Thursday 19th January

Remedial measures to be taken.

It has become necessary to draft some notations to myself to be read at a later date. As it is a favourite habit to pour dejectedly across my own letters, hunting with glee for weak phrases from which to extract delicious and sick pleasures for my unremitting self-criticism, I am second-guessing my future self, laying snares to hunt the hunter.
Once, it seemed only ethical to assist my untrustworthy other half by casually reminding him through these notes of ideas that would elevate him above his detrimental stupors; that I have grown apathetic to this needy character to the degree of aiding his psychological ruination testifies to how far beyond help he has become. Kind and cosseting words are nought to one such as he; it is a venomous spittle that he now must taste, and I shall laugh in advance at his impotence to defend against it.
How charming my future self is. I say ‘is’ as opposed to ‘will be’ not from some grammatical oversight, but precisely for the reason that I have been acquainted with him on so many occasions as to have arrived at the conclusion that he is trapped in perpetuity like a goldfish in a bowl. Why do I find him ‘charming’, you might ask? Perhaps it is due to the fanciful conceit that he maintains according to which he perceives his actions as a great string of failures, or perhaps it is even his petty, egoistic determination to demonstrate how sullied and wretched his existence is? And it is precisely due to his egoism that I do not pity his perspectives: pity would equate me with something altogether more worthless even than he! That he demands pity is enough to commend my spite.
This future self has the distasteful and self-defeating propensity for evoking me as scapegoat to his perpetual ruin. The motive that he conceals behind this conceit consists in contriving everything other than himself as blameworthy for what he is. Were he to abandon this cowardice, this condemnatory moralizing he would, to be sure, have no alibi with which to shirk his responsibilities. He would have occasion to blame no-one and no-thing for the fact of his existence and would instead glimpse his capacity for ‘bringing himself into being’.
I, on the other hand, harbour no fears toward unfinished projects; such enmity toward my own repetitive future should thus speak volumes. That I do not seek out hasty resolutions to organic processes leaves this future still more pregnant with the capacity to become. This method does not so much as create leeway in which to act, (for such latitude invariably creates further permission for inaction,) but does rather produce enough friction to incite the will to bring about its potential in a state of uncompromising adversity.
Some might contend that such adversity, such contempt for one’s own condition is at once foolish and immoral, retrograde to the common desire for peace that has been established by the rabble as the ‘ideal future’, nay, the ‘ideal of history’ as they call it.

Indeed; I do reject this ideal.

Adversity is, albeit paradoxically, where genuine selves are forged; for the self that does not know what it is or in what way to consist, the self that must wrestle for even the smallest quanta of self-knowledge, is no enemy of mine. Without this bile, without this distemper aimed toward all and everything, there would neither be no ‘Dolce Vita’; there would be only a mean type of creature who is adapted to exist beneath the derelict edifices of ‘the good’ and ‘the true’. A centipede of sorts.
Rather, I have come to take a certain jouissance in the anxieties of this perpetually frustrated self, sound in the knowledge that his struggle is the breeding-ground of my potential. No wonder then that he is forever holidaying in Rome of all places; what better place to watch the comings and goings of - the future.

Posted on Wednesday 18 of June, 2008 [22:43:52 UTC]

Does having an intention to deceive make one dishonest?

Honesty originates from the idea that man is able to be both truthful and deceptive. Presupposition not only of free-will, but determinism also. How to be honest about one thing without betraying a dishonesty toward something else? Selective understanding/conscience. If man has no access to truth (whether he either cannot grasp it or truth does not exist at all) can he be honest or dishonest at all?

We can be honest about a lie – but does this not steal a certain type of truth from out of that lie?

Is honesty related to regret – and therefore, ressentiment? Regret for this world (hope for the next world or the ‘future’ – the impossible) belief in one’s actions containing meaning at all as basic misconception of fundamentals. That ‘one could do better’ – betrays underpinning values that ‘devalue themselves’ – this world not good enough either when contrasted against fantasy land of the afterlife, the absolute good, the future etc. – supreme resentment for that which evades understanding (and not resentment toward the understanding itself.) ‘Life’ – not ‘life it-self’/life cannot ‘be’ or ‘be it-self’. Deception as vital nay, essential to our ‘under-standing’. To ‘stand-under’ a deception in itself – to stand under a truth (negation of world as not good enough for truth to exist in it.) Why must man stand under anything at all?

Is knowledge possible?

