Fixed Cross:
A rich injection of value into this young venture. I will formulate a quick overview of the immediate identifications my mind makes.
Where value ontology works as an abstract logic, wherein fundamental processes may be formulated, here is a concrete psychological approach, already beset with explicitly human meaning.
I already see the framework of a bridge to be built between these logical and psychological paradigms. Your work, what is here, coincides with the theme I have not yet dared to address, I preferred to keep grounding my logic by challenging it over and over. Behind my arrogance there is of course a fear - that what I say might at any time be broken by a superior logic or worse, a flaw in my own. But it has survived and in the meantime the question has remained: if the definition of the verb ‘being’ is ‘self-valuing and valuing in terms of self-value’, then what precisely constitutes self valuing, and what valuing in terms of self-value?
Yesterday night it occurred to me that self-valuing must be entire invisible. It can only be inferred from everything one does, and it can not be stimulated directly. (Self-help therapy - “you-are-worth-it!” does not work, as the will to make such a statement departs from the premise that one feels that one is not-worth-it. “Is that all you’ve got?” should be the exclamation. The acknowledgement of disappointment is crucial.)
The instinct to self-valuing can however be trained, indirectly, it first appears as faith. A more advanced clarity as to how matter stand between the empirical self-consciousness and the transcendental self exists in the state of zen not typically seen in monks as much as in the strong and morally dominant people of an ascending race; the pure clarity of deliberate good expectation. What might be seen as a third stage of mastery is play. From this, art, but also science, and in general the manufacturing good fortune by interpreting the chasm between the reality man and mans sense of reality as ‘opportunity’ as positive, as real, as working.
Forgive this bland term opportunity (opportunism stands to honor as valuing in terms of self stands to self-valuing), as it is very closely related to value – it designates the bridge across the abyss of knowledge of good and evil, as taken in the irreconcilable terms you have described. The “product of faith” is a formulated will to rationally/morally arrive at what one irrationally/immorally desires.
This accounts well for the paradoxal nature of consciousness, which seeks certainty in unification but stabilizes as the realization of an unbridgeable gap. And this realization is the bridge - as it posits the gap as a lack of moral dynamism.
You have already made clear that morality must be an activity, and activity is per definition creative, making use of actual conditions, sharp, observing – the first words abstracted from the playful flux must have begun by sharp, actual minds catch-grunts, and down the line, such actualizations of the immediate context into a centralized sense of identity, have evolved into philosophies, all the way up to the scientific paradigm.
We are now at the point of realizing this ‘catching’ for what it is - its perimeter is secured, truth-creating has arrived at a definition of itself as the opportunistic business of reproducing life itself. Where nature had before only (though already a feat of cosmic proportions) posited itself as good, it now is able to observe that it has done this – and admire it- now her-self for it all the more! As perhaps nature made beauty because it wanted to reward itself for creating herself against all odds out of her unnecessary absence, thereby making herself even more likely to exist, so now philosophy can ornament itself, reward itself for having produced the concept “truth”.
This has been the central task of art - to make nature appear to man, man to himself, as true, viable, likely to exist, in the terms that are closest to honesty.
In general, what is man - that which knows truth, or that is truth? Can one be truth and know it? This knowing-being must go by the exclusive name of philosophy.
Parodites:
You are quite right, self-valuing cannot be stimulated directly. The instinct for it can however be indirectly trained, the ancients did just this.
