Our Occidental Sentiments with Notes on Hyperphotography

For those of us who are accustomed to live on the deepest cosmical sentiments, on the innate spiritual virtuosities of a future humanity, always seeking the clearest and purest aspects of the suprised-packed forest of advanced knowledge, the swarm of creatures who insist on praising and promoting the most primeval ananchronisms of cultural decorum, the least civillized of all geographical periods and the beggining of the vast decadence that surounds us, cannot but arouse our pity and our legitimate protests. Luxury magazines dedicate their glossy pages to the study and mechanical reproduction of the most superfluous, distracting articles of art, fashion, music, literature and their commentary which reflects their objects just as emptily; the aimless proliferation of civilian talents and those who sing their praise under the banner of the word 'creativity'.

Now we who, setting false modesty aside, have the spiritual, intellectual exactitude and memory of reincarnated masters, know precisely what constitutes the meaning of 'tradition' and want above all to study this phenomenon psychoanalytically and to see what are the elements of the repressions of instinct, of education, [the egoical interests, miscomprehensions, insensibilities, infidelities, compulsions, and morbid fantasies, etc., that caused the birth in our century of this collective Babylonian movement.] Our innate capacity to recognise the rarest meaning and sense among the most top-shelf specializations of discourse the world has to offer is not only a gift of developed taste but is as well a psychic propensity which goes beyond even our own intellectual prodigyhood into the unspoken, nostalgic sentiments of private degrees of knowledge that dwells deep within the hearts of great men and were known only to deceased genius, initiates within the tradition: the elder masters.

To say our sensibilities are of an eclectic nature is to miss the mark for these investigations go well beyond 'eclecticism' ranking instead in the most dusty recessess of archives, the accomplishments of rarity contained in the Annales historia, the cloistered traditions of Europe's aristocracies past that today's lack of sense has influenced most all to neglect them. For those born outside Europe, or those living in this century in a post-continental Europe, to understand the essence of the Occident is something of an enormous rarity. Who in the American continent has truly grasped the hermeneutic truth of our heritage? Who can honestly say, with tones of deep sentimentality, to have a sufficiently expansive and detailed experience with the Occidental programe of art and education, to have attained it's eschatological truth and history from Socrates to Patocka? The elder [international] philosopher-scholar certainly has this maturity, but the youth of our beloved Europe have lost their memory. Perhaps this is much to do with the advance of corporate America onto European soil over the past few decades.

In the present age of popular photography the subject, the human figure, has lost all power of expression, every element of spectrality reduced by digital compression techniques, all spiritual value of the optical renounced, both the living human personage and its image, becomes mere still-life portraiture. It is curious to note the affinity in reproducing the human figure of today between animate and inanimate objects, between a head, for example, and a lifeless mannequin. There are far too many people unaccustomed to the world of the soul who find facile and instinctive enjoyment in such reproducible forms and of the insane logic bred of ignorance. Today we see every revelatory potential discovery extinguished, together with every element of lively, spiritual inquiry for the transcendent, to be replaced by a sort of sheeply cowardice both in technical research and spiritual content. True depth of thought [reality] can be glimpsed in those moments of publically expressed truth — when people descend from their playpen in the clouds whereabouts their heads usually entertain so many grandiose perplexities of personal superiority — but this miraculous event of revolution occurs only when there is a majority support for it or social pressure leaning from a majority forces mass confessions. This observation holds true insofar as it can be said that the truth seeker has ceased to 'seek' truth, has lost the natural instinct of the sojourning devotee who explores the lands of learning untill he has attained a complete understanding. But instead, today, mental itinerancy and data 'sponging' of trivial factoids prevails. As a result, the cultural relativism of 'all truth as relative' has itself become an absolutism; thus we see also in effect a state of mental absolvency, mass psychological absolution etc., by penace and sacrifice.  


When we feel the obstinance of others reluctancy to come to terms with indisputable facts, when we see the impenetrable stone wall put up baracading such mentalities from accepting truth, this is not to be confused with possessing a self-certain knowledge of which we are asumed to be ignorant. Empty-headed obstinance, not soviergn solidarity, is a symptom of psychophysical absolvency (i.e., the dissolved state of cranial anthropic structure, is considered a product of Shannon entropy disequilibrium, imbalance at the level of thermal information, set in motion by communication devices that utilize post-Moore's law core-digital processors in the post-Y2K period.) As such, today's people have been so completely absorbed in conflicting information to neccesitate absolutist claims to truths invalidity have lost all perspective that definite actuality itself can even be violently detested or scoffed upon.