There is no supreme ‘thing’ or ‘thing-ness’ (truth) that converts the cosmos into a small piece of knowledge or ‘under-standing’. The cosmos is not ‘rational’ – ‘rational’ as great de-valuation of the cosmos. The beautiful/joyful error of reason is to presume that reason exists beyond thought (another world only accessible to reasonable men) – somewhere out there – in the first instance, to deny the body, to deny raw matter, to deny the cosmos as what it is and its appearance – and then to reconstitute it (better) in the emperor’s new clothes – reason (that which makes the obscure transparent.) Also presupposes a design (and hence, designer) of cosmic order and conveniently excludes the fact that ‘it is not gods who have created men; it is men who have created gods.’

Posted on Thursday 12 of June, 2008 [14:03:31 UTC]

If we remove the idea, the necessary idea, of ‘intention’ from the world, (for intention being the signifier of some ‘thing’ at work, and we are testing the convention of ‘things’ here,) then we ought to be bewildered and amazed at everything that comes out of our mouths.
Also, in that we consider the world as a connected series of events which proceed out of causes, (which, in our experiment, is also under examination,) what would happen to the conception of ‘event’ if we begin to assert the primeval flux of ‘We are and are not’ – that there is no chain of events except in the psychical realm, (and not even there – the ‘mistake’ of cause and effect,) but there is instead no Being, no unity, no moral or cosmological order? We must remove under these conditions the idea of ‘event’ altogether – the idea that something can be separated from out of the Khaos and isolated, made knowable, made logical or necessary and, thereafter, to evaluate it.

Posted on Friday 06 of June, 2008 [14:32:06 UTC]

We believe in our conceited way that it is easy to shrug-off the common value and to think as an individual and we reckon in ourselves that the smallest input of labour will achieve this result, i.e. wear certain clothes, grow a moustache, have an opinion etc. But I say – this is the common value. What reckon you now of this ‘individuality’ which is touted as ‘everyone is different’ but which actually homogenises the different into a super-stratum of sameness? To think the individual thought and not to think like an individual, (which would be a contradiction in terms) – not only is this inconceivable to any half-educated person with a grounding in the idea of cause and effect, but it is also entirely necessary to overturn the idea of cause and effect, to overturn the idea of the atom as it informs the characterisation of the individual in the cosmos, to overturn the epistemological question of ‘How can a self know itself?’ and any number of re-evaluations that must occur until not only the concepts of ‘individuality’ and ‘common opinions’ have been overturned, but have completely mutated into a reality which is not available to us in our current format – a reality where ‘self and others’ is a piece of nostalgia, a reality where there is no underpinning, no history or future, no consciousness, no world to speak of.

Posted on Friday 06 of June, 2008 [14:30:08 UTC]

Notations:


Hesiod’s Theogony: Khaos as ‘yawning’ or ‘gaping’, ‘vast and dark’.


Heraclitus – primal reality/foundation of reality. (Becoming as opposed to Being)

τὰ ὄντα ἰέναι τε πάντα καὶ μένειν οὐδέν
"All beings going and remaining not at all" (Plato’s quotation of Heraclitus.)

"Ποταμοῖς τοῖς αὐτοῖς ἐμβαίνομέν τε καὶ οὐκ ἐμβαίνομεν, εἶμέν τε καὶ οὐκ εἶμεν."
"We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not."

ἐκ τῶν διαφερόντων καλλίστην ἁρμονίαν
"out of discord comes the fairest harmony."

(Note: principle of ‘justice’ bound-up in Heraclitus’ ‘Strife is Justice’)
Diogenes Laertius: “All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things (ta hola, "the whole") flows like a stream.”
Principle of Khaos – is and is not – not ‘law of excluded middle’ (Aristotle), but for ‘everyone and no-one’ (Nietzsche) Against false ‘opposites’ – opposites as product of reason and simplification of the infinite gradations in nature to binary logic (easier for understanding to grasp, but a founding error of logic.)

Interpretation ‘disorder’ (and then the modern ‘in need of order’ – Chaos) comes from a misunderstanding of early Christian usage.

Modern usage – ‘unpredictability’ – but according to complex, unseen laws (still reliant upon laws, therefore not Khaos.) Chaos, in modern parlance, is appearance – therefore signifying a lack of understanding due to complex mechanical laws unseen by the eye. Chaos is a call for people to reason better, to look for laws in sub-atomic patterns. (Read Nietzsche on protons and atoms.) Chaos then as a branch of knowledge, of that which is knowable. Chaos as reliant upon the ‘higher hand’ of reason and understanding – chaos as negation of Khaos, a systematisation of nothingness. Chaos as ‘in need of order’. The question of ‘What is needful?’ arises again. Systematisation needful or destruction of systems needful? Kierkegaard as unteachable or at least unquotable (anti-systematic – ‘I did not say this…’) Concept ‘nothingness’ unconceptualisable – core of ‘under-standing’ as unknowable. Reliance upon systems as valuations – system as morality. Morality as de-valuation of it-self. ‘Under-standing’ and ‘sub-stance’ as complicit in the hierarchy of the ‘higher hand’, of the essential and ‘in itself’, the anti-flux, the wholeness of Being. But look at an ant – I see the yawning of Khaos reflected by its core resistance to under-standing. I see the void of which I am afraid. Reason as combat against fear of Khaos.

