Aphorisms and Misc. Reflections I
Abstract: I collect some minor reflections and miscellaneous reflections from my 6th notebook. These are primarily philosophical-political meanderings, notes for further pursuits.
1. Doesn’t the greatest tragedy reside in the one who wasn’t quite tragic enough?[1]
2. Homeness emerges along the contours of the proper myth: with the right myth, with the true lie, I feel at home. The only illusion is that there is any illusion at all.
3. Every intervention is conducted within an aesthetic purview/narrative. One intervenes, intervention takes on justification, only in terms of form: e.g. to introduce form, to re-set form, to rehabilitate toward form. Intervention addresses itself only to where form threatens to collapse or already has collapsed.[2]
4. We cannot get out of the same problems, for we are locked into those problems not so much through our language as through our experience: that is, our problem is grammatical, but that is because reality is itself a type of language/grammar. To this end, we might say there exist better or worse speakers of the grammar of reality, just as we would with a traditional dialect. These privileged speakers we call world-souls.[3]
5. The soul in heaven wrongly chooses to be a tyrant in reincarnation—in his previous life, he was virtuous by habit, not by philosophy. This means only that philosophy is a form of, is constituted by, self-reflexivity. The basis of this reflexivity is the understanding that every choice alters the structure of the soul. One’s disposition toward the world is, in this sense, really a disposition toward the self; every choice outward seeps equally inward, and vice-versa.[4]
6. All life is birth; death is merely birth made possible again. To sidestep the pharmakon: how to enable birth without death? Here the problem of the mirror of self and society is extended further into nature: the civil war at the heart of nature penetrates into man’s core, which in turn penetrates into the core of society. Resolving the mirrored aspect of self-society therefore requires the further step of linking this mirror binary into further symphony with nature: to resolve the conflicts in one category (nature, man, society) requires one to resolve the corresponding and concurrent conflicts in the others. Nature—self—society in theory will all fall into one total braid; this is not to suggest that all might benefit from a common antidote, but rather that whatever antidotes are appropriate to each realm be administered concurrently and in coordination.[5]
7. The question of influence as really a question of who I disagree with most. There is a connection here between what one takes as an “enemy” and what one takes as the already-ruined, that which is ruined; is not the enemy that which we already think is ruined? What, then, do we pursue in competing—their redemption, or ours? I approach the enemy because I think they are already defeated—hence the whole confusion at the heart of the pathology of enmity.[6]
8. I refuse to be swept along by the current of my age; I yearn to reach out and master it, direct it, mold it and care for it—in a sense, to draw it so tightly and intimately into myself that the two will collapse, and I become synonymous with a moment, a swerve in the course of things. I am become an event: I transform myself, and thereby disturb reality. I am a stepping stone, a moment in the erection of an enormous mountain: one can easily imagine beings far later, far more equipped to deal with reality, far more capable of mastering it fully, and by that token, mastering themselves—finally, and triumphantly, relieving themselves of mastery entirely.[7]
9. The essential property of loving: to help the burning world next to you burn that much brighter; to help it go forward and grow, equally into itself as it does the open world.[8]
10. With Guicciardini, one may achieve greatness; with Machiavelli, one may achieve immortality. To the extent that one is the greatest idealist, so too must one be the greatest of realists; to achieve the impossible, heaven and earth must be altered—and first one must understand both as they actually exist and interact.[9]
11. There is nothing so stultifying and spiritually uncomfortable—even corrosive—than an encounter with pure experience. That is, different than boredom, one feels selfhood a unique type of prison, and the lack of escape a unique type of problem—something one can never quite get around or out of. One confronts the bareness and barrenness of existence, the ‘mere’ unconcealment of existing: no goal, no animation—entropy that extends to holy oblivion—but how to get out and control this? People want entertainment, yes—but we can only understand this against the context of lack of activity, lack of entertainment, e.g. boredom and waiting. One does not need to agree with Benjamin’s critique of capitalist anxiety to see that the economic dimension of this constant need toward activity is merely the symptom of a deeper existential malaise. This, too, is different than the Christian/Puritan injunction that “idle hands make for the devil’s plaything”; we encounter here the possibility of an entire politics, not unlinked to authoritarian principles of propaganda, directed purely toward the problem of waiting and boredom. Keep them entertained, yes; but entertainment often proves superficial, its agents and carriers supercilious and its impact perfunctory. The principle at stake: above all keep them active.[10]
12. The equation “myth + resilience = truth” is precisely the formula that links Nietzsche to the pragmatists. Whether this myth is the product of conscientiousness or not may be their greatest point of difference.
