Metaphysical Reflections

The third section of my philosophical system, completed.

Core Being and Causality

Being

Being stands before all things as they are in themselves. From whence did this great abstraction come? Man, of course, and his desire to see existence made like his hand—that is, something knowable to him, though it be ultimately obscure to him and very much unable to meet the task of being fully known.

Being is, and was for Hegel, the starting point from which all philosophy leaped. I liken it to the abstraction of all abstractions: everything in it taken from existence as it is known to us living creatures in conscious experience.

Being implies existence, which further implies an essence; here, essence is merely the predicate of being—whatever quality, label, or adjective we would like to apply to it. It is something which can come to us only in experience, but which can be abstracted and treated beyond experience, and known as a necessity prior to it from the implication (and necessary deduction) of its existence.

What being represents is nothing more than the whole of ontology. What does it mean to exist, and what are the properties of existence? It is a subject whose matter is so vast, intricate, and abstract that to even speak of it is akin to speaking on God—a subject which everyone knows of, but which nobody knows anything about.

As a single individual thrown into the world as the kind of being that I am, I am forced to make my way through it in a manner that seems most likely to perpetuate my being. Being as a concept, insofar as it exists for conscious subjects to ruminate upon, is what all things pertain to, but which do not concern it in a concrete sense.

Being simply pervades all things by the very nature of its abstract generality; it has its hands in every cookie jar, but doesn’t really want the cookies—only a place to rest its hands in. Abstracted from existence known to us in our existence, being is what the universal is to the single individual who only knows of the essences, or particulars, of reality—which are manifested in the cognition of the world.

Like all abstractions, the seeds of its life are in the human being as such; I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the term human in English is usually followed by being, meant to indicate the materiality, or the tangibleness, of this individual thing, this subject, that actually exists.

The term “being” derives from the Old English bēon (to be)—which I would argue is the most fundamental verb in every language. To be is a state of existence, a present tense infinitive that is a verb—an action that presupposes there is a being that recognizes its own being and which assumes the character of its being in its continued existence.

If nothing existed, there would be no thing by which to distinguish other things from each other. If there was only one being, there would be nothing but pure, absolute subjectivity—the I would be the only existent thing to be recognized, and that would immediately be followed by that which is the negation of the I: the “not I.” It is from this most basic kernel, or fundamental primitive, that existence has any intelligibility at all. In that sense, absolute subjectivity is pure being—for it is not mediated by the objective, but simply is as an innate predicate of its being.

Now, Kant famously argued against this kind of ontological argument (against God in his case) by stating that being cannot be a predicate of a thing which is actual but not known in experience, and I would suspect he did so because he did not believe that analytical a posteriori knowledge was possible—analytical here meaning a predicate concept that is contained in the subject concept (for example, the famous “All bachelors are unmarried,” or “All bodies take up space”; things which are true by definition of the subject concept but which do not require experience to know them as true), while a posteriori here means cognitions which are empirically known—but I think he focuses too much on the epistemology of predicates and definitions.

In the case of being—which can only have actual existence in the knowledge of said existence—it is, without a doubt, true that being implies existence analytically, insofar as being is cognized within a conscious entity no matter the form or aspect that entity exists in, and which is deduced from the fact of that entity’s experience of being. Granted, this is a petitio principii (begging the question fallacy) under traditional logic—for the premise of being is already contained within the premise of that being’s recognition of itself in experience, therefore becoming self-knowledge—but whoever said we had to listen to logic?

As far as I’m concerned, all claims about being are known a posteriori, but are considered analytically from the beginning; in fact, most ancient philosophers assumed their ontology from the start by beginning all their investigations with predications of the experience in question—in so doing, narrowing the scope of the investigation and deducing all things from those initial prejudices of experience. I am not here denying synthetic judgments, but rather saying—in the context of being!—that experience of being, which goes on to become knowledge, is predicated analytically from the start; that is, defined as already being (the analytic side) while only being known in the experience of said being (the a posteriori side). Thus, being (just like Kant’s synthetic a priori transcendental categories—born as a prerequisite in man in order to structure experience in the first place) is (so far as I know) the only analytic a posteriori claim which is true by the nature of us experiencing it as such in the first place.

The ancient Greeks, who took many naturalist stances with respect to ontology, posited being in its pure form, that is, as absent of presuppositions as was possible (although I must confess, I do not see philosophy as an impersonal subject of investigation—therefore it could never be truly pure).

Be that as it may, it should be noted here that Aristotle was very skeptical of the ontological claims made by the Pre-Socratics. He specifically thought of being in terms of actuals and potentials—but that only actuals existed in the concrete, while potentials were abstract possibilities that did not manifest in reality as it appears in our experience of it. All this mirrors my own conception of being as composed of its pure actuality in the abstract (ideal) and its essence in the concrete (material). However, unlike Aristotle, I do not find being as merely existing in a state of the actual only—rather, I view being as a constant interplay between static and dynamic forces, in which every potential is striving to become actual, and only does so when being is made actual in action.

Being cannot be approached rightly if it is viewed rigidly, for being is a constant agitation of objective experience which the subject must interpret in order for it to be objectified and made actual. Contingent particularity and necessary universality are the two poles of being from which every rationalization or empiricalization can come to us.

Every abstraction seems plausible at first until the actuality of reality forces us to confront and obey it. We are slaves to the material realm, and our master is the abstract, while the whip which rips our back anew is reality itself. All these long-winded expositions of what all this concrete stuff is fall flat whenever we strive to box it into a single aspect or category. To break out of the box of conformity and absurd practicality is to see being as a necessary contradiction itself. Being is contradictory because it has different ways of being interpreted; and all these interpretations serve very little in the way of furthering our understanding of it because, again, subjectivity is at all times confronted by that which is objective but which the subject cannot know objectively. Such is why I view the whole notion of dichotomizing reality as asinine. If being is to be approached with any pragmatism, it must move past the either—or convention and seriously consider the potential that reality itself is contradictory.

The greatest mistake in all philosophy has been man assuming that he could conceptualize the totality of his being in a definite, discrete, particular manner. It may seem unpragmatic to say that reality is contradictory—after all, doesn’t Occam’s razor reject that notion by only considering those things which require the fewest assumptions? Yes! But I would say that dialectic does away with the notion of the “fewest assumptions” and only assumes one presupposition that contains all others: that every idea runs against each other in the course of life, and only in recognizing that reason itself creates antinomies can we begin the process of overcoming all vague conceptions and bring them into subjectivity through our tarrying with them so long as we live.

Being is the long night of reason, where reason commits itself to various positions about itself which it cannot square and so destroys itself in the process in order to rebuild itself back up from the rubble of its own initially false conceptions. To think is hard enough, but to get at the core of existence through thinking alone is perhaps the hardest intellectual task a person can undertake.

I feel in this exposition I said many absurd things, but which I cannot ultimately counter or deny because of their immensity and necessity within the process of speculating itself. The notion of thinking always refers back to itself, and in that back-and-forth movement is the process of obtaining oneself in reasoning about the self. In order to describe reality simply, you must first reduce it to the point of absurdity and thus make it what it is not for the sake of convenience.

The dialectic knows no convenience, however, and only strives to process being in the motion of its progress in thinking it through. Reality is a singularity that expands each time a new conception of it is considered.

If man were honest with himself, he would not remain prideful in his state of learned ignorance—he would rather be ashamed to presume to know reality fully. What man has ever been able to move past his ignorance with anti-erudition—that is, erudition which is misunderstanding itself? Only those who treat misunderstanding as a necessary component in the path to understanding. Being is, in a word, dialectical (turning the absolute universal into a process or method by which to overcome all particulars that arise in reasoning about existence), and that is perhaps the best summation one can give it.

One and Many

One may have many things to say on the many, but I doubt any of it would make sense in the end. It is tiring to speak on things which you cannot ultimately know, but which you feel you cannot pass over without missing a very great aspect of life. Existence is the many, but it must be lived through the one.

The one is the particular, while the many is the universal; this is, once again, the age-old battle between abstract and concrete conceptions. Every experience that appears in consciousness is really a synthesis of the eternal and temporary aspects of living. There is an undeniable immensity to human life, and in it rests the beginning, and through it the end. Words fail at every moment we even dare to speak of it.

It has been the labor of every great mind and noble soul to provide the one a sense of order within the many. This debilitating plurality is marred in confusion from its very inception. Everyone wants to grasp that which evidently affects them, but which they cannot truly internalize and make sense of subjectively. For me, the many is the enemy to the one, because the many is what the one thinks of in its mere existence as one. What the one ultimately wishes for is to remain stagnant, and to have consistent unity between every plurality that seeks to become particular—that is, that seeks to become itself for itself.

The many is merely the representation of the one, which the one develops out of its conscious, lived experience among other ones. Every abstraction from life is many, but the singular abstraction which only man can know of is himself as one. The obviousness of this transcendental assertion becomes engulfed in misguided interpretations of what the teleology or axiology of this many is.

Oh! I cannot bear it any longer—the long malaise of life which rests on every individual’s shoulders is beyond even abstraction. The subject (one) confronts an infinity of objects (many) which they are made conscious of by virtue of their consciousness as such, and these manies make themselves into monstrosities for the intellectual (the one who feels a desire to know the many) if they aren’t, in some way, turned into conceptions to be comprehended and manipulated through reasoning and deliberate learning.

All of pedagogy today turns around the one besting the many by turning the many into a singular subject or discipline by which abstractions (more manies made within the mind) can be distilled into methods or strategies to memorize and recall by rote. The whole redundant mass of learning—human knowledge in general—can be safely categorized as the ultimate presumption of man to strain his mind in attempts to grasp the whole (many) within his singular (one) perspective.

There are too many analogous relations for all experience to be corroborated and contained within a singular framework that purports to “know all.” Who would be foolish enough to insist on living at all if all of life is really one striving to subsist among other ones, who themselves seek to contain the many? The many and the one are as inseparable from the being of man as the essences are which emanate from that same being.

Life may be described as a θεία ουσία (theia ousia; divine essence) from which the one creates for itself the many in order to have conceptions by which to conceive in the mind and act upon, so that being itself would have something to do other than to remain in a selfsame oneness which neither the in-itself nor the many-for-self could really comprehend fully.

It was only a matter of time before I would mention the divine. God—all high—the ineffable Nous (νοῦς), the absolute, the one, the source, the void, the thing, the this-ness of thingness from which things arise and pass away into dust and atoms: fine particles of conatus (effort or inner drive) and ipsa voluntas (will itself).

If only it were possible to speak of these things intelligibly. I would not, however, resort to rigidity in thought—to place my mind within a straitjacket—in order to give these thoughts a more “popular” (easy and precise) style. If I were to do so, I would only state the obvious—things so self-evident and intuitive that even a child could deduce them from experience. That is not my intention here, though.

Schopenhauer once said there’s nothing easier than to write for the sake of filling up paper, that is, to write in order to be misunderstood—usually the result of writing on things which have been thought through very little by the writer—but how much harder is it to write on something which nobody has written on before, or, better yet, writing on something so abstract and unexplored that the only things which have been written on them are very trite, obvious, inane, spiritless, prolix, and totally without wisdom or profundity.

I would argue it’s that much harder to write on things which nobody has written on before than to write on things which everyone has an opinion on—vain opinions which have been adopted by the herd as a whole. There is next to no profundity in anything today. The one is surrounded by everything which is not him individually, and which is conspiring against him deliberately. Modern man is made, constructed, and pacified with many manies, too-many manies, which all strive after his attention and labor, desiring his exploitation and time.

Damn the many, for it is just as confused as the one—yet the subject (the one) defers to the objective (the many—the crowd, herd, or masses) when it is itself just as confused and born in absurdness. This whole signification and false importance which we give to ideals which themselves have always been false serves only to detract from man’s individuality; nothing is more dangerous than to become a self-conscious one among the mindless many—a multitude of ones who have abandoned their being (their oneness) and striven only to lose themselves within the many, done with the hope of finding that lost being which transformed violently into nothing.

I hate all falsifiers of life. I hate that I cannot know what troubles me, and so distract myself with my worthless interests and heterodox, eclectic tendencies to consume all things worthy of cognizance. It is my fate to be the first decent human being; in truth, I should really be speaking in the past tense—saying “to have been” rather than “to be”—for I am already dead in an absolute sense, as all conscious creatures born upon this rock are doomed to experience. We are condemned to life, in fact.

Life… what a sweet dream you are. How much I wish I could have the courage to live you out, to be with you in a very real sense, rather than continuously pushing you off and ignoring you for the sake of building up the courage to approach you! Every intellectual knows exactly what I’m talking about. In many ways, this book is a way to finally say everything I could possibly want to; and yet, life has no why, no rhyme or reason, no meter or rhythm, by which to dance to consistently. I am constantly faced with the enormous burden of having to live life. At times, I really do wish I were dead, for then I wouldn’t have to think at all, or amount to anything—only return to what the state of existence really is: nothing.

To be anything is too ambitious. I don’t see why people live under a system such as ours. There’s very little freedom or leeway afforded to anyone who actually wants to live a life outside of merely subsisting through meaningless labor. “People must work,” they say; and, “the market demands all things to be done,” as if that justified anything at all; or, better still, “that’s just the way things are.” AH! I always hated the last one the most, for it’s so obviously false and life-denying! It’s the clearest form of slave-morality I can think of; it’s so clearly the embodiment of resignation and ressentiment that I honestly cannot stomach any excuse such as that one—and to think people are actually content with saying that, rather than envisioning a better world, rather than fighting for what is really good, noble, and dignifying to the whole human race.

This hopelessness and nihilism is precisely what we cannot give into. It must be fought at all times and in every corner of the globe. Life is too beautiful to be destroyed by those who justify their hegemony and privilege with abstractions and deliberately obtuse arguments for maintaining the current power structure—which, of course, keeps them at the top and everyone else at the bottom.

Dissonance will not be tolerated by the many from those few (the singular individuals—real ones) who are hopeful for the future. On every corner shall we be confronted with their propaganda and nonsense, and so we must combat them likewise at their own game, but better than them. Our message must be more powerful, more visionary, more significant, and above all more honest to the material conditions of man today. There is no life without a fight for it, and we must fight everything that represses us, and in doing so turn life itself into a thing of glory.

Life is glorious. Oh, so glorious. Isn’t everything brimming with divinity and life, beauty and inspiration—the size of which is comparable to the Earth? For all my complaints about it, and the obvious misery which lies at the heart of it, I am happy to be rather than to have not been. Look at all I have written thus far and tell me, do you really think me a man capable of hating life consistently? If I were a real pessimist, I would have considered writing as futile and empty. All thoughts seem empty, and, in a sense, are—for they only represent something which is transitory and never final—but while we live, we have enough within ourselves to make ourselves into something.

I consider life too seriously. That is my problem. I don’t know how to disrespect life. I don’t know how to ponder it in a truly pragmatic way. Everything I feel is felt absolutely so, and overpowers me to the point of tears. That is why I write so much about life, because I cannot help but attempt its comprehension.

Life is a language which is pretty to listen to but impossible to understand. There is no grammar of life—no parts of speech to follow—which, if studied, could make you master of it within a few months. There is only what is present to you in your moments of your solitary thinking. Nothing is more transformative to man than his solitude. The silence which accompanies anyone who actively considers the state of their existence is more profound than any book or scripture which one could possibly read.

I am transformed merely at the thought of life. Amator cogitandi sum—I am a lover of thinking. If I could be a pure thought, an undivided unity and synthesis of all into one, I would be the happiest man alive. Philosophizing doesn’t even interest me, to be honest. My true love is thinking, that is, contemplating life as it appears in conscious experience. It isn’t enough to know all! That revelation was my deepest despair, but was also my greatest opportunity for transformation. I was no longer beholden to the opinions of others. I finally felt able to affirm or deny whatever I wanted without recourse to another man’s opinion; now, I could rely on my own understanding and forge my own path through the dark forest of life.

You see at once how ridiculous all people are with their grand unifying theories, or “correct”—completely accurate beyond a shadow of a doubt—exposés into this or that subject, all which claim to be the greatest thing ever written on it. Only your own thought matters—everything else is a distraction from your own self; you must cultivate that self and become who you are, that is, who you are meant to be as you see yourself.

The one and the many merely represent the two fundamental contradictions that lie at the core of existence. Being commands our attention, but only insofar as it is considered in full view of all its contradictions. How are we to move beyond these? Indeed, I ask again, how is life to be approached in order that we may not be swallowed up by it? We must live it subjectively, dialectically, fully in view of our purpose and goals. The movement of life finds its final, and most complete, expression in its self-realization; that is, in its own becoming.

The process—coming-to-be—of life in itself is in the recognition that everything in it is moving forward, and progressing and regressing simultaneously. Within the material world do we have our first thoughts born out in our experience of it. The ideal is what we presume it to be as a matter of course when we consider the origin of our thoughts when confronted by the material world. The one and the many, therefore, are merely antipodes in the same manner the proton is to the electron.

Subjectivity finds itself completely in dialectics from the very beginning. Nothing really makes sense otherwise. The many (all the phenomena in the world) would overpower all else were it not for the one (the singular individual) simplifying everything in their perception through schematization. It is in this systematic approach, however, that everything seemingly loses its purpose and is made a mere catalogue of perceptions, nothing more than a history of errors, a journal of mistakes.

Life itself has more to offer than mere existence. It is in ideas, and the ideas that surround these ideas, that provide a backdrop for every scene which plays out on the stage of our emotions. The dialectic is the synthesis of every problem. Nothing can really be distinguishable when it is considered as one whole, a totality, and this is the best one could strive for in the realm of ideas. It is preferable, at least for me, that everything is made tangible and in the concrete, than to be mere ideals which sound good when thought or spoken of but which never really translate into action or upliftment.

Knowledge, I’ve come to discover, is really nothing and amounts to very little overall, if it is not treated as a concept whose purpose is transformative—something which empowers and moves the individual to action. What would be the point of life if the many were to predominate the one purposefully? It would be an endless sea of confusion and paradox never to be resolved: only to be ignored (as the herd already does without fight) or contemplated over endlessly until that too becomes stale, boring, and meaningless.

The poverty of philosophy is that philosophers no longer treat it as a way of life, or a method to use in daily practice, but rather as a system of thought by which to make sense of the world by grounding it in first principles which are themselves groundless—in doing so instantly becoming dogmas. This is what I ultimately want to combat. It isn’t right to treat a noble subject like philosophy with such contempt. Why should men addle their brains over someone else’s nonsensical system, when in truth the end of all systems should be to provide the tools by which a man can make his own—in the same way work should provide a man with a comfortable living regardless of market conditions. The unfairness of life is a bug, not a feature; and the more men assume at the outset that existence is a zero-sum game, the more we will continue to see unrest and misery spread throughout the world. I have no patience for those who claim to be objective but start with false assumptions and naturalist fallacies—to say nothing of the immorality that kind of thinking leads towards.

Cause

Cause makes its own meaning. Every cause has its own cause, and that cause too has a cause. The long chain of causation which made us also made the universe. What a splendid little accident we all are!

We conscious creatures only know the world through cause, and yet, how few actually understand the meaning of that. People assume that without freedom of the will, cause would simply turn into a determined event—as if anything else were possible but those events which did in fact occur. I never understood the need to reconcile action with cause.

Life appears before me, I experience it, I cognize it within the brain, I interpret and distinguish it from all other experiences; and after that, I’m no step closer to understanding cause than simply to label everything which occurs in the world as something from which a conscious agent perceived it as occurring. What good does this belief have for us? That we, conscious agents of our supposed wills, are the root cause of our life. My, my, what power this idea has on us—to think, some actually believe that if all is determined, then all is meaningless?

I, for one, have always viewed cause like the sun: simply existing and being there, an aspect of life—not a necessity in the metaphysical sense, but simply existing as an empirical fact within our life, like breathing. It cannot be helped, I suppose, for man always strives to give reality a meaning; he must search endlessly for that which grounds him, makes him feel leveled, sturdy, assured, and confident.

If nothing had a cause, then all would be random, and we can’t have that now, can we? Well, random according to whom? Things are coming and going into being all the time which we are not cognizant of—does that suddenly mean they have no cause, or are without meaning? People treat life from an epistemic perspective when they worry about these philosophical quandaries which really do nothing for them but idle their time away, second by second, thinking about the “facts of the matter” rather than the lived reality of occurrences in the world.

Life passes us by every second, and we look back on it from time to time after many years wondering where it has all gone. Such a harrowing thought it is, to discover that you’ve been living a lie, rather than experiencing the continuous awakening that is life itself. Cause, cause, cause—all this talk of cause, but no talk of the “why”—always the “how,” never the “why.” The “why” is the ethical aspect of life. That is only where I want to spend it, in the “why” of things, not bothering about the cause or appearances of them.

David Hume famously argued that causality doesn’t even exist, but rather is a habit of interpretation that we arrive at empirically. This certainly seems the most intuitive from the standpoint of the single individual—the individual concerned about the life of life itself—but it does very little for the man who strives after “the truth,” that is, the man who wants to know whether this is a true cause to cause itself. And so it was for philosophers since then, really, doing all they could to put a cause to cause itself. What a delirium!

Trying to ground cause from first principles is like trying to nail down sand; each time the hammer comes down, the sand just moves around the point. Every attempt is really just an argument from necessity or a presupposition dressed in vagueness. Schopenhauer, like Kant before him, argued that cause is merely causality; and if you were to ask him what causality was, he would simply reply, “It is an aspect of the principium individuationis (principle of individuation).” This, he would go on to say, is a necessary component of experience, without which there would be no question of cause to be had in the first place.

As much as I admire this answer for its simplicity—almost obviousness—it is not satisfactory from the perspective of truth. You see, the problem with every philosophical question is that it’s presumed to have an answer; since the beginning of the West’s intellectual tradition, it has always been thought that if a question could be considered—that is, made known to the mind and abstracted, as it were, from the contents of the question—it must be solvable through reason, and if not, then at least it could be shown to have no answer through reason. Where does the humanness shine through in this approach, however?

Shouldn’t it be, rather, that all questions are considered existentially, from the perspective of the single individual, in the context of their life and circumstance? It is a great disservice to abstract from life what does not need to be so. Best to place each foot upon the ground and smile with joy knowing that something solid rests beneath your feet; which is much more, and far greater, I should add, than whatever cloud of abstraction the philosophers of today fart out while sitting in their chairs—fist to chin, hunched over six different books—pandering and humoring their own lethargic intellect.

Cause has done very little to make its case as to why it should be thought as important as it is. Cause is its own cause, and that should be all one needs to know about it. The cause of this or that only concerns us from an intellectual standpoint, but I see very little done for the subject who makes their meaning the discovery of all causes.

Only man, with all his reason, could justify to himself the complete dehumanization of his own nature. It no longer matters to him the value of his thoughts, but rather how many he has, or better yet, the validity of them. Truth and cause are really overlapping parallel lines. For most, the truth of an idea is merely how well that idea corresponds with reality, but who would be so bold as to deny all skepticism and proclaim themselves able to behold the real “truth” which the world presents them with?

Cause holds the key to every intellectual gate which man constructs for himself. We make barriers to entry of the world for ourselves. It is, for me at least, impossible to content myself with ignorance of life; my psychology is such that reality is dark where there is no honesty in my convictions about the world: and though I strive for nothing more than certainty, I’ve come to find that such a goal does not belong to man. To think I even denied metaphysics for the sake of appeasing my heart. And what caused that?

Every cause in life is really absurd. It confuses me to exist. That we have language at all to communicate the incommunicable is tremendous; though it fails utterly when we approach subjects abstract and incommensurate with the intellect, it is all the more reason to embrace these contradictions which lie at the heart of every cause—the cause of all our causes. Doesn’t one live through life as if in a constant haze, as if blindfolded by causality—told to make sense of it all nonetheless?

Even writing on such a subject necessitates an almost superhuman willingness to endure and tolerate what is most intolerable to man: not knowing. Not knowing? Oh, beyond doubt—knowing is the cause of results. Where would we be without our knowing such and such a thing at such and such a time? It is only through causes that any of this is comprehensible in the first place. Man, though he does not know the cause, is still bound by the cause—but I think it’s time I stop beating around the bush with this subject.

Cause is merely an illusion. What I conceive of as cause is merely the playing out of events which nature around me necessitates. I am, on this topic, very much in agreement with Spinoza and Schopenhauer—as unorthodox and counterintuitive as their positions are to most people. If we truly were the authors of our actions, therefore being in charge of our volitions, then why do all our experiences seem to contradict that very intuitive notion? I only feel the cause of my actions because I experience them subjectively; every action is some interaction between subject and object—but the single individual is one whose existence is known only subjectively (to the singular person), and so only really possible for them to experience.

But where does that experience come from? The objective (external) world. And where does that sensation arrive? In the body. And what causes the body to sense? The nervous system. And what caused that? —————. And so on. You see, the problem with grounding causation-in-man due to man’s mere subjective experience is that it opens itself up to antinomies—contradictions in pure reason (paradoxes) which cannot be resolved with reason. Just like the child who keeps asking “why” behind every explanation offered to his initial question, to ask for the cause behind a thing almost always leads to some form of infinite regress, circularity, or resignation from the question altogether (agnosticism).

Apply this kind of skepticism to any philosophical problem and what do you have? The ultimate result of philosophy: that nobody really knows what they’re talking about on anything—usually because they speak on things which are not grounded in experience sufficiently, or the definitions of the things are ill-defined. And so at once do you have the main epistemological question that concerned the first half of the 20th century—how do we ground knowing scientifically? The logical positivists had a good run, but Quine revealed the dogmatic nature of reductionism and the analytic-synthetic distinction.

I would go further, however, and say that any foundationalist attempt to ground knowledge is ultimately futile: you can’t ground reality by finding the most general principle that applies to all other principles, because you can always ask, “What principle grounds that principle?” This is why the West has always remained well behind the East with respect to these questions. The West seeks to reduce everything to a framework or method, but nothing is truly elucidated by that because it always has an underlying premise which, according to strict logic, would lead to a contradiction or a boring circularity; thus, you see at once that the light which you claim to enlighten the whole world with was lit by you, and yet you claim that it was always lit—it is what reducing the world to logic (cause and effect, ground and consequent) always leads to, a boring return to whence you started.

Let’s be serious for a second. It would be ridiculous to ask the cause of your own existence, and yet, that is exactly the type of question people ask when they seek to know the origin of all causes, as if that kind of thing were possible for man to know. Everything could be doubted, and that is really the cause of every misery. Man must accept that life is contradictory; and to live after these contradictions is the only way to avoid being consumed by them. That is why I said any question which is not considered existentially is not worth considering. If a thing does nothing for your life, of what use is it?

Pragmatism blows past every philosophical sophistry and erroneous elenchus by considering the problems not on their grounds but on the individual’s grounds, which is the only one that really matters. The dialectic as method unravels every cause by revealing the kernel behind every supposed mystery in the world of thought. For too long has a malicious spectre hung over the world of ideas; it has dominated for too long and has misled all people who strove after real understanding—a lie they were told was true, and so believed it uncritically. Dialectic shows that all philosophical problems are really only so because of the unconscious dogma that rests behind every premise within them.

The true problems of life are not difficult because they’re not understood, but because they cannot be answered using logic alone; it should also be said that the problems of life are primarily material—immediate and necessitated by demands which society as a whole places upon us without our consent—and so, unfortunately, systemic in some aspect or another. I suspect that if one were to encompass every facet of human life, they would find that its comprehensibility is really a byproduct of how well we are able to simplify it and ignore every true issue which rests at the heart of every limitation on man’s mind.

Such is man’s life: one cause after cause after cause of concatenation after concatenation—a long, indeed, endless ensemble of misery; a diary entry half-finished, scribbled in haste in order to move onto the next thought, as if the previous thought was never written down.

Principle

Principles command everyone’s respect, but very few live after their own. To live after your own means nothing less than to accept your own life after the manner of yourself.

One must always have a mirror to look upon in life so as to be informed by the reflection how exactly one ages with time. Didn’t Dorian Gray lament his eternal youth after seeing the reality of himself in his portrait?

I take it to be the greatest burden of all to live after false principles. Writers, I’m sorry to say, are especially prone to this, for their styles and literary device usages are not determined on their own but rather on what seemed best in the moment of writing, or what author they had most recently read.

Principles are only good insofar as they are followed; anything else is mere folly—a white lie that holds no honesty in it. A principle not followed is merely a rule you make for the sake of breaking purposefully.

People live after the manner of their material conditions, and this says almost everything that needs to be said about them, for it is the only honest basis by which one can address their grievances in life.

Everything that is culled from the world for the sake of perception in our feeble brain is very little in comparison with ourselves. Our very being is unique, special, and abounding in grace and love unsurpassed in all of history. If only more were able to see this in themselves; it is in all of us, we merely have to be awakened to it.

Principle: That a thing as visible as the principles of the world is so little known, that it is a strange and surprising thing to bring to light all these little-known things, all for people to foolishly mock and malign them out of a desire to be viewed as great—this is remarkable.

There can never be peace within the self the more one lives for the sake of truth. A dark storm cloud must always surround the human heart, and thus block out the light of reason for the soul, if every aspect of life is to be reduced to mere premises and syllogisms. It makes no sense to me why man continuously seeks after that which he knows he cannot grasp but which he feels he cannot live without. Every burden is purposefully made for man by man, and upheld by society—and by extension the rest of the world—by other men. Everything by man is necessarily evil, for man only knows that which is by him, and which is, for precisely that reason, evil and wicked. Just think of all the countless tears that have been shed in the face of misery, but which few have ever been able to make up for or overcome in any meaningful way.

The trees sway with the wind, and like them, man moves within the sea of life like a bottle thrown in the ocean amidst a violent tempest.

I feel all I’ve written thus far in this book has only been straw, for most of it was written from the wrong perspective: or rather, it wasn’t honest enough for me—not existential enough, not human enough, not me… enough. It isn’t enough. Nothing, I fear, will ever be enough (for me). I’d be just as happier dead than alive; alive for what? To merely exist, to take up space, to smile around liars and life-deniers.

A life lived not after your own principles is really not a life at all; and yet, look at the state of things presently:—look at the violence, the misery, the lack of sympathy, the systemic collapse, the degradation, the continuation without purpose, the never-ending cycle of misfortune, the long story of falsity and perversity; look at the incentives, look at the state of our economy, look at our youth—on their phones as long as the sun is old…—look at the health of the people, look at the ignorance of the populace, look at the state of friendships and relationships, look at the constant pressure and stress everyone is under, look at the pale faces and unkempt appearances of everybody, look at the lethargy of everyone, look at the bags under everyone’s eyes… is there no end to any of this?

And this is all in America alone, to say nothing of nations less fortunate than us. The whole collective sigh of mankind sounds like a person drawing their final breaths. Our motto today is ruit hora, that is, the hour breaks in, time looms inexorably, it does not stop, it passes. All things pass and sooner than later pass completely into nothingness. Doesn’t life today seem exactly like that, molded after that example of misery?

There’s only so much one can say before repeating themselves. It’s as if in a single hour of writing the whole power of the mind is exhausted; and the only way to recover it is by reiterating past things already written down and dwelt upon, from which one must now dig up and reappraise in order to find some variation by which to spin it upon. All writing, after enough reading, really seems the same—we have nothing but man striving to comprehend his very nature through a narrative of his own creation; people dealing with the same things but expressed in different ways.

Like music, the whole tonal scale by which one can express themselves is finite and well-categorized, but still so vast that it may as well be infinite. Man is exactly the same: finite yet infinite. This is why I called man the synthesis of the universal and the particular. The objective world is what we are, but the subjective world is who we are. We are both, and must live in contradiction every second in order to fully appreciate the totality of our being.

To make principles is to contradict yourself, for it presumes you have enough foreknowledge to actually trust yourself with your life. Why do you think most intelligent men who sought God either became pantheists or absurdists (that is, dogmatic adherents to doctrines and principles which were from without rather than from within). Principles are difficult to keep because they’re always founded on compromises, rather than real evaluations of your present circumstances; and even if your principles are honest, they are worthless if they are anti-dialectical—that is, if they are rigid, rather than constantly shifting and evolving with the ever-changing state of nature.

It’s so amazing to me that people today are more concerned about what others think of them rather than what they think about themselves. I always thought man was destined to be unhappy so long as he considered the masses superior to himself. What is a life lived for others but shallow egoism or existential confusion? If it were possible to make life truly good, principles would not be necessary, for man would simply live after his own design and not interfere with anyone—but this is not the modern world.

Modern existence is dependent on too many factors to remove yourself completely from the world. Man today cannot live after his own image because his image is obscured by all the other people he shares the mirror with. What does a single face become among a thousand others? Nothing but an oval upon shoulders, upheld by a thin, feeble neck. Oh, how I hate how interconnected everything is. How I hate that one cannot live life as they wish because they are forced on pain of death to work for their life. This is not true freedom; and if the ancient saying of Cicero’s is to be held in any esteem (salus populi suprema lex esto—the good of the people is the greatest law), then men today must strive to actually make the good of their people a priority, rather than a luxury for a few.

Life is not that complicated, and yet it is made so because very few are actually capable of making good out of debasing misery, which is the common lot of the average man today. No amount of hard work shall ever overcome the rate by which men are destined to toil for their subsistence. The contradictory nature of occupations (or the boss-worker dynamic) is almost identical to the contradictory nature of life. Everything in life is a vanity because the principles that uphold life are contradictory. The negation of negation holds itself to the fire of the furnace which man labors in in order to buy bread. There is no single, sustaining happiness. No bodily or earthly pleasure can ever remove the fear of uncertainty which constantly surrounds man.

The more and more I look out on the sea of life, the more I see how vast and incomprehensible it all is. In such a situation, what use are principles—to what end are they to be followed, what even are they? The question is too obvious to warrant response, but it always happens that the easiest things to answer for are really the most difficult to interpret accurately. A principle is simply a conviction one has about how to engage with the world.

No matter how many clouds depart, and how clear the sky appears, there will always be some imperfection in it (in life—and the world in general) that would send a sensitive man like myself right over the edge. If only it were possible for me to write and not worry about living. If only I could make writing my living. If only I could be happy with not wanting to have an answer for everything.

To be happy in the midst of learning from a hard experience seems to me the most tragic joy one can get out of life. How dearly must one spend each passing second when pulled from all directions, distraught on every side, confusion abounding in every crevice.

Anything is possible in life, and in that is the greatest despair. There is only so far one can go when attempting to make something good of it. Not everything is doable, but all is possible. The dearest aspects of the world are felt in action, but given eternal life in language. Words hold a special place for me in the world as a writer, but even I see that not making them primary is the end of all honest thinking.

How far must one go to show themselves they’re worthy of life? I cannot begin to anticipate what the world has in store for anyone like me. What is someone with only a passion for learning and comfort to do in a world where none of that is really valued or possible? The end of all ends is death, and that certainly seems good to me. What point, I like to think in my darkest moments, is any of this experience worth if it cannot be alleviated by jests and jokes at its expense. It is easier to despair than to hope, and likewise is it with tears over laughter. So soon, indeed… but not soon enough, can the end come for all humanity. I wish I could say with Goethe, “I’m glad that I am not young in so thoroughly finished a world.” Alas, it is my pain, then, to live on through this finished world; I must adopt the lens of misery and humor if I am to find joy in all the endless suffering I must embody simply for living. Life is a burden one cannot throw off soon enough.

Nothing seems real in our world. Everything is made deliberately simple in order to pacify the truly great sentiments within us. Love and creativity are truly dead things, and no artist today truly understands the meaning of principles in art; where is the ethical perspective on principles? Has anyone ever given such an account? The Germans of the 18th century had a field day making rules for themselves in order to justify everything rationally—on first principles—and how far did any of that nonsense get them? I would say nowhere, for the current mode of thinking art is simply on subjective principles, exactly how it should be. Where is meaning, if anywhere, other than in the confusion one must confront whilst living a very unassuming and sterile life.