Returning now to our critique of method in the photographic arts — it is important to have grapsed the sense that when we speak of aesthetic aims in the capturing of a real object into an image that our aim has historically been allways the portrayal of real life and, more specifically, the representation of scale to form as it appears to us in the world — for this artists were known to use the method of painting to capture a pictorial representation of human figures as idyllic objects such as human beings had imagined themselves to be (i.e., self-representation and cultural identity.) With the loss of identity succeeding with the dissappearance of modernity — art — as the dominant method of representing reality, was replaced with the camera. Once the camera developed into an analog technology capable of reproducing visual objects at visibly accurate or 'analogical' scales of representation, photography was elevated to the level of an artform since it had to compete with this loss of identity in the presentational aesthetic. Photography is now a declining art and its technical exacting quality to depict reality in the scale to form representation has reached total decline since the introduction and adoption of high-definition digital cameras. The reason for this is of course due to the compression ratios of these devices which cannot produce smooth and fluidic, true to scale representations of persons and objects as we see and experience them with the eye.

Instead of the analog [copy] representation of accuracy that is scale fit we have the digitally compressed, reduced and fragmented presentations that do not do what painting and early photography intended to do which was to represent at scale the world as we perceive it. Thus by compressing the image at high definition ratios we move away from re-presenting the world to a bare presentation — presenting the world as if it were the actual world itself — an ironic style of distorting reality, which has then pressed itself into the opticon of perceiving the real, today, is no longer experienced truthfully since our logical sensorium is programmed by bombardment with the presentation of a real [simulacrum] that is empty of the thing itself. Just like the photographs that now present them, people also have been reduced to 'cinematic' presentations as a condition of this incessant bombardment of the eye with the cyber image. Representing is done with artfully crafted skills, a methodic task, to give presentation as well as a new cyber appearance, that of a physically present body and identity that voices its pressence by designed situational awareness, thematic pictorial arrangement etc., and induces a self eliciting effect.

To elicit is essentialy to draw out or bring about a desired reaction from someone or something extant that may or may not have previous latency of the reactive element in its extance. We must proclaim that natural things do not produce an elicit response, that they, being real on naturalistic-existent grounds, do not reach us through external self appearances. Neither are we to be effaced then by the disparaging effects of exerted forces by faceless objects, themselves having been annuled by their own techniques, for we know, prior to bombardment, what lurks below the surface of unreal appearances and phantasms. The convergence between psychical properties with those properties of instruments of technique have produced a hyperbolae of disconcerted responses in us. Such responses which we have engaged or expressly entertained are merely empty projections mirroring the elicited content. We must, on a daily basis, learn to deflect our awareness away from the emulations and enactments of expressive consciousness by those who do not possess it. The scandalous conjurations of collective mobs, with their minutely calculated jesterings, and the masterful placations and diversions of fanatics and syncophants, haunt us to no end.

It is no shock then to see how this crowd has taken center stage in the theater of masks given good consideration to the fact that the once powerfull real-life appearances of human beings can now be perceived with an eye of skepticism; an eye which has been trained to calculate and separate the physical features with the knife of a photogenic analysis. Favouring the extremes of light and darkness this new skeptical eye legitamizes truth and beauty by the confirmations of a retrograde analysis of surface structures. In like fashion the extremities of over exposure and chiaroscuro that supply demonstrable proof to immediate discernment, we behold the numerous charades played out by creatures in the shadows and spotlights as they flounder to voice their inexistence.

