“In order to estab­lish a sys­tem­atic rela­tion­ship, or cor­re­spon­dence in time, from one event to another, it is first nec­es­sary to des­ig­nate an arbi­trary point upon a chrono­log­i­cal scale….”
–David Neelin, “The Mean­ing of Chronol­ogy”
*
“In West­ern music, the orga­nized rela­tion­ship of tones with ref­er­ence to a def­i­nite cen­ter, the tonic, and gen­er­ally to a com­mu­nity of pitch classes, called a scale….“
—New Har­vard Dic­tio­nary of Music
*
“After Artax­erxes’ death, Bagoas des­ig­nated in every case the suc­ces­sor to the throne and enjoyed all the func­tions of king­ship save the title. But of these mat­ters we shall record the details in their proper chrono­log­i­cal sequence.“
—Diodorus Sicu­lus (Greek His­to­rian)
*
“There is really only one Game, the Game in which each of us is a player act­ing out his role.”
—Har­ish Johari, “Leela: the game of self-knowledge”
*
“Leela is essen­tially the game Snakes and Lad­ders, which in the U.S. is the pop­u­lar children’s game Chutes and Ladders….is really a 101 state absorb­ing Markov chain….”
—S.C. Althoen, How long is a game of snakes and lad­ders?
*
“Markov Chain: dis­crete ran­dom process: a ran­dom process in which events are dis­crete rather than con­tin­u­ous, and the future devel­op­ment of each event is inde­pen­dent of all his­tor­i­cal events, or depen­dent only on the imme­di­ately pre­ced­ing event.”
–World Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary
*
“In the Gre­go­rian cal­en­dar, 400 years are exactly equal to 146,097 days, and after such a period the sequence of ordi­nary and leap years repeats itself.”
—The Astro­nom­i­cal Insti­tute Utrecht
*
“A mnemonic can be found on a piano key­board: start­ing on the key F for Jan­u­ary, mov­ing up the key­board in semi­tones, the black notes give the short months, the white notes the long ones…”
—Wikipedia
* 
“To one who is accus­tomed to think­ing a lot, every new thought that he hears or reads about imme­di­ately appears as a link in a chain.”
–Friedrich Niet­zsche
*
“One can take the view that even with us there is still a tonic present—I cer­tainly think so …“
—Anton Webern (Aus­trian composer)

*   *   *

Intro­duc­tion

I. Pes­simism, Mor­tal­ity, and the Will

II. Untimely Vocab­u­lar­ies: the first human canonballs

III. After Exis­ten­tial­ism killed the Existentialists

IV. June Inside You: Snake Eat­ing Tail

V. Don’t Judge a Super­power by its Corpse

VI. The Build­ing of Bridges over The Tak­ing of Leaps

VII. About the Author: Assem­bling my Vocabulary

I. Philo­soph­i­cal Prac­tice 101

*   *   *

Intro­duc­tion

WHEN WEAPONS TURN ON THOSE WHO WEILD THEM: A CASE STUDY OF ISOLATING LANGUAGE

Lin­guists term “iso­lat­ing” or “ana­lytic” those lan­guages which con­sist pri­mar­ily of single-morpheme words. The mor­pheme is the small­est mean­ing­ful lin­guis­tic ele­ment, exam­ples of which include “un,” “fin­ish” and “ed”—which when strung together form the Eng­lish triple-morpheme, “unfin­ished.” In the “per­fect” isolating/analytic lan­guage, all words would be com­pletely invari­ant, which is to say, devoid of suf­fixes and pre­fixes, tenses, plu­rals, and pos­ses­sive mark­ers. Eng­lish is often deemed “iso­lat­ing” by virtue of its rel­a­tively low morpheme-to-word ratio—particularly when con­sid­ered in com­par­i­son to Ger­man and its Auf­sicht­sratsmit­gliederver­samm­lung, a term whose mor­phemes trans­late into the Eng­lish “On-view-council-with-link-plural-completion-collect-noun,” i.e., “meet­ing of mem­bers of the super­vi­sory board.” Syn­thetic lan­guages are com­prised of a high morpheme-to-word ratio, thus afford­ing the com­plex­ity of lin­guis­tic for­ma­tions as seen above.

Super­fi­cially, syn­thetic and iso­lat­ing lan­guages share the same goal—to retain and express mean­ing. But why do some cul­tures place the utmost value on com­plex­ity, so as to cram as much mean­ing into a word as can fit, while oth­ers pre­fer a dif­fer­ent kind of effi­ciency, whereby words become tidy lit­tle units that lend to reduc­tion? Are these dif­fer­ences indica­tive of cul­tural per­son­al­ity? A mat­ter of pref­er­ence? Such ques­tions are the stuff of meta-linguistics: the study of not just how, but why lan­guages are as they are.

I how­ever am no linguist—at least not in the above sense of the word; nor is this work an infor­ma­tional essay on lin­guis­tics. Rather, the above infor­ma­tional metaphor, which enu­mer­ates the ways in which words can be made—through iso­la­tion, and again, through integration—to retain mean­ing: mir­rors the processes by which peo­ple can be made to do the same. This essay is thus about how we, like our vocab­u­lar­ies, retain and express that slip­pery substance—call it “mean­ing” or “seman­tics,” call it “knowl­edge,” call it what you will. For while mor­phemes might be used as a metaphor for peo­ple, and lin­guis­tics for how “mean­ing” finds expres­sion therein—we are nonethe­less, in fact, and fore­most, the stuff that lan­guage is made on.

OF STICKS AND OF STONES (Intro­duc­tion, Cont’d.)

Con­sider the fol­low­ing thought exper­i­ment: if a world on the verge of anni­hi­la­tion could be spared via an inde­ter­mi­nate spell or secret code—could a life spent search­ing for these words be rightly called “mean­ing­ful?” Like a poem, the seman­tic poten­tial and poten­tial value of a well-composed, philo­soph­i­cal propo­si­tion, hinge on the strength and capac­i­ties of the mind that cre­ates it. Philoso­pher and psy­chol­o­gist William James in his ground-breaking work The Will to Believe, attrib­utes the valid­ity of such claims as “life has mean­ing” to an active belief on the part of the the­o­rist, or sub­ject. Fly­ing in the face of the West­ern Ana­lytic tra­di­tion, James takes the refresh­ingly bold posi­tion that some of our knowl­edge is result of belief—insofar belief inspires action, which in turn pro­cures evi­dence to back said belief, in the man­ner of the self-fulfilling prophecy:

“There are, then, cases where a fact can­not come at all unless a pre­lim­i­nary faith exists in its com­ing. And where faith in a fact can help cre­ate the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith run­ning ahead of sci­en­tific evi­dence is the ‘low­est kind of immoral­ity’ into which a think­ing being can fall.”

In the present writ­ing, sub­ject “S”’s belief that life has mean­ing “B,” inso­far as this belief fuels the man­i­fes­ta­tion of actions or prod­ucts that are tes­ta­ment to said belief’s legit­i­macy, will be shown to exem­plify just such a “self-fulfilling belief.” For “world on the verge of anni­hi­la­tion” I will sub­sti­tute the more real­is­tic notion of “the west­ern philo­soph­i­cal canon in a state of decay,” and then, in sec­tion 7, with “a sin­gle indi­vid­ual in the throes of chronic addic­tion, viz., self-induced decay.” As the reader can see, the “sur­vey of worlds” on which the effi­cacy of the Self-fulfilling Belief shall be tested, rep­re­sents a spectrum—the macro­cosm of tra­di­tion and his­tory on the one end, and the micro­cosm of the sin­gle human being on the other.

Philosophy’s unre­al­ized telos, I will resolve, is just that lat­ter “micro­cosm” or “indi­vid­ual” whose life lit­er­ally depends upon his or her capac­ity for reflection—which capac­ity Soci­ety, despite its bur­geon­ing excess of col­lec­tive con­scious­ness, has lost beneath the com­puter monitor’s monot­one hum, and which almost every­where drowns in pre­scrip­tion med­ica­tion. Now, as human­ity pro­gresses a cul­ture of depen­dency, and her self-reflective capac­ity shrinks rapidly away, the indi­vid­ual feels forced to assim­i­late and/or med­icate the skep­ti­cism and pur­pose­less­ness he feels as a “self” in a world wherein god is dead, art is dead, and long lives post­mod­ernism. Herein we are faced with the fol­low­ing Con­di­tional: if Phi­los­o­phy, as the sci­ence of con­scious­ness, con­tin­ues on in its cur­rent direction—losing touch with the liv­ing, breath­ing peo­ple who need it, who invented it, and for whom it is thus Servant—it will die its prover­bial death before the turn of this cen­tury, and who will be present at its wake? The liv­ing, breath­ing peo­ple it per­pet­u­ally neglected, and who in turn neglected it, on the grounds of their exclu­sion from “the fam­ily.” Which “family”—professors and stu­dents of philosophy—will by this time have become so detached and aloof as to resem­ble an eccen­tric aunt, who’s now joined a cult, and so arrives with a suit­case full of pam­phlets to dis­trib­ute at the funeral.