Life is best lived sterilely. The time keeps ticking but I barely hear it. I awake, I think, I write, I eat, I sleep, I repeat. It is a great life indeed. The greatest ever, perhaps. Sadly, I cannot do it alone, away from people, without a single soul to communicate with. To be alive around other people as an introvert is like living within a still-life painting—you only capture the moment of a single instance; for the conscious introverted man, however, he must embody every moment after that, but, not wanting to, he wishes only to retreat into a single frame of life, and thus remains forever in a state of inaction—thus comes every mental torture and wish for death.

Only on principles is anything worth doing, for without them, one is merely acting without knowing the purpose behind the act. What good is acting if darkness always prevails over the conscious decision? One moves through the world abandoned by seemingly everything.

There is very little in the way of silence to make peace within a noisy world—a world that is not really good for much. Some days, silence is all you can be when faced with the absurd, but that does not mean resignation; it is merely an acknowledgement that nothing is possible to do. Sometimes, the world is best lived through as if a ghost. The only true principle that one can hold to in life is the hope that in its endurance, in the passing of time through it, something good can come out of it. Without hope, all is futile.

There’s an overabundance of misery and death on Earth. Man is too noble, has come too far in his evolution, to merely resign from the world or end it prematurely. We always return to principles that we once shunned. If principles were as sure as our misery, we could rest comfortably knowing that they will uphold us in our worst moments—experience disproves this… obviously. Whatever good could be had whilst enduring life is almost always too much for us, or so we think, when actually in the immediacy of our misery; it seems better in that moment to either die immediately or forget existence completely—to feel like an automaton. Such thoughts, however, (true-false dichotomies) could only ever be arrived at through reason.

In such moments, only love can save us; love without a reason—simple, unadulterated love… a love for anything and everything, for all things equally. Only in embracing the irrational can life become more pleasant. It is in unreason that all of life persists. If man were given a scrap sheet by which to calculate all his emotions, he would find that in the end his pain was greater than his joy, and his only conclusion (logically following) would be to kill himself right then and there. This doesn’t happen, however. No amount of hedonic calculus has ever led a man to joy; it has only ever contented him in his suffering, and for many, that is enough—but not for me. I cannot give up on my desire to know what lies behind life. Unlike most people, I don’t treat life with contempt, but rather with the highest respect, maybe too much perhaps. It can’t be helped—only when man seeks after what makes him complete can he find a sense of meaning or purpose within all his misery.

Principles only matter if they’re carried out on behalf of life. Only existentially can man make living an end in itself, and in that find what he most desires out of it. If what I say seems too difficult, that’s because it is—indeed, it is impossible to have a coherent framework of life so long as that framework focuses only on particulars rather than the flux of things—but if one is to live, it must be carried out deliberately, with intent, and with meaning. Principles without actions are pointless; actions without principles are blind.

Relation

To have a right to do or claim a thing means nothing more than to be able to do or take or use it without thereby injuring anyone else. Simplex sigillum veri (The simple is the seal of the true). This definition shows how senseless many questions are; for instance, the question whether we have the right to take our own life. As far as concerns the personal claims which others may possibly have upon us, they are subject to the condition that we are alive, and fall to the ground when we die. To demand of a man, who does not care to live any longer for himself, that he should live on as a mere machine for the advantage of others is an extravagant pretension.

Although men’s powers differ, their rights are alike. Their rights do not rest upon their powers, because Right is of a moral complexion; they rest on the fact that the same will to live shows itself in every man at the same stage of its manifestation. This, however, only applies to that original and abstract Right, which a man possesses as a man. The property, and also the honour, which a man acquires for himself by the exercise of his powers, depend on the measure and kind of power which he possesses, and so lend his Right a wider sphere of application. Here, then, equality comes to an end. The man who is better equipped, or more active, increases by adding to his gains, not his Right, but the number of the things to which it extends.

— Arthur Schopenhauer, On Human Nature, Government.

All relations have their necessary connection with life. There is no relation without life. It doesn’t even make sense to consider relation without first considering life. Relations, like causes, have their seed in the mind, and germinate to become full flowers of action and decision in the hearts of men as they are exposed to the world and made to act within it.

Relations have importance only insofar as they are considered existentially—that is, from the standpoint of a single individual; a man brought into the world who wishes to leave it a slightly better place. That is the hardest thing on Earth, for so few truly consider the grandeur of existence, and thus let slip past them the greatest of all possibilities—life. If it were truly understood, everyone would act for the betterment of all; what is missed is the idea of connectedness—that you are not sustained by yourself alone, but that everyone around you is in some way responsible for your continuation.

With the world being so vast, and few actually capable of comprehending the immensity of modernity, most live life egoistically (nothing considered except personal well-being) rather than individualistically (living for yourself but in a way that respects the individuality of others).

If life were a commentary on human action, it would point out and emphasize every folly and vanity but none of the joys and immensities. What has always been considered first in life is the self—for self-preservation has always been the major preoccupation of man, and his perspective has not changed on this yet; but this kind of mentality shows the bankruptcy which lies at the heart of modern considerations on life.

The self is glorious, yes, but it is made greater by its ability to be realized in everyone. Egoism, the common strand of life today, is to ignore the other in its essentiality—that is, to ignore the other as an individual but to continuously reap the benefit of the other without thinking of them as such, removing their selves from yourself (in that sense objectifying them) and thus treating them as mere objects rather than subjects like yourself.

The contradiction implicit within modern social dynamics is an utterly fascinating one, not in the least because it is a relatively new phenomenon. Before Rousseau, the concept of the individual—the human being as an independent, autonomous entity with consciousness, feeling, and sympathy—didn’t really exist. Everything in relation to man was either subordinated to, or primary for, some other.

In the Neoplatonic conception, man existed midway along the chain of being: situated below God (the highest), angels, and superlunary substances (stars, planets, and the cosmos itself), but above the Devil (the lowest), plants, and beasts of burden.

In this framework, it was man’s purpose to work towards God and the higher aspects of being, but to shun and stay far away from the lower aspects. You see at once: the self was always viewed in relation to something higher, and with man’s capacity to reason and attain virtue by acting in accordance with reason, it only made sense to act in the ways God commanded—which, again, could only be arrived at by reason.

Without a doubt, this is the oldest conception of man’s place in the universe, for it has its roots in Homer, specifically in the eighth book of the Iliad, where Zeus speaks of a catena aurea (golden chain) which he could lift up and bind to Olympus even if all the other gods—and even the heavens and Earth itself—were attached to the other end. I suppose you could go back further to the days when man had only a primitive form of animism to believe in, and where there was no real distinction between the self and the other—for everything was communal then—but that framework, I feel, is too foreign to modern man.

For thousands of years, and still in some form today, man lived in complete subjugation to another—always in relation to power, which manifests itself in as many ways as there are ambitions within man to act upon. There has always been an artificial hierarchy which men have followed because they believed it to be natural, and this exact thinking still persists today, but only changed in relation to the material conditions which men exist under.

For most of human history, this power was physical. It was only when civilization became a thing, and one man could no longer keep in check others through power alone (for there were too many people to effectively instill fear into by a show of strength only) that ideas took the form of power—propped up, of course, by the priestly class and educated elite, who existed solely for subordination to the leader. Men internalized their lowly position as a necessity within the world, and endured it on the basis of that false idea.

Their own subjugation was sold to them as a necessity for the sake of the leader, and nothing could change them otherwise from their place. In some civilizations, this subjugation was seen as a divine command: as in Islam—which literally means submission, to God of course—and in India with the caste system. Ideas today have replaced force, for force is not really required when measures are taken by the state, or the ruling class, to deliberately ensnare the masses with diversions, financial pressures, and debilitating austerity—all of which contributes to and culminates in a rather tepid, monotonous, uninteresting, and uneventful life.

Nothing is harder for modern man than to live a life of dignity when most of it is spent for the sake of keeping himself alive, working in a spiritless, complex, and fantastically tragic occupation. It is no wonder, then, why Kafka has become like a prophet, for he saw the beginning of the end for man—the organization and commodification of the masses was already nearing perfection in his time, and it has only been further perfected in our own.

Man today is without guidance, tossed into a world where all the social conditions are decayed and without support. In former times, as already explained, there were sturdy foundations on which to walk culturally; there were norms and traditions which worked and continued to work long afterwards; there were ready-made narratives to buy into which actually gave toil and misery meaning. Where is any of this for the modern man?

Modern man’s toil and misery is, I’m sorry to say, not much different from his Paleolithic ancestors: we forage and gather and work to keep ourselves alive, but never with God or higher ideals on the mind—it is an animal’s life, a brute existence; only now we move to and fro with cars, in and out of well-ventilated rooms, boxed in by four walls at all times, lit only by fluorescent lights.

Old traditions for today are just talk; nay, it is worse—it is talk for talk’s sake. Words fill the air, and our minds are filled with ideas as a result, but nothing is permanent or lasting; very few actually care about consistency within their principles, and thus relations hold no sway. Relations only maintain themselves in understanding that each experience builds towards some collective goal by which to approach with action.

No amount of consistency will change the world if only a single person does it. There must be solidarity between relations, and responsibility must uphold its end of the bargain by maintaining consistency. It is easy to complain but hard to build relations that do not crumble under the weight of conditions which cause complaint in the first place. The world is made but not structured for individuality, and such is why egoism reigns supreme across the entire world.

The first modern man, I would suspect, was born sometime in the late 1700s, maybe after the French Revolution, for that was really the first time the ideas of Rousseau were understood intuitively by the populace—and thus modernity was born. There is within all modern states an underlying sense of relation and cooperation—a general will—which predominates every social organization. Relations encompass every facet of life. Indeed, without them, you could not compel a man to work merely for his own subsistence if social mobility, or freedom, were not offered him in return. These are the modern liberal ideas which enslave men today—the modern religions: occupations, labor power, wages, bills, utilities, rents, mortgages, commerce, calculation, accounting, law, equality, equal opportunity, freedom—nothing but the will of man made rational.

It has recently been announced (I refer here to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos), for the first time in modern history mind you, that the modern “rules-based order”—the rational enslavement of the mind—has always been a lie, an untruth, a “… rupture in the world order; the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality.” It is something which has more or less been admitted by the radicals (communist and utopian socialist) since the failed revolutions of 1848—that great bellowing of consciousness across the world which the proletariat were solely responsible for—but is something which those within the upper crust of society (the bourgeoisie) are really grappling with and admitting now for the first time.

The modernity which man has lived under since Napoleon… is dead. What follows from this point is nothing but a new evolution in the consciousness of mankind—the working class, the intellectuals on the side of the working class, and those within the current power structure who must necessarily concede to the working class, must all be cocked and ready for the slightest hesitation within the powermongers—that hesitation which indicates true, revolutionary change, for the normal tactics will no longer work. It is a force which is inevitable at this point.

I know how common it is for us revolutionaries to take any failings in the power structure as the end of that structure’s status and reign of domination, but I really don’t think it is a bluff this time; I really feel the world domination of capitalism is in a death spiral so severe that it can never recover, even with progressive policies adopted. All progressive policies that perpetuate capitalism are doomed to fail precisely because capitalism is a system built off of exploitation and cycles of collapse; we see it all around us and don’t need to be told how true that is.

Affordability is the populace’s rallying cry at present, but it is also a call back to a form of organization that is no longer possible anymore, for there is no connection between economic development and consumption—the so-called real economy. Nearly every nation in Europe is enslaved to capital, and for that reason is necessarily subjugated to America; there is no modernity without America, and that is why the fate of this great nation hangs by a thread that is ripping apart in real time. It is the end of an era, and with that must come a new mode of conceptualizing what the role of government, order, and the economy is—otherwise, our collapse is all but certain, and the future of our economic prosperity is but a dream… without doubt, things will get worse in fact; and, in my view, to pray for a better tomorrow is about as useful as consulting the stars to predict the future if it is not to incorporate the majority who uphold and determine that very future.

Modern life really is built upon relations which we do not see or hear, and is for that reason, I suspect, why Dostoevsky put in the mouth of Father Zosima (in The Brothers Karamazov) the famous line, “Every one of us is responsible for everyone and everything, and I more than all the others.” The world upholds us, and our decisions determine whether the world will continue to uphold us, or whether we shall all become bones by our own hands.

From a philosophical perspective, relations have usually been considered from the standpoint of causality. The actualizable ensembles of life all collapse into one at the end of every action, and thus, what is is ultimately what has been. Relation, insofar as it has any meaning at all, must conform to the lived realities, the “facts” if you will, of the real world. Many men love to idealize life because they fear the actual ground which they walk upon, for they know it is really in constant flux beneath them.

Reality is too much for modern man to bear because he must simultaneously live for himself and for others; and that complexity confuses him, and so he retreats into what is simple rather than what is difficult, and takes wholesale that which is not his own out of a very stupid pragmatism.

Pragmatism can only be pragmatic if it is done in and for yourself in relation to your current circumstances. Anything which makes you live against your own best interest is folly, and it is for that reason why modernity must be abolished; for modernity is against itself, and is right now engaged in the most ridiculous dialectic in history: the solutions are obvious (a world organized around prosperity rather than competition), but those with the power think otherwise because competition, and by extension austerity (economic leverage), is the only form of real power they have now; since the narrative is dead, and they can no longer make economic hardship a personal, moral failing (the oft-quoted “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” no longer holds) they have to make financial hardship and job insecurity a reality in order to maintain stability and order on a global scale—order here referring to the current modality of modernity, the structure which structures lived reality—things such as trade agreements, infrastructure projects, the prevention of war, food abundance, preventing ecological disasters (climate change primarily), and job creation.

It is a contradiction so powerful, no amount of dialectical substitution—that is, modifying the primary thesis (capitalism) with a contradiction (either Democratic socialism or communism) that doesn’t actually go against the thesis, thereby making it a false antithesis—can ever bring about actual progress.

Hegel’s dialectic, which Engels rightly codified into three fundamental rules—the main one being the third: negation of the negation—has a teleology of “infinite progress,” but that “progress” is all too contingent on material conditions which Hegel, being a true idealist at the end of the day, didn’t account for, or rather, didn’t think mattered.

There are two main downsides to Hegel’s idealist dialectic: the first is that progress is not always progress; in the course of history there have been periods in which there is a kind of anti-progress—the Dark Ages for example—in which man returns to a former state of consciousness from which he may never come out; it must also never be forgotten that progress is only possible insofar as human consciousness exists—once the human race is snuffed out, and the last light of consciousness is returned to darkness, there will be no more progress to speak of in the human sense, only the fate of the Earth dialectically playing out without us, and what a fear this causes, for man is vain enough to make himself the center of the world.

The second downside is that progress is dependent on man’s prior material conditions which, if they are not fortunately copious, will make it very difficult to progress out of; just look how short civilization is as an experiment, no more than 5,000 years, compared to the hundreds of thousands of years that came before in which man lived as nothing more than a glorified beast, hunting and gathering and bonding in small tribes, worrying every second, never at ease in anything, always uncertain—doesn’t that existence resemble the current lived experience for most people, only this time on an industrial, urbanized scale, where instead of nature limiting us, it is bureaucracy which limits and controls us?

Where there is no hope of advancement, due to a lack in the means by which to bring it about, there can be no hope for progress in the world—and no amount of citing Hegel’s List der Vernunft (the cunning of reason) will get around that lived reality, that is unless action is the primary mode by which consciousness advances, rather than some fanciful conception which occurs in abstraction only in the mind of intelligent men who can actually conceive of it as such.

Progress is not always progress, and progress is dependent on the prior material conditions which men exist in in order to bring that progress about in the first place. Just like how the working class, and class struggle more generally, didn’t exist prior to wage labor, so too man’s current conception of the good life didn’t exist until it was revealed to him in the abhorrent accumulation of capital by those who control the means of production, and more generally those who supply labor to the working class—the first capitalists.

Our modern relations, which shape how we understand and internalize ourselves in the real world, are solely focused on relating man to his subjugator for the sake of progress at all cost, even if the cost is at the expense of those who make progress possible. It is shocking to me just how confused we moderns are about our real power, and it’s so shameful to see so much misery and mental anguish on behalf of ideas which we don’t fully comprehend but which we adopt uncritically nonetheless.

If only our power was really understood: we would change the whole world in a second merely by rejecting all the falsities that came before, and usher in a new epoch of human history that proclaimed the true liberation of all from worry and hardship, merely by reorganizing our collective struggle for survival away from the nonsense of corporatization—which literally subjects to the market and the whims of asset managers the necessities to life—to a harmony of shared interest and mutual cooperation based upon the material conditions of nations.

The only reason capitalism survives at all at this point in history is that it is intertwined with the concepts of liberalism and freedom, but what part of labor exploitation—that is, the extraction of surplus value from surplus labor in order to increase the value of the commodity made for greater profit on behalf of the owner of the means of production: in short, the valorization process—is liberating? Better yet, what good are wages if the amounts provided are constantly outpaced by inflation? The common retort from economic liberals (bourgeois economists to use Marxian language) is either to save more (“live below your means,” that well-trodden platitude which means very little in this context) or get a job with better pay—ignoring the obvious impossibility of that for most people.

Let’s assume they have a point: QUID TUM? What then? What is to follow from these very liberal, very independent, very “strong,” awe-inspiring really, apologetics for misery? Nothing more than slavish adherence to the status quo, to keep things the same, to, in fact, spread the misery around in order to further entrench the notion that nothing is possible and capitalism is here to reign until the end times. They would argue for freedom in the market, no regulations, and total capitulation to laissez-faire economics (“let the market do its thing”) in the same way anti-abolitionists in America argued for the necessity of slavery in order to keep the southern economy going.

The arguments at once lose all objectivity: they are no longer tied to material reality, or what the evidence actually reveals, but are couched in moral terms; all arguments for capitalism at this day and age are moral ones, not economic ones—they’re arguments made on behalf of capital, not against it, and so they are essentially arguments against the workers who make capital possible; and to think, we argue for injustice everyday we go to work for the sake of our survival—man today is really no different from the Thracians or Scythians whom the Athenians were bold enough to call barbaroi (barbarians—those who did not speak Greek); you see, even then workers/slaves were dehumanized by labeling them as an other rather than as a fellow human being, an individual with feelings and goals just like the freeman.

And so I return finally to that original point about Rousseau: modern man is different from man of the past because his subjectivity is internalized in himself: he recognizes himself as a free man with capacity and talent which must be exercised in the world; man’s conception of himself is no longer beholden to some higher authority or placed beyond him as a result of cultural tradition. Today, nothing is sacred but the individuality of man, and no life can be fully actualized until man is freed from the necessity of wage labor to survive; and if that means that the freedom of the capitalist to make profits is to be enslaved to the well-being of his workers (by taking away his means of production) then so much the worse for the capitalist; for what the capitalist was offering up prior to his ownership being placed in the hands of his laborers was base servility on pain of death from starvation. Who could ever forget what Shakespeare puts in the mouth of Shylock:

Nay, take my life and all. Pardon not that.
You take my house when you do take the prop
That doth sustain my house; you take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live.
— The Merchant of Venice - Act 4, scene 1.

How could anyone hope to live off the fat of the Earth if the butcher (the greedy capitalist) is the one who cuts the cattle (the constant capital derived from the already existing material) and supplies himself with the majority of the meat (the profits that should really be repaid in the form of higher wages to his workers)? We have to get beyond morals, and treat the material conditions of the world realistically and dialectically if the majority is finally to live a life of dignity and meaning. It is very easy to give up or to resign yourself from the world in the face of capitalism, but capitalism, like every economic system that preceded it, will come to a glorious end—the only question is how long must men wait for that greatest of liberations?

Every subjugation has its master and slave. In the times of the Old Stone Age (the Paleolithic) man’s master was his mother—nature; in the times between Sumer and the antebellum South it was man enslaving man (Jews enslaved to Egyptians, Turks enslaved to Greeks, Africans enslaved to Romans, Pagans enslaved to Christians, Muslims enslaved to Christians and Christians enslaved to Muslims, whole continents enslaved by the Mongols, etc., etc., etc.); and all this lunacy eventually culminated in imperialism—the highest transfiguration of debauchery—when Western civilization (primarily) thought it ought to enslave the entire world, plundering wherever resources could be found (mainly taken out of Africa) and justified it under various moral, legal, religious, and philosophical frameworks, which were really sophistical sleights of hand, to debilitate and utterly demoralize and dehumanize vast swaths of the globe, whole peoples immiserated for the sake of someone’s ambition—if all that was done for the sake of profit, or national defense, or nationalism, then I want nothing to do with that kind of liberation or freedom; all this to say nothing of the modern enslavement people are under today: wage slavery, that is, subsistence which is increasingly precarious due to the decreasing purchasing power of the money we receive from our jobs—I ask again, what kind of freedom is it if real GDP doesn’t increase proportionately with nominal GDP (GDP not adjusted for inflation). If we are to argue on moral grounds alone, which is really all the capitalist can do, let the countless miseries played out on behalf of capital serve as a thorough refutation to this backwards, barbaric, idiotic, childish, insipid, sardanapalian, venomous, vampiric, exploitative system.

Our relations must be made strong by a firm commitment to ourselves and those around us. Until this is realized, relations may as well be considered no different from rules, norms, customs, or the international order itself—useful fictions that could be overturned by the will of a single avaricious individual, who would destroy the freedom of others in order to exercise his own. That is what the single individual lives in today, that is the world which he inhabits, one of cutthroat competition for the sake of empowering those who are already powerful and weakening those (the working class) who actually uphold their power to begin with. All relations rest on power, and I think it’s time the majority finally exercise it for the sake of liberating themselves from this most damnable of deprivations.

Manifestation and Materiality

Matter

Matter is the basis of all experience, but it is wrongly taken as the ultimate ground of reality. Just like the idealists who mistake experience (born in the mind) as the ultimate ground, materialists take the physical composition of objects as all that there is.

The question of the fundamental constituents of reality is one of the oldest in all philosophy. One may trace it all the way back to Thales when he proclaimed, “All is water.” But why water, and what did it even mean for everything to be water? That proclamation by Thales was nothing more than the speculative conclusion of a naturalist; and since then, more or less, all ontological claims about reality ignore metaphysics by subsuming metaphysics (the fundamental nature of reality—the aboutness of things perceived in this world) into what reality is composed of.

Naturalism, as a metaphysical doctrine at least, is effectively reality made natural; it does not assume things outside of nature, and it does not seek explanations for natural phenomena outside of what lies in the natural world. In that sense, it is more a method of investigation than an actual philosophical stance which one can argue for or against. But it is just here where all this confusion comes. Almost every confusion in philosophy stems from a confusion in the terms used to describe phenomena.

When most people consider the world, they do so with all their presuppositions in mind. Very few actually attempt to understand things from an impersonal, non-biased perspective; in fact, for most, that notion is either impossible or derided as ridiculous, simply because most don’t view reality in an objective manner, but rather take their subjective experience as the ultimate reality. When people call for consensus for the sake of having a collective framework by which to rationally arrive at solutions via debate or argumentation, what they’re really calling for is an agreement on principles from which problems can be analyzed and, in so doing, reduced to whatever the collective presuppositions already are.

In that sense, consensus reality is nothing but presupposition taken as fact because all the “solutions” are arrived at in the same manner—it is a false binary taken as a true unity, and made so on behalf of what the values are already assumed to be without question. It is a very conservative way of thinking because it is not thinking at all, but rather a blind allegiance to what is assumed as good from the outset—either from tradition, or from a rejection of what is proposed as new simply because it is new, even if the new thing would be of benefit to them to adopt.

There is no historical, philosophical, or material analysis anywhere in modernity because modernity is not interested in truth as a concept, but rather as a tool to make people agree with the collective presuppositions of those who do not think. It is the death of free thought—the free thinkers are long dead—and is why ignorance is so pervasive today; until people critically examine what they mean by “objective” or “true,” there shall never be an end to dogma or nonsensical argumentation.

Questions of matter or idea fall under the metaphysical, but the common strand of thinking today does not allow for metaphysical speculation. When we observe reality, we do so with the presupposition that what we observe is in fact before us, and does in fact exist in the same manner we exist. What we are, however, or rather, what we assume ourselves to be, is largely shaped by what we have encountered in our intellectual development. Even how we objectify the world in our experience as conscious subjects is subordinate to what language and culture we were born in and indoctrinated by; America (being the exception to nearly every norm or rule) is an interesting case study on this exact thing, because it is effectively the only nation, so far in history, to have its culture bound up within an idea about itself—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—rather than an actual quality native to the geography or minds of the inhabitants.

Our culture is essentially the Yankee yeoman, European ideal which the Founding Fathers were fond of, but not fond of being subordinate to: it’s no wonder we Americans are so confused about what it means to be an American (we have always been confused on this matter); it’s deliberately ambiguous because what it means to be an American effectively comes down to whatever we as Americans freely decide to label as American; in that sense, an American is really an ambiguity, a contradiction which we must constantly strive to overcome as we sustain our life, maintain our liberty, and pursue our happiness.

But what does this have to do with matter or mind? I would say everything, for the concepts here spoken of are effectively the same. It is an issue that stems from the inability to truly understand the things being spoken of—the ambiguity of language and differing assumptions about what this world is is where we must forge our own path of sense-making. Every claim about reality is really a lie told on behalf of reality. Reality doesn’t care about us, but we have a great deal to care about within it, and that is because we live within it, and are subject to its laws regardless of whether we find them legal or not.

What matter really is is a metaphysical proposition about the nature of the world which we inhabit. It is good and fair to point to atoms and molecules and atomic physics and quantum chemistry and think the universe a done deal—that is, a wager which we humans have won because our ideas about it are “correct”—but nobody ever seems to find certainty within answers that are themselves not final; there is always more “to know” and always more “to uncover” in science, and so, we make what we think the whole of what our life is—not realizing that we are, in doing that, affirming two positions which are contradictory but which are also correct on their own terms.

You see, when we say that something is, we are making a claim about ontology (the beingness of an object that comes to us in experience), but within every assumption—especially of an ontological kind—we are carrying innumerable metaphysical implications; implications which are themselves not totally certain, and which we can only presuppose in the same way a person’s already accepted values predetermine the outcome of their vote in politics. In a sense, the matter–mind divide is really an illusion, because reality is both matter and mind: mankind is made of matter, but it has a mind capable of abstracting matter to become idea (all this stemming from the mind); and the only reason people stand ten-toes down on one or the other (materialism or idealism) is because of ignorance with respect to what it means to actually affirm a position existentially.

Nobody chooses for themselves, but rather chooses out of deference to their presuppositions, which they take as real or true, when in reality they are groundless and meaningless metaphysically and epistemologically speaking; in truth they are moral.

To speak of matter alone is to ignore the thing that processes the matter in the first place. The materialists love to point out to the idealists that the mind is also matter (nothing but a bundle of billions of neurons and glial cells, and trillions of synapses), but that in no way makes reality somehow only composed of matter as a result. All absolute claims about reality are really falsehoods because none of them are capable of being validated—they’re all non-falsifiable. This is why I’m sick of the modern adulation (obsequiousness) which we show towards truth—as if truth were something powerful or worthy of our respect.

I’m a pragmatist. Truth only matters for me. It has no power over me in the same manner, unfortunately, it seemingly has over everyone else. I don’t care if a man is unreasonable, irrational, or even stupid, so long as he is all of these things while being pragmatic—that is, is all of these things with respect to some end goal, or with respect to a goal which he strives to achieve. That is what it means to be pragmatic; and that is also why every conclusion we deduce from our reality (whatever intellectual gymnastics we’ve performed to buy into some metaphysical claptrap) is perspectival in the end.

But I feel this metaphysical quandary needs to be explicated a bit more. The problem with metaphysics is that you cannot separate it from ontology. Every ontological claim about the nature of being is necessarily tied up with claims about that being’s fundamental or ultimate nature, and once this happens there’s no end to the amount of equivocations that occur between various schools of thought that claim to have the true nature of reality understood. For me, however, claims such as these always seemed like fruitless diversions from what actually lies before us as subjects of experience; it was mere intellectual masturbation, thinking and thoughts for their own sake, rather than for furthering our understanding of reality.

When I was first studying philosophy, I was taught that you could break it up into four main areas: metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology. Having addled my mind with science and mathematics well before studying philosophy, as well as going through the American education system, which standardizes every academic discipline and makes it seem as if every question or problem has one “true” or “correct” solution, I assumed the only “true” philosophy was epistemology, for that dealt with how we know things are “true”—it was a perspective only one who still believed in objectivity could affirm.

Still stuck on that scientific mindset, that black-and-white thinking where things are either true or false and nothing in between is possible, I only considered the nature of claims as they appear in my experience. I gave the least concern to metaphysics because I assumed it was merely speculative, and impossible to actually have knowledge of; and so for three years I went my reckless way serenely, considering the world through a reductive lens, making everything an either/or, a this or that, a true or false: this is the mindset of most people today (only concerned with the epistemological), and it is for this reason why most actually assume that reality is either the totality of matter or the product of a mind which gives rise to all phenomena.

People with no knowledge of philosophy view reality in a way not unlike the Ancient Greeks—that is, in a very intuitive way—and as a result suffer all the same defects: premises asserted without ground which lead their every conclusion into the abyss of a non sequitur. The Ancient Greeks didn’t have a method of investigating existence with any certainty or objectivity, and so they were left to their own presuppositions about the world, and thus had to construct explanations on that very shaky foundation: building from “first principles” which were really guesses at best (like in the Pre-Socratic atomists), dogmas at worst (like in the sect of Pythagoreans), or rejecting the very concept of “final” explanation at all (like the Ancient Greek skeptics).

The natural assumption of most people today is, in essence, dichotomous—and I would like to add falsely so; there is very little room for speculation because the only thing that concerns people is whether the thing in question is true, not whether the thing in question could change depending on the circumstances. The world is presented to us in a deliberately myopic way because that is the simplest way to get an idea within someone’s mind, assert it for long enough until it is gradually accepted as true. “Repetition is the mother of teaching” is a very true maxim, but it also has a negative side which most are unwilling to discuss; in the same way a “truth” could be arrived at through rote, without understanding why it is so, a falsity could be presented as “true” and eventually accepted as such not on the merits of its evidence or deductive validity, but on it merely being repeated enough times to the point of it becoming ingrained enough to seem like a self-evident fact, as if it were an axiom in mathematics.

This here is the ultimate indoctrination of mankind, and is why so many refuse positions contrary to their own—because to them, whatever the other person says is self-evidently wrong, rather than being a mere variation upon the same observation. This is seen nowhere clearer than in politics, where the false dichotomy takes on a kind of sacred status that reason or evidence will never evince the other of; you cannot change their mind unless you present your own position in a manner almost identical to the way in which the other became convinced of their position—and so reason retreats back into its epistemological castle, and leaves the surrounding farmland to be pillaged by values, sentiments, and feelings.

If reason were a motte, then objective reality would be the bailey, because reason flies from the world of lived experience the moment it is confronted by a thing which defies all rationality. It is in this sense, then, why strict adherence to “objectivity” or “truth” or “agreed-upon values” is folly in an absolute sense. You cannot stand on truth if there is no ground which truth itself rests upon.

Form

If matter is what the world is, then form is how it presents itself to us. Philosophically, this distinction was initially made by Aristotle and since then was modified slightly and dressed up in new jargon over the centuries; but I suspect very little is actually revealed with this most meretricious of all distinctions. I struggle to even call it a distinction. It is difficult to even affirm the is-ness of reality when everything we know about it thus far points to its ultimate unknowability.

With such vagueness being the common stamp throughout all of thought—which philosophy has never been able to answer with a straight face, that is, objectively—it only seems reasonable to assume that the whole of humanity is really in the dark about the phenomenal and the noumenal. Some have even gone as far as to say that the noumenal is an abstraction without content, a distinction without meaning: a mere concept born in the minds of philosophasters who desire to know the ultimate without first considering the possibility that the ultimate is itself a meaningless abstraction which men can either never know (because it does not exist) or never comprehend (because it lies far beyond the capabilities of human understanding).

I, for one, believe that the noumenon of Kant is just the thing (Das Ding) he wanted to know in itself (an sich), but because of the antinomies which inevitably result from relying on pure reason (Reine Vernunft) alone, he had to satisfy himself with a servile agnosticism—a critique to end all critiques, which at the same time gave birth to an infinite variety of them. Nowadays, there are innumerable schools of Kantian and post-Kantian thought which claim to have finally reconciled reason with reality—NONSENSE!

I’m with Hegel on this one and claim that the search for a reconciliation between what we as human beings bring to consciousness and our capacity to comprehend this consciousness—in all its particulars, in both its matter and form—is Das Ding an sich (the thing-in-itself). In a word, the noumenon—the objective, the absolute, the “truth”—is… Spirit (or to use modern terminology, a process of becoming or self-realization). In that case, all distinctions melt into air and become misty abstractions which we see evaporate before us, but which we cannot see shortly afterwards.

It is on this point, actually, that Hegel is almost a materialist, but I suspect the reason he didn’t wish to affirm a materialist metaphysic is because he, like me, felt it would be to affirm a groundless abstraction which is itself totally unknowable to us in an objective sense: therefore, the only true compromise between objectivity and subjectivity is reason (on the objective—exterior reality) made subjective (from within the subject—interior reality).

I cannot affirm because I do not ultimately know, but I’m also aware that the concept of “ultimate knowing” may itself be an abstraction that is meaningless, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. You see, the process of my thought is dialectical and therefore open to contradiction and evolution—indeed, it lives off the uncertainty implicit within consciousness. It is a form of skepticism that is itself anti-skeptical; what it is at its heart is a systematically unsystematic system: a system that organizes and conceptualizes all claims about reality (the systematic part), but which does not affirm any of them (the unsystematic part). It is a type of speculative philosophy, a paraconsistent framework that is ultimately pragmatic.

One cannot speak of the deep without first entering the shallow. The depths of man’s consciousness, which give rise to this whole accidental reality, are really like a shadow within the dark, indistinguishable from the surrounding darkness of everything. One can only produce a shadow in the presence of light, and so, what we do when we attempt to speak of concepts, or draw abstractions from experience as such, is really only light a flame from which all phenomena are given their corresponding shadow of incomprehensibility.

What would it even mean to “know” reality, to “know” the noumenon? I venture to say it would only mean to provide an answer to something that is itself unanswerable. The greatest theories which man has come up with to interpret the world, to give it some semblance of comprehensibility, have only ever been the classification of his ignorance. Even mathematics and physics, the most “grounded” in reason, evidence, and deduction, are really just models of understanding which have predictive validity, but which do not approach the “why” of reality, only the “what then.”

I respect the consistency, I even admire it—to view the world with awe but never with reverence, happy to not know, only to uncover, figure out, or reveal—ah, if only I were capable of truly affirming such a framework, it pains me sometimes… I make everything more complicated because I’m unable to separate myself (in my subjectiveness) from the world which appears before me as an object to be analyzed (in its objectiveness).

That pragmatic adherence to empiricism and reductionism—my oh my, what a commitment, what audacity, what strength; furthermore, what lack of self-respect!—where do you fit into that jigsaw puzzle of reduction and commodification? I’m all ears to hear how you fit, but I doubt it would make much sense to someone like myself, someone who doesn’t share that intuition about the world: that the world is only the world, its own brute fact, and that man’s “facts” about it are merely our extrapolations from our hypotheses about it.

Oy vey, this world is impossible for me to truly wrestle with subjectively, because everywhere I turn, I’m met with the physicalist, the reductionist, the empiricist, the rationalist, the positivist, the physicist, the religious, the artistic, the calculating, the mathematical, the nihilist, the objectivist, and every other aspect of humanity which I love and respect but which I cannot ultimately follow. The true path to life is to be found on the road which leads to no sects or doctrines, no premises or presuppositions, no dogmas or unquestionable beliefs; only in your own way, and with your own understanding, can you live a life of sufficient complexity and grandeur to be called a well-lived or well-spent life.

People think of life as a problem to be solved, when in truth it is a reality to be experienced. Life is an endless journey, a place which can be mapped but which has no finite topology—no surveyor’s chain is capable of measuring the complexity of this terrain. Every second of existence is one second of overcoming death: the tendency to decay and languish, to die a nothing in this world, to despair and become one with nothing, to love nothing, to make the emptiness of existence the only love possible, the only vanity worth falling into, for it is the only true “truth” the world seems to abide by unconditionally—all this and then some is really the condition of life, and yet, we persist… to what end though?

