Will and Interpretation

introduction

“Revolt.
The collective passions take the upper hand over the individual passions. Men do not know anymore how to love. That which interests them today is the human condition, and not anymore individual destinies.”

-Camus, 1945

Men have lost their souls and ways to the idea of humanity and the collective fate of all mankind.
No single man could ever have the faintest approximation of an idea of what this collective should entail, but it is rather the idea of collectivity and universal-humanity that has taken hold of the heart, the conscience, and now determines the law of affection. For all but the brutal and the profound, love has become a public matter, and with that, they have become a public matter – their individual substance has been dissolved in the ‘grand idea’ of human substance, in which all individuals are asked to partake.
The profound will keep their love secret, the brutal will simply love their love that is conveniently exemplary to the Universality as a negative form of affection, an ‘egoistic love’, in which they are not incorrect. Love is egoistic – ‘I must have you’ – and the other kind, the sublimated kind of the Buddha who loves to see all beings in their self-nature, is no less so; here the egoism is in the wish to be free of the affect, to be free from being determined by another human.

The Buddha loves contradiction. It is his reward for being able to see beings as rooted in themselves. When seen like this, all beings contradict, and contradiction is the name of the world of suffering. The Buddha sits still, not contradicting his left side by his right side or his top side by his bottom side. He perfectly balanced and ever so subtly in constant motion, no joint is ever fixed as his poise requires all the nerves and all the tendons to operate as freely as the synapses in the brain. The Buddhas outcome of contradiction is ‘immanence’ - bliss-awareness, the balanced body. The immediate relief of any pain in the mighty totality of the body-in-motion as suspended between the natural forces, which have long been cleaned of godly titles and valuations that make them into objects. The Buddha has learned to value nothing that is not directly immediate.

The strategist also loves contradiction. Divide and conquer. War is contradiction, and a strategist engages war as a playing field between two contradicting forces and/or premises. He stands in this zone of overlap, reading the minds of both wills, and decides on a point where he will contradict the expected play. Chess - dialectics, the programming of the future by calculating with will and intelligence as adversaries – perfect will and intelligence sees farthest into the future of all but never beyond its own victory. The strategists outcome of contradiction is victory. Compared to the Buddha, his outcome is temporary and thus not ultimately satisfying - but the release of tension that results is not a matter of careful and strenuous physiological and psychological engineering, but rather a simple fact, the objective destruction of another force. This objectiveness is deceptive, naturally, as no force has ever been deleted that has not been made to turn on itself. This because force (which is a fundamental conception) is based on principle, on a certain modus of possibility which has been occupied by a certain type of being. What matters is the victory or defeat of this type, and a sufficient defeat of a force can very well mean a sufficient affirmation of the grounding type. This depends on the degree of Buddha-nature in the type. Buddha nature is the ally to the defeated. (Marcus Aurelius was a strange Emperor, A Buddha nature behind a strategist - I would say the first sign of the decadence of Roman philosophy. It harked back to a more general, universal morality of the human species - the virtues of compassion and restraint. Essentially pessimist virtues - to contain the damage. I can only assume that Aurelius was a true philosopher who saw the first necessities of consolidating the Empire, to translate into principle.

But this is no longer Roman, but already holds the beginnings of the end. Rome realized its limits – stoic, even a bit self-begrudgingly - but still Italian enough to do it as a statement of virtue, of self-hood. But this could not last. Once principle takes hold as ‘god’, no humanity can stop that wheel from turning. This form of God is essentially superhuman. It is set in motion by humans, much like a bomb is set off, or a chain reaction of explosions, or even fire-beacons being kindled across that mountainrange by the hand of a hobbit - the cause is all too human, but once in motion, there is nothing in human control to stop the logic from unfolding. The consequences are non negotiable.

I might pinpoint the shift from individual passions in a collective vessel to a grand whole fed by quasi-individual believers any place, any time. All this is constantly happening, humans shift from modalities like birds pop out of eggs in an endless spring. and many people are free at this moment, far freer than I am in very many respects. Sailing across the oceans with the back of the head in the sea, looking at the sun upside down, parallel to a diving killer whale, glimpsing the empirical present, man will always find ways in this. But even this man will approach a harbor and lower his sails and congregate with men to make his due, show his face, do his business and say hello to his mother, and become part of the human condition.

When a Viking stepped from his vessel onto the common land, he arrived in a common condition, surely – but common to his people, his brotherhood. A source of sadness as well as of deep joy, a frustration at the smallness of the world must have driven men to sail away and plunder, and invent large an terrible Gods. Mans Universal Humanity is a result of many individual passions that aspired to their own fate, and recognized each other in this. But appearances often deceive – even though both want happiness, and even if both would grant it to each other without further thought, their happinesses might well contradict, as we can see in a pair of boys in love with the same girl, or even in a friendly tennis game. Mans cultivation of happiness is always a trying to convince that all can be happy at once. Under this condition men can easier accept the present inequality. Under this conditions therefore the faces that happiness is allowed to take come to fall under scrutiny of some Counsel… the terrible universe that man begins to create from thereon… but lets not speak of this further, not at least until we deal with Joseph de Maistre, in whom I sense that we can see the soul of finalized Christian terror, a vision that causes a greater pathos of distance than anything European that had come before. Distance of course to God, to purity, to whole-ness, but therein also a distance within oneself, given that every such at once terrified and elated soul is holding itself together - in this case it may simply be a creature of fear, who values fear above all, and knows in the relief from fear the evil of soothsayers.

