What I Am
5th Installment to my philosophical system
If the facts of my life indicate anything, it is that I am a deeply disturbed individual. In mind, body, and soul, I am an enigma. What I seem to myself is like a walking shadow. Constantly while I live does a single thought possess my mind: What am I. “What am I,” shouts the world, and here I am, standing without answer; in fact, I would not stay for an answer, just like jesting Pilate. What I Was was, relatively speaking, easy, for it was merely a narrative of my past. What I am (in the present), however, is a complete mystery.
Anyone who has done the difficult work of traversing their life story would likely agree with me that what we initially take to be our greatest moments are, in retrospect, only thought as much in the present moment of experiencing them. With the passing of time, however, everything takes on a new aspect: things once great now seem small; great pleasures seem like little trifles; our labors seem to be wrongheaded in their objectives; and life itself seems to grow a little duller each day. Time sends all things to oblivion, including life; and though we are dismayed by the fact that we cannot hold onto it, we still make a central aspect of our life the continuation of it—in any way we can—after death. It is, to me at least, a rather amusing effort on our behalf to expend so much time and energy into efforts which we know are ultimately folly. The human heart rebels against anything which seems to imply that it cannot feel itself at one with its essence. What we call being, the presentness of existing reality, is only made known through action; and so, when the external world presses down on us from above with its omnipotent thumb, and presses us into the dust from whence we come, it feels like an attack, a blatant affront against everything which we cherish about existence as such. Man exists as an active being, a thinking being, a social being, a needful being—one who must feel in order to act, and who acts in order to feel. Through our actions we strive to leave some imprint upon the world around us that reflects not merely what we were, but what we will continue to be in the lives of others. That is the spirit which possesses and inspires people to have kids; it is also precisely what compels men like Napoleon and Jesus to see their existence as something beyond mere existence—rather, what they hope for is a complete overthrow of all former conceptions of existence as such.
The ineffable, numinous aspect of life stands before every one of us, and yet no matter which way we turn away from it, it stands there motionless, waiting for us, almost calling out to us, begging us to greet it with open arms… and yet we cannot! We cannot because we know that we don’t know what this being, this life of ours, is ultimately. We derive what we can from all we have before us—our experience as such—but it consoles us little, and, in fact, in more cases than not, disturbs us, for it gives us what we think, but not truly what we feel at heart. That is the curse which modern discourse around being suffers from: a lack of heart in affirming what our very heart tells us. It is thus my task here to put being back on its head, while also paving, brick by brick, a new foundation from which future generations may walk upon without worry of it falling beneath them. But, in order to do this, a brief history of being is here needed, for, as I said in my essay What I Was, man cannot situate himself properly into being unless he first recognizes where his being as such originated. However, I will stop this analysis when I reach the point at which man’s being as such from the past no longer differs from ours of today.
We see all throughout history man striving to acquire what he deems good; and often, this good has always been associated with what continues survival, affirms strength, amasses wealth, promotes well-being, etc. In times of old, man’s primary worries were practical, in that they only revolved around his immediate desire to sustain life—to affirm the will to live. It was found that this will to live could more easily be achieved in groups, and so man naturally congregated into little tribes and communities which suited his passions best, and which allowed him the greatest possible expenditure of his energy for his tribe’s survival; even if this man were to act selfishly, his actions would still benefit others, for individual ambition serves the common good, and so, when it comes to survival, there is no right or wrong category, only what promotes the goal of the individual—selfishness, then, is not a virtue but a tool, as is every other personality trait. There is no right or wrong, only what is and isn’t effective for the goal.
As time progressed, and man’s knowledge naturally expanded and adapted to every struggle presented, we developed more complex organizational structures, devised new ways of efficiently acting in response to situations, and could now even plan out our courses of action to situations which may not occur at all; man, when his environment gets to a certain level of sophistication, conceptualizes more, reflects more, and begins to reason. What follows from this reason, very naturally, are arguments that convince not through force but through persuasion; these proto-thinkers became the wise men of the tribe, usually older, who settled things which no longer belonged to the sphere of power alone—for, prior to that, all was under the domain of power. And hence our every modern misery, for power, being deprecated in this act, was no longer consulted, but rather replaced with civilized argumentation which slowed things down and confused those not privy to fallacies, biases, lies, and deception. This here began the priestly class, who act alongside the king—who represented the older, more natural, and audacious elements of man, those associated with power as embodied in natural energy, as work expended, as some force applied over some distance. What became of man afterwards for nearly a millennium was a mundane existence of farming, crop rotation, procreation, and obsequious servility to the king. When tribes become empowered and dominate other tribes, they either annihilate them or absorb them into their ranks; this absorption, however, necessitates more sophisticated forms of control and organization, for without order there is chaos, and chaos brings destruction of the tribe as a whole—this is why every myth in history has been some form of worship or religious practice where some authority was maintained throughout—the king was simply the ultimate authority in secular terms.