Reconsider the world as Khaos – lawlessness, emptiness. Self-conscious entity somehow at fundamental odds with Khaos – requires lawfulness and knowability both within himself and without himself. ‘What is needful’ in man is part of Khaos, part of unpredictability. All failure at systematising what is essentially without essence khaos acts as a seasoning for self-consciousness for what is to come. Question ‘What is needful?’ arises once more – answer no longer required. Bewilderment essential and nonessential (Rumi) Understanding ‘It is unknowable’ pertains to some kind of knowledge of its essence, therefore such an understanding already has failure and unknowing built into it, but indicator still of some kind of essence. What is essentially unknowable is essentially unknowable – tautology – essence. Contradiction as contradiction – not a problem that needs to be untied, but a problem reflecting the core unknowing of man. Bewilderment not a ‘solution’ but an upshot.

Posted on Wednesday 04 of June, 2008 [12:49:39 UTC]

“It is the body that deceives, not the mind.” This is a common idea, one exemplified by Descartes in the Meditations on First Philosophy. That, however, the mind perceives the deception is paramount in our further understanding – that the body has no intention, (least of all, to deceive,) must permit us a different perspective. Only the mind is capable of deception for it posits ‘truth’ against ‘deception’ when measured against its own logic. When I put a straw in a glass, it appears to bend. But in my reason I understand that it does not bend. What does this actually tell us – that the mind is in apprehension of the truth and the eyes are in apprehension of a lie? No; the eye sees what it sees – the interpretation is, in the first instance, deceived by the need to interpret according to the higher truth of reason. In that the straw and the glass are treated as having a true nature, an objective ‘in-itself’, it stands to reason that we do not trust our eyes to interpret the true nature of what is seen. But that we ask whether the glass and the straw have an objective reality beyond our psychological perception of it is another matter. Only in the presence of reason are such ‘objects’ set against the moral objective of truth and falsehood, for man in his reason is set up in himself against his existential status – does he exist in truth or under the veil of falsehood?
Let us imagine for an instant that it is not so much that man has not yet sufficiently developed his reason to apprehend truth, but that his reason is the source of error itself. This reversal would indicate that the whole concept of truth for man was but an effort to reconstitute himself inside of a world that did not repel him – a better world of which he was master, a world that did not constitute any threat and in which a benign happiness could descend over him. With the fully enlightened faculty of reason, all things – including man – would stand prostrate and nude before him; a perfectly logical, rational and knowable world in which there was no dark patch of which to be afeared. So he contradicts his sensory apparatus which testify to a world in which the unknowable is manifest and invents a world where such unknowable, undesirable and illogical phenomena cannot exist. Man bends in the water of his mind’s eye. To uphold this edifice man must also invent morality, without which it can have no support, (and we ought to ask if reason arises from morality or vice-versa.) The ‘world of in-itself-s’ is therefore a moral order and the science of its apprehension is likewise moral. Should we dare to question the history of morals, the project of morals and furthermore, the possible nay, essential absence of morals from the sensuous world, we ought also to venture a re-analysis of the physical constitution of the world – as idea of physical constitution – and do away with the moral idea of an atomic universe, (atom as ‘thing’, as wholly constituted ‘self’,) where laws are in place, (no matter how chaotic their ‘appearance’ might be – Descartes’ influence is present in Chaos Theory,) where knowledge is possible and where truth is the governing entity from which sub-stance proceeds, (and under-standing, of course!) Our thought has developed little since Anaximander, whose atomic conception of the universe looks not unlike ours, (dressed in different apparel,) or Spinoza’s concept of sub-stance and the impersonal deity which is ‘in truth’. Truth cannot hold the prefix ‘is’; truth – does not exist.

