Epistemic Reflections

The second section of my philosophical system, completed.

II. Epistemic Reflections

The Basis of Perception

Space

To be born is the first and greatest tragedy. The second is that we inhabit this tragedy in space. Space is that which is from without. What we conceptualize as space is merely the mind’s attempt to develop fleeting pictures of what external reality is. It can only ever be fleeting, for that which appears embodied in space is like a mirage—really no different from the man with jaundice seeing everything as yellow: a fanciful illusion of the mind’s perceptual apparatus.

All reality would be a void were there no consciousness by which to perceive and make sense of it. The universe is primarily an infinite void of empty space, and it is only from a man’s-eye view that any of it has meaning at all. Hence why I say the first tragedy is birth. To come into being is literally to inhabit space. Space is that which surrounds us at all times and yet which we can never hold in our hands; the best man has done has only ever been the ability to measure everything from his conception of length and extension in it. But I highly doubt space, should it have a consciousness, would really care whether we make sense of her in inches or meters.

What Euclid did was to provide man a system by which to make sense of that which he sees but which he cannot comprehend outside of vague assumptions and empirical deductions. The Euclidean method, from which all classical geometry stems, is merely the reduction of the objective (external experiences in reality) to the conceptual (abstract paradigms with use cases, not total validity). That is what man has always done: mistakenly develop systems that work in one particular case, but which brush over or ignore other, more complicated complexities.

The true nature of things—the metaphysics behind every phenomenon—has always caused man to tremble at the thought of its incomprehensibility. Such is why the ancients thought all was, in some way, subject to monism; in fact, most humans in history have assumed some primordial force which was seemingly responsible for spawning all contiguous reality—it was our first basic assumption, and from that gave rise to the entire history of thought. The Chinese assumed it was implicit within the way of nature as such—the Dao; the Greeks assumed it could be conceptualized—and thus gave us theory after theory of what the singular constituent aspect of reality was; the Indians (Hindus) assumed the plurality of all things to be contained within a single unity that was itself trinitary; the Zoroastrians assumed a similar thing, but thought it unitary instead; from them, Judaism gave the world “the Lord thy God”—and called it YHWH; and from here sprang the pious frauds of Christianity and Islam. However, we moderns need not relegate ourselves to the past and repeat the same nonsense of the Axial Age metaphysicians: all is water, archē, air, atoms, void, stasis, change, fire, forms, earth, or a mix of all these, or none at all—to say nothing of the priestly classes’ attempts to justify their power through logic and persuasion rather than force and strength.

In this new technological age of ours, we find our only refuge in ignorance. It is easier to say you fear God and ignore His every command than to actually struggle with the implications of His love. It is easier still to disbelieve in God and become absurd instead; far easier, in fact, for an absurdist, a provocateur, a contrarian, or a nihilist all have the advantage of falling back onto themselves rather than on some higher force—at least the believers have a quasi-understanding of what it is like to conceive of reality with a higher aspect within it. Space is one of those higher aspects, or rather, an intuition from which all our thoughts around higher aspects stem. What we are is but one solitary speck of froth amid an endless torrent of violent foam, spewed forth from a giant source of chaos which we see but wish we hadn’t. Thus is the trouble with being born: that we are doomed to conceive it in space, when the best of all possible worlds would have been one in which space was not conceived at all—and to think cosmologists today suggest the shape of the universe is flat, with its size still too indeterminate to even dare a suggestion (although most lean toward finiteness)! If I were God, the shape of the universe would be a sphere, for it would only make sense if the totality of the world were really only a collective shadow of all its electron orbitals within their lowest energy level; then again, quarks have no discernible shape and are rather excitations or vibrations within theoretical strings—so perhaps the movement of a guitar string would better simulate that. This is all mindless speculation.

If Einstein hadn’t existed, it would have been necessary to create him—for he is the one who gave us our current conception of space. Newton only knew the world classically; Einstein, armed with Riemannian geometry, provided us with a more powerful conception of what space is: a manifold which bends in direct relation to mass. The more massive something is, the more space moves around it. With this now becoming standard, and philosophy largely falling out of favor at the end of the nineteenth century when it came to explaining the universe, Kant’s intuitionist approach to space has been lampooned and shot out of the water. But I feel both are satisfactory answers; it just depends on the context they’re put in. Psychologically, Kant is still right—space is merely a synthetic a priori, a transcendental aspect of reality, which is born from without and yet eternally experienced from within. The ability to perceive space is inborn, arrived at well before we even realize we’re conscious; it is prior to us, just like gravity, and so it follows from this that we are merely the kind of beings that are able to conceive of space prior to our ability to conceptualize it. Synthetic here refers to predicates or statements we make about reality which in themselves do not contain any new information about the thing in question. Synthetic statements are those which are not definitional, but rather experiential in the context of reason—known after the fact through reason alone. A priori refers to something that is known prior to experience. All this served to make Kant’s reputation among the ignorant and the learned alike, and it is no wonder why his name is still echoed across philosophy halls all around the world today: for he was the first to point toward the inward nature of our faculties of experiencing nature as such, yet did so in a manner so convoluted and drowned in a prolixity of style never before seen that most who attempt to understand Kant come out more confused than when they started. I suspect it cannot be helped, however, for to compare experiential categories with definitional categories would, on the surface, seem to conflate them. In fact, it was a conflation going off the traditional logical categories at the time—standardized by the English empiricists and French materialists. That’s why the transcendental category had to be created—to give way to this new approach to conceptualization. It’s funny, too, because Kant essentially synthesized all of Western philosophy prior to him—and it only took thirty years after his death for Hegel to put the capstone on all of philosophy with his Science of Logic.

After what I would consider the greatest achievement in the history of the human intellect (Hegel’s Science of Logic), it would only seem natural for things to stagnate and wane with time—even the greatest minds become victims of scorn long after their death by future intellectuals who disagree with their premises. It cannot be helped, for man will always find something to argue over; even if the whole world were given to him alone to enjoy, he would desire another person in it just to fight against. After Hegel, Kierkegaard’s existentialism, Nietzsche’s perspectivism, William James’s pragmatism, and Freud’s psychoanalysis—all of which paved the way for modern, postmodern, and metamodern (contemporary) thought—were inevitable: all of them being philosophical approaches or methods which depart from reason as such and refer back to man’s subjective nature, turning the whole point of philosophy upside down, making it not about the discovery of truth as such, but about subjecting it to man’s present circumstances for the sake of his purposes.

One can only fight against that which is logically coherent if the coherence of it does not satisfy his life. And so here is born the eternal divide between those minds who are tender-minded (rationalistic, intellectualistic, idealistic, optimistic, religious, monistic, dogmatic) and tough-minded (empiricist, sensationalistic, materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, fatalistic, pluralistic, skeptical)—those who are left-hemisphere-oriented and those who are right-hemisphere-oriented. As I said before, my philosophy is one of subjectivity made absolute: where truth is not merely the correspondence of some cause with its effect, but rather where the cause itself is always the effect; for from the existentialist perspective, all stems from the individual—the individual is the end of all ends, and the supreme essence in the world from which his whole conception of reality is bound in his being: a representation, to be sure, but a fact so powerful it cannot be ignored without ignoring life itself. My essence is being as such—a synthesis of all categories which doesn’t go quite right, but which gives an appearance believable enough. In that sense, it is fundamentally pragmatic while also being tediously dialectical. That is why my writings always seem disjointed and rambling: from the standpoint of one’s being, it can only be taken in its entirety or not at all—all else with respect to man is folly. It is unsurprising, then, why everyone today says they’re doing their best, but are in truth only hanging by a thread which may snap at any moment, and hence all their anxiety and misery.

We see in every uncurious mind the hopeless prattle and confusion which eternally follows them so long as they believe themselves immune to their subconscious cogitations. Nihilism stems precisely from this, in fact. No one in history has ever come to a belief in God after being shown a syllogism. Likewise, nihilists don’t reason themselves into a position of meaninglessness; it is a position that can only come from reason—an overuse of reason, an exhaustion of the intellectual faculty. What we have is a symptom of reason, not a direct result of it. The cause of nihilism is the feeling that reason itself cannot answer itself; that is, what reason purports to be can never be justified with reason. It is this realization—the sudden awakening that all is really without ground beyond caprice—that shocks a young mind so thoroughly that the only thing it resorts to is the complete negation of meaning itself. Ah, but this too is reason, all too reasonable. What is rationality but a pillow for a tired mind—the last safe space for a man in utter terror at his own lack of understanding; a mind so in fear of everything that it only feels comforted when it has placed a box around everything and categorized all according to specifications. That is the kind of world we have, and that is the kind of world we will consign to the flames, for there is nothing there for us. We existentialists are the future. We are the true inheritors of space. What we are bound to is a limit in our spatial conception, but modern man must think beyond categories, grow beyond mere conception, mere abstraction. What must empower man is his will to affirm reality in abstraction. The future of what man will be is a mindset, not a thing to bring about, but a thing to await. It is foolish to believe that a single coherent system for the world will bring it to its knees and make it submit to its designs. What man—no, the intellectual—must wait for is not that others will follow him, or even listen to him, but rather that he listens to the Zeitgeist itself: only those who measure the tremors of humanity on the Richter scale are free from the burden of present obscurity, for they can rest assured they have measured the times well enough to be appreciated afterward.

All existentialists must write as if they were the only person on Earth, for the whole of their experience is so subjective and powerful it takes on a life of its own in the process of writing it. A certain psychology is at play and lurks beneath the surface of every idea that not even the individual is privy to. That there is the greatest source of endearment to life; a source which is felt but not understood. Like space, the being of life evades our every attempt to capture it in our essence. This frightens us, and instead of turning this feeling inwardly and understanding it passionately, we turn it outwardly and look to a “professional” who can help us with our problem. But these “professionals” have no direct experience with our own subjective content; the best we can offer them is a simulacrum, from which they can only vaguely hint at what is wrong dialectically, in a Socratic manner, but the results are hit or miss. When one is faced with an internal struggle, they feel all of space around them closing in, and danger seems imminent. What space becomes to such a person is a dreaded reality of solitary confinement. Oh, how we tremble at the thought of being all alone, in our vast solitariness, unmatched by even the hermit. Why does such a situation seem like a fate worse than death? Because man is socialized to be around others; most natures seemingly demand it—where no one seems, all else seems dead. And so man believes himself to be dead in such a state, and that life is just a dream played out for his cruel amusement.

Space seems to be the definite end or limit to our external world. We perceive all reality in three dimensions. The human body is divided into three planes: sagittal, coronal (or frontal), and transverse (or axial). Rigid bodies in physics have six degrees of freedom, but three of them are merely the reverse of the first three. Newton has three laws of motion. I could go on. But what are all of these to the individual? Merely his intuitions at work, his representations shining forth in all their splendor. The space of Einstein is no closer to the truth of reality than Newton was; it merely refined our notion of what it means to be bound in reality using tensor calculus. But this boundedness seems less stable than one would like to put forth. What we have today regarding the notion of space is either a capitulation to current scientific thinking or a philosophical (probably neo-Kantian) idealism which hopes to relegate space to a mere faculty of the mind. This dichotomy shocks contemporary philosophers: to see a concept that was once theirs to rule now made subject to the “specialist” of the universe—the physicist! Physicists, like all good scientists, love to shatter the idyllic, sometimes absurd, ideas of bright-eyed philosophers. To them, every speculation is a nail to be hammered, and if the hypothesis does not hold up, it is to be driven out by another nail. This advent of specialization is so disheartening to one who theorizes about the world from their own point of view—from an existentialist’s perspective, for whom the facts of the universe are just pretty ideas made to make those more analytically minded happy… happy to have “advanced human knowledge” one step closer—whatever that means. These people do not think philosophically, and so the whole of their boastfulness rests on a certain acquaintance with “facts of the universe” that somehow make them “more correct” than another if that other does not think as they do. Science today has become the go-to subject for answers, and such is why nearly every field of human endeavor has been molded and subjected to it for the sake of some imaginary progress that we never really saw. Science has progressed; general human knowledge has not, for man will always be more ignorant than intelligent so long as he conflates coherentism with foundationalism—an oxymoron yet to be topped in the realm of philosophy. It should be noted, too, that neither of these systems works absolutely unless you view them under a pragmatic microscope. Everything beautiful in existence—all these splendors explained through the inductive method, made clear with science, happily running about—are forever to remain as dead facts from that point forward unless life can be breathed into them.

Science has turned the whole of man into a mere scientific diagram—as if life were comparable to the wretched food pyramid. What science would want every man to become is nothing more than a mere confabulator of concepts which explain himself. That’s as absurd as not eating merely because you cannot explain the process of digestion. What science lacks, and what most have yet to catch onto, is that science is not a total philosophy; in fact, it’s not a philosophy at all. What science is is a method—methodological naturalism put into practice—but this does not put the individual at ease. No one is comforted by having their anxiety explained to them psychologically. What man demands is answers, and so long as he feels himself “unqualified” to make responses in his own name, after his own thinking, in the manner most commodious with his being, he will forever feel behind and weighed down by a force of his own making. OVERCOME! That is what must be shouted at man. This here is the method by which to achieve that: POWER! Space may bound and limit my life, but being is far beyond it.

Time

Time is an ideality. If it did not exist, it would be necessary to create it. Nothing strikes the mind quite so vociferously as time. We are roused by the thought of it, for in it we perceive our life, and through it we consider our existence. From the standpoint of time, all is static and ever-present. It makes no difference to it whether we recognize it or not. For us, it is the all-seeing spectator who watches our every move and examines our every development. There is no jeer or cheer from its perspective on any of our accomplishments, however, for it cares nothing for anything but the continuous procession of itself.

All our actions are done in space and pass away with time. Without space, there would be no extension, and thus no entities by which to occupy all that emptiness. Without time, causality—as David Hume suggested—would simply be an illusion; it’s only with the concept of change that time has any comprehensibility at all. What would it be to exist in a universe without time? For me, that’s not a coherent thought experiment. To suggest a universe without time is already to place it under a category within time. You see, we still think in terms of time—that thing, concept, idea, intuition, or representation which is ever fleeting, ever passing, continuously moving, without the slightest concern for those who experience her. Cicero says, “There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.” And philosophers throughout history have said some of the most absurd things about time. It almost seems like a law of nature in thought that the more abstract a concept is, the more insane man becomes in attempting to comprehend it. Many men have tried to imagine worlds in which perception as such was nonexistent, and so they’ve made themselves contemptible and utterly ridiculous in attempting the impossible: to square a circle, goes the old saying—but that is a mathematical claim which did, although thousands of years after it was stated, get proven as impossible with compass and straightedge. Time has no such novelty, for time is not subject to axiomatization; to it, our attempts at comprehending its nature by placing it within the realm of axioms are laughable.

Has anyone ever tried to make time an analytical proposition—that is, a presupposition that adds no further predicate to its original subject definition? No, and for good reason. Time is known, at least according to the paradigm laid out by Kant, prior to experience, but is only felt, and therefore understood, within experience. What we have in time, like space, is an aspect of reality which is prior to consciousness and is therefore understood in reason as eternal and infinite, but which is felt in the senses as mortal and finite. From this seemingly paradoxical basis—upon which all our world lies—men have striven with all their might to rectify this contradiction by thinking time a category about which they can reason through in a thorough manner and come to a sound conclusion at the end of it. They fail to see that time is not a category of reason: it is prior to it! The basis of all our perceptions leaps from its foundations. To reiterate, nearly every man prior to Kant thought the best approach to time was to conceptualize it and to categorize it within silly labels or foolish presuppositions, as if that got man closer to the true nature of it. But time has no qualms evading comprehension. Every idea we have about it, in fact, is merely a vain attempt to bring it to a finite level. Kant was merely the first to recognize its superiority to us and its “necessary” status—as a thing upon which all cogitations rest, and without which they fall into the arms of incomprehensibility. Time cannot be analytic because the definitions man gives it are as vain as throwing water into an ocean. Time can only ever be known in experience: in the maturity of all living things, in the passing away of ocean tides, in the shortness and futility of organic life, in the movement of entire continents, and in the evolution of species through natural selection.

And to think Einstein made time a dimension! If general relativity made space an objective phenomenon rather than an intuition, then special relativity did the same for time. What is best in Einstein’s relativity theories is precisely that they’re relative, which leaves open a small crevice for us dialecticians to create a giant chasm within the framework as such—but more on this in a bit. Well before Einstein, there was a debate between Newton and Leibniz about the nature of space. Newton held that space was absolute and object-independent (today called absolutism), which means that it remains a permanent fixture of reality regardless of whether it is occupied by physical bodies or remains entirely void—space, in that sense, is a container which holds things but is itself not held in anything. Leibniz, on the other hand, held that space was relational (today called relationalism), which means that space does not exist as an independent entity but instead that “space” is simply the name we give to the spatial relationships between objects. In the realm of science, Newton won out, while in the realm of philosophy, Leibniz did—and so it was for centuries. It wasn’t until Einstein, however, improving upon the generally accepted local Newtonian inertial frame, that we found a harmony of sorts between the observer’s relation to the thing being viewed within the frame (Leibniz’s relationalism) and the acceleration of the frame which the observer finds themselves in (Newton’s absolutism). What became the new “absolute” wasn’t space itself, but the acceleration of the observer within the frame of reference itself—this being the speed of light, which is constant in the universe for all observers.

While Newton envisioned the universe as a rigid stage where space and time functioned as two independent, absolute tracks, Einstein revolutionized this “container” model by establishing the speed of light as the only true cosmic constant. In the Newtonian world, an observer’s velocity relative to absolute space should theoretically alter their measurement of light’s speed; yet Einstein countered that because light remains invariant for all observers, it is space and time themselves that must fluidly warp and stretch to compensate. This shift effectively fused these once-distinct dimensions into a single, four-dimensional fabric known as spacetime, where the “interval” between events replaces the “box” of absolute space. Consequently, in special relativity, we no longer inhabit a static receptacle; rather, we occupy a position within a relational spacetime interval—a deeply Leibnizian concept where reality is defined by the dynamic relationships between events rather than a pre-existing vacuum. Inspired by Leibniz, Kant posited that space and time function not as external realities or mere logical relations, but as synthetic a priori intuitions—essentially the cognitive “software” that pre-structures all human experience. In this framework, Euclidean geometry was seen as a universal necessity of our mental architecture, rendering it impossible for the mind to even conceive of a world where parallel lines meet or triangles deviate from 180 degrees. However, Einstein’s general relativity shattered this assumption by demonstrating that space is inherently non-Euclidean, acting as a malleable fabric that curves and warps in the presence of mass. This revelation suggests that while Kant may have correctly identified the flat, three-dimensional constraints of our sensory “interface,” he underestimated the power of pure reason to transcend those biological limits. By utilizing non-Euclidean mathematics, we can conceptually navigate a universe far more complex than the internal intuitions of our evolved minds were ever designed to visualize.

And so this relativity stands: where the phenomenal world makes sense in the manner Kant laid out for us (in the classical sense), but where Einstein refined our understanding of perception for things that are beyond our everyday intuitions—beyond the human, where things are much more massive or much faster than we are. In this relational, subjective aspect of reality, we dialecticians are all-too-happy to exclaim that the noumenal aspect of the world has yet to be found, and thus philosophy lives! Where there is doubt, there is always life in philosophy, for de omnibus dubitandum, et omnia sunt in omnibus modo suo [everything is to be doubted, and all things are in all things in their own way]. The first sentence in Aristotle’s Metaphysics is Πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει [All men by nature desire to know]. And later in the same book he says, διὰ γὰρ τὸ θαυμάζειν οἱ ἄνθρωποι καὶ νῦν καὶ τὸ πρῶτον ἤρξαντο φιλοσοφεῖν [For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize]. So one sees from its inception that we philosophers still have a place within the world. We shall always have a place to rest our feet in the realm of thinking so long as what man thinks continues to be a mystery to him, and yet amazes him nonetheless. And I am of the view that time, along with space, will forever be one of those things that cause θαυμάζειν—that is, wonder.

But now, let me take time from a dialectically existential perspective. Time is a subject that has no predicate; therefore, any attempts at attributing it an aspect, or some feeble characteristic, fall flat from the start. Like space, time is prior to us, and yet we exist within it. Indeed, our existence is predicated on it. Without it, there would be no aspect of change in reality. Causality—the experience of some effect by a known cause—is that by which our entire existence makes sense. What one considers in the passing away of an experience is just that which exists in causality.

I believe man has to accept the simple fact that there are things which are above him, and yet which he can never fully encompass. What is man’s life in the context of time but a prolonged moment in the sun that, in the end, amounts to very little? It is precisely those things which lie above man that make his rather shallow and all-too-short existence tolerable. If everyone had a full understanding of themselves, folly and tomfoolery would not exist in the world. What we have on Earth today is about eight billion knaves and wretches who seek every second some new novelty or joyous experience to distract them from the emptiness of their own existence. Man’s self-awareness would be enough to content him—and stave off any troubling thought relating to the existential—if he were a competent thinker; but to desire everyone to kindle their inner Socrates is to demand the impossible, for most are too absorbed in the immediate, the finite, worried about practical considerations that a man of action would toss to the side if it meant he could pursue that which was most important to him.

Life to most is a burden because their desires are far in excess of their powers or means, be they physical, mental, or financial. Gagner sa vie, sans pour autant en faire toute sa vie [To earn one’s life, without however making all of one’s life out of it], say the French. And what a wise saying it is, for most people labor endlessly after their vain conceptions of what a good life is without first considering it in the negative. In developing a way of life, for most people anyway, everything is seen through a positive lens, and it is only the constraints of reality which force man to humble himself before his wretched, actually lived existence. It is for that reason I find life so exciting: I love seeing every earthly misery rightly fall upon those too afraid to die for what they believe in. Death is feared only because one does not know what lies at the end of it. I’m almost certain that if science proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was life after death, we’d see millions upon millions willing to off themselves from this accursed place to find greater repose in that Hinterwelt (other-world), where the pastures are much greener and the water a lot more blue, where the air is clearer and the sun more glorious.

Life is first a joy and then a tragedy. What makes it a joy at first is our initial ignorance toward all its depravities and misfortunes, which are an ever-present danger, and which hang over the entire human race like some sword of Damocles. Once the tragedy is sung, and the rest is just a monotonous chorus of ever-decreasing octaves, life appears as a task, an occupation, a demoralizing job, and remains so until the end—one of endless toil, crushed hopes, and idiotic dreams which are never to see the light of day. I don’t suspect anything in the whole universe could be more depressing than that: the fact that life is but a brief ride which we all know is bound to end, but which we must reluctantly stay on nonetheless. When presented as such, it’s no wonder, then, the only conclusion is suicide or a feckless nihilism dressed up in absurdist language. Hence why I live my life as an indifferentist: one who looks upon the whole machinations of the world with complete and utter nonchalance. I have always considered life a silly thing to worry about. If it has a definite beginning and end, why should one bother with how the in-between manifests itself? However, for me, viewing life indifferently made it intolerable: I am of a mental temperament that requires me to act, to objectify life—to act in life for the sake of extracting whatever good I could from however bad the situation I find myself in is. I swear to you, reader, I would have put an end to my vain existence had it not been for my desire to continuously seek good within evil. I have always been encouraged to overcome and outdo whatever misery I found in front of me. Eventually, I got so good at doing that that I could effortlessly endure what most could not. I played with my own existence, experimented even (with my life), as if life were some kind of game; I saw myself, and still do to some extent, as merely a soul inhabiting a wretched vessel from which I will soon be liberated. It helps to detach your ego from your misery. Misery is a byproduct of the ego. The ego performs an evaluative judgment, and that judgment seemingly determines how we are to respond when presented with that situation; it’s a very stupid thing we humans do, relying on our old, instinctual habits—habits which were once useful but now are redundant and a cause of much of our misery in the modern era.

I overcame life in and through time, in fact using time to my leverage. I no longer viewed life as meaningless, but rather as a reality larger than the universe itself, from which I can create for myself some good in spite of every evil. I transcended the norms and common ways of thinking by seeing that everything which we use and grant without question for the sake of making the world “true” was itself meaningless and really without importance. In finding everything meaningless, I was able to find meaning; because, once one no longer feels bound to consistency and coherence, every potential in life suddenly appears that much more actualizable. This is where my dialectics ultimately had its birth: it was in attempting to reconcile my past paradigms of life, and the role rationality played in it, with this newfound desire to act only upon things in an irrational manner—things which only quicken my activity, and which have importance in my life both in the immediate and futurative sense. To quicken activity? Yes! A way of making sense of experience in order to feel enlivened at the thought of living, of desiring more life—more than was possible to experience, in fact. Ah, what a great goal, a noble goal, far beyond what the typical preferences for life are today.