From this point on in history, the being of man was a lot more comfortable materially. Thus man, no longer shackled with the constant threat of death, and no longer needing to move from place to place in search of food, took up an occupation to pass his time while also being of service to the community; those lower on the social ladder worked as well, but worked in positions less desirable, for those occupations resembled more man’s pre-civilizational days—manual labor, farm work, construction; in short, all fields of bodily exertion. With the abundance of food farming provided, and with the threat of nature largely held back due to infrastructure, those who no longer needed to farm to feed themselves became the scholarly class—those who learned how to read, write, and bookkeep. With the formation of careers as we know them today, man’s being was no longer associated with his place in relation to the alpha of the tribe, but among those who did the same thing he did for the community. Classes would arise out of this, and man’s being as such would no longer be subdued primarily by his material conditions, but rather subjugated by a hierarchy hitherto unknown to him. What follows from this point is cycle upon cycle of rise and fall, collapse and rebirth, of whole civilizations—Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, the Indus Valley, Ancient China, the Olmec, the Minoans, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, etc.—and it is here that man’s being as such in the past intersects with our own being today.
These cycles really do not concern us here, for after the point at which man was made to labor for society as a whole, rather than hunt and gather for his select tribe—thus becoming atomized and alienated from the teleology of his labor as such, in the concrete (for his tribe, which he was evolved to concern himself with), and rather made to labor in the abstract (for himself and the king, who took his share ungratefully)—man’s being was thus made subject to a new kind of wretched materialism, in which his lived material reality was changed for the better, but the spiritual essence of his being was totally transformed. Besides, far greater minds have mapped out the progression of man’s essence (although not being, for there has yet to be written an existential history of humanity—in fact, my attempt above was the first in history) far better than I could provide in this brief sketch of what I am. I recommend the following readings, should you wish to become more acquainted with the lived realities of man as told through a progressive history of his existence’s essence: Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind by Marquis de Condorcet, Das Kapital (Volumes 1 and 2) by Karl Marx, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Friedrich Engels, The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, and The Story of Civilization by Will Durant.
Now, knowing where our being stems, though not knowing whence it arises or how, the next natural question is: what is the being of modernity? Being as such for most people today is synonymous with our actions, as if the what-we-are in the world is merely predicated on what we do in it (again, originating in the creation of classes, occupations, bureaucracies, and self-sustaining but unstable organizational structures which allow culture and civilization to continue on), but I wish to put forward a new notion of being as told through the story of my own being—the what I am of my lived reality.
Implicit within every explanation of being is a subjective aspect that one could never be rid of, and one should not strive to be rid of. What we are, we are, and within the epoch we inhabit we appear to the rest of the world as ourselves and no one else. It is a great boon that we are at all, for the chances of life are slim, and existence is one lived reality which can never be repeated in all the universe. What naturally occurs to the individual who reflects on the fact that they are is a supreme sense of confusion. Every assumption about existence is mere prejudice. Man strives with all his might to think beyond what he merely is, but for most, the capacity within their mind to grasp that which does not strike their immediate attention—the immediate experience as such which they confuse for their true being—is forever consigned to obscurity within their mind. The more the herd is shown the light of truth—of our existence as such, which the philosophizer believes to be correct—the thicker a pair of shades they attempt to wear. Man would rather be blind than confront the true lived reality of his essence.