To live is, in a very real sense, to reject the demands of entropy to disband and disorganize and fall into a sea of chaos. Disunity between man and the world seems the way of all things, and to think men are so vain that they are capable of turning this resolute nothingness into a serious somethingness. What greatness lies within all these narratives of form—matter concerns us not; everything emerges out of small somethings, but we wish to know that something more than the object (the noun) which we have before our eyes. What ridiculousness is all this? Really, truly, what incredible grandeur this whole motion picture of reality really is.

Life is like a movie that is played out on a molecular scale, but which is only given apparent color and content in the broader scale of perception: the five senses—vain, fickle pricks of consciousness—only serve to prolong themselves in the consciousness of the subject they inhabit, and that is why life is so absurd yet simultaneously the most grand thing there is. Wallahi, nothing is more transparent than the inevitable nothingness which we are destined to become; nothing steals the hearts of men so quickly as the inevitable sadness which all things are bound to become.

We like to feel ourselves in command of all our fortunes and capable of changing them through our efforts and consistent labors, but it is all too much—all remains either perpetually out of reach or simply impossible to achieve given the current state of things; man is limited even in his imagination by what the current state of societal and economic development is for him, or rather for his epoch.

The ideas of the ruling classes are, sad to say, the true ideas which dominate our times; and though we like to think of ourselves as self-reliant, independent, intelligent, and conscious single individuals, immune to all that nonsense, we must never forget that we inhabit a world in which the majority are not so independent, not so intelligent, not so desirous of becoming great or interesting or clever or erudite. What we are, rather, in this world, is but a speck of matter given form from within ourselves (in the mind—the subjective) as conscious beings, but expressed by the same material (in the world—the objective) which we are forced to interpret and overcome!

This very line of reasoning (this nonsense “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality) is used by the ruling class to distract people from what actually matters in life. Just like the scientists who reduce all of reality to merely the physical, or the religious fanatics who reduce everything to God’s will, the grand narrative of existence itself is (today at least) sold, packaged, and commodified into a game of money-making or wealth-building—living a “good life,” which is really a life of little reflection and total hedonism; a life that isn’t really a life at all, but a fantasy, a narrative, a literal story that is lived through in struggle and ends totally in death.

The modern world could not be more monstrous than it already is: totally senseless, wicked, and insipid. Even if the world played out like a story written by a genius on par with Shakespeare, and who had the powers of God himself… it would still fail to reach the level of utter depravity which we find ourselves in today—a wasteland, a psychological black death, a mundane, tepid, crippled, ignorant, backwards orientation of existence. Until we cease profaning life and place back on its pedestal the glory that is subjectivity (subjective immediacy), we shall never overcome this “practical,” “pragmatic,” “common sense” approach to life—a life that is nothing more than a span of a few decades in which we work merely to live and die.

Our perceptions of existence account for more than our actual existence. Misery could be a glory. Pain could be a joy. Death could be an escape. People today are driven by narratives they don’t actually believe in, and if they do, they are made miserable by them because those same narratives are themselves narratives, stories, fairy tales—not realities to be accomplished without sacrificing your humanity to them.

The crisis of the modern world is that form is profaned for matter. We reduce things to simplify them, and we then go on to use this same kind of reasoning with life itself, which of course would lead to very dark and meaningless places—the abyss of all abysses in this context would be capitalism (no shock really), because it is the matter which also strives to become the form. In contradicting itself, it tries to become what it is not through a continuous dialectic of “progress,” which is not progress at all but really a regression to the lowest elements of life—the bare essentials made optimized in order to allow profits to flow the most seamlessly.

Nothing could be further from life than a spreadsheet of business transactions, because these abstractions represent only the subsistence of the business, but not the actual commotions of the firm. You see, this kind of empirical, reductionist reasoning is equivalent to saying that it is the mouth alone that is responsible for sustaining the body, or that the purpose of life is to eat because eating is the only way to sustain life. It is taking a part and making it into a whole. It is the composition fallacy made perfected by lived experience. You cannot call a lie the truth when experience shows the obvious falsity of the thing in question.

The very way in which life is organized reinforces false notions about life, and that is why the dominant mode of interpreting life today is so empty of any real content or meaning—it is soulless, and made solely for the sake of profit, or commodified for the sake of virality. There is no character or individuality in it because it isn’t produced for the sake of connecting with other individuals, but rather made to enrich a single individual who doesn’t have anything else on his mind aside from capital accumulation.

This is why we can never live happily in the world even if we actualized ourselves in it, or removed ourselves entirely from it—because the overriding narrative is one of continuous, perpetual, yes, eternal, dissatisfaction, want, and ennui. Therefore, our tangible material struggles must not be overcome with our own liberation in mind, but with everyone’s liberation in mind; the system as a whole must be destroyed, while leaving in its wake only the tools which exploited us, but this time with us using them for our improvement overall.

Everything in life seems geared towards a contradiction, and this is true—possibly the only truth in the world—but it is nearly impossible to handle when actually dealt with on its own. I mean, with everything said above thus far, doesn’t it seem at least a little true that we fear contradiction in the modern world the same way kids fear the dark? Well, intellectuals do at least.

The average person lives through contradiction by replacing the complexity of life with a rigid system of “practical” concerns that touch on material interest alone; that’s it. I’ve just explained all of modernity in a single sentence: you live through your own life—that great vessel of experience, which is but a moment in the sun—focused only on what sustains it, rather than thinking about ways of transcending it. It wouldn’t be so bad to live a hard life if the average person’s mind wasn’t addled with delusions of wealth and fame that are not coming to them even if they prayed to God for it, or EVEN if they found a magic genie in a bottle—that wish alone would take all three wishes.

Modern man doesn’t want freedom, I’m sorry to say, because misery and toil and endless drudgery is easier than actually analyzing life existentially. Figuring out for yourself what you want your life to be is harder than accepting what is commonly accepted without reflection by the herd. This truth is what led Nietzsche to admire rank order and actually desire a world in which people would return to slavery and live in even greater misery and bondage than they suffered as wage workers—what humanity!

This is what I meant when I said that life is a contradiction, that life is spirit recognizing itself for itself, that life is a gradual process that is punctuated by periodic tragedies and bouts of depression. I don’t agree with Žižek when he said: “Today, in a society in which the striving for pleasure and happiness fully displays their self-destructive potential, only figures like Mainländer can save us.” I prefer, rather, to say that the only savior for us today is ourselves; and if I was feeling really pessimistic, I would say Emil Cioran or Arthur Schopenhauer are the true saviors: our true prophets and intellectual saints; men to be canonized not as people who followed the way of the Lord, but rather as people who followed the way of the world, and saw it for what it was, and said afterwards that it was very bad.

But this is all too much. I’ve said enough. I’ve written enough, so much, in fact, that I really can’t tell whether I’ve said all my mind or none of it. Such is the tragedy of complexity and reality lived existentially. Whenever speaking on subjects of profound complexity (it should never be forgotten), it becomes almost impossible for one to turn their thoughts (the matter) into a coherent form. The art of a writer, in truth their genius, is nothing more than turning every thought into a concise, elegant expositional form. Every explanation for any phenomenon is form distilled into its most brief representation.

The matter ultimately determines the individual’s interest. It is for this reason those who write on anything out of interest alone usually write in a manner that is light, enjoyable, and very obviously personal and engaging. The thing which all writers hope for—and which few achieve but which all cling to the moment they obtain it—is spontaneity. Spontaneity is not something that can be cultured or developed, but rather is something that can only be arrived at randomly; it cannot be called upon willingly, but rather is something which happens to you precisely when you least expect it.

Half of greatness in writing is patience, for one must wait either a very long or very short time for an idea to come into their head which is good enough to carry them the rest of the way. The other half of greatness in writing is brevity; something which I strive for in my sentences, but which I scarcely think I manage to perform in my writings overall, not because I can’t, but because I feel like it would be a disservice to myself to allow my mind only part of my thoughts, rather than the whole of them.

Not everything has to be engaging, for not all matters strike our interests or are worthy of our engagement, but the end result should be something from the heart which carries meaning and truth overall. I know the form of this essay on form may have come out a bit sporadic or haphazard, but it could not have been otherwise, for the very nature of the subject necessitates long diversions and confusing digressions if the fundamental contradiction that lies at the heart of all experience is to be uncovered and made clear to others.

Quality

Man is quality. Now, with that said, one could spend their whole life (as philologists do over the fragments of the Pre-Socratics) struggling to figure out what exactly that means, but I doubt anyone would be impressed with the results after the lapse of a few years, let alone centuries.

Quality is merely the counterpart to form, which has its seed in matter. The whole of reality seems bound in this one kernel which is both a truth and a lie. You see, to even put words to quality is to engage in a contradiction—contradiction reigns supreme, after all.

Whenever a person describes something which they see, they mention its adjectives—its secondary qualities—but the ontology always remains veiled, encircled by a kind of foreboding, ominous mist which no one can see past.

By quality, I do not mean here the colloquial definition: something well-made, or of good standard, or elegant in appearance; rather, I speak of its philosophical depths, the mystery of it—a thing so obvious it would seem staggering to one who isn’t interested in torturing themselves mentally over it.

When we label a thing—that is, provide a signification to an object in order to distinguish it from others—we think we’ve done so in an analytical manner; in a certain manner, even objective, with surety, never feeling the need to question what lies at the bottom of this infinite leap into obscurity. We are so simple and intuitive in our approach to formulating things that we actually presume ourselves to be the real guarantors of what things are; like Adam at the start of Genesis, we are made so as to do the work of God and provide a name to all the animals—and more generally, to all the things that are not animals but which equally belong to God’s creation.

There’s a certain gap—an ontological gap—which everyone leaps past without recognizing the abyss they have just entered into. Surrounded by so much darkness, man assumes the only light which he could create is out of himself, and so he denotes things, labels things, names things, provides definitions and significations to objects which are not himself but which he feels (perhaps even knows) to be apart from him. All these things fall under the name of quality.

Ah, quality, dear quality, how elusive you are, strutting about in a burqa of mystery. Everyone thinks they can comprehend you through labels and systems of categories, but they do not understand the depths to which you throw all concepts down. At the bottom of the well does not lie truth but ignorance, and you are but ignorance (to us mortals) personified. Could we even perceive you? I say yes and no, for again, you necessitate contradiction every time we contemplate you. If I say that a quality belongs to an object, do I say that absolutely, or do I say that pragmatically? Here lies the contradiction, or, better yet, the dialectic from which a synthesis may be found.

To consider a thing from two contradictory aspects is merely to grapple with the reality that other conscious agents have a different interpretation of the same thing observed. The world, in essence, is an ever-evolving, ever-changing cycle of various opinions put forth and self-assured conclusions deduced that really get us nowhere but closer to the certainty that we really do not know what we are describing. Our world, intellectually speaking, runs on consensus. If a quality is ascribed to a thing enough times, and accepted by most people on that basis, then it is fair enough to describe that object by its collective adjective—its quality.

Now, for those who are not epistemic pragmatists or perspectivists—I mainly refer here to realists or some type of objectivists—this notion is abhorrent, and yet, it is undeniable that what people think about the world and how they actually live in the world are two completely separate things, and are more often than not contradictory. We live after the manner of our circumstances, not our conceptions or idealizations about our circumstances.

This thing has a quality, I ascribe it some meaning—does that make it objective? My whole philosophy is a systematic refutation of the question “is this thing objective?” Objectivity has no meaning outside of our ideas surrounding the meaning of objectivity. When I speak of the objectivity of a thing, what I really refer to is the thing’s quality—even the notion of an unchanging, static nature to an object is really just a narrative, a perspective, a useful illusion which assures our sanity and coherence. The empiricists are right, and the rationalists are right, but not in absolute senses.

To claim a thing to be absolute is to claim a thing which you cannot ultimately know: it is to assert, as a fundamental premise, mind you, that there is a mind-independent ontology behind all observable reality. I’m reminded of Russell’s teapot in such an instance; but, be that as it may, I’m not so much interested in arguing for or against the various kinds of evidence that make such a claim or premise justifiable, but rather in the psychology behind why one would believe that in the first place. I find all things in reality absurd, and the most absurd thing of all is life—which is but a quality painted onto the canvas of the universe as far as I’m concerned.

All ideas stem from our mind, and in that way only have validity for our mind. The material which existed prior to us can only be deduced from a pragmatic stance, not an objective one, and this is because what it means to be objective cannot be mind-independent. The very definition of objective (as it is used today by most people) contradicts itself, because nothing comes to man without first presenting itself to him in the mind, thus not mind-independent—the mind itself existing prior to man, but known by him in his use of it.

We can only lay hold of the claim that reality is but a poor translation, a confused representation, of everything which we apprehend and come to know in experience; it is for this reason that Schopenhauer considered philosophy a science, because nothing in it as a subject is to be assumed as existing without first being either empirically given or demonstrated from indubitable conclusions drawn from sound premises. In many ways, Schopenhauer was, at his heart, a pragmatist—even though most today consider him a type of post-Kantian idealist (he viewed himself as the only true successor of Kant because he only drew his philosophy from ideas which nature supported).

It takes, as I said earlier, a certain type of intellect to be able to question the obvious, to confuse yourself over things you already know, to think deeply upon those things which others accept out of prejudice or convenience; these types of thinkers cannot be called pragmatists, because accepting something merely because it is pragmatic to do so ignores the purpose of pragmatism—it is not for reassuring yourself the world is as it seems, but rather a method of speculating what lies beyond the world. Even scientists cannot call themselves pragmatists really, because their assumptions are made on behalf of “brute facts,” things which simply are because they are—I find there is no difference in that and assuming, as the religious believers do, that God’s will brought everything into being.

Philosophers love wisdom, but they only arrive at wisdom when they consider things in their complexity, rather than in their simplified mundanity. Just think how boring it would be to be omniscient, to know everything before it occurs: I’m sure misery would no longer exist for that person (assuming them to be of an intellectual temperament), but action must still follow, even if you have total insight into the positions of atoms and everything stemming from them. Now that is a slave’s life.

Man must seek and overcome. Those seem to me the only two solid foundations by which to build an existential existence. Question all things, never be certain, in fact, embrace uncertainty, but do not let it cripple your capacity to act in the world as I have let it do to me. I’ve discovered this soon enough, and now all I want to do is rid myself of this writing burden.

Wouldn’t it be the greatest confirmation of my systematically unsystematic system to leave it off halfway, never to be completed? I feel it would. I’m sick of writing it, if I may be honest, and the quality of it is becoming less and less a concern for me. I might soon only leave myself an hour to write a section rather than three. I must, however, get over these feelings of emptiness regarding it. I mean, it is the culmination of everything I’ve done for the last five years, after all. Shouldn’t that count for something? I say it does, and it would be a disservice to my younger self—that self which was obsessed with acquiring all the knowledge in the world before entering into it—if I didn’t see to its completion.

We must all have some external principle which we can place our faith in in order to exist and hitch all our actions to. The life of one who thinks is one who does nothing else, and as a result they are slandered in the world, from which they turn all their feelings of guilt and shame and suffering into wonderful acts of creation. I’ve always been a wanderer in that sense. I’ve never been happy with knowing mere facts about the world, or having a diagrammatic understanding of things. I’ve always been drawn towards those things which are not graspable, and which elude every attempt to systematize them.

One cannot imitate genius; you must embody it in action. Lord, how far I’ve fallen—turning my only action into thinking, doing nothing with myself in the world at large but contemplating it, hesitating along every step of potential action, comprehending everything but understanding nothing, becoming nothing but a statue in thought. This is the very contradiction which I must live through, and which every thinking person with a large heart must think through. I’m sure the comforts are very large for those who can forgo reality and believe in a life after this one; and the same I think could be said of the nihilists who already assume nothing matters and so act in a very destructive manner as a result: isn’t that kind of life what the modern world sells to us anyway?

My situation, I would argue, is actually beyond incomprehensible—even the word absurd fails to do it justice: I’m surrounded by no one who understands my heart, in a city for which there is nothing for me here, in a state that is perhaps the most ignorant of all the others, in a country that doesn’t admire erudition—and in fact deliberately goes out of its way to malign and mock it—in an epoch of history in which everything seems to move from bad to worse, and finally, in a world as meaningless and empty as this one.

The absurd man, it has been said, was born in Augustine, for he was the first true existentialist—the first human being, at least in the West, to question deeply the meaning of his crisis in a philosophical manner. The modern man, who is also absurd (but this time is conscious of it), was born in Rousseau; and, not long afterwards, there lived a Dane from Copenhagen who was so precocious he, despite not being a novelist, wrote out a series of “philosophical” tracts so powerful and elegant they showed the progression of man’s own existence—the realization of his own anxious state, of everything coming apart at the seams in life itself: this man was Søren Aabye Kierkegaard. In the major works of this man, we have nothing but complete inwardness, a total awareness of self—in fact, the self is the only concern, and everything that is written that doesn’t concern the self is merely ancillary to the self. All of existence is in Kierkegaard because he was the first modern existentialist—he is even called the father of existentialism, rightfully so.

Man has always been in a state of anxiety about existence, and it only becomes more absurd the deeper you venture into the darkness of it. It is here that the famous quote by Nietzsche strikes one most powerfully: “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” Dear reader, this is what you must take away from my philosophy above all else: that monster is you; that abyss is you; that darkness is you; that evilness is you; that goodness is you; this very life is… you.

The inward contradictions of outward experience are, by nature, astonishing. It leaves one in awe to have a sense of what life could be, rather than what life is; this sense of hope is singular but infinite, powerful but weakening, ever-changing but static in the moment; it leaves one not, not once, ever—so long as one lives, they must carry their life as a burden, a bundle of miseries wrapped nicely in a burlesque sack. Every quality is absurd because quality seems to necessitate the deduction that things are permanent and non-changing, when in truth everything is dialectical.

I feel a prejudice, which has its origins in Aristotle, has been allowed to live for far too long, and that is the prejudice of efficient and final causes. We need to get past the notion of things having reasons, or causes, for their coming into existence. It seems very reasonable to assume that things which exist are only so because someone made them like that, but since the times of Aristotle, the questions which he posed no longer seem to hold weight, and that is because our knowledge of things has advanced so far beyond what he thought conceivable. If we go by first principles, then of course we would have to have some initial cause, some prime mover, to bring all things into existence; but this kind of reasoning doesn’t hold today, again, because centuries have passed in which men have striven to overcome the prejudices of the ancients, and we moderns are the epitome of every overcoming of the ancients.

Cause only holds for those things which we do, but for those things which remain out of our comprehension, it doesn’t make sense to assume they follow the same type of reasoning. It is the folly of man to assume everything which he places under his domain of understanding is the final word on that thing. Isn’t it more reasonable to be unreasonable and accept the fact—indeed, perhaps the only objective truth!—that reason is a product of an ape, and that that ape changes his reason as the world changes around him?

Speaking dialectically, we can only say along with Heraclitus that:

This world-order (kosmos), the same for all, no god nor man did create, but it ever was and is and will be: ever-living fire, kindling in measures and being quenched in measures.

— Quoted by Clement, Stromateis, B30.

And,

τὰ ὄντα ἰέναι τε πάντα καὶ μένειν οὐδέν. (All entities move and nothing remains still.)

— Quoted by Plato, Cratylus, 401d.

And,

Πάντα ῥεῖ. (Everything flows.)

— Simplicius’ Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, 1313.11.

And finally,

δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης. (You could not step twice into the same river.)

— Quoted by Plato, Cratylus, 402a.

This great ocean! This great abyss. This great life. How strange everything is, and how much stranger the quality of all things appears when you try to understand them in words. Everything flows, and that is why we can get no satisfaction out of our ever-present, static, seemingly unchangeable life! Such is the state of man: such is his quality. But what of the quality? Why do we presume to think it actually matters? Misery is nothing but the misplaced attention to things in life. Of all the things to concern yourself with in the short span of time you have on Earth, you choose to spend it thinking about things which do nothing for you. Overcome yourself. You must be better. You must. You simply need to find a reason to become so. Nothing more, nothing less.

If I appear to go everywhere in my analysis, I am once again forced to blame the nature of the topic. The quality of my writing, I feel, is only as good as my misery is strong—and so let this horror reign on, and give me a reason not to cut the play short. Again I ask: why should I care how any of this comes out anyway? What is the quality of myself, which is really to ask, what is the quality of my writing? The quality of my writing? Ah, a thing I’m very fond of. So fond of, in fact, that I’m currently in the depths of misery because of it. I once wrote an almanac on the mental anguish of scholarship, and I said there that one who seeks knowledge for its own sake will have all the wisdom in the world but, so deep in contemplation and mired in the minutiae of insignificant details, will lose the name of action in it; and this loss of action is the worst thing, for the world at present doesn’t afford one the opportunity to sit with themselves and become transparent to themselves in thought—rather, what we allow is one to languish and forgo the dream, the real life, for the sake of remaining awake in a sick consciousness, the fake life, the modern life, the life which we live at present, and which we are ashamed to be stuck in.

Nothing, if it is not pursued for its own end, will ever be accomplished; even the things that are completed with their end in mind are but vain merits, or false credentials, which we attach to our character as if they really meant something—all done for the sake of our vanity rather than our understanding, and this propels us to vainglorious ideals which are thought of fondly in old age and considered reasonable in youth, but which reveal the sober debauchery that is ambition.

The ever-growing divide between those who do and do not do will only increase the worse things get. But, as a writer of the soul, of the single individual, of the absurd man who cannot fathom the whole of life and reality: I find it best to see just how far the misery can go—all this for the sake of a little quality in life.

Quantity

Life is a quantity.

The whole story of civilization is one collective episode of mass hysteria. This mass of existence, this pile of bodies, this deluge of flesh, this perplexing collection of matter and motion, atoms and voids—all this and then some is our collective quantity.

It would only be fitting to place atop the tombstone of humanity the following epitaph—the only real truth that bears out every existence: Après moi, l’obscurité de la mort (After me, the darkness of death). It is fitting that it be in French, for of all the languages in the world, it is the only one that simplifies life by obscuring it in ponderous phrases, and yet, in its obscurity, reveals more than it initially intended. This is why the average Frenchman comes off as more cultured or intelligent than the average Englishman: his own language is so confusing to him it forces him to think through his thoughts more carefully, and so he always says something that seems profound, even though it is just his average thought, and he thinks very little of it. It is very hard to have (literary) style in French for that reason also: “Parce qu’en français, c’est plus facile d’écrire sans style“ (Because in French, it is easier to write without style), said Samuel Beckett.

In quantity, every quality gets blended into one collective whole and so loses whatever uniqueness it had for the sake of a drab uniformity. This doesn’t only apply to languages, though; it may be found in every facet of experience. So long as one is doomed to live, they must interpret the whole world through one transparent lens and reflect every incoming ray of life to a focal point from which every diverging radii may collect, and that focus becomes the quantity which every quality melts into—slowly, morosely, deafeningly—all to death. We may scream at the thought of it, but we have no mouth by which to convey our dismay in this instance and so must thrash about until we concuss ourselves to oblivion.

The world reveals itself only in the dreams of those perverse enough to sleep within it. The night of death looms as the light of life fades from ourselves, and thus is only to be brought to consciousness in those who see us there, lying motionless, shutting down as it were—as we do in sleep—but this time… permanently.

The thought of a deathbed is enough to make a man dear to life shudder, but this happy man—so full of energy and excitement for the days of toil ahead of him—has probably never considered what the world is like for those who pay dearly for each breath drawn. In the memory of my soul, reaching to the past, I find a happy kid enjoying the innocence of play and having no concept of true toil; now, I find the weight of existence crushing and the thought of responsibility staggering—to even maintain my life seems like some kind of mistake. From whence did this sensation come, and why must it now live in me as one lives in a home not their own?

I have often contemplated what the point of all this quantity is. When one looks at a single object, they observe it not only ontologically (that is, qualitatively) but metaphysically (that is, quantitatively). The distinction made between emergentism and reductionism is one of ontology and metaphysics, of quality and quantity, of the whole versus the singular. I can only speak as a singular man but must make and shape my thoughts thoroughly enough in order to speak on something in a concrete, rather than abstract, way. If one were to only speak in the abstract, there would be no way to communicate concrete things—and we humans are very earthly, material, vain, avaricious creatures.

The language of Plato’s Forms is precisely the language of the obscure, because that only speaks of the shadows, the qualities of the objects, but never the objects themselves. When we consider the object qua object, we really refer to it in the concrete; every abstraction is really a placeholder for something concrete—except for when we refer to things that are abstract in nature, like our ambitions or dreams, or when we speak of “numinous concepts” like the divine, love, empathy, trust, God, etc.

This fact right here is why I can never be satisfied with merely speaking of things as they appear, and why repetition is the overarching theme of all my works: to live is to contradict everything you see before you, because the mind is incapable of perceiving anything at all without first conforming it (the objects of experience) to the “categories” which allow perception in the first place.

It is for this reason, too, why many people assume the notion of another world, or Hinterwelt, as absurd: not only is there no empirical basis for it, but, deductively speaking, there is no cause from which it could be deduced without falling into circularity or an infinite regress of causes. There seems to be no circle large enough to encompass all quantities which make up all qualities. And so the opposition and negation must go on. Live, live, yes… live and let yourself die in the world; become one with that which you cannot comprehend—it is the only way to live past contradiction after all.

Life is not like a pendulum which swings back and forth between pain and boredom, but rather between the abstract and the concrete—between those things which have been overcome in reason and those which have not. The human mind is capable of only so much juggling before it becomes a confusing ensemble of various states of collapse and reemergence. We emerge out of ourselves from within ourselves. The subject-object distinction is, yet again, another aspect of existence which reasoning alone cannot overcome, but only sublate and transcend in the motions of existence, given life via the dialectic itself.

I’ve said many times before that to live is really the worst sentence a person could receive. All these confusions—in truth, contradictions—about the world we must bear nobly, but to do so is really to live a lie. For it is asking you to bear the excruciating light of illumination which has no real source; that source is yourself, you are your own misery, and this dark world looks to you in your lowliest of low moments as something solid, something firm in the dark to step on, but the moment you do… down into the abyss you go.

The greatest analogy to life is really Dante’s Inferno: where we awake within a dark forest midway on our life’s journey, shaken and confused from the right path, and turn to ourselves to escape this tenebrous terrain—only to be prevented by three beasts which represent to us our true nature of lust and fraud, pride and violence, avarice and greed. No matter where we turn, no matter all our smarts, no matter all our good intentions and ambitious dreams, we become like nothing when faced with what we really are: wretched beasts, no better than the actual beasts which prevented us from escaping this turbid night of wretched sights—visions no heart or godly power can compel and exorcize, for this forest is dark and wicked, and we are no match for its malevolence.

How could anyone hope to become something in the world if their raison d’être (reason for being) is nothing but an ombre d’air (shadow of air)? Contradiction—the whole of life—is itself a circle which has no quantifiable diameter. Whenever man is tasked with thinking for himself about things, he is met with considerations he never before imagined and is also hit with various unknowns which, prior, never troubled him, but which he must now think through.

What is to come of our individuality if we are unprepared to make sense of its true meaning? Like the love for a person that is no longer alive, life exhausts us by merely being in the midst of it; we say to ourselves it wouldn’t have been so bad had we not experienced this or that thing, but when has the contemplation of alternatives ever revealed to us something useful in our sufferings? Nay, on the contrary, the possibility of imagining another world only heightens our suffering, for we then reckon all the goods that would’ve come our way had we done the other thing, and not the actual thing we did which led us to this misery in the first place.

Socrates was considered the wisest man in Athens because he had, unlike the sophists, the humility to admit he did not know anything which he spoke of. It was this revelation to him by the Oracle of Delphi, however, that began his suffering, for after it was told to him, he dedicated his life to disproving the oracle’s prophecy… but he never did. Socrates never did find a man wiser than he, a man who could finally put to rest all his doubts and uncertainties, and so he was left alone in a world of his own misunderstanding—as am I currently.

Life is lived forward, but understood backward. To attempt to understand life as you are walking through it is the task of philosophy: it is not a subject for those who only wish to sound smart, or who only wish to know the techniques of debate to defeat others with, but for those who genuinely want to know—those who seek life in wisdom, not wisdom for the sake of life.

A great mistake in conceptualizing life is to assume that it has a final answer, that it has an actual reason or purpose behind it—that everything which we experience is part of a much greater teleological story which we are not privy to, but which we feel must be so. I’m of the belief that even if it had a first cause or final purpose, we would never know it, and I affirm that belief because it seems more reasonable to me that what the ultimate purpose is for man is merely born out of his own mind, rather than already existing prior to him and left to him as a task to discover as he lives out his life.

There is no grand story, or reason, to life—only what we make of it as we make our way through it; our purpose is our own, and what we find great or small, meaningful or insignificant, high or low, joyful or sad, is for us to experience and make use of.

All this can only be approached, however, in a dialectical manner. It is in overcoming the contradictions of it all, and repeating the same wretched contradictions over and over again, that one can finally reason past that which hinders them.

Notice how all our troubles stem from our inability to remain happy or content with our present state; there is always a desire to figure things out in man, and this turns him into a slave of his mind, which he can never rid himself of without ending himself entirely. This is why I say that life is a contradiction: because every attempt to abstract it from the experiences which give rise to cognition in the first place only leads us to consider the opposite, the “what could have been,” rather than the “what is” as we live through life itself.

This sensation I would like to call the cunning of confusion: the sense that every action we take eventually leads to our disavowal of it and the desire to have done its opposite, because we crave a certain amount of novelty in life sufficient to satisfy our innate desires, but which we are incapable of because we are perpetually willing, dissatisfied animals, whose only true nature lies in the restless search for new things. In all this, we are overcoming sense via confusion; in being confused, we eventually find a new thing which to attach ourselves to, if only for a time, in order to avoid the mental torture that comes with actually facing reality as it really is. This is the dread of every self-conscious creature, but it is particularly felt by those intellectually self-reflective, deeply sentimental, overwrought individuals—in a phrase, those perfect existentialists.

Every confusion which occurs in thought, and most especially between two people who talk past each other, is merely the result of a difference in perspective. We must all live after our own experience and must necessarily draw on those things which have shaped us carefully enough in order for our mind to have some sense of clarity. But, however, this world thrives on the contradictions implicit in life—life as a series of opposing ideas.

Every idea is really a prejudicial ideology, a private language which is understood by all—une langue patois pour chaque homme (a dialect for every man)—but grasped by none. Here, it becomes clear that there is no peace in life, only peace from life in the solace of ideas born from experience.

It is a thing to be lamented that all this quantity—these objects which we label and name and think we understand as a result—can never be fully apprehended, but only gently touched, and even then, it hurts us painfully, for our every act becomes a leap of faith as a result, rather than a step into certainty. Without certainty, there is only contradiction, but such is life: that is why repetition is the first part of upbuilding, and thus, the creation of real quantity for life.

Change

Change is the law of all things. Has there ever been a time in which change was not occurring in the world? I would venture to say no thing has never not changed, for so long as things exist, there will always be an accompanying decay—decay both from within and from without. Change is decay when taken to its final conclusion.

For man, all change is bound in memory and just as quickly fades from existence when he dies as when the world becomes temporarily dark when he blinks—only that blink lasts all eternity. Change, like every abstraction born in the mind from experience, is destined to go out like a flame in the wind when consciousness falls flat in the grave. Reality really resembles more a coffin, or torture rack, than a soothing bed of flowers and petals to rest upon and find repose in, so as to forget the world for a while.

What tantalizing tangibility is experience; does the thought of life, and all its necessitated experiences, not cause pause in the heart of a man scared of life? Tantalizing is really the perfect adjective to use in conjunction with tangibility (at least in this context), for it signifies the tormenting or teasing nature of existence—the tangibility of it—with the sights or promises of things unobtainable; with such an analogy used, is one not reminded of Tantalus himself, from whom we get the word “tantalize”?

Life is a quantity whose tangibility is made manifest in the perceived qualities of it. I find life, like Ionesco, unimaginable, unthinkable, incomprehensible even. Is experience not merely a fine drapery we place over life to forget about it—a beautiful covering which, underneath, hides a very disgusting visage? The old proverb “out of sight, out of mind” is employed every day we live, for everything which we do not care about is put out of our mind by the sights of other things; in that sense, there is never truly an “out of mind,” but rather only a temporary respite from the mind. For there are so many things which grab our attention each day, but which we cannot devote any real time to, that it only makes sense to consider them superficially, not really in their totality—to gaze upon their qualities but never their quantities.

Can man truly escape his own mind? No. He can only distract himself from the crude reality of being by what occupies his present attention—that is, what makes up his experiences and which gives his life some color. I am, perhaps, the most qualified man to have ever lived when questions of life are concerned, for on this topic, I am an expert, and would like to believe no man has ever felt life in all its sufferings, and dreaded life more severely and seriously, than I.

I am, in fact, that man to whom all things in existence appear like mirages, ghosts, phantoms, apparitions, phantasms—whatever you wish to call them. I am that man who distracts himself from the essence of life (actions-for-life) in order to have a simulacrum of life (actions-in-life, but not for-life). This is precisely the misery I speak of: the inability to find change a very compelling concept, not because it does not exist, but because it does exist, and for that reason dooms every thing—especially we organic beings—to a very minuscule part of the universal hierarchy. What suffering I endure every second of existence: doomed to change and never to find any finality.

I search in vain for any meaningfulness that could possibly be conjectured in the process of change, but find only change and impermanence—doesn’t such a life resemble Spinoza’s or Pascal’s? I’m happy to know that there have been other men who have felt the weight of existence crushing, and who have been unable to move past the fact that we human beings cannot correlate all our experiences with a concept that is itself meaningful and which deepens who we are in a very real sense.

We still collectively resemble the Australopithecines which we descended from. There isn’t a clearer sign of our ape ancestry than from our tendency to lament the unknown and to flee from the predator who shall eat us, as if self-preservation were merely a prelude to suffering. I find our morphological similarities more striking than our genetic ones, because our bones bear the weight of our nervous system more than do our cogitations (physically speaking, of course).

It doesn’t make any sense, and that is why it is so insufferable, so intolerable, so absurd and ridiculous: the concept of having to study (which I hate) to get a job (which I hate) just to be able to live (which I hate). In this here epitome of modernity, one finds everything hateful, for there is nothing in it that is glorious, or which has a meaning beyond its own meaning, and so justifies itself in supporting an already miserable existence.

Meaning today is only derived from how we sustain ourselves, in what we do, rather than in who we wish to become. Change, in this existential context, is really only the capacity to conform to what is profitable, for money is the only thing which people assign a supernatural value to—for, as Schopenhauer and Marx already described so long ago, it is the abstract representation of all value, and so becomes the bottomless pit which everyone today flings their hopes and dreams into, as if it were a wishing-well, in order to finally achieve a “decent life,” whatever that means.

The problem with existentialism today is that the humanness of the subject—the single individual—has been completely stripped from it and is replaced by the actions of the subject themselves, as if actions alone were what sustained meaning; in the context of change, this is all meaningless and drops dead the moment someone moves towards it.

Even my own philosophy, I am just now realizing, only accounts for change through contradiction, but merely ascribing contradiction—the dialectic—as the absolute finality of things is itself a sort of cop-out. There is no end to doubt, and in that truth comes the even greater truth: there is no end to seeking. To seek what? For what end? To what purpose? Even pragmatism reveals its flaws by making the goal the truth—the end of all seeking being the continuous progress made on certain goals.

This is lunacy made manifest in the existential individual; there couldn’t be a worse form of being than to treat being as its own end and to make whatever supports existence the contingency when the search for real meaning fails—that is, the performing of things which are actually meaningful but which do not sustain you.

Every lie is predicated on a practical truth: a truth which is not true objectively, but only so given the prejudices which define the age you live in—thanks to the material conditions presently embodied and social structures that are sustained on that very condition. For most people, their thoughts are not their own, because they are forced to think through systems which objectify them in the most meaningless way imaginable, turning an individuality into a number, a cipher, a nothing within a greater sea of nothing—precisely meaningless because it reduces things to ordered systems that ignore the complexity of human desire. It is not that people are stupid, but that they are unable to see what restricts their horizons of thought.