It’s more preferable to have that which took a great deal of effort to acquire than that which was easily obtained, and yet how few actually make an effort to achieve anything great today. Most people would let existence pass them by if they could live without having to labor for it. But these people don’t realize that existence itself is a great labor—the greatest, in fact—and one that requires the most fastidious attention possible. If one is to live a full life, one must first undergo a transformation in thinking regarding what existing means in the first place. Existence is that which is subject to the individual, and from which life itself derives all its powers. The life of modern man is very shallow because his power is very weak: the only conception people have of it is in the immediate, the concerns of the now, the present, the so-called practical; all this and then some come to make up seven-eighths of an entire life, and how shameful is that. Where power is lacking, there is no passion, and where there is no passion, there is no serious commitment to anything aside from that which is immediate. What the individual must do in order to overcome time, and their life within it, is to see time as a sort of sieve which removes all impurities from your life, and from which you can build a sturdy foundation after reflection has been made. “But reflect on what?” you say earnestly. “On life itself. You cannot take action until the right action has been hit upon in all your contemplating.” “But how will I know the right action?” “You won’t, but such is the absurdity of life. No one does. The continuous malaise which hangs over existence like a specter is precisely that which we feel but cannot know until we’ve given ourselves over to it, and take the leap into the unknown in spite of it.”

Life is short, art long, and existence painful; but while we still breathe, let us praise time for relieving us of our every burden without lifting a finger! In due time, all is revealed, all wounds are healed, and all things come and go and have their own manner of existing; and in that, the whole of material reality comes to us and in us and lives through us. Such is why all things have their due: for due implies will in the future, that something will occur to us on account of its inevitability; when that is we know not, but it will occur nonetheless. That is all time can be. And while we have it, let it be the best we can make of it.

Mental Tools & Experience

Sense

Sense is that which upholds all of reality. Without it, life would seem like a shadow which is ever-present but which can never be seen. The moon is only revealed to us thanks to the sun’s light, and likewise, existence as such is revealed to us only in our perception of it; however, also like the moon, we only see one face of this perceived reality. What, in general then, is sense—or rather, senses? Sense is a representation, or intuition, of the world as seen through the light of experience. What we perceive with our five senses is nothing more than the world made manifest to us through our interactions within it.

It would be nice if materialism were correct in a metaphysical or ontological sense, but so long as the human mind conjures up abstractions that make what is not there seem there, we shall forever be in the dark about the noumena of the world. The world best resembles a dream that shall fade as soon as we wake from it.

If man hadn’t discovered his own apperception (self-consciousness), it wouldn’t be necessary to ruminate upon sense; much like the brutes of nature, man would find himself only concerned with, and therefore intellectually limited to, that which is immediate—his present concerns, which range between hunger, fear, boredom, self-preservation, and the urge to procreate. Aside from language and reason (which Aristotle thought was the primary trait that separated man from beast), the greatest aspect of man that distinguishes him from his other mammal counterparts is his self-awareness, his apperception. Without this, we really would be no different from our chimpanzee or bonobo cousins.

There is a debate currently around what constitutes self-consciousness, but to me it’s a semantic argument rather than a real philosophical quandary—leave something like that to the philologists and lexicographers. Consciousness is merely self-awareness combined with a capacity to reason about said awareness. When an animal of sufficient intellect looks at itself in a mirror, it pauses momentarily before attacking or running away from its image. This, I would assume, is because it doesn’t recognize its image as itself, but rather as another member of its species. As my father would say, “Animals have no time.” I don’t think he realized how profound he was being with that statement. What he was getting at was the idea that animals (barring Homo sapiens) are incapable of abstractions—they have no framework by which to organize or understand existence in abstracto, stemming from the mind and our wonder at the capacity in the first place. Animals, even the most intelligent among them, can only ever see the world in the immediate, and those who have a simulacrum of forethought, or planning for the future—such as crows, ravens, magpies, gorillas, octopuses, ants, etc.—are never able to generalize this to abstractions in animus (in the mind), but rather always only in concreto rei (in the concrete of things). Animals have no concept of the I; they have no subjectivity to their existence—to them, all reality is as it appears and will always be as it is. There is no reflexivity in any other animal, to our current knowledge, aside from man.

This subjective capacity to see beyond the mere material substrate of experience, and to plunge into the depths of that which lay behind present phenomenology, is where personality and character as such spring, and where the conception of the single individual first appears—and in that conception of the single individual, that is, the singular man striving to advance beyond nature, which limits his capacity mightily at every step, is where the truth of man is revealed.

In the concept of the I, which is within man, is instantly the antipode of man: the Not-I. From this dialectic of the I—Not-I, man turns into himself and beholds himself, not merely as another member of his species, but as a particular individual—worthy of immense love and self-respect for his own existence—within a vast genus; in that beholding is the totality of spirit—that which man utilizes for his upliftment; it is only in that very dialectic, however, that man can gradually develop the courage to become his being as such, that is, to become that which he feels himself born for. However, this “born for” idea within man is ever-changing, like the ocean tides, and so, as a result, it is incumbent upon the individual to take their life upon themselves and carry that burden with diligence and fortitude.

Life is an ever-boiling cauldron which bubbles over every now and then, and in that bubbling requires the self to continuously die and be resurrected if it is to continue at all. Man is the mystery of all mysteries; even God finds man mysterious, for He made him not for labor but for reflection and love—self-love and grace, charity and repose in Him. To have self-confidence is almost a sort of deification, for how could you ever manage the confidence to have enough love to think yourself worthy of love? Oh, how immense is man, and yet how feeble and decrepit he is when compared with God, or in comparison with his entire species. Awe is not so surprising in the presence of God, but in relation to his entire species? Yes, perhaps even more so, for while God’s love is infinite, man’s nature is all-too-familiar to him, for man is man, and among his fellow men he knows all that potentially is in him, the good and the evil.

From one individual to another—dear God, what a thought. To think two infinities could collide like that and still speak of it all in the finite alone. What is great in man is that he is a dialectic and not a colloquialism. Dialectic is that which recognizes the common as stupendously uncommon, and vice versa. It sees beyond mere perception and allows man to transcend all material barriers for his capacity to live. To be a dialectic is to be content with your contradictory nature. Man, for the longest time in human history, has been seen merely as a colloquialism—as a common thing, as a thing made in the image of its maker, but which deserves nothing further. The spiritual within man is that which manifests in his abstractions beyond mere experience; the materialist labels this experience a mere excitation of the brain, a nerve impulse, a chemical reaction, an influx and outflux of sodium and potassium—in short, as strictly a physical phenomenon, and thus always just a phenomenon; but they take this experience too far in the literal. To them, reality is merely what it is made of, and thus they have extremely simplistic notions when it comes to experience as such (phenomenologically speaking), because they believe that by being able to ascribe an effect to its cause, and in doing so place a label on it, they have discovered the Ding an sich (thing-in-itself); but in truth, they are not one step closer to any “true” reality than the man who claims in a past life he was God and created the universe as it appears now. What we have is a difference of perspective not only on the sacredness of the single individual, but on what ontologically constitutes the subject—man as such.

So I ask again, what is man? Man is the great dialectic, the eternal dialectic, the dialectic which must constantly rewrite itself so long as he persists. What is shocking is not that man exists, but that the I exists—that is, the sense of being different, of being unique, of being yourself in your own skin: that is the greatest terror on Earth. If one were forced to live like Robinson Crusoe or Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān from birth, the subjective impulse within man would never appear, for there would be no other, like yourself, by which to contrast yourself subjectively; there would only be experience of the external world, which would force the mind to see everything from an objective stance, and hence you would really only be an intelligent beast—the most intelligent, for sure, but still a beast nonetheless. The smartest termite means nothing to even the dumbest man, and likewise is man’s relationship with God and with others; it’s a false comparison from the start, for there is no comparing great with the greatest (in God), and there is no difference among equals in spirit (in man).

Men throughout history have loved using naturalistic fallacies in arguing for their “superiority” over other men, who are in truth just like them: from being stronger in arms or physical abilities, or in intelligence, or in the development of racism as a “scientific” concept which proved the “superiority” of one race over another. Quid tum? Seriously—what then? What is to follow from that? Where are you going with that? Why even think that? Why the obsession with placing yourself atop another, when in reality all men are subject to the same external reality and suffer under the same doubts and uncertainties regarding themselves? The dialectic demands that all which is not inherently subjective becomes made so. As Kierkegaard—my predecessor—rightly said in his book Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments: “Subjectivity is truth; subjectivity is reality.” (Subjektiviteten er Sandheden; Subjektiviteten er Virkeligheden.) This capacity to view all things from a subjective lens is precisely at the heart of the dialectic. The dialectic exists in order to work through and synthesize all things which are not first immediately subjective. This does not mean that truth is subjective, for that is a nonsensical concept in the first place—one of Kant’s antinomies for sure! Truth is nihilistic. Truth has no power; only POWER has power, which, depending on your temperament and interest, can be classified as one of many things: God, spirit, knowledge, wisdom, love, art, wit, humor, tragedy, poetry, literature, music, sports, kids, animals, etc. The varieties of human experience are ineffable, and in that ineffableness—a complete and total incomprehensibility—the dialectic shines brightly, and its piercing rays cut through every paradox and antinomy the mind presents itself with when thinking merely logically, rationally, coherently, in fear and trembling at contradiction. Hasn’t it been established already: life has no why. There is no reason or power behind any idea we encounter except that which we choose to believe in for the sake of our own empowerment and upliftment! Reason is dead, and in its place we install a far greater power than it could ever be: the dialectic—the master of reason, the master of knowledge, indeed, the master of ALL! In the end, Carl Jung will ultimately be proved correct: God is that which is your highest value.

How many millions had to perish in order for man to have a memory—to recall, to remain subject to the past, to forgo impulse, and to leave POWER to languish and die? It would seem man was fated to be the sole inheritor of a brain sufficient enough to cognize about external reality, and while cognizing, have cognizance of it. It is the single greatest thing about being human, in my view. Oh, how terrible it would be if man were without sense. If one were without sense, reality would be nothing. Since there is sense, reality appears as something. What this something is, however, has never received a satisfactory answer in all of intellectual history—and it would be folly to assume myself as finally coming upon a breakthrough with respect to this question; in fact, the question itself, like all truly great questions in philosophy, is itself unanswerable. To ask, “What is sense?” is really to ask, “What is it like to experience the world?” The question, like the question of ultimate truth or objective (noumenal) reality, is tautological, because in order to ask the question, you have to first have the capacity to sense, which presupposes sense ceteris paribus (all other things being equal) is that which you really sense—that is, that the world you sense is really the world as it appears to you in your senses. Every great philosophical question has no answer because they’re all paradoxes, deepities, Kantian antinomies—problems which on the surface appear deep but are at bottom merely vague; they’re false word games played for our own amusement. Hence the shadow of the dialectic appears everywhere, and rears its magnificent head around the corner once more to encourage us.

It’s impossible to confront life in any serious way without first comprehending it through sense experience. Is that true? Let’s assume it is. What then? Well, what followed in history—like all ideas which appear at first self-evident—was the creation of dogmatic philosophical schools of thought, all of which eventually hardened into a kind of debasing rigidity, until some maverick appeared and questioned its foundations, from which we get a series of new “discoveries” that follow decades or centuries henceforth. What I have just described, in very summarized form, is the history of intellectual development, and it should come as a surprise to no one that even in the realm of thought, man loves to subject himself to the rule of one rather than to himself—it’s always been easier to adopt a system of thought rather than to create your own; but I am of the race that founds philosophical systems. But what is the point of grand philosophical systems? What has philosophy ever been to man, and in what way did he use it or derive some use from it? Every philosopher has always started out either affirming or rejecting sense experience as the only “true” knowledge possible in the world. Those who say it was became our rationalists; those who claimed it wasn’t became our idealists; and those who affirmed neither became our dialecticians (pragmatic maieutics).

What I have just done here is divide all of philosophy into three categories from which all other schools of thought derive, and luckily enough for me, I can represent each of these schools of thought with their founders—all of whom are essentially responsible for the current frameworks by which we contemplate philosophy today.

In the first place, we have Socrates, who represents the interrogative, uncertain, dialectical, maieutic side of philosophy—from whom we get the following schools of thought: Cynicism, Cyrenaicism, Megarianism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Skepticism, Pragmatism, and Existentialism.

Next, we have Plato, who represents the idealistic, transcendental, intuitive (irrational), mythopoetic side of philosophy—from whom we get the following schools of thought: the Academics (students of Plato’s Academy), Neoplatonism, Christian Platonism (St. Augustine), Mysticism, Esotericism, Spiritualism, Syncretism, Romanticism, German Idealism, Transcendentalism, Hegelianism, Marxism, Theosophy, and Continental philosophy as such.

And lastly, we have Aristotle, who represents the rational, logical, empirical, deductive side of philosophy—from whom we get the following schools of thought: the Peripatetics (students of Aristotle’s Lyceum), Falsafa (Arab–Islamic Peripatetic School), Scholasticism, Empiricism, Rationalism, Positivism, Logical Positivism, and Analytic philosophy as such.

In the Western tradition, these three men’s philosophical approaches represent a particular temperament, or way of thinking, which everyone who has come after them has been drawn toward or influenced by in one way or another, whether they were aware of it or not. In that sense, Nietzsche was absolutely right when he said in Beyond Good and Evil:

I have gradually come to understand what every great philosophy until now has been: the confession of its author and a kind of involuntarily unconscious memoir.

And William James, only seven years after Nietzsche’s death, said in his book Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking:

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

…

Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key with the world’s character, and in his heart considers them incompetent and “not in it,” in the philosophic business, even though they may far excel him in dialectical ability.

Yet in the forum he can make no claim, on the bare ground of his temperament, to superior discernment or authority. There arises thus a certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions: the potentest of all our premises is never mentioned.

It really is amazing how the whole of intellectual history was effectively made on a dare, on a caprice, by wise old men who thought the greatest thing about man was his capacity to inquire into the nature of reality, existence, and his place within it. Metaphysics, in that sense, could only arrive after sense was given to man, and well after man’s mind had matured enough to be able to appreciate his self-conscious experience as such.

So, with all this laid out, what philosophical school do I belong to? What is my temperament, in essence? If it isn’t already obvious from everything I’ve said thus far, I have no idea how I could make it simpler than by affirming the following: I am an existentialist! And I use my unique method of philosophizing—dialectical pragmatism!—to make sense of the whole world before me, of everything and everyone in it, as they all appear in my life. In that sense, I belong to the tradition of thinkers who were most influenced by Socrates. In fact, I would go so far as to say that all philosophical ideas after Socrates were only ever falsifications of reality. What Plato and Aristotle (and everyone after them) got hung up on was the metaphysics of truth: that is to say, the belief that reality has objective content within it. It is the idea that there is an aspect of reality that is noumenal: real, objective, independent of the mortal minds striving to comprehend it. Both Plato and Aristotle affirmed that there was an aspect of reality that was objective—a world beyond the world perceived by the five senses—they merely disagreed on how that world could be known ultimately: for Plato, that objectivity was found in the world of perfect Forms, embodied within eternal Ideas; while for Aristotle, objectivity lay in logic—specifically in the way in which we objectify reality by describing it (in analytical statements, that is, statements that are deduced from self-evident premises).

What Socrates did was affirm neither approach; in fact, he rejected the premise of the question entirely. Socrates thought nothing was certain, not even those things which were self-evident; and even when he hit upon a logical deduction which rationally followed, he would end it by saying, “Even that thing is uncertain to me.” That is why Socrates was the first dialectician, and why he is the father of every system of philosophy which does not ultimately affirm an absolute metaphysics. If anything, the only absolute in reality is this: so long as man lives with the sensual apparatus he has, he will forever have to say along with Socrates, Ἓν οἶδα ὅτι οὐδὲν οἶδα (I know that I know nothing). And such is why Socrates ultimately said in Plato’s Apology, 38a: Ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ. (If you forbid me from questioning the world, you might as well kill me, because a life without questioning is not a human life.)

It is in questioning life that true life is found, not in affirming some belief in some objective world which you’re forever uncertain of. Philosophy as dialectic, as thinking, as moving, as doubting, as continuously affirming and rejecting—in short, as life itself: that is what it ultimately means to make sense in the world.

Γνῶθι σεαυτόν—Know thyself.

That is always best which gives me to myself. The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself. That which shows God in me fortifies me. That which shows God out of me makes me a wart and a wen. There is no longer a necessary reason for my being. Already the long shadows of untimely oblivion creep over me, and I shall decease forever.

The divine bards are the friends of my virtue, of my intellect, of my strength. They admonish me that the gleams which flash across my mind are not mine, but God’s; that they had the like, and were not disobedient to the heavenly vision. So I love them. Noble provocations go out from them, inviting me to resist evil, to subdue the world, and to Be. And thus, by his holy thoughts, Jesus serves us, and thus only. To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments. It is true that a great and rich soul, like his, falling among the simple, does so preponderate that, as his did, it names the world. The world seems to them to exist for him, and they have not yet drunk so deeply of his sense as to see that only by coming again to themselves, or to God in themselves, can they grow forevermore. It is a low benefit to give me something; it is a high benefit to enable me to do somewhat of myself. The time is coming when all men will see that the gift of God to the soul is not a vaunting, overpowering, excluding sanctity, but a sweet, natural goodness—a goodness like thine and mine—and that so invites thine and mine to be and to grow.
—The Divinity School Address, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Memory and Imagination

Mankind would not be mankind were it not for memory. If our perception of the world lay in faculties prior to our recognition of them, then our perception of our existence lay solely upon our memory. Indeed, our very existence only makes sense in light of memory. What would life be without memory? A cruel, empty nothing, no better than a wretched beast’s, whose whole life seems reborn each day it awakes, and who only considers what it sees before it as all that there ever was. Surely there is some form of remembrance within the lower animals—such as pigeons being able to fly vast distances and return to their coop without getting lost, or chimpanzees being able to effortlessly outperform man in spatial recognition tasks (such as recognizing and remembering the order of numbers that flash briefly on a screen)—but, with their brains not structured quite like man’s, and with their main concern being that of survival, it seems nature pushed them to have great physical capacities but very little intellectual development.

Every animal alive today is the byproduct of evolution. What we see behind every species is a taxonomical history that spans billions of years. Man just so happens to be the only one, out of the billions that have come before and have now gone extinct, to recognize his existence as such, and to contemplate what the meaning of that is. What does existence even imply for an animal who has no concept of its life in existential terms, without subjectivity at all? Nothing at all, for no deduction can be had without logic, and no induction can be had without memory. A vast meaninglessness is all our cogitations appear as to one who cannot understand their own subjectivity. Without subjectivity, there is only what things are as they appear, and thus no abstractions to higher-order principles or conceptions are possible: there is no self, there is no I, and there is no we; there is only what works best for survival, for abstractions alone are powerless—it is only POWER that matters in the world of nature. That is why every animal aside from man is not considered immoral when it murders one of its own kind, even if by accident, for they have no moral conception by which to judge others from; there is only the strong and the weak in nature, and, as Thucydides said,

You know as well as we do that right [i.e. justice], as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

In that sense, evolution demands that all organisms think as a collective rather than as individuals, because survival is always more probable when there is plenty rather than few, and so also the collective power of many is far greater than any single individual—physically speaking, at least, for mental fortitude and independence of mind (the aspects of subjectivity responsible for making the category of the single individual possible) are unquantifiable. What every organism ultimately is, is a collection of its long and dead history; and so too will it be dead soon enough, and make way for another generation ready to suffer and toil at the hands of a wretched world—for all of history points to organic life meeting the same fate: death and inevitable extinction. And, just like we fleshy beasts, so too will the solar system meet its decay and death, for the sun shall someday cease and turn into just another hollowed-out white dwarf, which itself will eventually become a static and dead black dwarf. This is to say nothing of the universe as a whole, in which entropy is slowly gaining the upper hand every second, as all things eventually tend toward equilibrium: the heat death of the universe—alas, a final end to all that there ever was. A greater story could not be told by our poets even if they tried. In that sense, the whole universe will be no different from a rock, and so it should be like one, content with all the comings and goings of everything, for nothing really has importance—only man makes things seem important.

It is for this reason I wish we didn’t call ourselves homo sapiens, for undoubtedly we too shall one day cease to be, and those who come after us (should they have comparable intelligence) will scoff at our vanity. Vanity is the mark of the day, and has always been the mark of the day, and everything which man pursues ultimately has that end in mind, even if he assumes otherwise; for existence itself is, as Schopenhauer rightly titled it, a vanity. The vanity of existence is ever present, and proofs of it are to be found on every corner of the Earth every second. For every second breathed, somewhere on this pitiless rock, someone has breathed their last. To think the source of life goes out of us the moment we cease—all this inhaling and exhaling, only for a time to come in which it will be the last thing we ever do.

A. “The last thing? But we’ve been doing it all our life!”

B. “Oh yes. The last thing for sure. And how poetic it is that the thing we do every second will be the thing we do in our final second.”

It really is remarkable that we’ve lasted as long as we have, especially when you consider the average lifespan for man (taking his prehistoric history into account) was only thirty years—which, to me, seems like more than enough life. But man is never satisfied simply to live life. What is to be found in humanity is an endless drive toward that which cannot ultimately be obtained, and yet the feeling cannot be shaken until it has been attempted. Man strives endlessly to overcome that which he feels limits his power. It has always been that way for man. Every person has within them the drive to be more than they are, and are only stopped by a lack of POWER! Modernity as such is the ceasing of all vital power, organic power—power which traverses oceans, reroutes rivers, and builds pyramids and skyscrapers! In ancient times, man was only stopped by nature; but what we have today is the domestication of man’s very nature as such, where he is stopped from becoming what he was meant to be by external pressures from society—a wretched abstraction—rather than from his encounter with nature as such—a truly powerful, concrete, objective experience. Modernity would seek to castrate man if it meant he could live in harmony with those who seek to become nothing, for their temperament has become absorbed by the herd’s energy of weakness and sloth; people today are anti-life precisely because they are against ambition, drive, greatness, and, most of all, SUFFERING. Everything in history was first achieved by overcoming suffering, but the herd today would rather live in misery and quiet desperation—so long as they live without true suffering—than attempt to become great, something which would entail suffering, and almost certainly lead to it.

If the world were perfect, there would be no philosophy, for it is in the experience of pain that life appears to us as something tangible for the first time—that we are powerful beings, but beings capable of immense suffering and self-torture should we make that existence for ourselves. Every man is responsible for the construction of his own torture chamber; and how gleefully man today clings himself to his rack of pleasure—he would break every bone upon it if it meant he could avoid facing true existential suffering, real anxiety, total stress.

Everything which people stress over today is utterly trivial, for it is always in the immediate, always about the practical, strictly in relation to the material. Man today fears poverty more than the wrath of God Almighty, and he would sell his soul to the devil if he were guaranteed a life of comfort in this world as a result. It is shocking to me how scared people are to confront their own subjectivity—it’s as if man’s own being, his very existence as such, only matters insofar as he has pleasure within it.

Nobody considers their life existentially, only materially. That is my ultimate problem with the socialist and communist utopians: they reduce every problem in existence to the inequalities inherent within the mode of production responsible for man’s subsistence, and laborious existence, in the first place; and while I absolutely agree these inequalities must be banished from the Earth like slavery, I disagree on what the ultimate objective of existence is. To them, it is to allow a world where man may live in total abundance, free from the need to labor for his existence, and pursue whatever he wishes—to, as Marx said in The German Ideology, “…hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman, or critic.” But this means nothing to the man of subjectivity. Material conditions may as well be an abstraction to the one who only has eternities and infinities on his mind alone. To me—and I admit I have a very bleak view of humanity and the future—it is so much easier to make peace with the dilapidated state of the world, and consign myself to resignation as a result, than to attempt to bring about class consciousness, and wish to see all working people united under one banner of prosperity. It is all too much, too quixotic for me personally. Most materialists would argue that if misery is caused by material conditions, then material conditions are to be changed, but I always found it easier to stand on the principle of ignoring material conditions altogether, and suffering whatever comes as a result with fortitude. Again, though, this is asking too much of people, for most still consider their life only through the lens of the immediate, their material circumstances—a very sad world we live in indeed. It is no wonder the thought of death is the greatest comfort when in the face of total despair. No one put it better than Nietzsche when he said:

The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night. —Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 157.

With all this inevitable death, it is no wonder why man—the only creature capable of grasping the implications of such an end—is so fond of making for himself narratives which distract him and keep him busy in the world, rather than assuming a calm repose in the face of his own eventual end. Even the most degrading and pointless existences have an earnest desire to maintain themselves just enough to continue going. Those who choose suicide only do so because they believe their end is preferable to their continuous pain. If they had no conception of pain, they would see no reason to end; indeed, without pain, there would be no true conception of life, for they would only see present existence as its own amoral purpose to pursue. This is folly, however, for it is only in and through pain that consciousness arose in the first place.

I hold the view that instinct is prior to consciousness, for all organisms have instinct, but very few have consciousness, and man (so far as we know) is the only one with self-consciousness—self-consciousness itself arising from our cognitive architecture, which was built from the environment, and which is continuously evolving in the environment. And so, the nature of man is all too subject to chance, subject to the environment, that is, which itself becomes determined only after the fact in light of our memory of the experience.