Theogeny I [Mythologizing the Post-Millenial Fall]

We live in a phantasmic world with which we are gradually becoming familiar. I will now dispense with this use of the plural: there were, are and always will be very few humans who feel and live the completeness of human life as nature intended. Let us not limit ourselves then to the repurcussions of "Mother Nature's" effects which act on the diminished receptive senses of such and such a human. We attempt to encounter the generous embrace of nature in it's fullness and to know the reasons that govern everything visible by penetrating into the nucleus of ultimate reality. At this point I should return to my opening sentence and above all to the word 'phantasmic' in order to avoid suspicion or those misunderstandings which cause truth to be shattered as it colluides with the stone wall of obtuseness. The intellectual and spiritual deficiency of my contemporaries becomes daily more apparent — the darkness into which they heedlessly grope, and the error into which they often plunge. Over the world there hangs a low and heavy sky. There hangs over the world a low sky that precludes the starry ventricals which makes finite beings doubt and fall into amnesia. The darkness rather than lightning is made much denser by this new smoke. In it there contend the falsities, the mistaken interpretations, the total miscariage of justice, and especially the securalism in which we live, the usurped liberty to spread rumours and expectorate judgements; the stupid amnesty conceded to thoughtlessness, the free will reigning beast-like in the world. Every connection between phantasmic as I mean it and any unnatural aberration is to be excluded.


Phantasmic meaning incipient phenomenon of representation; genesis of every aspect. And, in the case of sapient mankind: the initial state of the moment of discovery, when man found himself in the presence of a reality hitherto unknown to him. The world is, additionally, more than a mere phenomenon— like Venus — it is still a kind of anadyomenon: beyond some oceanic vessel that brought it forth, amid mysterious travail, there arises a new God. Every mind is created first as a splintering from the singular consciousness, in good spiritual, or, we could say, cosmical, order. They are not separated from the equally cosmic motivation of continual change. For this reason the sense of the phantasmic will never be dullened, like the spirit which touches the borders of an unexplored region. After the cultural aesthetics of the world had become uniform in a regularity without contrasts, after it had condensed, after the last fin de sicle, from a state of oceanic calm into an inactive, stagnant coagulation, it gradually began to lose all its power of spiritual consolation and every element of sustaining vitality was little by little extinguished. From lack of internal spiritual nourishment the external form of the world became a sterile system of technical processess, a controlled ecology of artificial life. Like vegetation without water, the essence of the world came to be reduced to this current level of extremity, to a scabby superficiality, an inelastic exterior which, because is was arid, crumbled to bits.

 There remained however that boneyard of academicism; the disorderly remains of professionalism which the arrogant society of ill-informed todlers avidly prescribes to. It consisted of many unifying secular views, apocryphal interpretations and policies of a now syndicated, general, Harvard philosophy of human history. But meanwhile, new complex formations were being extracted from the biochemical base of the specie and there manifested a new specie, a new supermental being. Though this new species of intelligence could not demonstrate any kind of fancy-filled proof, and this point is of the utmost importance, that the singular phenomenon implied theogonic interpretations could be dismissed by men of science while ignoring, or attempting to corrupt, forensic facts which had not yet been officialy revealed to them. What divine properties remained evident to the broods of the Earth then became no more than a residuum of the spirit that now evokes caesuras of madness and disquitude whenever it pressences itself. And it is this disquitude that finally makes men stop and glance to different proofs; manifestations of the certainty of a new birth. If it is this anxiety that forms a prelude to a strangeness that will come to pass in the world, then let us pause: Saturn mutilated Uranus in his sleep and from his spilt blood there germinated a new fecundity, fructifying in nymphs on the Earth and the appearance of Venus from the sea. Indeed there was a rebirth, in the total fever of its delivery. But on close examination of the period (now that distance permits it) one must conclude that unease and great restlessness, the continual drive to investigate, to break and to search, are like a barbarism that could only have motivation in a subsequent fulfillment, and that this could only happen when it was superceded by something superior to it (i.e., its spiritual reason; the new specie.)

The various contortions, multiplied fragmentations, hybridizations and infinite deformations that occured during this period of genesis show how hasty and primevil was the development of this germ of the new collevtive spirituality— the etheric substance of that collective spiritual breath had been sapped from the ventricals of our physico-spiritual labours even as our inexghausting artistic efforts turned to moribund waste the universal drain of society ceaslessly imposed its new age wisdom of justificatory dogma over our misfortunes as our failure to connect to a 'positive belief' in the karmic good of the universe. From here I must confess that the exccersize of faith, destitude, hopefullness, self assuredness, positive belief, trust and patience was manifested in us most absolutely and that such assumptions were asinine at best. Karmic law, if such a thing can be said to exist, would have been manipulated under the aegis of a superficial and primitive power — a magesterial yet earthy power that is minuteley controlled to suite the privileged ambitions of the worldly. Thus now we can see a great anguish impressed on all the new art and culture that presents itself in its painful monstrosity. It reveals to us its supremely taciturn and dark character, in the midst of which we perceive the tremor of a living nucleus still confined and constricted in bitter disorder. We could also establish the barbarous primitivity of such artistic protendors, producers and posers in the language of cultural anthropology, for even though they are most often Western humans they are culturally naive; their inspiration emerges from the multi-cultural mass dynamism, the aesthetic vortex of colonial apologetics, from a history of being nourished on the Negro, an archaism which was borne of servitude and poverty, until the breath of the spiritual alighted on them and became a prime necessity, carrying them beyond the logic of cultural formalism.  

