still arguing about the possibility of such a folly.

What did it take to bring about that fantastic creation? Consider that neither the Egyptians nor the Chinese nor the Chaldeans nor the Hindus managed it. Consider what a fascinating adventure it was, a conquest a thousand times richer and actually far more poetic than that of the Golden Fleece. No sheepskin is worth the golden thigh of Pythagoras.

This was an enterprise requiring gifts that, when found together, are usually the most incompatible. It required argonauts of the mind, tough pilots who refused to be either lost in their thoughts or distracted by their impressions. Neither the frailty of the premises that supported them, nor the infinite number and subtlety of the inferences they explored could dismay them. They were as though equidistant from the inconsistent Negro and the indefinite fakir. They accomplished the extremely delicate and improbable feat of adapting common speech to precise reasoning; they analyzed the most complex combinations of motor and visual functions, and found that these corresponded to certain linguistic and grammatical properties; they trusted in words to lead them through space like far-seeing blind men. And space itself became, from century to century, a richer and more surprising creation, as thought gained possession of itself and had more confidence in the marvelous system of reason and in the original intuition which had endowed it with such incompatible instruments as definitions, axioms, lemmas, theorems, problems, porisms, etc.

I should need a whole book to treat the subject properly. I wanted merely to indicate in a few words one of the characteristic inventions of the European genius. This example brings me straight back to my thesis.

I have claimed that the imbalance maintained for so long in Europe's favor was, by its own reaction, bound to change by degrees into an imbalance in the opposite direction. That is what I called by the ambitious name of basic theorem.

How is this proposition to be proved? I take the same example, that of the geometry of the Greeks; and I ask the reader to consider the consequences of this discipline through the ages. We see it gradually, very slowly but very surely, assuming such authority that all research, all the ways of acquiring knowledge tend inevitably to borrow its rigorous procedure, its scrupulous economy of "matter," its automatic generalizations, its subtle methods, and that infinite discretion which authorizes the wildest audacity. Modern science was born of this education in the grand style.

But once born, once tested and proved by its practical applications, our science became a means of power, a means of physical domination, a creator of material wealth, an apparatus for exploiting the resources of the whole planet -- ceasing to be an "end in itself" and an artistic activity. Knowledge, which was a consumer value, became an exchange value. The utility of knowledge made knowledge a commodity, no longer desired by a few distinguished amateurs but by Everybody.

This commodity, then, was to be turned out in more and more manageable or consumable forms; it was to be distributed to a more and more numerous clientele; it was to become an article of commerce, an article, in short, that can be imitated and produced almost anywhere.

Result: the inequality that once existed between the regions of the world as regards the mechanical arts, the applied sciences, the scientific instruments of war or peace -- an inequality on which Europe's predominance was based -- is tending gradually to disappear.

So, the classification of the habitable regions of the world is becoming one in which gross material size, mere statistics and figures (e.g., population, area, raw materials) finally and alone determine the rating of the various sections of the globe.

And so the scales that used to tip in our favor, although we appeared the lighter, are beginning to lift us gently, as though we had stupidly shifted to the other side the mysterious excess that was ours. We have foolishly made force proportional to mass!

This coming phenomenon, moreover, may be connected with another to be found in every nation: I mean the diffusion of culture, and its acquisition by ever larger categories of individuals.

An attempt to predict the consequences of such diffusion, or to find whether it will or not inevitably bring on decadence, would be a delightfully complicated problem in intellectual physics.

The charm of the problem for the speculative mind proceeds, first, from its resemblance to the physical fact of diffusion and, next, from a sudden transformation into a profound difference when the thinker remembers that his primary object is men not molecules.

A drop of wine falling into water barely colors it, and tends to disappear after showing as a pink cloud. That is the physical fact. But suppose now that some time after it has vanished, gone back to limpidity, we should see, here and there in our glass -- which seemed once more to hold pure water -- drops of wine forming, dark and pure -- what a surprise!...