Words in this context only serve as apparitions. The history of what truth of being is has always been a confused, collective mass hallucination—nay, perhaps hysteria is a better word. What was the good life according to Socrates? Only that which is lived in self-examination and virtue—and so we have it; even at the very beginning of our attempts to grapple with being, we have always fallen short of the true form of it, the Platonic idea which we affirm yet do not see. Man’s being is like his spirit. He believes it because he feels it, yet he never feels at ease within himself about it, because he cannot affirm it in concreto (in a concrete sense). If man could believe in his being in the same manner he believes himself to be reflected in a mirror, there would be no need to worry about reality, for he would have a total sense of himself in the world. The self is the essence which is reflected when being is contemplated—that is to say, man only sees his essence, and never his being. But this begs the question: for what is essence and what is being—should the two be thought separate? And is there really an objective being?
Looking back on everything I’ve written thus far, I almost wish I started with this question; but to philosophize about abstract ideas in the hopes of making them appear concrete, to say nothing of making them comprehensible and intuitive, is tough business. This type of thinking also gives us no comfort, for in our attempts to think about them we primarily see all the imperfections at first, and not their clarity afterwards; and so, as a result, we disregard all our thoughts at first merely because they do not appear before us in their most pure form. It cannot, therefore, be helped if the extemporal approach regarding being becomes an incoherent mess, where being as becoming and essence as the arrival of self intermingle and fall before us as consciousness—as one simple experience—rather than the true complex web of infinity and unintelligibility they really are. Let us strive onwards, however.
My distinction between essence and being is not unlike John Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities; but within this analogy is a deep metaphysical assumption which we cannot gloss over without the whole of our investigation falling into darkness. It was first noted by Plato in the allegory of the cave that there are two distinct aspects of reality: reality as appearance—which refers to shadows cast on a wall by a fire lit behind men who are chained within the cave—and reality as such, as it truly is—the objects responsible for casting the shadows in the first place. Plato had it so that one day, one of these poor cave dwellers broke free from their chains and ventured into the light; what they saw was no longer the shadows cast by the true objects, but the true objects as such, as they really appeared in reality. With this staggering revelation pressing itself on the liberated caveman’s mind, it left him dumbfounded—so much so that he ventured back to the cave to tell his friends about it. With this new enlightenment in hand, he was sure his friends would believe him when he told them the shadows were not the true objects, but merely the phantoms formed from the true objects themselves; unfortunately for our enlightened caveman, his friends would not believe him. They thought him ridiculous, a prankster, and a liar; thus unable to shake his friends’ conviction that they were merely seeing shadows—the objects as appearance, and not the objects as such, the objects of true reality—he departed his old friends begrudgingly, and left them to languish in their darkness and false reality, while he would go on to dwell in the true realm of real objects—in the realm of reality as such. And so it was ever since: the distinction between the truth and the appearance of truth was set. Every philosopher from that point onwards has merely been affirming or denying what Plato has said—and at once do I return to my initial analogy.
There is a world which it is like to be a thing as such. There is also a world which it is like to merely be the appearance of a thing. Whose to affirm one over the other? In my view, it is the fundamental question in metaphysics, because whichever one you affirm ultimately affects how you conceptualize being (and as an existentialist philosopher personally, the question of being takes precedence over all others). So which do I affirm? On such metaphysical questions, for the longest time, I was always one to take the safe route and choose agnosticism, because affirming aspects of reality which I could not know with certainty never sat right with me; but over time, this non-affirmation wearied my soul, and I grew sick because of it. I searched endlessly for a way to reconcile my desire to affirm reality as such with the fact that I ultimately had only the appearance which I could be sure of—all my misery lay in this tension, and the entirety of my philosophical system hinges on this exact question. I found the more and more I lived, the more and more I dreaded living—without feeling secure in one’s heart, life becomes a dreadful thing, and you would rather fly to heaven than stay put on Earth with all this misery from uncertainty. After many months, I reached a point at which I could no longer affirm life if I could not affirm the objectivity of life—but life is subjective in its being, so… what to do? The answer came to me not in Emerson, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, or even Hegel—so who? William James, the father of American psychology. I owe my soul to this man, though I read him very little compared to the names just mentioned. His philosophy of Pragmatism, as explicated in his book entitled Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, was ultimately the bridge which allowed me to cross this gap of affirmation/non-affirmation. He says at the very start of it, in fact, addressing his audience,
I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds. You know the same of me. —Lecture I: The Present Dilemma in Philosophy.
