Fixed Cross:
I want to think more about the daemonic and the heroic. For now I address those things which point directly to the possibility of creating new methods, whereby a fully active consciousness can be made to emerge.
If I understand correctly: The subconscious not as “nature” or simply the un-self-conscious, but as the battleground in which reason tries to kill “nature”. I interpret this is a reversal of the traditional approach, which has things emerge from the subconscious to be grasped by reason - here reason submerges itself, as a weapon, into the animal consciousness and ravages it, much like industrial man does to his surroundings.
Yes, an important point here (you have made many) - the human organism is organized by itself teleologically - its instincts are arranged to serve an abstract purpose. The nature of this purpose differs. Religions are invented to the end of setting a cultivating purpose, commerce works to arrange instincts in another way - no generalized goal/method so far, in our time, has proven to arrange the affects in a way that produces a truly happy creature. But man is capable, in some cases, to set for himself such a goal, to arrange his own affects, on an individual basis. These are “free men”, in command of themselves. Corresponding with what has been covered above such successful command is indirect. In this case it works by strategically projecting a goal, the attainment of which is not important. The goal serves to arrange the affects in a certain way.
Another practically useful definition. I have before attributed to the human the capacity to re-write memory. The “faculty” doing this is what you describe.
I suppose that this is true, yes. To a large extent, perhaps there are already some small exceptions. Perhaps in some humans, the new consciousness is able to produce, momentarily a kind of proto-affect. For the most part you are right, it seems - I notice in myself that the great passion of triumph that should come (that I would expect) from creating a new rational philosophy is entirely absent. It leaves me cool, calm, simply more conscious. We must perhaps actively create, forge such passions as what came before us has forged the instincts.
This appears as a very dangerous idea when put raw like this, to which defense I propose that it need not be antithetical to the old consciousness, and its ‘ingredients’. Rather, the new, active consciousness will have to make use in every possible way of what presents itself to it as the material of his former nature, the technical possibility of drives, conditions of organic life, chemistry. The only thing that is fundamentally changed is the order of determination - science has to do away with its false modesty, what may also be called its unjustified claim to objectivity. What “is” in man-as-animal is no longer ground, ‘canvas’, but rather ‘paint’, material. It need not be erased in order for its hegemony to be broken and its powers placed under the rulership of the new consciousness.
This is a crucial insight. From here on new methods can be devised, and the methods that work the best in what has been considered “treating the subconscious” (imaginative re-creation of the interior world) can be explained, and expanded.
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In the terms we have, the significance of this is literally unspeakable.
" It is probable that the first man Adam did not comprehend things in name, but in song."
And this is how we should attempt to approach ourselves from here-on. Not as regressing back to Adam, but to approach meaning in a more direct way, no longer as that which is waiting for us to pick it up and use, but as that which needs us to exist, and between “us” and “it” this “musical” - which then must be closely related to the daemonic.
We are honored to have your writing published here. It is fortunate that our two logics are brought into contact. I can not oversee the potential, there is a dark green ocean in high turmoil between here and the horizon. The work of taming this nightly ocean will be done bit by bit, mile by mile. But the end is clear:
Outstanding. Yes, this garden. My obsessive thinking, from childhood on, has been aimed at making the world subject to the laws of my garden. In this I did not seek to lie to myself about what the world is. On the contrary, I sensed that it is always lying to itself, ‘it’ here being ‘the world at large’ - the statistical world, hell of hells. I held it as necessary that what has been called to be the ‘spirit of play’ and which now you have designated in terms of the daemonic, would be the law of the world, instead of confined between fences excluding the world of politics, common sense, business.
How can this spirit rule? In order to solve this question, value-ontology was formulated - I had to formulate why it must rule. The purity of self-valuing, the solid, philosophical establishment of its primacy, over all the terms now constituting ‘reality’. Of course, it does rule, where/whenever true rulership is exercised. The workings of all leadership can be understood by value ontology, and the consciousness of all true leaders or “master-signifiers” as the daemonic. It is the only type of spirit that may properly rule, actively direct, justify a priori its consequences.
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Allow me some experimenting. I may be deviating from your definitions as I use your terms. Please step in when I make them unrecognizable.
A meaning of the ‘heroic’ is beginning to dawn on me, in the terms of leadership I just described. As leadership always requires sacrifice of the objective, an enforcing of the subject-as-art on its less than perfect canvas, there is always a certain danger involved, an ‘against the odds’, a going-down, the certainty of a compromise - not made my the subject but by fate, between the subjects inner ‘structuring’ as ‘daemon’ and the subjects outward ‘unraveling’ as ‘heros’ - the modus in which his value is perceived, spent.
There is always this dialectic, a frenzied activity indeed, between the hearts genius and all compromising means to “grasp” this, or “have it grasped” - see it confirmed. Such means can be refined, by the introduction of music, but in this first the essence of the loss becomes more apparent - the tragic. The effect that this tragic, the essence of lost self-valuing (a kind of value-sediment) revealed, has on the spectator is ultimately the value being transferred from the hearts genius of the falling hero to potential new self-valuing, in other subjects.
