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Heraclitus

The sage—quiet, alert, proud—speaks out. He addresses the logos calmly but firmly. That harmony can only be brought about through dominance, a reigning element exacting proportion from the lesser ones: this is his message, the balance of hierarchy. But the wind is either too weak to carry the sage’s resolute tone or too strong for it to be overheard. So the world, instead of modeling itself on the sage, goes on recurring. Swinging between extremes of strife and languishing, chaos and melody, waters crashing over land and air settling to earth, it is deaf to the need to keep the home hearths lit, to the vigilance that is always ready to risk war to make peace last. If the sage had only whispered, or shouted. But then he would betray himself. So he just stands, an inimitable paragon.

Lao Tzu

To write one of the world’s greatest books, and not even exist: the most fully actualized author is the one who lives only on paper, a dream of his own creation.

That Lao Tzu didn’t exist—what a trite observation! The real point is that all those warring-states writers jotting Taoist poems thought he did and consciously imitated him, writing only what he himself would have written. Like the Jewish scribes of the Old Testament, they were vessels for the spirit of Lao Tzu; their creative acts were his creative acts. The fanciful being behind such texts, whether man or god, becomes a social fact upon being imagined by a club of admirers.

Publishing companies have recently discovered the benefits of caricaturing the method of the early Taoists: instead of attributing the financially risky work of their fledgling novelists to some legendary wise man, they choose a bestselling thriller writer. It is the first instance of evolution in authorship since the Old Master: after myth becomes man, man becomes industry. James Patterson is the only literary Over-Soul. As there is a difference between one and another hour of life, so with every subsequent serialization.

Aesop

Aesop used beasts to represent common human qualities; I will use humans to represent exceptions to the prevalent beastly ones—only the higher monsters of our nature are suited to furnish lessons. Which exception is represented will be a moral subject to interpretation.

Seneca

No matter how bad things get in comparison with how good I have it, I continue to maintain a stoical acceptance—of the periodic conflagration of the world. Philosophy is not just the more prosperous half of self-enrichment: destruction is the cradle of redemption.

Marcus Aurelius

With Confucius’s dilemma representing the chief grudge of the practical philosopher, history bears few instances of its opposite: of one lucky enough to have power—and not merely by seizing it or climbing up the bureaucracy, but being raised up for it so as to wield it with all the naturalness of a fifth limb, a master appendage—without wanting it, of a man who yearns to withdraw from life in order to think at rest. The chief value of a creative work resulting from such a situation, therefore, comes to lie in the possession of the very thing its creator resented: an inside view on the vanity of absolute power. One wonders whether Confucius or Plato would not have become similarly disillusioned upon their own triumph, appending murmurs of resignation to grand conceptions. Or what of the thinker who was never utopian to begin with, one who grounds an axiom of ruthlessness because of his failure in practical life? Would Machiavelli in the service of Lorenzo the Micronificent have turned his cruelty upon himself? One has only to look at Seneca, Boethius, or More to see their work as a compensation for their lives, gentle inversions of the brutal conclusion of thought successfully diverted by ambition; or, conversely, to see their lives as the logical inevitability of their work, with every utopian dream spawning a frightening reality and any attempt at highbrow consolation twisted into agony by a cord around the forebrow. If democracy is the only form of government which blames itself for its decline, the empire of the philosopher is the only one that declares guilt over its success.

Nagarjuna

Analysis of Truth

Meditation leaves behind assumptions,

Then builds a house of dogma,

Inviting the assumptions back

To place them on the welcome mat.

Analysis of the Meditator

When the meditator appears,

The thoughtless ones will rule.

How? By cutting out reasoning

Intuition unites enlightened and stupid.

Analysis of Nalanda’s Destruction

Nalanda was burned down.

For fuel, the Muslim invaders used Buddhist monks.

An enlightened monk perceives not-self.

All monks used as fuel achieved not-self.

Burned monks were fuel before not-selves.

As fuel, they differed from fire.

As not-selves, they did not differ from fire.

Burned monks were fuel and fire.

Fire that is the same as fuel cannot arise.

Fire different from fuel can arise without fuel.

Fuel cannot burn, fire burns without cause.

Burning monks could not connect fuel and fire.

How, then, was Nalanda burned?

When it was established.

The meditator who established it perceived not-self.

Nalanda no land a.