One of Holderlin’s most beautiful pieces of poetry may be found in the sentence, “If once the divine succeeds through the poem so near to my heart, then I welcome the grave’s eternal silence.” The recognition of something beyond the sphere of the poet’s individuality and experience is the necessary precondition for his flourishing, and the Greek pantheon served in just this way for Holderlin himself as well as for the ancients. Through such a recognition the mortal act is prevented from being closed, and the possibility of the divine announcing itself through it can be entertained indefinitely; through the great symbols of their mythology the ancient Greeks succeeding in transforming the mortal sphere, the domain of “eternal silence,” into a genuine depth, into which one might venture in the hope of discovering some new datum of experience yet to be formulated. Mortality and finite, lived experience for the ancients became a womb, the “secret birth of things,” to cite Schiller, into which they willingly entered when the light of their ideas no longer bore enough of itself to kindle the heart of the poet. It is with this piece of poetic wisdom that Holderlin wrote his tragedy about Empedocles. What I have called the “daemonic,” then, finds its most poignant expression in the birth of poetic inspiration. The light of our ideas has faded as well, and yet we do not know how to conceive of our mortal life in this way, as a depth- only through the recognition of something beyond our individuality and experience, only through the refusal of hypostasizing experience as an absolute, can the circle of mortal life remain opened.
It is not only in a religious sense that one should understand this for indeed all of our truly philosophical ideas, comprehended not as positive objects of knowledge and hypostases of experience, but as representatives of this transcendental order- that order of things exceeding the sphere of individuality and experience, have equally allowed the finite and transitory ego to exist as an open rather than closed circle. The Gods as representatives of this order were imagined when the continuity between the language of ideas and experience had not been precisely delineated through a philosophical vocabulary. We must, now armed with such a language, realize the “transcendental unity of ideas,” through a new morality that aims, not to hypostasize experience and grasp in positive knowledge a series of particular virtues and vices, but rather to fully explicate this continuity; where philosophy exists to represent this transcendental order, morality most exist to mediate the two spheres, the spheres of experience and ideality.
Self-valuing is the correspondence between these two spheres. Holderlin enacted this correspondence when writing about the death of Empedocles (Empedocles wanted to prove he was an immortal God by jumping into mount Aetna, and as he did so, he perished.) One can only accomplish this by recognizing something that exceeds one’s own personal existence, (for Nietzsche, eternity) an excess which represents an order to which the self that is bearing recognition actually belongs. Nietzsche had to recognize an eternity beyond the sphere of his own empirical, lived existence in order to finally recognize himself as an eternal being, in order for the empirical and transcendental aspects of his ego to finally correspond.
But everything about our modern world and the direction that science and philosophy have taken seems bent on “closing the circle” of mortal life, on annihilating any possibility of mediating the transcendental and empirical spheres of the ego.
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What real domain can the human being claim for itself, when its most vital existence is found in the correspondence between the finite and transcendental spheres, when- to speak with Hippocrates, it finds in all men something divine, and in all divinity something of its humanity? This daemonic nature is the alien intelligence with which the will operates and is not itself a master; the symbols of myth and the host of philosophical ideas, as the most profound exertion of the human will, have not evolved by some merely inventive poet to represent an arbitrary reality of his own design, but have evolved rather out of this daemonic nature, in the pre-reflective state in which the poet recognizes something outside the border of his own experience and is in this way opened up to the deeper life. These symbols and ideas, like the eternity of Nietzsche, or the Prometheus of Aeschylus, are not linguistic in the same way that our common speech is linguistic, for they originate in the daemonic nature which is the precondition of human self-consciousness, and as such represent things not yet able to be fully articulated by the self-conscious human being; the myths and philosophical ideals are all true, for there is a human being to debate rather or not they are true. They are the precondition of human self-consciousness, the mere fact that we can debate them signifies their truth.
The contradictions and disputes among philosophers arise from a spirit philosophizing out of something other than the spirit of daemonism, something other than that middle-position and pre-reflective state which opens up the sphere of the mortal being to the immortal sphere.
The ancient philosophies were all spontaneously engendered through the daemonic, they served as a horizon through which the self-consciousness could take shape. They served as a limit to what could be expressed in human tongue.
And this is one of the greatest of mysteries. Language can only evolve when something has placed a limit to what can be expressed; there must be a limit placed upon language before language can evolve. Language only makes sense when it begins through a passive state, that of the daemonic being which has been opened up to “the deeper life.” I can only speak the word “man” when the word “god” has served as a limit to the former conception. So on and so on, down to the first word, so to speak.