I have wondered how the mechanism of self-valuing might be spread - it now seems to me that here a reaching-out and risking is involved. But the heroic could not be effective to this purpose if the daemonic is not immediately re-attained. The dynamic between these two is the truly dizzying, the frenzy, the inspiring. By its negation, the ‘truth of the daemonic’ is exposed, after which it is drawn in again by its affirmation.
Parodites:
“If I understand correctly: The subconscious not as “nature” or simply the un-self-conscious, but as the battleground in which reason tries to kill “nature”. I interpret this is a reversal of the traditional approach, which has things emerge from the subconscious to be grasped by reason - here reason submerges itself, as a weapon, into the animal consciousness and ravages it, much like industrial man does to his surroundings.”
Yes, exactly. Our consciousness is essentially a metonymic structure… intended to grasp temporal and spatial relations through contiguous impressions. To do this there had to arise a primordial, pre-reflective affect in the conscious animal. This is “sensation.” The first sensation was the first moment of consciousness. In the terms I have been setting forth, they are describing one faculty, that faculty which organizes, reflexively, the affects into contiguous impressions. This reflexive organization is essentially the creation of an internal conception of the world by qualifying, endowing with qualia, this primal affect of sensation. Through the metonymic relations carved out by an animal’s personal experiences, it learns to associate the raw information of a sense like a peculiar smell- say a poisonous fruit it ate once, with the ill feelings imposed by its poisoned state. This “bad” character of the primal affect, the sense, then, is the qualia. Over time these reflexive organizations play off one another, generating a richer inner conception of the world, and more intense qualia- qualified affects that no longer need an external stimulus to be invoked, are created. These would be analogous to what humans call fears, but in any case as they grow more complex they become recognizable as “passions,” as the beginning of a psychology. Eventually this process produced the human consciousness, which is so refined in its inner conception of the world that it is capable of using words, and of reasoning, and has been endowed with the sense of self. In accordance with these things a shift in the structuring of the consciousness began. No longer are our affects being organized reflexively, but rather in accordance to reason, to our thoughts. This has introduced turmoil into our passions, which are no longer held together in the coordinated organizations nature produced, and their war with one another has been deceptively called our “unconscious.”
Thus:
“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.”
This is what I mean by the disintegration of the reflexive consciousness within us, the remnants that it has left behind and through which we feel. Our active consciousness, as Spinoza and Nietzsche’s case prove, has never been capable of producing its own passions, of qualifying the affects on its own. The most the former two were able to do is reduce all the affects to one fundamental quality, joy and power, respectively. To grasp all the affects, all the passions, as only quantities of consciousness, as only different degrees of reflexive organization, would allow the active consciousness to finally begin qualifying the primal affect of sensation on its own, producing its own qualities, qualifications of this affect- its own passions.
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I would agree with these terms and your picture. The most painful depth of daemonic existence must immediately thrust one into the heaven of heroic philosophy, and vice versa. Modern man has been prevented from attaining that depth of daemonic existence though, as a consequence of the radical divide between the languages of the empirical and transcendental, of experience and philosophy. Hence my new morality, which would aim to reinstate the continuity between these two languages, between the empirical and transcendental aspects of the self, would have as its goal the production of a new heroic philosophy, and new heroic philosophers, a new “mens heroica,” to use Bruno’s own term, or “heroic mind.”
Fixed Cross:
The creation of new, realer passions then! This is necessary now as water is to fish, In terms of what I used to know as enthusiasm, I can hardly breathe in this new space, it is too heavily charged with real possibilities, possibilities for transformation of my environment. So the forging of an at least higher, deeper and wider passion seems to me indeed a necessity, even to express the fact that we have embarked on this journey to open up reality, open it up to its potential, directly, after all this preparation, from reflexive organic learning to the last poems of philosophical yearning for honesty.
What kind of passions may we imagine here? What is felt? Of course, the ‘it’ of feeling is a sediment of the passion itsefl - but the sediment is needed to begin to institutionalize such deliberate sensation into categories, which must take on a form of context in which the passions may emerge, not of description of what they are.
Pondering, again I come up with the idea that ‘our nature’ as we perceive it must still be used, though not as a hegemonic drive, but as a pool from which to delve useful elements to fit and sustain the architecture of our drives, the newly attaining form of passion we seek, whereby the world is transformed.
It is my strong believe that whereas the daemonic informs us about what it is that needs to be attained and what it is that is attained, the heroic does not inform us at all, but inspires us to inform ourselves. It draws us outward, it is the tragic fall fo self-valuing emitting the music that beckons others to value the tragic hero as themselves - i.e. value themselves in these heroic terms.
Parodites:
Yes, that’s why I titled my book which deals with these ideas, Hamartia. Aristotle’s term for the tragic element of the heroic figure.