Now that was really life-changing for me: that we not only all have our own philosophies, but that the most important thing with respect to them is how they shape our world. Our life, in that sense, is one long battle with philosophy, where everything we strive after concerns our being in a drastic way, and that to deny this very feeling within ourselves—this being of incomparable magnitude—is to deny our very life itself. This was my misery, but it was also my hope, for within the need to affirm life I found life. What William James showed me was that Pragmatism, as a way of thinking, does not concern itself with the false dichotomy that Plato had given us in his cuckoo cave—distinguishing between shadows and the objects that cause them, as if our being lay in eclipses imprinted on a background. What William James taught me to ask was not is there a true reality as such, but rather why should it matter for my life? Ah! dear reader, you could not find a happier person than me at the moment of that epiphany, for I was manic with joy. At once did all my previous problems dissolve like ice within a desert. I no longer felt handicapped in my thinking, walking about ambivalently, unsure of anything—unsure of whether my life had meaning (dear God) or whether I was the only person in the world (solipsism is a dead dog after all). From that point forward, I could affirm all, not because I knew with certainty that anything was, but rather because, for my life, that affirmation only matters in the context of whether it furthers me in my pursuits, my goals, my objectives, my passions, my desires, my loves, my wants, my needs, my everything—all my life, at once, could be made visible and tangible, and every infinity instantly became a finite. No one knows what it is like to not affirm something that is deeply felt until you have gone over the burdensome hump that is credere in absurdo quotiscumque cogito (to believe in the absurd whenever I think).
I was done with not affirming—only yes-saying would be my motto for existence. I wanted life in all its complexities. I no longer cared whether there was or was not some Platonic ideal by which I could ground life; rather, what I sought was a way to conceive reality so as to no longer feel threatened by not knowing anything ultimately. Some people are fine with not knowing, and God bless them; but for me, with respect to my life, in order to move through the world with any sort of confidence, I had to assure and put at ease the intellectual side of my being—which dominates my psyche primarily—that I was not cheating myself, that nothing was without reason, that all was explainable, and that nothing was foreign to me. Those who go through life content with not knowing the ultimate ground of their existence have a different psychological temperament than I, and it suggests to me either a mind incapable of abstraction beyond immediate experience, or a mind more practical than my own—and most of the time, you cannot tell which approach is wiser. Sometimes I wish I was like my father or mother, who grounded their whole being in service of their children—that is most parents, I would assume. What they did was place the core of their life in something real, tangible, concrete, observable, and, for them, something which responds and loves them back. In that way, they are much wiser than me, for they don’t concern themselves with any of this metaphysical static; to them, it is all an abstraction that, if without tangible effect in life, is not worth considering. In that way they are natural pragmatist.
The common man makes himself miserable because he places value in things which are ultimately less valuable than he assumes them to be. I make myself miserable by valuing my life more than is possible to value it; in that sense, my life suffers from value inflation: to value something so much it drops in meaning—a very real phenomenon that should be warded against. I think constantly about life, however, and cannot help doing so, because I do not find life conceivable. My own existence staggers me not because I value it alone, but because in valuing it I find in it something valuable. Like Walter Scott rightly said somewhere in his journal, “Life could not be endured were it seen in reality.” And Ionesco, echoing him, said, “It’s our existence itself I find unimaginable, unthinkable.” Maybe one day I could do what Samuel Beckett couldn’t—leave behind a single blank page as my only real expression of existence—but I’m too young currently to find value in such a modernist exercise. I must make an impression on the world first before I can leave it. It’s the only reason I’m still here, I like to think. I assume myself at present to have too many good ideas on life not to offer them to the world. It would be, I think, a great disservice to humanity for me not to make the best use of this happy accident I call my existence. I’m too absorbed in my own genius to recognize when I’m being too grandiose, but I don’t wish to seem any other way; I want people to misunderstand me so that when they attempt to understand me they end up only understanding themselves. That is the ideal writer’s life, in my thinking, so. But all this is just narrative, just filler, just the subplot to my wider goals as such.