People are awakened to their situation only insofar as they are able to think past the practicalities of their material conditions; the constraints of thought are precisely the constraints of subsistence—the minimum amount of labor power used in order to replenish the energy of the worker, to say nothing of surplus labor.

The end of philosophy will never come because man will always be forced to deal with his condition, even if he no longer had to work to sustain himself. Once again, a great contradiction for modernity, because modernity views (almost) all problems as financial ones rather than what they really are: spiritual or existential ones.

The whole capitalist machine could be ground to a halt in two seconds if everyone suddenly stopped caring about their subsistence and actually demanded change—it is, in fact, on this very systemic basis that capital misery persists at all. Measures have been taken to deliberately weaken the bargaining power of the laborer and to keep him in line through threats of ruining his means of subsistence—hunger alone is what maintains capitalism. This very sinister measure, as a result, has transformed the whole conception of existence; no longer are people really concerned with the arts or humanities, with culture or music, with critical analysis or existentialism, for the simple fact that these are all abstractions and in no way stave off hunger or the elements which one would be subjected to should they lose shelter (that is, should they stop working on principle—for work is a very meaningless thing today—or suddenly become unable to afford their rent or mortgage).

Every bright-eyed idealist is destined to become a hard-nosed realist the moment the lights go out. This is not the end of philosophy, but it is the end of any real creativity in philosophy, for this world at present doesn’t allow for romantics like Nietzsche to really be a thing anymore: the only Zarathustras, or Manfreds, people look up to today are the asset managers, the “innovators” who are controlled by agents and companies, the sports stars and actors who make obscene amounts of money doing nothing but contributing to the collective fantasy, the writers who are themselves controlled by their agents, etc.—every avenue of creativity is trafficked by profit. I don’t even feel the need to mention politics or business, for even the herd are aware of all the deceits and lies implicit within them, the blatantly obvious power dynamics at play, and the flagrant disregard for any moral standard aside from power in all its wretched forms.

My philosophy is, I’m sorry to say, so far the only one in this century to actually be an objective analysis of all the problems that face humanity—while still being subjectively existential. You see, unlike others who claim objectivity, I am actually objective because I also account for my own subjectivity and morality: I am guided by my morality, and by my desire to see the world a better place, not merely a defense of the status quo, or an “objective analysis” which only repeats what we already know.

There’s very little hope in the world at present because there’s very little to be hopeful about. Life is a play whose final act is death, and all the preceding acts are just temporary forays into distraction, confusion, and debilitating sloth. I already said that change is the only constant and that all things, even on an atomic scale, move and vibrate and seek stability from the internal chaos implicit within existence; but all this falls to the ground when we die and means very little while we live—again, because nobody considers their own existence existentially anymore, only pragmatically, only with concern to their individual well-being and not the species’ well-being.

Having kids, for most people anyway, is really only done in order to feel a sense of responsibility for the future, otherwise you become absorbed in egoism and take life out purposefully rather than naturally. There are only so many things which one can do, and so many things which one feels they were born to do, but if one has to consider the whole of their life without having considered it before, they are very likely to buy into whatever makes them feel good rather than what actually is useful to them—again, a practical consideration, not an ethical or personal one, for comfort, like hunger and pain, is the easiest repose of a “busy” mind, concerned for the future and the viability of its continued existence.

It’s easy to tell a fool from a thinker merely by what their insecurities are. People are thought smart today if they make the end of all their actions financial security; the thinker couldn’t care less what the future holds, for he already knows the end of every life is death, and money only holds a temporary purpose (the sustaining of one’s life) and in that sense turns money into a utility, while the “practical man” makes money the purpose. Even Aristotle knew millennia ago that money is never the true purpose of action, because we always earn it for the sake of another good—it is never a good in itself, because nobody likes earning money; they only like what it can allow them to do.

If man didn’t have to work for money (which, by the way, is a relatively recent development that came out of the Industrial Revolution—only revealing the very human, rather than natural, basis for it) he would still be faced with the existential crisis of what to do with his time and energy. Energy is the source of all things, and time is the freedom to pursue those things, whether they be good or evil; if everyone was feeble, or too hungry to concern themselves with life projects, they would live as mere scavengers—hunters and gatherers whose whole existence is staked on the capacity to eat and replenish that energy exhausted in the fight for survival. For most of human history, the concept of a goal outside of mere subsistence would have been confusing, perhaps not even communicable because of how foreign of a concept it is. The questions that concern us moderns are not the same ones that concerned Plato or Aristotle, let alone our Stone Age ancestors.

As humanity advances and our material conditions improve, so too do our consciousnesses, and with that further awakening comes new ideas, or patterns of thought, that provide us with new ways of conceptualizing our present existence. Advancement was only possible because man was capable of abstracting from his lived reality; he was able to envision new ways of solving problems that confronted him, and in doing so built strong foundations from which new thought was made possible. This whole concatenation of events eventually led us to where we are today, but we humans today are fundamentally different in the sense that our problems are beyond what primitive man had to face; our cognitive architecture is not really built to wrestle with the kind of complexity implicit within systemic issues like capitalism (and everything downstream from it). We were forged in a natural selection process which weeded out the weak and left only the fittest.

It is true that every threat to humanity is either external in nature or self-made, but the self-made ones—which make up the majority of problems today, having already conquered most of nature—are nearly impossible to comprehend because they are systematically made by other humans: smart humans who know how to leverage their power to their benefit and who know how to repress and restrain the true passions and desires of others for the sake of maintaining a kind of homogeneous order in which the majority are made to feel at the whims of their oppressors. The change needed today is a change in the social dynamics as such.

The current order is already on its way out, and with that comes the potential to overthrow the status quo—not to maintain it, or to slightly alter it for the sake of conceding to the masses only a little of what is actually demanded, but to actually create lasting change, revolutionary change, in which the capacity to live is no longer predicated on our ability to work or provide value to an uncaring system. A system in which the basic necessities of life (food, water, shelter, clothing, and utilities) are perpetually guaranteed till the end of time; and a system in which everyone can truly pursue what fulfills them without having to sacrifice a third of their day for it—that must be the system of the future. Yes, people must work—mankind has never not had to work for survival—but make it so that we can do so with dignity, with pleasure, with alacrity, with punctuality, with a real desire to work. Until technology advances enough so that we no longer have to work to receive the materials necessary for life—say, like in the movie WALL-E (although, of course, that future is presented as dystopian, which I agree with)—there will always be labor, and toil, and the need to change and transform inert matter into consumable resources. Until that is possible, utopianism will merely be a dream.

Change is the only necessary condition which we know of. Nothing can do without it, and nothing could be made without facing it. What debilitating darkness surrounds all things when taken into consideration by man. Man, the temporary animal, whose nature natural selection has forged and bred in destruction and death over the vast expanses of time—so demure and nonchalant to the universe overall that everything he does is doomed to change and oblivion. But, letting all this be as it may, the human spirit demands that we adapt to this inevitability as well. Contradictions will rise, hypotheses will fall, and so long as the world turns and man is made to accept his condition, he too will have to overcome the changes and contradictions which press him down into the dust, in order that he may rise like a phoenix after everything has passed.

Mechanism

Having spent the greater part of my life living like some automaton, it was only a matter of time before I would fall into the rapacious hands of mechanism. Mechanism is, quite literally, the standard of the day. I know nobody living, no matter their age—even if they predate the First World War—who doesn’t inhabit some aspect of character that is mechanistic.

Man is a mechanism, or at least, that is how the mechanics and reductionists—those sturdy mechanical fellows who strongly adhere to Hobbes, Descartes, and Gassendi—would like us all to believe. Man is a machine whose wind-up is not coins but atoms. If only it were possible to see how the internal mechanism worked—then we would be able to reduce all things to their simplest primitives, their universal, ontological axioms, from which every dispute in the world could be solved through calculation and reason alone; alas, reasonable methodologies reveal the common flaws present in every mechanical philosophy: the complete avoidance of the subject—the turning of everything into an object to be studied, to understand through mechanical principles; of bodies extended in space, whose motion (due to gravity) follows some rectilinear path from which a man well-read in the Principia Mathematica could deduce the destination of it via some “natural laws.”

Mechanism proclaims to be the only true philosophy—or, at least it did when it was the dominant mode of conceptualization in intellectual circles. Men, naturally, wished to deal with nature, and so they approach nature with the same assurance as they approach themselves in the mirror. This approach, however, like all things, changed depending on the time period.

For most of history, man and nature were viewed as one; every so-called “first principle” was really a deduction made about the nature of an object’s essence as it appears in its being: singular and universal, the one and the many, a plurality and a unity, a totality and a particular—all this spoken of in the language of essence, being, matter, form, entity, mutability, immutability, subsistence, extension, solidity, quality, quantity, relation, modality, spiritualization, hylomorphism, etc., etc., etc. Nothing works out right the first time usually. Experience is a better bearer of truth than any hypothesis drawn from reason over actual sense. And hence came the mechanistic philosophy.

This mechanical approach to thought is typically associated with the Enlightenment—the age where men finally lifted themselves up from the dogmatic modes of intellectualizing (hiding behind God and tradition) and leaped headfirst into depths of thought, freedom, and individuality so strong we collectively as a species have never recovered from it. This kind of thinking was, in a word, reducible. The mechanical contraptions of clockmakers were all the rage then, and many intellectuals, seeking to reduce man to a bundle of cogs in a machine in order to understand him, thought the clock was the best analogy one can find in the whole kingdom of man’s creation.

I cannot blame them; in fact, I cannot blame any man for finding it nearly impossible to break from the prejudices of his age in order to aspire to new heights of thought which only his descendants will appreciate. I, for one, have always aspired to the motto of the Enlightenment—Sapere aude (“Dare to know”)—but at the same time, I also aspire to a kind of realism that would ruffle the feathers of my more logic-oriented positivists, those who derive their philosophy from axioms and empirical premises. Realism in what sense, though? Is it not the case that reducing reality to its constituent parts reveals only what is real, rather than what lies in abstraction? No. For the simple fact that life is too multifaceted and too complicated to be reduced to its singularities for the sake of revealing its whole totality.

I do not only dare to know, but I dare to believe. What every philosopher has gotten wrong since Francis Bacon, really, is to treat belief and knowledge as separate entities—as things which are fundamentally opposed to each other—rather than treating them for what they really are: two sides of the same coin, two approaches born from the same action—observation. In truth, they’re really two types of intuition to view the world from: one is “rational” while the other is “irrational” or “sentimental.” You see, even in describing them, you cannot help but fall into that false dichotomy which time and prejudice has placed upon them.

To dare to know and believe is to reconcile a man-made contradiction; like I said, for most of history there was no distinction between subject and object, because it was always viewed as comprising a whole which was not seen as distinct but only different in form. This has led many to assert that the true start of modern philosophy, in the Western tradition at least, was with William of Ockham: for he was responsible for nominalism, as distinct from realism, which claimed that universals (abstract concepts like redness or humanity) were only mental abstractions—nomina, or names—which we rational creatures assign to various objects as they appear in our perception of them. This new framework was what gave Roger Bacon the courage to break with the Aristotelian tradition and posit new methods of inquiry which allowed him to more fruitfully plunge into the depths of nature, in order to extract whatever secrets lay hidden in her.

I myself am a nominalist, and feel I could never again be reconciled to realism for the simple fact that there is a kernel of Kantian idealism within me which I cannot break from, because I feel it is the only empirical basis on which to ground everything else, even though it be without ultimate grounds itself. I believe there are objects which exist in the world absent from our perceptions of them—and this I deduce from the fact that I am myself (in the most abstract sense) a product of objects (my parents) coming together and moving about in order to create me, which I was not cognizant of or perceptive to—but I do not treat these objects as being universal, that is, as existing independently of the mind as real features of the world; I view them as abstractions born in the mind from our perceptions of them, but which were prior to the senses perceiving them. That is why I said Kantian idealism specifically, for what I did to reach this conclusion was employ a kind of transcendental deduction which reveals itself in both aspects of perception—subject and object, empirical and rational, to know and to believe.

To be transcendental is to bridge the purposefully made gap between mechanism and irrationalism. This, no doubt, explains my obsession with Emerson’s Transcendentalism and Coleridge’s Romanticism; there is an obvious connection between the two approaches to reality which, to separate them, is to lose the human in the mechanism, and vice versa, to lose the mind in the clouds of sensation and feeling. I like Transcendentalism and would still call myself a transcendentalist if it wasn’t so misused and abused as a label by those who reject rational thought completely.

Transcendentalism is really a kind of pragmatism: it is pragmatism made romantic, made one with nature, in-tuned with the human soul, the single individual, the identity of the subject, the I of the world, who looks out upon the horizon and sees every divinity contained within a single glance. The transparent eyeball Emerson spoke of in his 1836 essay Nature is really the subject, the single individual, made one with the objects of nature around him; it is not to lose yourself in nature, but to rationally come to understand that you are a part of nature, bred of nature, and shall die in nature. Reason is but one type of knowing, as is feeling; but when the two overlap and combine to resemble the whole human being, rest assured, that there is where the truth rests.

It is the height of madness to even suppose that reason and feeling are really different. Reason is a kind of feeling; it is an intuition of thinking, an ethics of reality, that transposes itself from the mind into lived reality. Those who separate them for the sake of efficiency when investigating nature remove themselves from nature, when, again, they are part and parcel of nature—the heavenly particles which fall upon you in the act of sensation are what make you alive, aroused, surprised, and amazed at the magnificence of the world, that you breathe and exert yourself amidst all this beauty. You fight against this urge which is your right to act upon—for what?

The world is yours and mine and everybody’s; there is enough of nature to go around, and there is more than enough of mankind to enjoy in it. What shocks me most is that not enough people realize this about the world, or that they don’t see this great capacity in them to move beyond mere reason, mere practicality, mere worldly responsibilities, and can come to see life, and enjoy it, in a way completely devoid of all earthly anxiety.

The truest freedom is that achieved in self-awareness—something which can never be had if you restrict yourself to thinking through the paradigms of others, systems of thought not your own. My calling, and thus my reason for writing this philosophy, was to find my own way, to create my own path, and in so doing—through my words and ideas—come to inspire the same in others; for this world as it is now, dead and abstracted from abstractions atop abstractions which bear no resemblance to lived realities, must be changed and transformed in order to represent humanity in a manner that is true to itself.

Mankind is not that old in comparison with the Earth, and shouldn’t this fact cause great commotions in the mind, and make every living person desire to see this planet more resplendent and positive? A man cannot live fully if he cannot create for himself his own system of understanding. The first part in liberating your mind from the tyranny of practicality and mechanism is to free yourself from all the false ideas which the world seeks to make epidemic: ideas precisely like mechanism, egoism, capitalism, reductionism, hedonism, and efficiency at the expense of the self. There is no justification for any of these ideals aside from naturalistic fallacies and argumentum ad consequentiam (argument from consequences).

Mechanism is man’s mind made robotic, singular, absolute in a false sense; these conceptions have morality completely stripped from them, and in doing so are made to resemble rational schemas which have the same rapidity and consistency of a clacking mill—lots of noise but very little sense. The sense is drained out of them because they are not made to be conveyed to another subject, but rather to be explained as an object to another unthinking object—as if man was merely an object, which is precisely what these mechanistic dilettantes want us to believe about ourselves.

Man today is so rational he believes he can gain insight about himself by studying other anthropoids (monkeys and gorillas specifically) rather than looking at the mirror, or to the book of life, or in the books of other people who knew and saw and experienced a thing or two in this world. Shakespeare, Montaigne, and La Rochefoucauld have already given the template of man and expressed it, perhaps, far greater than anyone today can hope to emulate. They are the real masters of life because they lived life and weren’t afraid of the consequences that stemmed from their ignorance of it. You can either come to know yourself through your actions, or in the actions of others.

For myself, my life is one prolonged ambition, one delayed action after the next; so afraid was I of existence that—like Pascal—I thought it best to eviscerate the desire to live by mechanistically examining what the component parts of existence were, in order that after finally becoming acquainted with every nut and bolt, I could take to action like a real human being. If only I could live without evaluating, without thinking rationally, like a beast—then, my only thought would be of the present and on my subsistence, and nothing else. It is an animal’s life only because it doesn’t use reason to appreciate the grandeur and beauty of it; but the same thought process that leads one to fall in love with Romanticism is the same one that makes them turn on life itself and end up becoming like a clock or windup-doll, following the intuition of reason alone, forgetting themselves as subjects. They are the same, only one is practical without being rational (the beast) while the other is rational without being practical (the man enslaved to reason).

There’s a famous anecdote from Samuel Johnson on the topic of drinking in which he was once asked by a lady friend of his why men find great pleasure in getting drunk and, in so doing, make beasts of themselves; Johnson, without a moment’s hesitation, replied, “I wonder, Madam, that you have not penetration to see the strong inducement to this excess; for he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” I like to think the mechanists and lovers of reason today fall under the same kind of excess: they forget the pain of being a man by reducing all his complexities to a single cause (as if that would make him feel better)—and reduce every external event which has the fortune or misfortune to be felt by him into a kind of homogeneous regularity of indifference, in which each event can be viewed stoically, in order not to shake the foundations of his tranquility. Ah! What a way to live; I know it all too well, for I keep this same approach up today… to my detriment.

Every idea is really a moral one, because it is imbued with the subjective stance of the individual thinking it. Just as it is absurd to make reason the end of all thinking, it is absurd to assume that the subjective sphere of life is subordinate to the objective sphere; what is engagement with life without subjective feeling? Nothing but the false cogitations of a pseudointellectual who believes all of life is really no different from a clock, or better yet, a universal blueprint which reveals the momenta of all particles in the universe. These mechanical philosophers must have a thing for false thought experiments, for they prop up their whole worldview on nonsense like Descartes’ evil demon, Laplace’s demon, Maxwell’s demon, Schrödinger’s cat, or Gödel’s incompleteness theorems (not a thought experiment, but used just as maliciously).

These lovers of cogs and mechanical apparatuses must have a thing for embarrassment—they receive secondhand embarrassment from themselves, truly. All their talk about reason and reduction, but what have they actually gained from any of that aside from pompous phrases and the crazy conviction, which they’ve convinced themselves of, that only “objective” claims about reality have any meaningful content—whatever can be empirically shown is really all that matters. I have no interest in people who presume to know God’s final truth when they can’t even account for themselves as individuals. If you were to ask them, “What is it to be a man?” they would reply with evolutionary biology or creationism, and yet, whichever one you hold as “more correct” does not advance you one step further in the direction of knowing yourself.

Every claim about the self is really an ethical one, because the individual is the one who makes the claim; in that sense, we can never not be ethical in our considerations about the world—we are condemned to live so long as we breathe, and each hollow breath only brings us closer to death. With death as the ultimate end of things, the one end we can be sure of, it behooves each individual to discover for themselves what they are.

The beingness of things is not to be found in reductionism, encyclopedism, or any other system of thought that removes the subject of experience for the sake of simplifying the real complexity which lies behind life. To live life is to act. One must act. One must look beyond the mere appearance of things and get to the true core of their individuality. Life is a storm, a journey without guides, rules, or end—until the very end, that is—and so makes itself out to be a monster which the sleep of reason helps produce. The cunning of reason is yet another lie told for the sake of the “truth.” Man does not have truth, and thus comes every intellectual idea ever.

If truth were an independent aspect of reality which the metaphysical realist would like us to believe, I would venture to say, like Kant, that we cannot know it: and no amount of citing ancient authorities or holy books, religious dogmas or scientific evidence, personal appeal or threat of violence, will ever make reality suddenly become what we think it to be. We are a part of reality, not above it; and in our vain stretches to reach out to what lies beyond, we find only what we already are: nature, naked and pure, not reducible to anything but what it already is itself—a brute fact without cause, without necessity, without reason.

It is not such a bad thing, I suppose, to accept what we feel in spite of our inability to comprehend it: for so long, I rallied against this notion because I thought the human mind was, in fact, capable of obtaining “the truth” of things, but now I realize how far off I was from the true path and how much more difficult I made existence because of my faith in reason. It seems the only way to become reasonable is to forgo reason itself and live life subjectively, not enslaved to reason but pragmatically in tandem with it.

Mechanism has only ever tried to explain man in terms of what he is not: things which comprise him and which he experiences, but which were not him ultimately. There is no “ultimately” to man, but there is a pragmatic acceptance of what man feels himself to be. This may be completely without grounds outside of a self-assertion (where all philosophy finds itself eventually), but it is the best man can do in a world in which objectivity is only a caprice born in the mind, not a real aspect of reality—in the same way man himself is not a real aspect of reality from the perspective of everyone not themselves, only an experience within the mind of some other, another subject, equally great and powerful, but still just that: an experience within the grand play of another person’s life. Mechanism could never be the answer, for it could never account for that subjectivity—the most powerful thing in all the world, and the only true solution to life.

Life and Inevitable Conflict

Life and Death

Nothing is presented to man with more certainty than his own life; and nothing in his life shows greater indication than his own eventual death.

Man is a mystery, a mystique, an utterly confused and absurd particular whose consciousness is a constant reminder of his own confusion.

Today, what constitutes the life of an individual is so mundane and boring it’s shocking to anyone with an eye for the lively why they persist in living. If the world isn’t already obvious—even to the most dense, thickheaded fools—then it assuredly will be when the last cubic meter of air has been expelled from their lungs, and a dark haziness begins to grow over their eyes, and they see the life of the world for what it truly is—that is, what it ultimately leads to—death.

Man thinks of himself in terms of the living. While he breathes, however, the shallowness of each breath becomes apparent to him with the passing of each day. The constant agitation which the body is convulsed in at every moment, though we be unaware of it mostly, is a cause for rumination in my book. What is this thing we call life? A greater presumption, I feel, could not be made when we are forced to answer the call of life for the sake of feeling a part of the living.

The agitation which we are constantly in is a direct byproduct of this very presumption:—we presume to live, though we die every second, and yet, either out of language or tradition, cowardice or custom, folly, vanity or obfuscation of our inner sufferings, we tell ourselves that we live, or rather, they live—those who are not us but are living together with us, though not alongside us in a direct way.

This confusion is the whole epitome of man, for after all, man has only ever been a miserable little pile of secrets. The world is seen only through man’s eyes, and so naturally it would be assumed that everything in it concerns him, and only him—but when viewed from a much broader perspective, a much more realistic perspective that is, he sees his own insignificance and rebels against it—against the idea that he only lives in order to die, and nothing ever-after more than just that sad reality. So be it, however: man looks everywhere but in himself to see the truth of that undeniable claim—nay, fact—and thus concerns himself in things which are only of this world.

Man, thinking only in a false dichotomy, believes that if he cannot have the truth, he must begrudgingly accept a lie, a Hinterwelt (Heaven, Jannah, Olam Ha-Ba—the World to Come) in order to feel at peace with his own lived reality here. It is either, man feels, that his earthly life is miserable—and so must be a lie—or only temporary and not really final—and so must be continued on in some way afterwards; there’s no in-between because he cannot accept contradiction, not realizing that if he accepts contradiction as necessary, and as something to overcome, he can push past this inculcated fear (which is really a false and stupid thing to be afraid of) and start living life as if life itself, and the world more generally which he inhabits, weren’t a barrier to him.

But let me speak of contradiction a bit more—for life and death necessitate a discourse equivalent to the universe in magnitude, but given the shortness of life and the limited attention of the reader, it is necessary to simplify the whole encyclopedia of man into a single phrase—just as Francis Bacon was wont to do. But I always held the contrary view: no matter how pithy and exquisite your maxim or adage on life was, man will always need more in order to deal with the constant flux of life (the ever-rattling contradictions which necessarily face him as he lives) in order to find peace and solace in his confusion. Thus, what is really needed is a kind of Bible, something so vast it could never be read over and over without new insights appearing here and there.

Sure, it can be argued a single quote contains an entire book of insight—and each time it is read a new book appears—but for the practical man, the man in a hurry, it is better he have in hand a book he will never read, in order to give the appearance of someone very busy and deep in esoteric things, when in truth he only holds the book up because it is big, and glancing at it gives him an imposing aspect, as someone greater than he really is.

If I were to hold myself to some restraint in thought, it would take a decade for me to write a single paragraph; so condensed would my thoughts be that even to myself they would appear absurd and confusing, just like my own life. I suppose it could be argued the whole of life should really be lived after the fashion it presents itself to one, but life would be very uninteresting if it were impossible to ruin it for yourself—to act rightly without worry, without having any thought of potential disaster or fear of loss.

I’ve come to accept the fact that no matter how much one knows, they could never know enough to not fear uncertainty in life; even if you lived with the same consistency and regularity of Immanuel Kant, your life would still be at the whims of chance and misfortune, for your life depends almost entirely on others, who have the thankless task of maintaining society by not going insane at the thought of existence—and who have the very real responsibility of keeping themselves alive by whatever means necessary. Whether they be a loafer or a workaholic, a man has got to eat and have a roof over his head.

The material conditions which Marx speaks of so elegantly and cogently bear very much on this reality: man cannot be a man if he lacks the means to maintain himself as a man—that is, the requisite conditions necessary for the epoch he is born into. It’s a point that has some inkling in Rousseau, and even goes as far back as Leibniz and Cardano, but which is really only a modern problem precisely because the consciousness of man is tied to his ability to recognize his own material needs, and his capacity to obtain them not out of the ground which he tills—like in the case of the European serfs during the Middle Ages, or African slaves during the Enlightenment period (what illumination it was)—but in his ability to perform some service, or repetitive task that really could be automated, in order to be paid in the form of wages in order to afford the same commodities he just had a hand in making.

Or, better yet, to pay a bank (a mawkish, avaricious middleman whose sole purpose is to lend out money—not his own—in order to receive payments in the form of interest, and in the process of doing so charging a service fee for no other reason than out of necessity, otherwise you would be barred from banking entirely) or landlord (whose sole purpose is to derive profit from a person already without any for the “privilege” of living on land which he has no claim to other than “owning” the residence it sits upon—the total Georgist victory could not come sooner) just to live under a roof. What a staggeringly complex situation we moderns find ourselves in; it isn’t even fair to call it “being stuck between a rock and a hard place,” but rather to call it “being stuck between an ultimatum and death”; for that’s ultimately what the current power structure is offering—either you play by the rules “fairly” (rules totally not stacked against anyone and without doubt capable of being overcome with enough hard work and perseverance and elbow grease and selling your every waking hour to some occupation, etc., etc.) or you die.

You see how this contradiction rears its ugly head into every aspect of life, because you necessarily have to engage with it in order to live. Being born in the world today feels like being stuck on a really bad roller coaster, and the only way off it is to endure it until it reaches the end; however, in this analogy, the end of life is death, and to live is really only to suffer through it—does one not see now why everything appears so hopeless and meaningless? Why this contradiction is nearly impossible for most to endure, and if they can, it is only because they have accustomed themselves to the dolor animi (mental pain) which they are faced with every second of existence.

On this very topic, no one even approaches a nihilist or existentialist when it comes to truly grappling with the core problem of existence; indeed, the problem of existence strictly falls within the domain of the religious, the spiritual, the existential, and the nihilistic—all meaning is bound to end in tears because tears are the only relief one can receive that is any use at all when confronted by the complete incomprehensibility of life itself. To be specific, I have, in no particular order, men and women like Augustine, Meister Eckhart, Montaigne, Madame Guyon, Shakespeare, Pascal, Vauvenargues, Chamfort, Jules Lequier, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Lev Shestov, and Camus as the greatest and most thorough communicators on existence there has ever been.

To live is the greatest of all contradictions, for it evades effortlessly all attempts to systematize it, or mathematize it, or, in a word, reduce it to the point of making it like a science—that is, to make it conformable to our hypotheses about it. A hypothesis is a type of subjective reasoning, in which the subject feels they have thought a good idea that may give insight into the nature of a thing’s mechanism: how a thing works, what a thing can do given the nature of it.

To ask for the nature of a thing is really to demand an impossibility, like asking why you exist: the concept of life already contains within it consciousness, that is, apperception—self-awareness of existence itself—and so has implicit within it the idea that it is already present and existing, not something that once was not existent and now suddenly is, but rather becomes itself through recognizing what it is, what its essence is as implied in its being as such.

It is a very difficult thing to even put into words precisely because words fail us when communicating what our minds have never been able to grasp; that is why when speaking of the ineffable, one must resort either to repetition or speaking in the negative—affirming what a thing is not rather than what a thing appears to be, for appearances are but representations, and thus in an absolute sense really nothing but abstractions born in the mind from experience.

But this contradiction, again, is omnipotent, for no conceivable conception can hope to apprehend it in its totality; when we speak of life, we really only refer to death, because death is a kind of absolute that has no referent in anything aside from the concept of nothingness, non-being, anti-life, without soul or, better put, without meaning for life, for it is the very negation of life. But how is one to speak of contradiction then? Let us examine this a bit closer now.

Every contradiction presents itself as something to be overcome rather than understood in a direct way; and, it just so happens that life and death are the greatest contradictions ever conceived by man. Not even the law of identity really does justice to true contradiction, because it only posits itself in relation to what it is not (as every colloquial understanding would bow to), but in doing this has no concept of what it is becoming, or what it may be in the future as it recognizes itself in-itself for-itself, but not for-an-other—here I mean in the Hegelian/paraconsistent sense.

This flaw of reasoning which has reigned since Aristotle—for he was the first in the Western tradition to really consider all things encyclopedically—has given us very good but now very restrictive, I dare say obsolete, modes of affirming and negating concepts, which has become so pervasive that nearly everybody who is educated today cannot think outside of dichotomies or simplifications or reductions or reifications (the treating of abstract concepts, models, or hypothetical constructs as concrete, physical, or real-world entities).

The only way to speak on life and death, and in that way bypassing their internal contradictions, is to treat them in a life or death manner—as a thing of utmost importance, a thing nearly beyond the pale—nay, is far and away beyond the pale, but which you must wrestle with fully and totally anyway in order to live. To even speak on these things requires an astonishing amount of courage, for very few are able to burrow deep into the recesses of their being, the abyss of their individuality, and come out sane or actually informed on anything. Usually it ends in madness if history is to judge—going insane or ending in despair are the two most common hallmarks of a mind stretched out on the rack of concepts far beyond what it can psychically go. It really requires a mind of immense fortitude to enter into itself without worrying about how ignorant you actually are about yourself.

I say all this from personal experience:—dear reader, take it from me, you do not, and will not, ever find yourself (who you are as an individual human being) in the study of history, literature, philosophy, or science: you’ll only come out like me, being really good at synthesizing vast swaths of information, facts, dates, figures, and technical jargon, but utterly lost as to how to use all of that to explain yourself to yourself. You can only explain yourself in terms of yourself, in terms of what you’ve been, what you are, and what you will be.

Everything is a becoming, not a static, rigid abstraction which can only be thought but never brought into reality. In order for anything to have any existential value, it must be lived out in the concrete, rather than lived in the abstract—as merely a thing which one can call to mind but which can never be acted out on, only acted in the mind, but not in the real world, where things come and go and move here and there and everywhere all without your slightest notice.

My philosophy is a philosophy of awakening. It is heavily influenced, indeed may honestly be called, a modern form of Transcendentalism. Action, like perception, is transcendental, and it is so because it unifies reason and feeling into one cohesive framework—where reason here is rationalism and feeling is empiricism. Everyone already familiar with Kant’s Copernican revolution (the synthetic a priori) will know that his transcendental deductions formed the whole basis of what became post-Kantian idealism, where the new paradigm was to find categories of the mind which could reconcile emotion with reason, sensation with material reality—what I would call today the war between positive thinkers and realist thinkers (realist not in the metaphysical sense, but in the pragmatic-practical sense). That is, on the one hand, thinkers driven primarily by positive affirmations, and on the other, thinkers solely focused on outcomes and results derived from logical procedures which were thought to work given their past performance.

The whole world is really divided between these two types of thinking, and yet, I know full well that everything I’ve just said is really a lie, because, if we are to speak in an absolute sense—which anti-realists in the practical sense of that term deny outright—we have only provided our prejudices regarding mankind, and how they think, and what they assume to be true based on their own subjective frameworks of veracity and conceivability. It is a lie if it is meant in an absolute sense, and it is merely an educated guess if it is meant in a pragmatic sense: in fact, that is all it can be, pragmatic:—pragmatism as the mode of reconciliation. The reconciliation of reason and feeling is only possible in a contradictory, non-dichotomous way; they must appear only in lived experience—everything else is folly. Life necessitates contradiction, and I mean that with the same authority reserved for atomic theory, evolutionary theory, and the germ theory of disease—nay more, going further back into intellectual history, with the same seriousness that geocentrism was once treated, or astrology, or Aristotelian metaphysics, perhaps Thomism even.

There is a famous quote by H. P. Lovecraft that speaks of the greatest fear in the world, and it goes as follows:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

In enlightenment—there lies our fear. There is no end to our benightedness in the world; what we even dare to consider in it is something which, were we to venture deeper into it, would leave us with a strong sense of dread—an emptiness of unimaginable proportions, so vast, in fact, that we would conclude with the same certainty of our death, that no amount of prescience, or clairvoyance, would illuminate the dark undercroft which we are perpetually walking through in this world. The world is a constant night to man, in which all his concepts appear black, and thus give him the aspect of intelligence by merely labeling every object he comes in contact with as black, in the same way a logician labels all propositions as either analytic or synthetic. I find it all very boring, and not really enlightening on a personal (existential) level.

Life is, as an idea, so obvious and intuitive you would think no one would have to explain it; but the simplest things often hide the wildest paradoxes, or, in my experience, contain the most miraculous contradictions which even dialectics and pragmatics is incapable of overcoming—and yet it must be overcome, it must be, has to be, needs to be, for without that, there is no living, only thought, only Le Penseur, after the manner of Rodin.

To go back to Lovecraft, it is exactly in our inability to correlate all our contents that makes life comprehensible and livable, otherwise it would be impossible to even breathe within such an existence. Anyone stupid enough to presume that life has a single answer to it simply has not lived life, but only reflected on life; and those who take life only for what it is, and fail to see that there is more beyond it by merely looking within it, have only considered life practically, aesthetically—not ethically or existentially, religiously or spiritually.

How many times must it be repeated? To the point of dying of despair, I would suppose. It was Kierkegaard, after all, who was the first to identify despair as the only reasonable action to come to if the leap of faith was not taken with respect to life. What makes life existential is death, and everything else considered in it is bound to go unnoticed with each passing second. It is for that reason that it must be thought of dialectically—where the feelings and reasons of man are both given equal ground to graze in the walk of life. Life is death as it is lived through, and death is the end of life—forevermore.

Animal

It has never been doubted that man was an animal. Even the ancients, whom we moderns today like to think of as superstitious or given to vain speculations for the sake of easing their minds, admitted that man, though a creation of the gods, is closer to animal than any divine thing.

It was man who first came up with the concept of “animal” after all, was it not? Did man not deliberately distinguish himself from the beasts of the field in order to place himself higher atop the pecking order—the summit of nature, higher than all things below it on account of our genius? I, for one, find it an extremely presumptuous thing we do: to assume ourselves the center of the world—for some, even the creators of it (idealists)—and prance about it with an air of pomp and circumstance that should rarely be seen, or even expressed.

No. Man reveals his true nature all too often; and it is enough to accept the truth of it alone, were we honest and far from vain. But alas, it is difficult to get man to see what he feels he could never become, because man is ignorant of his real nature so long as he does not have to confront it, so long as he is spared from the realities of life: of misfortune, anxiety, choice, chance, misery, and death.

It is an incomparable fact, when recognized, that life hardly presents itself to us today as something interesting or as a task to be done. What, if anything, is there to truly differentiate life today and life tomorrow? Does anyone have even the slightest idea what makes every day different, or unique, or interesting, or even worth living? One does not have to go far to consider the basic questions of life and instantly find themselves in the depths of a darkness so immense no light can escape it. The event horizon of man’s ignorance with respect to life has seemingly always been constant; whether the advancement in man’s material conditions justifies an expanding circumference is difficult to say, for the matter has not changed, merely the form. Man’s ignorance with respect to himself is like a ball that is in one instance dipped in white paint, followed by black paint, completely covered and unable to know whether it was always black or whether it was once another color.