This phenomenon of Cana is not impossible in intellectual and social physics. We then speak of genius, and contrast it with diffusion.

Just now we are considering a curious balance that worked in inverse ratio to weight. Then we saw a liquid system pass as though spontaneously from homogeneous to heterogeneous, from intimate mingling to clear separation.... These paradoxical images give the simplest and most practical notion of the role played in the World by what -- for five or ten thousand years -- has been called Mind.

But can the European Mind -- or at least its most precious content -- be totally diffused? Must such phenomena as democracy, the exploitation of the globe, and the general spread of technology, all of which presage a deminutio capitis for Europe...must these be taken as absolute decisions of fate? Or have we some freedom against this threatening conspiracy of things?

Perhaps in seeking that freedom we may create it. But in order to seek it, we must for a time give up considering groups, and study the thinking individual in his struggle for a personal life against his life in society."

Quote :

"Of great import are these last lines:

"This coming phenomenon, moreover, may be connected with another to be found in every nation: I mean the diffusion of culture, and its acquisition by ever larger categories of individuals.

An attempt to predict the consequences of such diffusion, or to find whether it will or not inevitably bring on decadence, would be a delightfully complicated problem in intellectual physics.

The charm of the problem for the speculative mind proceeds, first, from its resemblance to the physical fact of diffusion and, next, from a sudden transformation into a profound difference when the thinker remembers that his primary object is men not molecules.

A drop of wine falling into water barely colors it, and tends to disappear after showing as a pink cloud. That is the physical fact. But suppose now that some time after it has vanished, gone back to limpidity, we should see, here and there in our glass -- which seemed once more to hold pure water -- drops of wine forming, dark and pure -- what a surprise!...

This phenomenon of Cana is not impossible in intellectual and social physics. We then speak of genius, and contrast it with diffusion.

Just now we are considering a curious balance that worked in inverse ratio to weight. Then we saw a liquid system pass as though spontaneously from homogeneous to heterogeneous, from intimate mingling to clear separation.... These paradoxical images give the simplest and most practical notion of the role played in the World by what -- for five or ten thousand years -- has been called Mind.

But can the European Mind -- or at least its most precious content -- be totally diffused? Must such phenomena as democracy, the exploitation of the globe, and the general spread of technology, all of which presage a deminutio capitis for Europe...must these be taken as absolute decisions of fate? Or have we some freedom against this threatening conspiracy of things?

Perhaps in seeking that freedom we may create it. But in order to seek it, we must for a time give up considering groups, and study the thinking individual in his struggle for a personal life against his life in society."

How to endure the final diffusion of culture without becoming decadents- that is a great task that is set before us."

Quote :

"But everything about our modern world and the direction that science and philosophy have taken seems bent on “closing the circle” of mortal life, on annihilating any possibility of mediating the transcendental and empirical spheres of the ego."

Quote :

"These symbols and ideas, like the eternity of Nietzsche, or the Prometheus of Aeschylus, are not linguistic in the same way that our common speech is linguistic, for they originate in the daemonic nature which is the precondition of human self-consciousness, and as such represent things not yet able to be fully articulated by the self-conscious human being;
The ancient philosophies were all spontaneously engendered through the daemonic, they served as a horizon through which the self-consciousness could take shape. They served as a limit to what could be expressed in human tongue.

And this is one of the greatest of mysteries. Language can only evolve when something has placed a limit to what can be expressed; there must be a limit placed upon language before language can evolve. Language only makes sense when it begins through a passive state, that of the daemonic being which has been opened up to "the deeper life." I can only speak the word "man" when the word "god" has served as a limit to the former conception. So on and so on, down to the first word, so to speak.

Philosophy, as that essential thing which a daemonic being does, as the fundamental nature of a daemonic being, (the only one we know of is the human) is the ground of this mystery."