Theogeny II [The Ideology of Change; an Anthropological Error]

Why, following a precise anthropological study of human aesthetics, should naturalism prevail over the spiritual form? Let us pause to consider this spiritual form. Just as I would qualify positivism as a deficient form in the totality of philosophy, so there exists a form that is exclusively spiritual, that is to say 'abstract' and of a purely mental quality. And hence I must declare, once and for all, that I cannot accept a spiritual notion that refers spirituality directly to material things and establishes an indivisible unity with them. From a purely anthropological perspective one must conclude that this kind of spiritual notion of indivisibility is as irresponsible as blind positivism. And just as much as positivism is considered a grounding for anti-philosophical 'brute materialism', the philsophical policy that the spirit is everywhere equal to material things does not promote spiritual people. Instead what you get is a coagulate of irrationalism, super-naturalism and psychic policy in support of regressive animal-empowerment.

It may assist in the prevention of further confusion to note that contemporary spiritual collectivism devotes itself to two conflicting notions. First, the inseperability of spirit and matter would be a gross misconstruction in the abssence of a religious God. Second, the universality of change in the universe would be a gross misconstruction without mind-matter dualism. Spinozoa himself had imagined the first axiom, however with specific theological reservations, and called it pantheism. But regarding the second notion, and grounded as a logical consequence of the first, he believed that nature qua the universe was immutable and thus could not undergo any fundamental or constant changes. Evolution however presuposes a series of transformations towards more advanced structures, in nature's language, life develops, grows, maintains continuous metamorphosis. Change on the other hand is a proverbial superstision today with no real commonality to evolutionary facts or theological principles. Once again, it is an anthropological problem we are faced with — change — with respect to evolution, is not one of nature's plans. Nature strives for heightened complexity, the advancement of life into more integrated, complex life, and, unless an evolutionary extinction is permitted there are no laws governing devolution or regressive 'change'. This change, considered in its progressive stages, seems to be complicated by all the various elements that belong specifically and inevitably to it.

That monstrous suffering, and that anguished look of melancholy, are the most obvious symptoms of that very fatality in which one can detect a necessity that is clearly anthropological. The characteristics noted with regard to the present phase of the world emphasize the cultural-historical difference between the primitive and the civillized human dynamo, and simillar characteristics are verified in all previous cultural and economic periods arround the world where such dynamics existed. To offer but one parallel: in the history of Greek statuary one can establish with chronological exactness the progress of the gradual dissolving of the element of melancholia, so dimly affirmed throughout the entire archaic period (the closed phase), until one arrives at a balancing-out of that lamentable quality; from the xoanon, monoform and hermetic, to the first freeing of a limb from the body, to progressive movement, and where expression is concerned, to the earliest statue that smiles, precluding classicism — and which attains the fulfillment of its organic and spiritual impulse. It is obvious to the historian to see this melancholic tonality of existence marked throughout the aesthetic milleux of antiquity. But we must also note that there is a similitude to be found between the spiritually detached inertness of the classical statue with the numerous mythical characterizations it displays in society, particularly those expressive nuances that represent the psychological dynamics in today's people.

 

The title of Walter Benjamin's book 'Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' say's it best. So for us it is no suprise, to think in terms of reproduced form — that the mechanical processess of the world have expanded solidification of human appearances. Wether one imagines this petrified look to be a consequence of the liberation of brute force or a Medusian folly of repression (in Freud's interpretation of the myth), the emotional nullity it exhibits as symbolic power exposes its true essence to be that of a schematism; a systematic plotting, planning, modelling, in short, a 'scheming' against us. 