Erasmus

It is possible to go even further than simultaneously celebrating what you denigrate: to not celebrate while also not denigrating. A parallel non-preference. Rather than straddling the line claiming both territories, the neutrality of tiptoeing within its breadth. But the ambiguity here is deeper: each “not” coexisting inside a hair’s length, which one is the more greatly favored? With a slippage of word choice leading to praise or blame, and inconsistency inevitable, what inclination will the tongue trips display? The opposite problem of Folly’s overselection—of wide ambitions combined with universal reservations—is that even when a man succeeds in flattening his desires on the anvil, extraordinary discipline in doubting is still required. This is no mere treaty drawn up by Swedes. One is not a spectator to warring factions, but an armed border patrol—and the most likely invader is not Houyhnhnms or Yahoos, but the guard himself. Neither nationalist nor expatriate, he is a victim of conscious indecision and unwitting prejudice.

Gracián

Lock yourself away in a cell before the first book. Conceal your depths—this is one of the best pieces of advice ever given. The Jesuit was his own greatest example of how brandishing his talent to the world brought him a heap of trouble. A guide to life, like statecraft, should be contrary to what those of common sense would actually advise—to be good; nor should it just take note of what everyone really does—observe evil; it should, instead, recommend the exception—what few advise or enact. This strategy ensures that the author’s true thoughts on the matter will leak through only indirectly, without any pretense of expecting that people either can change for the better or will achieve self-enlightenment upon reading about their irremediable badness. One gives counsel not to change readers—there is no reason to act otherwise unless you can be otherwise. Nor does the counselor merely guide them towards their destiny—there are some cynics who take advice’s role to be the harbinger of blame, ensuring that the dread and bitterness escorting the failure of choice will summon the hammer and whittle it into the gavel. One instead gives advice simply to show others what they are not doing and will not do. The author himself is no exception to this. The wisest sages lack the discipline to hone their wisdom—they hide their depths from themselves.

Lady Conway

Several female thinkers who died in undeserved obscurity and never had a chance to impact the philosophy of their day have been recently rediscovered. But it is not enough to simply appreciate their ideas within their proper historical context; we must fill in the intervening centuries and punish our paradigms for such long-lapsed judgment: to really appreciate Lady Conway we must resurrect her vitalist principles. What might our theories look like today if we had taken her into account? Not enough to rely on Leibniz’s hidden influence; anonymity needs a name. With the esoteric mysticism of the Lurianic Kabbalah mixed with the directness of Quakerism, we must chew on the viscountess’s strange God in our thoughts and will him into the foundation of our systems. After beating our heads against the desk struggling with present-day philosophers, we may come to understand her notion of pain as integral to the process of purification and, with the help of a debilitating headache, purge our minds of frame semantics. As matter impedes the activity of the soul, so does Alphabet-Reckoning obstruct dynamic thinking.

Conway’s monist entity is almost adequate to explain the current state of pluralism—were this entity not so vital. To posit instead a trivialist principle: an entity that does not breathe life into the world, but sucks it away. One source of intense darkness is not enough to follow; we need a mediator to lead us. Between God and Creature, a middle nature communicates decay, malevolence, and arbitrariness: The Infernal Carpenter. Felling a forest to erect a city of shopping malls, he partakes of two extremes, blending the precision of God with the expediency of Creature—to this middle nature in the continuum of species there is no moderation. How can we not help being carried away by such a being? Looking more closely, we perceive that corporeal substances are not inert, only supremely sluggish. The cause of laziness is not just free will; our paralysis was built into the monads all along.

Margaret Cavendish

The most qualified spirit to write dying speeches for a blazing world of vanishing social types. To resurrect her, simply sacrifice the number of living souls equivalent in weight to her own; society will gain by this not only an arisen Cavendish, but the abolishment of feminist theorists. The world awaits the gender-progressive version of Aristophanes’s Frogs, in which an academic sisterhood marches into the underworld to bring back its early modern champion and is destroyed in the process. The plot: each feminist competes for the title of “Best Commentator on Cavendish’s Legacy” with a speech informed by post-structural theory, compiled by the duchess herself into Orations of Similar Sorts. But with none amidst this mental spinning of factious hearts understanding the importance of the ego, the most qualified vessel to embody her freed spirit is sought elsewhere. The twin values of selfishness and sovereignty are grasped by no living women philosophers—no, nor men either.