Philosophy, as that essential thing which a daemonic being does, as the fundamental nature of a daemonic being, (the only one we know of is the human) is the ground of this mystery.
Capable:
This passivity I would call an essential unknowability unto oneself, the disappearing self within oneself. We might call that passive which is not yet capable of harnassing its own indeterminateness toward some projected and protracted end-use. That this ‘obscure relation’ between finite and infinite, constrained and limiteless objectification and perception is that middle-ground wherein, necessarily, the play of forces surfaces to condense, distill out a more or less common element, a ‘summational movement’ deriving from the movements both up and down, in and out, yet wholly reducible to neither. And due to the unknowability, the void of self-disappearing which arguably is the impetus for the emergence of the transdendental sense itself, this summational movement also cannot be reduced to the supposed union of empirical with transdendental.
The incapacity of the ‘empirical’, the inability for an erected structure of total self-enclosure necessitates, where this inability comes to directly and sufficiently inform the more central functionalities of consciousness in its multitude of manifestations and modes - in other words in man, who has become a consciousness sufficiently conscious of, responsive to, itself in terms of itself - the fabrications of exteriorities into which displaced machinic operations may be put, failing as they do to find anything tangible, “empirical”, substancial to couple with/in.
So not only have we traced the origins of the trancendental fabrication, but we (you) have also posited this as the medium-framework by which the sustaining-maintaining of inner experiences (“an emotion or experience”) is made possible; i.e. if the empirical consciousness lacks the incapacity for grasping-holding sensations long enough to effect sufficient comparison to what came before and what comes after, then the transcendentality can find no point at which to hook into this empirical relationality, the middle ground is obliterated. Man’s consciousness grew up from ape to the extent of becoming self-definitive and self-sensing enough that the void of unknowability became know to man; when this void came to be known to consciousness it fractured the unity of this consciousness, broke open the (superficial semblance of) connective-temporal continuity of conscious experience/s. This created the possibility for the transcendentality to take over the role as “connective tissue” via positing an-other exteriority. Additional to all the other utilities of this positing, of central importance here is that we get a increase of the empirical capacity to relate across time without sacrificing its awareness of the void. Void is sustained because temporality effected and becomes that by which positions are more essentially posited and projected (of course this transcendentality always ultimately wraps back onto the “empirical consciousness”, onto the affective-intensive conditions and environmentally-interposed movements comprising the psyche in its actuality).
The passive state as the inability to more fully reconcile two opposing spheres of conscious experiencing, an essential incapacity for unification. This strikes me as perhaps nothing more than a necessary distancing of organic parts from each other, being as they are separate and incapable of becoming-one. The necessity of time-space separation between those which are other than each other, regardless of the extent of their mutual co-relationality, being, particularly with respect to the vastly deep and intricate relations attained between these spheres of consciousness, perhaps the sufficiency of these very spheres themselves. As you write later, language must be limited, subject to limitation in order to grow. So it is with all things, no form can attain to a limitlessness, and where it is not cognizant, influenced by its limits it swims in a sea of ineptitude and arbitrariness, disconnected from its actual conditions (and the conditions of its own possibilities) in reality.
Unlike Kierkegaard I do not lament the separateness of the “consciousnesses”, the fact that man is a being-machine composed of separate functionalities and spheres of experiencing-determining. As the immediate knowledge of man’s own essential unknowability penetrated into his consciousness it became necessary to posit with respect to this void, this incapacity. Why? Because to not have done this would have been for man to stagnate at the pre-self-conscious level, for knowedge of void to have acted as an absolute barrier to further growth. Man ingeniously (naturally) found a way (adapted) around this problem, found a means to continue growth in the face of the severe implications steming from the direct knowledge of the void. We can understand and appreciate this adaptive process which has given birth to man as he is, to the “schizophrenized” “bi-polarized” consciousness that divides functions among the various parts of itself, not sparing any function from this division, even the highest (most emergent-summational). Philosophy needs to learn to function within this intermedial space, learn to exist as the possibility for a bridge across the otherwise (with respect to otherwise transcendental visions of absolute unification) incommensurate.