As if to seal all of our fates: I look around me—and see in tired eyes what I see in my own, and know these peo­ple, whether despite or because of their estrange­ment, despite or because of the dys­func­tional or bleakly quiet rooms that they call home, have too lit­tle energy and far too much dig­nity to seek out life’s “mean­ing” if that “mean­ing” is locked up in some dis­tant and deca­dent ivory tower, while here, there are bills to pay and mouths to feed. See­ing this, I see no rea­son why a “call to self-consciousness,” even less so “a call to save phi­los­o­phy” should be met with any response, save per­haps for the ful­fill­ment of the prophecy above. Hence, “see­ing no rea­son…” a rea­son we must generate.

The first four sec­tions of this essay will ana­lyze the results of some recent, and some not so recent, attempts in Phi­los­o­phy to restore the worth of The Indi­vid­ual, by first restor­ing that of The Field. The first thing I’ll pro­pose with regard to this pro­ce­dure, is that most of its con­duc­tors after Socrates have got­ten it back­ward. And lit­er­ally. To descend in order from macro to micro, or ascend, if you’d rather, from the individual’s tools to the indi­vid­ual, is prob­lem­atic no mat­ter how you look at it. We will have the honor of exam­in­ing said prob­lems from per­spec­tives housed both within and out­side of the macro­cosm, to deter­mine that the prob­lem is pre­cisely just the walls which make this “in/out” dichotomy pos­si­ble. Restora­tive attempts from “within,” as it were, have exhausted all but three pos­si­ble options: seek tools for self-reflection in such “exquis­ite corpses” as phi­los­o­phy schools and texts; go with­out, arrest devel­op­ment, and grad­u­ally per­ish; or make new tools out of old bones.

SUICIDE AND THE LANGUAGE OF IDENTITY (Intro­duc­tion, Cont’d.)

The con­cern with, or ques­tion of, or fix­a­tion on mor­tal­ity—whence arises crav­ings for immor­tal­iza­tion, be its locus heaven, or some schol­arly canon; the here­after which is eter­nal, or the “here, after” which is “posthu­mous being in the world”—is reflec­tive of the “meta­phys­i­cal streak” we are pos­sessed of, or afflicted with, as humans—on which grounds it can be claimed that we can never “med­icate away” our con­scious­ness of mor­tal­ity, never “opt out” of existence’s race for mean­ing: as to do so would be to strip out the hard­wiring wherein surges our lifeblood, our very will to live. Desire begets strug­gle, which in turn begets energy, motion, speed—and in the same way that the San­skrit Nir (“leav­ing off”) when applied to the root Vāna (“the path of rebirth”) derives Nir­vana, or being off the path to rebirth, the solu­tion to the “great cos­mic joke,” i.e., Human Con­di­tion, is the ces­sa­tion of all attempts to solve it; it is the prover­bial pen lift­ing off the prover­bial equa­tion; in a word: it is death.

It then fol­lows, if the ces­sa­tion of strug­gle must result in death, that strug­gle is implied by the being’s exis­tence. She can­not be with­out strug­gling. Nor, cor­re­spond­ingly, can she be with­out consciousness—whence comes her knowl­edge of the mor­tal­ity she strug­gles against. As long as you exist in time, my friend and fel­low concubine—such that some part of you still resists the cusp of the hourglass’s pull—Death her­self, more than any other “unknown,” is the sub­ject of your dreams, your muse, your seducer. It is thus when the mys­tery and awe that shrouds death’s face at last dif­fuses, demys­ti­fied either by spir­i­tual enlight­en­ment or skep­ti­cal ambiva­lence, that the dream ends; you’ve “won” in the dream-sense, in the non–sense of wak­ing from a dream—which the seducer once haunted—which is now your reality.

That that flame does not go out with a strug­gle, but rather with, as T.S. Eliot says in The Hol­low Men, “a whimper”—is quite clear; as would I argue is the sheer impos­si­bil­ity of extri­cat­ing from any, much less all wak­ing moments, such ques­tions as what shall I do while I still have inde­pen­dence? What goals and moments, whose love to seek out? Where is Death now? Nietzsche’s pro­posal, so typ­i­cally Niet­zsche in its con­trari­ness to pop­u­lar belief, was that strug­gle, because it invokes the will to live, should be embraced by us regard­less of any “greater pur­pose,” or more accu­rately, lack thereof. Niet­zsche in fact requires all his would-followers to first “lay down her meta­phys­i­cal nets” and admit that, except for those pur­poses we assign it, life is pur­pose­less. In exchange, then, Niet­zsche claims to offer us a phi­los­o­phy that is as ironic as it is hon­est, because it is hon­est. He says, and here I take lib­er­ties to para­phrase: “In this world, which is all that there is, exist no absolutes, no truths with a capi­tol T; all that there can be, we cre­ate. The weak must die, the strong must strug­gle, and the lat­ter, the indi­vid­u­als, are they who “win” life’s race—the prize for which is noth­ing but the abil­ity to look back, in sweet defi­ance, and say of the past ‘thus I willed it’”

Like Niet­zsche, I am advanc­ing an ironic out­look on the nature of exis­tence, the will to exist, and role played by one’s sense of “pur­pose” in secur­ing the “iden­tity” through which the will is seen. Unlike Niet­zsche, I’ve no inter­est in strip­ping human­ity of its “meta­phys­i­cal streak”—which strip­ping is done merely to tem­per one’s long­ing for Nir­vana, the East­ern coun­ter­part to Christianity’s “dying to world,” or high from which the one who finally hits the “cos­mic punch line” never comes down. I can’t legit­i­mately assume, as the later Niet­zsche claimed to have, that one need extri­cate one’s “meta­phys­i­cal sense” just to pre­vent one­self from laps­ing into mind­less dogma-worship, aver­sion to strug­gle, uncon­scious­ness, com­pla­cency, fates worse than death. More­over, just as “deca­dent” and “symp­to­matic” as a reliance upon meta­physics, wherein the word “truth” becomes a crutch or a drug or a weapon—is the aver­sion to meta­physics, wherein child-locks are installed in the mind so as to pre­vent one’s “lying ” or “tired ” or “social­ized” eyes to let illu­sion enter in. And in the same way that cul­ture is lack­ing in its self-critical/self-reflective capac­ity, and would do well, I con­cede, to reclaim phi­los­o­phy for that end—philosophy, itself unful­filled, is lack­ing in telos, a sense of or belief in its (albeit con­tin­gent) pur­pose, func­tion, per­son­al­ity, appeal.

Nor could Nietzsche—even hav­ing fur­nished his phi­los­o­phy with, egad! per­son­al­ity and hay corumba! style—quite trust that he, or his con­tem­po­raries, or his suc­ces­sors would ever have the “will” to remain neu­tral toward meta­physics with­out thereby get­ting sucked in with its promis­cu­ous claims to peace of mind, sal­va­tion, cer­tainty. My crit­i­cism regard­ing this aspect of Niet­zsche is two-fold: first of all tar­get­ing the over-generalization of his later attacks on reli­gion and meta­physics, and sec­ondly tar­get­ing the pes­simism or rather fear by which he falls prey to afore­said fallacy.

Of the first tar­get: the early Nietzsche’s repul­sion for reli­gion is just one of many masks passed around by his tar­get pro­tag­o­nists; among which: mob-think, “fem­i­nine” or “exag­ger­ated” responses to the sting of rejec­tion or the storm clouds of uncer­tainty, all-too-human “cults” wherein com­fort and com­mu­nity and pur­pose gets bought at the cost of one’s will and one’s self-consciousness. Over the course of Nietzsche’s career, how­ever, such flimsy and clown­ish “masks” as “Chris­tian­ity” and “meta­physics” grow sin­is­ter, start form­ing to the sin­is­ter faces they were once meant dis-grace. In this turn, the philoso­pher starts blur­ring the lines between “one who is reli­gious” and “the weak;” “cre­ative influ­ence” and “co-dependency;” between, essen­tially, Nietzsche’s self-created nec­es­sary and self-created suf­fi­cient con­di­tions. Where once “mob think” stood as a suf­fi­cient con­di­tion for a group to be con­sid­ered, by Niet­zsche, “gre­gar­i­ous,” sim­ply “being a group” now does the job. The church, the state, the canon of phi­los­o­phy, thus shape-shift for Niet­zsche into near-perfect repli­cas of his “evils”: uno­rig­i­nal­ity, mob-think, weak will—until we can no longer tell the mal­ady from the sample.

Such an unprece­dented shift in thought evokes a glar­ing error; for philoso­phers, it indi­cates rash­ness on the part of the thinker. But as one who advan­tages the occa­sional “lit­er­ary flour­ish” over the con­stant dron­ing of coarse “objectivity”—even if that flour­ish some­times lends to decep­tion, indulges ambi­gu­ity, con­ceals error—I am less con­cerned than most of Nietzsche’s crit­ics with regur­gi­tat­ing crit­i­cisms of his want­ing argu­men­ta­tive rigor. I am more con­cerned, unlike most of said crit­ics, with expos­ing the fear which pro­voked Nietzsche’s self-censorship; which fear he kept secret from us, as well as per­haps from him­self. Niet­zsche grants, after all: “The most com­mon lie is that which one lies to him­self; lying to oth­ers is rel­a­tively an exception.”