Quote :

"The musical animal.-- The development of human language only becomes comprehensible when one proposes some purely representative language out of which it evolved and eventually adopted the power of communication. It is probable that the first man Adam did not comprehend things in name, but in song. Music is just such a kind of purely representative language, when one regards it in its most essential sense, as an art whose own medium or manner of depiction serves as the depiction itself; music is the primeval nature out of which man first began to take cognisance of the world through his intellectual, abstracting power, rather than his brute sensibility, in which all things first suggested to him their “meaning,” in which every being stood frozen in a moment of revelation and betrayed its form to him, rent open by the entry of his voice. The dream of all poets has been to realize this purely representative language in words rather than in tones, but unfortunately the instinct or need for communication, which grew up within man much later, only after the utility of form was realized, and has thereby been insolubly bound up with words, always makes itself known, and renders this goal unachievable. In music itself this instinct has been exerting a retroactive influence, imbuing mere tone and sound with communicable significance, so that rarely even in this domain does man attain to that state of complete suggestibility which is called "inspiration." We cannot discover this primeval consciousness by realizing it through the analysis of our own music, but in the terms already ventured here one could imagine it as that point at which the consciousness, in its reflexive organization of the affects, first achieved that degree of reflexivity necessary to produce self-consciousness in our human sense of the word, when the enduring forms out of which our experience is constituted began to appear as such, as enduring, as form. That power which has transformed and has been transforming consciousness, that power for actively constituting the mental effects rather than reflexively, in accordance to our language and reason, in accordance to our more refined self-consciousness and the real utility that we find in the apprehension of form, namely logic and communication, will one day be controverted, as the last remnants of the older consciousness are annihilated through the new means of organizing the affects, so that the new state in which man might one day find himself, a purely active consciousness, will be quite analogous to that “musical consciousnesses,” to that absolute suggestibility before the world, in which all things intimated to man their being, which we cannot now imagine. But this new consciousness shall not represent, it will not represent at all, but only create, only declare; this consciousness of absolute communication, of absolute expression and engendering, will be more similar to the older consciousness of absolute representation than it is to our present one, to our now chimaeric nature."

Quote :

"Toward the good conscience.-- It is probable that the greatest human beings were in actuality the most child-like, but also the most courageous; who, by virtue of their courage, found the greatest beauty in emblazoning all their lives with hope's plaintive colors, their greatest happiness in the bountiful enthusiasm of desire. The misfortune is, that in time one of their hopes must be realized, one of their desires attained, in which case their good conscience about things becomes poisoned by reality, which forms only the lowly dregs of a wine that has long since run dry and, in relation to their ardent dreams about life, must always corrupt them. Hence, the great commandment of Epicurean morality to throw off all the dregs of reality, which of course means to throw off reality itself, to dwell silently in one's little garden all life long. A Stoic, possessed by an opposite nature, and perhaps also by an opposite courage; incapable of hoping and desiring with a good conscience, without the birth and death pangs of expectation and dissappointment, aims to so wholly indwell in reality that he forgets how to desire and to hope completely, but with the same final aim as an Epicurean: to maintain a good conscience, only with respect to bearing the truth. These are both quite violent methods toward securing a peaceful breast; have we developed no subtler means of reconciling the ideality and actuality of man, of taming the heart than- Epicureanism and Stoicism?"

Quote :

"A great sentence from the hand of an ancient Greek philosopher says that only he who possesses a glint of heaven in his eye can endure looking at the sun. But we cannot know that this glint is truly born of the heavens and a moral fecundity by looking at meager fires, but we must see if we can endure the sun, the idea, itself. Our love must not be meager, but noble."

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"Man imbues his most powerful desires and passions with intellectual and artistic meanings, to the point that exercising these things (like the sexual drive) no longer fully empties them of their vital force, and an inarticulate melancholy is left over as it were: the melancholy of the artist and the philosopher, or what we sometimes refer to as genius."