***

An academic philosopher’s dying speech to future readers:

“For those who learn in order to think automatically, and think automatically to sleep, and sleep to dream of better educational conditions: as there are three sorts of books—the popular, the poetical, and the drowsy—so are there three sorts of readers—the escapist, the word-addict, and the napper. Of these three sorts of books and readers, the drowsy and the napper are the best—and as an author of over thirty books and a thousand articles, I am proud to have drastically enlarged the numbers of this first category, even if the second has remained smaller than I feel I deserve. Though in my entire life I was never read by more than six peer reviewers, I am confident that you, Nobody, will remember me. It is true that my books are outdated now—indeed, before they even hit the shelves—and the style difficult to digest, and the terminology difficult to understand, and the concepts behind the terminology minute variations of the ideas of my peer reviewers; but this is our lot: we study to argue and argue to get paid. Nevertheless, I hope, like the medieval scholastics, to someday be appreciated by some discerning mind (wink wink) as one of the elite unknowns of intellectual history.”

La Rochefoucauld

Those who turn bitter from the world disappointing them have in fact been highly persevering in the face of reality. Not to wait for experience to implode lofty expectations, but to be bitter from the beginning—an a priori cynic—is the only way to escape the accusation of naïve idealism. Far from it being a contradiction for a pessimist in the abstract to be an idealist in the particulars, such double-mindedness, with its lack of expectation in the first case and lack of judgment in the second, effectively balances self-preservation with striving towards The Bad.

Bayle

Only a man who leads people to the ruins of Faith—a capital he himself razed—is qualified to rebuild it.

Vauvenargues

The restraint of a great soul maximizes his vices. His heart circumscribed, he lowers the standards of all around him, above all himself. He cannot sincerely console others for their lack of genius or chide for talent misplaced. His revs of passion are thinned and stretched into purrs expressed with slight movements of the head. His encouragement is gentle: “work diligently.” Praising him as a good man, they slack off when he turns his back. Modesty, not arousing fear, is incapable of fostering respect.

Lichtenberg

A single thought can often branch off in different directions, its followers stranding themselves in irreconcilable positions. An electrical tree of dead-end insights, this is the image gathered of one who sits down to write a treatise on human nature and ends up with a feuding family of observations. Such a person is not only a bad theorist, but a keen judge.

Kierkegaard

In comparison with his fragments, a literary thinker is like a man who sows a vast field with crops of every kind. In the end, this universal farmer ends up being the world’s most extravagant gardener. Grocers ask to explore the grounds, but they do not ask for a price. There is simply not enough of any one thing to buy in bulk. Intending to feed mouths, the cultivator of lyrical meditations succeeds only in drawing eyes.

Emerson

With Emerson, American philosophy began in grandeur. So will it end, everything in-between content without substance, as isolated in influence as in geography. In order for a work to be recognized as composed with matter in mind today it must be stripped of style, as plain-spoken as an aphasiac who grasps nothing but the facial expressions of his table mate.

Americans have turned their back on the transcendental in favor of either the grounded or the extraterrestrial. The middle region doesn’t satisfy these days—nor did it then. Countervailing winds always blow a person up or down. Even those trying to bury their heads in cotton clouds only cough wisps of vapor.

Wings and wetsuits are not in our armoire—no matter where life carries us we always bring skates. Unsuited to live anywhere but surfaces, heavenly voyagers skimming across a celestial sphere fall through a thin spot and drown in the quintessence. Under-Souls are distinguished by the way they keep looking forward, unmindful of chasms beneath their feet or the eternal One above them that threatens to particlize the dreams they are forever sighting ten feet ahead. If they would only chance to look up they might consider looking in—and find, in each case, only the conveniences of description.

The essence of soul and universe is artifice.

Is the universe natural? No. It had to be created, its secrets kept hidden from us until now—even now. There is nothing natural about nature—nor God. Before pantheism came consciousness, the profane spark. And a moral deity? That had to incubate in our cognitive categories for millennia. We created God so he could create the universe in turn, giving us night-lights to sleep by. Only after these inventions were we in a position to look inside and posit a lofty core behind the heartbeat. Descendentalism is the realization of this threefold fabrication: Source, slime, soul. We look out into a silent sea of the imagination, draw our decanter through it, and drink it down.

The Good German

Friedrich and Elisabeth—the Übermensch and the Imbecile, two polarities of Being spat from between the same legs, proof that humanity’s limitless possibilities are always in close proximity to insuperable barriers. Nietzsche may not have been Zarathustra, but he was the Madman: at the moment his genius left him he became his own literary prototype, an image his loyal sister augmented unwittingly. If only the tutorials in her brother’s concepts had been followed by a grasp of them, she might have given her nation the “good European” it so wanted, its four champions of secular Christianity:

The artist who chains himself to his work with intent to allure—product of a slave aesthetics.

The hallowed warrior who sees a fresh conquest in every new cause—perspectivist crusader.

The philosopher who renounces life for the sake of conceptual variation—periodically-recurring martyr to unique configuration.

The 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.