Natural wisdom, what I often call absolute reason after Hegel, is forcibly evicted from the body by its unruly animal power and this disembodiement of the human spirit from its corporeal form renders him an atomistic and souless creature. Thus does he become a conduit of the most vacuous assertions, an empty vessel — his head is filled only with nilpotent assumptions — the failed prepredications of an alienated (secular) monkey with all its groundless positings. Indeed, the specie has determined its own secular history with such vacuity of mind that it must deduce from itself the foundational origins of its logic, building in its place [chaotic] disorderly chains made of presupositions and theoretical holes where various truths had to be reinterpreted or overlooked. Examples of such secular felonny could fill entire textbooks so I will not bother to recall them all here.

Fine Art of Cynicism Upon the Pathos of Today

By taking the words of their historical idols at face value, vainly applying them to today's problems of ignorance. In the present crisis, a Dark Age of scientific and technical reason, has replaced the previous Dark Age of absolute theocracy. Again as before, the previous history has been displaced and naively interpreted, lost to the new crisis of reason just as then it was a crisis of knowledge. What really concerns the dismal fate of today's world is the decline of philosophical thought. Thinking is shunned as a remnant of the past, as obsolescence. Philosophical language has lost priority in the minds of the public over and against the predominance of ignonimous political power, societal assemblages, and economy just as it had in the Dark Ages. Thus a Dark Age aught not be diagnosed by the predominance of either a theocratic or a technocratic worldview as from the abssence of philosophical thinking in civillization wether it is supressed by religion or science matters only to philosophers. Prior to modernity, Medievils and ancient stoics entering into the age of reason compare today to posthumanized and postmodern peoples coming to terms with European modernism or new age spiritual philosophy. One must not deny that a patient and meticulous study of reality, if it is well detected, cannot but have some results in the development of civillization — philosophers would continue to be the prophetic makers and shapers of forseeable history and civillizational development in the Occident even if their pressence in the world were to have gone unnoticed.  


When we talk of tradition I mean to reaffirm ancient and universal principles, true for all times, climates and latitudes, and I do not do so not out of a macabre fancy for reincarnation. We detest the bloodless products of a 'progress' without novelty, revolution or movement, without warmth and without life. Let the barometer of absolute reason show stormy weather. The tummult will pass and be succeeded by calm. Let us not forget that certain infantile paradoxes engender more evil than is believed. Justice is not a pleasure, let the brutes be brutish, and let us rather confess that we too have nourished many heresies. If we have never given in to Lady Industry, we confess that we are not indifferent to the attractions of Sir Progress. First we must conquer in ourselves the heresies bred of drunk passions, since before we can make demands of others, we must first be severe on ourselves. Even if no glory, no esteem, no memory remains of us, we will endeavour to represent in our minds the dispositions of the souls of those who in the silence were able to give us that sound, restorative truth that constitutes one of our greatest glories. What does it matter if these words seem dry, or if all spoken facticity falls upon deaf ears; the vein of imagination and discovery is not dry, even if the most gifted doctors show impatience and make speeches fit only to give vent to an infinite series of personal opinions. He who works for the recovery of the honesty that is essential and indispensable for the nourishment of the absolute truth needs very different support. How noxious is the constant drip-drop of conjecture. These are really authentic misdeeds that only a sharp jerk on the reins of reality can contain. Ah! the anthropological fantasies of the cosmopolitan daemos and 'universal democracy'. What is meant is 'universal confusion!'. Everyone says that we are a specie fed on vain hopes and you humans accredit this defamatory legend.  In the past, since World War I, leftism has been a suspicious entity for European humanity even before it's rise to power durring the Nazi occupations. The liberalized, cosmopolitan class were depicted as being stupid, semi-conscious, self-empowered animals hell-bent on arching themselves over the bar of reality, pushing forward false precepts of reality in contradiction to their own gut instinct. Surmounting lies upon the truth, indefinitely, they would go to any measure to outdo the inevitable for the sake of tranquil gratification. Their extended efforts only raise the indefinite debt of inevitability. The manner in which they regard truth, beauty, justice, love and honesty as mad, childish weakness, brings up the numbing stench of their own infantalism.