Yes, morality as the “philosophy” (the self-experience) of the empirical ego, where traditional philosophy serves as that of the transdendental ego. You see this as a bringing-down-to-“earth” (to the actual lived reality of the subjectivity) of philosophy? Ethics serving as the anchor by which philosophy is grounded to “the world”?
As we can never reach a state where one “half”, one side of the equation of self-subjectivity - world or heaven, finite or infinite, real or imagined - is annihilated, being as they are each conditions of and for the other, man thus far fluctuates between these as his desires lead him now up, then down. It does seem centered around desire, longing, but we might conceive of the more essential-foundational movements (e.g. love) as being derivative from a less developed “desire” and more so a direct manifesting of structurality itself, of the conditions of this internally-divided (two-part) consciousness. If so then love becomes not only the most powerful attempt at unification but also the best way inside the divide, in terms of direct sensing. So the task of philosophy, and of your ethical project, is to further delimit this inner divide and objectify its conditionalities toward the end of effecting new couplings between empirical and transcendental “egos” (qualified-aggregate form/s of constancy of experiencing/s) such that we begin to develop representational understandings (analogies, metaphors) of these spheres of consciousness - of the conditions of the empirical ego - rather than, as ethics (and an unfortunate amount of philosophy as well) has tranditionally been known to do, arrogantly and arbitrarily impressing artificial impositions from without which have little or no substantive bearing upon that which is actually being impressed-upon?
Yes, this is all beautifully said, and how you define the opposition is wonderously useful and inspiring. We have a platform from which to grasp these transformations of sorts which are the basis of an evolving and expanding subjectivity. The condition of the eternal for such expansion-growth - the direct manipulation of the horizons and substantive fabrications of this eternality therefore the condition of the possibility for self-grasping and self-directing one’s own transformations of consciousness. This is very “occult” at heart: we set the limit of ourselves, against ourselves, in order to generate resistances productive of new evolutionary potentials; we explore further definition along the edge/s of certain horizons of our being in order to effect better representational analogies between the internal mechanics of these limits and that which is most limited by them. This is philosophy as powerful, conscious utility.
The valuing subject then being that which exists in terms of the conditions of its own self-valuing, the conditions imposed upon itself by itself. Clearly this occurs most in the most “developed”, internally complex being, e.g. man. The “void of unknowability” representing the ultimte threshold for self-valuing in that self-valuing can never truly (directly) value ONLY in terms of its “just itself”, being as it is both essentially unknown (closed) before itself in its being as well as being a largely contingent manifestation of its embedded situatedness within “the world”. Neither can this self-valuing get control of this world nor of its own eternally escaping mnemosyne. In man then we see the highest synthesis of the possibility for self-valuing projecting from within the constraints of these world-conditions. As man continues to operate within the intermedial space between his projected-imagined self-valuings and his concrete-actual self-valuings (valuing with respect to either the cohesive-interpositional fabrication/s of images of unity or the emergent structural-architectural embodiments of his more functional-reactionary biological-psychological being) he experiences his own expansion, his own “controlled schizophrenization” that can never stray too far too fast just as it can never cease expanding altogether.
Parodites:
I will write out a longer response to you soon, for at the moment I am withdrawing pretty badly from opiates. I have been here before, when my seemingly faithful muse, opium, shows me its graver aspect. But all pain surges up from within one’s self, and is never, nor can ever be, the product of a merely external influence… so nothing can prepare one for it, for pain. In pain there is an alien presence which everything in your nature tries to reject, to push away, but it cannot, for this alien presence is someone connected with you, its life is in fact your own life.