The most com­mon lie, indeed—unless one’s work is a reflec­tion of one’s own inner dia­logue, in which case the “lies one tells to him­self” are simul­ta­ne­ously the lies one records and trans­mits to oth­ers. As in the case of Niet­zsche. It is my claim, that the most com­mon lie which Niet­zsche believed and thereby led us to believe, is that he did not bank on such illu­sions as “pur­pose” and “cer­tainty” i.e. reli­gion and metaphysics—and would never let a trace of these infest his life’s work. On this point, this paper begs to differ.

I. PESSIMISM, MORTALITY, AND THE WILL

*
Oh, how like a clock the lover lost its pale face and col­ored.
Num­bers the longer you looked at it, until each phan­tom.
Tick of its inner­most mech­a­nism her­alded pos­ses­sion.
And the mer­cu­r­ial sen­sa­tion that some­thing was slip­ping.
Away from you, until what once was your seduc­tion device.
For mea­sur­ing time had now become your myth: Aban­don­ment.
To lead you, said the clock, said the lover, we must leave you.
And when there was no hope, when the wild horse watched you.
From the death field, you stood, frozen and alone, the black.
Wil­lows tick­ing, this is your fail­ure. Stop. This is your blos­som­ing.

—Tessa Rum­sey, “June Inside You”

*

No con­cept is so loaded—so poten­tially con­ducive to both the sur­vival and the destruc­tion of a being—as that of mor­tal­ity. To it we are con­stantly and end­lessly returning—endlessly refer­ring all oth­ers; from it we receive that most cher­ished gift of will, which man­i­fests in the desires and projects which color the life and define the char­ac­ter of the indi­vid­ual. The phe­nom­e­non of will­ing, whether it adopts the form of a poem, a new-born medium of art, or an infant—suggests a finite being attempt­ing to tran­scend its lim­i­ta­tions. In short: life forms, inso­far as they are death-bound, are born bound to “will.”

It is not because our earthly endeav­ors, our wars and rev­o­lu­tions, rela­tion­ships and careers, are medi­ums of the will—but rather because they serve to dis­tin­guish “this” gen­er­a­tion from “that” gen­er­a­tion; this, from that peo­ple group, per­son, etc—that the human race is a race com­posed of “indi­vid­u­als.” Whereas the Owl can always be seen swoop­ing down to prey on the Mouse, i.e., indis­crim­i­nately man­i­fest­ing the will, via instinct, as a species—the Human Race may con­trar­ily rep­re­sent the same will in what seems an infin­ity of ways, for an infin­ity of motives not reducible to instinct, or the needs of the species, in a word: mere func­tions of survival.

Schopenhauer’s con­cep­tion of the indi­vid­ual, i.e., human being, is two-fold—consisting of both will and of rep­re­sen­ta­tion. The lat­ter term is inter­change­able with “phe­nom­ena;” it is the empir­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tion of the will, the intrin­sic and uni­ver­sal impe­tus behind every striv­ing, every goal, every mode and machi­na­tion of pro­duc­tion and sur­vival. Rep­re­sen­ta­tion, thus, pre­sup­poses the will’s exis­tence. Cor­re­spond­ingly, the will—or invis­i­ble foun­da­tion under­ly­ing all phenomena—ceases to exist in the absence of phe­nom­ena, through which alone it is conceivable.

The “will” Schopen­hauer attrib­utes to all liv­ing mat­ter appear­ing in time and space, includ­ing plants, ani­mals and human beings. As mere will, then: the human, the black­bird, the African Vio­let, are not unique—but instead are just one more iter­a­tion of the same blind striv­ing, the same nec­es­sary and suf­fi­cient con­di­tion for life. It is through con­scious­ness of our selves-as– rep­re­sen­ta­tion, i.e. Will Made Man­i­fest when Set to Motion, that we as humans stand apart from our fel­low “will­ing crea­tures,” accord­ing to Schopen­hauer. Self-consciousness, in turn, affords us the abil­ity to reflect and make choices on the grounds of sub­jec­tiv­ity, open­ing the door to poten­tial selves, self-created pos­si­bil­i­ties, the pos­si­bil­ity of the exis­tence of individuals.

Schopenhauer’s exis­ten­tial suc­ces­sors would take the above account of humans as “beings who will and who yet will as indi­vid­u­als” as their enquiry’s spring­board and telos, mak­ing it their goal to explain how exis­tence can have mean­ing despite the lim­its and restric­tions imposed by the species, which impo­si­tion is the essence of Schopenhauer’s pes­simistic account of the will. The exis­ten­tial­ist inter­pre­ta­tion of Schopen­hauer might be seen as an attempt to cir­cum­vent the fol­low­ing prob­lem: If the will is “the homoge­nous given,” the inher­i­tance bestowed upon geniuses and idiots, ani­mal and plant-life, alike—then it is com­pa­ra­ble to a genetic quirk that causes every mem­ber of fam­ily “F” to have a pasty com­plex­ion, a stut­ter, a gar­gan­tuan nose. As such, whether we con­ceive of the will as a curse, like the deformed facial fea­ture, or con­trar­ily, like a nat­u­rally high IQ or metab­o­lism, as a blessing—it is what it is, with or with­out our con­sent. This con­cep­tion of the will—the con­cep­tion offered up by the pes­simist Schopenhauer—posed the same prob­lems for Niet­zsche and his rad­i­cal indi­vid­u­al­ism as it does for the present-day Amer­i­can and her stan­dards for a self-created identity.

To the 21st Cen­tury Amer­i­can, for whom “auton­omy” and “inde­pen­dence” are near-absolute Values—Schopenhauer’s pic­ture of the will may seem highly unsat­is­fac­tory, or at best—a point of indif­fer­ence. Con­cur­rently, since the men­tal­ity which idol­izes the qual­ity of inde­pen­dence will often also ele­vate that of authen­tic­ity, so as to look back and say to one’s past, “Thus I willed it”—the West­erner, be he a philoso­pher or lay­man, accepts with great dif­fi­culty the “will” whose every “whim” he has no say in. Hei­deg­ger iden­ti­fies this men­tal­ity, or feel­ing, as “guilt” over not hav­ing cre­ated one­self. The Niet­zschean affir­ma­tion: Thus I willed it—con­ceals beneath its bois­ter­ous clamor a deep sense of shame over hav­ing begged the ques­tion of a free, or self-directed, Will. The above quote, “Thus I willed it,” so laden with the West­ern obses­sion with orig­i­nal cre­ation, has been ren­dered, since Niet­zsche, the “mantra of Exis­ten­tial­ism.” Rorty unpacks its sig­nif­i­cance to the school of Exis­ten­tial­ism through the lens of Hei­deg­ger in the fol­low­ing passage:

“To say Dasein [the human] is guilty is to say that it speaks some­body else’s lan­guage, and so lives in a world it never made—a world which, just for this rea­son, is not its Heim. It is guilty because its final vocab­u­lary is just some­thing which it was thrown into—the lan­guage that hap­pened to be spo­ken by the peo­ple among whom it grew up.”

Heidegger’s claim that “Dasein [the West­ern man] is [feels] guilty” [my nota­tions] and Rorty’s expli­ca­tion of this claim—reveal the resid­ual pes­simism left over, from Schopen­hauer or else­where, regard­ing the link between the Will and the Species—which pes­simism trans­lates in the works of the exis­ten­tial­ists as fear, pes­simism in its dis­tilled form. So where Schopen­hauer scorned The Will out­right, for depriv­ing him of some quo­tient of auton­omy in favor of The Whole—the exis­ten­tial­ists sim­ply use pos­i­tive as opposed to neg­a­tive ter­mi­nol­ogy to describe this same conun­drum. Which is to say, the exis­ten­tial­ists “pick up after” Schopenhauer’s pessimism—his neg­a­tive def­i­n­i­tion of what the will is not—with a series of claims about what the will is and affords: a phys­i­cal locus of power con­nected to the animal’s instinc­tual bent toward sur­vival, and in its higher forms—creative solu­tions to humankind’s dark side, i.e., drive toward destruc­tion: the quest for knowl­edge and under­stand­ing, worldly pur­suits, reli­gion, art. Indeed, com­pared to Schopen­hauer, Nietzsche’s “Gay Sci­ence” is some­thing of a fairy­tale, com­plete with rain­bows and unicorns.