The truth of life changes with respect to the perspective we adopt for the sake of making sense of it. Hence comes the variety of opinions and falsities which are spread throughout the world for the sake of saving face, maintaining personas and statuses, which in the end are really vain things that only have meaning at all thanks to our memories of them. And to think memory was turned on by a bundle of neurotransmitters simultaneously leaping across the synaptic cleft. That leap was one small step for man, for sure, but one giant leap into the world of misery. What a funny thing existence seems in the face of science, which has no qualms totalizing man into one giant molecule. Lord, our God, have mercy on us, for we have sinned against that which is most sacred in your eyes—our very selves. Man’s existence seems so degrading and arduous when it is lived outside of his nature, or when it finds no way by which to reconnect with his nature, his primal instinct, within his present environment. It is certainly wrong to tell the whole of a man’s life story from the perspective of his environment, but it would be foolish to assume the contrary—for man is both his nature, what he is as a single individual, and his nurture, what he is in the face of that which is not himself. All of character, all the qualities and aspects which come to ascribe a man, are genotypic in their inwardness, but phenotypic in their outwardness; that is to say, all that man could be is contained within him at birth (his genotype), but all that he appears to be in the world is what his environment made him to be (his phenotype). In that sense, man has both a determined and undetermined nature. From this, we may say along with Ariosto, “Nature made him, and then broke the mold.” The making from nature is nothing, for her resources are bountiful, but the breaking of the mold, however—the forming of a man’s character, his parents, grandparents, education, privilege, status, class, intelligence, competence, friends, looks, interests, desires, passions—in short, his everything—all that which makes up the single individual, whether he knows it or not, is to be found in that undetermined aspect of nature which man himself is responsible for breaking.

It is a folly of man to assuage his responsibility to himself merely because he feels he was not granted the nature he desires. I hear very often man lament that he doesn’t have this or that thing, but then he assumes he would if, in an alternate universe, he had the prerequisites by which to attain them—more or less blaming his misery on his determined nature, that is, blaming his misery on something he cannot change. This man assumes the nature of his present character would remain the same; he feels his material condition would change, but not his actual being.

It’s extremely amusing for me to hear what someone would do should they win the lottery. They always have the most elaborate plans and “intelligent” ends with their newly won money, but if they thought only half as much on their actual situation as on their fantasies, they would very likely make them a reality; but man never finds contentedness in his reality, only the continuous desire for more and more and more—more life, fun, adventure, extravagance, decadence, depravity—and NEVER less. Life for man is cyclical only because he continuously gives himself up to the exact thing which destroyed his ancestors—pleasure. And what is modernity but the culmination of abundance and pleasure, so much pleasure, in fact, that everyone’s being seems set on making it the end of life. Modern man is weak because he is comforted by innumerable amenities and utilities which reduce the amount of stress and strain on his far-gone body, and thus he takes a natural liking to that which precisely makes him weak. A tree only grows firm when blown by a sturdy gust, and likewise, man must look upon his lack of pleasure not as a misfortune, but as a truly great luxury, for out of that misery comes something far greater than anything produced in leisure; and how right Schopenhauer was when he observed in his essay On Authorship:

The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little.

How far man today has fallen, seeking very much while providing very little. Man today is far more docile and relaxed than his ancestors, and as a result strives after nothing, achieves very little, develops vain goals, and has a very poor perspective of himself—for he does nothing with his existence in mind but only for the sake of maintaining his existence, as if he maintained his life by accident. Such is why men today seem so lost and without hope: they have no conception of greatness, and everything they view as good has already corrupted them to the point of no return, and so they live the rest of their days utterly stranded from their own heart, communicating very little with their own soul, and have no truly noble future prospect by which to get excited about. In short, there is no upliftment today in man, and the path to upliftment is perhaps the hardest one can traverse—for upliftment only comes when man is willing to transcend the immediate, and seek for that which is eternal in him. In him… yes, I mean within yourself—you, dear reader, are a great soul, a single individual, with potential far beyond your wildest imaginations! But what can possibly bring about this great upliftment? That is the end imagination has in view at all times.

Up to this point, we have only considered memory from an existential perspective, but I now wish to expound upon imagination as the counterpart to memory. To reiterate, however, memory is an extension of reason; it is reason with width, and contains within it all that we were and are, and from which we will be. Without memory, there would be no consistent existence; all would appear perpetually new, and we would never remember anything at all. In memory is the whole of our life, more or less, for everything that is done in the world by man is considered in light of past experience. And hence the famous quote by Cicero in his De Oratore, where he says, Memoria est thesaurus omnium rerum et custos (Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things). Memory is only a single aspect of life, however—a large part of it for sure, but again, only one. What one cannot do with memory is see beyond, to transcend. That is what imagination is for, and is why I call it the counterpart to memory: for while memory reveals to us in the present what to do based on the past, imagination makes us think of the present in terms of the future.

Imagination is nothing more than memory abstracted into the future, but abstracted in such a way as to envision both possible and impossible worlds. There’s a certain kind of modal logic at play within the imagination, for you’re able to extend beyond the real world, but you can only bring to fruition those things in the present world. Therefore, as much as we would like to see our every ideal actualized in reality, there is only a finite number of things which man can possibly bring about in the world as he is. Hence why imagination is the most powerful creative force man has within him. It is in the imagination that man suddenly comes alive, and is freed from the dull, boring logic-chopping and verifying of science or analytic philosophy—or worse still, the sterile, stifling, stultifying, life-denying, empty, plain, prosaic practicalities of the real world: nothing causes more dread to a man with artistic inclinations than a spreadsheet—oh! how lifeless the modern world seems to those who have passion in their hearts for things beyond this world.

It is in imagination that every potentiality in man can become an actuality. This is why every dialectician must also necessarily be a poet—a creative man capable of making his subjectivity seem like the greatest reality there is. Man, limited by the very physicality of his being, can only think so many miracles before everything appears like a repetition to him. It is precisely in that repetition, however, that all happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom can come to you. What do I mean? Ask yourself: what is the very limit of my current power? What is it in life that I feel I would die without? What really matters to me in the grand scheme of things? Each of these questions is staggeringly subjective, and yet in their subjectivity is where all their power lies. The only answer which can be put to these questions with any assurance and confidence is the answer found in the imagination.

Man must live his life as if his future were already known, as if his fate were sealed since the beginning of time. What is lacking in man’s conception of power today is confidence! There is no sense of fatalism in man today. What passes man by, and which becomes the material from which his memory is roused and strengthened, is but the immediate—but the imagination to man is like the faith of a firm believer—unwavering, assured, confident, in short, POWERFUL! What is necessary today is that which seems impossible, even stupid. Oh yes, stupidity has always been the end result of all humanity’s vain ambitions, but I mean stupid not in an ideal sense but in a practical sense. What is at first maligned and ridiculed by those out of the loop is eventually accepted wholesale by the populace on account of its results and effects, and nothing more; and those who were initially right are praised by those who originally slandered and libeled them. The greatest satisfaction in life isn’t necessarily proving someone wrong, but proving to yourself that you could prove them wrong. An immense and indomitable will is necessary within everyone, for all people have to have some amount of insanity (as well as self-confidence) within them if they are also to have some genius; and what is the imagination but the genius of childhood resurrected in adulthood, reborn as it were, rising from the turbidity of ignorance and falsehood like a phoenix from the ashes.

The imagination is where subjectivity is at its highest point, and where the single individual can truly feel like themselves in the world. Existence is made narrow by the narrowness of our environment, and we are constantly surrounded by that which disenfranchises us completely. That is why there will always be some truth in the self-reliant doctrines of Emerson and Thoreau—for so long as society brings to the helm that which is bad, and leaves by the wayside that which is good, there will always be a cornucopia of bad; in fact, Transcendentalism as a philosophical movement—inspired by German Idealism, and Romanticism more broadly—is itself an individualist doctrine; it is not meant to be a prescription for a country, let alone an entire civilization, but rather a singular attitude in which the subjectivity of the self is made holy by a recognition of what it really is: an aspect of nature, beautified and immortalized in self-love and self-respect, for the self as the self is forced to contend with his narrow environment. No greater truth was ever uttered in the history of the world than when Emerson said in his essay Self-Reliance,

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve yourself to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

Tat Tvam Asi (“Thou Art That”), says the Upanishads. To yourself you are, and all you are, and therefore must be, if you are to become who you are, and are meant to be. To be or not to be—these be but the same things to me, for whether I be or not be, either way, I still have my conception of self, the I: this is the doctrine of non-duality, and it is also the basis of Hegel’s system of absolute idealism. It is no surprise that nearly every great mind, ancient and modern alike, finds themselves always on the edge of human thought when the question of being (metaphysical ontology) is taken to task. There is no language yet created by man that has captured the concept of being and non-being; only the dialectic has managed to approach it, and even still only slightly.

Subjectivity can only be revealed through the dialectic, and this is precisely why those who have chosen the path of objectivity as an aspect of reality have always considered it through the lens of contradiction, rather than Aufhebung (sublation: a lifting up of the concept past its contradiction in order that it may find a higher synthesis within the process of becoming comprehensible as such—what Hegel ultimately called spirit). And with this point stated, I return again to the imagination, for it is in ideas that imagination acquires its strength. All that has been said thus far would not have been possible were it not for a combination of my intellect, memory, and imagination—all of which are bound by, and subject to, my sense of reality, tethered with my capacity for abstraction upon that reality. Schopenhauer rightly said that all knowledge—that is, representations drawn from objective sense experience—exists only for the intellect, the faculty in the mind responsible for processing and organizing all of reality as it appears, and, it should be added, in accordance with the principium individuationis (principle of individuation). (By the way, for Schopenhauer, objective simply meant the phenomenal (exterior) world, that which wasn’t born in the subject, like abstractions.) Imagination moves beyond this strictly sensual, objective world, however, by allowing subjectivity to become an objectivity not in the objective sense, but in the superlunary sense—in a higher sense, in a sense that appeals only to the irrational, in that which cannot be reduced to premises and a conclusion; this is the appeal to the single individual as such. What becomes of man is that which he makes from this particular cauldron of ideas and dialectical ruminations. The thinking man, the philosopher, the intellectual, the one who loves wisdom and seeks wisdom for its own sake—that is one who understands the imagination in full, and who is capable of synthesizing it with memory (reason) through the dialectic.

I will never tire of repeating and reiterating the core of my whole philosophy—it is to be found in this: being (existence) is subjectivity as such, and essence (life) is objectivity made manifest in action; and both are considered through the lens of a pragmatic dialectic.

I believe I’ve now taken both topics as far as I could existentially. There comes a point in every existential analysis where you feel you could say much more, but if you did, it would just result in a variation on the same idea, only with the same aspects emphasized in a different order—and when you’ve reached the end of this, you rely on the dialectic to turn out something new, though the material be very old. That is, as a philosopher, the greatest analogy for life I could find—a continuous, never-ending process that requires a new consideration every second of experience. I don’t think I would want it any other way; for what is a philosopher but a creator of ideas—an individual who labors with his mind to bring a sense of order and clarity to all that there is. What a beautiful idea it is: to live life only in seeking to understand it, completely oblivious to all the practical considerations that uphold it. That is my ideal life. What is yours, my fellow wanderer?

Experience

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced. —Søren Kierkegaard.

What is the whole of life but an experience? Within that word rest the entirety of our existence. In the interstices by which we human beings are forced to trudge along through, in this long and dreary forest of thorns and spikes, containing the most unthinkable miseries and deprivations which no conscious creature should force their way through—we, MANKIND, are born and die in and through experience.

In writing this, I am experiencing. In your reading this, dear reader, you’re experiencing. In thinking this, while breathing and itching and fighting the urge to give up, I am experiencing. One may as well equate conscious existence itself as mere experiencing.

Experience is that which we are doomed to suffer from in life every second we tolerate it. Existence as such is the progressive toleration of ever-increasing and immiserating circumstances which we are forced to adapt to for the sake of our survival. Oh! how cruel this all seems—how terrible, how much of a mistake existence seems when confronted by the whole of it; a whole so large that not even God could contain all of it.

The pressing pangs of life, and the hollowed-out dreams that are had within it, are such that we delude ourselves for its sake. Humanity, in some very real sense, only lives at all in order to see what could be in the future. It is with a very sad and sorrowful sense, then, that I relate the whole of it in its truth: it is all a shallow dream, lived on through hope, and through the lie of hope is made a good in itself for our very own gratification and appraisal of it.

What mockery our very lives are to the concept of life in the present. Modernity, like seemingly every other age before it, has made the end goal of man a lie. For hundreds of thousands of years, man’s sole concern was survival—and it could be argued that that age was the last time man was ever honest with himself; an age when the sole concern was life itself, and thus grounded in the truest of all true realities: his very continuation and subsistence.

After some development, only born out after countless millennia of consistent stagnation, man became comfortable enough to reflect in his pastime, to reflect, in fact, in order to pass his time. Time at once was free for man to think within. With this liberation from constant striving found in earlier times of bare-bones existence, man at once was forced to confront his life intellectually, abstractly, divided from the concrete reality of his former existence. Nature now appeared to man as something to understand, rather than to fear, and thus arose every single justification ever conceived by man.

What experience was prior to that revelation of abstraction was the nearest to instinct: the lived, the embodied, the completely encapsulated within the physical. No longer. Now, within the brain contains all of experience, organized and synthesized thanks to the prior categories of perception already contained within the apparatus as such. Experience is lived, and that is why the instinctual way of life will always be more true than that conceived in thought. We have our brains to thank for the whole of reality which appears before us as perception; but we in modernity live as if all is to become subject to it—to the principle of sufficient reason; nay, to the principle of insufficient reason, of wretched, anemic reason—of reason that is completely divorced from the instinctual, a reason not worth the name.

What is meant by reason today is the correspondence of all our experience to their rightful origin point. We wish to provide the cause to every effect. If every consequent could have its ground, we would strive for that eternally—and in fact, that is what has become of philosophy in the 20th century: one know-it-all after another pontificating on their grand unified, ultra-sophisticated, totally valid, utterly without error or fault system of absolute philosophy—an absolutism not seen since the days of monarchy. We of today would sacrifice our very life if it could be proved that we were right. That the correctness of our views holds more importance to us today than the use of them for our very being is a very grave sign that things have headed in the wrong direction, and have been for over a century; in fact, many centuries: since Hegel, no Kant, no Descartes, no Aquinas, no Avicenna, no Augustine, no Plotinus, no PLATO! DAMN PLATO. He was the one. He gave us the lie that truth and life were co-eternal and equal. What he did was make truth an objective quality of nature, abstracted from, and outside of, man. This here is the greatest lie in the history of humanity—even more than Christianity itself.

Experience bears the truth of every truth, and in that sense, truth itself is really subject to experience. That is why science is the ultimate guarantor of truth, because its method is fundamentally dialectical! Life is truth—like God in the Christian conception—and thus it is subjective: the exact conclusion of, possibly, the greatest dialectical mind in history—Kierkegaard. Life is truth and truth is subjectivity; thus, life is subjectivity; and in this subjectivity is found only the prescriptive (normative) rather than the descriptive; thus, every action we take is necessarily ethical, and requires sufficient rumination upon it in order to properly embody it in right action.

One instantly sees the true nature of life—a long, tiring, nearly incomprehensible uphill battle against our own ignorance, tethered with a passionate negativity of aspect in action so gut-wrenching that to even act is an infinite choice which necessitates despair. This explains why every dialectical mind—like my own and Kierkegaard’s—is necessarily syncretical, scattered, confused even, and everywhere melancholic. We are miserable not because we cannot act, but because we cannot understand the purpose behind our acts; we intellectual sentimentalists need to feel the infinite not only in the abstract, but also in the concrete; but because this eludes all conceivability, we have to relegate all our actions to a wretched finiteness, and thus annihilate the power that originally made us dear to the ideas in the first place. We want what we feel in mind but cannot bring to fruition in any sense, and so we hang our heads in shame even when we feel the experience itself was good. Endlessly do we dialecticians make a mess of every simple concept, for in their simplicity hides a potential divinity which, for life, is indispensable. Such is why modernity is vain, for it views everything through an already tainted lens—everything in reality is assumed either as matter, idea, or some stupid synthesis of the two, which in truth could never be the case—hence why it’s dialectical. To bring action to the finite is necessary; otherwise, one would contemplate the infinite in every action and never act in the first place; a very sad truth about the nature of man, but a truth which, when recognized, emboldens man to take a leap nonetheless. Every action is a leap, and every leap a commitment to that which is good for you as an individual.

Agere recte in vita impossibile est. (To act rightly in life is impossible.) This is a truth which holds good for all self-conscious creatures, but which is especially poignant within a reflective man—an melancholic, intellectual man, seemingly born to make difficult everything which everyone prior to him had tried to synthesize and comprehend in its entirety—as if the infinite could possibly be grasped in the hands of man. Man combs through his experience in order to find what was useful to him in them, but without ever acting truly rightly in anything, and thus making him, in an absolute sense, in the wrong in all things, he can only rely on his instinct to overcome in order to become anything within his wrong. A man serious about doing right, then, must look inwards, towards his own being, and strive after that which fulfills his essence in the immediate—noble actions, born out of his desire to act, in order that he may find within them a hint of the infinite which first compelled him to move past his state of inaction in the first place.

Every attempt to grasp the reality of life is really an attempt to bring it down to the finite, in order that the infinity of it does not swallow you whole, and leave you incapacitated and incapable of action. Action is experience, and experience must always be directed towards the higher, the infinite, God, without, however—in contemplating its highness—leaving you unable to do anything. Such is why the first important lesson of life, and essentially the end of all experience, is that which is edifying, uplifting, inspiring, and you; you in the sense that it is unique to your individuality, to you as a single individual, as a human not in humanity, but of humanity; you great soul, you—impossibly powerful, yet humanly limited.

Every power is really a mirage should it not be made total in its experience. It is hateful to the living to have such capacity, yet make nothing of it aside from a debasing consistency and uniform regularity—in short, to turn life into a system, a habit, a cycle—like digestion—which circles back and forth forever and ever without imparting to you some aspect of divinity, grace, potential, in short, POWER. POWER OF, BY, AND FOR, YOURSELF.

The category of the single individual exists within all of us, and so must be used as a kind of existence which is not merely the contingent or average, but a total—a, to use an algebraic analogy, closed solution under radicals. Life is to be lived in the finite while wrestled with in the infinite. It is extremely difficult, but no one has ever claimed life was easy. In fact, life, to me at least, seems almost too difficult at times; even to endure life seems superhuman—to just sit there and do nothing seems inconsequential, but in reality is an act of bravery matched only in mythology, in legend, in the tales of the truly remarkable. Every human being has every aspect of every other inside them; it is merely a matter of bringing it out. This bringing out is something which demands action, an experience of a kind that may seem impossible for one who has never acted in that way before; but be placed in the right position, or in the proper circumstance, and you can expect to do something which would shock upon later reflection.

The story of every life is one bound in experience, and thus experience becomes the only thing man can rely on in order to make sense of existence as such. To think of life absent of experience is really to think the impossible: a bare-faced nothingness, completely empty and void of any tangible content possible for its conception; you may as well compare it to the thoughts of rocks, which is to say, nothing at all. Everything done not for life is done in vain.

The end of every experience should not be pleasure, comfort, security, or happiness—for all of these things are doomed to oblivion by the rapaciousness of our human nature, always striving after novelty and excitement—but life itself. A meaningful life, if such a thing is even possible, is a life that is tarried with consistently, in a dialectical manner, such that it accounts for all necessary contingencies; contingencies which lie at the heart of every human life, and which remain to us impossibilities forever, in regard to our knowing what is to come of them in our life. In that sense, every life is uncertain, just as it is ethical, and bound in experience, and mediated by ourselves as subjects. Life which is NOT lived for the sake of itself is not worth being called life; nay, it is rather like an abstraction which sounds nice and pleases our ears, but which has no deep meaning behind it at all.

What becomes of existence when it is not lived for itself is a degrading process of suffering, which tires out the individual and makes them lose all sense of self-activity—that is, actions which pertain to the self, and are done for the self, and which are only done so that the self may prosper from them. Experience is that which holds all the beads on the string of life, for life, after all, is similar to a string: thin, short, and not much to get excited about in itself. Man today is like a shipwrecked survivor stranded on an island of despair, from which no material exists for a potential raft to be made—nothing but the sky, sand, and ocean.

What kind of dark abyss lay at the core of every man’s heart? It is such a frightful idea to indulge in that I consider it rather absurd to even consider. It is supremely scary because life so much resembles a darkness which is all-encompassing, and which none could ever truly comprehend.

I feel, in this discourse thus far, that I’ve reached a point in the explication of the subject at which the real analysis is over, and now the dialectic can really begin. In every writing, there is, at first, a sense of uncertainty, for every beginning is really a great leap of faith: a faith in yourself, that you actually have something to say, that you can, in fact, provide anything worthwhile to say. (Writers are such vain creatures—to value our own ideas so highly we think them worth imparting to the rest of mankind, as if our singular perspective were enough to enlighten all of humanity!) After the initial leap, however, it is not done there. There must be another leap, and then another, one more, forever and ever. There is no end to the leaping, for every leap implies another leap. Such is the nature of our minds, so inconstant and fleeting, that the only way to write anything of merit is to write it honestly, with feeling, in a natural manner—a stream-like manner, that reflects nature more than anything else. We have to cultivate our gardens deliberately, and maintain them consistently, if any hope of overcoming the miserable experiences of our life can be thought possible. What is possible is everything, so long as our subjectivity is remembered, our truth strengthened, our power powerful, and our hopes unwavering.

That is what it means to be dialectical, after all: the ability to repeat every repetition, every action, with the same firmness and conviction we had when first living them out. The eternal recurrence of the same, the life lived over and over—like some representation of the Ouroboros—without end or deviation from its inception. The origin point of every great life—and especially of every writer—is that which is born out of suffering and misery. It is for that reason that depressed individuals have the most acute sense of not only their own suffering, but of the sufferings of others; there’s a kind of sensitivity they possess that is not common among the herd, for most of the herd drown their depression out with antidepressants—a kind of antipode to feeling, a manifesto for more misery, a very real love for that which is anti-life.

People today are against life, instinct, feelings—in short, being with their emotions—because all their life they’re told that that which does not aid them immediately with respect to life is a hindrance to life; such a foolish attitude to adopt, for they do not see the necessity of suffering, to say nothing of its inevitability. They ignore life by making it a sterilized system, an association of associations, which strives to cobble together out of nothing something which can be used as a sort of guide in life. These people do not know the first thing about their subjectivity, about the power of their individuality, about their life as such, and so they fall back upon that which is familiar to them, but which gives them no lasting impression of assistance in life. In life as something within you, in your subjective experience of things—experience as such, for experience’s sake, which in turn involves you, and makes you not a stranger to yourself, but a master. You master yourself by being yourself: be yourself—such a platitude worthy of hell, no? Yes! Indeed—but also one worthy of the Gods if it be understood in an existential sense, as all of life should be understood. Remember, dear reader, this whole tome is only for your upliftment. My own experience means nothing. It is found in you. Born in you. Created from you. A book is only as useful as the one reading it. In books, one finds nothing which wasn’t already in the reader; it was only expressed and made tangible in words the author felt in the moment of writing—but as for the experience, and the takeaway overall, it is all on the reader.

Logic and Structure

Logic

Everyone today likes to think themselves in the good graces of logic, but only a cursory observation of their habits of thinking proves them completely otherwise—in fact, they shun logic. Never before in the history of the world has an “educated” populace proven itself so utterly foolish with regards to every kind of thinking: from mathematical, to analytical, to deductive, to inductive, to even plain “common sense,” or everyday reasoning. The whole of mankind seems utterly incapable of following even the most basic line of reasoning. People think it beyond them to try and grasp the world, and so they go through most of it utterly ignorant.

The general lack of appreciation that is commonplace for education is a very clear sign that whatever narrative they were told regarding education has fallen flat, and so, turned off by this betrayal, they rebel against all reason and logic as such, and find themselves in a manacle of ignorance from which they can never break out. This ignorance, in turn, perpetuates itself throughout the generations, until it becomes common among the collective, and thus is taken as the norm—as if that was the way things always were. Such misunderstanding and lack of avidity toward intellectual pursuits has turned logic into what it is today: a tool used by liars, lawyers, pundits, propagandists, sophists, swindlers, con artists, and rhetoricians for the sake of convincing other stupid people of their bare-faced lies.

Logic was man’s greatest attempt to systematize the world, to place it under a single banner of understanding. Logic, in short, is nothing more than a system of reasoning about the world in a formalized manner. Born in the mind of Aristotle, its initial purpose was to turn thinking into a science. What Aristotle envisioned was a way for any statement about reality to be categorized under certain criteria from which its veracity (the truth of its conclusion) could be determined through an analysis of its premises. Prior to this, man had only arrived at logic through intuition, a feel for what was right in the course of reasoning; after Aristotle, however, every potential truth about the world could be formalized—or so everyone thought.