You are quite right, my ethics is aimed at rooting philosophy in the element of genuine experience. To let my book speak for itself:
"… The only man that has ever appeared before the eyes of the philosophers is the man in a sickly, diseased state, the man enraptured with idealities, upon whose imagination plays the whole throng of human fancies and manias. The man who has cloistered himself up beyond the influences of such things never enters into their considerations, for it could only be a philosopher who had been spared such a fate, never a man. We lack any concept of a true and vital struggle with illusion, of a vital and human struggle in which philosophy may perhaps at one time have found its origin. "
This vital struggle with illusion… is what morality should have been.
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“So the task of philosophy, and of your ethical project, is to further delimit this inner divide and objectify its conditionalities toward the end of effecting new couplings between empirical and transcendental “egos” (qualified-aggregate form/s of constancy of experiencing/s) such that we begin to develop representational understandings (analogies, metaphors) of these spheres of consciousness - of the conditions of the empirical ego - rather than, as ethics (and an unfortunate amount of philosophy as well) has tranditionally been known to do, arrogantly and arbitrarily impressing artificial impositions from without which have little or no substantive bearing upon that which is actually being impressed-upon?”
Yes, precisely.
And now, I venture to the modest servants of the God Asclepius. Doctors…
Fixed Cross:
I am tempted to use this for a reversal of values ‘certain’ and ‘potential’. Now that the real-world, experientially human definition of potentiality has been given as the space between the divide of transcendent and empirical, we may consider this invisible field of potentiality as the certainty, and the limits between which this space exists as the potential. In other words, we suspend the visible and the seeing, in favor of the primacy to a synthetic experience as the benefactor of the entire delineated spatiality - in this a sense of natural ethics is acquired – first incidentally, through cultivation and writing, formulating creating sediment. This works as a penetrating influence both on the transcendent experience and the empirical ego, who now find a limitless space to experiment, rooted in a new meaning – no longer the basis of certainty, but the means to experience.
Where we have always sought experience, we will be able to cause it. Our influence on the empirical world as directly on the cognitive process, no longer via ‘verification’ through a model of objectivity.
This experience is at first assumed, as in strictly postured mediation - it is in any sense not a given. This is how it is alike to morality - it is active, flows forth from posture of the organism to its experience, in which two principles that may go by a thousand names are observed: rootedness/balance/endurance, and openness/willingness/ concentration. I think that these two refer to respectively the transcendental and the empirical.
We agree then, that morality can only be trained indirectly, as an instinct, a “tendency to be in the position to judge”.
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“Where we have always sought experience, we will be able to cause it. Our influence on the empirical world as directly on the cognitive process, no longer via ‘verification’ through a model of objectivity.”
Yes, exactly!
I have been trying to connect my two separate projects. My theory of consciousness and my ethical project. This causing of one’s own experience I formulated in the following terms:
" The great pregnancy.-- Primitive life which could only respond in an immediate way to stimuli would have remained on the earth for only a short while, for a more refined life endowed with what we call “consciousness” had to arise. These new forms of life gained the capacity to react, not immediately to an external stimulus, but mediately, to an internal world, by engendering a mental affect, a “thought” which, in this context, is only a kind of reflex. “Thinking” is only this mediation carried to further and further extents. With this consciousness, behavior was rigidified into instinctual organizations of mental affect, what we call impulses or drives. What we call a behavior, a reaction, is only the reconstitution of certain mental affects, by means of a reflex- namely, that reflex or fundamental schema of consciousness introduced by the development of primitive sensation in response to primitive stimuli: it is the induction of a certain chain of mental causes and effects which nature, experience, and memory have rigidified into hierarchy and organization. This reconstitution is the basis of all consciousness, which is to say, of all stimulation. Egoic consciousness, however, that self-consciousness peculiar to man, has emerged out of this reflexive organism, as its highest power, in accordance to which a new means of organizing the affects has been realized.