Far from a decon­struc­tive read­ing of Schopen­hauer, wherein Niet­zsche might have oth­er­wise exposed the former’s errors and from there recon­structed the will to his own theory’s ends—the late Niet­zsche turned on his predecessor’s pes­simism, but hav­ing built his phi­los­o­phy on the source of this pes­simism, could not afford to reject the will itself. He thus sal­vages the will, but dis­cards key aspects of Schopenhauer’s model: namely, its ulti­mate banal­ity and indebt­ed­ness to the species. Niet­zsche allegedly departed from Schopen­hauer where Schopen­hauer goes on to divest rep­re­sen­ta­tion of free­dom, to attribute the ways we choose to man­i­fest the will as indi­vid­u­als to such con­tin­gent vari­ables as envi­ron­ment and his­tory. Niet­zsche inte­grates Schopenhauer’s “var­ie­gated” Man as Rep­re­sen­ta­tion (ignor­ing the fact that this man’s “vari­ety” results from his envi­ron­ment and thus is not freely cho­sen) and “life affirm­ing” Man as Will (ignor­ing this man’s anti-individual implications)—and comes up with a model for the Human Ideal wherein the Autonomous Indi­vid­ual and the Will­ing Indi­vid­ual are mutu­ally inclu­sive, nay, inter­change­able con­cepts. The rea­son Niet­zsche does this is, as I’ve stated, Schopen­hauer would ulti­mately reject the rad­i­cal auton­omy of the will which the for­mer later come to advance, and, since just this rad­i­cal con­struc­tion of Nietzsche’s was bound up in Schopenhauer’s pro-species Will, Niet­zsche would be forced to re-describe this will—to reject, and para­dox­i­cally be forced to still work within, its bounds.

II. UNTIMELY VOCABULARIES: THE FIRST HUMAN CANONBALLS

Now, existentialism—according to pop­u­lar folklore—was the first school of thought since the Ancient Greeks to prof­fer the “human con­di­tion” as philosophy’s ulti­mate sub­ject, hold­ing that Philosophy’s means and its end is none other than The Indi­vid­ual. Socrates was one such ancient whose account of phi­los­o­phy echoes through­out the works of exis­ten­tial­ism, which might again be seen as a man­i­fes­ta­tion of Schopenhauer’s “will” hav­ing found its philo­soph­i­cal expres­sion in the lives of mor­tals. Per­haps this is why Socrates believed the task of phi­los­o­phiz­ing to be syn­ony­mous with dying, or “prepar­ing for death.” In con­cor­dance with Socrates, my descrip­tion of the so-called “philo­soph­i­cal dis­po­si­tion” (where phi­los­o­phy is defined in the pos­i­tivist sense of “a quest for truth,” knowl­edge, or under­stand­ing) as syn­ony­mous with the death-drive, mor­bido, runs as fol­lows: If the search for, and inte­gra­tion of, wis­dom, is equiv­a­lent of the will as a striving—in and through representation—for sur­vival: then the thresh­old at which one’s search finally ends, whether in acqui­si­tion of knowl­edge or in a ces­sa­tion of the desire to know, is the equiv­a­lent of death, where death can be taken sym­bol­i­cally or in the literal.

The famously exis­ten­tial attempt to prove the mutual benef­i­cence of the Will and the Indi­vid­ual pos­si­ble, relied on an inte­gra­tion of Socrates’ view of phi­los­o­phy with Schopen­hauerean rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Thus the “will” for Niet­zsche did not hin­der but rather afforded indi­vid­u­al­ity, such that Schopenhauer’s influ­ence extended only so far as the former’s account of the man­i­fested will, the individual-as-representation. Niet­zsche was not inter­ested in an “invis­i­ble sub­stra­tum” which under­lies and deter­mines, if only partly deter­mines, the motives and actions of the becom­ing indi­vid­ual. For Niet­zsche and the exis­ten­tial­ists, this sort of meta­phys­i­cal spec­u­la­tion is pre­cisely what phi­los­o­phy, if it hoped to sur­vive, had to break with—so as to return to a Socratic self-image which lays claim to both the will and indi­vid­u­al­ity.

For if there exists no meta­phys­i­cal, invis­i­ble sub­stra­tum that binds us all to one another in one epic and gloriously-human sac­ri­fice, in which each becomes, willy-nilly, a mar­tyr for the Species; if meta­physics, like God, is “dead because we killed it”—the indi­vid­ual is then not at the whim of The Will, but vice versa. Thus begins Nietzsche’s sup­posed depar­ture from Schopen­hauer, leav­ing meta­physics in the dust of his cape-clad Uber­ma­chen, the will-powered Super­man. Or, on another inter­pre­ta­tion, Niet­zsche does with Schopen­hauer what philoso­phers have been doing with one another since, arguably, Socrates—playing language-games.

In his book Con­tin­gency, Irony, and Sol­i­dar­ity, Richard Rorty makes a con­vinc­ing argu­ment for Nietzsche’s self-deception with regard to his influ­ences and, indeed, his influ­en­ci­bil­ity. It might be said that, as on Rorty’s inter­pre­ta­tion, Niet­zsche didn’t “depart” from Schopen­hauer any more than Schopen­hauer departed from his meta­phys­i­cal pre­de­ces­sors. Nietzsche’s own obses­sion with tran­scen­dence, his rejec­tion of influ­ence in favor of self-creation, his affin­ity for the (albeit mortal-made) “sub­lime,” would even­tu­ally lead him to ele­vate the “will” to an extra-human (uber­ma­chen) sta­tus. It would become his own, latently meta­phys­i­cal, con­cept of the Infinite—wherein the super-human capac­ity to “re-evaluate val­ues” so as to cre­ate them anew, became its own objec­tive, bor­der­ing Absolute, value. From such heights he would inevitably descend and request that we inter­pret him not as a meta­physi­cian, but a psychologist—one who is versed in the human con­di­tion, and trained to coax out reme­dies that were there, if lying dor­mant, all along.

Niet­zsche ele­vates the capac­i­ties for sub­li­ma­tion in man—until, that is, the wall between nat­ural and meta­phys­i­cal ide­al­ism, between a New Athens and the Christian’s “New Jerusalem,” dis­solves. Hav­ing painted him­self into a cor­ner of pseudo-metaphysical ide­al­ism, he calls to the res­cue his alter-ego, the artist, who explains away “Niet­zsche the Utopic Vision­ary” as a poet’s attempt to lib­er­ate him­self through fan­cies and dreams. Niet­zsche fur­ther enlists his ear­lier pes­simism to alle­vi­ate the meta­phys­i­cal impli­ca­tions of his claims, so as to say “even if he does pos­sess sub­lim­ing capac­i­ties, man has wasted them; thus, what­ever Utopia might have been, can no more be.” Hence his ver­bose accounts of the “gre­gar­i­ous mob”—the major­ity under which his indi­vid­ual strug­gles, but can tran­scend only inas­much as a squir­rel per­form a proof in Logic.

We are left with but two options: either we read Niet­zsche as a mod­ern meta­physi­cian who is decep­tively donned in such terms and con­di­tions as “psychological/literary philoso­pher,” or we read him exclu­sively in the sense of the lat­ter, and thereby fail to take seri­ously his philo­soph­i­cal work. The species-impetus can­not be tran­scended by Nietzsche’s super­man if Nietzsche’s con­cep­tion of the Will resorts to the latent meta­physics seen in Hegel’s “World Spirit”—in which case it offers no more than a watered-down deter­min­ism, wherein the “phe­nom­e­non” or “super­man” or “will made man­i­fest” is still at the whim of some­thing greater than itself, some­thing of which it remains igno­rant by choos­ing to ignore.

*   *   *

So what, if not the will, secures humankind’s unique­ness? For cen­turies, philosophy’s answer to this question—whether coined “mind,” “know­ing sub­ject,” “pure rea­son,” or “soul,”—has been “that fac­ulty which enables us to grasp unchang­ing, uni­ver­sal truths, as opposed to just par­tic­u­lar facts,” i.e., the fac­ulty whereby we derive from our encoun­ters with such things as “yield signs” the con­cept of “tri­an­gle,” from a hand­ful of gold coins, the con­cept of “mul­ti­plic­ity,” from the mass of gold the same coins cre­ate upon melt­ing, the con­cept of “unity.” “Of all things, why this?” the reader may ask. “The capac­ity for abstrac­tion? I mean, really?” To answer this ques­tion, I need only refer the reader back to the ini­tial ques­tion: if not the will—what then? Philoso­phers, in attempt to prove our race unique, and more­over, to give this unique­ness a “firm philo­soph­i­cal basis,” for cen­turies have been forced to appeal to this fac­ulty, inso­far as it was pre­sum­ably all that they had left. Thus, the demys­ti­fi­ca­tion of this “abstract­ing faculty”—call it the intel­lect, call it what you will—puts our unique­ness as a species, and thus phi­los­o­phy, at risk of endan­ger­ment. How­ever, such a “firm philo­soph­i­cal basis” is not so eas­ily found, and the philosopher’s cher­ished “uni­ver­sals” may be proven just as insub­stan­tial as “sen­tience” and “will.”