Quote :

"The destruction of the past would not have been inevitable if human beings were not so fucking stupid. Not the destruction of the old values, but their transvaluation, that is what Nietzsche wanted. He would have used (if he hadn't gone insane) the will to power as a principle to organize all human values into a system, a hierarchy starting with all the life-denying values and leading up to those which most affirmed life and promoted the will to power. Doubtlessly Nietzsche would have put the eternal return at the very top.
Once this system was developed, it would serve as a kind of science. The philosophers of the future would have used it to construct new values. There need not be any destruction of either abstract values or human beings through this process, the process Nietzsche always spoke about.

This is why Hitler failed as a creator of value. His art was not informed by techne, by a science, by the kind of system Nietzsche was trying to develop and which I just described. You can't just assert values out of thin air, they have to be based on something. And the only thing, to Nietzsche's mind, they could be based on was that system I am talking about. Hitler didn't fucking have it, and Nietzsche never was able to complete his construction of it."
A drop of wine falling into water barely colors it, and tends to disappear after showing as a pink cloud. That is the physical fact. But suppose now that some time after it has vanished, gone back to limpidity, we should see, here and there in our glass -- which seemed once more to hold pure water -- drops of wine forming, dark and pure -- what a surprise!...

This phenomenon of Cana is not impossible in intellectual and social physics. We then speak of genius, and contrast it with diffusion.

Just now we are considering a curious balance that worked in inverse ratio to weight. Then we saw a liquid system pass as though spontaneously from homogeneous to heterogeneous, from intimate mingling to clear separation.... These paradoxical images give the simplest and most practical notion of the role played in the World by what -- for five or ten thousand years -- has been called Mind.

But can the European Mind -- or at least its most precious content -- be totally diffused? Must such phenomena as democracy, the exploitation of the globe, and the general spread of technology, all of which presage a deminutio capitis for Europe...must these be taken as absolute decisions of fate? Or have we some freedom against this threatening conspiracy of things?

Perhaps in seeking that freedom we may create it. But in order to seek it, we must for a time give up considering groups, and study the thinking individual in his struggle for a personal life against his life in society." - Paul Valery.

"Nietzsche's systematic presentation of all human values, the basis of a world-culture and moreover a culture of value creators (geniuses, to use Valery's language) whose creation is informed by this science, this techne or technical knowledge, was Nietzsche's answer to Valery's crisis, the diffusion of culture.""

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"How can one have a concept of freedom when freedom itself, by its very nature, defies all conceptualization? That was one of Schelling's big concerns, and we could ask a similar question: How can we value our selves when the self defies all value-conceptualization? That no idea is adequate to its ideatum, contra Spinoza; that no concept is adequate to its signified, is the major lesson in Schelling's great essay on freedom, and in a similar way we might say that no value is adequate to the self. Schelling thus said that all things find their ground in "that within God which is not God himself," and we can say that all values find their ground and origin in that "within the self which is not the self itself." I have articulated this unreflected part of the self which is none the less constituent of it in my writing about man's daemonic existence.

Nietzsche, too, recognized that no value was adequate and equal to the self which posited it, and that the Will to Power, this positing itself, then was the primary constituent of the self's moral-philosophical reality. He refused to look for a new ground for values, allowed them to remain groundless, and did not recognize any more subtle logic at work in the self, namely the daemonic- the existence of an unreflected, unegoic principle which, in its dynamic interaction with the reflected principle, constituted the moral-philosophical reality of the individual.

This dynamic interaction is nothing less than what has here been called self-valuing, or what one could speak of as self-love. We can see the shallowest example of it when a woman loves her own beauty and body, the corporeal, unegoic, non-reflective part of her self, and thereby appropriates it to the higher order of the reflective self-consciousness, herself thereby rising into a higher order of daemonic reality.

But what are the deeper and the deepest unreflected aspects of the self, how can they be appropriated by the reflective self-consciousness: to what extent can we recognize in the unreflected aspect of the self the ground of our values, our self-love, our self-value? Such unreflected aspects are things like necessity against our apparent freedom, mortality against our eternal aspirations. As I formulate the questions in my own philosophical language: to what extent can the continuity between the empirical and transcendental egos be realized?