The qualia of an experience is directly analogous to a quanta of consciousness, that is, of reflexivity. The instincts, or “drives,” to use the language of modern psychology, are not really singular affects, affects with an immediate character. They are organizations of a kind of primordial sensation, a character-less affect, which have been produced by the reflexive coordination of this primitive sensation. In the lower forms of life this reflexivity endows the affect with character, in the form of pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion, and the character of the affect becomes more nuanced in higher life, and in relation to the development of a more complex sensory apparatus. In man, the reflexive organization of mental affect led to his awareness of enduring states of emotion, of sense, and eventually of enduring things, and of himself as an enduring entity. Language and self-consciousness here emerges, as the highest degree of reflexivity. In accordance to this new self-consciousness and language, which eventually became reason, man has begun to organize the affect in a different way, a non-reflexive way. He is organizing it in accordance with his reason. This marks the beginning of modern consciousness, an active organization of the affects, in accordance no longer to the primeval schema of consciousness, but in accordance to conceptions, ideas. Two different modes of consciousness are, as it were, existing side by side in man: the left-over of the older, reflexive consciousness, and this new, active one. To enlarge itself, the active consciousness must decompose the reflexive one. Reason introduced into that structure of man’s drives which nature, over the thousands of years, had produced, a disharmony, a breakdown. This turmoil and war among the drives is what we have called our “unconscious.” The completely active consciousness has yet to emerge… An applicable metaphor to describe the reflexive consciousness is memory. Memory relies on the capacity to perceive similiarity among objects; an animal, after eating a fruit that has a particular smell and falling ill, realizes in another fruit that also possesses this smell a danger. The sensuous element, the smell, is endowed reflexively with a qualia, in accordance to the organization of characterless affect or sensation. Once a suffienct store of this affect has been organized, an instinct is produced … Consciousness itself possesses a metonymic structure informed by this principle of similarity. It produces similarities to establish the contiguity of experience through the reflexive organization of affect until it reaches, in man, the abstract and linguistic, the archetypal. In accordance to these types, the new consciousness, the active consciousness, then decomposes similarity, realizing differences in objects, collapsing the contiguous or metonymic structure of temporal and spatial relationships. Further, it’s affects are no longer organized reflexively, but with relation to the various producible types. The human capacity to regard futurity, to plan, and to reason, is essentially a differentiating, a distortion and reintegration of the contents of the metonymic consciousness, its work being essentially the reverse operation of memory. It involves, ultimately, discoordinating the structure of the drives established by the older consciousness. It has not yet gained sufficient power to endow the characterless affect with quality; this new, active consciousness, is incapable of producing passions and drives in accordance to its own principle, that of differentiation. Man does not “feel” through this active consciousness, all of his passions still belong to the reflexive or metonymic consciousness. The structure of reflexive consciousness, of the metonymic consciousness, along with the instincts and various passions which it produced that continue to live through man, are of course erroneous, are of course constituent of a false consciousness, however beneficial they were for animal existence- for the concept of similarity is erroneous. Language, reason, and the active consciousness function on a very different principle, and that human in total possession of this later consciousness has not emerged yet. The passions and drives which live through and exercise themselves upon me, are only so many memories passed down from animal life, which are structured in accordance to a principle, namely that of the similar, which is contradictory to the principle which informs the very language and reason with which I regard the work of these passions and drives.
Perhaps what separates man from the animals is not his intellect, but the fact that he needs this intellect; the fact that, in relation to the other animals, whose various drives have been carefully organized into succession, rhythm, and functional hierarchy, man’s inner life is characterized by a contrary state of turmoil, of contradiction and war amongst the drives. It is thought that man could carry on as he does not, purely instinctually, that his “self” is somehow a superfluity of nature. That is not possible. Consciousness arose only to make sensation possible, for the mediation of the inner world which is essentially what consciousness consists in is necessary for sensation to take place, and self-consciousness in the human sense of the word is only this same mediation carried to the highest power. As a result of developing this self-consciousness, man’s attempt to accomplish an active as opposed to reflexive organization of the drives in accordance to his language, ideas, and reason, implies the destruction of everything formerly “conscious,” implies the destruction of this pre-existing reflexive consciousness, and induces the conflict among the drives.