Nature necessitates change, and if any absolute claim can actually be affirmed with certainty, that would be the one I bet on. Man may change, but he is still an animal; the whole taxonomy of man bears this out—the law of monophyly practically necessitates it. It was for that reason that “animal,” after Carl Linnaeus, was no longer used as a scientific classification for man proper (ignoring his kingdom classification—Animalia—of course); there was no trait in man, aside from reason and perhaps consciousness, that distinguished him from his simian ancestors. Man has never not been Hominidae, nay further still, Eukaryota. The proper taxonomical name for man today lies in our vanity, as everything under the sun seemingly does in reference to man, for we gave ourselves the moniker sapiens (the one who is wise/discerning) from the Latin sapĕre—originally meaning “to taste,” but over time it became “to know”; as if man was able to know anything, or as if his judgment was good enough to be considered wise by others. It is shocking how ignorant we have seemingly always been as a species.

There is no clearer sign of maturity in a mind than to see the majority of mankind for what it really is: a band of ignorant savages who have always been ready to sell themselves to an authority, so far as their lives are not inconvenienced by whatever decision that authority makes. The very conception of what it is to be man, as we have it today, is a relatively recent innovation. There was no such thing as the “individual” before Rousseau, really; the very concept of individuality would have been completely foreign to, say, the erudite scholars of the Italian Renaissance—let alone the ancient Greeks, Muslims during the Umayyad Caliphate, Japanese during the Heian period, or Chinese during the Tang dynasty. Everyone living in those societies would have considered themselves only in respect to the community, or as subjects to the lords whom they worked under; there was no internal recognition of individual identity—what I call interiority—but rather a type of collective identity with respect to those who were “above” you in the social hierarchy. The only thing a person then could identify with was their own family legacy or, if they were lucky, their leader. The very framework by which we consider ourselves, and view ourselves through, was a byproduct of man becoming conscious of his own place within the world. Anyone who has studied history will know that most human beings lived lives almost identical to their ancestors; there was very little in the way of social mobility, just like today, and there were rigid structures in place to maintain that status hierarchy—a thing we also still cling to today.

With the breakdown of monarchical order and with the restructuring of civil society, combined with the rapid advancements made in technology, medicine, and science, along with countless progressive ideals being pushed to the front of public consciousness, the average person gradually became aware of their status as individuals—their place in the world and what they contribute to society. The decline of the old order had been in play since the Protestant Reformation, for religion held massive influence on the majority and was for the first time being spoken in the common vernacular, the language of the people, rather than Latin. Just imagine: you go to a Sunday service only to hear a whole sermon in a language you can’t understand—ABSURD. The Bible was for the first time being liberated from the scholarly stranglehold it had been under since the Patristics; the word of the “good” book was no longer subject to church authority but rather left to the common people to listen to and interpret on their own, and thus came every sect and division we have today.

But, in truth, these religious uprisings were only the prelude to the real destroyer of the old order—capital. To the king or emperor, the peasants, even in revolt, proved little threat, for the army was too strong, too vast, and too well-fed to be in any danger of defeat from a few thousand feeble, backward, malnourished serfs; to say nothing of the nigh impossibility of uprising in the first place. Anyone thought to pose a true threat to the crown was either killed or banished from the land, and this stronghold of austerity led to dependence and compliance out of a practical necessity: survival. The first real threat to the established order was capital—the birth of the bourgeois class, right below the aristocracy itself. When subjects grew private fortunes as large as, or larger than, the king’s, it was the king who was subject to the whims of his creditors, rather than the bourgeois being subject to his ruler.

The dictatorship of the aristocracy was on its last legs, and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie was on its way. This was cemented with the Dutch East India Company, the first joint-stock company, which effectively acted on behalf of the Netherlands, advancing its interest—imperialism—and making null the concept of a king by showing a state (for at the time “nation,” a collection of independent, autonomous lands, did not exist as a concept) could be run without top-down authority. This was the beginning of what is today called classical liberalism, made famous by arguments from John Locke mainly, that supported, among other things, property rights and the ability for landowners to have a say in how the state should be run—essentially making the direction of a state subject to the desires of the ruling classes.

If it isn’t already obvious from what has just been said, let me make it clearer: this is where modernity comes from—the birth of Western modernity is liberalism. The notion of modern man, free and able to pursue what he will, was born out of the idea of being able to own something which the ruler of the state had no claim over. It should be noted that this remains only true in theory but false in practice, for most are unable to own anything at all; the barrier to entry into the ownership class is kept artificially high by those already in power in order to exert dominance and maintain order on the majority, while simultaneously ensuring that they maintain their power and make it impossible for the majority to rise up in their social standing. The very hands which made modernity are also slowly strangling it, because it cannot keep up this power charade forever; sooner or later there must be reforms, or revolution is all but certain.

Throughout history, every working-class group—plebs, shudras, serfs, slaves, and members of the Third Estate—have always resented their impoverished state, but it was only in modernity where the commoner could, again in theory, advance beyond the status or class they were born in in order to live a life of their own design. It all leads back to capital and the ability to acquire and enlarge it beyond all necessity; it is through that lens that most people today see themselves. It is their ticket to live as individuals rather than animals, or so they’re told, and so they make it the central part of their identity and subjugate nearly every action for its end. It is for this reason that modern man is so lost, and why he really is no different from his ancestors, who worked and lived not much differently from beasts of burden—domesticated animals whose sole purpose was to tread out grain to make bread for the sake of eating it. Harvesting was the primary trade, and we moderns are merely reaping every seed we didn’t sow.

Modern men cannot find themselves in the world because they are doomed to live after the demands of another rather than their own. To call that life is really a tragicomedy—for it is comedic to take seriously, but tragic because it must be taken seriously in order to live. This newfound consciousness within man, which I just spent a great deal of time explaining the origin of, is really a kind of nightmare: for at least during the Middle Ages there was no concept of social mobility, or freedom, or choice in the matter of how one was to live their life—all to obsess and depress oneself over. In such a case, I do, in fact, believe it would have been better to remain in great ignorance of our true power than have the responsibility of making one’s way through life and putting oneself out there for the sake of making a living. This indomitable feeling of being in constant strife and conflict with ourselves as we move through the world is nearly too much to handle responsibly; there is, perhaps, too much freedom today and too many potential avenues one can go down for their life.

Everyone living today knows this feeling intuitively: knows the world is large and uncaring, and rigged against us, and organized for the sake of humiliating us and making us feel like failures because all we’re shown outside ourselves is other “successful” people that society at large tells us to admire and be like. And worse still, the potential of becoming successful is made to seem as if it were certain so long as we work hard enough at it—this lie has to die. We need to be more realistic, more conservative, more restrained and pragmatic when it comes to formulating what we think the “good life” is. Most people today only seek the good life in money, because money is sold to everyone as the only way to achieve happiness—again, because our culture, and our values more generally, are inherently materialistic, egoistic, self-defeating, and meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Man is an animal because he is led to live like one, after the manner of his ancient African ancestors—Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve.

Man is man; he is what he is, but the moment he considers what he is aside from himself, what is outside him that is… —————. Nothing. Blank. No one dares to consider what lies beyond himself, for if he does, he will revolt at the madness caused by it. There is nothing scarier to man than himself, for his self is the ultimate mystery, a blindness that is immense. This fear makes him subject himself to material conditions he hates but, because he fears uncertainty and death more, endures for the sake of his peace of mind and life. It is our modern condition. Man is at all times made to think things which are not from himself, and time and again he destroys himself in attempting to become more, to be more, to see himself as more—all this stemming from his self-conscious state of reflection about himself, which he never really had before: it is absurd.

The world has always been absurd, and man has always been ignorant of his true purpose, but what we face today is unlike anything in history before, precisely because we moderns are unlike every generation which has come before. I made the argument that modernity was born with the Dutch East India Company at the start of the 17th century, and I feel that’s true, especially considering the historical evidence, but I did not venture deep into the existential implications of that. The reason for that is because they are not the same as they would have been for, say, a Dutch merchant in 1637 who lost his life savings over tulips. Since then, the progress of man’s condition and the rapid maturity of his consciousness with respect to himself, alongside all the advancements made in living standards, have caused a new crisis in man the animal to emerge—what René Guénon dubbed La Crise du Monde Moderne (The Crisis of the Modern World). This is man’s inability to see himself spiritually, to become himself without turning to evil (money), without forcing himself to play on the terms of corrupt forces (occupations), to play a rigged game that makes it nigh impossible for him to actually live decently—and all this, compounded, to make it beyond difficult for him to live in a dignified manner which actually fulfills him.

Man is lost to himself because the conditions of the modern world—both materially and intellectually (spiritually and emotionally)—are not conducive to his well-being or for his benefit. Modern amenities are not the problem. Work is not the problem. Bills are not the problem. And money is, in an absolute sense, not the problem. Man is the problem, and always has been the problem, because man has the ability to change everything he or she is subjected to by other people but chooses not to, because it is easier to accept being trampled upon by those more powerful than you than it is to put up a fight for your newly discovered and accepted rights and dignities. Until you see how trivial everything in the world really is, you will always feel incapable of doing anything to change it, because you feel yourself subject to, rather than actually being above, it—which you are.

Every barrier to man’s liberation is placed upon him by himself, because he lets others—those unforeseen forces that control things—make him believe he is incapable of overthrowing them. This is the first thing which has to be overcome if modern man is to get beyond crisis and actually start living authentically, genuinely, and ethically. You are subject to your material conditions, for sure; but the goal is not to play within that framework, that artificial construct which limits your self-potential (as most people do today), but to get beyond it. To change the world: that is what must be done. To meet the needs of the majority: that is what must be fought for. Until then, there will always be class warfare—with the few holding indigence over the many like a Sword of Damocles. Friedrich Engels famously said:

Tears do not give power. Power does not shed tears. The bourgeoisie shows you no gentleness and you won’t conquer it with kindness.

And so we have it. Power does not shed tears. Power only acts, and it acts like an animal (violently) for the sake of maintaining and propagating itself among the few. If the people’s appeals are not heard by their representatives, then what use is government? What use is “freedom” or a vote if nothing changes, and the few continue to batter the many into submission on pain of misery and death? I ask more directly, again: what use is freedom if you cannot use it to further your freedom and the freedom of others, or, better yet, to extend it beyond what the ruling classes want us to consider as freedom? For we all know deep down their freedom and our freedom are completely separate things: they get luxury and we get a social class with little mobility; they get tax write-offs while we get tax hikes; they get the freedom to pursue their passions without worrying about the bills, while everyone else is forced to compete and to look upon each other as competition, when in truth we’re all allies and friends in this great class struggle. Until we as individuals collectively rise up and fight for the values we wish to see spread throughout the world, we will never be able to live as true people, only animals.

Nature

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.
—Henry David Thoreau.

When I look out onto the world and look past all the superficial things which are taken as truth today, I see the true meaning behind nature. I am a man thoroughly in love with nature, and I only wish it were possible to instill this kind of passion in others without effort.

All my life, I feel, was lived in disregard of nature. What nature was to me before I knew her was merely an abstraction—something enjoyed by people who had only sense enough to quickly discard her when reality came calling. I never heeded reality, however. The creative soul, the wanderer, the seeker, the yearner, the existential enjoyer—in short, the philosopher of life (poet of existence)—has never been one to take reality as it is, but rather to see in reality what it should be.

The distinction between the descriptive and the normative has always dominated the psyche of man; the descriptive is in the ascendant today, but it is, thankfully, on its way out—as more and more see the necessity of community and sympathy between individuals, rather than the morose isolation and egoism by which we have been led. These influences come from without, with no relation to anything within ourselves for ourselves. The normative, the subjective, the spiritual, the mystical (whatever you wish to label it) has more or less been relegated to a kind of esotericism—something to be looked at in awe, but not really deeply understood, let alone practiced; and if it be practiced, it is done in a very shallow and meaningless way.

I’ve never been one to really allow the world to limit my heart. My interests were always paramount, and always to be followed without the slightest hesitation or distraction. My life is one long passion with the damned and demented; in fact, the word “passion” alone may have sufficed, for if we look upon our Lord and Savior—Jesus Christ—we see in his Passion the final steps within a long journey that make up a story worthy of changing all of history. What is it within the whips, and jeers, and crown of thorns, however, which makes us come unto him with reverence and awe? Indeed, I know many people converted merely on a single telling of the Passion narrative, but again I ask: why is the nature of suffering in Christ so supreme that we give ourselves up to him and follow him almost forever after? It is in his sufferings that we see ourselves. Jesus is like a mirror from which all of humanity’s deeds are reflected for all to see. Jesus spoke for all humanity with his death and was the final sacrifice needed for man’s salvation. That is the power of the story, after all: that a man was willing to die for us, for all his children, only to return again after three days and ascend beyond this world to a place where he reigns like a king, but much more powerfully than even the greatest conqueror of Earth.

Again, what is great in the Christ story is that there has only been one Jesus, and there has only been one true sufferer when thought of from the religious perspective. The subjectivity of it is immense. The sensation one feels at the thought of Christ is unlike any other: so much immensity, so much depth, so much power—all born within the breast of a single man who knew himself to be the Savior, the Son of God, the true prophet of whom the whole Tanakh spoke. Such incomparable magnitude is nearly incomprehensible for any man to describe. We are in Christ when we speak of our passion, for his passion is like our passion, but much greater—so great, in fact, that it transcends everyone else’s. His suffering was so full and complete that, within it, every other person can find something to relate to.

But I think that’s enough exegesis out of me. I only wished to call to light what the Passion meant to me. The passion of Christ is the passion for all mankind. But I want to return to a phrase which I did not emphasize when initially writing: “and thus follow him almost forever after.” The important part here is almost. Why almost? Am I not a believer? Are the sufferings of Christ nothing to me? The truth is, in Christ I find myself, but I do not subscribe to any doctrine, dogma, denomination, sect, or creed regarding him. It is not that I place myself above God, but that I only find myself in Him, and I do not place myself beneath Him. I am a follower of Christ in the same way I am a follower of Muhammad, Mani, Valentinus, Buddha, Zarathustra, and Socrates. In truth, like every great mind—be it sage, syncretist, mystic, poet, prophet, philosopher, novelist, or existentialist—I am a follower of myself, like every true individual that has ever lived. There was no Christianity before Christ, no Islam before Muhammad, and no self (subject, in an existential sense) before me.

My shadow is really the only one who knows me, for like it, I exist, yet I feel when I consider life honestly, I do not think, and therefore am not, and can never be—just like the shadow which cannot be without the object to obstruct the light. The light of my life is really only comprehensible when I see the shadow of my ignorance regarding the source of it. The moon may shine, but only because the sun allows it to be so; otherwise, there would be an eternal new moon, which would grow old very fast, I feel.

It is in this ignorance that I search and destroy, collect and discard, gather and waste. Is this not the greatest passion of all time? Does one not feel their life so internally and powerfully that they could turn their individualities into their personal religions? Could one not consider their very selves like Brahman to the Hindus, or like the Dao to Daoists, or like nature to the Romantics and Transcendentalists? Ah, this ignorance of life… this very aspect of singularity made to survive in a world full of contradicting pluralities, amongst others, amongst other omnipotent individuals. How, when faced with such a situation, is anyone really to humble themselves before existence and not go mad at the prospect of it? Didn’t Pascal and Kierkegaard find the answer in God, and Emerson and Nietzsche in nature, and Schopenhauer in the will, and Tolstoy in love, and Kafka and Camus in the absurdity of existence itself?

Didn’t all great thinkers return to the Earth and either spiritualize or humanize it? I like to think everyone’s meaning, or purpose, is monistic—from Platonism to Irenicism: from the Forms to matter, from the Nous to the Monads, from animism to atheism—man’s search for meaning has always been dependent upon himself. That is the one premise which upholds all of existentialism; nay further, humanism (as Feuerbach defined it) is but an extrapolation of the religious impulse—but placed within ourselves, where it originally was, rather than outside ourselves, where most today think it to be. The true and final religion, in that sense, is humanism.

The greatest misfortune in the history of mankind was the triumph of abstraction over man: where man became submissive to himself, submissive to his own ideas, and relegated his whole activity to propitiating what he thought was right, rather than what was actually right for his own life. I once said that any man who wishes to treat religion in a purely objective (rational) way will either become a Spinozist or an atheist; they will either treat their holy books literally or allegorically (spiritually)—but true individuals who know themselves will treat it like neither, but rather pragmatically, that is to say, in both aspects. For, again, the point of belief (or faith) is not to forget your humanity (individuality), but to uplift and encourage your humanity. Kierkegaard, like Jacobi and Tertullian before him, is supreme on this point:

Faith is precisely the contradiction between the infinite passion of the individual’s inwardness and the objective uncertainty. If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.

Where is the upliftment in anything? Where am I in anything? Where am I supposed to go in order to find myself within this vast sea of nature which constantly pulls me in every direction and which leaves me without a rudder to steer with? I say it is within you, in your heart, soul, and mind; it is in your love for others and in your hatred for the wicked; it is in your fortunes and misfortunes, your victories and your defeats: in short, it is in your life. Every answer to the question of life’s meaning—if we are to take it at face value and not skirt around it—will necessarily be recognized inwardly but understood outwardly. It is in the internal recognition of our actions from the external world that reality appears before us—both manifesting in our minds and in the world at large.

Reality is both becoming and perception, will and representation, appearance and existence—whatever delineation you like. The only thing you must remember is this, dear reader: the world is a mess, and society will provide you no answers, for the world at present is run by people who see no qualms in needless immiseration so long as they benefit from it. Therefore, you must trust nobody but yourself ultimately and find strength enough to move beyond the Zeitgeist and create for yourself a new paradigm by which to live, in order for others to do the same.

As much as it pains me to admit this—for I spent a year of my life thinking this—individuality alone will not save you; a benign form of universal egoism (essentially socialism with democratic characteristics) is, in the long run, no different from hell. A world in which everyone sees each other as a means to an end, rather than an end in themselves, is a world made for beasts, demons, and everything non-humanitarian. Almost everything in the world at present is hateful to me because nothing in it is true. There is so little honesty in people because they hide their true motives under a litany of false justifications made to seem strong using absurd assumptions and entirely wrong presuppositions. It is this reason that makes life seem no different than a bad joke. What a joke this world is, this cruel experience, this absurd state of things; a man can hardly understand why he lives, let alone comprehend what he lives for. Isn’t it much better, then, to live without trying—to stop taking it all so seriously, treating everything as if it has a reason for being or a final answer—as if life were a multiple-choice exam? Let’s be serious now—stop taking even the moonlight seriously; there’s nothing in it anyway but the whole of earthly joys. What little that will be when faced with the oblivion of time, from which there is no escape and no medicine powerful enough to forget completely.

I am, if I may be allowed to speak without vanity, a man who finds meaning in the unending search for what existence really is. That is why I described my life at the start of this as one long passion (suffering) with the damned and demented; by “damned and demented,” I really mean those whom I sit alongside and who are, like me, absolutely stunned and bewildered by what life really is. That is why I find myself in every great thinker, sage, prophet, or poet who, again like me, sought the answer to the universe—I see myself in everyone who has ever been and would die before I relinquish myself, my reason, and my individuality for the sake of a false consolation that comes from being told what is true, rather than discovering what is so on your own.

Nature to me is the world, is humanity, is being human. Most questions to life can be answered by simply staring at a tree in my view. There’s a famous anecdote about Henry David Thoreau regarding this feeling of nature as the ultimate source of all things beautiful and the truth of all things human:

Why, one morning I went out in my field across there to the river, and there, beside that little old mud pond, was standing Da-a-vid Henry, and he wasn’t doin’ nothin’ but just standin’ there—lookin’ at that pond, and when I came back at noon, there he was standin’ with his hands behind him just lookin’ down into that pond, and after dinner when I come back again if there wasn’t Da-a-vid standin’ there just like as if he had been there all day, gazin’ down into that pond, and I stopped and looked at him and I says, ‘Da-a-vid Henry, what air you a-doin’?’ And he didn’t turn his head and he didn’t look at me. He kept on lookin’ down at that pond, and he said, as if he was thinkin’ about the stars in the heavens, ‘Mr. Murray, I’m a-studyin’—the habits —of the bullfrog!’ And there that darned fool had been standin’ —the livelong day—a-studyin’—the habits—of the bull-frog!

This recollection of the neighbor’s regarding the habits of Thoreau informs us more than I think we can bargain for. There is in this single anecdote the whole universe—I say truthfully. What Thoreau sees in nature is the whole expanse of creation, laid out for man to take part in. Man is not merely some passive receiver of sensations—sensations which astonish him temporarily, but which can just as quickly be forgotten—but a participant in creation every time he observes nature. The glory of nature is almost enough to make me affirm God Almighty. I said before that I feel God in the Passion of Christ, but the temptation is just as strong to affirm Him when I look out into the world and see everything that is magnificent in it.

Just think about it: you’re sitting there out in the sun, as far from anxiety as one can imagine, and while you sit, bathing in all that heavenly glory, you notice a little bullfrog hopping about—you wonder, “Maybe it’s looking for a partner, maybe it’s hungry, maybe it just wants to go for a hop in the sun.” All these thoughts hit you at once, and immediately you come to the correct conclusion about that little bullfrog: it’s just like me. Am I not like that little bullfrog, hopping about, looking for something to love, something to do, something to enjoy and take part in? I, for one, would like to think I am just as glorious as that little bullfrog, come to think of it. If I may be allowed to quote Emerson regarding this matter:

Who is he that shall controul me? Why may not I act & speak & write & think with entire freedom? What am I to the Universe, or, the Universe, what is it to me? Who hath forged the chains of Wrong & Right, of Opinion & Custom? And must I wear them? Is Society my anointed King? Or is there any mightier community or any man or more than man, whose slave I am? I am solitary in the vast society of beings; I consort with no species; I indulge no sympathies.

Man is but a part of the world, but the whole of his essence. Me and the little bullfrog are solitary in the vast society of being—this “being” is nature, and like your own subjectivity, it is the truest truth that truth can truly be; it is the truth of all truths, the truth above all other truths. One finds in the presence of truth that which is numinous and ineffable—even atheists become believers when they stare at the moon, for who would be so bold as to proclaim the moon an empirical fact only, and nothing more? Nay, nevermore, nevermore; the raven atop the bust of Pallas above my chamber door is not merely a sign, but a whole realm of existence—this raven is but one aspect of the whole essence of reality.

Like nature, I am one with it, and come unto it with reverence reserved for something above myself; that is the problem with most people today: the things they place above themselves are really below them and are beneath notice and contempt when you really understand how trivial and unimportant they are in an existential sense. I talked earlier about the descriptive and the normative—that, too, has to go: the whole notion of thought being divided into two, or unified in one, or three, or four, or however many you wish to make the world out to be. The world to me is like God to a Thomist: apophatic, negative, never to be predicated in positive terms, but merely in negative ones—what it is not. The world is not anything but that: itself. The world is ipsum esse subsistens (existence itself), and in that self-same actuality, I find all that one could need in life. That certainty I feel regarding nature’s nature gives me hope beyond everything else.

What I find in nature is really a relation with myself, between me and it: I feel a part of this it because I know I am it; I am nature, in nature, loving nature, sustained by nature, and see every aspect of myself in nature. I am, in truth, really lying when I speak on nature, for her source is so great and inexhaustible; all we really do when we talk about her is merely mention an aspect of her, never do we enjoy nature fully, solely in love for the sake of love itself—that to me is what the whole world shows itself to be. Nature is powerful because she confuses the logicians and amazes the naturalists; when one wishes to speak about her logically, they instantly sound incoherent and contradict themselves at every turn. Who is the one person alive smart enough to turn the beauty of nature into a syllogism? I pity the fool vain enough to actually think they’ve apprehended nature by merely restating what they’ve seen in their own words. Nature, like our life, is beyond words, because our intellect can’t conceive what nature is beyond us—there is no knowable noumenal in this respect, only the phantoms of the phenomenal.

So be it, though… for life: it is enough, it is enough! The dialectical interplay between all things washes over everything—the ever-evolving response to and from the interactions played out in the world are what constitute what we are, and what we are, we are. No amount of categorizing, systematizing, organizing, connecting, and relating will ever deduce for you the true purpose, the true meaning, of life. Only in moments of silence, when the sounds of the world no longer hum in your ears, can you hear the inner voice from within speak the truth which transcends you: that is truth, that is nature!

It is only necessary to behold thus the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair’s breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance . . . To perceive freshly, with fresh sense, is to be inspired . . . My body is all sentient. As I go here or there, I am tickled by this or that I come in contact with, as if I touched the wires of a battery. I can generally recall — have fresh in my mind — several scratches last received. These I continually recall to mind, reimpress, and harp upon. The age of miracles is each moment thus returned . . .

We get only transient and partial glimpses of the beauty of the world. Standing at the right angle, we are dazzled by the colors of the rainbow in colorless ice. From the right point of view, every storm and every drop in it is a rainbow . . . I have seen an attribute of another world and condition of things. It is a wonderful fact that I should be affected, and thus deeply and powerfully, more than by aught else in all my experience.
—Henry David Thoreau.

Evolution

It may be said regarding the fundamental nature of being that evolution is a natural byproduct of it. Certainly, when one passes over the history of thought, one will find that reality has been conceptualized in various contradictory ways which, in the end, somehow all managed to intersect at the same point—as if every idea which man has ever thought, when paired with another idea, follows a kind of parallel postulate, where those two thoughts, when met with another thought and taken to their logical conclusion, find a point of intersection between them.

Every contradiction between opposing ideas is really an evolution in process. The whole flux of being finds itself embodied in the motions which bring it into being. When one is faced with the opposite of what they expected, they immediately look for categories by which to bracket the scenario in order to stave off any troubling thoughts which may result from not comprehending what the actuality is; aren’t we humans so pedantic and fastidious when it comes to avoiding what is painful to us? I, for one, think we have always feared the truth behind evolution because we cannot accept the fact that chaos is ultimately what rules, and order is merely what we cling to out of deference and fear of the unknown.

Our ignorance of the nature of things has always been unwavering and indomitable. What is total and absolute, yes, even unconquerable, is our doubt regarding everything. What has the whole history of intellect been but the nonstop creation and destruction of one paradigm after another—whole wars and genocides waged on behalf of ideas which man believed out of love for what was accepted on faith—faith, one of the strongest of all impulses in man.

I see within humanity the desire to affirm what is final and shun any notion of gradual change and development—especially within the realm of ideas, ideology in particular. If there really were a finality to ideas, there would be no debate; the first thought would have been the last, and everyone would be of the same opinion regarding the nature of the world. What we see, rather, is a constant commotion between competing forces and sects, raging like the ocean when creating a hurricane.

No idea seems applicable to anything which it purports to describe because, in the very act of processing it, it changes for us and is augmented to the point of making it seem completely different, even contradictory, from what it originally was; again, this contradiction is what man fears, for, since Aristotle, it has always seemed like an absurdity to allow for contradiction when thinking logically—as if logic itself were some sort of guarantor of truth and reality. I say no, and no again.

Evolution is feared for the same reason: it cannot be reconciled with man’s predefined categories of what reality is—as if reality were ever reconcilable with man’s notions of it, as if correspondence with reality were all we humans ever considered important. Logic is absurd because it’s upheld by syllogistic strings which are controlled by the desires of man, rather than his reason or rational judgment. “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them,” says David Hume; it’s not a surprise, really, when you consider how close to a true skeptic he was—the only modern Pyrrhonic there has been.

Everyone with even a cursory knowledge of what evolution is today may have assumed I would’ve started this explication with Charles Darwin, or perhaps even with Anaximander, but I decided to avoid the scientific approach in favor of the philosophical, not only because considering things philosophically leads to more insight in my experience, but because most have relegated explanation to the scientific on the belief that everything in science is final, and any other interpretation outside of it is somehow absurd or wrong; like I said earlier, it is our desire for finality, and our fear of the unknown, that makes us condemn what we do not instantly perceive or understand. It is my task to show that everything is really evolutionary, because everything is really in flux, contradiction, and dialectical tension.

Evolution, in the scientific sense, refers to nothing more than the gradual accumulation of changes within allele frequencies over many generations due to various factors such as natural selection, mutation, and genetic drift. Now, if I were to leave you only with that, I would suspect you would feel a bit dissatisfied, not only because it’s incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t a biologist or a current student of 9th-grade biology, but because there is no existential content to it—there is nothing in that definition by which to relate to your own experience, aside from the fact that it distantly refers to your own gradual development as a member of the genus Homo.

The evolution I refer to is the evolution of man proper, not man reduced to a hypothesis, sterilized scientifically for the sake of “advancing human knowledge,” or some other platitude that is used to turn man into a diagram or schematic rather than a living and breathing individual with passions and prejudices which are already presupposed from the outset. Every investigation that atomizes man is already wrong in an existential sense, because whatever is concluded from that simplification can only refer to the ideal, not the actual. The actual is what the final cause of every explanation shoots for, and it’s what the principle of sufficient reason ultimately demands from our perception of causality. This issue is deep and profound, perhaps too profound for even a genius to comprehend fully. I know full well that whenever one speaks of the actual, they really only speak of a shadow, because our ignorance only leads us to the certainty of our own doubt, and nothing besides; to think Descartes thought he could base ontology on that rational basis—but he too still assumed reason itself was final, and that it had a teleology as well: asinine!

In the end, all roads lead back to Rousseau for we moderns, because he was the first to turn man into a subject, existentially speaking; and Kant, the great categorizer of concepts, was the first to do the same but philosophically speaking. I mean, where would we be without the great hermit of Königsberg, that enjoyer of long walks and dizzying contemplations; he gave us that undeniable delineation between analytical and synthetic propositions after all, and made them fourfold by the use of a priori and a posteriori considerations of them. I can’t believe a man was capable of showing the bankruptcy of all thought when not taken from the transcendental perspective, and yet still managed to be praised for it by showing what could and could not be predicated about reality: he effectively restarted philosophy in the modern era, and had it finished three decades later in Hegel—a more absurd course of events could not have played out. The late 18th century was very different indeed, for I know no one today who is capable of doing the same: of providing modern man a map of his own ignorance and not be ridiculed for it, or derided as already stating the obvious.

Most of the complexity of life has already been accepted a priori as unchangeable, and so, naturally, every philosophical intellectual today has an air of nihilism about them; I would say it’s a tragic thing, but I think I know too much at present to suspect any other outcome but where we find ourselves today; in a way, I’m even grateful to have been born in the thoroughly depraved and debauched era of history I find myself in, because it allows me to act as a new kind of Kant, or Hegel, or Nietzsche—in order to pave a new way for the future, it is necessary to first change the conception of it in the minds of everyone; everything else follows from that change in perspective.

When I said that every contradiction is really a form of embodied evolution, I was really referring to the Hegelian dialectic—the only tool still left to us moderns that hasn’t been corrupted by ignorance or enslaved to capital. Evolution is really a call for acknowledgment; it is meant to serve as a concept of awakening from which anyone who sees the true nature of reality—the ever-constant flux of change amidst the slow progression of time—can form from that enlightenment a new conception of being human, of existing in the world, of being a being itself, rather than a passive observer of being, as if you were only a body and a brain which you just so happen to be conscious of; no! the spirit of the human soul yearns to be reconnected with the heart, and every sensation that lifts you out of the depths of emptiness (to lose the sense of willing, as Schopenhauer called it) is truly what every action should be geared towards.

Evolution to me is not merely scientific; it is existential—it is the whole universe placed before us as it actually is: from the origins of life on Earth to the nebular hypothesis of solar systems, from extraterrestrial life to even the Big Bang and consciousness; is every mystery in the universe not in some way related back to our existence—we small, insignificant apes, lucky enough to have minds capable of creating knowledge, all for the sake of learning about the things which shine above us and move below us?

It is palpably absurd to me to not really investigate life existentially, that is, ethically, emotionally, spiritually, and humanly; every triumph and tragedy on Earth has been like all the world to the one going through it, but in this one, do we not find ourselves? Wouldn’t it be insane, then, to view everything from only your own view, rather than take a perspective which encompasses the whole expanse of existence? Do we not all find ourselves related? Aren’t we all part and particle within the cosmos, one vast universe unto ourselves, capable of seeing within ourselves whole stars which died in order for us to be born? Don’t we all participate within the vast symphony of creation by merely being what we are, existing and inhabiting the world as we evolve through it?

It is very hard not to romanticize life because of how difficult it is to fully enclose it within the realm of concepts which we make for the sake of bypassing the immensity of it. It is for this reason why poetry is really more appropriate for themes which strive to represent totalities rather than singularities; hell, even singularities are infinite, because their inner complexity soars far beyond what man is capable of conceiving. The number of permutations within existence, while theoretically finite, is so absurdly large that, for a human life, it may as well be considered infinite. There is no concept so vast, however, that dialectics (evolution) could not approach it, or at least comprehend it.

The opposition between all ideas only finds grounds in the confusion we create for ourselves with all our self-made categories. Abstraction is the death of realism because it makes it impossible to metaphysically ground objects objectively, given their reliance on the subject; idealism must, therefore, be a necessary component of any serious philosophizing, due to its necessity when considering objects both subjectively and objectively. I find it impossible to even consider the world without the idealistic lens, because there is no matter without the mind, and there is no possible reduction to pure matter from the mere emergence of what is already within the content of perception as such—qualia, in that sense, is really an adjective for Kantian apperception (self-consciousness): subjectivity made integral to the objectivity of sensation, which arises from the interplay between content (phenomenal, empirical, external, objective perception) and synthetic a priori categories (noumenal, transcendental). Unless you’re a Hegelian, or a (dialectical) pragmatist like myself, there is no one who can claim any predicate about reality as real, in an objective sense, or final.

Evolution, as I use it here, demands that we do not seek to know the end, but rather seek to know the path which the end tends towards—if it tends towards anything at all. Within the uncertainty of man’s nature, Descartes—who is rightfully called the father of modern philosophy—tried to turn man into a binary: a mind and body; but from this arose the whole contradictory opposition—a war of false pretense—between the rationalist and empiricist schools of thought. Just like the Reformation before it, the Enlightenment gave rise to many “plausible” interpretations of what the scripture of the world was, but this multiplicity of forms and ideas gave rise to such a cacophony of sects and “rational” systematic treatments of all things under the sun, that half of all learning since then has been filled with prejudice on the one side, and misinterpretation on the other. It is for this reason that Hegel, in my view, can be argued as the last philosopher that ever walked the Earth; for he saw everything as fundamentally confused, and purposefully mischaracterized: the values which we upheld regarding knowledge were wrong, for its telos (end) was assumed from the start, rather than treating the evolution of man’s spirit as an evolution in and of itself, as well as being a continuous thing, unending and always striving; its end was defined before it was even considered, in much the same way a baby is named well before it can walk.

Life is in constant evolution and agitation. Each time we breathe, we are one step closer to the grave, and another second closer to death. Oh, what a great malaise life is; how contradictory it all seems. Existence is like a dream, for each time we consider it, we lose the original intent we had with investigating ourselves. Every time we strive to find what lies at the bottom of life, we discover more material by which to sift through and contemplate in order to come to a point where we can finally say anything solid about it, rather than hide behind the vagaries of abstractions which never touch the solid.

Dear reader, why do you think I keep you constantly in the dark whenever I explain anything that is yet to have an answer for it? It is because there is yet to be a vocabulary sufficient to elucidate existence existentially. I almost feel at times like Kant when he was writing his Critique of Pure Reason; there had yet to be a standard, academic German by which to organize and explicate all of the topics considered (every philosophical treatise prior was in Latin and, in Germany at least, after the manner of Christian Wolff—prolix beyond all conception)—and so, it’s no wonder Kant’s style is perhaps the most impenetrable in all of philosophy (I actually think Hegel is easier once you understand the dialectic, but Kant… he’s in the clouds before he lifts his pen up to write). The more I write, the closer I feel to eventually getting at the heart of the matter. But until then, I must resolve to remain in constant evolution and flux, and be appreciative that I have not gone silently into that good night of ignorance and barbarism which most people feel the need to consign themselves to today.