These questions are the theoretical objects of the new philosophy I see posed here and by myself, the only philosophy capable of re-grounding morality and human values.
Goethe shows an equal point in his metamorphosis of plants: a plant grows through a series of expansive and contractive movements in distinction to animals for, while it must strive up for the sun, the plant must grope blindly in the dirt for moisture. The plant can grow indefinitely, but it only takes shape, becomes formulated, becomes an organism, because of the limit imposed on its progress through its need for water and light.

Without something to limit the development of the self it can never become structured. We should re-read the works of literature and philosophy through the lens of this metaphor, as if they were developing plants reaching up infinitely toward the sun and the horizon of meaning, but which nonetheless need the ground and its water; which expand and contract randomly, as the night changes to day, as it rains and as it dries up.

In other words, we should look for the unreflected aspect in every self-conscious moral and philosophical idea, and then play the reflected idea or principle upon the newly uncovered unreflected one.

The daemonic being becomes structured, individuated, through the interplay of these two principles within itself, the one limiting it, the other compelling it to expand. Holderlin described a similar situation with his concepts of the aorgic and organic, the spirit and the body, inconceivable nature and nature structured by human thought.

But this structure, in distinction to Holderlin's concept of the self, is self-effacing. The frenzied existence of the daemonic, the interaction of the egoic and nonegoic principles, is continually effacing its own productions. This is why I borrowed the term "daemonic" from Bruno's book "eroici frenzies" to describe my concept of the self: it is a self-effacing, frenzied existence. The final destruction of the self, the final renunciation of the self which Holderlin imagined was the apotheosis of tragedy cannot be accomplished through my philosophy: the height of daemonic existence leads to a dramatic reversal through the attaining of "eroici" or heroism, to use Bruno's terms: what has been called here the act of self-valuing, self-loving, and what I have called the re-instantiation of the unreflected aspect of the self in reflected self-consciousness.

This philosophy then, I think, would attain the greatest power in not offering itself as something for cohering the self in the manner of old morality and philosophy, through prescriptive ideation, not as a tool for shaping one's self and asserting particular values, but as an instrument for grounding the act of self-valuing, as an instrument for grounding the "daemon." It would do this by fully articulating the middle-ground the daemon occupies, by realizing the continuous discourse between the empirical and transcendental within which man, as a daemonic being, continuously takes form and is continuously effaced."

Quote :

"The ancients, especially in the case of the Greeks, found in nature a relief from their humanity, from the impulse toward knowledge, beauty, the true, and the good, which continually burdened them. These drives have grown cold for us, and it is in nature that we aim to reawaken them, as though by a kind of intoxicant. To be relieved of one's humanity- what a noble pleasure! Perhaps man once went before his gods with the same longing in his heart."

Out of that cold silence with which we return the silence of the divinity, philosophy learns to speak."

Quote :

"Just as Aristotle threw himself into the tides because he could not understand them, just as Empedocles threw himself into the flames of mount Etna because he could not understand it, so the poet throws himself into time because he cannot understand the eternal, which is to say, he loves."

Quote :

"What consoled us in hope can never be loved, while what we have loved can never console us in hope, for it is only when one of our desires denies the particular joy for which it had suffered to all the other innumerable desires which play upon our heart that one of life's graces manages to wholly confide itself to us, and will thereafter never betray itself again."

Quote :

"In the fulfillment of one longing, another usually finds its birth. In those beautiful waters Narcissus found his own image which, rather than the waters, he then loved, while from the most beautiful vantage upon the sea creeps into our heart those melancholy suggestions of some distant mountain that seems to lie brooding overhead. Our greatest joys tend to renounce themselves."