Sometimes I view my existence as something grand; other times, as some kind of mistake. In truth, it is both. I think all truths are really both—that is, double-sided. What I affirm one second should be disregarded in the next if it no longer suits me—that’s pragmatism at its heart. Truths are narratives. They’re costumes we put on to perform in front of everyone, and so long as we’re consistent with the narrative provided us through socialization and culture, we’ll be alright; but this isn’t honesty—it’s a mask that is attempting to replace a real face. Those who affirm reality as such—that is, an objective basis for it—say things with more confidence because they assume the truth is on their side, but every affirmation of truth is really only thought so because it is valued to be so; if the thing affirmed were shown wrong, it wouldn’t be disbelieved merely because it was shown to be so—rather, it would be doubled down on for the sake of keeping face, but this is revolting to watch. I wish everyone simply affirmed, with respect to life, only that which helped them move through it. I despise when one plays the objectivity card, because hidden beneath it is always a self-assurance that is intolerable—smug, arrogant, cocky, conceited, vain, and everything else. Why do you assume truth has power, that it’ll set you free, that it’s on your side, that everything is being watched and accounted for? Who are you to know such a thing about reality, and why do you sit there with a smirk on your face as if you were omniscient? You’re not perfect, and you know less than one who knows nothing; for unlike the truly ignorant person, you affirm your truth with conviction rather than meekness, and you believe that your affirmation is superior to others. Why? Who do you think you are? What do you affirm that somehow surpasses my own affirmation? That’s ultimately the problem with those who value truth above everything else: they don’t see that truth itself is a value, and thus ultimately without objective reason for valuing it. Where’s your piddling truth now, huh? I suppose you weren’t able to see that, blinded by Minerva’s skirt! Affirm what you want, for ultimately that’s all we can do, but don’t assume your truth has the advantage over mine.
In true fashion, after the common man, life bends to the whims only of its needs, and everything else is folly; truth at that point becomes mere instinct—a powerful instinct, which originated in the days in which we were still beasts, not civilized, worried every second, scared at every rustle in the leaves, hunched over some dead animal feasting on its innards. All this we are, and to think otherwise is to miss the point truth always pointed us towards: that it serves us, not that we are in service of it. If you reject such a notion, you have either too optimistic a view of human nature, or you’re simply a silly contrarian who contributes nothing of your own except outrage worthy of contempt. Hence why every voice which proclaims to have captured the owl of Athens is usually met with silence, for their “truths” are too dangerous, too twisted, too complicated and obscure; the common man, again, finds nothing in them but mere sounds, for their minds aren’t accustomed to thinking in the abstract about a concrete thing—such is why they, in the end, soar far beyond us scholars in “real-world” accomplishments: their heads aren’t addled with weighty ideas which would hesitate their action. The activity of man is what makes him stand out among the crowd, not how many ideas he has crammed in his head; in the same way one who thinks much before speaking says more wise things, the one who does much does more things. For that reason, a man of ideas must also be a man of action, and vice versa. It has always been a mistake by scholars to stay too reserved and less confrontational; rather, what man needs at present is a supreme force of confrontation, a spirit of argumentation and deep defiance against all norms and prejudices—such is the war against values which we are up against… where lies are told as truths, and where truths are consecrated and made irrelevant. What becomes irrelevant ultimately dies, and what follows is a new adoption which none before could predict, but which a few were early to—only because they had the right perspective on the zeitgeist, nothing more.
But to return to this notion of the common man for a second, I used to label him a fool for not considering the complexities of life deeply, but what I ultimately discovered was that he was far wiser than me with respect to life; for he, like Socrates, thought the only certainty was that he did not know anything with certainty. The Socratic maxim returns with a vengeance against me, and shows me how wrong I was all along about life. But I have bested Socrates, for I do not say, “I know that I don’t know,” but rather, “I don’t care whether I know or don’t know—what matters is what it does for my life!” That there is my Socratic maxim.
But what is life? Schopenhauer said,
Life presents itself chiefly as a task—the task, I mean, of subsisting at all, gagner sa vie [to earn one’s living]. If this is accomplished, life is a burden, and then there comes the second task of doing something with that which has been won—of warding off boredom, which, like a bird of prey, hovers over us, ready to fall wherever it sees a life secure from need. The first task is to win something; the second, to banish the feeling that it has been won; otherwise it is a burden. —Studies in Pessimism, “The Vanity of Existence”.