It is only now that the various impulses of man’s nature (the impulse to truth, to justice, etc.) have been isolated and delimited to the extent that their universal turmoil, the universality of the war amongst the drives, and the complete annihilation of this former consciousness can be grasped by those new philosophers in whom it must find expression. Above all else one must keep in mind that it is a superficial conception of the unconscious to regard it as merely a store-house for repressed or forgotten objects of experience, for in fact it is constituted by this conflict among the drives, and is pregnant with a new, as yet unforeseen consciousness, a consciousness developed through the active organization of mental affect and wholly opposed to the reflexive consciousness through which man has to the greater extent operated in the course of his history- a creative, as opposed to “re-creative” consciousness, so to speak. Where it was the task of the older consciousness to organize mental affect reflexively, it will be the task of the new consciousness to exploit the basic schema in accordance to which the reflexive consciousness has transformed the uncoordinated and formless affect- that is, to “think” into this formless affect, producing that effulgence of new passions and unremitting sensation, which flourishes and dies in the same breath, which will one day be called the “self”.
Reason, fundamentally, disqualifies the affects, it disrupts the structure of the affects which qualifies them as drives, as passions, which gives them quality, be this quality pleasant or unpleasant. Spinoza accomplished the most systematic disqualification, reducing the affects to one basic quality, passion, and emotional state, namely joy, and considering all the “bad passions” merely corrupted qualifications of joy. He is an example of what I called the active consciousness. An imperfect example, but an example. Not to disqualify the affects through the hypothesis of a fundamental quality, (for Spinoza, joy, for Nietzsche, power) but by their complete reduction to quantities of consciousness… (consciousness is only the metonymic structure which qualifies them, which endows them with quality by configuring them as single passions and drives, more consciousness equals more sharply defined affects.) Who has done that? I’ve elected it as one of my tasks. A truly active consciousness could arise only after this total reduction was accomplished."
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And in another place:
“The musical animal.-- The development of human language only becomes comprehensible when one proposes some purely representative language out of which it evolved and eventually adopted the power of communication. It is probable that the first man Adam did not comprehend things in name, but in song. Music is just such a kind of purely representative language, when one regards it in its most essential sense, as an art whose own medium or manner of depiction serves as the depiction itself; music is the primeval nature out of which man first began to take cognisance of the world through his intellectual, abstracting power, rather than his brute sensibility, in which all things first suggested to him their “meaning,” in which every being stood frozen in a moment of revelation and betrayed its form to him, rent open by the entry of his voice. The dream of all poets has been to realize this purely representative language in words rather than in tones, but unfortunately the instinct or need for communication, which grew up within man much later, only after the utility of form was realized, and has thereby been insolubly bound up with words, always makes itself known, and renders this goal unachievable. In music itself this instinct has been exerting a retroactive influence, imbuing mere tone and sound with communicable significance, so that rarely even in this domain does man attain to that state of complete suggestibility which is called “inspiration.” We cannot discover this primeval consciousness by realizing it through the analysis of our own music, but in the terms already ventured here one could imagine it as that point at which the consciousness, in its reflexive organization of the affects, first achieved that degree of reflexivity necessary to produce self-consciousness in our human sense of the word, when the enduring forms out of which our experience is constituted began to appear as such, as enduring, as form. That power which has transformed and has been transforming consciousness, that power for actively constituting the mental effects rather than reflexively, in accordance to our language and reason, in accordance to our more refined self-consciousness and the real utility that we find in the apprehension of form, namely logic and communication, will one day be controverted, as the last remnants of the older consciousness are annihilated through the new means of organizing the affects, so that the new state in which man might one day find himself, a purely active consciousness, will be quite analogous to that “musical consciousnesses,” to that absolute suggestibility before the world, in which all things intimated to man their being, which we cannot now imagine. But this new consciousness shall not represent, it will not represent at all, but only create, only declare; this consciousness of absolute communication, of absolute expression and engendering, will be more similar to the older consciousness of absolute representation than it is to our present one, to our now chimaeric nature.”
