Aphorisms and Misc. Reflections IV
Abstract: I further collect some minor reflections and miscellaneous reflections from my 8th notebook. These are primarily philosophical-political meanderings, notes for further pursuits.
1. To speculators of man: sift through your dirt and ash; dissolve your pyrite; sell your gold; lay your stones upon the shore—and watch how soon they smooth back to sand.
2. Three paths present themselves: that to self-enlightenment, that to emotional fulfillment, and that to power. Purpose: to be the river that runs through all three.
3. The greatest parent of innovation is not necessity, but love. Or: love bears on innovation as innovation bears on the world. One has to work through one level of mystery in order to reach another. It is love that redeems reality; it is love that makes all time valuable.
4. Exceptionalism is first and foremost an aesthetic principle. A society in downfall may still see itself as exemplar, may still present itself as principal and primary, may still use its self-destruction as a point of pride. Still a “city upon a hill”—but now cast in the image of a burning Acropolis.[1] Democratic knowledge is always a Faustian compromise: we have won and learned much, but at perhaps irreparable cost.
5. We are scrambling today to look at the world as it really is—to remove the self in a self-oriented culture. Today, when one is “alienated,” it is not alienation from one vital force or alienation in a set of neat binaries: it is total, complete, thorough. Or: when one is truly alienated, it is not in one way, but in all ways. Hence why alienation is compared to a prison: it requires a full transformation, an all-in-one escape—anything less merely deepens its hold.
6. In this, the universe of forlorn gods and forged time, the boundedness of things means only: their will-to-changeability.[2]
7. There is an irony to the self-victimization of the modern media, a double-edged blade it is forever grinding down and blunting: “Woe is us!”—they shout, “That is, woe is our business, woe is what we spread….”
8. Governmental refoundation is the equivalent to heat management in a sauna: it is about identifying the right mark and then adjusting, calibrating, dialing in the right atmosphere. The “backwater yeoman” is the element in our particular history most likely to draw us back to our own foundations well.
9. The nature and purpose of protests: to ever prepare. This is why protests do not have a real terminus—they can only and ever move toward a general and unfulfillable goal, lest they no longer exist as protest. The real political alchemy occurs by transforming effervescent feeling into lasting action—it is in knowing when the protest ought to kill itself in order to realize its purpose, in knowing when to die in order to live.
10. The essence of total war: to hate another more than you love yourself.[3]
11. It is only when man has transcended the possibility of his own death that harmony of the social world may be achieved, that the civil conflict at the heart of society may be resolved. Immortality is the means to this utopia, rather than its end, and may only be achieved in and through the perfection of self-understanding. Or: immortality comes about when the civil war of the self has finally ceased.
12. There will be no end to war until something fundamental in man is altered; but to alter something fundamental in man, there is only endless war. And I mean by this: death is the road to a new life; one must end a certain power, a certain worldview, a certain version of the self before a new one may arise. Against the unavoidability of violence, the problem becomes: how to kill softly and die with a whisper.
13. Only when I have truly come to know myself, only when I have truly come to live “well”—only then will I have transcended myself, only then will I have escaped the inevitability of death.
14. One of the surest ways to avoid the pitfalls of positive liberty is simply to ask the stranger what it is that they need—to begin the conversation with a question rather than an answer.[4]
15. The metric of state stability might come down to how well and how permanently that society has come to articulate its own existential parameters. Here, we should not confuse articulation with self-consciousness—all that matters is how lived and alive those parameters actually are.
16. The dialectic of modern fashion is that between the outer death of stylistic trends and the inner death of identity[5]: it is predicated on a permanent itch, an eternal agitation—the perpetual transcendence of the self by the self, the everlasting attempt to get beyond the self and become something more. Capitalism is merely the interrogation of the injunction “know thyself” from an aggressively materialist perspective.
17. Can the true anthropologist, like the true liberal, be anything more than a partisan for anthropology or liberalism as such? The question here is how to commit to certain forms of relativism without being more than a defender of that relativism; how to take as one’s object “relativism” but, as a subject, how to simultaneously be more than a relativist. Here is also the problem of leaving the door open in a certain manner.
[1] See Winthrop, Burke.
[2] See Emerson; Ken Liu’s short story, The Waves.
[3] See Clausewitz, Schmitt, Hoffer.
[4] See Mill’s utilitarianism; Augustine. Iris Young and Danielle Allen viz. storytelling and talking to strangers; Simmel on the stranger, Borochov on assimilation. The most important contemporary theorist/ethicist here is probably Peter Singer.
[5] See Leopardi and Benjamin on modernity, fashion, and death.