On Eudaemony
The, in itself, "first form" of the endeavor and life of self-maintenance is the constitution of the environing world, and in it [are] human persons struggling for their "existence" in life in the world. The "existence" that they reach as men in belonging to this open-ended environing worldliness - the kind of self-maintenance, of normal satisfaction of their endeavors, of their "needs", in the personal horizon of their whole life - is one that is eudaemonistic, relative, temporary, with a finitude that never stands firm. Abstractions: egoistic satisfaction, family egoism, national egoism, species egoism, internationality in the stance of egoism. Man in historical time, in unsettled, legendary historical tradition, in the normal environing world of the nation in normal hopeful existence. The individual and his fate in this normal existence of the political whole. Belonging to normalcy, the ruling power that makes the political whole, the government. The rulers as functionaries of unitary political mankind - every people has it's ruling leader. Accord and discord among peoples in egoistic togetherness - one's own people in conflict with other peoples, it's interests. That is the continual concern of statesmen, of leaders, they have the horizon of internationality, their eyes are always on the dangers of loss of national existence, the possibility of the breakup of the environing world of the nation in it's normal form, in which is included the possibility of individually personal existence as of one citizen, who has as his purpose the familiar historical environing world of this national form and historicality, who affirms it as the sort of thing in which he can fulfill his needs or which lets him hope for a unity for his life in satisfactory form. Of course, not in individual isolation. All needs are already historically formed and the individual in the national, generative context is immediately and mediately interwoven with his countreymen in his personal existence: however egoistic he is, regard for others also living is not to be wholly written out of his endeavors and life. The life of reason in the normalcy of the countryman, in the horizon of ethnic groups (national unity), hence in the normal growth of "the people". Life purely in customary tradition (tradition within the period of normalcy), successful, unsuccessful life. In practical life the individuals rational reflection and decision is particularized. Motives for a universal rational reflection, various kinds of universality may exist.
We for our part, however, have lived as planetary émigrés to the worldhood of the environing world, as existential aliens, as phenomenological onlookers in a world operating within it's own autonomy but always on the fringes of a much greater cosmic ruling system. To be alien, to be an onlooker, is to be a singularity within the world, a center of gravity, surrounded by negative units of mass; non-subjects, automatons, the ‘locals’ of a peopled planet. As conscious singularum [singularly focused on the {objective} mediation of universal concernedness to conscious Being] - our business is always indeliberate; our actions only consequences dependent on the rules of autonomy within the system. Imaginary knowledge is something we have introduced into the socially connected mechanisms of this world by interrupting the social order of all those politically correct monodromes as they circle around the world and [within] a world that can only be defined by it's monodromy. Political beings circle around the polis of their nation, the political classes, who are concerned about the political status of the nation, of the people, that is the monodromy of wordly aroundness with the people in political togetherness. A people whose decisions and social actions are always dependent upon and obedient to the fads of government and corporate agency. All of these instances of destitute that have apparently occurred by spontaneous social-psychological processes of connection have never occurred at all, what appeared to be meaning uplifted from the myth of lifehood was really just the comfort of paranoia against the random non-happening of 'events' that were suppose to of had meaning. This is the vital illusion that holds the world as being good for all […the {illusory} concealment of the daemonic in maintaining worldly eudaemony -- the purported objective of a people‘s economy.]
What is called eudaemony may only give it’s concealed meaning after a grammatical deconstruction. The (eu)daemon is the non-demon who is also neither man nor beast according to the oldest accounts of it’s usage, the eudaemon is a glorified angel in exact contrast to the demonic Being. Eudaemons can only be given any form of autonomous self-definition when referenced to daemons. Unlike the angel that stands in natural contrast, the eudaemonic Being must be identified as an angel even if it were a demon. Not being a demon however it is, precisely speaking, a human being glorified as an angel; since it is the non-demon it can only be a man or a beast. Later usage has given the word a more exact quality: ‘eudaemony’ is the material maintenance of human happiness, the glorification of man i.e., worldly utopian materialism. Eudaemony is that inauthentic or outwardly exhibited happiness derived from material comforts and or vain egoic fulfillments rather than from a naturally constituted [rational] apropos or destitute. The eudaemonic man finds comfort in the things of the world for they are his enlightenment; his humility is sourced in them, in the ergonomics of leisure (work and play) feeds into his delights that his leisure time is, to an extent, monotonous economic fulfillment and that his working hours are made leisurely by fulfilling this monotony.