Quote :

"In nature, the animal man’s instincts were coordinated in such a way that the expression of one instinct was not merely the expression of its own force, but that of the entire organism, that of the consciousness. Consciousness is only this unified force, this reflexivity. To call forth the greatest store of consciousness with the slightest amount of sensory excitation, that was the “goal” of nature. Man’s reason eventually separated the instincts from one another, it introduced discontiguous states of mental affect into a consciousness born out of the need to grasp through continguous impressions relations of temporal and spatial nature. Such discontiguous states of affect we now recognize as “ideas,” words, abstractions. To reason, to arrange aesthetically the same kinds of relationships arranged metonymically by the early consciousness, relationships between events, things, and feelings, that is to say, to arrange them in accordance with these abstractions and the relationships suggested by an appeal to their standard (such as causality) man would have been provided with an advantage over the other beasts, the advantage of anticipation, imagination, and strategy.


His reason, in short, had the psychological consequence of a disruption in the metonymic structure of consciousness so that man began to experience the force of the instincts individually. The sensation of distance and gulf within himself inspired him with the thought of the soul, the thought of a self. The self represents a kind of abeyance of consciousness, the repose of a continuously discharging instinctual organism, a fragmentation of this activity in accordance with which the instincts could be re-coordinated, through “thought.” But this “thinking” could not realize a harmonious order of the instincts like that which nature took thousands of years to produce. The first thoughts to lend their coloring to the humans soul were accordingly very painful, and constituted a kind of negative expression of the organism, the force not of an organization but of a disorganization, from which man still suffers, for this disorganizing power of thought was doubtlessly very seductive, the force it was capable of generating far surpassed that of the organized instincts and the individuated instincts, and was in its power very compelling to early man, offering to him an impetus toward action and life that could not be denied, even if the life and the acts it led him to were dangerous, painful, tragic. It took root in the deepest parts of his consciousness. It is his conscience. The conscience juxtaposes instincts and passions of contrary dispositions, as the sexual drive and the metaphysical need are counter-poised to produce the inspiration of the Christian saint, and grasps this disorganizing power, this inspiration, in an abstraction, in a discontiguous state of consciousness. The disorganizing power of thought is the most seductive and powerful impetus to life that has been produced by nature, and for this reason it persists in man. This is only because thought has still been unable to realize a harmony of the instincts equal in power to that of his original nature.


The conscience, then, is the perishing and diseased nature which still lives within a consciousness attempting to actively realize an organization of its constituent drives, attempting to attain through discontiguous abstractions a new organization of the forces engendered by these drives as well as by the senses which disturb and incite it to life. In short, it is the voice of a disintegrated nature, a compendium of all bestial life, it is the voice of a being trying to become human.

You could picture the consciousness of man as a number of pendulums swinging... In most men the pendulums are separated by a great distance, they swing not together but at different speeds, by different paces, etc. A lot of them do not swing at all, they have run down over time, a particular drive has atrophied, ie. human domestication prevails. But in the man of genius all the pendulums- the drives, instincts, thoughts, and emotions which constitute consciousness.... are close to one another. If one pendulum swings, it hits up against the one next to it, and it to the one that follows, and so on, until all the pendulums are operating equally. Genius is measured by how little stimuli is needed to induce the entire consciousness to activity, the greatest geniuses need only a little stimulation to become very, very conscious. The fact that the drives operate as one leads to the strange behavior that allows the association between genius and insanity to be possible. Sexuality, intellect, all the emotions, etc.. all operate as one. Of course this is all archetypal, no genius, no man, has every united in his consciousness absolutely all the constituent drives available to human nature. They have achieved greater and lesser degrees of such a union, which always operates against a much stronger, much larger background of the unconscious which, again, is not repressed memories and drives, but those drives, thoughts, etc. which resist integration and still operate as separate forces."

Quote :

"There is a world outside of us, to which we have no access save through our senses, then there are these senses themselves, and finally there is our post-reflective apprehension of this sensory world, wherein we find ourselves capable of speech. My mouth waters when I think of the food because the reflexive chain coordinating these three stages has been broken. I fail to bridge the connection between the second stage, my senses, and the first and third stages, things on the outside world and post-reflective cognition. Sanity is this reflexivity, the continuous relationship drawn between these three "realities." To fail at any stage of this process would lead to the inability to distinguish the imagined from the real and from the experienced.