13. The split between monism and pluralism is less a split and more a dinner table disagreement—they share a pantheistic and catholic appreciation for singularity, and only emphasize differences in its contours—they are both part of and fixated upon the same assumed picture of the world. For instance, both Koselleck and Parmenides (or Parmenides and Heraclitus; or Parmenides and James; or…) share more of an intellectual affinity than they would admit, something approximating what Kant refers to as “antinomy”: both are primarily concerned with the singular—the emphasis/stress is merely placed differently. That is, both are concerned with the essential individuality of things: for Koselleck, this individuality is reducible to the unique moment, complete in-itself but unmoored from other individual moments; for Parmenides, this individualism is merely elected into a categorical truth: the experience of this universe is a whole, is singular, is individual.[11]
14. To know oneself is to overcome oneself.[12] This is the basic formula of conversion, of which Kierkegaard is perhaps the most incisive thinker to date. For Kierkegaard, the task of conversion is to create a subject unknown to oneself—to invite the stranger-as-self, to show ignorance and sin where one saw previously only emptiness. The maneuver here is Arendtian, similar to the idea of the daemon: one is ever too-close to oneself; one needs to be taken out of oneself first.[13] For Kierkegaard, the true god is a humming bird, whispering “there is another way…” in one’s ear, then whisping away.[14] To convert another, lead them not to thought, but to wonderment. That is: lead them first back to the foundations, back to the beginnings—for new things are always born from new beginnings…[15] To convert is not to change, but to show how all change has already happened, has already occurred, has already come to pass. The converted soul is merely made conscious and responsible of that passing.[16]
[1] Nietzsche; Yourcenir; Ozymandias in negative (Shelley)
[2] Martin Jay on the aesthetic, Hayek on the problem of intervention; Nietzsche: reality is justified aesthetically. Wolin, Voegelin. Chytry. Pragmatism more generally: what is the relation between form and habit?
[3] Wittgenstein, Lakatos. Arendt and James.
[4] Socrates on the myth of Er. Peirce and Bourdieu on habit. Kant and Habermas on reflexivity. Taylor; stoics; Descartes, Vico. The scene from Moby Dick with Ahab tracing contours on the map.
[5] Arendt and Whitehead on birth and novelty. Voegelin; Wolin on Christian metahpysics of society. Sontag on illness as metaphor.
[6] See Harold Bloom, “Anxiety of Influence.” See Schmitt on the political; Nietzsche on enemy-selection. Heidegger on that which is already-and-is; Descartes and Hesse.
[7] Kleist and Dewey. Nietzsche. Heidegger on Descartes; Bacon, Locke, Hegel.
[8] Rilke, Dewey, Socrates. Popper, Schiller, Lovejoy.
[9] Arendt and Jaeger. Relatedly: Robert Caro on Robert Moses.
[10] See Agamben on the “open.” Hoffer; Tocqueville on the sheer activity of early American democracy.
[11] Lovejoy; Montaigne, Guicciardini; Fleming, White; the split between expectation and experience; Leibniz on the monad. Descartes on the cogito, Taylor on the self. Wittgenstein on a picture holding us captive; but what would it mean to disengage from this picture?—a new type-of materialism-idealism relation entirely?
[12] This is the conceptual thread that links Socrates, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Foucault.
[13] See Longinus on the sublime; Shaftesbury, Addison, Burke.
[14] See the notion of the “still small voice”.
[15] See Arendt, Scherer, Wittgenstein, Cavell, Derrida. Heidegger.
[16] See Taylor on Socrates, especially on the notion of education. The critique of Socrates: to be made conscious of the passing does not necessarily make one responsible. Hence the practical deficit Kierkegaard fills.