If it isn’t already clear from my writing style, my thoughts very much resemble the man who strives after something and gets near to obtaining it, but abandons it as soon as he is nearest to capturing it. There is a method to my madness, however, and it is the simple fact that madness is the method. Repetition lies at the heart of existence as such, and whenever one tries to speak on that which is unspeakable, it is best either to leave it alone or turn it over from every angle until you feel you have exhausted all it has to offer; the problem with the latter is if the thing you turn over is life itself, then you will never tire of turning it over, for with every turn lies a new discovery. What shocks me isn’t that man lives, but that man continues to live. Where does man get such confidence to openly exist in the world aware of himself, but not worried about his own lack of awareness? When a man acts, a scholar trembles. When a scholar acts, a man is confused. What differs is simply the perspective by which one takes. The scholar views life through a microscope; the man merely through his eyes. Where one sees endless complexity, the other sees a situation to be conquered—one acts, the other contemplates; for a scholar to act is to become tired of thinking on the action as such. Thought can only take a man so far, and his language can only support his ideas for so long until he grows tired of his own existence’s dialectic. Can life be exhausted? No. Why? Because it can’t. Why not? Because life itself doesn’t allow itself to be exhausted. Life is like an atom, which is in constant motion due to the strong and weak nuclear forces which make it bounce about. Schopenhauer, again, says:
The whole foundation on which our existence rests is the present—the ever-fleeting present. It lies, then, in the very nature of our existence to take the form of constant motion, and to offer no possibility of our ever attaining the rest for which we are always striving. —Studies in Pessimism, “The Vanity of Existence”.
This endless striving and endless agitation of the soul moves us at every second. Even in sleep the will to live shows itself in our shallow breathing. We cannot live life without first acting in it, embodied as such, with all the innumerable situations we necessarily find ourselves in—not that we would want these things, but that life determines that we have them, as if it were baked into reality somehow. This constant motion is also analogous with my approach to writing. Again, the topic sentence of my every thought is existence. What we consider in it, and why we consider it as such—all these things I cannot turn away from without somehow feeling like my life is wasting away in idle speculation. My thoughts, as far as I’m concerned, mean nothing if I cannot make them present before me on the page. I will never be satisfied until I say what has never been said about life—such is why I must always write, incomprehensibly if need be, for my thoughts are vast, my connections deep, and my mind in constant motion, striving, seeking not abundance but contentment—a thing not possible to achieve in life. Ah! I want the impossible in life, however: that is why I cannot help myself but go endlessly up and down twisting and turning hills, hills with steep acclivities. Does life not resemble a mountain with no footholds to rest your grip on? And yet we must try to climb anyway. Such a burden, such a hassle, such a glory to think about endlessly. It is implicit within its nature to be endless, for it cannot be grasped in words alone with any real confidence. What man does when he attempts to explain life is merely give some sliver of it, some singular perspective, and tout that as the truest view of it one can possibly have. What wickedness in man, to presume that he alone has all the answers.
If it wasn’t for his God-like prose, Schopenhauer would be insufferable to read: not only because of his pessimism, but because he speaks as if he’s divining some truth never to be superseded in the history of man—honestly, has there ever been a philosopher more self-assured and cocky than Schopenhauer? Then again, I love him precisely for that reason, for he never considers the thoughts of other men except for the sake of criticizing them when compared to his own thoughts. He truly was the first independent philosopher in the modern sense—and in that way all we non-academic philosophers must forever stand in his shadow. My personal style in philosophizing is much more like that of Emerson, Nietzsche, or William James: concise, elegant, rambling, introspective, anecdotal, and sometimes extremely difficult to follow. It is the nature of the beast we are dealing with, however, for life has no why, no definition, no shape, no box to contain it, no single word to describe it. Life is the universal of all universals, the set which contains all subsets, for, like philosophy, it touches on the whole of reality as we experience it. Death, in that sense, is really the only end it could have, but with such a thing already known to us while we live, we continue on for the sake of making that inevitability seem much more distant. It is not a shame we must die, nor is it a thing to fear, but it is a shame that we must stop living should we still feel there are things left to do on Earth. Such is why I said at the start of What I Was that I feel I’ve already lived my entire life: what I meant was that this work before you really is all I could possibly consider on life, as told from my own perspective, in which every conclusion is drawn from my own head with no real indebtedness to anyone but myself for them. In my view, the scholar can live life without action—for he can conjure up in his imagination all experiences as related by others—but it is certainly a life not vying for or honoring in any way; for again, man lives through action: constant, ceaseless, ever moving, perpetual, eternal, a mobile aeternitas [moving eternity].