What most people think of when they hear the word logic today is what is known as term logic, formerly called Aristotelian logic; and this is a great tragedy, for it completely ignores every advancement made since Aristotle, and consigns logic to merely an analysis of premises within syllogistic form. It deliberately narrows the view by which people can comprehend the world, and makes it seem as if that were the only form of logic there was—completely ignoring all the various systems of logic that transcend the traditional method, and go well beyond the ordinary categories of soundness, validity, and contradiction.

While Aristotle is to be praised for his efforts—as is every other logician after him—he is not to be slavishly adhered to like some dogmatic gospel that proclaims total truth. What is great in man is not only that he is rational, but that he can overcome the rational; that he can move beyond himself, and adopt a form of thinking that conforms to his life alone. Logic reveals nothing to man that isn’t already obvious. All logic does is dress up a “truth” in formal garb to appear authoritative, like a Catholic priest putting on his gold and white robe with a symbol of the cross on it to prove to his congregation he’s a very pious and holy man whose word is to be taken seriously. Logic formalizes and finalizes claims about reality that can be put into syllogistic form; which is to say that every result in logic is merely an exercise in setting the right premises to a conclusion that experience has already validated. And thus, Schopenhauer rightly exposed the true nature of logic when he said,

Logic can never be of any practical use, but only of theoretical interest for philosophy... For it may be said of logic as of other sciences, that it does not show us how to think, but only how we have thought. — The World as Will and Representation, Volume 1, Book 1, Section 9.

Logic makes formal that which is already intuitive within the mind, for humans reason by nature and draw conclusions from experience in the concrete. Again, all logic does is take every concrete experience and generalize it into a system by which future experience can be similarly approached for the sake of making it appear reasonable. Logic has no practical use, only utility for philosophers and those wishing to appear smart. It is no wonder, then, why it is such a powerful tool—taking things in the general case, and revealing why they apply to all specific cases. If one is skilled in this art, they can reason their way out of anything, but they can also use it to make reasonable an avalanche of logical fallacies and cognitive biases which everyone is prone to, and none immune to absolutely. Such is why falsity is the rule of the day, because those with the biggest pockets, and access to the largest talent pools, can pick up any orator or philosophaster and have them make falsehood into truth.

Outrage, sensation, scandal, lies, falsehood, and other such claptrap are what run the world of media, and what gets passed off as news today; this is why every narrative in modernity is, in a very real sense, complete nonsense—because it’s already filtered through ten different biases before it’s placed before the public as official, and made to wreak havoc on every mind interested in the validity of it. “Show me facts! Show me facts!” they all cry, but where were these same yells when one grew bold enough to turn logic on itself, and questioned its own validity? Instantly do the placards come down, and every vanguard of reason is turned pale by the prospect, and shuffles back into the shadow of agnosticism. Such a state of things would make one question the intents of logic, and rightfully so. What use has logic ever had for man beyond being a tool used to justify what he already knows or believes to be the case?

I suppose this is where truth as a concept turns black, and decays before all as a shriveled and antiquated notion. Logic, for seemingly all of history, has been the single most powerful weapon for upholding truth; it has used its antiquity and noble tradition to stun all with a blow from its authoritative heel—so powerful, in fact, that to question it seems like the height of lunacy; but what genius fears being called insane, already having a bit of it in him? Logic reveals the general in the particular. From the specific case, we reason rightly and receive a self-justification for making our pontifications upon it as general, and thus “true.” But what does true mean in this context? True as an arrow flies? That external reality corresponds with our abstracted explanation of it? From my pragmatic lens, the question is meaningless. I presuppose that reality has no noumenal aspect to it, and I assume that from Occam’s razor, as well as from my own intuition regarding the world as it appears before me, and my temperament. In my view, anyone who claims to have access to the thing-in-itself, which supposedly lies beyond our perception of the world as such, is no different from Plato talking about Atlantis, or Aesop talking about frogs, birds, hares, or foxes—it’s a narrative you tell yourself for the sake of easing your mind when confronted by that which is incomprehensible.

Now, anyone skilled in logic, or philosophical debate in general, would probably retort with a valid parity of my presupposition: “If you assume reality to have no noumenal aspect, what’s stopping someone from claiming the opposite? If both are presupposed, and neither has evidence for or against one another, why not pick your poison subjectively?” And to this I would say, “Well done. You have rightly spotted precisely what I wanted you to: both are equally valid (or invalid, depending on how you look at it), and so, whichever one you pick is ultimately hopeless from a logical standpoint, but not without serious purpose from a pragmatic, or existential, standpoint.” Logic is, and always has been, the maidservant to truth; but truth—like every other abstraction which philosophers throughout the centuries have wrongly placed above themselves—has always been a lie from the start, and thus all collapses into a void of epistemic nihilism. And at once do I return to my earlier point.

Man today must have a pragmatic air about him in everything he does, and must treat logic like a teacher treats a slow student—with patience and sympathy, but not too much indulgence or cruelty. In order to surpass logic—to go beyond those feeble notions of soundness, validity, and contradiction—one must first get over the notion of truth. Truth is an interpretation, an evaluation, a feeling—in essence, a kind of subjectivity that makes the logical real, and the real logical. Real is that which appears before us in our perception. Logical is that which is abstracted from experience for the sake of making said perception comprehensible. Like overlapping circles, subjectivity contains both the subjective side of reality and the objective side of reality. (It should be noted, too, that by objective I do not mean the Platonic notion of mind-independent truth—but rather, in the Kantian sense, that which lies outside of the subject, an object for the subject, for experience itself.)

The instant truth becomes subjective, the dialectic takes over, and all former systems of logic—obsequious toward formality and definitions of little utility—become paraconsistent, that is, true in specific contexts, and allowed to be reasoned through without contradictions hindering the investigation; in fact, contradictions are necessary in order to bring about a higher synthesis. This is, in my view, the most powerful method of philosophizing ever devised by man. Not only is it the most general, but it has the most existential utility, and can make logic a tool for existence, rather than a stale form of analysis which only holds for a handful of cases, which are themselves extremely boring in theory and worthless in practice.

To overcome logic is to overcome truth, and to overcome truth is to become subjective in an absolute sense. Dialectical logic is the foundation of Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic), and was the precise tool used by Kierkegaard in all his analyses of subjectivity—specifically in his category of the single individual and in his theory of stages; Nietzsche went even beyond this by questioning logic itself, and affirming no real “objective” system of epistemology, but rather employing his concept of perspectivism, which was arrived at independently by William James in his philosophy of pragmatism. Dialectics is the philosophical tool by which all contradictions may be wrestled with, and eventually overcome, though only after immense sacrifice and deliberation, from which you may still emerge unsure.

The nature of the method necessitates uncertainty, for in uncertainty lies the truest core of subjectivity, and in subjectivity lies every truth the human heart ever conceived. A true nihilist has never existed, in the same way a true relativist has never existed; every human that has ever lived has valued one thing over another, and in that sense became dialectical, for in order to choose one over the other requires a leap into that which no traditional approach to reason or logic could ever provide for. I sometimes wish I could even surpass my need to evaluate—to do without concepts and abstractions within reality—and simply live on brute instinct, like a tiger or antelope; but so long as I am condemned to be just a man, and not an Übermensch, I am forever chained to my desire to validate the world in my conceptions of it. Thus, man is forever to be like a child when confronted by the whole of his nature—a complete abyss which no genius throughout history, no matter how precocious or awe-inspiring, has ever been able to pierce through and reveal its hidden contents.

Such is why Nietzsche urgently warned any man attempting to comprehend life that, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” In my philosophy of subjectivity, looking into the abyss is the quintessence of upliftment—for one must first have a courage strong enough to even dare such a look, and thus must collect themselves for the prolonged staring contest that is to ensue from such a bold move: the boldest move in all of history! History is beholden to truth, for truth is merely the expression of that which is valued above all others, epistemologically at least. Mankind has received a very bad blow indeed from its obsession with logical proof, irrefutability, and absolute certainty in all things: as if the nature of man’s mind were like an automaton, a clock, a mechanism, a computer, and every other analogy that rationalists have hurled toward the character of mind within man, to make everything seem like a spring with infinite elasticity. Ludicrous!

And now, with all this said, the question ultimately becomes: how is this kind of thing to be taught to the masses? Is that even a worthwhile question, considering the state of things? Let’s see. What we have today in the world is an amalgamation of stupidity the likes of which have not been seen in millennia. It is almost impossible for me to wrap my head around the fact that people today are run through a system that purports to educate them, yet the majority leave as ignorant as they were when they entered; as if every concept enters one ear and leaves the other.

People today find it immensely difficult to abstract beyond their immediate circumstances; basic questions pose great challenges, and the obvious nature of a paradox, to them, seems like a thing worth reasoning through—not seeing the futility in it. Whence comes all this ignorance? It is all too clear: from their nature. Intellect, in the academic sense at least, is not something that is born in man. What school does is prepare a man’s mind through repetition, and forces him to think in a certain way that is peculiar and not intuitive to his nature; education is forced on kids, and with that comes a lack of purpose behind education—nor do most have an innate desire to become learned; and so, as a result, kids resort to viewing their education through a strictly practical lens (a lens provided to them by society at large)—in terms of what it can do for their future prospects, what kind of livelihood it can provide them with, in what way it could further their material ends: this is where education goes to die.

Education today is rational and systematic, not dialectical or maieutic. What is lacking is subjectivity. As already stated, there is no truth—only that which is useful for the individual. What is called “true” or “correct” in the context of school is that which is already established by the curriculum, and which is tested on in exams. In a very real sense, education today is the exact opposite of what it should be: instead of teaching minds to think for themselves, and to be creative in their approaches to understanding the world, they are forced to memorize and retain large swaths of information which have no relevance to their lives and which fail to hold their interest—and so, we have a system that perpetuates, generation after generation, conformist and shallow-minded morons, all the while considering the greatest (the valedictorians and salutatorians) those with the strongest long-term memory. It’s not a surprise, then, to see what the average literacy rate is in America, to say nothing of our overall incompetence in mathematics.

Until we get past this notion of standardization and consistent examinations, we shall continue to fall precipitously on the world stage, until we find ourselves in an idiocracy far greater than the one we presently reside in—which is a thought that shakes me to the core (how can we fall further into stupidity?). We all need to reevaluate what truth really means for us, and start taking pragmatism and autodidactism with seriousness. Logic has kept us chained and repressed for long enough. It is time to break loose from every old conception, and start thinking for ourselves, subjectively; and start valuing those things which really matter, while fighting for the possibility of seeing them in our own lifetime!

Thinking intellectuals, UNITE!

Definition

Definitions are a way of avoiding true thinking. The end of thinking is an overlap between the concept and the reality as experienced in the subject; but what definitions do is offer a way of simplifying the real complexity behind every experience, and in turn subjugate all to a mere colloquialism—an agreed-upon meaning behind every conception. Again, definitions provide labels, signs, signifiers, all with the hope of conveying what it is we think about some thing in the world. Reality is understood through definitions. Language itself, which shapes the entire structure of our thought, is merely a compilation of rules which are collectively agreed upon and understood.

What distinguishes a native speaker from a fluent one is the speed and rapidity by which the concepts (the words and their meaning, along with the corresponding grammar) can be called upon in the mind; the native speaker, physiologically, has the advantage by having their entire auditory nervous system primed through continuous use since earliest childhood; in that way, a fluent speaker may be more elegant or learned in a language than a native, but will never have as much ease as a native speaker, unless they deliberately drill themselves in the language until it comes as easily as their native one, which is a process that takes many years, and may even necessitate full immersion in the culture and people of that particular language.

Definitions are born out of necessity, and they make themselves felt every second one is alive. Man, being the kind of creature he is, has always strove to comprehend things in a manner that maximizes utility. In the state of nature, all bow down to power as the end of all things; and so, with knowledge came power, and with that our survival. The ability to categorize was, in that sense, the very first intellectual task man ever undertook. For hundreds of thousands of years, feeling no impulse to abstract beyond what was necessary, man stood in a state of mere language alone—language as the only form of abstraction there was. Man created language as a tool for his use in abstracting reality, and so everyone abstracts reality—even the dumbest of people, who are more likely to embody this abstraction in strange grunts or gesticulations, perhaps even screaming or running away.

It should be noted here, too, that language only arises within and between human beings: without community and social relations, there can never be anything but a motley of idiolects, if anything like a language forms within the individual at all. This is proved by the existence of feral children, who, when found, have no concept of language, and rather resemble animals in the wild—no doubt a result of their lack of enculturation. Genie, the most famous feral child in modern times, had no language whatsoever, but was able to acquire a very rudimentary understanding of English when she was taught it, although with great difficulty.

Nothing we consider as obvious would be possible without our ability to first give these sensations names. Man is not necessarily the rational creature (as Aristotle thought), but the creature who, in groups, develops his rational faculties, which are already in him, but which must be cultivated in the real world through use and experience. It is for this reason I consider language a sacred thing. The fact that I have one, and can use it to express what I feel—and through that overcome my antipathies towards the world—is a blessing no man without one could ever comprehend. To even say the word “comprehend” implies that something is understood within me; there is an apprehension of some empirical reality that compels my mind to correlate my mental state with my lived experience.

All this is given meaning in words: a language, with a structure and a grammar, full of exceptions and confusing rules that not even native speakers are privy to, and which linguists and grammarians have yet to document completely. One may as well say that “definition” and “language” are synonymous. It makes sense, too, when you think about it: for every word in a language has its own definition and use, and with this use comes communication, and from this sympathy and mutual understanding. Language is the greatest child of the human intellect, for from it we encapsulate not only our own individual lives, but the whole of humanity as such.

In the context of logic, definitions are nothing more than prerequisites, things needed prior to real philosophical investigation. And here lies all our confusion and vain audacity—audacity in taking these definitions as something sacred, unchanging, eternal, objective, noumenal, etc. It is all too much with us; acquiring and using, we lay waste our powers in actual thinking, and consign our minds to a stupor of detail and technicality from which no real authenticity can ever be retrieved.

Authenticity is found only in subjectivity. When the single individual dares to think for themself, they think what is from them, within them (in their experience), and not from something they’ve heard, read, or accepted as true from an authority. The truest form of definition, then, is your own definition, drawn from your own nature and experience. That is where every “accepted” definition falls to the ground, and becomes mixed up in a sea of stupidity and varying opinions. The true definition of anything, in a colloquial sense, is that which has become accepted by the wider populace; and in that way, definitions are, by their very nature, subjective, and thus potentials for authentically subjective individuality. The single individual becomes paramount, and must remain so if definition in the world is to remain sacred and useful to them.

Words are prescriptive, not descriptive. They have uses, not set-in-stone definitions. Lexicographers are harmless drudges, who merely evaluate (subjectively) the etymologies and significations of words. Every dictionary is built on a compromise, and so, like language, life too should be approached in a compromising, pragmatic manner: a manner that makes simple living and tranquility an end in itself; everything done in life is half pursued if it is not done for its own sake, with its own furtherance and end in mind.

Words are a reflection of phenomenal reality, not some Platonic idea that is itself some embodiment of everlasting truth. That is why every word has behind it a moral valence, a prescriptive reality, born out of the speaker, and which enters the world as some shiny abstraction that gathers the attention of all who hear it. If it has meaning, that is good. If it has significance, that is great. If it has impact, that is the greatest of all—for that is where revolutionary fervor (the potential for change) shines through, contained within an idea whose time has finally arrived. You see, even words have an ethics behind them; they can be used for good or ill, but the main thing is whether they are useful to the individual or not. The survival of any word really depends on its use value; if it has no use, it will fall into obscurity—used only by antiquarians, until even they are blotted out by death—and then it is only useful to historians and cultural anthropologists.

Let us return to that idea of being useful to the individual, however. Change must first be born from within, subjectively, in the abstract, and made apparent in the concrete. In this subjectivity, the individual becomes the evaluator of what is useful or not. The guarantor of all truth is the individual—this is another reason why truth is subjective fundamentally. If every word had only an objective aspect to it, there would be no linguistic drift, no change in convention, no new language—the first language would have been the last, and no progress on any intellectual front would have taken place; only stagnant conformity to tradition and falsehood would have remained.

To see the truth subjectively is to treat the truth as it really is, subject only to its interpretation. What everyone gets wrong is precisely the value, or significance, they attribute to these mere abstractions. Definitions have always been treated like some abstract entity that has power over us, but this is foolish. The end of all evaluations is the practicality they afford us, to what degree they further our own objectives—everything else is folly. This is why I said earlier that “definition” and “language” are synonymous: language is the structure by which we express the external world, and definition is how we truthify it; definitions are no different from labels subjectively considered, and used with their practicality in mind. Pragmatism’s shadow looms heavily over all of this, does it not? Subjectivity is truth!

Man wishes to believe in that which is beyond him, but cannot bring himself to believe in God—thus, he believes in truth instead, and gratifies his vanity by saying wild things like, “I’m with the truth,” or “Truth is on my side,” or, better still, “Truth commands all.” When he says this, he really means he is in command of truth, or that he subjectively sides with what he already believes; no one has ever captured truth’s attention fully, for she changes consistently like the ocean tides, and recedes back into stupidity just as frequently. The greatest explication of the true meaning of truth is given by Nietzsche:

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.

[…]

To be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon everyone… From the sense that one is obliged to designate one thing as “red,” another as “cold,” and a third as “mute,” there arises a moral impulse in regard to truth. The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and everyone excludes.

As a “rational” being, he now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions. First he universalizes all these impressions into less colorful, cooler concepts, so that he can entrust the guidance of his life and conduct to them. Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. —On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.

If it isn’t already clear from this, it will never be made so. Nietzsche, in his poetic, awe-inspiring explication, has given the true nature of truth by effectively agreeing with Schopenhauer: that truth, as a concept, exists only for the subject—just as knowledge does; in fact, what we call knowledge, like everything else, is done from an assumed “objective” stance, when in reality it always stemmed from within the subject originally. This is why I said in my essay Experience that, “Life is truth and truth is subjectivity…” Every evaluation is ethical, and thus subjective—definitions are but the rubber stamps we place on our ideas to give them validity and power.

Truth has no power on its own; only POWER has power, and power can only ever be bestowed by man on himself (on his ideas and conceptions). All of human knowledge is but a directory, a map, a handbook, a chronicle—in short, a history of epic failures and botched attempts to place, within a single tome and under a single, unified conception, the totality of our ideas; every encyclopedia, in that sense, is really only a collection of fossilized evaluations (“facts”) made with respect to what was considered true in the world at that time, eternalized in ink but mortified in its results. All this scavenging for knowledge, now in light of its true essence, resembles more a stamp collector, or better yet an entomologist, who loves nothing more than placing their favorite bugs in a glass case—as if knowledge were merely a thing to be stared at, rather than used for our own empowerment and upliftment.

It all seems absurd from an existentialistic perspective, and in truth, it is! For if knowledge is not made sacred, or valued in the slightest, its future will be left to the whims of the herd, and when have they ever displayed rational judgment in the face of that which they hate? So it is with all evaluations, subject to the whims of their creator (man) and destined for death (along with man) with the passing of time. This is why we must value things passionately, truthfully, with our own subjectivity in mind, and nothing less than the most honest approach to our own existence as such.

In my case, I value knowledge, but gave up becoming a polymath long ago, for our age is replete—indeed overwhelmed—by the sheer quantity of information created and shared every second, far beyond the capabilities of a single man to obtain alone (something which was possible prior to the printing press, but no longer); to say nothing of the vanity and stupidity of our age, so averse to learning of all kinds—disgusted at the thought of wisdom for its own sake, of philomathy (learning and the acquisition of knowledge) for its own sake: how unfortunate indeed. Der Prozess des Lebens ist mein Kampf. (The process of life is my struggle.) And I don’t think I will ever equal the trials and tribulations which I must put up with merely to exist in the world.

With this fact recognized, surely—without question!—this life must be some kind of mistake. It has to be! It must be! I cannot see any other fundamental aspect to life outside of suffering; and at the same time, I feel it contrary to my soul to value those things which I interpret as lies and fallacies for the sake of perpetuating it. I cannot go against what my will tells me: this world is a lie, life is a dream, and the fundamental essence of existence seems to be Śūnyatā—emptiness! And yet, I live! I continue to live, in spite of everything contrary to my well-being—everything opposite to my happiness and purpose. I owe it to the fact that I find within my sufferings a great meaning hidden within them: a great meaning hidden within everything, in fact. That is what it means to be fundamentally subjective, after all: to value those things which pragmatically promote your life, which give your life meaning, which sustain you in the darkest of dark moments. I say again, in spite of my complete agreement with Schopenhauer’s pessimism, I continue to live anyway, happy to be subject to my will, and wanting nothing more than to gratify it as much as I can—which was the same conclusion Nietzsche came to when he broke away from the influence of Schopenhauer! Der Wille zur Macht! The will to power! That is what is needed today—not the continuous barbarity with which we subject ourselves daily when we affirm that which is safe and comfortable, rather than beneficial to our existence. More POWER! No meekness! That is what we must strive towards.

Reasoning

Reasoning is the process by which logic manifests itself. Man has always considered his position in the world as something precarious—as something bound to drop dead in due time—and with this recognition has come, understandably, an innate sense of confusion and timidity when placed face-to-face with it. The world offers man no answers whatsoever, and so, desirous of living and continuing on as best he could in the face of overwhelming odds, he developed within himself a tool of boundless utility and applicability: reason (which in the process of its use is called reasoning). This was the most mendacious minute in human history, but alas, it was only a minute, and man was fated to die like the rest in due time all the same.

Man does not feel himself if he cannot compare what he is with other people or ideas. It is only when man feels he could dominate reality that he feels at home with himself, and can exercise his power to the extent that it furthers his own ends and happiness. Without this, there is nothing by which to expend energy on, and so all would remain stagnant and inert, undeveloped, and destined to decay with time. It was reason that made man cognizant of this very fact: without his strength and effort, his labor in every pursuit and discipline—all for the sake of his vanity and self-aggrandizement, his desire to overcome all that obstructs him—the world he inhabited would be left to other beasts of burden to overtake and die in selfishly, all without progressing it one step.

Such is the story of man: a single revolt within the mind that led to countless revolutions and paradigm shifts, one after another, all to further his own conception of the world—shifting and adapting to all that he finds in order that his ideals may be more firmly secured and established. It would be man’s greatest boon if he could build the whole world after his own image, but, unfortunately for him, the world is more resistant to change than he thinks; and even if he could, either through persuasion, force, or conceiving an idea whose time has come (to be, more or less, in agreement with the Zeitgeist—as well as understanding what is to be done for the advancement and prosperity of humanity), time would beg to differ with all such abstractions—for time itself has no time to listen to the shouts of utopians and idealists who wish to free humanity from its fetters. Man is the animal who uses reason to overturn his former reasons; and in this triumph of reasoning, reason reasons over reason, and comes to a reasonable reason to overthrow reason. In this overthrow, we have the happiest cause for celebration—a reasoned justification has been born in us through our reasoning, and in this a new potential for greater prospects which we can only dream of. Justification itself is a form of reason, in which we provide various reasons for why we have thought what we have about reality. We can’t even discuss reason without referring back to itself—to itself as idea, concept, or significance; it’s a tool so vast and infinite, that any attempt to abolish it reverts back for a time, but always returns with a greater form of emancipation.

To ourselves we are reason: humanity is reason in action (never forget that reason is a verb). In fact, the word “reasoning” is, to speak grammatically, the present participle and gerund of reason: that is, spoken of as an action occurring in the present tense, and which has the -ing suffix at the end to indicate that it is a gerund—a verb that is not in the infinitive form. Even in our linguistics do we display our own self-importance. Our desire to act in such a way that doesn’t merely make us in and of the world, but as the world itself, is all too present in our self-conception of who we are. Man’s ambition knows no end. Man wants the world and everything in it, and anything that stands in front of him will be routed and overthrown—just like reason overthrowing itself every second.

It is shocking to me that nobody recognizes the infinity that lies within them. Reality is born in us, and receives its attire thanks to the material which preexisted our very cognition of it. A human being is a constant agitation, an ever-moving and thinking creature who finds the limits materiality places on him absurd and worth ignoring—even overcoming if possible; nay, it doesn’t matter whether it is possible or not, what matters is that it is attempted. It is no surprise that the word “being” is used (in English at least) in conjunction with “human” when referring to man. Man as the single individual, as a singular entity—a being, whose existence also posits the whole of reality as such. Reality as negation and affirmation. Humanity as instinct and intuition. Life as idea and material. The whole concept of reason has its basis in man’s conception of himself, born out of his self-consciousness, whose highest form is found in his complete freedom to affirm his own individuality. What is offered to man in the idea of being himself is nothing less than the whole of his being, affirmed in the confines of his essence as such. I said earlier that man’s totality is found in the unity between his essence and being: with essence being the material (objective) side of his reality, and being being the immaterial (subjective) side of his reality. All our reasonings and miseries stem from this very fact of self-conscious experience.