That we can con­cep­tu­ally grasp some­thing is not tes­ta­ment to that thing’s exis­tence. “Can” does not imply “ought,” as it were; while I can see uni­corns if I take hal­lu­cino­gens does not mean I ought to see uni­corns under “reg­u­lar con­di­tions,” i.e., does not mean uni­corns exist to be seen in the world. And indeed, the argu­ment has been raised and defended in myr­iad philoso­phies that while uni­ver­sal con­cepts can be “grasped” by the mind, only par­tic­u­lars exist empir­i­cally, to be seen by the eye. As such, uni­ver­sals, to which I’ll add “beauty,” “jus­tice,” and “the good”—do not exist save for in lan­guage, in minds. Now, that we think that we can “grasp them” is but tes­ta­ment to our cre­ative function—our affin­ity for pat­terns that is so over­whelm­ing that we’ll note them where there are none, and to our imag­i­na­tive func­tion that is so over­whelm­ing as to instill in us a belief in our imag­in­ings’ inde­pen­dent exis­tence. In other words, our “detec­tion” of uni­ver­sal con­cepts with which “par­tic­u­lars” iden­tify, speaks to noth­ing but our abil­ity, and indeed, our ten­dency to fab­ri­cate con­cepts by which to define the things we see and encounter in the world. Nei­ther, how­ever, are these fea­tures unique to our species. For ani­mals may be hypo­thet­i­cally said to have an equally sophis­ti­cated sym­bol sys­tem and net­work by which to com­mu­ni­cate this system—one which relies on sim­i­lar “means” as mind or rea­son to an end that is syn­ony­mous with the detec­tion of pat­terns in chaos—one which exclu­sive access is granted to mem­bers of species “X,” and as such, are no dif­fer­ent from humans in terms of func­tion. The ques­tion then becomes: are ani­mals just the a-lingual equiv­a­lent of people?—just as “unique” in their abil­ity to orga­nize data from their sur­round­ings into com­part­ments that can be read­ily grasped and com­mu­ni­cated by their species? This idea can be demon­strated through the fol­low­ing sim­ile: Just as Ger­mans have con­cepts which the Eng­lish speaker can­not accu­rately “grasp” via her native vocab­u­lary, and vice versa—animals may be in pos­ses­sion of con­cepts that peo­ple are not (and vice versa)—the lat­ter of which “sets of con­cepts” is no more “real” or less “real” than their a-lingual, i.e., ani­mal coun­ter­parts. Human­ity, as such, gets no closer to the “heart” of the mat­ter, to the “thing in itself,” than do iguanas.

That “supe­rior fac­ulty” to which we attribute self con­scious­ness is here reduced to a func­tion whose dis­tin­guish­ing fea­tures are triv­ial, while its impor­tant or inter­est­ing aspects—the orga­niz­ing capac­ity [intel­lect] which seeks pat­terns, and the cre­ative capac­ity [imag­i­na­tion] that invents pat­terns where there are none, and the sym­pa­thetic capac­ity that via a col­lec­tivized sys­tem of sym­bols com­mu­ni­cates with like-beings “con­cepts” of import to the species—are aspects not unique to our species.

The lat­ter “con­cepts,” as I’ve just dis­cussed, may be deemed “par­tic­u­lar” by humans, just as we deem “triangle-ness” a prop­erty of yield signs, and like­wise, “universal”—just as we deem three-sided shapes tri­an­gles. While ani­mals, on the other hand, don’t have in their symbol-system such uni­ver­sal con­cepts as “triangle-ness,” but instead may at best be able to grasp and recall the recur­ring object they see pop­ping up along­side the road near the field on which they graze—this point becomes moot when we debunk that of uni­ver­sal­ity. They may trans­late and even com­mu­ni­cate the yield sign using the same cri­te­rion as us, and yet the imple­men­ta­tion of this cri­te­rion on a per-particular, as opposed to uni­ver­sal, basis—is nei­ther arbi­trary nor accu­rate, but rather a mat­ter of pref­er­ence. Each respec­tive species may “favor” the usage of “uni­ver­sals” over par­tic­u­lars, of “pat­terns and forms” over “rec­og­niz­able par­tic­u­lars,” and ani­mals may just as well have con­cepts that are tan­ta­mount to “uni­ver­sals” on the basis of func­tion, but not on the basis of kind. The point is that, if “uni­ver­sals” are con­tin­gent, nei­ther the use or mis­use or neglect of such con­cepts helps the sub­ject to pen­e­trate the essence of an object, but instead casts an accent over those fea­tures it con­sid­ers most essential.

The con­se­quences of reduc­ing our “uni­ver­sals” to the sta­tus “lin­guis­tic con­cepts that retain mean­ing for a species,” or of shat­ter­ing the “mind as mir­ror” metaphor, in which shat­ter­ing resounds the accu­mu­la­tive efforts of the exis­ten­tial­ists and their fol­low­ers, are as fol­lows: 1. Nei­ther man’s “uni­ver­sals” nor the equiv­a­lent thereof as employed by another species is supe­rior, in the sense of “an accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of real­ity.” 2. In terms of why and how such “uni­ver­sals” were brought to fruition by any two species, those two are equals. 3. Due to 1 and 2, our unique­ness is “endan­gered” if by endan­gered we mean “lev­eled” with that of animals—for while we are dif­fer­ent from animals—as they are from us—these dif­fer­ences are trivial.

Note: A less Schopen­hauer­ian, more opti­mistic, ren­di­tion of point three, might read: Our unique­ness is acci­den­tal: man­i­fested as opposed to essen­tial, rest­ing on mean­ing or what we take for “mean­ing” as opposed to “truth” in any absolute sense, in the sense that phi­los­o­phy claims to furnish.

III. AFTER EXISTENTIALISM KILLED THE EXISTENTIALISTS

In the his­tory of philosophy, the self-proclaimed duty of  “meta­physics”  has been to explain the fun­da­men­tal nature of being and the world. The meta­physi­cian thus appeals to an exclu­sively human abil­ity to not just inter­pret the world as we know it—but also to access that world’s foun­da­tion. As “key holder,” then, to that mys­te­ri­ous realm wherein lies the alleged blue­print for all Cre­ation: the meta­phys­i­can has proven vital to phi­los­o­phy by first appear­ing vital to man’s under­stand­ing of the world, and by promis­ing humans a rea­son to believe that we are unique and supe­rior as a race. As stated in the pre­vi­ous sec­tion, how­ever, the goal of meta­physics is jet­ti­soned when we stop see­ing our minds (or our lan­guages) as a “mirror” for reality.

Rorty coins as “iro­nist the­o­rists” those per­sons such as Niet­zsche, Hegel, and Hei­deg­ger, who attempt to explode (or draw to a close) the meta­phys­i­cal tra­di­tion by “re-describing it” in their own terms; but whose the­o­ries, in so doing, stand sub­ject to the same re-description by a fire squad of future Hei­deg­gers, Niet­zsches, and Hegels. They are “ironic” because they real­ize the ulti­mate contingency—both his­tor­i­cal and geographical—of every vocab­u­lary: includ­ing, pre­sum­ably, their own. They are “the­o­rists” inso­far as, con­tin­gency notwith­stand­ing, they lay down their anti-metaphysical the­o­ries in said attempt to explode the exist­ing canon. As such, their pro­duc­tions are time­less bombs—strate­gi­cally planted in a self-contained sys­tem, to be strate­gi­cally det­o­nated by their successors.

It is pre­cisely this even­tual, and accord­ing to Rorty—inevitable, death-by-deconstruction by which the attempt of the iro­nist the­o­rist fails. Says Rorty:

“This quest for the his­tor­i­cal sublime—for prox­im­ity to some event such as the clos­ing of the gap between sub­ject and object or the advent of the super­man or the end of metaphysics—leads Hegel, Niet­zsche, and Hei­deg­ger to fancy them­selves in the role of the “last philosopher….An iro­nist the­o­rist is caught in a dilemma between say­ing he has actu­al­ized the last pos­si­bil­ity left open and say­ing that he has cre­ated not just a new actu­al­ity but new pos­si­bil­i­ties. The demands of the­ory require him to say the for­mer, the demands of self-creation require him to say the latter.”

Rorty then goes on to dis­tin­guish the iro­nist the­o­rist, e.g. Niet­zsche, from the iro­nist nov­el­ist, e.g. Proust. Where the for­mer comes to “Iro­nism” armed with a the­o­ret­i­cal agenda—be it a desire for time­less­ness or an anti-metaphysical “vocab­u­lary” which vies for recep­tion on a uni­ver­sal level, the lat­ter wants only to lib­er­ate him­self, to unshackle his mind and moral being from the vocab­u­lar­ies and con­cepts and the­o­ries the past would impose. The char­ac­ters in Proust’s Remem­brance of Things Past are not ideas, not hypo­thet­i­cal syl­lo­gisms, but fic­tive peo­ple; any “moral” the reader may derive from their actions or the con­se­quences of their actions can­not be deemed “valid” or claim “nec­es­sary uni­ver­sal­ity” the way a the­ory or ana­lytic propo­si­tion can. Such a “moral” may only be called “true” inso­far as it is true for Proust, and/or inso­far as it rings true for a par­tic­u­lar reader, at a par­tic­u­lar moment. Proust, then, escapes the “inevitable fail­ure” of the iro­nist the­o­rist by approach­ing his iro­nism with­out a the­o­ret­i­cal agenda; he cuts the double-bind described above by not demand­ing sub­li­ma­tion, and lib­er­ates the vocab­u­lary employed in his nov­els’ re-descriptions of the past, by inter­pret­ing said vocabulary’s func­tion as pri­mar­ily per­sonal.