I suppose one who thinks a lot must necessarily be a rambler in the highest regard, especially if they write primarily in an extemporaneous style which, having read as much Nietzsche and Emerson as I have, I cannot help but write any other way; I’d held out hope for a while that reading Plato and Schopenhauer would balance me out in this regard, but after a perusal of Francis Bacon’s Essays, as well as Montaigne’s, I’ve never been able to write any other way primarily than in how the thought first appears. Never forget that Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Hamlet, “... and the lady shall say her mind freely, or the blank verse shall halt for’t.” Let not the blank verse, or in this case prose, ever halt for’t, for to halt for’t is to lose the vitality and life within the expression as such—which is the entire essence of the idea. Such is why Schopenhauer’s prose is among the best ever, for he has no purple prose to speak of: from the word go, his mind is set on presenting the idea only for what it is and nothing else, the essence of brevity. But let us return to life if we can, if that even makes sense, for to say we ever leave it in thought is quite the presumption.
If I may be allowed to return to an old point I have yet to explicate, I don’t wish for a life of action if that action is not in some way related to my being: “but what is being,” asked existence—a question which made man tremble. Locke held the view that objects as they appear before us have aspects which are both necessary (a priori)—primary qualities—and contingent (a posteriori)—secondary qualities; and my claim was that being and essence are precisely analogous to these. But are they? I hope I established, by this point, the clear fact that I don’t care whether being as such is metaphysically possible or not. From this Lockean simile, I only wanted to spin out a thought which could eventually be turned into a ball of yarn—it is clear, however, I failed in making it a ball, and rather turned it into a jumble of knots. Let us venture forward without fear anyway, for nothing is to be feared but only understood.
Since Plato, man has confused essence with being. Essence is man’s succession, his continuous presence of self which in some way substantiates him in reality; it effectively allows him to distinguish himself from all other beings. The essence of man in the modern sense, to my knowledge, has its origin in Fichte’s distinction between the I and the Not-I, the Ego/Non-Ego construct—his Ich Philosophie. This idea was later taken and developed more substantially by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, and effectively serves as the basis for all modern psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Essence, to return to my analogy, is contingent, known only a posteriori—that is, through experience alone. It is mutable, subject to all the whims and passions a man can experience, and develops along with man as he develops his methodus vitae (way of living). Essence, in short, is simply how we identify in the very present—or rather in the moment of being asked. Being, on the other hand, is that which waxes eternal, is core to ourselves as such, yet is itself ineffable. Being is the only word that approaches life as such with great respect, for every other word falls much shorter in attempting to grasp reality through the lens of existence as it really is.
What modernity misses in this respect, and hence my diatribe at the start on this point, is that it either doesn’t affirm being as objective—usually on grounds that it’s too vague as a concept to have any meaningful content—or that it’s merely an abstraction of essence, something deduced from our qualia. For the first objection, I have no reply, for it’s simply a difference in temperament with respect to the question itself; those who forever seek to reduce and subjugate reality to a single aspect which is assumed objective will never be able to understand the subtleties that lay at the heart of idealism as a branch of metaphysics. As for the second objection, I see why one would think that, for I used to think it myself, but now I see it from a new lens that I find more beneficial. You must never forget that I view everything from my existentialist perspective, and therefore, the ultimate consideration of every question rests on how it personally affects me, not whether it has truth in it or not; truth is an interpretation of some sensation which the nervous system has made apparent to you, nothing more. Being cannot be deduced from essence because they are qualitatively different categories; to say that it can is to relegate being to a wretched finiteness which it cannot have, for if it could we would be completely transparent to ourselves, which we are not—ergo, no essence without being, but yes being without essence; it is a category fallacy any other way.