It is to be mourned that no man (whether genius, commander, or prophet—sometimes even all three like in the cases of Solomon or Muhammad) has ever brought us true freedom: freedom from every want and desire, which propels us to reason in the first place. Desire itself is a subjective abstraction born from our material conditions. Every particular has the abstract and the concrete within it; every facet of life presents itself to us without our consent, and we are thus compelled by it, or moved by the sensation of it, to either want or flee from it. By concrete, I mean the sensation of the particular (the external object in the world) which causes our desire, and by abstract, I mean the idea born in our minds of what the particular represents to us; in that sense, every evaluation of reality is an a priori prejudice known to us only a posteriori, and which we allow to have command over us. What is man without his prejudices? Nothing but an unthinking beast, who views every sensation only in relation to what pleasure or pain it causes. It is for this reason that any attempts to ground the world within an objective framework is folly; and it is also for this reason that man has developed reason. Every idea which strikes the mind of man is born in experience, but was shaped by material realities which were prior to our experiencing them. The table of categories which Kant gave the world, and which he was so lavishly praised for—seen in the eyes of many as the pinnacle of Enlightenment thought—is really just the prejudices of a thinking beast.

This obscure (in his lifetime) Königsbergian was a physically weak, effeminate, slender, solitary man—taking more walks than his health demanded: a waste of time!—who saw the world in all its variety, and conceived of its intelligibility in abstract conceptions; and so, through an overly prolix analysis of reason—worked out in a manner akin to a mad man whose goal was to torture paper with ink: the audacity of this little German, treating philosophy as if it were architecture (his vile architectonic structure of thinking)—came to justify his reason by stating what a bricklayer could have discovered in five minutes on his own: that all of reality responds to our perceptions of it (and vice versa), and that the complexity of life is nothing but a by-product of the infinite multitude of experiences within it. Man wishes to correlate the variety of his experiences with a concept that “explains” it; in doing this, man makes his life after the image of causality—as if our entire being were but a game of pairing the right cause with the right effect, but no one will ever find themselves in such a way.

Out of safety do we make the world, and out of conformity with society do we act within it—thus do we all, in some sense, live a lie, a life that is not true to ourselves: our individuality as it is. Kant is great because he was the first to recognize that existence is necessarily dualistic: that reality appears to us, but that prior to reality is our potentiality to experience it in the first place; and also that this appearance cannot be known in an absolute sense. Every attempt after Kant to reconcile this subjective-objective divide has only ever been a fairy-tale, a presuppositional apologetic. This is why all of metaphysics, and by extension all of philosophy, after Kant has been nothing more than reversions to forms of Platonic idealism, Aristotelian realism, or Socratic maieutics. For myself, I take the Socratic route; and I find the only possible reconciliation between subject and object to be born within the inwardness of man, within his inner conflict, and within his capacity to endure and overcome all! Life is dialectical precisely because it is interpretable, and it is tolerable only in so far as man recognizes his own singularity within it. Every day is a tough battle, and so too are all the innumerable aspects of it which we have within it, but which we are incapable of expressing truly. This is why writing is the nearest to the soul a person can get to another that isn’t themselves. Your own experience is sacred, and you must do whatever you can to preserve it, and make the most out of it that is possible.

What is seen as complex on the surface is really vague and uninteresting in the depths. True freedom, in my view, is the ability to toss aside the desire of all desires: TRUTH! What every common man does is grope about through the dark hall of life hoping to grab the veil which prevents him from seeing the light. Like a fool, man dives headfirst into life without first looking at what he dives into exactly. Hence the indomitable confusion which reigns supreme across the entire Earth, and all the stupid smokescreens and distractions which we have come up with to distract us from the crude, barbaric, undeveloped state of our being. Our essence is always to be confused so long as we think we find it in false idols and conceptions not from within ourselves. Man is born in strife, and privation is the common order of existence; all rank orders with respect to the nature and character of humanity are, in a biological sense, born out in those specimens who are the fittest among us. It is this inevitable material reality which all philosophers—idealists and realists alike—must brush up against, and break through, in fact, if they are to truly make something of themselves in this insane world. For some—I have Hegel in mind here—true freedom (freedom from truth) is accomplished when all humanity comes together and brings about its total self-realization (for every being)—where every individual comes to know the one, supreme absolute. For others, like myself and Nietzsche, true freedom is really an idea that has no place in man to begin with; rather what freedom is, is recognizing how feeble and paltry it is as an idea from the start: what has truth ever really done for us, aside from making claims it can’t support, and emboldening vainglorious men to develop whole systems which are circular in the main, and incoherent in the particular. Thus the vanity of reasoning as a whole.

Every desire is born within, and every passion is a response to the sudden urge to expend power in overcoming. This is truly what man must be today. He must be uncompromising in his hatred for truth. “Truth for whom? To what end? Where does it lie, and can it be measured? If no, I want none of it.” Man loves to hide behind ignorance the moment he is caught affirming that which he feels his reasoning has affirmed for him. Why bother with any of it? It’s obvious to those with an innate capacity to sense bullshit that no one really stands ten toes down on anything they believe to be so. This is most obvious today in politics, which is essentially one giant circle-jerk of self-affirmation and propaganda, justified with arguments made by pundits and pseudo-intellectuals. I’ve developed over the past year a virulent contempt for all these mawkish morons, bloviating baboons, whose ignorance borders on the bovine. Everything that is false is dear to me, and everything which man proclaims as truth is pointed at with the finger of contempt. Oh, how I hate everybody who is not true to themselves. How I greatly despise the vast majority of people, for the simple reason that they’re all so scared to think for themselves, and have very little ambition to really change the world. Everyone, at least in this crumbling republic (America), would die before fighting for what is truly right. We have, as a nation, been led astray by knaves and fools who put profits over people—billionaires and asset managers who would rather see humanity go extinct than have their massive fortunes ceded off to those who need it. The collective will of humanity is far from true WILL-TO-POWER; rather, it is WILL-TO-MYSELF—a debasing form of selfishness, in which the end of all justifications comes down to an unethical bottom line that puts the self before the collective good. The collective must never override the single individual, but likewise, a single individual must not prevent others from recognizing themselves as individuals; and yet, this is exactly what we have today: incentives perfectly tailored to a society with the aim of producing burnout and total capitulation, furthered by ruthless competition and staggering ignorance, making any form of solidarity nigh impossible. We’ve made a whip for ourselves, and now we are being told to flagellate our backs. Disgraceful.

Humanity has been in a constant struggle to overcome what it fears will be its end. Every religion and utopian vision bears this out all-too clearly. Unfortunately, so long as man is condemned to live, he must be forced to reason about his condition; and on all sides, while in the midst of life, must he hear the foolish opinions and downright falsities of every idiot and billboard. Everything is constantly telling man what to be except himself, and so long as he believes his salvation lies in understanding reality, he will be condemned eternally to pick up ideas which are not his own—from without, and yet which pull him from both the front and back. What is man to do when reasoning, that trite faculty of the mind, fails him completely? OVERCOME! SUBLATE—DIALECTICALLY; that is, to view each abstract and concrete through their negative aspect, in order that their higher synthesis may be achieved.

Make great and noble goals for yourself, from yourself, and live in such a way that makes each hardship endured a kind of blessing, from which innumerable good fortunes may arise afterwards, like forgotten seeds scattered across the soil, which receive copious amounts of water from an auspicious rain cloud. As Nietzsche rightly said,

Man becomes that which he wants to be; his volition precedes his existence. —Human, All Too Human, Section Two, Aphorism #39.

Hypothesis

Everyone lives after their own hypothesis. The world is filled with thoughts about things—things of a trivial nature, which bear no significance outside of their recognition within our own brain. The home of every thought is the brain, and reality makes itself known to us through the labors of our minds to give some coherence to every uncorroborated fact of experience.

What a strange capacity it is: to make the world not after our own image, but after the image we are forced to take from all the material that surrounds us. The conditions of man are prior to him; but man, being vain and wanting so desperately to cling to that which makes him feel unique, places himself above those very conditions which bear him out.

The world molds us, and we, after having the breath of nature breathed into us, break free from it like a mummy from its wraps—only to reveal that which we are: flesh, blood, and bone. It has been a continuous mistake throughout intellectual history to assume this or that thing as true so long as it conforms to some criteria of truth which we ourselves are unsure of, but which we assume to be so because our reason has told us it is so. The thinking man today is too sure of himself, too scared to affirm that which he cannot know with certainty. Push off against that which you cannot brush up against, and you will find you move backwards anyway.

The materiality of things strikes us as certain enough, and these sensations should be enough to build whole castles out of—not in the clouds but upon soil and Earth, upon that which is actual and really tangible. It is a pragmatic decision, and for me that is enough to build off of, and to drive towards change in the world as such.

Change is that which happens as a result of man’s desire to see things brought about which differ from the present state of things. Change begins as a concept in the mind, but only after strength has been exerted, and our hands have moved a great distance, do we gradually see what was once in our minds made visible with our eyes; the actuality of change is made so thanks to the potential in man to bring it about.

Everything in the realm of man is an abstraction from himself. The objects of experience lie outside him, and yet they are equally a part of him in his experience. How could anything be differentiated were it not for man knowing what is not from him in the concrete? Here, man is amazed at the sight of everything different from him, and thus, he begins to philosophize—in the midst of wonder does he find it suitable to give himself free rein to assume everything which is not his own. From his own experience does man posit reality, and from its shared validity with others does a coherent picture of things gradually take form.

Like I said at the start, the world is filled with many thoughts, many opinions and ideas, which people hold to without realizing it. And so, philosophy is born out of our experience of things without our full cognition of them, and every explanation offered up as to what lies behind this experience has always ever been a hypothesis. Alas, we come back to the main topic. What is a hypothesis? As every schoolboy knows, it is “an educated guess,” but more specifically, “an assumption about some natural phenomenon which can be proved wrong through experiment.” Ah, but what is an experiment? A test of experience; or rather, an experience made specific, made scientific, made in a deliberately narrow way so as to remove all extraneous variables within a study. At once do we understand what is being said: it is the modern scientific method in all its glory; with all its independent and dependent variables, randomized control trials, and double-blind experiments—removing all biases for the sake of “accuracy” and “precision”.

The will to truth is strong here. The pragmatic nature of the whole enterprise is enough to make me faint in awe. It is, without doubt, the single most effective method for disproving claims about reality; but as I sit here ruminating upon all its benefits, I find that it has no answers to any questions that pertain to human experience as such. Man can never find himself in the scientific method, for like logic, it only reveals what is so within the limits of reason—what is tested for within the parameters of the study. Science, for that reason, can never hold a candle to literature or philosophy when asked, for example, “what is the meaning of life,” or “to what end should this be pursued,” or “what is the good life.” Science only probes into those things which fall neatly within conceptions which are falsifiable, and for this reason it is pragmatism (from an empirical-analytical standpoint) taken to its logical conclusion. From this exact line of reasoning, you get the famous dictum of Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” The problem is that, as pragmatic as it sounds, nobody can actually follow through with this; for if someone truly felt their words failed to capture the meaning of their utterance, they would go the rest of their life without saying a word. It is pragmatism taken so far it becomes anti-pragmatic.

All that is concrete melts into the abstract the moment it is made a dogma. To justify its own sovereignty, it must develop reasons which lie outside of the initial experience. It is reason gone berserk. Such a thing could only ever come from reason, for reason turns the concrete into the abstract, and pats itself on the back for having made an objective perception into a subjective definition. There is your hypothesis for you: a compilation of prejudices which over time develop into sickly habits of thought, which are so persistent and ingrained that breaking out of them requires an entire revaluation of every mental scheme you have—an impossible task for most people. Indeed, the masses go about their reckless way serenely, and fall into every pit the world lays before them thanks to their conceptions of everything.

Everyone is absorbed into this or that pragmatic mode of thought, but does not see the deeper revelation that lies behind every first impression. We are all slaves to our minds, but we are also the liberators of ourselves, provided we change when the time calls for it. The key to every happy life is found in the heart, but is prevented from being grasped thanks to our brain’s over-correcting with undeveloped logic what it feels is false. This is the false habit of the modern world: to use reason where it shouldn’t be, and to treat reason as inherently better, or more appropriate, in every situation than feeling. This is yet another paradox of life. (It should be noted, too, that paradoxes only arise when a problem is viewed from the wrong perspective, and when a single approach is treated as best in general for a problem whose solution it continuously evades because it cannot be generalized.)

Every idea has its negation. The negative aspect of all thought approaches its initial positivity when it is taken to its logical conclusion. If the Sun were to represent the absolute unity of all ideas, then Earth would represent every particular idea whose revolution goes around and comes around until it eventually reaches the point where it initially was after enough time—in the context of ideas, after it has been taken to its logical conclusion over time. I get the sense that Hegel saw the true unity of all ideas (a concept beautifully argued for by Schelling) as fundamentally flawed, because it did not account for the evolution of ideas, the gradual change and development of sentiments within the heart, the ever-changing material conditions that follow events in the world, and the constantly willing and desiring nature of man to move beyond that which he is presently accustomed to.

Ideas must be dialectical if they are to persist through time and mature fully. The sign of a bad thinker is one who holds to a rigid system out of its “coherence” or “logical necessity.” Necessity! Please, don’t make me laugh. To even affirm a necessity is to define it in such a way that it cannot be anything else but a necessity. Every predicate is really the presupposition of its subject; it exists for the subject—like the rest of reality—and so, it hardens itself against outside influence for the sake of preserving its own internal purity. We see this kind of systemic decay and systematic collapse within almost every conception of Western thought, for the simple fact that most Westerners are caught between an eternal false dichotomy—either left or right, blue or red, coherent or incoherent, in short, true or false. Truth is a value. It is something which happens to an idea, born out of whether it advanced your particular goal or not. To hold to a doctrine about the consistency of an idea is exactly what you do if you wish to make it into a dogma. The dialectic of this line of reasoning is all too clear. It plays out first as tragedy, then as farce.

All of logic is a mirage, a charade, a phantom which appears before us like a genie released from its bottle in a cloud of smoke; likewise are hypotheses, assumed without reason and defended against all reason—it is a difficult thing to even talk of things in the positive sense when their negation is ever-present, and which makes a contemplative man shudder at the thought of affirming that which he doesn’t actually believe in; to speak of those things which are not agreed to, or assumed by, or even hinted at in the thought of a person, is to enter into a battlefield you are woefully unprepared for.

All arguments for one position over any other are necessarily false, for they demand that the “rules of discourse”—this unwritten guidebook which all must adhere to for no reason whatsoever—are followed, and that arguments are argued for on their terms. Every true debate is really one of presuppositions. Hegel knew this, which is why he explicitly made the thing-in-itself an aspect of his dialectical method—the method which reveals “the truth” in its application to reason—rather than in some Platonic idea which is “out there” but which can never be known “in this world”; to say nothing of the barefaced absurdity of materialism, with its obviously false assumptions and general agnosticism—those who preface everything they say with “maybe” or “perhaps,” as if the world needed your educated guess as to what really occurred, rather than your personal, independent explanation as to the nature of things as they appeared before you. What the dialectic ultimately allows for is true freedom.

Thinking requires a pragmatic, ethical emancipation, from which every thought is liberated from the chains of consistency or coherence. All things are coherent if none are—and that is precisely what I would like to see more of; for the world, to me, has always been a mirror of man’s hopes and dreams, rather than his rational conceptions of virtue and the good life. It is for that reason that I find in Marx the greatest system of hope and freedom possible, even if I disagree ultimately on the validity of his premises.

The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals.
—The German Ideology, 1845, First Premises of Materialist Method.

And so we have it. The great Marx, in all his materialistic glory, providing us a premise which we are to take wholesale, provided we are materialists as he. It is amusing to note that this “self-evident” assumption falls prey to every folly that falls upon idealistic assumptions—it affirms that which is known in experience, but which cannot be justified in its experience outside of its sheer existence: as if being itself were a kind of starting point from which all systems stem. All of modern philosophy bears the sins of Descartes heavily; if only his cogito (I think) were really an arbitror (I suppose).

As much as I hate to say it, Marx is the true dogmatist; while Hegel only supposes the absolute to eventually reveal itself in the process of reasoning and self-realization, Marx—desiring to change the world, and to place humanity in a much brighter, higher light—felt the only way to do so was to affirm the material ground of all things in order to overcome that exact materiality, so that the proletariat (and humanity in general) may prosper as a result of recognizing their own power, and realizing what the true future ends in: FREEDOM!—in the inevitable change of the world via the labor of the working class, freeing themselves from the thankless job of working under deplorable conditions for the sake of their subsistence, all the while producing surplus value for their capitalist employers—who love nothing more than to see their profits rise, and to see their workmen desperate, tired, and without other options.

In many ways, I sympathize with Marx, for I too want to emancipate the world from the fetters of capital. Nietzsche said in his Wahnbriefe (Madness Letters) that, “I am just having all anti-Semites shot.” And one would have loved to see added to that, “… and all capitalists and union busters too.” Marx’s objective is the right one, but he approached it from the wrong philosophical perspective, I think. Then again, I suppose it is not fair to criticize a dead man, a genius, and without doubt the most influential philosopher who has ever lived; Marx also wasn’t just a man of theory (like myself), but a true comrade and patriot for the cause of liberty: he lived in poverty for the sake of studying the economic system which dominates and manipulates the way in which we conceive the world; he donated a third of his father’s inheritance to arm Belgian workers who were planning revolutionary action; and he wrote pamphlets like Wage Labour and Capital to “… wish to be understood by the workers.” I almost envy how honest and forthright Marx was with his intellectual objective. While I disagree with his presuppositional materialism, I cannot agree more with the subject which he strove his whole life to explicate, and in a very elegant and readable German prose which is to be the envy of philosophers and economists alike, who tend to write as if they spent their whole life in books, rather than in actual life—the life of the working class, to which I would assume all my readers belong.

I know full well that at the start I set out to discuss the hypothesis proper, but like with all my other essays, it devolved into a hodgepodge of static scribbles and half-developed ideas, but I suppose the nature of the subject is to blame rather than myself; for while I like to think of myself as an extraordinary writer, I—and possibly no one thus far in history—have ever been able to make dialectical thinking seem intelligible to one not already initiated into our obscure ways of thinking: of culling from every facet of life this or that experience with its own objectification in view, an experience which views its end as its own end—for itself.

Dialectics, which is the method Marx used in his analysis of capital, is the hypothesis which has no conclusion, for the continuous search for “truth,” alongside the continuous process of refining our assumptions, is very much the spirit which dialectics follows through and through.

Who I’m against primarily (philosophically) are formalists, or system builders, who, the second they make their premises known, strive to explain everything from them. Marx, like Kant, Hegel, and Feuerbach before him, were all philosophical architects; they were spinsters, the fabric of which they spun being ideas—their own ideas—which they developed and clung to for the sake of their sanity; none of them was ever bold enough to affirm the world in spite of it not having any metaphysical ground to speak of.

I know I’m repeating myself at this point, but I feel it must be said: I can’t get over how scared philosophers are to affirm reality should their conceptions of it be groundless. What does this silly superstition do for you? What do you think will happen to you should you be bold enough to assert, “I do not know, but I will act anyway!” Think pragmatically, but not so pragmatically that you discard thinking altogether. Great men like Marx and Hegel still cling to the notion of correspondence—that their internal (subjective) ideas must, in some way, refer back to their external (objective) experience. I see no need at all for this. Do I make myself ridiculous in affirming such a proposition—a proposition which I cannot justify no matter how greatly I wished to? So be it. I admit it there in full: I do not know, I have no hypothesis by which to get at the nature of this experience; but I shall act in spite of my ignorance pragmatically, and see whether my action in some way advanced whatever goal I had in mind in the first place.

Let me make myself as clear as possible. I believe with Marx that the only change possible in the world presently is change done through deliberate action, in our shared material reality, in order that the current material conditions which subjugate and impoverish all of us may be overcome collectively. I see no teleology to this, for I don’t believe it is a necessary outcome of our material conditions that man will free himself from capitalism—and in doing so break the manacle which his labor helped to produce—but rather that man must: 1) understand his present conditions, 2) contemplate the future which he wants to live in, 3) develop a plan for overcoming the present conditions to bring about that future (through much study of economics, history, philosophy, and literature), and finally, 4) ACT!

If true unity is to be achieved, it is to be done so on the collective backs of the proletariat. Unity is the recognition that man is both a single individual and part of a collective struggle for true freedom—freedom from all false ideas and dishonest narratives which are manufactured and delivered to us for the sake of keeping us down. The owners and controllers of globalized financialized capital (OCGFC) would quake in their boots if the whole human race were to see past the false veil which they place over our heads. They think we’re all stupid because we accept the contracts they provide us for the sake of our subsistence, but we’ll show them all soon enough I believe. I know how unlikely that seems considering the world presently is passive rather than active (there isn’t nearly as much fervor as there was during Marx’s age, where a workers uprising was happening seemingly every other year), but that is, I feel, actually a dangerous thing for the bourgeoisie—for the pressure is only increasing, and instead of having multiple small revolts, you’re begging for a full-scale revolution of the working class worldwide.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. —Communist Manifesto.

If this is to be overcome, we must as a whole of humanity come together and reduce to atoms every vicious hypothesis which seeks to justify inequality and exploitation. The 21st century should not resort to 1st-century power dynamics and social stratification for the sake of saving those responsible for our oppression. Work itself is violence against man, for—like in dishonest argumentation—it presupposes a fair playing field, but is really rigged from the start; but, upon agreeing, you seemingly forfeit all chances you have of actually rejecting what you agreed to: all the terms are deliberately vague so as to make you go against your word should you make a capitulation to it. This is the malaise of the modern world—the haze whose noxious fumes have suffocated us completely, and have impaired our capacity to think properly with respect to it. We are (supposedly) modern, civilized human beings. Let us start treating each other likewise.

Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. — Engels, Anti-Dühring (1877).

The Products of Intellect

Idea

Ideas are the crown jewel of intellect. What is an idea? A thought dressed up in language and given a very pretty explication as to what it is in itself. Ideas are born in perception which has been elevated to the height of an abstraction. This abstraction is then made sacred by how well it agrees with experience.

You see at once the double aspect of an idea, which in truth is really a unity of both. The double aspect appears in the form of bodily sense and mental sense, but since sense refers to the whole organism—and I think it is quite ludicrous to assert a fundamentally different (metaphysical) aspect to sense as such—the dichotomy collapses the moment one accepts the fact that both are simultaneous within the organism. This simultaneity is born out of an abstraction which refers to the concrete experience; and so, to think one causes the other, or that one is necessary while the other is sufficient, is to cling to an antiquated notion of metaphysics that is too narrow to be useful and too dualistic to be accurate within the eyes of experience itself.

To say reality is a duality is false. To say, however, as the Pre-Socratics did, that all is one—that is a fundamental truth which holds for all thinking beings, but which (so far as we know) only humanity is able to bring into abstract consciousness.

Every sensation, every movement of life, is both mental and physical. These sensations, which are responsible for the entire phenomenal representation of reality—those appearances in the world which provide our every joy and misery (the songs of birds, the sights of mountains, the tastes of foods, the laughs of friends, the cries of children, the news of a deceased family member, etc.)—occur to us subjectively (mentally) at the same time they are experienced objectively (concretely). Two is one, and one is two. It is, in short, the doctrine of Schopenhauer, as well as being the fundamental perspective of many Vedanta traditions within Hinduism and holding a paramount place within the doctrines of Buddhism.

Dualism shall always persist so long as man finds it necessary to carve up the world of appearance with his blunt knife of logic and place it within his shallow box of abstract conceptions—abstractions which he mistakes for the true world, but which are only his narrow slice of the whole totality, which he is but one molecule of.

We cannot escape ideas even if we wanted to. They are as necessary to humanity as water is to fish. They arise in action, through a simultaneous correspondence of sense and reason. Again, this must be stressed: ideas are appearances in consciousness which have their existence in sense experience—the mental and the physical come together as one and shine forth with a splendor so palpable that all creatures with a nervous system take part in the recognition of that object with immense joy or dread, depending on the kind of experience it is.

A world without ideas would be a world without self-consciousness. As Galileo rightly said in The Assayer: “… if ears, tongues, and noses were removed, shapes and numbers and motions would remain, but not odors or tastes or sounds.” Here we have made explicit that Aristotelian distinction between the matter and form of an object: between that which is a primary (essential) quality and a secondary (accidental) quality.

This simple absurdity made great minds in late antiquity devote themselves to fruitless passions—arguing over distinctions and definitions about the “true” substance of reality, as if that kind of thing could be known in an absolute manner using logic; to say nothing of the whole scholastic tradition that type of philosophizing gave birth to: worthless, trite nonsense like nominalism vs. realism, or arguments over the nature of God, or whether the actus purus (pure actuality) could ever be known by man.