I argue in accor­dance with Rorty when I claim that, unlike Proust the nov­el­ist, Niet­zsche the the­o­rist achieved some—but not all—of his goals: he suc­cess­fully re-described meta­physics, but could not “do away with it.” More­over, the very attempt to put an end to meta­physics is syn­ony­mous with an attempt to destroy all philosophy—on whose very canon the the­o­ries of Niet­zsche, Hegel, and Hei­deg­ger live their nec­es­sar­ily par­a­sitic exis­tence. Nietzsche’s suc­cess, as well as that of the Exis­ten­tial­ists, lies in this: he proved it impos­si­ble to solve such reverse syl­lo­gisms as “life is mean­ing­ful” or “life has no mean­ing,” “the will is deter­mined” or “man is free,” “uni­ver­sals to which we alone have access exist” or “we are not unique”—without appeal­ing to a cer­tain, e.g., meta­phys­i­cal, vocab­u­lary. This development’s sig­nif­i­cance to Phi­los­o­phy is as fol­lows: it is now pos­si­ble to con­ceive of a world wherein ques­tions tra­di­tion­ally assigned to Phi­los­o­phy are rephrased, i.e., not tai­lored to a strictly Schopen­hauer­ian vocab­u­lary, nor to Niet­zsche and his Superman—but rather, get lost in trans­la­tion. “To lead you, said the clock, said lover, we must leave you.” Do you grasp the poems sig­nif­i­cance? As the sub­ject of aban­don­ment, can one fathom for­give­ness? Can we log­i­cally expect to jus­tify the act of leav­ing, to the ones we leave behind?

IV. JUNE INSIDE YOU: SNAKE EATING TAIL

The philo­soph­i­cal canon—like all col­lec­tives, fam­i­lies, and/or relationships—are sys­tems of jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, and as such, are fore­most self-enclosed. The rea­son Nietzsche’s attempt to lib­er­ate Phi­los­o­phy from Meta­physics by writ­ing a his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tive about the for­mer, “about suc­ces­sive attempts to find a re-description of the past which the future will not be able to re-describe” (Rorty, 108)—failed, due to Nietzsche’s own inevitable lapse into meta­physics. And why was his lapse inevitable, but for the same rea­son Hegel would inevitably appeal to a “World Spirit,” Hei­deg­ger to “Dasein”—the same rea­son the lover, still bound up in the “like­ness” with which she co-identifies her Being, can­not jus­tify what changes com­pelled her to leave using the terms and con­di­tions of the beloved’s vocab­u­lary: because to be flu­ent in a lan­guage one must first be sub­merged in it, because “to love is to drown in a sub­stance you once begged to con­sume you,” because to answer to a sys­tem is to speak its lan­guage, is to appeal to its author­ity, is to accept its claim to Truth.

Genius or not, no one of the exis­ten­tial­ists, nor any of their successors—could, or will ever, do more than to re-describe the past. Any attempt to do more than this, is inspired by the Western/ Hei­deg­ger­ian “guilt” over not hav­ing cre­ated one­self and thus not pos­sess­ing a rad­i­cal auton­omy of Will, and is per­pet­u­ated by what Rorty describes as “the temp­ta­tion of think­ing that once you have found a way to sub­sume your pre­de­ces­sors under a gen­eral idea”—kind of like I’ve done in this essay—“you have thereby done some­thing more than found a re-description of them—a re-description which has proved use­ful for your own pur­poses and self-creation.” To fol­low this “temp­ta­tion,” and act as if one’s own re-description has access to a power that’s beyond oneself—a World Spirit, the Will to Power, Absolute Truth, God, etc. etc.—is to lapse, as Hei­deg­ger says, and does, into metaphysics.

Proust thus suc­ceeds where the “iro­nist the­o­rists” failed, if only in the neg­a­tive sense of not attempt­ing what the lat­ter attempted. As I’ve stated, Proust’s suc­cess was of a pri­mar­ily per­sonal order: he re-described the past in a way that coheres, i.e., holds together as a narrative—thereby lib­er­at­ing him­self from the nar­ra­tive he was “given.” I will argue, how­ever, that iro­nist the­o­rists’ fail­ure would ulti­mately result in a suc­cess in which Proust could not take part. That the Exis­ten­tial­ists so lapsed—ere seal­ing their fate—does not take away from the “moral” their founder­ing served to demon­strate. The com­mu­ni­ca­tion of which moral (which word I use iron­i­cally), I’ll argue was the ulti­mate intent and suc­cess of their phi­los­o­phy. In short, because the exis­ten­tial­ists left a trail of det­o­nated bombs inside philosophy’s nar­ra­tive structure—Philosophy is now pay­ing mind to what these authors had to say, and more importantly—what they never got the chance to say.

What I am about to say, fits well within the frame­work pro­vided by my Iro­nist predecessors—it is a state­ment regard­ing the sta­tus of Phi­los­o­phy at present, i.e., in the post­mod­ern wake of the existentialist’s real­iza­tion that Truth is as con­tin­gent as the lan­guage we use to describe it, and that Phi­los­o­phy is mean­ing­less if not for its per­sonal capac­ity, i.e., the value it retains—or can poten­tially retain—when bestowed mean­ing by peo­ple like the char­ac­ters in Proust’s nov­els, and for the final id est, by which I here mean, the Individual.

V. DON’T JUDGE A SUPERPOWER BY ITS CORPSE

The Exis­ten­tial­ists pro­claimed “the indi­vid­ual” philosophy’s new telos—or des­tiny. But what of the indi­vid­ual? Cer­tainly Niet­zsche and Hei­deg­ger and Kierkegaard and Sartre could not have meant that I and your­self, Reader, and the kids down on Broad­way ought to flock to the near­est Uni­ver­sity, enroll in 19th Cen­tury Phi­los­o­phy after Hegel, and there ren­der their prophecy ful­filled? The notion of insti­tu­tion­al­ized learn­ing, as we’ve seen, couldn’t have been fur­ther from the late Nietzsche’s mind when he was trying—to what must have felt like no avail—to extract his ideas and ideals from that self-consuming “cesspool.” If there is a heaven, on which point I am indif­fer­ent, and if Niet­zsche is in it, on which point I’ve not the fog­gi­est, I hope he can see how his rebel­lious streak made an impact—even if at his, and the canon’s, expense.

Like the Navajo sand paint­ing, whose func­tion it is not to be “observed” by an audi­ence, but rather serves as a “door­way” for the gods and heal­ing spir­its upon whose entrance the pic­ture is destroyed—the value of the char­ac­ters in a novel are objec­tively unquan­tifi­able. They are fic­tive beings whose minds we can read, and yet the thoughts and beliefs and judg­ments therein are as glis­ten­ing grains of sand on the med­i­cine man’s can­vas. It is no more the goal of the nov­el­ist to trans­mit the truth to her audi­ence about the nature of exis­tence, than it is the goal of the sand-painter to attract an audi­ence for his work. Regard­less, as one who does not believe that truth with a cap­i­tal T is any­where to be found, I would argue that the for­mer goal is not even log­i­cally attainable.

While char­ac­ters in nov­els, like actual peo­ple, are often seek­ers of the truth who may wax philo­soph­i­cal, who may hold and artic­u­late jus­ti­fied, coher­ent beliefs—the reader knows bet­ter than to mis­take these activ­i­ties for sooth-saying. One only need read a few “clas­sics” in lit­er­a­ture to know “genius” is not tan­ta­mount to “keeper of wis­dom,” much less Truth. Some­times, while read­ing a stream-of-conscious mono­logue, or hear­ing a deeply-felt dia­logue on film or in a play, we intuit that a “truth” is being spo­ken, for which the characters—and per­haps even the author—is but a chan­nel. I would chal­lenge the reader who can recall hav­ing had such an expe­ri­ence, to con­sider whether what she here means by “truth” is not in fact “meaning.”

The fol­low­ing pro­posal is not to be read as an attempt to dis­tin­guish between “mean­ing” and “truth.” Such machi­na­tions I’ll leave to the epis­te­mol­o­gists who have not yet been taken off life support—I mean, who are tenured. My pro­posal, which to some will seem rad­i­cal, to oth­ers obvi­ous, is that the fact that we so flu­idly sub­sti­tute the words “truth” and “mean­ing,” is not sug­ges­tive of intel­lec­tual inso­lence, but rather of what close prox­im­ity their mean­ings must stand in our vocab­u­lar­ies. Since terms are as fluid as the inten­tions of those who define them, categorical errors or errors in def­i­n­i­tion that occur and recur on macro­cos­mic level, may after all just be a sign that our his­tor­i­cal vocab­u­lary is ripe, or over­due, for revi­sion: lin­guis­tic phas­ing as Freudian slip.

If, like the Navajo med­i­cine man, we intend our con­cep­tual medium (lan­guage) to serve a func­tional purpose—we are con­tent to call “truth” what­ever “hangs together best in this con­text.” Con­trar­ily, if, like the imi­ta­tion artist, our intent is to gar­ner longevity for said medium, and demand that it imi­tate “nature” or “real­ity” by which stan­dard it is to be critiqued—we are closet meta­physi­cians, still believ­ing in an Absolute Truth to which “mean­ing” stands infe­rior. This of course was the chain of rea­son­ing which led Plato’s pes­simism (inar­tic­u­la­ble fear) of art. “Who knows,” he would say, “what these poets are capa­ble of?!—enchanting us with “mean­ing,” deceiv­ing our ears into believ­ing we’ve heard truth!” Now, the fur­ther away we move from our Pla­tonic ori­gins, i.e., from meta­physics and abso­lutism, the closer we come to real­iz­ing the irrel­e­vance of such empty con­cepts as “absolute truth,” and con­trar­ily, the deep neces­sity of mean­ing, to life. This the Exis­ten­tial­ists real­ized, but in their quest to demol­ish crit­ics present and past—had to sac­ri­fice in many ways their own sense of lib­erty and own­er­ship over the mean­ing they lived to create.