Posted on Wednesday 04 of June, 2008 [12:46:15 UTC]

Today is one of those days whereby I am so entirely disheartened that it is a feat in itself to actually sit down to write at all. It is not so much that I am disheartened to have no audience whatsoever, (because I can hardly imagine what kind of worth my work could possibly have to others, let alone myself,) for were I to have an audience I would have the additional pressure of others to be considerate of when penning ideas; how would this modulate what I have to say? Perhaps I would try to refine what I was saying, or be a little more coherent, or interest myself in subjects for which I have no concern? One thing is certain and it is a question that I have to ask myself regardless of any audience; would my vitriolic disdain for all people including myself be tempered – would I ‘see the light’, so to speak, of other people’s merits and values – perhaps even my own?
I ask myself this question after a strange occurrence yesterday. I was trying to find a way of promoting my web log on the internet, (the idea is funny in itself) so I thought that I would join a forum group and make comments to the general topic of debate. The forum was ‘self-help’, (a subject of which I have vast storehouses of distaste for,) and decided to make an unhinged attack on the basic principles of ‘self-help’. And yet I was powerless to write a thing. I know how people would have responded to my ‘criticism’, so I would have had to built in a self-criticism into my attack in order to win some people over that aren’t totally immersed in ‘the world is so bad, let’s love each other and be strong’ sort of nonsense. But I was little concerned with being attacked myself, for I know right what the merits of that particular avenue can be. It was that, as I wrote, I began to take apart what I was saying in order to make the argument sound – I removed the indefensible positions, I strengthened the weak arguments, tried not to be so sweeping with my statements, etc. In short – I was writing a ‘good argument’. It was this that caused me to stop writing.
‘Why, (you might ask - if you exist,) would it be undesirable to forge a strong argument from one’s opinions? To be sure, the only way in which an author can gain popularity is by having an ethos that other people can sympathise with or by having a strong argument that can win over those people who sit ‘on the fence’ so to speak.’

I can answer that.

All the merits in the world cannot make up for the single defining weakness in a good argument – that it is an argument and nothing more. Anyone having read Euripides can testify that good arguments can make you dizzy – all of which are geared to ‘win over the audience’ as though in a gladiatorial contest or show of wit. The idea that one has to bolster and fortify one’s position at all smacks of a basic, grounding insecurity in one’s position – if one believed in one’s position truly, one would be sure that any kind of attack could not possibly damage one’s belief in it. However, were one’s belief wavering and simpering one should naturally wish to fortify it against attack due to its feeble constitution.
But this is not about strong and weak positions, for were I to continue in this vain I would be sure that I was developing a ‘strong position’ for myself. What is this about then? When I started ‘strengthening’ my argument, I was sterilising it. I was removing my dirty hand from it, removing my trace so to speak. My argument was becoming an apology for myself, for what I have to say, and only through a process of sterilisation would I find it acceptable to say anything at all – which is, to say nothing whatsoever, but merely to fulfil the criteria of ‘good arguments’ and to abide by the selfsame conventions that people take for granted as having something valid to say (because of its accepted and recognised format.) But this is not what I have to say at all – I would rather attest to the rubbish that I have to say as it comes out – even if it looks valueless to people who only recognise something of value when it has a price-tag, when it is enshrined within a convention – when it has been fortified. I would rather feel the distaste at experiencing a radical subjectiveness than taste nothing at all of a conventional objectiveness. That we cluster behind good arguments whatsoever and take refuge against the bad weather of radical subjects belies the aforementioned weakness – the betrayal of what we say by what we actually believe. What I have to say only masquerades as having something to say; it is the masquerade itself that holds meaning.
What does this have to do with ‘self-help’? Not much. This is my form of self-detriment. The ‘self’ is little more than a vain preoccupation, an invention, and its worth within the frameworks of convention, institution and society itself is not of any necessary value to require helping; this is why I say ‘…my vitriolic disdain for all people…’ Better to attack the feeble preconceptions of what a self ‘is’, better to test the ideologies that inform it, the myths that give it form, the deceptions that allow it to exist at all than to seek help for its miserable condition.

I have written this letter to myself because my inability to post anything in the ‘self-help’ forum has been of some value to me. I woke up invigorated after that failure and attempted to make this self-criticism, not without a sense of irony regarding why it was that I had failed and why I then found it necessary to write a letter to myself. I am not going to post this in the forum to hope to find readers who might sympathise with this anti-selfhood ad neither am I looking for attacks against me as a way of generating ‘interest’. I am not a capitalist in this way. I am posting it here to spite myself. Nothing more.