To return to Plato’s distinction, there is a world as such—that is being. There is also a world as appearance—that is essence. With respect to existence as such, then, it can only follow that it is comprised of two aspects: one objective (being as such) and the other subjective (essence as representation). Again, whether these metaphysical categories actually exist or not as Dinge an sich (things-in-themselves) is irrelevant to me; I wasted so much time arguing with myself, back and forth, over whether there’s a true grounding to existence or not; William James’s pragmatism broke me right out of that dogmatic carousel of craziness. What’s the cash-value of the idea, in what way does it affect my life—that is paramount in all existential analysis. It doesn’t matter what Plato says, what matters is how you feel; in what way does the thought change your psychology? Does it make you powerful? Then continue to think it. Does it quicken your activity? Then continue to think it. Does it allow you to flourish and move through the world with confidence? Then continue to think it. Nothing more, nothing less.
I pity the men who can read all this and only say in reply, “What irrationalism, affirming what he cannot deduce through logic.” Oh, you silly fool, you still cling to your logic and objectively verifiable facts like they do something for you, like they actually give you power, like you can build a castle out of them to retreat to should an intellectual Hun like myself come to greet you. As far as I’m concerned you’re only limiting your own capacity by your obsequious reductionism and strict adherence to skepticism alone. You claim agnosticism on everything, and thus you conquer nothing. Your motives are not motivated by a desire to gain the world, but rather a desire to stay content in your little logically secure and safe cottage of straw and mortar. You are an intellectual weakling, and thus you are a man of small designs, and are utterly contemptible in the eyes of the strong: those with aesthetics and beauty on their mind, with the elevation of culture through a strong and passionate desire to make all the chaos around them a work of art!
I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.
Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the frenzy with which you should be inoculated? Behold! I give you the Übermensch. He is this lightning. He is this frenzy. —Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
POWER! That is the only song I can sing from this point forward. To even engage in battle with those logical blockheads is to give them too much respect. I would rather disrespect them by ignoring their appeals and objections. You still believe in objectivity, ergo you are wrong. That is my argument. I no longer want to argue who’s correct, I want to overpower and overcome through sheer force of will—WILL-TO-OVERCOMING! In power we seek all things, and through it we acquire all! E pluribus unum potestas. [out of many, one power.]
I affirm that existence is both being and essence. They are two sides of the same coin. Man mistakes his essence for his being because he is unable to see beyond his immediate concerns with respect to his life. Modernity has neutered man, and has restricted his thinking only to prepackaged labels and categories which give him identity, and which he assumes as intelligently designed. This is the emasculation of the modern man’s mind, and he will continue to castrate himself unless he affirms power, thinks beautiful things, and develops grand ideals which he can never fully accomplish in his lifetime, but which in striving for will make him great in the process—this is the only way through: with deliberate action and a force not seen in centuries.
So what am I? I am dynamite. I am a reckoning. I am a human being and an individual. I am a solitary wanderer and free spirit. I am a writer, reader, intellectual, scholar, philosopher, a brother, a son, a cousin, a godbrother, a friend, an enemy, an evil man, a holy man—in short, I am a Shepherd who abandons my whole flock to save a single lamb. I am a ridiculous man—a ‘deeply disturbed individual’ as I said at the start—embodying every contradiction imaginable. I reason not through logic but through my pragmatic dialectical process, in which every synthesis affirms my power, and advances my goals overall! That is what I am! A man who denies all and accepts only that which is from myself. The world would be a better place without me, which is why I have to keep living. I must become an ulcer to humanity as a whole. I do not exist to comfort you but to shock and disturb you, even intrigue you in my evil ways! But what is evil in my being? That I think at all—I am evil because I think! But what is more evil? That I reject all that is weak, that I abhor everything the herd loves, that I despise passionately false scholars, and ultracrepidarians. And what is the most evil of all? That I do not fear the end of my existence! and that I am subject to no persuasion with respect to my will, my power—in short, my existence as such. How fortunate I am that at this point in my life I can say alongside Nietzsche, “Of all that is written, I love only that which one writes with one’s own blood.” Is not everything I have said thus far not taken directly from my beating heart? I would venture to say this essay is the most living, pulsing, throbbing text written thus far in this century. It appears I have always been fated to be the first decent human being. As a philosopher, I make clear what is obscure, and make obscure what is clear. I baffle. I tickle and bother. I say what I mean and do it better than all my contemporaries. I have myself to thank for that, and I have myself to see to it that I end my existence in the greatest manner possible: with a (literary) bang!
Also sprach mein Wesen! [Thus spoke my being!]