Necessity and Contingency

Nearly everything in philosophy can be blamed on Aristotle, most of all metaphysics. I’ve never been a fan of metaphysics because of what I felt to be unnecessary abstractions from experience. There is, however, one aspect of this “first philosophy” which I do enjoy ruminating upon: necessity and contingency. As we understand them today, necessity and contingency were born out of what were assumed to be “correct” logical deductions regarding the nature of things. Claims about reality are always prefaced by certain underlying aspects of the world which necessarily must be in order to make such claims in the first place; this division is what gave rise to the notions of necessity and contingency.

Firstly, regarding necessity, Aristotle breaks it into two aspects: absolute and hypothetical. On the one hand, absolute necessity is that which cannot be otherwise, like, for example, mathematical proofs or sound syllogisms—these are aspects of the world which are “eternal” and unchangeable. On the other, hypothetical necessity is something which “must” occur in order for another thing to actually be actualized in the world, like a house needing a foundation before it can be built, or a tree needing nutrients if it is to grow—these are conditional aspects of reality because they depend on other things in order to be brought about.

Secondly, contingency is merely that which can be, but is not necessitated by anything—these are accidental aspects of reality, things which occur but which are not destined to be so necessarily. From this, it would seem like hypothetical necessity and contingency are the same thing, but Aristotle makes the distinction in order to separate things that must happen from things that could happen by pure chance (accident). This distinction allowed Aristotle to explain why the world feels both orderly and unpredictable at the same time—it was his way of reconciling two interpretations (the necessary and the contingent) from one empirical fact.

I think it should also be mentioned that this aspect of Aristotle’s metaphysics is what gave rise to the rest of his philosophical system: from his matter-form distinction, to his four causes, to his virtue ethics, to his Physics (explaining all natural phenomena in terms of their necessary “natural motion”), and even to his Poetics (where certain events in the plot are necessary for a play to be considered a comedy or tragedy).

Every explanation in the Ancient Greek world revolved around the notions of necessity or contingency, because there had yet to be a method for thoroughly investigating nature without relying on (what we would today consider) baseless presuppositions or assumptions about reality; everything was dealt with strictly on first principles, and so, everything had a rational character to it rather than an empirical one.

As I argued for in my essay Science, the shift occurred—sometime around the start of the Islamic Golden Age—when philosophers sought to distinguish the teleology (purpose) of nature from the ontology (being or is-ness) of nature; here all wise men divided, and the former natural philosophers suddenly found themselves scientists. It should also come as no surprise, then, that during the Islamic Golden Age men were making great innovations upon Aristotle’s necessity-contingency dichotomy. So great, in fact, were the innovations that the whole system of Kalam was developed out of it: the speculative investigations of Aristotle, combined with the need to reconcile or refute the claims made by the kuffār with Islam, gave rise to Muslim philosophy, pioneered by men like Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Al-Ghazali, and Ibn Rushd.

But what is the nature of necessity or contingency, and why do we need it? Philosophers are obsessed with two things: wisdom and closure. Wisdom comes as a natural byproduct of experience, but closure comes only when you feel you’ve exhausted your wisdom when attempting to explain matters outside of your comprehension. What is closed is final and doesn’t have to be thought over again because it is already perfectly understood; but in the search for wisdom, one always has to necessarily dig up old grounds which were paved centuries, maybe even millennia, ago; philosophy is very much like that.

Philosophy is difficult because it makes two contradictory demands on an individual: that they continuously seek the truth, and that they find wisdom in never obtaining the truth through all their seeking. In a sense, every intellectual innovation was made on a false premise, because it assumed that the truth was out there to be held in the mind forever, never to be changed—in reality, we’ve only had the simulacrum of truth, because we’ve been thinking about truth wrongly since Plato.

Existence is not something which one can find the end of; much like a line, it extends infinitely, but the page upon which it is drawn—which in this analogy is life—must necessarily have edges which limit how far out it can extend. Originally, philosophers presumed the world to be something which was contingent on the necessity of the Gods; man was merely a byproduct of their will, and everything which occurred in the cosmos had its reason in the Gods. Everything which occurred in the world was already so, and so it appeared to man as if it had to be necessarily so—in that sense making everything a kind of hypothetical necessity, given that the Gods were the ones in control of all. However, this foolishness only lasted as long as man was willing to kowtow to unknown forces and propitiate total mysteries.

Hubris could only have arisen in man the moment he felt himself an equal to the Gods. The whole situation is enough to make us moderns die of laughter, for the original sages, poets, and wise men actually maintained their faith in their own myths in order to flatter themselves by saying the “ultimate truth” of everything was really something (the Gods) which they could engage with, and, perhaps even sway in their favor; it is as if Homer and Hesiod forgot they were making myth, and not truth—nay, to them, myth was truth, for truth originally meant aletheia (ἀλήθεια—lit. “non-forgetting”): the process of revealing, becoming known, or bringing reality into the light.

To the ancients, truth was something you participated in while you existed in the world; and so, it is no wonder why all the Pre-Socratics, to say nothing of Plato and Aristotle after them, thought that all of reality could be unveiled and revealed to man as man made his way through the world. It must never be forgotten that the last words of Socrates were “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius; pay it and don’t forget.” Even in death, the greatest exemplar of the philosophical life wished to worship the Gods; from this, there can be no doubt that Socrates was not corrupting the youth of Athens by inclining them towards atheism, but rather inclining them to speculation about the Gods in order to further reveal them—discover them as true. That is what Socrates’s dialectical (maieutic) method has always been: to turn man’s mind upon himself, in order to truly inquire into his own truth—to find out whether he knows anything or not. That is true truth. That is what I find to be the truth—the never ending search that, in searching, reveals what we’ve known all along, and thus is really only our long forgotten wisdom.

From an existential perspective, wisdom is merely what allows us to live, indeed, may be called necessary for life—that which we cannot live without. I have spent the better part of my life wondering, and the other half forgetting why I ever wondered in the first place. I almost feel guilty for putting my younger self in such dire straits as I find myself in now.

It is nearly impossible, nay, is impossible, for me to set right what was made wrong so long ago—without doubt, there can be no turning back in life, no joy without the accompanying pain that follows its end; so much I’ve striven for, desired, loved, forgotten, languished in sloth, made contemptible out of spite, mocked out of fear, ridiculed out of shame, etc.—my whole life has been one long postponed dream, and I cannot speak to that younger me who saw the truth as something different, the truth which ruined him, and which he was unable to understand at the time.

Did I not survive it all so far, however? It may be that my wisdom then was not what it is now, and all my false ideas about myself were really ways of avoiding the suffering that lay at the bottom of everything which I strove to avoid, rather than confront. It was not wasted, though. I cannot say it was without its purpose. I cannot even say it was without meaning, for I managed to find something meaningful in it all in the end.

There was no pretense to necessity in anything I ever pursued—it certainly wasn’t felt by me to be necessary anyway. That is why my life is deep, my suffering great, and my fortitude literally incomparable: it has always been, I thought, my duty to avoid life, to drift by it like a leaf upon a raging river, to make no pretense to become anything in it; and all that “truth” now considered in my present maturity—what has it led me to? Nothing but the recognition of my own correctness. I lived my life so truthfully, so independently, so ethically with respect to my own subjectivity, that now I see almost no point in living further, having seen the true truth of the world.

I cannot see myself going through with the end of it, however, because I see no motivation stronger than stagnation; in that sense, I could never end myself, because I lack the fortitude to break from the truth, and lie to myself by ending my life, which has up until now been nothing but total truth. The truth of this world is in me, in the same way Tolstoy said where love is there is God. Merely having the truth is not enough to live off of, however. “Man shall not live on bread alone,” said our Lord and savior; and how great he did suffer at the hands of Satan—placing before him every possible temptation.

My greatest temptation is death. But I know there is no truth in death, in the same way there is no necessity in life. And so it must be. So it is. I must live so that I may die, not the other way around. My confusion about the nature of the world, all these ideals and aspects of existence, now only find their place in my beating heart. My own wisdom was forgotten because I hadn’t the maturity to see what the meaning of wisdom was. But now, I like to think the world is a bit more clear for me; not because I always lived my life truthfully, after my own interest and in my own way, but because I now understand myself enough to know why I was in the right with respect to my own life—why I lived it so honestly, so truthfully, so passionately.

I was false to myself for so long, the mask was lifted up before my face for years, which I deliberately kept up in order to ensure I would not be gawked at by the world for being some sort of eccentric—but now, what is any of that to me? Nothing. My truth is great, but not because it is true, rather, because it is true for me—without that, there would be no honesty in anything I relate. My writings are only done for the sake of myself, and in being truthful to myself in writing them, I hope to endow another with my own wisdom, in order that the nature of the world may not appear so foreboding and unforgiving to them as it did for me in my great ignorance. Existence is but a contingency made necessary.

Existence appears as a necessity that is comprehended through contingency, when in truth it is the other way around. To already exist seems to imply that there’s a sort of determined necessity which brought us about, but that is only assumed because we do in fact exist. The saying “it is what it is” perfectly exemplifies this: because a thing already is, it could not be other than what it presently is, but the mere existence of a thing does not carry with it the necessitated corollary people would assume it to have. Existence is a contingency, not a necessity.

The idea of necessity with respect to our existence is born out of the fact of our impossibility to conceive of the contrary: if we did not exist, we would have no content by which to infer our existence out of, and so, it would follow that we do, in fact, exist—otherwise there would be an incomprehensible nothingness which distinguishes the conscious from the unconscious, in a sense, the living from the dead. This, however, still does not get us to the necessity. In the same way every argument for God’s existence ultimately fails because there’s always doubt regarding His necessity—which implies a limit to His nature: a contradiction—there is always doubt regarding our own necessity.

Our own necessity is born out of our confusion regarding how contingent we all really are. We cannot even say that we are hypothetically necessary, because there is nothing within existence itself that must be—only what happens to be on chance. It is, after all, the highest form of vanity to assume our own importance. Once again, every existential issue man has faced throughout his course of being one among billions of species which have existed, is his inability to properly frame himself with the totality of existence as such.

Nobody really tarries with existential questions because everybody intuitively sees, or perhaps even knows, the bankruptcy that comes with describing, philosophically, the implicit emptiness in all our attempts at describing what lies at the core of existence. To be descriptive only is to forget what it means to be human, because human beings are more complex than one can even imagine—even the most creative super genius could not exhaust the source of infinity that is the human experience: I really do mean it, combine Shakespeare with Goethe, Da Vinci, Einstein, Schopenhauer, Montaigne, and Pascal, and you would still fail to bring the whole of man into focus.

Again, to be descriptive only fails because man must also be normative in his judgements: there comes a time in everyone’s life where they must make a choice which no amount of deliberation or right reason could be had in order to bring ease to their anxious hearts. It is here, then, that we must all accept Kierkegaard’s dictum of taking the leap of faith, and place our life entirely upon another. However, with me not believing in a God to place my life upon, I must perform an inversion of sorts, and fall upon what is actually there to catch me: nature. That is why my God is the God of Emerson or Spinoza, and is why I very much find myself most happy these days gazing at forests than being amongst other people—I find I relate much better to those things which simply live without speaking a word, than those who live and breathe and desire much more than they really need.

The necessity of life is only found in the long chain of contingency that upholds it. Though it was initially born out of metaphysical deduction from the representations of the world, we now know what it really signifies: a desire to systematize life, in order that its immensity may not consume us completely. I, however, find great comfort in knowing there is no end to its depths, and find the initial path Socrates led the only necessity there is: that of searching for the truth in a world where it continuously evades us.

Opposition

Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony.
—Heraclitus.

The ways of the world depart in opposition but are upheld in contradiction. If the force of my speculative-theoretical conjectures on contradiction have not made themselves felt so far, they will certainly be made so here.

If we are to speak of ourselves as subjects within the world, it must first be recognized that any attempt to understand that subject (the individuality of our person) comprehensively is bound to end in tears. The fact that no amount of overcoming can ever become a true becoming is a result of the present dearth in concepts regarding subjectivity as it relates to modernity.

We find ourselves presently in a very interesting time in history. There has never before been so much relation and interconnectivity between people and their ideas, but this overwhelming sense of connection is perhaps too much for we moderns to cope with given our present mental architecture. Our social nature dooms us to a sort of benign complicity with technology. What is praised and rewarded is the ability to acquire attention, and further still the ability to monetize it. Without the obsession that comes with the need to continuously acquire more and more of that which is necessary to survive, there would be no social malaise as it currently exists.

The system in its current form is so synchronized with the passions that drove its development in the first place, that any form of opposition to it is considered either absurd or dead from the start. It cannot be helped, however, by those who dream of a better future, to consider the current situation and not wish it to be anything but what it presently is. I find that if subjectivity is to be made actual, and realized in the world—in a complete form of self-awareness that transcends the current modality of thinking—it must first start with the subject recognizing its individuality, and, right after, recognizing that this individuality is connected with all other individualities.

From here, to use Hegelian language, the spirit which progresses as the eyes of men move from Earth to heaven, and advance forward from the dogmatic present to a more rational and self-actual future, it will be possible to create a collective bellow from every living being which calls for the end of the oppression it has been under since the beginning of our modern era.

But the growing of consciousness has always been a hard thing, for it is still new, and I don’t believe the masses have yet overcome their herd mentality; it’s a very interesting distinction that Nietzsche actually makes between the herd and the so-called rulers: because what he effectively does is turn whatever the masses desire into a form of religiosity built solely upon ressentiment—a sense of hostility directed toward an object that one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration.

What currently exists in the age we inhabit is nothing more than a system of gaslighting that turns each systemic deprivation into a personal failing. It has always been noticed that those with nothing will want for nothing so long as nobody else has anything, but the instant something is acquired by one which is novel, and perhaps even collectively desired by all, those with nothing will suddenly have a want for something, and thus turn the whole course of their being around the acquisition of that one object. Today, this object is money, and, I suppose more generally, abstraction—for abstraction has truly been the cause of universal suffering, for out of it one could build a whole narrative that accounts for every subjective facet of their being, while also justifying all their actions so long as they relate back to their narrative.

You see now how the system is set up in order to deliberately stifle our creativity and reduce our empathy for others? I would venture to say there can be no true subjectivity without first releasing all of us from the chains of opposition which are not our own. Again, the trick is to make it seem as if the oppressive chains which bind us were ours from the start; but anyone with even a slight understanding of history, philosophy, or intellectual development, would know that everything today which structures how we live in reality was designed to ensure order and subservience, not true freedom born from the opposition we face on behalf of these conditions.

This is not to say that were these conditions eliminated there would be no opposition—for opposition exists as a byproduct of our inability to comprehend what we are—but rather to say that those things which oppress us would be our own cogitations, rather than mere reactions to the oppressive stick which perpetually pokes us while we’re chained in order to indulge in our futile thrashes in response.

The world in which our own subjectivity is the only problem is (if I may sound like Leibniz for a second) the greatest of all possible worlds. What does this imply? It implies that material conditions are no longer an issue, and that the only real problems which face man now are existential; in much the same way the bourgeoisie have always had a problem of occupying their time in order to pass it by more quickly—considering they didn’t have to work in order to live—this perfect world, freed from the manacle of labor, will allow the masses to face perennial problems more directly, because their time and energy is now their own, rather than belonging to their employer for the sake of their survival.

The moment one is freed from the necessity of work in order to live—true living can begin. Many like to argue that it is natural to work, and that humans have always needed to work in order to survive, but this naturalistic fallacy forgets that leisure and sloth are equally natural, and that people are compelled as much to work out of boredom as they are (especially today) out of necessity. The only restraint on man, when he is no longer bound by the oppressive chain of labor for his subsistence, is his imagination—that is, the things he can consider for himself on his own time; those things which he can judge for himself in order to understand what he is in himself for the sake of self-examination.

There is, perhaps, no aspect of existence so powerful as the need for finality or closure. What we seek in self-examination is the same thing which was written on the stones at Delphi—Γνῶθι σεαυτόν, know thyself: of what this life consists, it has, up until now, only been considered from the subjective, but it cannot be forgotten that in knowing whatever you presume yourself to be, there is always a tension of what you may become in the search for yourself. This, I call, a dialectical opposition: an aspect of the world that shall forever elude the individual because they approach the aspect as something to be overcome in a single moment, rather than something which must be continuously overcome again and again forever and ever with no end to it. This is the ultimate opposition—the opposition born in reality itself, which cannot be avoided because the contradiction is integral to reality.

The whole structure which transcends the objective world is that born in the subjective; the abstract which necessarily follows from every consideration of the objective world can only be a shadow of what the subject presumes the world to be: in that sense there is no real world, but only our world for ourselves, coincidentally inhabited by other selves who presume the same. This is why one can never surpass their own individuality, they can never grow out of what they are subjectively, and so they are doomed to only being able to relate to others in themselves, rather than actually knowing what the other is objectively. Here, Kant laughs, and cries out “victory!” for having so thoroughly expounded this most fundamental of all antinomies. The best world, in that sense then, is really only one comprised of existential antinomies.

But what is life aside from its implicit oppositions and contradictions? I venture to say a great nothing, or, perhaps, a nothing from which a something must be born. I already argued that necessity is an illusion, and that contingency is the only true necessity with respect to the individual, but I haven’t yet fully propounded what the existential absolute really is—and if I did, I did not do so sufficiently to ease my dialectical mind.

It must first be acknowledged that the object which man has craved above all else is novelty, and that in this continuous craving for that which is new has given rise to many things which man has falsely assumed to be the absolute thing. Every man really lives a lie, because he doesn’t yet know what he really lives for, and in this not-knowing comes a sense of dread so powerful he feels he must find something to cling to in order to live at all—hence come all our traditions and routines and religions.

Modernity is built upon this continuous lie: the lie that man, in his present circumstance, can, in fact, build himself, and make something of himself, and even choose his own values, but this is absurd. Man can no more choose his own values than he can choose his own interests; what sustains man, in fact, is the faith he has in his unchosen values. Values, at least to Nietzsche, were ideas which the herd were only capable of being subject to, rather than masters of themselves; in a very astonishing way, this more or less echoes Marx and Engels in The German Ideology:

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 ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. —Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook, B. The Illusion of the Epoch.

This is why I said earlier that no man can truly live existentially, that is, as his own person independent of the corrupting forces of society at large (which is already dominated by the ideas of the ruling class), unless he either becomes spiritual—as was the case with Pascal and Kierkegaard, who both staked their lives on the proposition that God exists, and were only able to maintain themselves through their overwhelming faith in God; or pragmatical—here really meaning a synthesis of the material way of being (as laid out by Marx primarily), and the ideal way of being (as exemplified in someone like Hegel).

What is lacking in the world today is the capacity for most people to tarry with the contradictory: (Hegelian) dialectics as a way of being is shunned because it is seen as ridiculous or unlikely to be a tool for progression and eventual emancipation. This makes sense especially when you consider how categorized and systematized and dichotomized the whole world at present is; there has never been a time in history like now: where we understand the natural world as well as we do, yet feel ourselves—personally, subjectively—more dead or obscure than ever before. This contradiction arises precisely from our inability to accept the absurdity of existence: we would rather die, or subjugate ourselves to narratives or values not our own, than actually become our own person (our individual self), or dare to reevaluate our values; it is not that Nietzsche said we can create our own values, but rather that we must deliberately become what our will values in response to the world at large—in that sense always being open to change and contradiction in how we view ourselves.

Existence is an ongoing process, and has no end to it until we draw our final breaths in it. Everything in life seems absurd because we do not find a point to it, but this is a mistaken conceptualization; it is not that there isn’t a point to life, but that the point has to be drawn by our own hand from within ourselves—we have to actively call out into the world in order to see what echo rebounds and strikes us like a blast from a trumpet. The hard point of life isn’t in living it, or even in enduring it, but rather in searching for it amidst all the oppositions and contradictions which pervade it.

Very few today are true existential thinkers because they still think in terms of categories—rather than in contradictions—that purport to answer all of life’s questions; again though, life is not a question to be solved, but a reality to be experienced: it must be lived forwards but understood backwards. There are no two ways around it, dialectics is the only solution to opposition because it doesn’t claim to solve opposition, only tarry with it for life’s sake. This is why finality or closure is perhaps the ultimate desire in man: without it, he feels himself for what he truly is—a small subject crushed by the immensity of his ignorance and the magnitude of the cosmos; without the ability to say “this is final,” or “this is done, and no longer in need of investigation,” man will endlessly create for himself paradoxes which his mind cannot overcome, and thus he will feel unable to comprehend the meaning of his own subjectivity; in such despair, he will find nothing but suffering, and afterwards generalize this feeling to be the pervading force of reality, as Schopenhauer did; I feel, in this context, it must be remembered that the first half of Pascal’s Pensées was dedicated to the THE MISERY OF MAN WITHOUT GOD—God here being the object by which to place all earthly misery upon in order to live at all; this black sea of nothingness, which is the universe, is so incomprehensible to us conscious creatures of Earth, that it is better to forget thinking all together if it cannot give us a sense of what is final in life aside from death. I, for one, have found this to be the wrong approach to life—for it is, again, made on a false dichotomy that assumes life is to be lived linearly, in a homogeneous manner, without contradiction: this is wrong existentially.

And so it is. Man today must be willing to synthesize both the abstract and the concrete, the contradictory and the noncontradictory, the autistic and the schizophrenic. That is, after all, what my existential philosophy tries to be—both dialectical in the Hegelian sense, and pragmatic in the William James sense: in a phrase, dialectical pragmatism.

I wish it were possible, for me at least, to live life as the majority do—without the slightest concern for their existential character, busying themselves with distractions that will provide their life no greater depth than the temporary pleasure it gives them, but to me this has always been dishonest. I’m overly conscious, I feel, regarding the world and my place in it; this consciousness gave birth to a monster within me—a fear so foreboding I would never be able to challenge it were it not for my resolve to see the truth of this world.

If only it were easier for me, or, better yet, for everybody, to find themselves in the world, fully actualized and totally in command of their person, rather than always feeling at the behest of commands not born from within their own heart. If only I didn’t have to create my own philosophy, scouring through intellectual history in order to find answers which, in the end, were really always in me from the beginning.

Life, for me, really does seem more a hassle than it’s worth at times I think to myself; but then I remember how few have really considered it at all, and how miserable they are as a result, not realizing they could throw the chains off from themselves in a second should they recognize that the cause of their misery is themselves, or rather, how they see themselves amidst this systemically broken system; out of that recognition comes the necessary consciousness which builds towards a better future through action. Yes, action—that is what I found the answer of life to be.

In the final analysis, one will find that life only sustains itself in purpose-driven action, action that is existential and done for the sake of not only yourself but others as well. The only real opposition which exists is between yourself and the world at large, and in that tension gives rise to what you really are as an individual.

The Human Drive

Desire

If we must accept Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character. This is true, and that other is true. But our geometry cannot span these extreme points, and reconcile them. What to do? By obeying each thought frankly, by harping, or, if you will, pounding on each string, we learn at last its power. By the same obedience to other thoughts, we learn theirs, and then comes some reasonable hope of harmonizing them. We are sure, that, though we know not how, necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with the spirit of the times. The riddle of the age has for each a private solution. If one would study his own time, it must be by this method of taking up in turn each of the leading topics which belong to our scheme of human life, and, by firmly stating all that is agreeable to experience on one, and doing the same justice to the opposing facts in the others, the true limitations will appear. Any excess of emphasis, on one part, would be corrected, and a just balance would be made. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life: Fate.

One key, one solution to the mysteries of human condition, one solution to the old knots of fate, freedom, and foreknowledge, exists, the propounding, namely, of the double consciousness. A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature, as the equestrians in the circus throw themselves nimbly from horse to horse, or plant one foot on the back of one, and the other foot on the back of the other. So when a man is the victim of his fate, has sciatica in his loins, and cramp in his mind; a club-foot and a club in his wit; a sour face, and a selfish temper; a strut in his gait, and a conceit in his affection; or is ground to powder by the vice of his race; he is to rally on his relation to the Universe, which his ruin benefits. Leaving the dæmon who suffers, he is to take sides with the Deity who secures universal benefit by his pain. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life: Considerations by the way.

Life brings to each his task, and whatever art you select, algebra, planting, architecture, poems, commerce, politics, — all are attainable, even to the miraculous triumphs, on the same terms of selecting that for which you are apt; begin at the beginning, proceed in order, step by step. ‘Tis as easy to twist iron anchors and braid cannons as to braid straw; to boil granite as to boil water, if you take all the steps in order. Wherever there is failure, there is some giddiness, some superstition about luck, some step omitted, which Nature never pardons. The happy conditions of life may be had on the same terms. Their attraction for you is the pledge that they are within your reach. Our prayers are prophets. There must be fidelity, and there must be adherence. How respectable the life that clings to its objects! Youthful aspirations are fine things, your theories and plans of life are fair and commendable: — but will you stick? Not one, I fear, in that Common full of people, or, in a thousand, but one: and when you tax them with treachery, and remind them of their high resolutions, they have forgotten that they made a vow. The individuals are fugitive, and in the act of becoming something else, and irresponsible. The race is great, the ideal fair, but the men whiffling and unsure. The hero is he who is immovably centred. —Ibid.

What doesn’t man desire? The strongest of all temptations in life is the temptation to live. I am struck by how far people go to purposely extend their miseries only for the sake of keeping themselves alive. So much labor is expended on behalf of a false desire—a desire born in nothing besides itself; its own perpetuation is the goal, and that is what man follows blindly even though it leads him off a cliff.

Whenever I attempt to give a piece of my mind on things as abstract as metaphysical concepts, I’m forced—perhaps beyond my power—to make amends with existence, to rewrite our past wrongs together, and to make up for what was lost in so much sloth, vanity, and sin. I despise this fact, however, for I would much rather hate honestly than love falsely.

What comfort is there in a world such as ours, where everything is seemingly driven by stupidity, faith, and idealism? I do not hold it against existence that so much misery should be delivered upon creatures as vain and fickle as we, but I reject the invitation I receive from it which proclaims that I should live anyway. For what end, and for whom? Why, and to what purpose? Life almost seems as if it manufactures its own purpose on the spot in order for the individual to continue at all. All lies; false, conniving lies. Even knowledge fails to sustain me now, because I know it to be fundamentally useless existentially.

Should not this ardent woe compel me to the depths of misery? It has, dear reader, more than you can comprehend—and yet, look at how far this misery has taken me; look at the fruits of my desire, and my drive to sustain myself despite not wanting to. All this suffering has renewed my very self, and in that great instauration comes what you see before you: my truth of the world… my philosophy.

Desire as a feeling has its place firmly in my heart; it may even be said of it that my subjectivity is firmly the slave of it, and, in truth, it is, for all my life I’ve made sure to follow it out as correctly, honestly, and consequently as I can. Every breath I take is a defiance against myself. Every sudden awakening from sleep is really a revolt against the universe. However strongly I see the good in life, and make thorough encomiums on its behalf in order to raise it, in my mind, to a light far superior to what it deserves, there still remains in me a strong inclination to decay, death, misery, and, above all else, the desire to extinguish everything along with myself.

It is a common trope amongst us nihilists that our suffering is too complex, too much our own, for anyone to understand, and if they would try to understand, they would turn out like us. This, I believe, has firm foundations in the truths of nature, borne out by how few people truly are nihilists. The everyday person laments life—maybe even sheds tears over it—but they do not despise it, and this is, as Schopenhauer noted so long ago, the result of the average Joe having no intellectual inclination. It is only when one rationalizes their suffering that they begin to believe. Ignorance is bliss not because you’re ignorant of worldly affairs, but precisely because you believe yourself able to endure, or even overcome, worldly affairs; it is a child’s optimism that ultimately separates the common folk from the true deniers of the world.

I have seen it firsthand, in fact, know it firsthand—for I am a nihilist, but not existentially. You see, the dialectical nature of life is so finely tuned to the capacities of the individual that the cunning of reason assumes itself in every presupposition about existence; we delude ourselves into thinking what isn’t the case is the case, and in doing so maintain ourselves with a strong disposition of positivity and willful self-effacement from external affairs. These people, however, have no reflection, and dare not approach repetition—which, in layman’s terms, is merely the ability to go over in your mind some scenario in the world.

They do not reflect on life, and that is why they are ignorant of their true nature and are thus the happier for it; in this, they do a great service to themselves, for they do not worry about the future, only their present, and as a result have no comprehension of the truth regarding the world. Because they do not know the nature of the dialectic, they can only sense it intuitively as they live through life, but not having the requisite background to wrestle with it thoroughly—intellectually, that is—they are instantly swallowed up by the theoretical aspects of life, and so, instead of facing it and researching into it, they retreat into a debasing ignorance which they flatter themselves with, in the same way a person today ignorant of mathematics loves to pave over that disturbing fact with the all-too-common phrase: “I was never good at that.”

Again, to be a nihilist is not merely subscribing to the position that life has no inherent meaning—anybody with a brain not swimming in mystical idealisms or religious fervor will concede to that—rather, to be a nihilist (as I interpret it) is to intellectualize your suffering beyond what is useful, and, as a result, to turn it into a justification for remaining in your already miserable state. Most people who claim to be nihilists are not true nihilists: their desires are not of hate and destruction, but rather of the ability to identify with a label that perfectly describes what they feel: emptiness—meaninglessness.

It is indescribable how much of modern psychology is really born out of the innate human desire to identify with our own subjectivity; if we today cannot feel like we’re a part of some grand narrative, or group that affirms what we feel internally, then we are mere castaways waiting for death to take us and for the world to end. This is a relatively new phenomenon. There was no concept of nihilism before the Enlightenment; in fact, the term originates in the late 18th century with Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, who coined it as a philosophical concept in order to represent a common custom of philosophers during his day to start their investigations without first accounting for the individual who was carrying them out—in a sense, he was criticizing the concept of philosophizing devoid of subjectivity, which to him necessarily implied being devoid of meaning or existence. One may say it was all downhill from there.

What nihilism identifies is the rejection of innate meaning within existence. As one lives, they develop habits and customs out of instinct, which they follow out of familiarity and prejudice to any alternative. Again, prior to the Enlightenment, the ultimate ground for every custom was religion, for it provided an ethical, spiritual, and cultural foundation on which to see yourself. With the increasing independence from the church, however, and the creation of the individual subject (individuality) out of reason and personal judgment—pioneered by people like Descartes, Pierre Bayle, Benjamin Franklin, and David Hume, and made popular by the French philosophes (Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Diderot)—it was only a matter of time until atheism would arise and people would find themselves suddenly thrown into an uncaring world without the help of their divine savior. It should be noted, too, that this was, at first, a largely bourgeois phenomenon, for the common folk weren’t yet educated enough to see the world through any other lens but a religious one—which was something the Catholic Church wanted, in fact, in order to maintain their influence upon the masses, who in turn were a check on the power of the king… but we need not go into the power-struggles of Caesar and Christ here.

In the modern era, what we see with regards to the growth of mental illness, the overly psychologized (individualized) approaches to mental illness, and the birth of many online “communities” or subcultures built upon shared interests, is a direct result, or perhaps even a direct response, to this lack of religiosity. Whether the modern conservative turn to ‘tradition’ or ‘old values’—always being synonymous with Christianity (especially in America)—is a historical aberration, or something that can be verified conclusively, is not something that I shall investigate here. I merely wished to bring to your attention the history of modernity and why desire is so dead and empty today.

My goal, really, is to psychoanalyze philosophically—in that sense, I’m no different from a medieval chronicler, but instead of recording dates and events, I record mental antipathies. My method is really no different from Nietzsche’s, although explicated not as beautifully, of course, and without as much depth, sadly—very few minds today are capable of innovating in philosophy after Nietzsche, I’m sorry to say; it’s not that there isn’t anything to discuss, or no new innovations occurring in the present which threaten our mental life, but rather that Nietzsche already laid the groundwork for everything and then some with respect to man’s interiority.

It is why my discourses are very terse, personal, and incoherent at times, perhaps even aphoristic: I have no patience with consistency and would rather not write at all than write without fidelity to how my thoughts first arrived in my head; all my explanations are long asides, already determined in how indeterminate and contradictory they are. That is my secret power… extemporal exposition, and I will not let it die for anything; to write any other way is anathema to my creative spirit and has no place in my heart. Indeed, my philosophy is a rejection of formalism and finality: it is dialectical and contradictory, in clear imitation of how nature truly is.

The desire to feel at home within one’s self is the quintessential problem which existentialism concerns itself with. It is, necessarily, a problem of desire—because desire is a value born either in want of a new tradition or a return to an old one. What one feels in life is nothing short of their entire being, and in the confusion of being, depending on the individual’s temperament, one is very likely to do one of two things: return to what worked in the past, or innovate and create new modes of being for today. This here is one of the many fundamental distinctions between a conservative-reactionary thinker and a liberal-progressive thinker, and which one you fall under is largely dependent on what presuppositions you hold regarding human nature.

See here though, how I label once again, how I can never escape the dread of concepts, how I must always refer back to abstractions rather than concrete realities whenever I explain anything to do with existence; words fail and can never be true aids in the search for the self. It goes back to what I said earlier: the innate desire to feel connected to something higher than yourself—the religious impulse has never really died in man; it still shines through when life brings us to our weakest moments, and such is why nihilism can never be an answer to life: it lacks existential affirmation; it is, rather, a rejection of what is in the heart for what is outside it, for the feelings of the heart mean nothing to one who sees it only as an organ for circulating blood. The spiritual challenge for man today is born in his inability to see what lies outside him as something more than mere matter.

The nihilistic individual who clings to life like a newborn babe does its mother does so out of fear or laziness; just like a baby, they know nothing but believe themselves to be smarter than everyone they encounter because they believe they’ve thought a lot more, or perhaps more deeply, on the “true” state of things. But this kind of intellectualization is no more help existentially than shooting yourself out of despair of not knowing what to do in life.

The greatest intellectual defense mechanism to avoid thinking existentially is to throw a sea of concepts at a personal problem with the hope that after such an onslaught the problem would run in fear—this does nothing; what one ultimately discovers in such a display is that no amount of erudition will ever save you from yourself. You are, in your own person, a mystery which is itself mysterious, unknown to nearly everything else but yourself, and even in that, unknown. What cannot be undone is that you are born; your existence is now present, and in you lies the truth of what your life shall become—the question only remains: how far are you willing to search for it, and are you willing to search for it should you find in the end that there was no end to the searching? Desire plays a role here because it is ultimately that sensation which chooses for you.

The sheer contingency of life is almost unbelievable. To think, everything which occurs to us feels necessary, but in a fuller view was only accidental. It cannot possibly help one on the edge of despair to turn to them and say, “it is better to jump now than later, for all roads lead to death.” I’m of the opinion that life’s absurdity is what makes it endurable in the first place. A placid life, lived among perfectly happy individuals, in which everything went your way and you were sure of every good fortune, would be an utter abhorrence to anyone who lives in actual reality—because it is something that appears impossible in the real world and is something one could only imagine because they do not live in such a perfect world. The world one finds themselves in is very much the world they reflect (not counting the neurotics, of course, who find even happiness a hell). Happiness is not the main desire of life. Most people today assume it to be and, as a result, subordinate every wish to the acquisition of money in order to make it a reality; but as I expressed in my last essay, even if Earth were a utopia, there would still be existential quandaries which remain. One can never truly outgrow life because they are bound in it, imbued with its will, and are made to serve it until natural causes take their course.

It requires a very powerful will to even maintain life, let alone continue it for decades; I would have no qualms enduring it were it only my decision to live, but life is more than merely what I think of it; I have relations and responsibilities to others, and I am so made as to endure it in order to make good on every responsibility I have. It would be easy for me if I were the kind of person to live without responsibility, but I know all too well that were I to live without it, I would feel more than I really am and thus lose the call to action in the world, because I would see myself above everyone and not wish to deal with them as a result. I already feel a call to inaction, but this is out of no ill will towards others, rather, only out of an ill will towards myself—my own life is what I suffer, and so I feel it passionately, overly so, and prefer, as a result, to ruminate upon it than make something out of it.