Posted on Sunday 01 of June, 2008 [13:39:58 UTC]

Today is one of those days whereby I am so entirely disheartened that it is a feat in itself to actually sit down to write at all. It is not so much that I am disheartened to have no audience whatsoever, (because I can hardly imagine what kind of worth my work could possibly have to others, let alone myself,) for were I to have an audience I would have the additional pressure of others to be considerate of when penning ideas; how would this modulate what I have to say? Perhaps I would try to refine what I was saying, or be a little more coherent, or interest myself in subjects for which I have no concern? One thing is certain and it is a question that I have to ask myself regardless of any audience; would my vitriolic disdain for all people including myself be tempered – would I ‘see the light’, so to speak, of other people’s merits and values – perhaps even my own?
I ask myself this question after a strange occurrence yesterday. I was trying to find a way of promoting my web log on the internet, (the idea is funny in itself) so I thought that I would join a forum group and make comments to the general topic of debate. The forum was ‘self-help’, (a subject of which I have vast storehouses of distaste for,) and decided to make an unhinged attack on the basic principles of ‘self-help’. And yet I was powerless to write a thing. I know how people would have responded to my ‘criticism’, so I would have had to built in a self-criticism into my attack in order to win some people over that aren’t totally immersed in ‘the world is so bad, let’s love each other and be strong’ sort of nonsense. But I was little concerned with being attacked myself, for I know right what the merits of that particular avenue can be. It was that, as I wrote, I began to take apart what I was saying in order to make the argument sound – I removed the indefensible positions, I strengthened the weak arguments, tried not to be so sweeping with my statements, etc. In short – I was writing a ‘good argument’. It was this that caused me to stop writing.
‘Why, (you might ask - if you exist,) would it be undesirable to forge a strong argument from one’s opinions? To be sure, the only way in which an author can gain popularity is by having an ethos that other people can sympathise with or by having a strong argument that can win over those people who sit ‘on the fence’ so to speak.’

I can answer that.

All the merits in the world cannot make up for the single defining weakness in a good argument – that it is an argument and nothing more. Anyone having read Euripides can testify that good arguments can make you dizzy – all of which are geared to ‘win over the audience’ as though in a gladiatorial contest or show of wit. The idea that one has to bolster and fortify one’s position at all smacks of a basic, grounding insecurity in one’s position – if one believed in one’s position truly, one would be sure that any kind of attack could not possibly damage one’s belief in it. However, were one’s belief wavering and simpering one should naturally wish to fortify it against attack due to its feeble constitution.
But this is not about strong and weak positions, for were I to continue in this vain I would be sure that I was developing a ‘strong position’ for myself. What is this about then? When I started ‘strengthening’ my argument, I was sterilising it. I was removing my dirty hand from it, removing my trace so to speak. My argument was becoming an apology for myself, for what I have to say, and only through a process of sterilisation would I find it acceptable to say anything at all – which is, to say nothing whatsoever, but merely to fulfil the criteria of ‘good arguments’ and to abide by the selfsame conventions that people take for granted as having something valid to say (because of its accepted and recognised format.) But this is not what I have to say at all – I would rather attest to the rubbish that I have to say as it comes out – even if it looks valueless to people who only recognise something of value when it has a price-tag, when it is enshrined within a convention – when it has been fortified. I would rather feel the distaste at experiencing a radical subjectiveness than taste nothing at all of a conventional objectiveness. That we cluster behind good arguments whatsoever and take refuge against the bad weather of radical subjects belies the aforementioned weakness – the betrayal of what we say by what we actually believe. What I have to say only masquerades as having something to say; it is the masquerade itself that holds meaning.
What does this have to do with ‘self-help’? Not much. This is my form of self-detriment. The ‘self’ is little more than a vain preoccupation, an invention, and its worth within the frameworks of convention, institution and society itself is not of any necessary value to require helping; this is why I say ‘…my vitriolic disdain for all people…’ Better to attack the feeble preconceptions of what a self ‘is’, better to test the ideologies that inform it, the myths that give it form, the deceptions that allow it to exist at all than to seek help for its miserable condition.

I have written this letter to myself because my inability to post anything in the ‘self-help’ forum has been of some value to me. I woke up invigorated after that failure and attempted to make this self-criticism, not without a sense of irony regarding why it was that I had failed and why I then found it necessary to write a letter to myself. I am not going to post this in the forum to hope to find readers who might sympathise with this anti-selfhood ad neither am I looking for attacks against me as a way of generating ‘interest’. I am not a capitalist in this way. I am posting it here to spite myself. Nothing more.

Posted on Sunday 01 of June, 2008 [13:35:35 UTC]

We must not forget that the idea of truth is an idea. Can an idea be ‘true’? Truth as tautology: “We must define truth first” – and we do so - with ideas.

Posted on Saturday 31 of May, 2008 [15:35:10 UTC]

How to make money: Turn other people’s business into your business.

Posted on Saturday 31 of May, 2008 [14:40:43 UTC]