Con­trar­ily, Proust:

“at the end of his life….saw him­self as look­ing back along a tem­po­ral axis, watch­ing col­ors, sounds, things, and peo­ple fall into place from the per­spec­tive of his own most recent descrip­tion of them….He was a per­spec­ti­val­ist who did not have to worry whether per­spec­ti­val­ism was a true theory.”

Rorty derives from Proust’s exam­ple a piece of empir­i­cal evi­dence that nov­els are “a safer medium than the­ory” for artic­u­lat­ing one’s aware­ness of the con­tin­gency of one’s authorities—whether those author­i­ties be peo­ple, insti­tu­tions, doc­trines, or words. I would extend Rorty’s les­son to encom­pass, beyond nov­els, any medium in which this sort of epistemic/philosophical aware­ness can be sub­jec­tively expressed—whether poem, philo­soph­i­cal trea­tise, or con­ver­sa­tion. I say “sub­jec­tively” to dis­tin­guish the penul­ti­mate “trea­tise” from main­stream phi­los­o­phy whose ana­lytic cur­rents have no patience for con­tin­gency, i.e., for the sub­ject who is, like the char­ac­ter in a novel, “quite evi­dently time-bound, embed­ded in a web of con­tin­gen­cies.” Rorty’s “les­son” car­ries great impli­ca­tions for the future of philosophy—a future Socrates envi­sioned and ulti­mately died for, which the Exis­ten­tial­ists “died to the sys­tem” to make the sys­tem see, and which we now—from within the space these souls have created—may start building.

VI. THE BUILDING OF BRIDGES OVER THE TAKING OF LEAPS

Between the “pri­vate” and “pub­lic” con­ver­sa­tions which con­sti­tute the whole arena of philo­soph­i­cal dia­logue, between “epis­te­mol­ogy” and “ethics,” “the­o­ret­i­cal” and “applied” meth­ods, there exists a genus of prac­tice that is nec­es­sar­ily eclec­tic, fur­nish­ing both pri­vate and politically-tailored motives and goals. Said hybrid has been real­ized by cer­tain indi­vid­u­als who claim the title “philo­soph­i­cal prac­ti­tioner” and whose works at the time of this writ­ing are widely regarded by Phi­los­o­phy as blas­phe­mous at worst, exper­i­men­tal at best; and by psychology—if not crim­i­nal, then scandalous.

It is no secret that the “pri­vate” aspect of phi­los­o­phy under­goes habit­ual neglect by aca­d­e­mic philoso­phers. A lack of empha­sis, will­ing­ness, and/or abil­ity among our own, to inte­grate the realm of “work” with that of “life,” and thereby real­ize a per­sonal nar­ra­tive whose rela­tion to the field is mutu­ally infor­ma­tive, does a dev­as­tat­ing injus­tice to Phi­los­o­phy, to the indi­vid­ual, and to the world. The ana­lytic trend which presently pre­vails in philo­soph­i­cal insti­tu­tions involves the over-generalization from “applied” to “polit­i­cal” or “pub­lic,” such that the pri­vate aspect is either wholly neglected or assigned the role of an “aid” in and for the philosopher’s own the­o­riz­ing. Ana­lytic phi­los­o­phy is par­tic­u­larly keen at strictly dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing between “sub­jec­tive” and “objec­tive” analy­ses, and more­over between the prac­tices which ought-be tai­lored to either mode. The effect this pro­duces is a rigid con­cep­tion of typ­i­cally “pub­lic” vs. typ­i­cally “pri­vate” realms of appli­ca­tion, which con­cep­tion per­pet­u­ates stig­mas and taboos regard­ing cross-overs of method­ol­ogy therein. Thus, applied phi­los­o­phy, by virtue of the pub­lic role we’ve long assigned to it, is by def­i­n­i­tion divested of its “pri­vate aspect.” Cor­rel­a­tively, the­o­ret­i­cal phi­los­o­phy lim­its the “pri­vate” to the cere­bral cir­cum­lo­cu­tions of thought which pre­cede “actual practice”—the com­po­si­tion of argu­ments in books and in the class­room, where the “pri­vate” is again cut off to retain that thought’s “purity.” For this rea­son, acad­e­mia, i.e. ana­lytic the­o­ret­i­cal phi­los­o­phy, has shied away from the “per­sonal” for fear of taint­ing or cor­rupt­ing or abus­ing its function.

Hence the sub­or­di­na­tion of the Imag­i­na­tion and Under­stand­ing to the highly-revered Rea­son we see in Acad­e­mia. Stu­dents enter classes, seek­ing clar­ity regard­ing their reli­gious beliefs, their sex­u­al­ity, the val­ues imparted them in child­hood, or the nature of art—and not only do they not find the Answers they are look­ing for—they are then roped into join­ing the pro­gram under the tragic impres­sion that if they just hang around long enough, just get that sec­ond degree in phi­los­o­phy, just read X many more books, just go to grad school, just devote the prime of their youth to the sub­ject, they’ll gar­ner truth. They’ll know. They’ll know with cer­tainty. It’s a slip­pery slope—and such is the fate of the phi­los­o­phy stu­dent who legit­i­mately engages with the sub­ject on a per­sonal level. They are roy­ally doomed if they don’t fig­ure out, and fast, that their pre­vi­ous con­cep­tion of Truth is an illusion—and thus can’t be accessed through a text­book, a class, a pro­fes­sor, or even all phi­los­o­phy. Thus, those stu­dents who look to their pro­fes­sors, and indeed, to the acad­emy, as mod­els for how to achieve an accu­rate or just deeper under­stand­ing of them­selves and the world—leave the ivory doors sorely dis­ap­pointed, poor both in pocket book and spirit.

VII. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: ASSEMBLING MY VOCABULARY

A word about the empir­i­cal grounds on which this author’s inter­est in Philo­soph­i­cal Prac­tice, a move­ment still much in its incip­i­ence, is based. Long prior to my deci­sion to pur­sue degrees in Phi­los­o­phy, and even prior to the estab­lish­ment of my com­mit­ment to the writ­ing prac­tice, i.e., at age thirteen—I devel­oped an elab­o­rate, con­di­tional proof for Iden­tity as Con­se­quent of Self Destruc­tion, or the con­di­tion prop­erly known as Anorexia Ner­vosa. Eight years, three hos­pi­tal­iza­tions, and innu­mer­able ther­apy ses­sions later—I recov­ered. Which is to say: I achieved a healthy weight and man­aged to “cor­rect” the pat­terns and behav­iors that years of addic­tion to star­va­tion had ingrained in me—no small feat, indeed. Yet all but unad­dressed remained a hoard of resid­ual beliefs regard­ing myself and the world—beliefs which both pro­voked and per­pet­u­ated the ill­ness, over time becom­ing my world-view default. By “world-view” I am here refer­ring to a sophis­ti­cated com­plex of argu­ments, at base philo­soph­i­cal, which—however full of holes—I had nei­ther the per­spec­tive nor the self con­scious­ness to see through. The “cognitive/dialectical-behavioral ther­a­pies” employed by my treat­ment team, if nec­es­sary to my sur­vival, treated my symp­toms but did not fur­nish the tools for re-describing my self-destructive past, which re-description, in ret­ro­spect, is what saved me.

What I needed at the time of my treat­ment is what oth­ers still arguably need: Phi­los­o­phy. More­over, Phi­los­o­phy itself is in need of an arena wherein noth­ing short of the “best” of both the pri­vate and pub­lic worlds is represented—a medium wherein the Sub­ject man­i­fests the Niet­zschean ideal of the “self as work of art,” ripe for revi­sion and re-interpretation, trans­for­ma­tion as well as transforming.

I. PHILOSOPHICAL PRACTICE 101

Philo­soph­i­cal Coun­sel­ing, more accu­rately referred to as Philo­soph­i­cal Prac­tice (“PP”), iden­ti­fies as an art dis­tinct from psy­cho­analy­sis but which is yet built on a dia­logue between individuals—a sci­ence, if you will, dis­tinct from aca­d­e­mic phi­los­o­phy which yet retains its philo­soph­i­cal integrity. Its alleged appeal is its ful­fill­ment of a niche that does not merely draw on the approaches of said insti­tu­tions, but rather real­izes goals that have been his­tor­i­cally unmet if not dis­owned by both.