You see, dear reader, how much I suffer and endure even to write these words? You, for sure, now see why I can never feel at home within myself; why all my discourses for upliftment may help you existentially but are only done out of the necessity of life for me. I am stretched out on the rack of life, and my torture is the only meaning it presently holds. I am impaled by a spear which simultaneously upholds me. I can get no break from life, for my every waking second is spent in contemplation of why I even continue it. Emil Cioran famously said that, “A book is a suicide postponed.” And also, perhaps more morosely:

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?

This echoes what Thales famously said 2,600 years earlier. It is recorded by Diogenes Laërtius in his life of Thales as the following:

He said also that there was no difference between life and death. “Why, then,” said someone to him, “do you not die?” “Because,” said he, “it does make no difference.”

And not far after this immortal saying, Diogenes records a few more sayings of the great Thales which I think posterity ought to read:

When he was asked what was very difficult, he said, “To know one’s self.” And what was easy, “To advise another.”

What was most pleasant? “To be successful.”

To the question, “What is the divinity?” he replied, “That which has neither beginning nor end.”

When asked what hard thing he had seen, he said, “An old man a tyrant.”

When the question was put to him how a man might most easily endure misfortune, he said, “If he saw his enemies more unfortunate still.”

When asked how men might live most virtuously and most justly, he said, “If we never do ourselves what we blame in others.”

To the question, “Who was happy?” he made answer: “He who is healthy in his body, easy in his circumstances, and well-instructed as to his mind.”

He said that men ought to remember those friends who were absent as well as those who were present, and not to care about adorning their faces, but to be beautified by their studies.

“Do not,” said he, “get rich by evil actions, and let not any one ever be able to reproach you with speaking against those who partake of your friendship. All the assistance that you give to your parents, the same you have a right to expect from your children.”

All of them are great, but the one that strikes me particularly strongly is the first one. I find that my whole philosophical system is really one long letter of advice to my younger self, given everything I’ve learned since then. It’s so easy for me to sit on high, kick my feet up, and override the sounds of the real world with my own advice, but does any of this constitute ‘knowing myself’? I suppose if one is smart enough they could pose as a great sage, but that’s merely acting, playing the role, being something you’re not—but to actually embody every experience you speak of, and to actually know the lived lessons of life rather than merely receiving them in print, is much different.

I would suspect, as Schopenhauer rightly did, that those who know life only through books can write out a discourse on par with Plato or Aristotle, but in an absolute sense, it would all be empty platitudes not worth the pages they’re written on. It is better, then, to write honestly what you think rather than what you’ve received from others; and that is why my writing style is so enjoyable and natural, because everything writ is from the heart and only occasionally passes through the brain when making an analytical point or finding fault in the structure while editing. My approach to writing is, above everything else, Schopenhauerian. Let me end by quoting him on this point:

My works are a succession of essays, in which I am possessed with one idea I wish to determine for its own sake by writing it down. They are put together with cement, therefore they are not shallow and dull, like the works of people who sit down to write a book page by page, according to some preconceived plan. —Arthur Schopenhauer, His Life and Philosophy, Chapter 3, by Helen Zimmern.

And on the approach to an idea to be written out more generally, he says:

If I faintly perceive an idea which looks like a dim picture before me, I am possessed with an ineffable longing to grasp it; I leave everything else, and follow my idea through all its tortuous windings, as the huntsman follows the stag; I attack it from all sides and hem it in until I seize it, make it clear, and having fully mastered it, embalm it on paper. Sometimes it escapes, and then I must wait till chance discovers it to me again. Those ideas which I capture after many fruitless chases are generally the best. —Ibid.

In the next chapter of Zimmern’s biography, he further says:

A work forms itself under my hands, or rather in my mind, a philosophy uniting ethics and metaphysics, which till now have been as wrongly dissociated as men have been separated into body and soul. The work grows, takes substance gradually and slowly, like the child in the womb. I do not know what originated first, what last. I discern one member, one vessel, one part after another; that is to say, I write them down without troubling myself about the unity of the whole, for I know that all has sprung from one source. Thus arises an organic whole, and only such an one can live. —Arthur Schopenhauer, His Life and Philosophy, Chapter 4, by Helen Zimmern.

And why not quote the man at his most honest regarding life and genius:

In order that man may preserve a lofty frame of mind, turning his thoughts from the temporal to the eternal; in one word, to keep a higher consciousness alive in him; pain, suffering, and failure are as needful as ballast to a ship, without which it does not draw enough water, becomes a plaything for the winds and waves, travels no certain road, and easily overturns.

Suffering is a condition of the efficacy of genius. Do you believe that Shakespeare and Goethe would have written, Plato philosophized, Kant criticized Pure Reason, if they had found satisfaction and contentment in the actual world surrounding them; if they had felt at home in it, and it had fulfilled their desires? —Ibid.

Emotion

I would gladly give myself completely to emotion were it not an unwise thing to do today. Everything about which I think regarding the world always comes to me in two forms: a practical one and an emotional one; a divide made only because modernity is steeped in division and categorization made from abstractions, rather than real experience or honest hermeneutics.

Emotion is derided because it is not felt honestly. The whole world today is drawn out from the accountant’s scrapbook rather than the painter’s canvas. There is a war of ideas currently underway; a war of values—those who wish to give up and give in, and those who wish to reject and renew. The whole panoply of the present age is fought in the shadows between these two forces, and is played out behind the scenes from the prying eyes of the public—that ignorant mass who is willing to change with the winds the moment it suits them.

Every conflict which the world encounters is really the result of opposing values. Every problem is the same but the methods to there solutions are different. Even individually, we feel this constant tension and opposition play out between ideologies we can’t even understand, let alone sympathize with. The whole libretto is written long before the music is put to it, and likewise, the world was decided long before we had our say in how it should be fought out. People today can’t even agree to disagree, to let bygones be bygones—everything has to be a constant dialectical struggle with the intention of maximizing casualties in ideological warfare.

Ideas today are not our own, but rather someone else’s, who themselves took them from somewhere else. It may be said that nothing new is under the sun—and in that way nothing worth talking about—but I would like to believe that the human spirit is vast enough to take old material and breathe into it fresh life, in order that there shall be a continuance of old ideas in new garbs, which in a sense makes them new.

I care very little for the antiquity of an idea; only what it brings me, and what, within it, fulfills me, that I concern myself with. It’s very hard to feel like we’re capable of innovating in the world presently, and this is because, as I said, everything is subjected, first, to an analytical treatment which strips from it all the creativity and emotion that went into its creation. The way in which we devise our schemes is hardly new, but this does not imply that nothing innovative may come out of it: one merely needs to glance at the history of art in order to see the clear evolution in approaches, and the new responses to old traditions, in order to see culture born from the womb of ideas so to say.

Everything has its urphänomen (archetypal or primordial phenomenon) which we as observers are made to acknowledge, and from which we are forced, by the very nature of it, to draw upon, in order to resuscitate it from a deadly stasis. Nature is a dialectic; it requires an observer to notice it in order for its beauty to have an enchanting effect upon us, and from that sight comes new worlds of abstraction which can be made tangible in the world through action. Nature and life are co-eternal because they’re both ideal and material—without objectivity there is no subjectivity, and without subjectivity no truth of what the object is. We are as dependent on nature as we are independent of it, which is to say, totally dependent on it, for we are both nature and non-nature—and the sooner man recognizes this, the sooner he will see the importance of emotion.

Nature, and by extension life, has emotion implicit in it, but it is only man that can bring this emotion into perspective, and thus give life to it—something which one who only seeks to objectify nature, mathematizing it and reducing it to line, number, and figure, can never truly appreciate. Abstraction to a reductionist is the whole point of observation, for they believe that the observation itself is meaningless unless it can further their knowledge of the thing being viewed; they take all things to their logical conclusion, and wish to find in simplicity the kernel of truth they believe to be there—never asking why it’s there in the first place. This point cannot be emphasized enough: these reductionists presume the simplest form of a thing is all that thing is, rejecting subjectivity completely, and thus turn existence and the cosmos into factoids and trivia—as if the glory of life were simply the answer to it, rather than the journey and experiences from it. I cannot hate more strongly than I already do those who despise life by turning against it in order to feel master of it; they would speak in the language of Leibniz’s characteristica universalis (universal characteristic) and end each period with a Q.E.D. if it meant remaining totally consistent and logically coherent. They condemn what they do not understand, or rather, what they cannot put in logical terms, and so use reason to justify itself in order to ensure emotion cannot get a foothold within the analysis of reality.

I’m an existentialist, however, and cannot help but notice how bankrupt that approach to reality is when it comes to real life—when it comes to actually living amongst irrational beings with passions as deep as the Earth. What good does this kind of thinking bring anyone if it cannot relate back to their own person personally? Where is the subject at the heart of every experience if you treat each moment as a camera does time—snapped, forever eternal, but made so only momentarily? No. What is necessary is subjectivity. Without that, all you have is your deductions without personality, and are no different from a calculator doing arithmetic. It doesn’t help that these reductionists are the most insufferable people to be around, always trying to find fault with what you say as if you were in a debate with them, rather than hearing you out first and then commenting on what you said. But, sadly for them, they’re on their way out, for the world at present doesn’t need people making the futility of life that much more apparent; it is already clear to every feeling heart just how debauched the world is, and how impossible the prospect of lasting happiness remains. What is needed here are new ideas, but ideas of an ethical, sympathetic, even impractical kind; the world needs more dreamers, because for far too long have we let the Enlightenment run roughshod right over everything which we artists and free-spirits hold dear—turning the point of art into truth, and the end of all activities profit.

There is a kind of absolute truth in the statement “art will save us all.” It will never be accepted by those who shun the emotional, but these are people already obsessed with ideas, not things which are abstract and have no limit to their conceptualizations. You cannot teach a blind man to see, and, similarly, you cannot open a man’s heart to things if he is unwilling to become vulnerable to them, and potentially transformed by them, in the first place. It is absolute because art is the one subject which man can truly feel himself to be totally free in; there are no limits to what he can create because what he creates is only limited by his will which, if we are to agree with Schopenhauer, is indomitable, veracious, and unlimited in its desire to acquire more. It is also true because it necessarily connects with the emotions—the one aspect which our whole subjectivity is embedded in; the heart does not feign its movements when it encounters something beyond it, and the spirit within does not progress without first coming to terms with the thing which moved it—the prime mover, in this case, is we: we are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.

Art sustains and art persists, because in all its gloriousness we are made that much higher by it, and so stumble over it in order to know what it is like to taste life twice, thrice, nay, forever after to infinity and beyond. No concept bounds what mere abstractions provide. The point of art is to see ourselves within it, and to transcend what mere flesh and mind find as only material; it cannot be just material when it exists in both the brain and heart—organs of our knowledge, extensions of our humanity, turned into cold, dead things when the spark of life is not driven into them by emotion. My words would have no meaning whatsoever were they only to be considered tactilely; it is necessary to visualize what the objects relate to in order to grasp what the words themselves are trying to convey. Were there no objects in the universe aside from a solitary, disembodied subject, there would be no external perception from which thought could arise, and thus everything would remain as solitary as our imaginary Boltzmann brain could possibly be. If I may be allowed to quote Robert G. Ingersoll on this point, he says, very rightly:

Is it possible to imagine an infinite intelligence dwelling for an eternity in infinite nothing? How could such a being be intelligent? What was there to be intelligent about? There was but one thing to know, namely, that there was nothing except this being. How could such a being be powerful? There was nothing to exercise force upon. There was nothing in the universe to suggest an idea. Relations could not exist—except the relation between infinite intelligence and infinite nothing. —Why Am I an Agnostic? Part I.

The beauty of emotion is that it is the whole of art embodied in human expression; it is not something from nothing, but rather a something from an everything—all things around us excite our curiosity, and we are baffled at how our world came to be, while thinking also why it cannot be something other than it is. This great mystery which lies at the heart of human existence—in much the same way the meaning of our lives stands motionless in the infinite abyss of ignorance which our minds conjure up in order to answer it—can only be approached artistically, emotionally, spiritually, ethically, and passionately. It is a question that demands the whole of our being in order to properly answer fully.

To analyze nature in an emotional way is to connect with it spiritually, and to see yourself as part of it, and alive within it. We cannot merely gaze upon a star and think of it as nothing more than a speck of light in the sky; to be emotional about a star is to see the grandeur in it, though it be a lifetime away—it is to engage with it beyond its mere stellar classification. One must see the life in the inanimate in order to vivify your own anima (soul).

Without emotion, there can be no originality, because everything would find itself being subject to past feelings which offer no new insight. Everything not considered practically today—which is really to say not considered with respect to your wallet—is the subject of coarse criticism done out of spite by those who cannot take their minds off of the constraints the world places upon their imagination.

All my life, I’ve been told to place my intellect over my emotion—and I tried as best I could to manage that stoic disposition with respect to every event, be it grand or miserable, in my life; but I found after keeping that up for decades, that the strategy has more negatives than positives. I found myself while in that state less than human. I was unable to connect with people on a deep level—for I more often than not made them into abstractions rather than treating them as living, breathing human beings with feelings and emotions. I was always told my problems are my own, and are best solved independently; and while I still hold some reserve, and even reverence, for that kind of approach (for my introverted nature makes that very appealing), I now know that even if that is the best for me, it is not for most—and if I’m to better myself, I must open myself up to the potential of being hurt or misunderstood by another.

One cannot open themselves up to love without also opening themselves up to loss. Hate and pain are among the strongest emotions for that reason: they destroy reason, and allow passion to override what the mind knows intuitively as wrong—hence comes revenge and the cycle of hatred which has engulfed the world several times over. If human beings were not emotional there would be no war—for envy, lust, and greed would not exist—but at the same time there would be no concept of art, love, philosophy, and passion. All the things which make life worth living are those things which also allow for suffering to enter into it; the price of admission to enter humanity is two things: suffering and death—but from these two necessities of being also come joy and life; indeed, it may be said that every consummation is born in joy, and every life which enters the world is that sensation taken to its ultimate conclusion.

Emotions know no bounds, and are the bulwark of every comedy and tragedy which man is blessed or cursed to encounter. In pain we endure through pain, but overcome with joy—and so it is with joy, we endure through pleasure, but suffer the pain of its gradual decline, to say nothing of all those fun memories which we can never live again, but must suffer and endure in times of sadness. I am reminded of a poem by my God-brother in this instance:

21 Novembre 2022

There are no wounds graver and deeper than the ones we inflict upon ourselves for the sake and love of others.

~

Gentle tears can fall heavier than feathers, petals, and stones.

The first line is great enough, but the second is what makes it immortal. I find in tears the whole story of a person’s being, for one who is able to cry is able to comprehend life. We may shed them in all emotional states, and thus find ourselves with all emotions at once when we cry. There is in those little droplets more gravity (importance) than anything which the comings and goings of daily life suggest to me; I am more moved at the sight of a person beside themselves, gracing the ground with their tears, than any show, movie, anime, or book can possibly give me. Art is born in tears, because one has to first empathize with the facets of existence before they can express what they think existence is.

Emotions are simultaneous: they occur abstractly (in the mind) and physiologically (in the body) at the same time, and in the simultaneity comes what we are—human. Man is that rational beast, that confident wimp, that dramatic stone, whose life is predicated on the inability to know what the point of it is.

The present age makes the point of the individual something final, or rather attempts to—which I think it ultimately fails at doing; what modernity lacks is, as I said earlier, dreamers. There are very few people today actually willing to incur suffering for the sake of growth, even if it was guaranteed to them that at the end of it they would become more than they are.

It’s easy to criticize others for criticism’s sake, or drama’s sake—especially when those others are doing things derided by the masses as impractical, or wishful dreaming, but what would there be in life without that—without that sense of impossibility and futility? I would argue nothing but stagnant, boring, uneventful progress which has no implications at all existentially. If people cannot get excited about their lives, how do you expect them to produce great art, or make way for the next culture? It cannot be done unless emotions are considered in their totality. Without emotions there is no art, and without art, there is no life.

Pleasure and Pain

Pleasure and pain come upon life as naturally as light enters the eye. There is no pleasure without pain and vice versa. What we endure in life may rightly be figured as one-tenth pleasure and nine-tenths pain—and yet, man endures, and considers his fortunes well enough even though he may have been dealt a bad hand in life.

The sheer audacity within man to even confront life is worthy of praise; it is, perhaps, even heroic, simply to live in the face of so much unending drudgery and suffering which has to be got through in order to sustain yourself. Life has never been a fair gig, and what makes it absurd is precisely that we are forced to believe it fair nonetheless in order to get by; but in that continuous cycle of absurdity, there seems to always be pockets of simplicity and beauty that turn even the most tragic of situations into events fondly remembered.

I may at times, or even all at the same time, be melancholic, pessimistic, idealistic, happy, hopeful, sad, miserable, and every other emotion. In such a state, I find great relief in knowing that I, as a single individual facing off against the totality of the world, am capable of enduring all the pricks and pangs of life in spite of how I feel in the face of them. To recall what is happy in sad times is always a slight consolation, but to recall what is sad in happy times is greater still—because in that, you recognize fully the necessity of pleasure and pain as you live out your life. When a man learns to feel love, he must also bear the risk of feeling hate.

The dialectical nature of pleasure and pain makes itself known every second of life. If life were merely a matter of getting by without considering deeply what you want out of it, philosophy would have nothing to say on the existential questions that plague it; but since man is doomed to inhabit the body he is born in, and persist in the times he finds himself in, it is necessarily a matter of dialectical struggle how he is to recognize himself in the mirror of the world when so much of it is bound in inevitable pain and temporary pleasure. Nothing ever truly lasts in life, and what we make of all our goals and interests has no greater concern for anything outside ourselves.

If one is to consider life as objectively as possible, in order to get at whatever truth lies at the center of it, they will find, I’m sorry to say, nothing beyond the pleasure and pain which comprise it—and since the majority of it is taken up with pain, they will become pessimists, and perhaps even nihilists.

One cannot consider life authentically unless they undergo the arduous journey of overcoming what fundamental antinomies lie at the core of it. Life, if I haven’t made it clear already, is a fundamental contradiction itself: to live is to be amongst the living, and thus to serve as a repudiation of the dead—to say nothing regarding the absurd nature at the heart of what existence really implies. One may as well call upon Kierkegaard’s symparanekromenoi (fellowship of the dead) in order to give a lecture on the true implications of existence.

What is absurd in life is that it cannot be systematized without falling into a perfidious rigidity, or a dogmatic anti-human ferocity—the sentiments of which are worthy of the grave, and whose supporters write the epitaph for life without the tombstone to engrave it upon. This great secret is only kept because of how many different ways it may be told. Life confuses us, scares us even, because there are too many ways it can play out; there are too many ideas which one can give in order to explain life, and in this confusion comes various interpretations which claim to be the “right” one. I am convinced, however, that no matter how far one is to take life, they shall never find a suitable answer to it, or a framework to live in which shall be completely satisfactory to them—pain once again overrides all, and turns our foolish pleasures into hateful phantoms: mirages give hope to the man stranded in the desert, and so do all our life-philosophies.

Every idea regarding life is really an affront to what it really is—a miscellany of misery, a bundle of crushed hopes and sad reflections which afford us no respite. Life is suffering because to live is to suffer whatever comes out of the void of absurdity and chance, which we play no part in but which we must endure and get through if we are to experience a far-off pleasure which we presume to be there because it has always appeared after every tragedy.

It really is sick when you think about it: man only sustains himself because he feels intuitively that if he holds out long enough, he will be rewarded for all his suffering—in fact, most today don’t even consider life a thing worth bothering with; they’re waiting to die, and are desirous of it, in order to be freed from all their earthly misery. This is the function Christianity, and essentially every other religion, has served since its inception. “Religion is the metaphysics of the masses,” said Schopenhauer—or, perhaps better put by Marx, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” One cannot disqualify religion without dooming nearly half the human race.

For the masses—bound by drudgery and physical need—religion is the only bridge to life’s deeper meaning. While philosophers address the few who are intellectually emancipated, founders of religion rouse the multitude from their stupor. As Plato noted, the masses cannot be philosophers; therefore, religion serves as their necessary guide to the lofty import of existence. But again, in truth, there really is no distinction; both the philosopher and the religious person hold out (on life) on the basis of faith—faith in their own judgments regarding the systems or ideas they buy into; the philosopher is simply better at justifying to himself why his worldview works in his context.

Every ideology, whether directly or indirectly, is a response to the material conditions which imbibe every facet of sensuous activity. One cannot consider life without considering their material conditions, in the same way one cannot consider the world impartially—without subjectivity, that is—without falling into a solipsistic nightmare. The absurdity of life once again finds its place in the pleasure and pain which we feel at any given moment. We respond to our external world and compartmentalize it in our internal world. There is no better summation of what modernity is than one large distraction from what the external world (pain) is striving to place upon our subjectivity as we live.

Man is both internal and external. What is absurd is that he must juggle both aspects of his life while existing in a world that tries to limit him to one or the other. Everything is an either/or in modernity; every nuance is brushed over for the sake of simplicity—critical thought is nowhere to be found except in a few corners of the internet (for no one really interacts with anyone anymore) that either try to justify its destruction or its emancipation. This confusion is then further propounded by the fact that so many are unable to think for themselves on anything; everyone wishes to have the answers to life given to them, rather than going out and discovering it for themselves.

Every framework is contingent on the power structure which it’s striving to free itself from; every pleasure and pain in the life of an independent thinker is really ancillary to the one overarching pleasure and pain which they are under: the pain of enslavement to the world and the pleasure of seeing yourself free from it. In that sense death is a pleasure, so long as it confers freedom on the one who feels subjugated to everything which is malicious and vain in this world.

Repetition is really the glue that holds every dialectic together, for without it, there would be no turning over of events (in the mind) which led to us developing systems of understanding in the first place. It would be impossible to face life genuinely were we forced to recreate new meanings each time we awoke from our temporary slumber. Implicit within repetition is the concept of memory—that faculty of the mind which turns the mysteriousness of life into a manageable practice which we keep up with at all times.

We are constantly going over in our heads what it is we need to do, but very few stop to ask why we do what we do in the first place; this question is enough to put all of life into perspective, and it’s from here we form our habits of habituation—we do things because we do not know what else to do besides them, and hence comes all our daily rituals and activities which we adopt without reflection. Reflection and repetition go hand in hand. There is no negation of negation without reflection continuously repeating itself.

Now, unlike Hegel, it is here I depart from the optimistic teleology of an eventual synthesis; I do not believe that history has a purpose to it, or that it is moving towards a higher form of self-realization: the rational processes of man are part and parcel of his already determined condition; every “victory” is really an overcoming that was not arrived at through “sheer force of will” but contingency. If man achieves anything at all it is due to how suited he is to the task at hand which, altogether, is largely out of his control.

Repetition is the realization that reflection alone is not sufficient to capture reality in its entirety. What is necessary is that one reflects always, at all times, on everything they encounter, if they are to achieve, if not lasting peace, temporary contentment. This again gets at the idea that the only way through the absurdity of life is through its necessary contradictions via the dialectic.

There is, in life, a method to insanity and a method to peace. In the former, one need only try to live life as if it had no meaning, and they shall quickly fall into a manic stupor. In the latter, one need only live life as if it did have meaning, and they will find that it is nearly impossible to locate—if it has a location at all. As I’ve said before, every concept really fails, because they abstract away from what life is existentially. Every concept is born by accident and lives depending on its utility to the individual.

Those who strive for a perfectly consistent, “objective” worldview are really striving after the impossible, for there is no perfection in life, and man’s mind is incapable of dealing with the groundlessness of existence itself, let alone the philosophical implications such an “objective system” would raise the moment it was completed.

Wise men make God the ground of all things, for, like life, it is equally mysterious and unknowable—but it is a prophylactic against the darkness which all things fall into when left to our own reason; it is, however, a kind of philosophical suicide, for it makes all rational productions of the mind slave to a master which reason itself cannot comprehend. Such is why it is wise, for at least then, it can claim ignorance on divine rather than human grounds.

Honest men, however, grapple with life dialectically, confusedly, openly, contradictorily—in a word, humanly. There is no end to the number of permutations which man may devise for himself when attempting to understand his place in the world. This innate confusion about our very condition gives rise to all our pleasure and pain—but, at the same time, one is endeared to the idea of pleasure being found through engagement with the pain openly, for all to see, in real time, at every instance one is forced to consider it.

Life is a pain, but in that fact is also found, standing behind it, the dialectical method of reflection and repetition—in short, the act of thinking real hard about what it really means to be a subject existing in an absurd world—this one thought, over and over and over again, until it cannot be thought anymore, only to be picked up once again the very next day. Everything I write with respect to life is really a therapeutic exercise, because in this stream of consciousness I find the ideas which most relate to my situation, and in giving them vent, and making them immortal by placing them upon the page, I in a sense exorcise them, and in doing that come closer to what I seek: a lasting peace with simply being, having no thought for tomorrow, no consideration for the past, and no anxiety about the future.

Life is a pain because it is, we are; we cannot be other than what we assume ourselves to be presently, and in that, we cannot go outside ourselves until we accept what we are presently. The hardest thing in life—a lesson I discovered only after many years—is being happy within a state of desirelessness; half of man’s pains are from his ignorance, and the other half is from his envy or desire for things which matter very little in the grand scheme of things. People are quick to reject pain and welcome pleasure, not realizing that all pleasure is bound in pain, and in pain is found the source of our liberation—we only conceive of what pleasure could be in response to what it would be like to be freed from our present pain.

As you can see, you cannot have one without the other, and the more you want one over the other, you throw off the balance, and thus disturb your whole harmony. A thing at rest shall remain so unless acted on by another force, and likewise, the dialectic of life is found when our thoughts regarding ourselves are made insignificant. It is not bad to be made small when compared with the universe; humility today is a lost art, much like patience, and you will find that the sooner man is able to overcome whatever inconveniences he is forced to endure on behalf of life, he will be made the happier for recognizing how trivial they all really are. Living life in this respect allows one to more easily wrestle with pain, and overcome it through the pleasure of realizing what is really important to the subject who was born to live and forced to die.

The last man shall have no undertaker, and thus he will go out of this world similar to how he came into it—not by choice, confused, and ignorant of the whole point. It is in the thought of death that one gets through many difficult events. Memento mori! Memento mori! One must remember they will die in order to enjoy the fact that they live; in fact, personally, if it wasn’t for death’s eventual certainty, I would have ended it all long ago, for I consider nothing in life meaningful enough to overcome its eventual end. But, at the same time, that thought is also what compels me to live—since I don’t know everything, I’m interested in seeing for myself just how far my eternal torment and ephemeral joy will take me through life.

Life really becomes an adventure when you don’t set for yourself objectives to complete within it; there’s an overwhelming amount of freedom that comes with not taking life seriously—life is a cruel joke when taken seriously, and a divine comedy when taken lightly. Taking it easy, and not thinking much about it at all, is the best way to pass it by.

Every “practical” consideration today is really a false pragmatism that doesn’t concern the subject existentially at all. All “existential crises” today are really material, not existential; almost every trouble that faces an individual stems from their inability to realize themselves as fully actualized subjects (single individuals who understand themselves dialectically)—and the reason they’re unable to derives from their inability to live without sacrificing most of their life to their employment. Life today is tied to your occupation, and as a result, you have, over many years, a gradual dissociation with your own subjectivity; people forget what it means to be human, and in this ignorance comes every dishonest cope, grindset, life hack, online community, wellness program, and guru-entrepreneur self-made millionaire study guide that the human brain is unfortunate enough to cogitate. All of this leads to an eventual disenfranchisement with your own soul, and ends in a vexing disenchantment with life itself. Nobody is capable of saving you. The world is pain, and existence is all too short to make something out of it when the materials are lacking for its production.

To live is one burden, to think it has a reason, another—and, worse still, to believe it has a meaning, the greatest burden of all. What kind of absurd meaning would any of this existence have when you consider how miserable things are presently in it? In such a state, it is very easy to consign yourself to the flames, and resign from the world like an ascetic—but I find too much enjoyment in enduring life, even when everything seems like a dread, than ending it short. My meaning is derived from my inability to find meaning. I find power in not knowing where the winds shall carry me, and, all the while, not caring whether I’m blown into an isle of Sirens or a whirlpool of death.

Life matters very little to a man who does not wish to live it—so much of his life made hard through pain, and, unable to overcome, sees very little point in it. I understand this man all too well, for I’m very much like that, but, in pain, pleasure is always a certainty, provided you’re willing to wrestle with what the pain really is existentially. There would be very little to complain about in life if you were able to live it without concern for how it turns out, or how all those you care about are to get along after you’re gone.

Most life advice is bad precisely because it doesn’t engage with your own present subjectivity; it doesn’t consider your pain, and makes whatever you take pleasure in as the thing you should maximize—it’s utilitarian, and thus a very uncritical and lazy kind of thinking. Pleasure and pain only mean something when we take them on their own terms, play by their rules, see things through their perspective—and overcome them anyway using our own tools, our own reason, our own methods. Life is mostly pain, and some parts pleasure—but in the existential engagement with the two comes all a man’s character, and his ability to endure the world.

Fate and Finality

Chance

Chance falls upon every man, regardless of whether they be fatalists or not. To suppose things otherwise than what they really are is to write out a condemnation of contingency. Chance is really synonymous with contingency, for all things are contingent on another; but we, in our great ignorance, assume that those same things were always present, and not brought about through the randomness of the cosmos. In all respects, everything in experience is but chance made tangible. The whole flux of life, the implicit dialectic within nature, and the constant reminder of suffering in the world all point to chance ruling and dominating our lives.

Life itself is a chance: a chance to live, a chance to die, a chance to love, a chance to hate. There is no end to the innumerable complexities which surround a human being as they trudge through life. Everything in our subjectivity being subject to the chance occurrences of life—those random events which more often than not prove great inconveniences and difficult drudgeries—is subject also to our temperaments and capacities for enduring them; in that sense, even our ability to live in the world is largely chance—predetermined by how well our descendants were able to do the same. It is unfair to ask the cripple to climb a mountain, in the same way it is unfair to ask the idiot to learn; what chance has wrought upon these individuals is a misfortune, and thus should be considered when striving to crudely objectify them.

No man chooses to live; he is born into a losing struggle which he must fight against every time he is called from slumber. Chance is arduous, for it spares none, and very often strikes down people when they’re at their lowest. Most make themselves subject to chance more than they should by taking on things which they are incapable of overcoming given their present circumstances. Chance makes men with the same rapidity it destroys them, and leaps with alacrity into the arms of everyone, though it be repulsive to all. Life is a misfortune precisely because it is primarily left to chance. A man’s capacity to feel hope in the world is largely dependent on how well he is able to accustom himself to his dreadful conditions; chance, in that sense, really becomes the raft which the shipwrecked cling to, though it was also the cause for the ship’s capsize in the first place.

It is undeniable that everything in life is really meretricious when considered purely from the perspective of chance. It is so disheartening to see the wicked succeed and the poor fail, the hungry starve and the well-fed glut themselves more; everything in the world should really be looked upon as a sort of desengaño (disappointment) if it is to be considered with honesty. It isn’t my intention to turn chance into the devil, but it’s very difficult to speak of randomness—which is all chance really boils down to—and not wish to ascribe to it some autonomy.

Usually, I would affirm uncertainty if the only other option was erroneousness, but with chance, even the option of uncertainty becomes uncertain, because how could we be sure that uncertainty is certain? The questions which realism forces us to predicate dichotomously are wrong precisely because they fail to consider the negative; the negative here being merely the negation of what is claimed and concluded. Without the negative, one cannot consider the opposite, and thus cannot account for the chance of things. If one fails to consider chance, one fails to consider the possibility of suffering, and so loses the most fundamental and basic quality of life.

As I said, without this, there is no honest framework by which to construct around life. Everything we do in life is done with the hope that whatever chaos the world confronts us with will in some way be mitigated by our actions. Even if everything was determined, as Spinoza thought, the inability of man to comprehend the difference between the effects of his actions and the world which caused him to act in the first place would be enough to forever place the idea of determinism in the dark; nay more, it is something which, if we were trying to be balanced about it, would compel us to adopt the position of agnosticism. The whole divide between believing and knowing is down to chance too, for what we say we know is really saying what we firmly believe on the preponderance of its evidence—assuming we were being rational about it.

Events are no more subject to our will than the sun is subject to the Earth. What happened, happened, and there is no changing the past any more than there is knowing the future. Man’s life is made intelligible to him in proportion to how much he can suffer in it; and so, the more a man suffers, the more he is able to accurately depict what existence really is. It is hard enough to live, let alone paint a cohesive narrative around it that makes sense of it; and so, in the face of so much difficulty, tethered with the inability to correlate it all in a comprehensible manner, it is very common for man to throw himself into religion, or—if he be a secular fellow—to start a family and make the purpose of his life the prosperity of his children. I am, in this regard, however, utterly solitary and devoid of any contact.

When I consider my own life in relation to all the chance encounters I had within it, and when I consider how all those events made me—despite my not remembering a single one of them with any clarity—I am surprised to find that no author in history, or piece of worldly advice given me by family, friends, or strangers alike, has in any way enlightened my path or given me guidance regarding the conduct of life. It’s as if, in attempting to understand myself, I attempt to do what no man before me has done; of course, what I just said is ridiculous on its face—for there have been innumerable existentialists before me—but I’m speaking here anecdotally, not factually: what I really mean to imply is that no book or conveyed lived experience from another has been able to show me the way of life, the method of approaching it, or the ability to overcome its chance.

In this sea of confusion, I find myself attempting to stay afloat whilst a massive tidal wave approaches. I’m cast at sea on a boat without a rudder. Nothing makes sense to me, and I am forced to make sense of it myself, as if for the first time in history. Every new day is really a new chance to remember how much of your own self you have forgotten; the sun shines upon every earthly misery, and in such a cruel jest adorns with light all the depravity humanity does to occupy itself with. Only a single glance out into the real world would be enough to sober you up to the truth of it: that existence is wicked when you consider how the whole of it is organized and subjugated for the sake of maintaining order and security. Nothing really matters today because everything has been profaned for the sake of some homogeneous, uniform regularity, run on exploitation and the very real threat of hunger and loss of shelter if you even remotely act contrary to the norm.

It doesn’t confuse me, then, why everybody thinks the same, does the same, wants the same, and hates the same. Everyone is so disconnected from their own person, they’ll stake their whole being on a savior figure, or guru, or politician, or even philosopher, long before they believe in themselves. Things at present are organized in order to make the humanity of the individual seem like an unnecessary component, when in truth it is the whole being. Even activist groups are shallow today, since everything they do is really a power play, and not considered with the individuals in mind.

All this chance just so happens to be what we humans have concocted for ourselves, and we shall either perish by it, or overcome it by taking chance into our own hands, though it be something we cannot grasp. Our chants for change are like whispers in the ears of chance, but it is in chanting that we find within ourselves enough courage to envision a better world. A better world is possible, so long as there are those few hopeful spirits who uplift a whole class of people through their advocacy. Not everyone can be a Marx, or a Lenin, or a Luxemburg—but everyone can be inspired by them and see to it that the future does not become like the present.

Like I’ve been saying, it’s very easy to see the world for what it is and wish to resign instantly from it—and many do—but I’ve never been one to give up when faced with the absurdity of life; my life would be so much easier if I could afford resignation, but that remains a thing only for the few already well-off enough, or dedicated enough, to do so; it is not in my temperament, however—I know not the color of fear when angry, and I’m right about now absolutely furious with everything in this poor, diminishing, quack world.

I find life so much more exciting when suffering is the common occurrence each day, for it rewards those looking for it with endless inspiration. The world we live in at present is really only suited for a Schopenhauer (pessimistic philosopher), a Dostoevsky (existential novelist), or a Nietzsche (existential philosopher); everyone else is forced to eat their own bread bitterly, and thus pay dearly for each breath drawn.

Nothing seems to get better because hope and change are nonexistent, and the average person—lacking any real critical thinking skills or deductive reasoning—is forced between giving up entirely or placing unreasonable amounts of faith in total incompetence. To expect the people of today to democratically elect a person willing to actually improve their lives is like giving a baby a hammer and nails and expecting it to build a house out of them—you’re better off asking a blind man to land a plane, or a fat man to run a marathon in under four hours.