Every mental illness would share one common feature: they arise from such "broken chains" between the spheres of experience, sensation, and post-reflective, linguistic cognition."

Quote :

"... It is a wonder that, for such a delicate and ingeniously constructed melody as composes our inner life and idea of the world, the truly somber and the deeper notes such as love or suffering do not disconcert it, but that all the subtler notes of which it is comprised should almost immediately order themselves after them, incorporating them into the self-same theme of our personality; life recovers itself, not by opposing, but by encompassing, that which would disturb it. Truly vital character remains immutable, not from resolve or from obstinacy, but from a more complete understanding, and loftier sympathy.

... A Roman would slay himself, not out of despair, but out of happiness, when he was at the height of his physical and intellectual powers, so as not to be cut down inch by inch, as is the way of nature. A Greek would, at the height of passion, slay the object of his love, rather it be a lie, a god, or even a man, in order that it may not betray him. These are the two heights of spiritual independence which are, however, no longer possibilities for us: might there not be a third? The great soul suffers silently, as Schiller says: the great soul may, perhaps, also love silently."

Quote :

"From my understanding, what we call value-ontology here is a reversal of the classical philosophical paradigm. Philosophy has first studied the nature of being, ontology, then built a morality on top of that. What we think is that ontology, that being, can only be discovered after valuations have been made, after a value system has been established. The primary ontological factor then, for a morality of this kind, must be that entity which empowers and makes the valuation possible in the first place: the valuing and creating self. The study of ontology then becomes the study of what is theoretically possible, conceivable, for the valuing subject in terms of experience, it becomes the attempt Adorno pointed towards in this quote, "Perspectives must be produced which set the world beside itself, alienated from itself, revealing its cracks and fissures, as needy and distorted as it will one day lay there in the messianic light."

Morality (value) as primary, ontology as secondary, that is the basic premise. Following it through would eradicate the distinction between essence and appearance, noumenon and phenomenon, that Nietzsche often criticized and which had stifled philosophy by the 19th century.

This value before ontology notion I would sum up with this quote by Athanasius: Ει ουν φιλοσοφητέον είτε μη φιλοσοφητέον, φιλοσοφητέον. [Man, by virtue of his daemonic nature, must be a philosopher, rather he wants to or not, rather he philosophizes or not.]

The corruption of philosophy, morality's loss of its primary quality, goes as far back as Plato.

Traditional ethical philosophy and morality have phrased the Good in a language quite distinct from the language that traditional philosophy uses to phrase the True. The true has always been purely representative. The truth, in the old Platonic sense, as the Ideas, are not positive specifications of knowledge. They are conditions of possibility of knowledge. Like the law of identity, a thing is what it is and no other thing. That is not itself a positive piece of knowledge, but is rather a representative kind of knowledge: it merely represents the transcendental object by which the empirical consciousness holds itself in existence and sustains the process of thought. I want to begin a new ethical philosophy that treats the Good in just this way, as purely representative, as a condition of possibility for the empirical, lived, finite, meaning-seeking consciousness. Our morals do not accomplish such a representative act, they do not represent to us a transcendental object. Our moral and ethical philosophies have tried to be merely positive designations of knowledge. Do this or do not do this. This is a virtue, that is a vice, etc. This owes itself to the primal error by Plato, who spoke of the good in a different language than he used to speak of the true. The true was spoken of as a representative idea, whereas the good was discovered within Eros' loving gaze, was born of this gaze, and because it was related only to Eros, only to the lover and not the beloved object itself, not the transcendental order to which truth belonged, which truth represented, this "good" served for Eros as a merely positive objectification of knowledge rather than as a representative of the transcendental. The foremost goal of a new ethical philosophy must be to re-imagine "ethical ideas," that is, purely representative goods. In the way in which the idea sustains the process of thought and holds the empirical consciousness in existence, "ethical ideas" must sustain a process that I call the "erotic-daemonic," and that new ethical philosophy which engenders them must hold the transcendental objects and those truths which represent these objects in existence, must hold the "ontological" philosophy in existence, by continually recovering those conditions of limitation within the empirical consciousness from which such truths were born."

