In other words, you don’t have shit. We all have our guilty pleasures, though I don’t take to blaming my chemical dependencies for not being able to respond to a post, and I spend a good 10 hours a day in a comatose state drooling on myself while staring at the ceiling.
My cause is defending the Western tradition against those who would compromise it from within,- out of a misguided sense of justice, or a feeble rationalism or positivist epistemology, or simply out of misunderstanding- or un-understanding. That is what I would say- if I had a cause. A cause? I can’t say the word in this context without cringing internally. Philosophers don’t have causes. We wouldn’t condescend to act upon the world-stage. Causes are carrots we dangle in front of the unassumed masses, that we may cultivate them for our instruments.
As to my meticulous nature: I have a respect for language, and in particular, the written word; as did Plato. His Greek prose is a refinement of an already hyper-refined and pretentiously distended species of Athenian elocution,- though for all the talk of Grecianism, my own language is characterized more by a bent for the Latinate.
You made a joke with reference to Plato’s doctrine of Recollection. Anamnesis: it is as little understood as any other notion of Plato’s. So to facilitate that lack of understanding, I am going to cite the 5th volume of my Great Work and a bunch of really pretentious stuff you’re not going to understand, full of weird ass words, arcane mysticisms and unfalsifiable hypotheses: (Platonic anamnesis is actually a mytho-poetic device meant to establish a continuity between passive and active intellect within the human soul, that is what “reconnected with the divine spark” means, as I elaborate in the referenced text, which is actually just an annotation to an even more pretentiously inflated text stuffed with even more weird ass words, arcane mysticism and unfalsifiable hypotheses.)
Mone, a term from the Plotinian dialectic of the One (the monon) re-appropriated to Schelling’s idea of the Remainder.
[size=85]The phrase “a glorious risk” [καλος γαρ ο κινδυνος.] refers to the famed Socratic gamble for immortality, and, in the context of
this passage, immortality is taken as a reification of the negative; as a duplication of the very metaphysical absence which, having
separated human noesis from the “vital centers of life”, has afflicted man with the malady of the infinite. However, only the exoteric
or conventional reading of Socrates would interpret this risk solely in terms of a kind of superficial Pascalian wager between death
and eternal life, for, in the Socratic gesture, it is the unrepentant movement of philosophy in putting everything at stake, even in the
face of death, as Socrates eyed his lethal potion, and in thereby throwing man into what was spoken of earlier as the simultaneity of
given-ness and receptivity, that is, the duplicitous opacity and transparency of Being arrived at by the ek-static oblative projection of
the mone, which constitutes the “glorious” risk, introducing man into the very exigency of meaning,- an exigency of meaning as is
intimated by the apparent asymmetry, which I call the existential-totality, of man’s teleological presentation in the fulfillment of pure
passivity and pure activity given in the Phaedrus and Symposium, respectively- the combined passion to exist, the eroto-poietic agons
of the daemon, and the creative aim that measures the riddle of fate, and the seemingly contrary, (if, like the Phadreus, we wish to
give all the universe the measure of man, for “man is the measure of all things”) patience, ie. receptivity, needed to allow the rich
given-ness of Being, saturated with meaning, to differentiate itself in the dark excesses of prohodos,- the pathos or passion, the
conatus essendi as Levinas would call it, compelling man to discover a “home”, to use a Heideggarian word, and lift up his tribe, or,
to turn back to Levinas- conquer a territory compatible with his needs, within Being, with the ethos or moral need to actively
interpolate and superpose the Ontos or imagal representation upon the existences gathered in reflection in order to constitute the
World as inexpressible and meaningful Whole- as Being. This exigency of man in relation to the catastrophe or Loss of Being, that is,
the deepening of metaphysical absence, is a state of wonder quite different than, or even opposed to, that given in the Heideggarian
philosophy, in which a temporal horizon opens up to Being in a fundamental relevancy to humanity, as a kind of space in which to
exercise his techne and fashion- a home
By invoking the very Depth or ineffability beyond the liminal circumscriptions of nous that he is calling into question with the drama
of death and the immortal soul, Socrates establishes a continuity with it, just as Voegelin’s theory of the Symbol and Depth would
indicate, and it is this continuity, once established, that forces Socrates, in his mytho-poetic recombination of the imagal fragments of
thought he has managed to seize hold of and capture in this imaginal drama, to run up against the very process of unfolding which
fragmented them, thereby “reduplicating” the negative, accomplishing the reification of the absence behind the Depth whose
continuity with man, at the Surface,- in reflective cognition, is responsible for what Plato called the anamnesis, the mytho-poiesis of
memory reaching into the soul’s immortality, which he compared to a dream,- for, like a dream, it collects in its self-representational or
tautegorical structure,- in its dramatic pattern of unfolding, those fragments of thought which Socrates has exampled by capturing (in
my language: “inhering” the epistrophe) in what he calls his “incantation” before facing the hemlock. Indeed he admits his tale of the
soul’s immortality is not rationally justifiable, but nonetheless, in this way, wins the approbation “kalos”, ie. glorious. [καλος][/size]