The phenomenological onlooker is acutely aware of the unnatural quality of this synthetic unity (synthesis) of toil and repose, the drudgery of life as it presents itself to the sentient mind. For him there is a deep sense of discontent in mechanical effort and a profound dissatisfaction with the indolence and entropy induced by worldly amusements. The onlooking subject is repulsed as much [by] the world as he is [of] the world and this is reflected in his intelligence and will that is overlooked as imbecility and weakness. He is scoured by those feeble minded worldlings who see in him the refracted image of truth that brings to conscience the muddiness of their own aggregate existence. Born out of true complexity, the onlooker is an evolutionarily self-contained human emergence who will always prefer to deduce the parts from it’s whole whereas his blind cohorts, those who must compete with him for evolutional primacy, will by their own nature, always reduce subject matter to the parts they believe define it’s qualities.
As onlooking subjects our gaze is directed towards the accretion [phenomena] of symbolic power as it adapts to our discriminating consciousness. Natural (discriminating) consciousness penetrates like a sword into the spatial fabric of this continuous attempt of the [sapient] world to challenge and deceive the transcendental Being of the subject -- it’s mechanistic program; to coerce the thinking subject (cogito), to masquerade around the subject, to draw the cogito out of it’s dwelling into a concern for materiality, to ‘pull the wool’ over the eyes of the subject, to stupefy and make null all obvious intelligibility, to ape him parodically as though the obvious were unobvious. It is this continuum of difference, this anthropic horizonality of the worldhood of the world that, when naively considered, places worldhood into the existential mode of apperception -- the mode of self-identification with worldhood that [is] also the state of prereflective world captivation. World horizonality presents the world as a manifold of continuous sense bestowals -- the giving of worldly meanings constitutive of the environing world of concern. Social reality, the space of common men, the work world and the social world [that] is always at-hand, the naïve world of principles concerning life; the ‘pragmatic’ logic, worldly aroundness (the political) that is immediately of [human] concern, the mentalities and concerns of men centered in mundaneity. Such is the itinerary of prereflective life; a life of wandering in the world, of prereflective men who uphold the principles derived from the sapient logic: the principles and mores of the household, of the family and of all his co-habitants whose thinking and activity must always be directed by what is at-hand; the norms of regional governments, regional programs, party politics, social welfare etc., that is his limited duty to fulfill the business peculiar to the thematic field of his environment -- an agenda to maintain the worldliness of the world.
Individual life is constituted in it’s all-inclusiveness as universal horizon and endeavor to be able by reflection to give the whole of life the style of something striving upwards, continuously and harmoniously affirmable -- as a whole (progressivism). Government -- solicitude for the whole people, compromising [what is] for the best form of it’s life, the “best possible” system of governing; democratic socialism, a compromise in which every “citizen” could have the best life-possibilities, first in familiar style, then eventually in change of style. Government -- care for the inner, care for the outer: for what is immediate -- public demands (change), and new publics form out of new governments, tensions arise empires fall. Egoistic motives and the individual’s passions against reason -- likewise for the politician conflict of political reason with individual-egoistic passions. Traditional motivation and rational motivation -- rational motivations on the basis of tradition, bound by it and not yet conscious of the bond (as bond of rational freedom). Man, the people in abnormality. The rupture in normal existence by “destiny”, fate, natural laws -- individual and of a people. The rupture in individual existence within a national Existing in good fortune [eudaemony] -- further still, life under the threat of a disastrous fate, the rupture in existence as possibility constantly belonging to normal life. For the nation as nation among alien, eo ipso “enemy” nations (as egoistically interested) life in constant danger of loss of Existence or loss in the face of the threat of egoistic existences not of one‘s own national identity. Various possibilities. The people remains a national unity, but enters into service, becomes a servant people, a people enslaved to existential drudgery, labor and eudaemony. Or the people loses it’s national unity as unity of a nationality; the nation is shattered, the individuals become individual slaves or are transplanted into strange surroundings, denationalized they become locally globalized wherever they find themselves to be in the world. Loss of the identity of the nation, of it’s polis (the polis of the nation) becomes apolitical or is replaced by communitarianism -- global cosmopolitan society -- becomes popular as a people go through historical stages of liberation. First religious (liberation theology) then political (democracy) and finally corporate (progressive individualism) which