Such a man is neither strategist nor Buddha, and the suspension of tension is here in the completely existential nature of the suspension, suspense, tension. It is at once the lowest form of human being and the most ‘amazing’ – it is this feeling that children seek in roller coasters. Christianity, and now Islam, are enormous roller coaster-rides. Once a man has been caught in them he wants nothing of reason and balance, much less tranquility – excitement, unpredictable turns, a loss of orientation, a freedom from rationality. This is the lowest denominator form of human release and absence of pain, discomfort; Upheaval of natural law.

Camus notes, “A modest and charitable Satanism”.

Christianity, especially the Catholic church - its gothic blood drinking and really all of its expressions, as exalted as Dante, William Blake or Victor Hugo, men operating as free souls-to-themselves within the specter of Christianity, and much more so the actual practices of the religion in its dungeons and back-chambers… virtually all of it is is a Satanism and Jesus on the cross is clearly the most Satanic symbol ever held as a symbol of God. How it speaks to our state that men have become used used to seeing the cross as a sign of humanity and the pentagram as a sign of evil. As the cross brings death and the pentagram, containing in itself the golden ratio, the measure of life, the Satanism is evident – “Evil” is deemed the symbol of life, “Good” the symbol of death. But we all know this. The end of this spectacle, its goal, can be placed wherever we like but I place it in the terror of the man who beheld his own uncertain fate torn between two certainties of absolute difference and terrifying proportions. Whoever really believed in this and beheld a Sun King, a man he believed to represent the terrifying will - and horrifying whim - of God, must have undergone a form of fear-unto-awe so powerful that we can speak of a certain justification by the depth of pathos alone. This pathos has driven men to do miraculous things, mainly for self-aggrandizement and idiocy, but nonetheless miraculous in the amount of determination that was put into it. Fear, when it ties the hands of a genius to a hope for salvation, produce inescapable art. We still linger under the shadow of this enormous endeavor – our freedom from God does not bring sunshine yet - we must walk all the way out of its majestic shadow cast in the form of human accomplishment fat exceeding our present capacity.

Nature has diligently cultivated fear in man, it is one of our main assets. Men can be brought to do the most incredible things when riven by a fear of a thing an animal could never be threatened with. Fear and imagination, rather than will and imagination – will and interpretation. To command power over interpretation is to be free of fear.

So far the introduction.

Camus wrote that passage at the end of the greatest conflict in human history. Where it had been seen as necessary for millions to sacrifice their own lives, dreams and wishes to protect their posterity, their families and their homelands.

SInce that time we have seen an unprecedented move to the individual and away from the wishes of the herd. A move that Camus would have relished and promoted. Instead his ennui and angst of the futility of life led him to terminate it on a lonely French road.

He didn’t commit suicide.

Says who?

Everyone except conspiracy theorists.

Sorry my error.

He was in the passengers seat of a racecar. There’s also rumor that the Soviets did it, on account of him criticizing the situation in Budapest. I suppose the death of an influential person is their last gift to the world, and on account of the massive success of that kind of gifting, we’ve grown used to interpreting it as their essential nature.

Camus in any case represents in this context the threshold-walker, someone who is freed from Christianity and religion entirely, and is, empirically, beginning to formulate a new kind of ethics.

We have perhaps made great strides - both forward and backward. But not so much in the terms of the intellect. Camus is a Nietzschean epistemologist, but he is no Nietzschean idealist. When he speaks idealistically, he is either a Libertine or a Marxist, and this is to the end of his life, as the cold war begins to unfold.

The notion of the Superman did not mean anything to him - he was too busy transcending the conditions of humanity and attaining to honesty and modesty, and in this process refined the centuries philosophical taste, crystallized some of its potentials into assured works of genius, and so left a trail through the century of humanism toward a more lofty goal, be it one he did not have the constitution to conceive.

“I am not made for politics since I am incapable of willing or accepting the death of my adversary.”

How one can be a Nietzschean in this way; N also left the battlefield in terror, and collapsed at the beating of a horse.
A philosopher responds in such ways because he sees too sharply. Battle blinds the warrior to the suffering and the pain blinds him to the pain of others - but a philosopher can be blind to no pain. This is what kept Camus from becoming a political philosopher, as is suggested throughout his notebooks.

So much either ignorance, fortuitous benevolent circumstances, or radical self-harm are needed when the philosopher engages in the world. Most avoid the dilemma entirely, which is why real philosophy so often remains away from the world- “politics” is merely a manifestation and outward expression of that lack.

And Trumps entering into politics was the moment when politics touched philosophy/truth-
And in his enemies all this ignorance and radical self-harm became … the world.

And when he touched that stone, all that expression returned the fury of long buried and forgotten impressions.