Consciousness is nature’s nightmare to man. It is this damnable capacity to see ourselves as fundamentally different from nature—thanks to our ability to abstract from it—that makes philosophy possible at all. Wonder is the prima materia (first matter) of all philosophy, and by extension all abstractions which relate back to the wonder in question; philosophy, then, is one continuous chain of unbroken abstractions that make the whole world its canvas, the paints of which are our conceptions of it. It is the recognition of that which is different that gives rise to thought, and from thought abstractions about what that difference is, or better yet, why it is so.

Abstractions exist for ideas. Ideas are different from sensations in the sense that they are abstractions from sense experience, not implicit within experience as such. A man may itch in the same manner a bear would, but the bear would have no concept of “itch” as a man would. The sensation is the same, but the conception of it is not. Both have consciousness, but only man has self-consciousness—the cradle of all our ideas. Ideas are sensations made abstract, hence why they exist for them; it is this aspect of man’s mind that makes him so intelligent and which has allowed him to dominate the Earth.

Without this faculty within man, the origin of which is still unknown, there would be no primary aspect of existence by which to differentiate man from his fellow eukaryotes; for, without man, every idea we have about the world would collapse into a fundamental unknowability. Even the concept of knowability is an idea of man—it is an epistemological question which has yet to receive an answer. If there were not such a thing as idea, then it would have been necessary to create it—and such is exactly what man did.

The natures of man depart when questions of foundational importance to life are considered; this is why there can never be one truth, because every truth is an evaluation and thus only ever considered existentially, subjectively—which I feel is the glory of it. TRUTH is an a priori of the heart, but an a posteriori of the brain. That is to say, truth is first felt and then considered abstractly (in the mind). Its validity is prior to experience precisely because it can only be known after experience—after its embodiment in action, the drive of which is the emotions, which are given life in the heart. Truth is not action itself, but rather made so after the actions have been considered abstractly in the mind, always with respect to the concrete goal in question.

Truth is pragmatic, made for you, for your ideals and goals! It has no validity outside of how it affects you personally. It is not something which can be defined in a systematic manner because—like money being the abstract representation of all commodities (desires)—truth is the abstract representation of all abstractions. It is akin to Hegel’s idea of the absolute, but (in my view) seen from the perspectival, rather than objective, lens: reason makes known every particular which can be experienced empirically, from which every sensation can be rationally conceived and organized—made tangible in encyclopedias and tables containing every academic discipline—in order that it may reach a complete synthesis through a unification of not only all present experiences, but every possible experience.

Truth is the abstraction not to be undone. It is the final idea which represents all other ideas. It is the reserve currency within the globalized world of conceptual commerce. What we have in truth is an idea so powerful it has taken on a life of its own and has for nearly everybody become an unrecognized religion. Truth is even more powerful than Christianity, for even Christians are made to justify their belief to those who ask (1 Peter 3:15)—and if not asked, they must at least strive to make sense of it within their own hearts; for me, grace and faith in the elect is not enough! I want evidence: I want God himself to appear before me. In short, I want the truth of Christianity and everything else. I want the whole world. I want a complete and total harmony between myself and the world. I want every facet of experience—particularly those conceptions which fall under the banner of idea or concept—to manifest before me in an intelligible way, in order that I may make sense of this whole phenomenal world. Quid est veritas? Non in mundo, sed in meo mundo. (What is truth? Not in the world, but in my world.)

We affirm what we know because the concept of knowing is dear to us as an idea. We conceptualize to understand, and we understand only when we hear ourselves. The world makes sense no other way but through the self. Reality must be interpreted from the perspective of the self—the I, the singular individual. Das Ich setzt sich selbst (The self posits itself), says Fichte. This is not to say, however, that the self is fundamental, or necessary, or independent of reality; but rather that the idea of the self is born out of what we are as thinking, self-conscious creatures. (It must always be remembered that my philosophy is anti-metaphysical—rejecting all “final,” absolute claims about reality and abhorring above all else formalists and system builders.)

Man exists materially prior to his self-conception. I take this as a premise born out in experience, but which can never be justified on that basis alone, nor should it be; for those who require justifications for their beliefs do not see the necessity of contradiction within all ideas. Evidently, too, nobody lives according to strict necessity or logical coherence (we contradict ourselves all the time), but rather according to behavioral patterns which we adopt to more effectively move through the world. Knowledge is a type of adaptation, from which the world gradually gets cut down into various competing systems of thought that strive to place everything under their dominion.

There is no ethics in knowledge at present, no sense of subjectivity in any analysis. We are told in the present age to shun as much as possible all ideas that do not derive from reason; I wish to offer an alternative—a system of thought which is by no means new, but which very badly needs a return: pragmatism. Until ideas become ethical, until they truly turn to the subjective, man will always be at war with himself, up in arms about those things which he wishes to affirm but which the world tells him he cannot, all because it is not logical. Forget the world if that is the case, and remember that all stems from you in the first place. Ideas have, after all, only ever been abstract reflections of who we are, rather than what the world truly is. Toss aside the need for truth, and every truth shall suddenly become apparent to you.

Knowledge

Most men’s knowledge is but history duly taken up, and very few are actually made the better for all of it. What most people consider as knowledge is but the dross of erudition. It serves very little in the way of advancement in learning for man, and rather only acts as an impediment to true learning—that which is only attained after countless hours of fruitless struggles to comprehend a single, powerful idea.

Laymen and scholars alike mistake the quantity of ideas for the actual quality behind them; but if merely sounding smart were enough to constitute knowledge, then philosophers and politicians would be walking encyclopedias. I would say what I myself think constitutes real learning, but Schopenhauer has already done that for me better than I ever could, and so I will quote him here:

The thinker stands in the same relation to the ordinary book-philosopher as an eye-witness does to the historian; he speaks from direct knowledge of his own. That is why all those who think for themselves come, at bottom, to much the same conclusion. The differences they present are due to their different points of view; and when these do not affect the matter, they all speak alike. They merely express the result of their own objective perception of things. —On Thinking for Oneself.

It is precisely for this reason that it is a very difficult thing to write about knowledge at all, for anyone who attempts such an enterprise—assuming they have done the requisite reading and study to even begin—is met with the consensus sapientium (agreement of the wise) at every turn. Seemingly every learned man and woman in history, from the ancients to us moderns, has more or less said the same thing about it, and so, to write on it is akin to painting on an already covered canvas.

What I take most from that quote of Schopenhauer’s is the clear distinction between the thinker and the mere imitator of ideas. The thinker is one who comes to his own conclusions about his every experience; he draws from his own source of wisdom, and in that way acts as his own teacher, whose material is gotten from the world which surrounds him, rather than the ideas or opinions of those who have read in books how things are to go. The imitator takes everything second-hand, and even when he has encountered the world on his own, he still views and interprets it through a secondary lens—a habit of thinking that is not his own, and rather is a mechanical process that he was drilled to repeat subconsciously. In that way, the man who focuses solely on what lies in books or in the words of other “learned” men will never come to his own opinions, and will be stuck with taking them from others for the rest of his days.

As a result of all this, it could easily be argued that education really perverts the young mind, because it interrupts its natural development with a surrogate: a systematic pedagogy that is drilled into them from the start, taught by “authority figures” from on high, which causes the child to hesitate in their own thinking, and forces them to sieve out their own ideas from those which they are taught by others; the child thus never fully matures in their mental development, and is forced to go the rest of their days like a cripple without a crutch.

This is all to say nothing of how unnatural and unintuitive this is for the child, especially if they are natural contrarians. To one who is more agreeable temperamentally (like myself) it is even worse, for we take wholesale the garbage we are taught: we even go as far as to memorize it, and internalize it to the point of never forgetting it, in the same way every child leaves elementary school remembering nothing but the Pledge of Allegiance.

Not only is this approach to knowledge bad developmentally, but it is also very dangerous, for it forces the child to view the world as something which “other people” have already figured out, thus completely annihilating any innate passion or curiosity which they may have for the world and all the abstractions within it. With this deleterious process complete, philosophy becomes impossible, for wonder is beaten out of the child and replaced with a scantron. All knowledge is taken for granted, and the most profound discoveries are treated as mere facts, as if that alone were enough to make them meaningful or interesting.

Knowledge is interesting only insofar as it has meaning for us. If knowledge is to have a meaning, let it be born in us, and let it stem from our interest in it for its own sake. If knowledge is to have a teleology, it is, I feel, either to be for personal ends or for humanitarian ends, both of which are two paths that lead to the same destination: wisdom. Personal wisdom is that which uplifts the soul and makes life a tolerable affair. Humanistic wisdom consists of those ideas which are meant to uplift the whole human race, rather than a single individual within it.

The history of humanity can be taught in a comprehensive manner from the perspective of its intellectual developments alone—one of the few frameworks which allow for that. Many like to think of history as merely the chronological organization of events, but this reduces the subject to a mere timeline, lacking all depth and complexity behind the events, and ignoring the material conditions that made them possible in the first place. There is no one right way to tell history, but for those who seek to understand how we have come to where we are today, with all our technologies and amenities, one must necessarily be a student of history—and in particular the history of philosophy—if it is all to make sense.

Having now spoken of knowledge in general, I now wish to speak of it in the concrete. Knowledge is colloquially understood as a body of facts which have been verified beyond all reasonable doubt thanks to an overwhelming preponderance of evidence for their validity. From a pragmatic, or rather existential, perspective, however, I could not find a more disagreeable maxim. What does all this “evidence” have to do with me? Where is the subjectivity in it? Where is the passion or love? How exactly am I supposed to get off to this idea if it is presented to me in a grotesque, incomprehensible manner?

I do not view knowledge the way my contemporaries do. I do not treat it analytically, as a thing merely to be categorized and labeled; as just another datum to be tossed upon the ever-growing stockpile of human knowledge. To me, that approach was always stale and dead. It was as if something was lacking in it. It was off. It had a slothful quality to it, and lacked all impetus or innate motive force, which made it appear to me as something not worth pursuing. I never was able to do things for which I had no interest.

For me, knowledge is ethical, and it is ethical because it is fundamentally subjective. Like I was saying earlier, the modern world is not ready for this conversation yet. Nobody today is willing to entertain the fact that what we call “truth” may really be a lie, and that every idea we hold to, and every subject which purports to provide us with knowledge about the world, is really only a single framework by which to operate in—the inheritance of which has been disastrous on nearly every level. Truth is a lie because it rejects contradiction. Like a greedy capitalist, it makes the contract to its advantage and then gets upset when its blatant unfairness is called out.

In order for knowledge to prosper, it must be liberated from the chains of reductionism. Every thought has two aspects in the same manner a coin has two sides: on the one side we have its positive aspect—that which is generally accepted prima facie (at first sight), and which is applauded by the majority as generally correct thanks to its intuitiveness—and on the other we have its negative aspect—that aspect of the concept which serves only to negate the positive side. Every truth, then, is really in a constant process of becoming and falling away—at every turn does it feel itself in upheaval, wishing to affirm the one, but being prevented by the other from doing so; it is like the split-brain patient who puts his hat on with his left hand and removes it with his right simultaneously.

This is the famous negation of negation: the process by which two opposites may be reconciled into a higher synthesis, in order that, in the process of aufhebung (sublation), they eventually reach the absolute. This is the core of all dialectical or paraconsistent logical systems. They are above truth, for they are not beholden to their own criteria of truth; rather, truth, in this framework, reveals itself to them as a result of its effects on them! It is truth made subjectively. At once does all seem clear when the barbarous adulations of the logicians are swept away, and room is made for this new approach to knowledge: knowledge as process, as a continuous cycle of birth, death, and rebirth—of becoming and beholding as such.

Life is for us to experience, and the world is for us to change. The world is that object which appears for us as subjects, but which remains always above us in an absolute sense, for it was prior to us; thus it seems reality resembles the dialectic even when it wishes to affirm itself in the concrete sense. It would have been a shame if reality were not dialectical, because then the formalist and dogmatic metaphysicians would actually be right in affirming an ultimate ground to all things.

If I may be blunt, the only difference between me and Hegel is that I have the gall to deny that which I feel is true simply because to affirm one position (“truth”) over any other would be to ignore what the dialectic tells me is the case: that truth is like a lung which expands and contracts, the result of which stems from the negative pressure within the thoracic cavity, and the influx of positive pressure exerted by the contraction of the diaphragm and intercostal muscles—you see, even nature is dialectical (positive and negative), and that is why I must remain in the dialectic, rather than in one or the other. To say truth is either—or is to mistake the nature of it. This is what most men have done before me, but what none have managed to explicate before me. Truth is one movement, and that movement is dialectical (every motion possible).

Deus sive natura in veritate est unus. (God, or Nature, in truth is one.) God is not nature, nor nature god, but rather both are two parts that belong to the same greater whole, whose creator is not abstract but concrete—one within the minds of men (God), and the other in its lived embodiment in men (nature). If only this were the commonly accepted position on God—there would be so much less infighting and dogmatism. Kant killed philosophy to save God from logic. Hegel saved God in the same manner Spinoza did—by redefining what God meant: aequivocatio argumentorum iterum victor est. (The equivocation of arguments is victorious again.) It is no wonder why every man who attempts reconciling God with reason ends up becoming either a dogmatist or Spinozist; you either affirm a position you already know is baseless, or you presuppose the precise thing you want your reason to prove as true—in the process committing a petitio principii (begging the question fallacy).

In my study of God, I found that logic and reason alone were completely unable to handle such a contradiction, and thus I sought far and wide for a way to actually make reality make sense again, and reconcile the human with the divine; I studied everything, wrote on everything, accomplished everything I could intellectually given the information I had available to me, and found that no one in recorded history had laid down a system that was exactly in harmony with my own views—and so I had to take the matter into my own hands, taking from my studies what I felt was right while discarding what I felt was wrong, and developing for myself my own philosophy: and so it was… this tome you see before you is that labor brought to fruition—my philosophical system in whole: my dialectical pragmatism fully explicated, and made use of in every aspect of reality I thought important enough to consider through its lens. It is not an end to philosophy proper, but rather one of many systems of philosophy that I hope may be of use to those who share my intellectual temperament. Let it be ignored, mocked, and ridiculed by everyone else for all I care. The fools have always been told the same from the wise, and in exactly the same manner do they go against them; thus the wise must always repeat themselves, and the fools must continue to make a mockery of themselves.

Like maturity, knowledge is something that takes a long time to finally reach. Man would be lucky to have even a small percentage of the total amount of human knowledge that currently exists. Knowledge, depending on the discipline, advances rapidly or not at all. In nascent fields like psychology, still young and without consensus, every theory is given its due, and all ideas are considered as worthy of inquiry and investigation. In fields that are already well-trodden—say physics, biology, philosophy, or mathematics—there is very little in the way of actual progress, not only because these fields are much older (which is the main reason), but because there is more agreement on what is established, what is foundational, and what is, above all else, “true.”

Young sciences represent the most perfect embodiment of knowledge because they are the most dialectical—constantly changing and evolving with the times; but sadly, as more is made known, and more discoveries are had and forgotten, the body of facts morphs into an academic discipline with conventions and firm foundations—in that sense, all knowledge (a body of facts) becomes dogmatic because the notion of an established truth is dogmatic. Truth, by definition, is dogmatic, and that is why it is the greatest enemy of the dialectic: if truth is the “positive” which all strive towards, reality as such is the negative which drags everything down to a realistic, levelheaded, pragmatic medium.

If only there were a way for man to study and learn things without having to affirm the “truth” of them; if only there were a way to live without willing at all—to be a brainless omniscience, a nonexistent omnipresence, a weak omnipotence—that would be my greatest happiness. If we return to Hegel for a moment, we find that his doctrine of the absolute, with its presupposed telos, is really a kind of anti-knowledge, or better yet, an anti-wisdom; he thought all things were progressing in a positive direction as a necessity of reason coming to recognize itself, but Hegel’s reason is cunning, and it would get to the “truth” through the form of a lie if it had to. For Hegel, all is one because all that appears for the subject is really that which appears for the subject’s reason, and through that experience, reason is given another sensation of the world by which to develop. The progress of history extends only so far as man is willing to recognize his place in it. Aufhebung weiter (sublation onwards) is really to be the motto of every dialectician, as well as for those godless anti-metaphysicians.

The capacity to learn is born within every man, but not every man can become a genius—the reason being that most find it impossible to become self-reliant in acquiring knowledge because they are unable to see past their current framework of conceptualizing knowledge. Everyone thinks of knowledge as formalized information, as a collection of discoveries and oddities to gaze at in admiration but to do nothing further with! Again, it must be made subject to subjectivity—information must be set free and made to roam the world on its own in order that it may find what it itself is, and at last, in that great self-realization, come to truly know its own self, liberated from those human fetters which have strangled it for so long.

Every man is his own barrier to knowledge; he could read the whole Library of Congress and still have no idea what it means to be himself. That is a great loss, and yet it is the exact path which most men go down in life, knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing, and sacrificing their very life for the sake of living. Hence why every genius has been, in some way, an antipode to their own age; thinking for themselves and coming to conclusions that are in a direct way the opposite of what all their contemporaries think is the case.

I’ve always found that people are willing to passively accept whatever the Zeitgeist is so long as it does not harm them materially; thus, so long as exploitation and the working class exist, there will always be some truth in that famous quote by Marx:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. —The German Ideology.

If freedom is the goal, and if knowledge is the surest path to get us there, then let us make knowledge more powerful than it already is. Knowledge freed from the fetters of past dogmas and made mobile again; knowledge which inspires action, not hesitation! What we need in this world is an upliftment so strong, a love so firm, a heart so dear, and a mind so open, that every particular subject in the world moves forward in a direction of general goodness so that the majority of mankind may prosper. Until every hesitation of the mind is lifted, and every doubt is bypassed, and every obstacle to action is removed, true freedom will never reign in the world—a world in which the proletariat becomes the new ruling class, and directly afterwards abolishes classes altogether.

All philosophers, all thinkers, all oppressed—in a label, all working class—UNITE!

Truth

… this philosophy does not presume to explain the existence of the world from its ultimate grounds. On the contrary, it sticks to the actual facts of outward and inward experience as they are accessible to everyone, and shows their true and deepest connection, yet without really going beyond them to any extramundane things, and the relations of these to the world. Accordingly, it arrives at no conclusions as to what exists beyond all possible experience, but furnishes merely an explanation and interpretation of what is given in the external world and in self-consciousness. It is therefore content to comprehend the true nature of the world according to its inner connection with itself. —Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume 2, Chapter 50, Epiphilosophy, pg. 640.

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness [Diesseitigkeit] of his thinking, in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question. —Karl Marx, Theses On Feuerbach, Thesis #2.

In a very real sense, all my writings, and all my thoughts in general, concern truth. Truth is the one concept that, no matter how much I try, I can never rid myself of. I’m obsessed with truth. Totally in love with it. Drunk on it, in fact.

Truth is like the Sun at the center of the solar system of ideas, and man acts as the telescope of existence—gazing in and out of conscious experience and developing his own conceptions of what lies at the center of himself.

To use another analogy from astronomy, truth is the sky in which every idea appears like a distant star; some approach nearer to truth and thus shine more brightly, but none could ever fully blot out the darkness of ignorance which continuously surrounds it.

The greatest possible world would have been one in which the concept of truth was never born, but alas, man—feeling devoid of meaning and wishing for nothing more than certainty of his continuation after death—thought it best to invent an idea so powerful it would act as a foundation by which his material existence can be made stable while he lives and made eternal after he dies. And so it was; the first man who invented truth, like Rousseau’s first property owner—seeing a plot of land and fencing it off in order that he may call it his own—simply found a world full of matter and thought it best to gain dominion over it by binding the objective world to his subjective perception, and in doing so, enslave external reality to his abstractions of it.

Thus we have at once what truth really is: an abstraction born in the mind, but which existed prior to it in material reality as such. Truth exists for the individual. If there were no self-conscious perception, no extrapolation from sensual stimuli, the world would simply persist unnoticed but constantly in a state of evolution until its eventual decay and death.

Man is the maker of concepts, and philosophy is the subject that not only incorporates all experiences but attempts to explain them in their totality; that is why, as an academic discipline, philosophy precedes all others: because it was and still is man’s honest attempt to encapsulate what lies beyond mere conceptions, born in consciousness and developed in self-consciousness. All of knowledge today was first born in an idea by a philosopher which gained enough popularity to sustain itself through the ages. Modern academic disciplines are merely extensions, and vulgar specializations, of concepts which had their origin in philosophy; even philosophy itself (today at least) has become a victim of this narrow specialization and has more or less been demoted to a subject concerning logic and intellectual history only, rather than what its original purpose was—a way of life and thinking appropriate to a lover of wisdom.

True philosophy lies in the liberal arts, that is, liberales artes, meaning “arts worthy of a free person,” deriving from liber (free) and ars (skill or knowledge). The essence of every truth is freedom, because without the free capacity of man to focus his attention and interest, he will be overtaken by death stemming from his inaction. Worse still, a man who is not free is hardly a man at all, for he cannot truly express what his heart feels. Whether the will is truly free or not is irrelevant. Truth manifests itself in every aspect of life because truth is the embodiment of every external action. Truth’s true purpose is muddied only when it loses the idea for which it was developed; and it gets confused only when a large variety of experiences force themselves upon us and demand that we recognize and interpret them, even though they may not have significance for us.

Man is a concept whose truth is sustained in his continuous affirmation of his own conscious existence. What we have in man is a material being capable of recognizing his own immateriality. Thus, man is a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, the objective and the subjective, the singular and the plural, the one and the many, the particular and the plurality.

This, without question, is the single greatest aspect of existence. Every cognition is an expression of man’s will-to-truth—a battle between the conscious and unconscious aspects of his mental life, which make up half of his being. The whole organism of man is born materially and comprehended immaterially, and, unsurprisingly, as a result, the whole world of ideas departs between this false dichotomy. Every intellectual stereotype is born out of this division and is really only made so because of the different temperaments of man, which primarily determine the presuppositions he is to adopt. Reality exists on its own, whose embodiment is the totality of all things (both concrete and abstract) within it; but only man is capable of bringing about a change in this reality by a revaluation of its truths and a revolution in its ways of perception.

There would be nothing in life to get excited about if the Akashic records actually existed, because that would mean every potentiality already passed into actualization, from which one would deduce that the very reality we see before us is merely a repetition of what has already been before. I for one believe that if Laplace’s demon were real, it would purposefully restart the universe each time it came to an end, in order that it may get the enjoyment of rewatching every atom bounce off of each other again and again. Alas, if only a God existed in order to give us some divine exegesis on the meaning of life, some guidance on the question of, say, “What it means to be man,” or “What is to come of man after he’s dead.” Wait a minute, you’re saying God has already come and has risen? Oh, what’s that? It turns out it was merely a pious fraud made up by primitives in order to establish a sense of order and meaning in a world whose fundamental drive is needless immiseration? Why am I not surprised?

I suppose it also doesn’t help that this “divine” revelation was given to a creature incapable of fully comprehending the purposes of this divinity. Every “divine” scripture still needs a mortal hermeneutic, and so at once does it lose all real credibility as true. From a strictly logical standpoint, God must either be false or redefined in such a way that it is true in every respect—which is, in fact, what most people actually mean by God: a higher purpose (an abstraction of the mind) which they cannot understand but which they are subject to nonetheless, and which they must obey not out of fear of punishment from Him, but rather so that they may be more at one with themselves—safe and happy in their own conscience knowing that they have done “good.”

Nietzsche puts into the mouth of his Zarathustra the phrase: “Dead are all gods: now we want the overman to live.” It was only at the end of the 19th century that, for the first time in history, the plebeians or proletarians could follow through with the creation of this overman—this Übermensch!—this new system of values from which the lowliest pauper and affluent plutocrat alike could dissolve all material differences and come together as one mankind in the flesh, whose differences, only existing now in temperament, may bring about a new culture and social organization as such. Man has always been fond of taking himself and his ideas too seriously, but it is precisely in this seriousness—the result of which stems from the belief in the truth of the idea—that real, substantial change is possible.

It is a lamentable fact that, for most of recorded history, man has lived and died not realizing his own potential and was made subordinate to arbitrary powers on pain of death. Seeing that man today has yet to evolve out of this barbaric schema, I am utterly revolted at the state of things presently.