then becomes a movement from religion to global ecumenism and or public empowerment under the guise of spirituality. The liberated people of a corporate class have for decades striven for a transnational identity, their ambitious desire to be ’internationally savvy’ and ahead of the game. Since the 1970’s commercialites, socialites and lobbyists have built themselves up on extravagant vitae only to find that at the end of each decade they plumit from over exhaustion. It is by folly of shear primitivism that titanical, monstrous communisms arise in so many nations who glorify the progressive corporatizing of their governments: By the looks of things one would think the Russians were being owned by the Siberians and the Chinese by the Mongols. Workers employed or laid off strive to be self-defining entrepreneurs (liberated workers) are internationally employed, are no longer under the foot of capitalism, working class citizens with socially elite middle-class values. Loss of jobs, loss of workers, de-unionizing the state, unemployment. The corporate world impedes on the livelihood of the workers, of their ordinary mode of existence, determines their type of eudaemony, of what is deemed suitable to their endeavors. Loss of the government at the feet of the corporate establishment -- the secular establishment of “humanity”, the elite, as a socially liberated class of persons; their autonomy and sovereign status. Political superiority of the corporate class i.e., it’s self-appointed power (political power) to absorb the government as it’s “right”. The people are blinded by technological media to view primitivism as progress. Loss of the private world (privatization) as the seduction of corporate power given to the public to secure the interests of company privacy. Loss of historical worldhood -- the life of the world as the world of man -- threatened by the disappearance of human consciousness, of collective, mythic and historically referenced “life coordinates”, human spiritual depth, human sentiments erased by social technologization. Loss of a species, of it’s existence-maturity, is now one of immaturity, ludic socialization, political absolutism, corporate dandyism, effeminacy and exalted maledom. Likewise the soteric religion of the ruling classes now turn to politics and economic aestheticism. Growing interests of greed; growth of assets, growth of a company, the prolongation of one’s hegemonic survival, prolongation of life (finitude).
Possibility of forming a quasi-national unity out of historicality, a people in the disapora. New formation of peoples out of peoples. Among them, therefore, the formation of stateless “peoples” as generative-historical communities of life on the part of foreigners and associations of foreigners within the peoples of a nation, among which they themselves have no part as citizens. Further transformation: naturalization of these foreigners while their national bonds beyond the state cannot yet be dissolved. The community, that which institutes personal bonds, lies as historical tradition further in persons. The intrusion of scientific reason into mankind, which lives prescientifically in finitude and knows of the world only as open horizon of life. Disclosure of the open endlessness of the world by the rational form of infinity. Supposed “discovery” of the infinite world, in which all relativity in one’s belonging to an environing worldliness and everything that exists within an environing world is annulled by this, that in a universal attitude encompassing all possibilities precisely the totality of relativities is taken in and considered, that in an action of idealization it carries out the anticipation of an infinite ontological structure of identically worldly being as Idea, which as given world in the sense of approximations of “true being”, which lies at infinity.
The powerful instinct for self-preservation, for an existence that one can universally affirm. Living in finitude man stands before the riddle of the world -- the world is senseless, all human endeavor is ultimately senseless, a chase after unreachable goals, “life-goals”, ultimately a will to life under the practical ideal of “happiness”. This is senseless, even if individual life looks upon itself as a function of national life. For the latter can only temporarily (in the contingent absence of ill-fated occurrences) remain propitious. As soon as man leaves restricted finitude and enters into a knowledge of the world that reaches further, particularly a wide-ranging historical knowledge, something which belongs to every higher culture, he will not be successful in coming to terms with the sense of the world. Man rescues himself by absolutizing religious powers. In naïve worldliness man suffers under restraints, accidents, fates, which break into the normalcy of his traditional existence and do not make possible a ruling of his life by reason, by reflection and foresight. Man, projected beyond familiar finitude and knowing himself in the infinite (endlessly open) world and in the infinity of incalculable possible contingencies, sees in the world and his existence in it an incomprehensible riddle. Positive science with it’s naturalistic objectivation of the infinite gives him new hope of grounding Existence through reason. But there he founders. Now the world of scientific reason becomes incomprehensible -- new absolute reflection, epoche, highest level of rationality.
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