thirty-year old who enters public life to preach masterful living—Night of the World.
William James
Taking cues from rapacious financiers, penniless professors have developed Truth-for-Profit Philosophy into a tradition that predicts classroom success based on the cash value of impractical students. Statements about the world that are to be valued for their functions and consequences are fiat facts, interchangeable as long as they fill pockets equally, exclusive insofar as one splits more seams. It is as if a tour guide were to lead you on a safari and only tell you of the world beyond the conservancy; leaving unscathed, you are so impressed with the guide’s knowledge that you ask him to follow you home and tell you about all the strange wildlife there. This is in fact how many people live, carrying around their philosophy like a foldable map in their pocket. Whenever they come to a dead end, they assume they must be reading it wrong and flip it upside-down.
Santayana
Dog faith? —Too much dignity.
Lion faith? —Not noble enough.
Fish faith? —A useful aerobic exercise.
Giraffe faith? —Necks would roll.
Bird faith? —Ample ingenuity and daring, seldom convergent.
Sponge Faith? —A temporary non-adaptation.
***
The objects confronting us prompt every Metazoan presumption at one time or another. Experience modifying our timid reactions. The Crawl of Animal Faith.
Unamuno
It is only with the rise of the professional philosopher, the salaried truth-seeker, that marriage has become a normal practice within the discipline. And among the pessimistic philosophers it continues to be rare. Out of all of them, only Unamuno was happily married. Rousseau had his memories of being mothered to nurse him through his final days with his ignorant peasant mistress; Freud, his theory of marriage: a concoction of cocaine and never-ending therapy sessions rooted in an epistolary chronicle of jealousy and domination. If one must be a man before he can be a philosopher, as the Basque says, then a woman is apparently requisite in placing the impetus towards more life at the center of his philosophy. Spinoza made an exception of himself by escaping into a higher romance—his longing for a God. Two proven forms of continuous, supreme and unending happiness: infinite reason and the feminine ideal—both too uncompromising to collaborate on a balanced joy and too abstract to be sustained without coopting corporeality. In this, having it one way becomes an everything-or-nothing affair.
The shrewishness of grand intellect leads to a sort of provisional exhilaration as one nags one’s way into an eternity of perfect geometrical forms and necessary ethics, only to find one’s mind re-terrestrialized upon finding that this state bears a close affinity with more locomotive paths to ecstasy. Once gratification can be achieved with a simple brain throb, stooping to mortal courtship becomes an inconvenience.
Experiencing the sea of scents one is obliged to coat oneself in after going to the bathroom, the inexorability of feminine charm kindles a drive to assimilate the dainty gender values into the machismo model: imposing, aggressive—the fresh sex, willing to stake everything on a whiff of eau de toilette, ferociously outdoing each other in submissiveness with tributes of wildflower fields. Parthenogenesis of plantation serfs, propagating to expand acreage plots without a master, rejuvenating their pheromones through wars of obedience.
Unamuno’s connubial bliss percolates through his fashion sense: he wore black to absorb the rainbow. His was a spirit of style that, in striving to become conscious of itself, usurped the known world of Spanish letters.
Cioran
The philosophical seer is especially prone to neglect in his era, a solitary figure arising and departing in the shadows, not commented on intelligently for generations. The redundancy of prophets: we raise our ears to one born a century ago while dismissing today’s as a killjoy. That a forward-looking humanity is incapable of learning lessons from the past should be enough disincentive to prognostication, were it not that the prophet thrives on his neglect, is corroborated through it. There is a suspicion of demagoguery in being listened to, a reinterpretation of wisdom into cliché.
Cioran has yet to be discussed. The Anglo-American obsession with lexical, logical, and empirical particularities swamping existentialist fashions, his concerns are not our concerns—but when they become so, we will need concepts of planthood to navigate them.
The euphoria of despair is a curiosity exclusive to the child born old. To be a Nietzsche of exuberantly willed will-lessness is a paradox comparable with the frail German himself—the sensuousness of French philosophy grafted onto the bleakness of the Romanian peasantry. Writing masterpieces in two languages was not enough to prevent his familiarity: if he is ever fully translated he will become even less known. Even after renouncing the heights of despair he continues to encourage it in the reactions of his best readers. Distancing himself from a fascist ideology only intensified the strain of ruthlessness in his thought.
Contemporary aphorists, by contrast, the spawn of pessimism who have had a generation to become blasé about despair, are like centenarians stuck in the prime of middle age. Obliged to pass in society, they knit turtlenecks as a brace for their droopy heads. Only in optimistic ages do pessimists don armor; after victory the luster of bellicosity is lost.
Badiou
There is a historical recurrence of a certain type of mind that continually attempts to reduce humanity to mathematics. Perhaps realizing the silliness of such a claim, these minds have tended to mask their concepts in fashionable conceits, and in witnessing the success of their work later thinkers are inspired to recreate this underlying theoretical failure. Pythagoras infused a religion into his numbers to make them unquestionable. Descartes appealed to God as the foundation of certainty for the cogito on the coordinate plane. Contrary to Leibniz’s concerns, humanity was mature enough to realize his dream of a characteristic univeralis—his ideas were popularized beyond recognition for the sake of universal intelligibility. But Badiou, too honest to have the good sense to clothe his dizzying logic in the optimistic mysticism of the crowd, makes his thesis into a reductio ad absurdum argument after the first proposition. Whenever one makes an empirically ridiculous statement and neglects to ground it in an unverifiably ridiculous statement, arguing in its favor only seems to prove the twisted psychology of a desperate man. Escaping linguistic deconstructivism into mathematical reductionism is like a man rising from a bowl of alphabet soup in order to validate himself as a Cheerio. A man cannot belong to humanity, he is a member of a void set—perhaps old Badiou is right after all. The mere fact that he blends different branches of knowledge into a body of work not easily compartmentalized (and is thus largely ignored) is an indication of his importance. He is too broadminded to be read.
My Audience
Whoever happens to read this book is merely a witness to my dialogue with the past. When I speak of Gracián, Cavendish, Emerson, and all the others, I am not speaking to their present-day followers, or some sophisticate who can appreciate them—I am speaking directly to the Ghosts of Reason themselves. They hear me and submit their approval, filling me with messages to transmit to a wayward culture. Through me, they transform themselves to suit the needs of the times. If Emerson lived today he would be a Descendentalist; Aesop, a parabolist of freaks; Gracián, an advisor on absurdities. All current ideas are reanimations of dead ideas, every new thinker the zombie of one long departed; I am a walking corpse made up of body parts from different graves. Even when I seem to be directing myself against a living writer, I am only sending my moans into the past to reflect their echoes of condemnation. But will these be heard, once they are channeled back through me? No. Readers are too handicapped by life to identify with positions against it.
Part 4
Plurality of Cataclysms
That a higher being doesn’t exist—a far more dangerous scenario than its contrary. A god brings with its existence certainty of our end, an obligation to carry out its revealed prophecy, the assurance of