In a phrase, the point of truth is the liberation of mankind—in order that each individual may flourish as themselves but still live amongst their others, while at the same time encouraging those others to become themselves as actualized individuals. As Marx famously said, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” So it must be. Man must rise beyond every fetter if they are to actually become themselves. It is not enough to be satisfied with a “truth,” or with a set of “facts” or “systems” to which you may resign yourself in order to avoid change or action. Do not be like Schopenhauer, cooped up in his little room in Frankfurt with his poodle writing about the vanity of existence and the need to resign from everything within it; this is just the kind of attitude our oppressors want us to have. I no longer wish to be like Schopenhauer! I wish to move beyond him. I now only want to affirm life in order that I may fight for change and revolution within it! Do NOT speak to me of sloth and inactivity, of unemployment and underdevelopment: I am just as much a representative of my age as everyone else living today, and it does not need to be elaborated by anyone just how deep the issues in the world presently go; everything, and I really do mean everything, needs to be overturned—routed and removed completely, in order that a new foundation may be set and leveled, so that we bricklayers and cobblers, we writers and intellectuals, we managers and service workers all alike, push past the present and enter into an abundant future of our own making!

As I’ve said already, truth is both an abstraction in the mind and an embodiment in the world. Unfortunately, however, the colloquial meaning of truth is still made to stand against itself, and thus attacks and sends into retreat the mental tranquility of man. What it attacks is not the veracity of the claim but the individual who makes the claim. Truth as an abstraction in the mind of fools is made to be conceptualized in a purposefully antagonistic manner, and the reasons I think are quite simple: if the masses cannot agree on the ways in which they are divided, they shall never agree on the ways in which they can be made undivided; in this way, nothing more than posturing between opposing factions (born from nothing more than differences in priorities) is all that shall result—and who alive today could read what I’ve just written and not see that that is exactly what mankind has fallen into, across the entire world: a never-ending cycle of stupidity and pointless disagreements over trivialities which never approach the real issues at hand.

The issues at hand are those which are materially felt by everyone, but which are understood differently thanks to the differences in everyone’s presuppositions regarding what is of real value and importance in the world. This is a perennial problem within civilization and social organization as such. The nature of man is such that the organizational structures which he devises are made only to serve his values, ignoring everything else. With that said, I think it has to be acknowledged by everyone that the first true step in revolution is an agreement on values, and in particular on what the main priorities are in society. This is where the new valuation is possible. It exists not in a strict agreement of what the truth is, or what the priorities should be, but rather in a totally new way of conceptualizing what the truth could be. It is a revaluation of the concept of truth as such. You’ll never be able to get all of society to agree on what the priorities should be, and the reason I think is because of the differences that are implicit within the truths that we agree with. Again, truth is a judgment, not an eternity. The presuppositions which we take wholesale are nothing more than culturally acquired prejudices of our upbringing, stemming from our current material reality.

What man needs is a new conception of what social organization can be. In essence, man needs a new outline for the philosophy of right—a new system born from a new process of conceptualization that combines praxis with solidarity on outcomes. Nothing can be expected to come from nothing so long as man does not strive to bring that nothing into something through his labor and ideas. But how do we reach this something? We do so via the dialectic—the dialectic turned political! It is the absorption of all presuppositional attacks merely by analyzing the material conditions pragmatically. It does away with all nonsense and jargon by cutting through all the fluff and overturning all the typical retorts, arguments, slanders, one-liners, and rhetorical tomfooleries from nothing more than an objective analysis of things. Dialectically speaking, we may put politics back on its feet by overcoming all existing barriers to prosperity of the people. The main issues within society are caused by fools who insist on remaining subject to capital, and who would defend to their dying breath that antiquated system of oppression so long as it remains in their interest to do so. Every zoning law and stagnant wage, all inflation and unaffordability, each tax, rent, and mortgage—in a word, each systemic tool of exploitation, oppression, and austerity—are made so deliberately in order to pacify the populace from ever overthrowing the system as it stands now.

It has to be reiterated that all this, and then some, stems from arguments over values and presuppositions—all such things vociferously argued for on the basis of the truth of them. There is no TRUTH, however, only interpretations of truth: abstractions in the mind that correspond to our sentiments and values.

The moment an idea is captured by fools, it descends to the pits of darkness, because fools always tend to make things about themselves, and in doing so, compromise any real potential for positive change. What fools do—which is what makes them fools in my regard—is that they make truth static, unchanging, indomitable, and eternal, when the real truth of truth is that it cannot be made subject to itself. TRUTH cannot be truth, because truth is an abstraction, a value subject to the whims of existing material conditions; truth is made so out of our encounters with the world, not as Plato or Aquinas would have had it—far beyond man, existing in something prior to him.

Ideas exist, but they are not prior to man in an absolute sense; they are only an a priori because they exist in man as the organism he already is (our perceptual apparatuses—controlled by the nervous system and mediated by the brain—which we developed thanks to variations in allele frequencies caused by evolutionary forces such as mutation, natural selection, genetic drift, gene flow, and nonrandom mating).

Matter exists but, again, it is not prior to man in an absolute sense, because matter is only known to man a posteriori—due to his reflexive comprehension of it as he stumbles and falls on the objective floor of reality, which he would not be able to perceive were it not for his already existing (a priori) sensual faculties: eyes, noses, tongues, hands, and ears.

As one can see, the nature of man is not one or the other, but rather a synthesis of the two; and I like to think that truth is very analogous, but instead of being a synthesis between two concepts, it is a synthesis of every conceivable concept. Every conceivable? Without question, it has to be, for truth is not subject to a dichotomy of claims made on the basis of presupposed premises, but rather to every prick and pang of ideal and material misfortune alike.

And what is the process by which this circulation and sublation (aufhebung) of conceptions can be made tangible and processed? THE DIALECTIC.

Hence why all philosophical roads lead to Hegel; because Hegel reformulated the primary question posed by Kant’s phenomenon-noumenon distinction, namely: can the Ding an sich (thing-in-itself)—the noumenon—be known in a phenomenal manner, that is, in the same way we know a chair or house exists? Kant says no. For him, we possess faculties in the mind that are transcendental (prior to experience, yet known only in experience), but they are incapable of bridging the gap between what is perceptible and what is not.

It is very interesting, actually, because Kant tries to show everything that can be known in reason (rationally and empirically), yet posits an aspect of reality that exists outside of reason (cannot be known rationally or empirically). This contradiction drove every post-Kantian philosopher mad, and rightfully so, but out of all of them (including Schopenhauer), the only one to hit upon the real solution, in my view, was Hegel. What he did was essentially turn the question back in on itself.

For Hegel, it did not make sense to separate the phenomenon and noumenon between the two spheres of transcendental perception—analytic and synthetic—but rather to incorporate both into perception as such—”as such” here meaning as it appears to man in his everyday experience of reality. The dialectic is the progression or movement of man’s self-realization, aided by reason, experience, and contemplation of experience through reason; self-realization here refers to the absolute—the unity, or complete synthesis, of all reality as it is.

The dialectic overcomes all because, to it, truth is not something to be discovered in the world, or to be deduced from premises drawn from prejudices and presuppositions based on intuitions or past experiences; but rather to be arrived at in the process of life itself. In a word, truth for the dialectic is fluid—continuously evolving and updating as the material conditions of the world manifest themselves in our experience of it. Truth is subject to us and our ideals, not to whatever logical hocus-pocus we make for ourselves when devising methods of inquiry.

To attempt to find truth in premises alone is like attempting to chew liquid; no matter how hard you try, it will always slip through your teeth. Truth as something to be deduced from what we already assume to be the case (found in all our premises) is nothing more than placing an intellectual straitjacket on ourselves, because we narrow our potential conceptions and, like a sieve, strain out all that is not in accordance with what we are searching for.

This idea of truth as a dialectic—as something fluid, ever-changing, and in constant revolt against itself—is pure practicality in my view. It does not offer the world anything but itself in toto, as it is made known to us in our existence through it. In that way, I think I can finally say that the conception of truth which I hold to—and which I wish everyone on Earth held to—is dialectical pragmatism: truth that is goal-oriented and interest-driven. My whole philosophy is dialectical pragmatism in practice; in fact, this whole book is essentially my attempt to place this new philosophical framework on a sturdy foundation by making its application across all domains of human experience and interest—from the practical to the obscure, from the simple to the esoteric.

Since it is a dialectic, it cannot be defined in any systematic way, because to define it systematically would be to make it anti-dialectical—rigid, static, non-fluid, unchanging. To be without structure is to be encompassed within all structures, and from that point, you merely pick which structure works best for your particular goal in that particular moment. There is no such thing as an unbiased, neutral, or impartial truth, and yet everyone today views their truth as the truth—something which is true for everybody, and which was arrived at reasonably, logically, and well-supported with an abundance of evidence. It is amazing to me that in proclamations of what we think, we do not instantly recognize the personal, subjective nature of it.

But I suppose this view of truth as something outside us is to remain so long as we conceive of truth as something sacred within the world—as a part of the world that was prior to us. For those who have made it this far, it has to be concluded that truth is something to be overcome—or rather, to be reevaluated—if any liberation is to happen within the world.

Like I said before, for me, all truth is an abstraction of the mind, but it is at the same time an embodied action within the world. You may rightly ask why I hold to this strange dualism. I can only reply that the dialectical nature of my thinking does not allow me to say truth is an either—or, but rather a unity of all “eithers” and “ors.” I can never affirm a ground to reality, or a metaphysics to nature, because to ground something is to be certain of not only its validity but also its immutability—and that is a step too far.

I want to live in the ever-changing flux of space and time, and wish to be awash in temporalities in order that I may one day speak to the absolute itself. I also want to be open to what I feel to be the fundamental nature of existence: a constant striving and passing away, a continuous contingency. What I ultimately wish to avoid is dogmatic thinking, for I despise the man who is certain in an absolute sense. At the same time, however, I also wish to give the world its due and heed every practical, immediate consideration.

You see, dear reader, the world is flux, and in that conception, something can become nothing and nothing can become something. Out of nothing, in the context of pure being, comes everything, because both partake in something as ideas (concepts) but nothing in material. As such, the ways of men will naturally part from this difference in perspective: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, become anti-dialectical; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, become dialectical—and I should also add, become pragmatic, for that is the basis on which all real change in the world is made.

The parting of men is from our different temperaments, but the unity of all men is from our shared material reality—and it is on that basis that we must strive to overcome the world itself and labor onwards for the emancipation of all human beings alike.

Science

The true shape in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of such truth. To help bring philosophy closer to the form of Science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title ‘love of knowing’ and be actual knowing—that is what I have set myself to do. The inner necessity that knowing should be Science lies in its nature, and only the systematic exposition of philosophy itself provides it. —Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, §5 (A. V. Miller Translation).

In the various thoughts which strike one throughout the day, the most vivifying are those which are meaningful. When my idle mind stumbles over the many concepts which I may be contemplating at one time or another, I am most taken aback by those which I cannot completely comprehend or correlate with some past experience. Science, as a tool for advancing man’s knowledge of the world, is one such subject which, no matter how many times I ruminate upon it, I never seem to truly apprehend in its totality.

Reality, as it stands before us, is really the whole subjectivity of the mind turned into the objectivity of the individual by their embodied action in the world. Science is nothing but man’s attempt to bring the whole subjective representation of reality into concrete comprehension.

It is no surprise to anyone familiar with intellectual history that science as we know it today was originally referred to as natural philosophy. For millennia, this label captured the whole essence of what the natural world was for those bold enough to study it. Ancient men and women saw the world exactly as we do; the difference, however, was how they interpreted it.

In the distant past, it was common to view all things as related to one another. Everything in nature seemed to have sprung from a single source or idea, from which everything that we perceive now originated. There had yet to be a standardized method for investigating nature, no single technique to probe the recesses of the natural world; the only thing ancient man could rely on was his mind and his ideas about what seemed to compose reality.

There were numerous theories about what was fundamental to existence, but everyone differed in their conclusions, stemming from their different starting presuppositions. In the West, the first person to offer up a natural explanation of reality—i.e., an explanation that does not rely on gods, folktales, or the supernatural—was Thales, who claimed that all was water. In the East, there was Uddālaka Āruṇi, who said that all of reality was sat (सत्), meaning, among other things, being. While both are ontological frameworks that have metaphysical implications, the important thing here is what was actually assumed: Thales took a materialist beginning, while Āruṇi took a purely ontological one.

From this split came the distinction between Western thought and Eastern thought, and from which came every sect, school, and dogma about the world. Of course, with time, things were bound to change, but the overall method of thinking still remains an ingrained cultural meme between both sides. It is hard to break past past vestiges of what we were; it seems, rather, that what we are, we are condemned to remain.

Once science got up on its feet, however, and entered into the modern age, the world—both West and East—was temporarily blinded by its illumination; so bright was this new revelation. It cannot be repeated enough just how transformative science as a method of investigation was. Again, prior to it, the best man could do was argue for reality on first principles—that which seems intuitive and logically follows.

The greatest of these thinkers was Aristotle, from whom we get practically all our important metaphysical terminology; but now, in this enlightened age, man no longer looked to himself but to reality as itself, and decided to consider the natural world on its own grounds, rather than from his logical homeland. At once, science lost the philosophical connotation to its original name (natural philosophy) and thus became the subject we recognize today.

What exactly happened, though? Why did man go from arguing from first principles to finally deciding to test nature itself by experimenting? It is difficult to know who was the first to bring about this change, or why man stopped considering reality in that way, but I would suspect that it happened because man was able to separate teleology (purpose) from ontology (being); that is, man stopped assuming that the causes behind things were really the grounds for their tangible purpose, which appear as effects in the world.

In essence, all of natural philosophy (prior to science proper) was derived from an implicit assumption about what nature actually was; the first philosophers all assumed that there was intentionality behind natural phenomena, and so, logically following from this, they subjected all of their conclusions to an effect which lay within the purpose of a natural occurrence, rather than in questioning the “why” behind the occurrence. In this way, all their conclusions about natural phenomena did not extend beyond what the final cause of the object was.

There is a very strong argument to be made that the first person to treat reality in a strictly ontological sense, that is, only as it appears to us in our experience of it—from which the scientific method was ultimately developed—was neither Francis Bacon, nor Da Vinci, nor Roger Bacon, but Ibn al-Haytham, who famously said:

The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them—the one who submits to argument and demonstration and not the sayings of human beings whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.

He was the first to test his logic and intuitions about nature with actual experiments, because prior to him, it was assumed that if a thing worked out logically, that somehow made it a sure thing in reality.

It never occurred to ancient scientists that their conclusions about reality could be off if their assumptions about that reality were off. Of course, there were skeptics and sophists in the pre-Socratic age, but they only questioned their perceptions in an epistemological sense; to them, if a thing cannot be known with certainty, investigating it is pointless, for it ends in uncertainty.

Scientists, however, do not worry themselves about absolute certainty or the ground/validity of their methods, so long as it provides them with practical results that are corroborated with supporting evidence. That is why most scientifically minded people are ignorant of philosophy, and by extension, the intellectual traditions that gave birth to their frameworks to begin with; they view all ideas not directly related to the natural phenomena in question as irrelevant, and rightfully so. They couldn’t care less about the grounds or ends of their methods; all that matters is discovering the “why” through experimenting and hypothesizing. Such is why most scientists today are naturalists and naïve empirical materialists. They view all questions through a false dichotomy of verifiability: either the thing in question can be investigated to the point of proving it false, or it has no meaning whatsoever. It is very pragmatic, but I believe overly so, and too simplistic a view to have on the world.

Scientists treat the world in the same way they treat their experiments—better yet, in the same way mathematicians treat their axioms—with a view to simplicity and simplification; the point is never having a total comprehension of things, but rather a framework to view things through in order to develop methods that refine the initial results.

In truth, science is really about generating reasons for events in the world; it wishes to offer the best explanation for every natural occurrence, and in doing so, turns every aspect of reality into a natural occurrence whose cause must have an attribution. It is the subject naming the predicate. All things experienced by man are natural; therefore, they must have some natural explanation—and they are off, searching for what mechanism lies behind such an event.

By reducing reality to only a single particular, you come to discover many things about that particular, but you never see what lies beyond it—you only retort that what lies beyond it is irrelevant because it does not refer back to the particular. This is what science is today: a telescope made only for a particular star, rather than the entire cosmos.

Science, like capitalism, is an ideal dialectic—and it is ideal because its approach to reality is never final, but rather always evolving and transforming as new discoveries are made. Unlike capitalism, however, science has brought untold riches and benefits to mankind through its method of investigation (its process), and is, in my view, the single greatest paradigm shift in intellectual history.

Science is the process by which nature is apprehended and made known; it takes the concrete aspects of reality, breaks them into their simplest parts—in doing so brushing over all their complexities—and then rearranges them in order to construct a seemingly valid explanation for the thing in question. It is a good method that is also pragmatic, but I feel too many people today cling too tightly to it. Most intelligent people like to think the results of science speak for themselves, and that alone justifies subordinating all aspects of life to it. I, for one, never felt satisfied with the results of science because it did not answer—nay, it did not even consider or look at—the questions which literature, philosophy, and theology at least strive to answer.

Science is not existential, and that is my biggest problem with it; it removes every complexity of nature for the sake of making the phenomenon as narrow as possible—in doing so making it easier to approach, with the hope that once this simplified phenomenon is figured out, it will give a clue as to how to approach the thing as a whole—and then stands proud atop the anthill it just conquered while the whole mountain still stands before it. It considers the questions of life, meaning, and existence to be unanswerable, and as a result, provides us no insights on that front, and sadly never will.

But for some reason, still unbeknownst to me, many people today only consider life through a scientific lens; again, mistaking the forest for the trees. What value has science ever added to, say, the question of love—aside from reducing it to a mere chemical reaction, a release of dopamine? I feel anyone would be hard-pressed to argue that science explains love sufficiently at all. It is as if every important aspect of life—those aspects which make living meaningful and which are never to go unnoticed as we live—are not to be approached by the scientific method, all because they cannot be put in such a definite way as to be proven false.

In short, every abstraction which can be given meaning is totally ostracized by science insofar as the meaning is subjectively made. For science, the only meaning there is is that which is objective, i.e., not subordinate to anything else, mind-independent, anti-subjective; this is foolish, however, because objectivity does not exist in the manner they define it. They deduce from the impossibility of the contrary—a dubious assumption without any real ground—that objectivity has a metaphysical status, as if a law of nature, or the logical absolutes, or a mathematical proof, were eternal and prior to all conscious creatures. They fail to recognize that these “facts” exist for us, for individuals, and are made by us from our methods of investigation; they also neglect the fact that facts themselves are values, hence being inherently subjective. The word “objective” has been maligned and equivocated against long enough. There is no “objective” anything in science. I hereby suggest that we go back to the original meaning of objective: that which is external to the subject; or in other words, that which lies outside of the individual, but which lives for them in experience. (This is how Kant and Schopenhauer used it, and it should be returned to.)

People speak of science having truth, or that this experiment showed the truth of something, but I am still waiting for them to show me the answers to life. Evidently, it would be helpful if all science enthusiasts remembered that famous quote from Lex Luthor: “I don’t believe in truth. You can’t measure it or hold it in your hands.” Existential science is the only truth there is, because it is the only one that strives to grasp reality in its totality, rather than attempting to construct it from an infinite sea of “truths.” Even if there were a finite number of truths in the universe, it would not be possible for man to comprehend them all, for our lives are too short, and life has other pressing concerns than merely pondering the whole contiguous universe.

Science can provide us with suggestions and useful results pragmatically arrived at, but it can never touch philosophical (existential) questions, and is ultimately without “objective” truth—the one thing people find meaningful about science; a crude misunderstanding which has to be attacked and driven out from everyone’s mind.

I feel we should not forget where the word “science” originates from: the Latin scientia (”knowledge”), from scīre (”to know”). Ipsa scientia potestas est (knowledge itself is power), says Francis Bacon. That is what modern science ultimately has to be: a subject whose sole focus is power—power to advance the human condition and provide information for the service of man and the planet he inhabits. Science should cut the act, trying to pretend that it has truth, when all it has is a vague conception of what reality truly appears like.

Man’s idea of truth is like a broken mirror, reflecting only pieces of the total image that stands before it. The future of man’s knowledge has to be encyclopedic and universal, incorporating everything rather than only a few simplified imitations of what the whole of conscious life is. By “science,” we should only have in our minds a totalizing kind of knowing—a knowledge that is extensive, ethical, personal, religious, artistic—in short, polymathic. That is the type of man the future must lead to if humanity as a whole is to move forward. The progression of one man must, and I think will, become the progression of all men—born in man’s own self-realization and embodiment in the world, a direct consequence of everything that has come before, unified and synthesized as one being of immense perfection. So long as man lives, power must predominate. It is up to us, therefore, to use such power to overthrow all old gods and conceptions and bring about an aeternus annus mirabilis (eternal miraculous year).

Pure self-recognition in absolute otherness, this Aether as such, is the ground and soil of Science or knowledge in general. The beginning of philosophy presupposes or requires that consciousness should dwell in this element. But this element itself achieves its own perfection and transparency only through the movement of its becoming. It is pure spirituality as the universal that has the form of simple immediacy. This simple being in its existential form is the soil [of Science], it is thinking which has its being in Spirit alone. —Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, §26 (A. V. Miller Translation).

The Subjective/Objective Divide

Judgment

Kant has written a critique on the practical judgments of mankind, but I should like to write a dirge on them, for I find so often man kowtowing to principles and conceptions which he does not understand, yet which he feels enslaved to for the sake of consistency or conformity with the rest of society.

Judgment is an aspect of man’s mind in the same way his fingers are an aspect of his hands. What we have in judgment is nothing more than reason being placed in the ascendant when an experience within the world necessitates deliberation. Judgment is reason personified in the rational faculty, and it takes hold of man whenever he is confronted by that which is not an immediate threat to him, but which causes him to consider and reconsider nonetheless.

Every organism thinks as it lives, but not every organism is capable of judgment; in truth, judgment—born directly from reason and found in the mind as a capacity within it—is a direct byproduct of existence and can only be had in those creatures whose brains are sufficiently developed to abstract ideas (conceptions) from experience, and in cognizing these ideas, perform an action that coincides with the initial thought deliberated upon. One cannot live without formulating conceptions of the world. Esse est percipi, et vivere est experiri (to be is to be perceived, and to live is to experience).

The only difference between man and microbe in this respect is the degree to which this reality is conceived. To the microbe, I’m sure the only thing it considers—were it capable of thinking like man—is the countertop (or wherever on Earth) it finds itself upon; to it, that is the whole universe, for its inner experience is limited to its dimensionality, scope, field of view, perception, and being (as in its physical makeup). Man is so much higher than a microbe because he is the microbe made cognizant of itself. It may shock one to find that an adult human being is composed of over 37 trillion cells, and, greater still, some 7 octillion atoms. What an immense fortress of existence we are.

In experience, it seems like judgment is a necessity of consciousness, but that depends on the level of analysis which you’re willing to adopt. For most of life, judgment is not necessary; and this is seen in how absent-minded and aloof people are to the divinities that surround them at every moment. People consider life in the immediacy of their circumstances, but very few go beyond that mere immediacy to the higher aspects of judgment. What is more common is base instinct, mere reaction, and total subservience to the experience as it is in its appearance in consciousness. All the higher aspects of thinking (imagination, contemplation, creativity, etc.) are left to languish on the island of disuse and neglect, all for the sake of stupid practicality. What is not used is lost, and what is overused is lethargic.

Judgment, as a matter of reason, is had on behalf of a particular goal. Judgment is really synonymous with reason because it does not exist without it. Everything that exists is said to have a reason for its existence, but I feel the principle of sufficient reason has for far too long dominated our conceptions of what thinking really is, or rather what thinking should be. Judgment is reason made practical.

All thinking has an ethics behind it, because every thought, whether conscious or unconscious, displays to the world a drive or force which moves the mind to consider what the end of that action will be subjectively; you cannot have thought without the individual who performs the thoughts, and every thought has some content to it that ultimately relates to the experience being experienced and the teleology that arises in the mind in the process of that experience.

It would have been a boon to life had man never developed thought in the first place, for then, like the crude beasts that roam the savanna, life would only be in the immediate, and anxiety from existence itself would not have been; but alas, man is condemned to life so long as he breathes, and he makes his way through only so far as he finds purpose within that breathing. What then is judgment but the means by which man becomes himself in the midst of living life pragmatically?

What persists as a dogma among man today is the idea that the true purpose of judgment is really to serve reason—to slavishly adhere to what reason dictates to the mind. It has never been the case, however, that reason was the one faculty by which man grasped the world and subjugated it to his will. Rather, what has always persisted was a single overarching idea by which man viewed everything else.

Practicality exists as a necessary correlate of the material conditions of the world. What confronts man is nothing less than the totality of existence, and, seemingly throughout time, his goals have always been fashioned after the manner of a statue—firm, rigid, and unchanging—in order to assure himself that in that unwavering (flaccid and consistent) conviction he would arrive at a conclusion regarding his being which made sense of all the toil that was necessary to sustain it; his goal was really the ultimate end, but at the same time that goal turned in on itself, and as a result turned against him, and so he was left with the only absolute truth there could possibly be: all is flux!

The judgments of men are only as consistent as their reasons, which is to say not consistent at all: for stupid men use no reason, smart men use only reason (and in doing so become the most dogmatic and insufferable of all), and pragmatic men make reason a handmaid for their judgments.