The mass duplicity of technical progressions is a serious issue for contemporary anthropologists who have yet to properly diagnose it. Machines have evidenced their power to control and direct the thought of men and this is a sign of the deceivable, weak qualities in them. Truly any intelligent person with real courage would address this deceptive stance in humans as it precludes any rational study of society today. Again, truth should be preffered to the political agitation and ideology which detests it. The degrees of imorality that exists today in the field of the so-called 'arts', especially in the globalized countries, is incredible. These humans who wish to be artists and are aware of their spiritual-imaginative impotency are full of subdued frustrations that shows through all their mechanical efforts to construct works by selective craftsmanship.

 

Today's young will never know what it was like durring the real revolution, before the War, and hence before the propaganda, madness, death, famine, environmental destruction and overpopulation of the emergent left. Although it was far from the world of the great periods, the post-War period, was still a world a hundred times more respectable and redeeming, a hundred times more worthy of sympathy than the world of today, where the loftiest calculations of the brute-mind; the global media, the digital arts, the music industry, the mass indulgence in synthetic, globalized and hybridized world-culture, are dragged down into the mud by a band of castrated, ineducated people; scortching lava drinkers, real bootblacks, real arse-lickers of everything superficially foreign and who, in a cowardly and criminal manner have reduced all forms of spirituality, art and philosophy to an obscene aping of the most decadent, empty and frivolous things. The envy of this horrible tribe then leads them to attack those in whom they see danger and to attempt in the vilest and most amora fashion, capitalising on the confusion, anarchy, ignorance, indifference and lazieness which reign today in people's heads, to do harm to those who work seriously, to those who possess the balanced solidarity of real humans and not of pederasts, eunuchs, onamists and old maids, to those who are still real and refuse with disdain to join the ranks of the blackguards, the existentially impotent and the imbecilic.  The gut-raking spiritual impoverishment of today's world is an ill omen that echoes the failed political logic of onus sacrifice — economic, cultural and spiritual sacrifice — that stems from colonial-imperialist greed. It is a conditional logic that survives in the international financial policies of the Rothschild's Empire. Their monopolistic use of gold to propel or destroy nations pervades the Western world, their dynastic influence extends to the occult powers over the human mind which they have controled since the Baroque age of fashion and which they now continue to instill ignorance into the people's of Earth through the use of materialistic symbolism. The superstisious philosophy behind this covert abduction of the spirit has allways been one of sacrifice and every great war, invasion, colonizing power and impedence of history has based itself upon it. Their legacy in destroying nations has been to install ideologically refined demagogues who feast upon and then popularize the historical prejudices of the people while exploiting them with false claims and promises in order to gain power there. Today, protectionist criticism and congressional impassivity against their activities is often reduced by word to the defamatory image of political despotism and puritanism. But to us it is immediately transparent to see into their empty acts and charades. The table-turning polemics, finger-pointing and the apartheidic mentalities which they engender blindsights the majority. Public jesters fall in-line for the unconsciously generated tricks played upon them by their master simulators in this game which reflects the dialectical adventures of colonial eurocentric impertinence. It is easy enough for the Brill scholar (and those of vast historical knowledge and experience combined) to secure a sound prognosis by detecting from the cultural rubble of today the return of specific public evils, charectaristic attitudes, temperaments and psychological vapours which are present whenever that financial Empire is doing its meddling with a country or unleashing its propaganda on a society. As a result of their work all strata of society today and in all corners of the world have been contaminated to different degrees.But this prognosis would never be apparent to those who neglect the rigour of 'historicism', nor would it be apparent to the politically versed Litterati in the face of the present journalistic and media powers who prey upon the fecund outbursts of their commentators and critics. Few possess sufficient knowledge to acurately see past the slough of lies and false information.


The good instincts amongst normal dissidents and religiously aware people in general have detracted from the culture of the mass and many have learned to acquire a sense for radical theories, even antithetical ones, however shows that intellectual progress is still immanent. Only certain elder members and generals who have been inducted into the conclaves of the two great Orders share the most secret mysterious of the political and thus have direct insight into the true mechanisms behind current affairs that explode in the media. Independent historical theorists of respectable decree, contrivers offten, including some stick-figure officials, gentile impersonators of Zion, have inadvertently contributed to this mass confusion that currently has everyone in a frenzy. Thus, the acrid censorship of free thought enforced through the libelous confabulations of mass media is itself a weaker spell than the associated vitrol that ushers through the scolex of its parasites.  

On Eudaemony -- [ Reflections on the Mundaness of the World]

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.