Nobody likes to deal with the reality of things because reality isn’t a thing to be dealt with without first sacrificing yourself to it. This world requires a pound of flesh from you before you can even enter it. Nobody comes into this world without pain being inflicted upon the mother, and nobody leaves it unscathed from the mental and physical anguish which must be dealt out in order to survive within it.

Life, if considered honestly—and everyone knows how scary honesty can be—is more a misfortune than a blessing, for all the sufferings we encounter within it are disproportionate to the number of joys we are lucky enough to experience. You would think one such as myself would get tired of exposing the truth of life, ridiculing it all the while; but, unlike Cioran, I actually find you can never repeat enough times just how barbaric, cruel, unequal, and stupid life really is—I find in it, actually, an inexhaustible well from which to extract essay after essay, aphorism after aphorism: the whole point of my existence at present seems nothing more than turning my thoughts into statues of prose made beautified by their elegance and truth.

Besides, I’ve spent too much time in the philosophical systems of others not to attempt to give my own complete analysis of the world. I believe it is something everyone must do, in fact—for without your own standard by which to judge and consider things from, who is to be master, who is to be critic, and who is to be interpreter of your existence? Do not take refuge in the false security of consensus; experience will prove to you that more often than not, everyone acting in their own best interest doesn’t actually lead to the best outcomes as Adam Smith thought, but rather only leads to a majority of mediocrities. Smith’s logic only applies to the market, which is very much run like a monarchy led by philosopher-kings; the whole pretense of democracy is founded on a falsehood, for representatives are still needed, and power, no matter where it spreads, always tends to corrupt even when placed into the hands of an angel. Even America, the supposed freest nation in history, was never really a democracy—if by democracy we mean the ability for a man to choose who he is to be ruled by, while living his life free from government interference, while at the same time being able to execute his rights and liberties without the threat of them being stripped from him.

If I may speak about contemporary matters for a second, it shocks me America is celebrating its Semiquincentennial when Americans are the most self-centered, arrogant, ignorant, bigoted, unhealthy, superstitious collection of rubes and knaves this planet has ever seen. I would say I’m proud to be an American if I saw things to be proud of, but when I look out into the world and see nothing but the strong crushing the weak—combined with nonstop justifications by the ruling classes for their own supremacy—and very little in the way of effective mobilization of the populace to change this barbaric, disheartening, retarding system of exploitation, it is only natural I remain silent, or, if asked, say I’m American by accident more than anything else. America is the only nation in history to be founded on an idea rather than an actual historical connection to the lands going back millennia. In my opinion, the only thing admirable about America is the founding fathers; other than that, our history is nothing more than a bunch of immigrant farmers being kicked around by the landed gentry—to which our founding fathers mostly belonged.

This world has always been run by chance, and this manifests itself nowhere clearer than in the study of history; even philosophy cannot be spared from its own material analysis, because every philosophy is a response to some material condition. The fact that slavery was considered natural for as long as humans have been around is proof enough that, by nothing more than chance, the whole history of our species is really governed by a maleficent force of will which we are privy to but which we are also slaves to.

I can never get over how nonchalantly people consider their own life; the whole of their being, everything they are and wish to be—a little miserable pile of flesh and bones—turned into nothing more than another entry on some spreadsheet, or some doomer waiting for death, or some degenerate who passes their time lost in some obscure, deranged, perverse corner of the internet. Nietzsche was right; he was always right. The advent of nihilism is upon us. What once seemed like a prophecy from Nostradamus is now coming to pass in our own times, and the scariest thing is—nobody knows what to do when all this darkness shall consume us.

Chance, in all its glory, rules us as a king does his serfs—all while the peasants are still shackled to the lands out of necessity. Chance, great chance, ruler of all contingency, harborer of all events, keeper of all secrets, embodier of all things: we are, compared to you, like a moth to the moon, chasing after your light without realizing how far your rays truly shine. If only it were possible to affirm what is determined; since this remains out of our reach, we must enter life conspicuously with all our ignorance still attached to us.

As sad and insignificant as it is, life presents itself as a task—the task, I mean, of subsisting at all. Once survival is secured, life becomes a burden. The first task is to acquire what we need; the second is to endure the result—warding off the boredom that, like a bird of prey, circles any life safe from want. To find no use for what has been won is to be crushed by it. Such are the ways of chance.

Fate

I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous—a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.— Yet for all that, there is nothing in me of a founder of a religion—religions are affairs of the rabble; I find it necessary to wash my hands after I have come into contact with religious people.— I want no “believers”; I think I am too malicious to believe in myself; I never speak to masses.— I have a terrible fear that one day I will be pronounced holy: you will guess why I publish this book before; it shall prevent people from doing mischief with me. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Why I Am a Destiny.

Revaluation of all values: that is my formula for an act of supreme self-examination on the part of humanity, become flesh and genius in me. It is my fate that I have to be the first decent human being; that I know myself to stand in opposition to the mendaciousness of millennia.— I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies—smelling them out.— My genius is in my nostrils. —Ibid.

I am, like every other man who has ever lived, fated to exist in confusion about the world and my place within it.

Within the vast domain of human experience, it necessarily behooves one to make what he will out of what the world provides him in it; but, being so far from his mind as to how all of it connects, man is hung from above and pulled down from below—on all sides is man attacked, mentally and physically, by all the oppressive forces of the world which manifest themselves in his experience as he is fated to come across them as he lives.

All this would seem to make fate, like chance, the ruler of all; and, in truth, it is—for, like chance, fate is that which drops from above without our notice until it has hit us on the head. Depending on its size, we may either receive a lump or be crushed to dust, for the size of fate varies with how large a burden we carry in the world. We may find ourselves high in one moment and low in the next, but the world carries on nonetheless.

This is our fate. We are all condemned to fate in the same way we in life are condemned to death. It’s not such a hard thing once you’ve gotten used to the notion of being nothing—merely one among billions—in a world whose purpose forever eludes us. Rather, one is strengthened at the thought of having only yourself to make use of—but, at the same time, it is a perilous thought: take it too far and you shall find it impossible to act, for, strong in doubt but weak in conviction (firm judgment), you may find yourself contemplating life more than living it, and thus soothe your inaction by calling your sloth a type of action, a great activity even—nonsense, palatable and convincing only to the wooden-headed. Your only real power in the world comes from overcoming what your present values have deemed treacherous.

Fate plays a role in man’s life in the same manner contingency does. Again, fate and chance are synonymous because they are both found in the contingency of life—and they are both thought necessary after the facts of them have played out. Everything can be explained after the fact; what matters is predicting what is to come before—whether it be from past experience, intuition, or sheer chance, all should rightly be considered before ever engaging with it. “… Before undertaking any enterprise, careful preparation must be made,” says Cicero in his De Officiis.

A large part of living life is enduring burdens you would rather not have gone through—nay, would have cursed your very existence for having suffered; it would’ve been better not to be at all than to have suffered misfortunes not brought on your own head by your own hands. Lord knows how much my own fate has given me trials and tribulations which were not my fault, and which I would have taken death over rather than go through. Everything in life is fated to decay and death, but while we live, we make constant justifications for why that means nothing to us, though deep down we know it means more than we give it credit for.

The sheer thought of life—considered existentially, that is—is enough to cause a panic; every post hoc rationalization for it falls flat the moment we recognize fate has other plans; everything comes apart at the seams when we see how life has played us for a fool, and how little control we really have over it. How dreadful is the thought really, truly, honestly? Incomprehensible, terrible, impossible to place in its true frame.

Fate is that which we are forced to face while in the midst of so much overbearing dread; the world antagonizes us each second we live: for the most part, the will to self-preservation, helped a little along by boredom and temporary joy, is responsible for all our commotion and movement—all in vain as far as I see it, but necessary regardless if we are to move beyond it, overcome it even. It is always after the fact that things seem light and easy, but in medias res one cannot help but feel despair at having to live at all; nothing seems worth surviving when misery and suffering is all your lot can afford—how many men and women have lived life only to die from the burden of living it?

I would venture to say nobody’s fate is known whilst they live; only post mortem are the causes realized after all the effects have played out. All this uncertainty has caused man, throughout history, to develop ways of deriving some “certainty” about life while in his infantile innocence regarding the ways of the world; one need only look at the history of divination to see the variety of ways man has devised in order to acquire even a slight premonition regarding his fate: Astrology, Pyromancy, Haruspicy, Palmistry, Augury, Runes, I Ching, Tarot (Cartomancy), Oneiromancy, etc.—the superstitious urge has never really left man, only changed in accordance with the prejudices of his times; one can just as easily place scientism or faith in reason (self-enlightenment) in the same category as tools of divination: the only difference between the two is how they’re justified—one claims evidence while the other claims inspiration. Both, as far as I’m concerned, however, are two ends of the same fragile string—pull too tightly in one direction over the other, and you must give way lest it rip in two.

Reason is simply a type of intuition about knowing—knowing in the existential sense, not in the reductionistic sense of being verified beyond all reasonable doubt, or being deduced from premises that are themselves “infallible”; rather, reasoning for the sake of life, in finding within the multiplicity of things a single overarching principle behind which everything lies, from which everything can be made sense. Aren’t we all after the same thing anyway—truth? Isn’t faith seeking understanding, or reasoning seeking evidence, born from the same impulse which causes man to reflect on his state in the first place? I, for one, have never thought the two should be separated, so long as one knows when they’re speaking syncretically (broadly, without fear of contradiction) and when they’re speaking scientifically (narrowly, with only evident facts on the mind).

In essence, my version of pragmatism is a synthesis of the mystical and scientific; one must have their hands in all the domains of life if they are to comprehend all the antinomies which necessarily arise between the warring presuppositions.

Without empathy, there can be no unity between people—the same is true in the realm of ideas; without it, you get what we have today: an increasingly varied number of specializations and academic disciplines that do not engage with each other at all—thus increasing the amount of specific knowledge but decreasing the amount of interdisciplinary knowledge; all this resulting in a motley of perspectives and worldviews that all cut across each other, while overlapping in some places, but totally without unity or coherence. It is not that domain-specific knowledge is bad—in fact, it is necessary—but when taken to the extreme as it has today, it far exceeds the practical bounds of knowledge’s telos (purpose), and thus makes everyone a specialist unable to do anything outside of their expertise.

To an academic, all this may seem like hogwash, and fair enough—but I’m not in the business of placating Ivy League intellectuals; my goal here (with my philosophy) is to reevaluate modernity on its own terms and return it from a handstand to a normal stance; I’m interested in knowledge for life, in changing the way we consider life: to move from the material to the pragmatic, from a plurality to a unity, from all things being apart to all things being together.

When I look out into the world, all I see is one constantly moving substance—the dialectic itself—not a diverse multitude of different things all vying for attention and opposition without harmony. If a thing is not for life, then it is not for me; every consideration must be human, and must be able to incorporate the heart of man into the investigation of nature as well. To constantly have an antagonism between reductionism and irrationalism is to fruitlessly labor on behalf of two masters, trying to reconcile the unreconcilable; the only synthesis found within this most powerful of negations is that of overlapping them with one dominant framework that incorporates both of them.

There is no light without corresponding darkness, and the same is true regarding our public and private lives; the private life is the intellectual one, while the public life is the pragmatic one—where you sacrifice, though not completely, some personal principle or aspect of your individuality in order to make your way through the world with less headache. This is the dualism which Romanticism has always been plagued with—the battle between the individual and the world—and which men like Goethe, Coleridge, and Emerson have tried to intellectually bridge by imbuing the materialist reductionist approach with subjectivity (in an idealist form)—all while acknowledging the mental anguish this will undoubtedly cause for those who are unable to adopt two contradictory modes of being.

I should mention, also, that I say “intellectually bridge” specifically because it was a particular approach unique to its time and place—to make intellectual what was, prior to the Enlightenment, in the realm of the religious, not the rational; in truth, there have always been men and women who were natural, existential pragmatists—those who didn’t even consider contradiction as something incorrect with respect to thinking, that is, something which was not considered irrational merely because wasn’t arrive at logically—say through some syllogism; some have an innate capacity to transcend their age by conceptualizing it in complete opposition to the norm—or, in other words, to conceive it in a unique way that is wholly their own. If everyone were capable of thinking out for themselves, independently of every other opinion and presupposition, there would be no need for existential philosophy—for everyone’s own wisdom would be enough, and they would rely only on their own understanding and reason from their own first principles on how things are to go with them in life.

That would be as near to a perfect world as I could conceive, for there would be very little in the way of coercion or mass manipulation by bad faith actors who, today, have more power than they’re capable of managing; of course, crime and poor material conditions would persist, but a world in which everyone has enough intelligence to know what is and isn’t for their benefit, as well as knowing the best ways to bring that about (hearing all objections and displaying a practical, dialectical judgment unheard of in the history of humanity), would make Democracy that much stronger and rational: it really is the ideal republic which the founding fathers were hopeful of bringing about; but they were still men of their era, stuck within an aristocratic mentality that strove to have the populace “managed” by their “more enlightened” peers—representatives, in a word—rather than bringing that level of enlightenment (self-consciousness, to use Hegel’s term) to the populace as a whole; this, along with slavery and the lack of suffrage for the majority—which contradicts the whole notion of a Democracy—were the original sins of America which we still wrestle with the implications of today.

America has never had a coherent narrative about what its goals are. Nobody since Thomas Jefferson really has had a comprehensive vision for what role values and individual differences are to play in the context of statecraft: the question really is, and has always been, how are millions of people to be collectively unified given a broad spectrum of individual differences which inform their visions of the future. Jefferson’s ideal was the enlightened, independent subsistence farmer, who owned just enough land to support himself and his family on for the rest of time, all the while enjoying his liberties and inculcating his children with his values; of course, this would never work today, and is lacking very much with respect to domestic policy overall, but it is a vision: a thing which, since Jefferson, has been derided as being impossible, or too ambitious, or too impractical—because one man’s liberty must, in some way, always be at odds with another’s. It is, I feel however, something which needs to be returned, for this nation will not last without a narrative, or project, that bridges all divides—and preserves the union through its unity of ideas.

Of all the things which we are forced to make sense of, life certainly remains the most difficult, not because it cannot be suppressed with concepts but because it cannot be overcome with concepts alone. All the prevailing notions that have to do with life are decadent, for they do not deal with life existentially, but rather only concern the material basis of its affections. The solution is, as already expressed, one where fate is taken hold of in the palm of our hands and made into something tangible through our correspondence with it, done between our mental world and the material world which we are surrounded by.

Fate must always be like the boulder which Sisyphus pushed if we are to think of it as something which we are in continuous opposition to, rather than as something which we are beholden to and which we must accept in order to progress honestly through the world. Fate is not our friend, but nor is it our enemy; we must accept the powers that be at first if we are to overcome them later. We must remain strong, and in doing so carve a path that is our own—a powerful one that we can be happy to walk through after paving it over with our experience.

Infinity

My life is an infinity. The world is grey and the void that surrounds it is black.

If the pages of my existence were to somehow be bound into a single folio volume, it would be the most depressing reading imaginable. I cannot think of anything more ridiculous than an author who obsesses over their past thoughts, and yet, I find myself to be exactly that kind of ridiculous individual. I am absurd. My life is everything and nothing to me. All this experience—to what end or purpose? Ah, that is just it: the question of purpose, of telos, of meaning, of definition, of line, circle, square, triangle, angle, value—in short, life… all this and then some, all for what? If life were a theorem, we would find its incompleteness the only Q.E.D. imaginable.

What is infinity, after all, but the one aspect of metaphysics which every metaphysician has written on, but in writing has said very little. Life is an infinity. This endless sea of corroborating experience is enough to make the present seem like all there is; and, if we are to speak metaphysically, we can say that is true, for what remains after a moment is simply that which was, and no longer is. All this talk of discovering something mysterious that lies hidden behind the great magnitude of infinity is nothing but wishful thinking. Man only presumes to know a thing when his heart is touched regarding it; otherwise, his own opinion will be enough for him, and the words of other men are to be treated as mere background noise.

Infinity is that concept which contains everything but which explains nothing. God is infinite, life is infinite, love is infinite, energy is finite—and conserved; but what does any of this have to do with the individual? I only feel a sense of infinity because of how overwhelming the sensations of life truly are. If there is one overarching theme running throughout my entire corpus, it is that everything which we say and think regarding the world is merely our attempt to manage its infinity. In the same way Newton developed the concept of limits (“ultimate ratios,” as he called them) to explain how quantities over finite time converge to a definite value, we philosophers and contemplators of life—we wanderers and shadow seekers, we dwellers in the dark, we free spirits, we artists, we writers, we pessimists and nihilists, etc.—develop our systems of thought and modes of expression out of the infinite abyss which we find in every aspect of life. The death and decay which override all, the sickly constitution of even the most lively of beings, the sheer immensity of our ignorance regarding ourselves—let alone the whole world we inhabit—all this and then some points to the ineffable and numinous (I dare say spiritual or ethical) aspects of being which we cannot comprehend, yet which we feel drawn to, and contemplate nonetheless.

Existence is not a collection of static parts, but a relentless convergence; when the distance between two entities diminishes toward the infinitesimal, they are ultimately rendered one and the same. This is not a union of harmony, but a dissolution through motion. Just as a line is merely a point that has lost its stillness, and a solid is but the ghost of a shifting surface, our reality is “generated” only through the agitation of a constant flux. We are rooted in a nature that abhors the permanent; like time itself, we are a “genesis” that exists only by moving, mirroring a physical world that finds its “truth” not in being, but in the inevitable equality of the void.

We are all made to pause when we reflect on what the world truly is. For all our insights and assumptions about life, we find the most impossible infinity to explain within it is ourselves. This temporary consciousness is the seed of all our experience, and the root of all our miseries. One burden in life after another piles on top of each other like the bodies in a mass grave, and we are forced to shovel over all of them nonetheless—that is, until they rise like zombies and return to us, the living, and make us part of their endless search for death.

Burdens are better than any other thing at making us wish for death; the infinity of life meets with a staggering discontinuity, or singularity, when you remember the fact that all this infiniteness finds its finiteness in death. Death: the end of all our woes, the great return into the dark—but this dark is not of ignorance, but of nothing whatsoever, as all things should be.

When one looks upon the history of the Earth and considers the eons which have passed in total lifelessness, only for single-celled organisms to suddenly appear as confusedly as they did—and from this generating every creature that has ever lived—one finds it a shame that this great journey which we call life was merely the byproduct of some random process. A process which just so happened to spontaneously create life after so many millennia of nothingness; the polymerization of molecules, and specifically the deoxyribonucleic catastrophe which has given rise to all cellular life—though man (Homo sapiens) is the only one consciously aware of it all—has been, perhaps, the most unfortunate event in all of history. But I think I’ve said enough regarding the misfortunes of all this infinity…—or have I?

Whenever one feels compelled to write—when they feel it is the only alternative to the rope, and so, speak their heart out of necessity rather than compulsion—you find that all of misery is born differently, but suffered identically. In this, you would think that every honest interpreter of themself would find they return to every theme which their heart feels, and this is exactly what happens; one can never truly be unique in literature, because everything which the heart brings forth has already been done by another, perhaps with more sensitivity and understanding than you; one merely reformulates what has already been said in order to make a variation upon it.

The dialectic of writing is this: one responds to the world, and in doing so says or writes many things which the world has already heard before—but because it is couched in the language of modernity, and very much a representative of the zeitgeist as a whole, it is praised by its contemporaries for its aptness and integrity to the modern condition. Of course, there were writers who were more prescient in this regard than others (Emerson, Nietzsche, Marx, Dostoevsky, Freud, Shestov, Kafka, etc.), but overall, everything written since about 1800 has come to pass, and has revealed itself to be a total repudiation of everything the human spirit cares about.

This infinity I can never escape. The moment one finds themselves in the “backrooms,” they feel a complete and total ominousness unwavering in its deleterious effects upon the soul of man; everything is crushing, and no amount of repetition can ever equal the size of this infinity which we are talking about—the infinity of life. Infinity is so large, in fact, that mathematicians deal with levels of infinity that transcend our normal understanding of what that means. There are levels to infinity: potential, actual, countable, uncountable, cardinal, etc.—there are even dimensions higher than our current 3-manifold: the fourth dimension of time, the tenth dimension of superstring theory, the eleventh dimension of M-theory, and the twelfth dimension of F-theory; theory after theory, infinity after infinity—but where does man find himself in all this talk of cosmic superstructures? This is what I was talking about earlier: man would unify the whole universe before he finds unity within himself. This is the scariness, indeed omnipotence, of infinity. There is nothing within man capable of staving off the undeniability of his own internal emptiness. Man’s life is a balancing act, stretched out along an infinite line dangling over an abyss equally as infinite.

Mankind is a rope fastened between animal and Overman—a rope over an abyss, a dangerous crossing, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and standing still. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end. What is lovable about man is that he is a crossing over and a going under. I love those who do not know how to live unless by going under, for they are the ones who cross over. I love the great despisers because they are the great venerators and arrows of longing for the other shore. I love those who do not first seek behind the stars for a reason to go under and be a sacrifice, who instead sacrifice themselves for the earth so that the earth may one day become the Overman’s. I love the one who lives in order to know and who wants to know so that one day the Overman may live, and so he wants his going under. I love the one who works and invents in order to build a house for the Overman and to prepare earth, animals, and plants for him, for thus he wants his going under. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Section 4).

A going-over and a going-under! This is the infinite act of self-assurance, an act done only because the alternative is no action at all—and how disturbing it is to live life without at least striving to act and become something in it. I love those who act without a goal, who make up everything as they go along, who know what they want but also know it will never be within their powers to achieve—and yet they yearn anyway, work anyway, suffer anyway, endure anyway, and overcome anyway. My life is very much like that. My writings are very much like that. My soul and spirit are very much like that. I am one with this whole infinity and make my destiny out of everything which I feel within it. I do not know, and know I will never know, and yet I still yearn to know; I have never been able to live my life without first attempting to know—without that, what is the point of this crude barbarity which we call existence?

If I cannot give my heart to everything it yearns for, I cannot feel a reason to live. I must exhaust the desire to live intellectually if I am to feel satisfied enough to enter the world existentially. A large part of man’s misery today is his inability to find the time and energy to sit by himself, in a room of his own, and rummage (in his mind) through everything which has made him—which the world has done to him. We are, in fact, what the world does to us; and every human countenance bears the marks of its humanity: in how deeply their wrinkles appear, in how smart they are, in how healthy they are, in how sick they are, in how evil they are, in how merciful and kind they are—in short, in everything which they are. The eyes are the window to the soul which see every infinity, and none have reached the “undiscovered country” which all this talk of infinity really refers to.

Everything said about life must really be repeated and repeated till repetition itself has had enough. The dialectic must always find its center of gravity in the conduct of life and must never veer too far from its intended course, lest it fly off tangentially to the direction it originally intended. All concepts really return to infinity because every idea, as Plato thought, is a mere imitation of a higher realm, a world of forms, which must substantiate this one. The truth of this claim is irrelevant, as is every claim that tries to factualize life. All that one should really concern themselves with is whatever their heart is focused on in the moment of living. Everything else is folly.

It is impossible for most to conceive of life existentially—that is why those who do pursue this path are derided as crazy or foolish, vain or ambitious; the herd condemns what they do not understand and despise those who live after their own heart rather than following along with the majority. The majority live lives of quiet desperation, and that is something I wish to avoid at all cost; if I must live desperately and struggle mightily to even feed myself, then let me do so on my own terms, in my own way, after my own heart. Time and time again, I am renewed with a new lust for life by remembering how short my time truly is and how little all my material worries really are overall.

I mind not the times but the eternities (infinities); my mind is the keystone of my temple, without which the whole edifice should collapse. I must die before I live dishonestly, or dishonor my dignity, or act unfaithfully to myself. I must tarry with infinity until I’ve managed a sizeable portion of its totality. I must say everything I’ve wanted to before I can act on what is necessary in the world. I must think until I have thought the last thought and have said my piece on everything which concerns my existence. All this is what infinity demands—a total sacrifice of yourself to it, until you’re lucky enough to break free from it and no longer feel controlled by its domineering presence.

These thoughts you read now were born from a suffering unimaginable for most; and this is why I can never stop writing, why I can never stop living—I must see where all this suffering and infinity leads. If I didn’t care and thought as most do today, there would be no reason for me to philosophize, no reason to discover what I myself think about everything; things for me would simply boil down to a process of observation and inductive inference—I would be nothing more than an automaton made for the purpose of persisting selfishly in the world; a completely boring existence, which is why I find it abhorrent, and why I think it necessary to denounce as thoroughly as I could.

Anyone who bothers with getting about in the world will find that most of our actions scarcely offer any existential reflection. Most of my life was lived mutely, in total anonymity, without the slightest glance from anyone except my family and few friends. People always baffled me, because they never seemed to deeply concern themselves with life proper; life for them was gagner sa vie—a task which one pursues only to earn a living at the end of it; this narrative never sat right with my soul, in the same way the question of God never sat right in my mind.

Everything today is done without feeling because life today isn’t meant to be felt, except in moments where hedonism is engaged with in order to forget the pain of living; most people today are so diseased and sickly, they actually presume themselves to be healthy; this is a world-wide pandemic of the brain, the malfeasance of which is so severe my generation (Gen Z) is performing cognitively lower than the previous one—a trend with scarce any example in recent history.

It is embarrassing to even endure life at times as an intellectual today, because you’re constantly surrounded by Besserwisser (know-it-alls) who are really the most ignorant people humanity has had the misfortune of producing. Only a cursory glance at what these people’s dreams are will be all the proof you need to know regarding how backwards, narrow-minded, and staggeringly stupid the vast majority of mankind is. They have no concept of infinity and do not want the capacity to even contemplate it, because if it doesn’t aid them materially, they want none of it; hence comes all their pride and vanity and nonsense about their independence of mind, which is really a justification on their behalf to remain as ignorant as possible on everything that doesn’t concern them personally—egoism abounds, and the world shudders at the thought of being led by such baboons, ignorant men and women whose intelligence borders on the bovine.

Eternity

Eternity makes fools out of men, for what the notion of it implies is something which can never be fully apprehended in the mind. Like infinity, eternity is what we wish we could command, but which we must forever be subject to. Out of all the possible things to conceive of in the world, eternity is the one thing where all our concepts converge, but in converging become totally confused. Nowhere is this clearer than in merely describing eternity; like whenever discussing life, words fail to do complete justice, for the concept of eternity is so vast that nobody can ever descriptively exhaust all the possible interpretations of it.

The colloquial definition of eternity is temporal: something which is everlasting, implying infinite or unending time, from the Latin aeternitās (”eternity”), from aeternus (”eternal”), which came to English from the Old French eternité (”eternity, perpetuity”), though the original Old English form of the word (as translated from the Latin aeternum) was ecnisse, as in, on ecnesse (forever).

Infinity is to space what eternity is to time; both indicate something which is, in magnitude, scope, or comprehensiveness, far beyond the reaches of our mind—where no mortal soul dares to go, lest they be swept by its enormity and find themselves in a sea of infinity. Where one speaks of magnitudes, quantities, and compounds (infinity), the other speaks of beginnings, origins, and persistence through time (eternity).

The lengths men would go to give order to the world is astonishing. Every concept born from the mind of man is really an attempt to place himself above the world, and in doing so give order to what was otherwise a chaotic mess of images and associations drawn from experience. When the first syllable was uttered, it must have frightened man, for here was the first evidence of his own intelligence.

When we speak of things far above us, we must remember that they are only so because they are immutable to us. No amount of denoting or affixing some definition to a thing will ever make that thing more comprehensible; merely placing in logical form a concept that is still unknown doesn’t suddenly make it known; it merely ascribes a label to it which eases our fragile minds. Nothing is explained by semantics, in the same way nothing is explained by saying God made it that way. A noun is no different from a sound syllogism, in that both merely repeat what is already implied; they make formal and authoritative what was really arrived at through informal and arbitrary means.

The ineffable aspect within man knows intuitively what eternity strives to be, but, also knowing that he can never fully understand it, he pretends to know it by appealing to his heart when the time comes to truly wrestle with it, and in doing so puts to bed all doubt by a mere substitution of reason with sentiment. All complexity is brushed over for the sake of soothing his scared mind, and nothing calms him faster than assuming the conclusion and justifying it afterwards—man reasons backwards while pretending to know forwards.

This is why all attempts at explaining metaphysical concepts are really mystifications: everything said about them is so vague and inconclusive it ends up sounding more like poetry or purple prose than anything else. To even attempt an explanation of the incomprehensible is really the work of either a madman or a philosopher—and in truth probably both, for as Seneca said, “There is no genius without a touch of madness.” Madness is innovating upon the obvious; it is to muddy what is intuitive, and in doing so make complex that which in truth should be simple. Genius, on the other hand, is simplifying what is already simple; it is to take a concept and turn it into a self-evident intuition—making it seem more obvious than it already was.

Genius, like madness, is rare, for most people do not have the fortitude to use their mind for anything aside from their maintenance and subsistence; it is curious why people have brains at all when you consider how few actually use them—you would think, evolutionarily at least, that some would have developed stronger instincts, while others stronger reasoning capacities; but, on the whole, brains do not differ all that much between people—some are slower or faster cognitively, but generally we’re all using the same software; the smartest man doesn’t differ all that much from the dumbest when everything is considered.

It would require an eternity to explain eternity. Every concept which philosophers have come up with in order to objectify the world and place it under their dominion has, in my view, never wrestled with the existential aspects of those concepts. Thinking is an existential phenomenon; it requires input from the subject in order to make itself known at all. Without mind, there would be no subject, and without subject, there would be no object—the two coexist, and without one or the other the entire world falls into oblivion.

All things are naturally in the dark, and it is only after man’s light has illuminated them that they appear before us; such is why Prometheus was punished, for by giving fire (knowledge) to man, he kindled within him a passion for knowledge and advancement, and thus, a means by which to move past the natural state of things and become more than human. Knowledge was considered by the ancients a godly thing, a divine thing, a thing of reverence and necessity; without it, there would be no possibility of culture, and thus, no representations of the human spirit—the most essential of all things for a scholar.

He that kindles knowledge progresses culture, but he that burns too much for it shall burn himself the closer he gets to the fire; similarly, the more one knows the more they can empathize with, and thus, the more pain they can feel—suffering is a form of knowledge, but knowledge itself has a suffering attached to it stronger than any other; one who feels close to the source of all things, and whose wisdom nears Solomon’s, may find that all is but air, for the ways of things depart when torn from man, and all his knowledge loses its call to action when meaning cannot be put to it.

Nothing ever lasts forever, and that is really the paradox of eternity. The history of man is a long story of overcoming the infinitude of things by use of reason or instinct; and though we’ve made it as far as we have, there is no guarantee that we will continue forever—in fact, should we remain on Earth, we already know our extinction is all but certain. Now, with that acknowledged, doesn’t it give one pause, and engender a desire to reflect on the purpose of our existence? When eternity is not certain, and in all likelihood will never be so, isn’t the best thing to do simply to sit down with yourself and account for everything that has passed you by, in order that you may act with more significance in the world presently? I have never been able to overcome this great immensity; even while I write at breakneck speeds, I know in the back of my mind I’m really in a race against time, and that everything I do is subject to disintegration when made to play out on the timescale of eternity.

Life, in all its glory, maintains its dignity only insofar as it is cherished while we live it. I’ve given a lot to understand the world, but found that no amount of knowledge was sufficient to have even the slightest clue as to where to begin within it. Everything today turns around the practical because it is simple, but that doesn’t make it meaningful or good; in truth, I would say it’s bad, for it makes it impossible to take account of your life existentially—in the same manner an account of all the transactions is needed in order to balance the books by the end of it; life is a balancing act whose proportions are unknown quantities, and when placed on a scale do not indicate their magnitudes; our whole existence is an endless chaos of inconveniences and tragedies which pass us by as quickly as we forget them when we die.

You’re not perfect! Nothing is; nothing would start were it our desire to become so. Perfection is another eternity. Indeed, every concept is an eternity, an infinity, an impossibility (to grasp fully). We scholars feel our way through the world only illuminated by the light of our own reason; we categorize and simplify things in order to bypass their infinity, and in doing so strip away the true nature of things by placing them on our level. I feel as if I can never stop thinking and contemplating about things because I intuitively know there is a bottomless well where truth dwells. If what I’m after is the truth—a kind of eternity—then I ought to stop now, for I cannot handle the truth, and if I could, it would undoubtedly disappoint me the instant I obtained it.

Nothing in this world seems to give any indication of its perfection, or of its comprehension fully. We all act and assume roles in order to live functionally: because that’s the easy thing to do, because that’s what’s accepted by the herd, because that’s what we’re told to do—the whole structure of socialization is like a pit where everything is thrown into merely to make a ground upon which to walk; nothing is holy because all has been profaned, and the more one contemplates the world today the more pessimistic they become about the age overall.

There’s an endless cycle of content today by which to keep us distracted; and I’m amazed so many humans collectively perpetuate this by indulging in it—as if it gives them anything of worth, or affects their life in a positive way. At the rate things are going now, too, it will no longer be humans responsible for the distractions, but content generated by AI—a greater dystopia could not be imagined. I cannot help but notice how much of our intellect has been carted off for the sake of convenience; it’s as if no one today truly wants to grapple with existence; we are the makers of our world, but we do not make the material we use for our creations.

The whole of eternity shall perpetually find itself right back to where it began; time is a flat circle—the eternal recurrence of the same thing, one after another, all lead back to the same whole: the ouroboros of time continuously treads on us, and infringes on everything which we hold sacred and undeniable. Though it is not possible to take back existence, it is possible to still treat yourself as if you mattered within it. This here is the beginning of all yes-saying, of all life affirmation, of all action within a world whose complexity—if actually considered—would halt the whole function of society.

People know, on an intuitive level, whether they’re cut out for thinking or not; I feel most act in accordance with whatever they most immediately desire in the moment of having to act. The instincts of man are strong in the sense that they overpower all other drives, but they are weak in the sense that they are not done out of existential consequence—rather they are made out of debasing conformity; the modern man does nothing which will make him stand out from the crowd, even if it’s something he wishes to do for himself. The self is ostracized from the very beginning of life because it is not something that the present culture wishes to cultivate; it is much easier to control people if they feel subtracted from their individuality, and if they feel so systematically discouraged and weakened that no amount of independent thought on their part could ever amount to anything.

Modernity is a culture of objectification, not individual subjectivity. Everyone today identifies with labels and stereotypes and popular movements rather than moving to the rhythm of their own heart. Individuality is far superior to group identity because you remain free from objectification—there are no other subjects to judge and disenfranchise your own subjectivity, and so, you remain totally dependent only on yourself, and as a result are much closer to your own desires and truth. On an existential, individual scale, this is best; however, because society is not made for an individual alone, the best alternative is the nonsense we have today—boot-licking and kowtowing and stultifying yourself in order to be brought down to the herd’s level, and thus act in accordance with their will (the general will of Rousseau) rather than your will (the subjective will of yourself).

Every “thou shalt” was once an “I will.” What man wills is great; everything he follows that is not from his will is weak and vain. The culture we have today is the most perfect form of egoism possible because it has made egoism a virtue—it encourages greed and a worship of the self-image, but all done selfishly; it’s a complete inversion of Nietzsche’s concept of the rank order, of the aristocratic rebel, of the true Overman.

In the same way morals change with the times, so too do cultures, which move from bronze to silver to gold to bronze again. The capacity within man to overcome the age he’s in is largely a result of how much he can endure the absurdity of living in a manner contradictory to the current mode—that is, how well he can manage himself while among the herd, animals who treat thinking like a weather vane, changing with the wind in order to not fall out of favor.

Camus was absolutely right when he said, “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” To rebel is to refuse to be an object. It is the rejection of being a mere footnote in history or a tool for power. In this defiance, we affirm a shared human essence that remains untouchable and beyond the reach of those who wish to command it. In every free spirit, there’s an air of liberty so empowering it must be breathed in deeply or its scent will forever be lost. What is great in man is his capacity to move past his desire to know eternity in order to live. While some live without thinking critically, others only think critically and so fail to act at all; but the best are those who are able to think before acting, and thus make peace with themselves by finding the reasons behind their actions beyond will and instinct.