The stupid man needs no comment, for he ekes out an existence well enough from his own obliviousness; he is undoubtedly the happiest of the three because he lives without introspection and doesn’t actually mind the toil and misery he endures for the sake of his life because he has no conception of what comfort is—he’s an ox for his job, gladly following orders blindly, and takes the deepest despairs upon himself with a smile, again, because he has no understanding of equality, fairness, or social mobility: things for him simply are what they are, and change doesn’t even occur in his little pea brain, again, all because he’s too stupid to see the very clear existential problems that lie before him.

The smart man, very much like David Hume, considers it the goal of his intellect to accept things only on proof, experience, or undeniable evidence; and as a result he becomes prosaic, lifeless, boring, and uninterested in speculation, abhorring the concepts of dialectic or change; he thinks himself the most rational, the most wise, the most logical, the most consistent, the most intellectual, and without doubt, the most correct in everything considered—he lacks intellectual humility because he’s found a framework that works for him and accepts it on that basis pragmatically, and in doing so has immense difficulty seeing beyond his own “right” method of thought; he is immovable in his ways and considers anything not born in rationality alone as absurd and worthy of being consigned to the flames: funnily enough he also claims agnosticism for everything he is not convinced of, and so always answers with the famous “I do not know” when pressed on an issue, and thus achieves nothing in the world of thought but selfsame certainty—certainty in what he already knows to be the case, just like the prolix and irrelevant logical positivists of the early 20th century, or the superfluous scholastics of the Middle Ages.

The smart man takes himself too seriously because he believes his reason alone is enough to apprehend the truth of reality. Sola ratione (by reason alone) is his motto; and so he lives out his life taking everything to task with his reason, subjecting all to his wicked analysis, coming up short in everything—for no one told him the world doesn’t live by reason alone (if he was a truly rational thinker he would’ve discovered that about the world long ago)—and thus sits atop mount Parnassus wondering why the heavens recede at his approach. You can formalize everything, have every academic discipline at your command, have an informed opinion on every topic under the sun, even write whole encyclopedias as a testament to your intellect, and yet still come up short in discovering what the point of all that intellect was for: the improvement of your judgment. Preferring to remain consistent in inaction—satisfied in your small sandbox of certainty—you think the whole world is to be understood through reason alone, and thus you understand nothing of it fully.

The pragmatic man, on the other hand, does away with all dogmatic prescriptions and in doing so rises above himself and views the world as it really is: changing, evolving, dynamic, etc. He is speculative and never certain, but he does not use that as a reason to halt his judgment. The pragmatic man deliberates and acts simultaneously. What we have in the pragmatic human being is one whose judgments of the world are made upon the basis of the particular goals he has for himself.

Thinking is a kind of action, and judgment is a kind of thinking: it is a thinking with a point, a purpose, a meaning, a “this” rather than “that.” Action is totally embodied when thinking ceases, momentarily, and becomes a movement of the body. Didn’t I say that thinking was a kind of action, though? Yes, I did—but you must remember that there are different kinds of actions in the world. To be idle is itself a kind of action. Thinking is man’s mental action—a never-ending cycle of abstraction and interpretation; whereas action, in the sense of actu agere (to act in actuality) is that which is embodied in the impulses or drives within man and results in the exchange of his power for some movement—a force which compels him to some kind of exertion of energy. That is judgmental pragmatism, if a label should be ascribed to it.

The pragmatic man doesn’t think in strictly rational or logical terms, dichotomizing everything into an either—or in order to say “yea” or “nay” in the face of a very complex decision. The only thing that matters is whether the judgment that led to the action was effective in furthering your goal. This is what I was referring to at the beginning; man today subordinates his goals, his ideals, or objectives for reasons other than the judgment being insufficient for the task.

There are innumerable barriers to man’s power (action) today, whether from social pressures or his own incompetence, that make living a kind of burden to him. The ultimate cause for stagnation in man is his own uncertainty within himself. The complete and utter fear he is to acquire at the mere thought of something of which he is uncertain is enough to cause him to despair and lose hope. In such a scenario, the only possible action to take is a leap into the unknown—that which is to be feared not because it is uncertain, but because not leaping into it would be much worse.

In a sense, the ultimate form of pragmatism within man is actions which are done not through judgments but intuitions. To rely on reason solely is to imitate the smart man, the man who does things right but doesn’t dare to do anything he doesn’t know with certainty is right; OH! how I despise such weak, feeble men—men who can’t get out of bed in the morning without first having the next ten years planned ahead of them. These are the ultimate deprecators of life! Their life is a lie, and they live selfishly for their own destruction—the only thing they feel in control of in the world. They yearn for control but find the world wanting in this respect, and so they either do nothing or become nihilists: anti-meaning becomes their new meaning, and thus they go headfirst into the dark abyss of meaninglessness which shall annihilate them.

In an abstract sense, every action is its own reason. Judgment today is viewed by men in a strict utilitarian sense—that which is done for the good of the individual—but that is absurd because it treats reason in a vacuum, devoid of the subject behind the reason. Action proves itself to itself in its own becoming in the world, a kind of movement which every living thing does, but only man can abstractly represent in his own mind and say very witty things upon. Just like how being necessitates non-being, action necessitates judgment, because judgment is a deliberation of reason that is made manifest in the world thanks to action.

All rational things are subject to judgment, and judgment is merely the aftereffect of something that is known after the fact of its embodiment in the world. It is hard enough to live within one’s self today—man being prey to so many violent temptations and wicked passions—but if truth is to be embodied in subjectivity while also being affirmed and displayed in the objective sphere of things within action, man must strive for a kind of irrational judgment that is supported by only the surest reason. If this conception of judgment is counterintuitive or plain nonsense, that is not my fault—blame the incomprehensible nature of the dialectic.

Man’s judgment, at the end of the day, will either be his life or his death, and it’s ultimately up to him to decide whether he is willing to toss the coin of life up in the air, though he is unsure which side it will land on; hence the irrationality of existence, and thus making the only rational judgment the completely irrational if life is to be lived at all. Rise above your judgments and obtain yourself at the expense of your doubts.

Opinion

Opinions are like phones: everyone has one, but nobody knows how to use it to their benefit. You can’t expect men to stray too far from what they already believe, and opinions only serve as morsels of wisdom from which that belief is made manifest in thought.

If man had half as much intellect as he does confidence, his opinions would actually be worth a fair amount; but because the average person does less thinking than, say, receiving ready-made ideas, he takes wholesale that which is not his own, and so becomes enslaved to the opinions of others rather than master of his ideas.

It is a regrettable fact that lies are more often provided in place of very well-considered thoughts. Most men’s opinions today, I think, can rightly be classified as lies—not only because the sources from which they’re derived are biased themselves (and more often than not deliberate falsehoods without any originality) but because their end is merely to support what is already considered true.

You cannot expect the truth from those who think truth is something to actually be acquired objectively. The average person still conceives of the truth as the antipode to the false—as the negative or opposite of that which is the Ding an sich (thing-in-itself). This notion will persist so long as man considers it his business to view the world through the lens of objectivity alone. Opinions only prop up this false notion of objectivity within ideas by empowering them through a lack of conflict between the subjective and the material basis of all things.

There is no dialectic between ideas and opinions today, and such is why everyone defers to the false and becomes insipid and ridiculous as a result.

The acceptance of all things foolish and barbaric today is a direct result of placing too high a value—or rather, not knowing how much value to place—on opinions. Opinions are, in a word, true, insofar as their truth is predicated on the subjective within man; and false, insofar as they are only subordinated to the objective. You see, conceptions are abstractions born in experience and given form in the mind; the two aspects of reality are really synthesized in one the moment you recognize that, like a coin, you cannot have one side without the other. The very idea of a concept necessitates a negative within it.

Dialectical reasoning is the closest thing to reality there is because, in a sense, its teleology is reality itself. Pure being is also a pure nothing so far as it exists within a reality that allows contradiction and evolution. A single idea brings forth a new one every time it is thought; and man, so long as he is doomed to be uncertain about his thoughts, must languish in a sea of contradiction and opposite affirmations that bring about their own positivity. Negativity and positivity necessitate one another in order to bring about their own continuation and existence in thought—a type of thought which exists only for man to cognize and make use of.

What everyone gets wrong about the nature of truth is simply that it has no meaning outside of what predicates (adjectives or qualities) we wish to assign to it. Truth is subjectivity absolutely but objectivity immanently—that is, in the immediate of some experience. Reality presents itself as one continuous whole, but while observing it as one whole, it is also simultaneously cut up infinitesimally each passing second of conscious awareness into discrete units of experience which become actualized in our experience: all this to say, existence is its own truth, made a brute fact by the nature of its representation to us.

Truth, like every other concept whose idea belongs to Plato’s Hinterwelt of forms, is a lie and a truth at the same time; it presents itself to us as an objective reality but has no ground on which to stand in a metaphysical sense—unless you would like to ground it in your own absolute conception, which is, I’m sorry to say, all man has ever been able to do when it comes to abstractions taken from experience.

To affirm one position over another is to presume that there is an actual fact of reality, that certainty is present, and that it is obtained in this one conception, approach, or method. I think, unfortunately, that man cannot get beyond his desire to know existence in its true form, and thus creates for himself “true” forms, or higher worlds, or utopian visions for society, all in a vain attempt to forget that his meaning is ultimately dependent upon him.

We see people get offended when their motives behind an action are erroneously assumed, and this is because the person doing the assuming presupposes knowledge they ultimately cannot have. They have good reason to get offended, for their integrity is ultimately being questioned; and everyone likes to think they have truth on their side when they consider something from the standpoint of their reason—but again, this is all a mirage. Everything is relative. Opinion and perspective are the common order of the day and shall rest eternally atop the idea hierarchy so long as man thinks it his duty to make truth something sacred.

Truth is both farce and tragedy, but it only becomes tragic when opinion is substituted for it. Truth has no objectivity, but that doesn’t mean it has no power. God doesn’t exist so far as I know, but that doesn’t stop people from praying to Him and using His name in vain. For most of history, God was truth; but now, man knows better and places truth within himself rather than outside himself.

True truth is truth that recognizes it doesn’t need the label of truth to be powerful. It is a failing of language to even convey such an idea, contradictory as it is; all the writer can do is hope that the reader is not turned off by the blatant absurdities that are written with respect to the true nature of reality.

Reality is often more strange than we would like to admit, and no one has fully exhausted their own mental capacities as of yet. Not even Shakespeare, as profound and deep as he was—with his encyclopedic understanding of human nature—managed to encompass even a tenth part of what man truly is. The fact that Shakespeare was a writer rather than a philosopher could be chalked up to the fact that the stage paid more than some struggling bungler of Aristotle or some misinterpreter of Plato; besides, England had no need for another philosopher with Francis Bacon alive—a man whose prose rivals Shakespeare’s verse. The brevity and profundity are almost too much to describe in words.

To play with abstract ideas is the game of the philosopher. Very few actually obtain this, however, and those who think they do merely cull from others what they themselves think, and in the process of imitating, spoil the original idea and make themselves fools in the process.

I’ve often thought while writing all this thus far that my labors and efforts to encapsulate all of existence—in order that I may finally be done with the intellectual sphere of life and enter into the objective sphere (the real world of struggle and hardship)—is in the end a fool’s errand, because to attempt something impossible is necessarily to do what no one can. Greater minds have tried and have been broken upon the rack of reality when all their ideals melt into air and become like nothing in the face of death—such a shame to yearn for that which one cannot have, and yet how inspiring it is, and how improved one is by striving after that which cannot be done in an absolute sense.

Even Hegel had to affirm the absolute as something which is changing and evolving within the world constantly; the whole universe rewrites its laws upon the tablets that are space and time, bearing all these stars and galaxies where, upon a single lone planet within the Milky Way, conscious creatures were smart enough to create for themselves a systematic schematization of all conceptions in which they aimed at comprehending all of it. So it was for human knowledge, forever to remain constrained by its own efficiency of organization.

An opinion is merely what someone thinks about something that has no epistemic content to it: say, your favorite color or what you think about some book you’ve read. These have no right or wrong answers, we are told, and so everyone holds themselves to their opinions above all else in order to feel assured in the world. I, for one, tend to accept this notion out of convenience, but I don’t find it all that useful in terms of a descriptor.

If one is to go back to Frege and think the only way to “correctly” describe the world is through predefined terms that prove themselves, then we are to forever know no more than that—merely what we already know to be the case. It is shocking to me that people look upon the analytical logicism of Frege and think it the greatest act of human intellect ever performed, when in truth, Schopenhauer, decades before him, already described the same theory of term predication and then proceeded to undermine it by stating that it, too, had no ground from which you could evince the consequent of all its deductions.

Logic is but the superfluousness of an idle mind seeking understanding. It reveals nothing which isn’t already considered reasonable enough to assume. I abhor solipsism, but much more do I abhor those who claim absolute knowledge when, in truth, they scarcely have the shadows of it.

Opinions tend to make a scholarly mind idle, for anyone with an acquaintance with logic could delude themselves into thinking their opinions are actual facts. It bothers me a lot to see so many people so sure of their convictions when they haven’t got a leg to stand on. I just wish people were more open to various forms of truth instead of thinking of it as this immutable object that has persisted since the beginning of time.

Truth is our subjectivity made objective in the world. Those who confuse truth’s nature and assume that with reason they have the ultimate tool by which to judge all statements of reality as true or false have only maintained a narrative they’ve never once critically examined. To them, to question truth is either absurd, irrational, or purely sentimental. They’re so dyed in the wool with respect to truth that they conceive it only in a vicious dichotomy, and this makes sense, for truth has traditionally been viewed with all things either in its domain or out of it. I understand it completely, but I don’t hold to it anymore for the same reason I no longer hold to materialism as a basis for my metaphysics—it cannot be known absolutely, only subjectively and dogmatically clung to out of fear. Now, I hold to nothing but speculative philosophy itself: philosophy as a way of life done in the pursuit of wisdom—a constant search for that which is beneficial and good to both myself and society at large.

My opinion of the world is that opinions are blind if they are not searched for with the light of dialectic to illuminate them. All the halls of intellectual tradition silence themselves in the presence of the thought that one can affirm something but not affirm it absolutely. But what does it mean to affirm absolutely if the absolute doesn’t exist? It is to affirm without certainty that you truly did affirm in the first place. It is to endure the full weight of every decision upon yourself and, ultimately, accept each responsibility that comes with existing in the world, manifested in the world through action.

The absolute is not merely the complete synthesis of all things, but rather it is the incorporation of the full progression of each thing in its stage of development; it includes both true and false notions and, in fact, treats them as equals, for nothing is truly right or wrong in the eyes of totality, only just another aspect of that same absolute. To affirm is to accept that you cannot ultimately affirm, but the idea of it is so present in your conception of reality that you have no other choice but to affirm it anyway—you must affirm air if you are to reach the atmosphere, though you can’t see either.

Subjectivity alone is the only true leap into being which one can take ultimately and affirm absolutely, though it be done in a confused manner. In fact, one does it so long as they live, for life is literally the counterpoise to death and so must always be affirmed amidst the uncertainty of “when.” Everything presents itself as it should, we think, but we must never forget that abstractions exist only for us and are not really out there in the world roaming about, but rather the byproduct of the mind—a constantly changing and ever-evolving faculty. All opinions turn about the dialectic and make themselves known in the world through their embodied contradictions.

I have given my opinion well enough, however, and no longer wish to write about it.

Universal and Particular

One who exists cannot help but be struck by the immediacy of both the universal and the particular. Man is, in fact, the unification of both conceptions; he is the synthesis of that which is eternal and that which is temporary.

In the universal—(universal as a strict concept, I mean)—we have only a shadow derived from experience. It is typically conceptualized as that which is a whole totality: an utterly totalizing and encyclopedic mass of abstractions and concrete perceptions. God, for most of history, served as this universal. God was that from which none before could have sprung—He has aseity, along with all omni-properties.

Well, well—who could have supposed that such audacity on the part of human intellect could have given us such a monstrosity of abstraction and self-assuredness? Only man, of course, would be vain enough to predicate God and ascribe to Him properties which are supposed to be above him and, as a result, incomprehensible to him! So be it; man has never been one to pause in contemplation when logic so obviously refutes him if the thing refuted pertains to his heart. God bless them. Such ridiculousness is why idealism can only provide the shadows of these supposedly grand conceptions, while materialism provides the concrete prima materia (first matter) of reality—and this has its seeds in the particular.

If the universal is that aspect of reality which man can contemplate but never fully conceptualize in its totality, then the particular is that aspect which man knows absolutely but which he doubts from his inability to grasp it completely. This particularity is born in consciousness and is extrapolated from this consciousness’s engagement with itself as it moves through the world, as if a bodiless brain whose sole function is perception. Man is not bodiless, however, but rather a cyclical entity with extension, solidity, mutability, and all the other primary qualities you wish to label man with—and to think that kind of analysis served as the highest form of metaphysics!

From all this, one must forever find the dualism of Descartes a very natural conclusion to draw, though it be completely wrong in light of Kant’s Copernican revolution. The particular for man, brought into existence through his perception of the external world, is for his lived consciousness what the concept is for the universal—that which is abstracted from lived consciousness and turned into a concept.

What Kant recognized, from which all proceeding philosophy rightly follows and tarries with, was that man is both an a priori and a posteriori being. Perception of reality presupposes a reality to experience, and this reality itself presupposes an entity which is a part of, yet fundamentally distinct from, the reality it inhabits.

The a priori nature of man was found within those mental categories that preceded his a posteriori knowledge of them. At once was the nature of man apprehended and unveiled before the whole world in such staggering light as to cause all manner of confusion and misunderstanding. The advancement of learning never seemed nearer to hand than at that moment, but alas, man must always stumble when blinded whilst walking upon uneven ground beneath him.

What followed Kant was post-Kantian idealism, speculative philosophy, dialectical materialism, American pragmatism, Nietzschean perspectivism, Husserlian phenomenology, existentialism, modernism, post-modernism, etc.—most of it extremely influential in its own unique way, but which, like most ideas over time, distorted and changed to suit the needs of its interpreters. To me, everything after Hegel’s dialectical speculation of philosophy seems to be nothing more than a reaction against him; his absolute idealism is the Archimedean point by which all concepts, frameworks, methods, and schools of thought move around—where he stands, there the whole Earth moves.

Most of those philosophasters who claim to move past Hegel are really just ignorant of him or do not understand the notion of the Absolute as such. Everyone strives to square the real-unreal divide—reality as appearance and reality as tangible experience—but they fail to recognize that both are really one and the same thing: one is the shadow (the universal) while the other is the object (the particular) which casts it. Let us now analyze both more fully and see if we can uncover some esoteric contradictions that lie at the heart of them.

Starting with the particular, it is clear—or rather, at least not absurd to assume—that we exist as concrete beings capable of bringing into existence ideas which do not exist concretely, but which exist as their own particulars within abstractions drawn from our experience of being. The experiential realm is seemingly the only world which we, as conscious creatures, are aware of with any certainty; and yet, there always rests some doubt within the back of our minds that our deductions are in some way futile attempts at corroborating all our transcendental perceptions—transcendental because we conscious creatures synthesize the empirical (particular/concrete) with the rational (universal/abstract) every second experience is occurring.

This doubt must always haunt us. Doubt is the mother of all philosophy, for wonder only arises when confronted by that which is novel and peculiar to the senses; once a thing is known, it loses all interest for us and so causes no wonder at all. The particular is merely one facet of the universal, but man, being the self-conscious creature he is, makes for himself universals within particulars. Seen for the first time in self-conscious life, man becomes universal while striving after an infinity of particulars. The concepts blend together into one until differentiation becomes impossible and seemingly lock together forever as one category from that point forward. The only way to break from this rigid oneness is to recognize that this oneness is really a false perception of the nature of things themselves. It is not as Parmenides or Heraclitus thought—static or constant flux within the world—but rather a dynamic interplay of both universal and particular forces that we just so happen to experience as conscious creatures.

The universal is born out of a desire from the particular to really know itself in itself—a total knowing for itself only to be found within itself. Here, the dialectic is an indispensable tool for making sense of, and definitively moving past, that which seems contradictory but really is just one aspect of a progressive movement towards the knowing of all aspects of reality. Every thought is really a universal and a particular. The aspect of thought which is universal is that which is comprehensible but without concrete tangibility, while the particular is that which makes itself known in the concrete but which is only one aspect. What the dialectician ultimately strives for is a unification between the universal and particular: this is only to be found in man, and thankfully so, because from this we get the whole spectrum of thought which encompasses all plurality and unifies all division.

If one had access to the true nature of things, there would be less philosophizing and more actualizing, for every abstraction would find its place in the actionable realm of concrete, material particulars. Man finds himself totally absorbed into the excellency of his own thoughts and confuses what is thinkable with what is real. If only it were possible to be satisfied with not knowing.

Since the dawn of human intellect, philosophy has been upon the minds of all mankind; every particular has striven to be actualized, but not every conception has the opportunity to be brought to fruition. What there has only ever been is a constant cyclical continuation of becoming and not-becoming; nowhere is this more fully seen than in the failed attempts to achieve eternal happiness, or in the very obvious emptiness which permeates all reality—the scale of the universe, the differences in thoughts regarding the nature of things, the diversity of languages and rank orders of men—all such things serve as the mortar which keeps together the indelible mistake that is existence. Oh, how lamentable all particulars seem when confronted by the universal. Grand totality, that which is all things: to you we obey, whether we want to or not.

Doesn’t everyone rhapsodize about concepts which they fail to understand but love because they do not understand? Man takes delight in his ignorance, while philosophers delight in providing their false truths on the whole. The more abstract an idea is, the more it is likely to be abused and mangled by those who really seek only its clarification. If an idea were clear enough, it wouldn’t need exposition, and yet that is precisely what all thought is treated as by seekers of “truth”; in reality, they are only falsifiers and bunglers of abstract conceptions which demand sufficient respect from those of intellectual integrity.

I have often wondered what is the best way to write about something complex while holding to a dialectical type of analysis—and I’ve come to the conclusion that brevity beats all else, without doubt, even at the expense of some clarity should the topic be sufficiently complicated. The nature of the subject (the matter) is what determines the words written, more or less, while the mental state of the author determines how it is written (the form). In thought, matter trumps form in the same way life beats death—until it doesn’t, of course. It is hard enough to sustain a consistent line of thought without eventually becoming prosaic or redundant. Being redundant is really saying too much, while being prosaic is saying what isn’t necessary. Both are sins of the trade of ink, but are in some cases necessary. An author should never say more than they have to—they should only say what they think pertains and what may be useful in the end.

The end of all particulars is to return to the absolute universal. Whether concepts such as particulars or universals help man in his quest of self-discovery is something which only the subjective can affirm or deny ultimately. My task as a philosopher is merely to write sentences which reveal a part of me in them. I’m more literary than anything else. I only got into philosophy in order to understand the development of intellectual history. If I wanted to write prettily, I would have read more Tolstoy or William Hazlitt. No. Instead, having been influenced most by Emerson and Nietzsche, I thought it best to write in a systematically unsystematic way: to plan what I’m going to write, but not to actually know the structure of it.

The freest thought, which I feel is closest to the universal in its Notion (notion being the embodiment of movement in the process of thinking), is that which overlaps with the process of becoming itself. It cannot be disputed, I believe, that Joyce really had the most dynamic, the most dialectical, style in literature—a style that has its roots in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy—really reflecting the universal within man, the single individual as found within the infinite, rather than merely being an anti-personal narrative of a single idea unraveling itself before the reader.

How contradictory Schopenhauer seems when he claimed his whole philosophical system was merely the unfolding of a single idea, turned over and over again revealing its various forms; one can say his kind of philosophizing was λιθοστρέφης (lithostrephēs), that is, one who turns over rocks. Indeed, you may find many interesting things under one, especially one of size, but to claim that the whole world—universal and particular—is revealed merely by interpreting it through a single domineering lens which is slavishly adhered to with a dogmatic consistency is folly of the highest regard.

Nobody knows how difficult it is to describe the indescribable until they have tried it themselves. Damn all universals and particulars, for they compose man but never with harmony. The world disproves a consistent man by revealing to him the correctness of the inconsistent man. So long as you stick to rigidity in thinking and consistency in all conceptions, you shall soon enough find yourself master of every thought but slave to every difference; difference is, in fact, something the consistent thinker fears, for he still conceives the world in binaries and false dichotomies.

Nothing shall ever come of a stable man but wretched stability—no love for sensitivity or the chance for passions to override the logical side of the mind. It is all too much to ask for a change in one who thinks they are right, no evidence to the contrary able to overthrow their wrong ideas. For them, only the particular is real, and the universal bears no meaning whatsoever. The confessions of the world, however, bear this one truth in mind: the universal is in the particular’s mind, and every flux of time is in the universal’s shine.

End