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You may notice that I have succeeded in equating consciousness with sensation. Sensation emerges as affect without character, affect yet endowed with quality by the reflexive operations on which consciousness is founded. As I put it here:
"The inevitability of consciousness.-- Why did nature see fit to endow us with a consciousness whose only use, at times, seems to be in allowing us to apprehend our own pain? Why could we not have been slightly more ethereal beings, as whisks of smoke which this world might have stirred for a moment and in the next instant wafted into nonentity? Why must this consciousness preside over us, cleaving to the remotest tremor of hunger or pain, and so needlessly torturing us? Why could we not have been as but images cast in the waters? All would be as it is now, only without this consciousness which convinces us that it is we whose images have been so cast. These questions are attractive in their naivete, yet sensation and consciousness cannot exist without one another, in fact they are simply two aspects of a single faculty. The peaceful, insensitive, oblivious life which nearest approached a merely mechanical existence could not have abided long upon the earth- nature does not rest. These more fortunate creatures, possessing no sense as we understand it, were soon educated with that primeval formulation: Pleasure and Pain. Here consciousness arises. For, rather than behaving out of pure mechanism, as did their ancestors; rather than reacting in an immediate way to the world about them, nearly blind, these new beings could now react reflexively to secondary affects produced upon their inner conception of the world, they could entertain a sensation of alluring or repulsive character. A noxious odor, a sound, an image, a memory; these all became ripe with meaning for the new creatures. This is of great import to the living being, and it is also why, in giving to us those supreme tools of pleasure and pain, we were inevitably cursed with consciousness; consciousness is simply the reflex itself, or is constituted by it at any rate. Sensation and consciousness are fundamentally identical, they are two words describing a single faculty. "
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To actively think into the formless affect of sensation, producing new passions, new qualities of affect, endowing the formless affect with quality through reason, qualifying it in accordance with reason… Is the future of philosophical method. An actual production of experience, rather than impotent reflection on it. This can only take place after the reflexive consciousness, its remnants at any rate, are completely dissolved. We are in a privileged position to do this, seeing as how the reflexive consciousness with all its various passions, with all its various qualifications of affect, as the impulse to justice, knowledge, morality, etc… has been fully delineated by our philosophical predecessors.
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As I say in the 291st aphorism of my first book, “Towards the good conscience.”
“Toward the good conscience.-- It is probable that the greatest human beings were in actuality the most child-like, but also the most courageous; who, by virtue of their courage, found the greatest beauty in emblazoning all their lives with hope’s plaintive colors, their greatest happiness in the bountiful enthusiasm of desire. The misfortune is, that in time one of their hopes must be realized, one of their desires attained, in which case their good conscience about things becomes poisoned by reality, which forms only the lowly dregs of a wine that has long since run dry and, in relation to their ardent dreams about life, must always corrupt them. Hence, the great commandment of Epicurean morality to throw off all the dregs of reality, which of course means to throw off reality itself, to dwell silently in one’s little garden all life long. A Stoic, possessed by an opposite nature, and perhaps also by an opposite courage; incapable of hoping and desiring with a good conscience, without the birth and death pangs of expectation and dissappointment, aims to so wholly indwell in reality that he forgets how to desire and to hope completely, but with the same final aim as an Epicurean: to maintain a good conscience, only with respect to bearing the truth. These are both quite violent methods toward securing a peaceful breast; have we developed no subtler means of reconciling the ideality and actuality of man, of taming the heart than- Epicureanism and Stoicism?”
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