Quote :

"The primary ontological factor then, for a morality of this kind, must be that entity which empowers and makes the valuation possible in the first place: the valuing and creating self. The study of ontology then becomes the study of what is theoretically possible, conceivable, for the valuing subject in terms of experience...

Value ontology would be a method for refining a self-consistent, internal vision of life which, objectively specified, would provide such a "philosophical concept of experience." The philosophy that emerges out of it would deal, even in the extremity of its ontology, with things rooted in perception and experience, (and therefor the truth) since everything must first pass through the refining, self-consistent, internal conception of the world and the self, established through a cultivated valuation(s).

A quote by Nietzsche seems fitting:

This ridiculous overestimation and misunderstanding of consciousness has the very useful consequence that it prevents an all too fast development of consciousness. Believing that they possess consciousness, men have not exerted themselves very much to acquire it; and things haven't changed much in this respect. To this day the task of incorporating knowledge and making it instinctive is only beginning to dawn on the human eye and is not yet clearly discernible; it is a task that is seen only by those who have comprehended that so far we have incorporated only our errors and that all our consciousness relates to errors.""

Quote :

"Value ontology is a way of philosophizing that grants ontological primacy to the human agent (the valuing subject, named many things by many people- for Nietzsche, will, for Heidegger, Dasein, for me, the daemonic, for Kierkegaard simply the self or that which despairs) rather than ousia or being. It gets beyond, in this way, the distinction between truth and appearance and deals with questions of being in a language derived from a philosophically accurate and rich concept of experience rather than an abstract, Aristotelian table of categories, something which Kantian philosophy has always lacked."

Quote :

"The truth, that one is a mere instance in the world soul, and the appearance... that one truly exists, that one is a self. ..."the far more useful idea that value (more precisely the act of valuing) gives rise to both appearance and truth.""

Quote :

"To realize the will to power, which is the world, nullifies your existence as a human subject. You no longer exist as anything more than an incarnation of the world soul, an instance of will to power. The concept itself of will-to-power is a single line long ontology intended to describe all of existence. "Water is wet" is an ontology, but it only describes one small facet of the world. "Will to power," as an ontology of similar length but much wider scope, essentially means there is a potential that is continuously recycled without ever becoming actual. This potential force is what reality is, and there is no way to "actualize" or "unpack" this energy, as if the world itself were a continually climbing orgasm that cannot be consummated in any release of the built up force. "Will to power" as a philosophical concept literally means an unrealizable force, a potential that is infinite not in extremity, dimension, or intensity, but by virtue of the fact that it cannot be made actual, it cannot be actualized. Thus this ontology implies a world of pure appearance, with no underlying noumenon. There is nowhere for the will to go, so it wills unto power, which is to say, it continues to be precisely that, will, and "eternally proceeds within its own being," to use Spinoza's phrase."

Quote :

"
This criticism of the will to power on ontological and psychological grounds demonstrates that the subject, the human subject, requires something beyond itself in order to establish the language necessary to realize a structure it can embody. Alone, the Nietzschean self cannot be actualized- it is not properly a self, rather a "selves." To be actualized the self requires a limit, without it, it cannot be articulated. Kierkegaard says as much in declaring "despair" to be the fundamental nature of the human being, it is not a psychiatric ill that can be cured, it is human nature itself, the basic incompleteness of that nature, and can be relieved only by God, the limit. Systems of religion, philosophy, and metaphysics- systems which have provided limits of this kind, have concealed the real truth which is that it is the subject which is onto-logically primary, not what is limiting it, meaning that the act of value and creation by which the self is realized becomes disfigured, is seen as a moment of subordination, of being encapsulated by the limit. If this was not the case, then the creative act would continue indefinitely, the self would be perpetually "realized," that is, created.

This "onto-logical primacy" of the subject which would allow that creative moment to persist, I have articulated with the concept of the daemonic."