The pur­suit of philo­soph­i­cal prac­tice, be it as client or as prac­ti­tioner, requires one adhere to, if not believe in, its premises: that phi­los­o­phy can change lives by specif­i­cally address­ing them, for one; two—that acad­e­mia shirks said attempt with increas­ing reli­gios­ity; and lastly—that the appar­ent lack of “demand” for said prac­tice is not a reflec­tion on the prac­tice itself, but rather indi­cates a dan­ger­ous trend: trends, to pre­cise. These, one might describe in the gen­eral terms of “the west­ern med­i­cine move­ment,” or enu­mer­ate, if one so chooses, in a list which begins: “a deficit of self con­scious­ness,” and pro­ceeds” “a flour­ish­ing of sys­tem­atic cures” then to “a crash course in sta­tis­tics, wherein aver­age means healthy, and excep­tional means ill,” pick­ing up with the penul­ti­mate “over-diagnosis”—whereon aster­isks denote: “if not alcohol—then Prozac.” Phi­los­o­phy, at least the ver­sion that is most often doled-out in schools, falls some­where above sui­cide and some­where below enlight­en­ment on the list of alter­na­tive reme­dies for the life’s tri­als. The prob­lem with such alter­na­tives is that, if used with­out dis­cre­tion, they become just as addic­tive as the sub­stances one seeks to avoid: psy­chic detach­ment as med­i­cine sur­ro­gate on which one may suc­cess­fully escape one­self, may grow hap­pily depen­dent, may overdose.

In his arti­cle enti­tled Beyond the Walls of the Philo­soph­i­cal Prison, philo­soph­i­cal prac­ti­tioner and scholar Ran Lahav draws a poignant par­al­lel between acad­e­mia and ortho­doxy, stat­ing that the former

“lim­its phi­los­o­phy to a very spe­cific kind of dis­course, and it sup­presses other poten­tial forms of dis­course. In West­ern phi­los­o­phy, this hap­pened when phi­los­o­phy became focused on abstract dis­cus­sions that are aimed at pro­duc­ing the­o­ries, while ignor­ing vir­tu­ally every other way of under­stand­ing life”

—just as ortho­doxy may be said to “the­o­rize” or “dog­ma­tize” or “explain” away the inef­fa­ble, the dif­fi­cult (because mys­te­ri­ous) and because mys­te­ri­ous, beautiful—complexities and para­doxes which con­sti­tute the nature of exis­tence, among which we might include love, as well as exis­ten­tial anx­i­ety and spir­i­tual rev­e­la­tion. Prac­ti­tion­ers work­ing in the embry­onic field of PP, among whom Lahav stands as an excep­tion­ally inno­v­a­tive fig­ure, claim to offer an approach to phi­los­o­phy which saves it from the fate out­lined above, and to which the West­ern world has suc­cumbed on the lev­els of med­i­cine, edu­ca­tion, and spir­i­tu­al­ity, to name just a few. Those like Lahav who have achieved sus­tain­abil­ity, have had to argue—and vehemently—their way to this achieve­ment. For aca­d­e­mic philoso­phers and clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gists alike cast an eye of sus­pi­cion, and per­haps rightly so, on this grass-roots move­ment which claims to know some­thing that the for­mer, its elders, don’t know. On this account, how­ever, the ter­ri­to­r­ial sus­pi­cion on the part of phi­los­o­phy and the behav­ioral sci­ences is arguably unfounded; it is the nat­ural how­ever irra­tional revolt of the organ­ism whose intel­li­gence has been insulted, i.e., who has been hit by a girl. This “female imag­i­nary,” iron­i­cally enough, first appeared in the flesh of a man known as Socrates—a philoso­pher who referred to him­self as a metaphor­i­cal “mid­wife” for wisdom:

“The high­est point of my art is the power to prove by every test whether the off­spring of a young man’s thought is a false phan­tom or instinct with life and truth. I am so far like the mid­wife, that I can­not myself give birth to wisdom….I can myself bring noth­ing to light because there is no wis­dom in me.…Those who fre­quent my com­pany at first appear, some of them, quite unin­tel­li­gent; but, as we go fur­ther with our dis­cus­sions, all who are favored by heaven make progress at a rate that seems sur­pris­ing to oth­ers as well as to them­selves, although it is clear that they have never learned any­thing from me; the many admirable truths they bring to birth have been dis­cov­ered by them­selves from within. But the deliv­ery is heaven’s work and mine.”

The above his­tor­i­cal aside is less an aside than some philoso­phers would like to admit, for Socrates’ method—“the dia­logue” as opposed to the “mono­logue,” the “question-” as opposed to the “argument-“ ori­ented discussion—represents the “fem­i­nine,” and simul­ta­ne­ously, the ori­gins of phi­los­o­phy. Philo­soph­i­cal Prac­ti­tion­ers are in almost unan­i­mous agree­ment upon the impor­tance of the Socratic Ques­tion to philo­soph­i­cal dialogue—whose pow­ers of sug­ges­tion for the prob­ing sub­ject have been lost or long—repressed?—by acad­e­mia. The PP move­ment can only real­is­ti­cally be charged for sug­ges­tion, i.e., of sur­fac­ing in the mind of the philosopher-scholar the per­sonal capac­ity he’s for­got­ten, through its very appear­ance. In other words, the prac­ti­tioner appears as a threat to the academic’s familiars—his syl­lo­gisms, his podium, his orderly proofs—insofar as the lat­ter rec­og­nizes but does not want to real­ize his personal-reflective capacities.

On the other hand, to those who nei­ther real­ize nor rec­og­nize said poten­tial as insti­tu­tions or indi­vid­u­als, the prac­ti­tioner appears as a threat to the field as a whole, in which case she is charged for infi­delity, blas­phemy, fraud. As is stated above, the sus­pi­cion holds only for charges of suggestion—and thus for dredg­ing up, like the mnemonic device of the psy­chol­o­gists, a past that had actu­al­ized the poten­tial that now lies dor­mant: the Socratic imag­i­nary, the fem­i­nine, the personal.

Just as one may ques­tion the integrity of “aca­d­e­mic motives”—the ego­is­tic drive for recog­ni­tion, and impe­ri­al­is­tic lust for power via knowl­edge: aca­d­e­mics may ques­tion the integrity of the flight there from. Let us, for argument’s sake, return to the dis­cus­sion of Schopenhauer’s “Will,” and beg the ques­tion that the pur­pose shared by all human actions is in fact just “to gen­er­ate within that action’s agent the will to live.” If such were truly the case: is “aca­d­e­mic phi­los­o­phy” any less legit­i­mate, any less pure, an endeavor than that of the prac­ti­tioner? More­over, is it pos­si­ble that the philo­soph­i­cal prac­ti­tioner, along with those he or she coun­sels, along with Proust, Niet­zsche and, why not, Hegel—just a dif­fer­ent man­i­fes­ta­tion of the will to go on living—such that, where the academic’s and/or artist’s exis­tence is fueled by cre­ations that are tan­gi­ble, the coun­selor and/or coun­se­lee just require a dif­fer­ent type of fuel? And if so, is PP’s objec­tive, like that of the acad­emy, purely rel­a­tive? Alright—what if?

By advanc­ing a pol­icy of “non-interference,” wherein the goal of the prac­ti­tioner is never to advance his the­o­ries or “how-one-ought-to-live’s,” as this is pre­cisely the goal he is try­ing to break with—PP con­se­quently upholds a stan­dard of Coher­en­tism. As such, the mutual objec­tive of prac­ti­tioner and client negates the idea that knowledge—be it about the self, morals, or the mean­ing of life—must rest on a foun­da­tion of “uni­ver­sal neces­sity.” Instead, Coher­en­tism claims that a per­son has “knowl­edge” when, and only when, she is in pos­ses­sion of coher­ent beliefs. But what counts as coherency? “Coher­ence,” accord­ing to the Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy, is defined by log­i­cal and prob­a­bilis­tic con­sis­tency, as well as the exis­tence of strong and exten­sive infer­en­tial con­nec­tions between the beliefs within the sys­tem in ques­tion. Thus, beliefs are not “jus­ti­fied” via uni­ver­sally ver­i­fi­able and enforce­able terms and con­di­tions, but rather in terms of the inner coherency of the sys­tem they comprise.

In accor­dance with the Coher­en­tist notion that your beliefs need not mir­ror mine for both the for­mer and lat­ter sys­tems to be jus­ti­fied, the prac­ti­tioner treats his “stu­dent” not as an objec­ti­fi­able proof in philosophy—but as an a appren­tice, a philosopher-in-training. Just as Andrea del Ver­roc­chio showed da Vinci “the ropes”—only to prove the latter’s artis­tic subordinate—so does the prac­ti­tioner, or “mas­ter of phi­los­o­phy,” teach his client to use his tools with the intent, indeed the hope, that his client will found in his or her Sis­tine Chapel, a style, a method, a cre­ation of her own. Whereas aca­d­e­mic phi­los­o­phy may be seen as equiv­a­lent of Art School, wherein stu­dents mimic pro­fes­sors who mimic mas­ters whose the­o­ries they like most, or which the art-world deems “infallible”—the philo­soph­i­cal practitioner’s office bears resem­blance to the stu­dio: that realm wherein the stu­dent tests out her wings, her skills, tak­ing lib­er­ties to exper­i­ment and seek out her own unique vision, then deter­min­ing if that vision was jus­ti­fied by what she has to show for it.

Far from refer­ring to the above parallel—between arti­san and philo­soph­i­cal practitioner/ PP and Coherentism—in the neg­a­tive, I do so only as to posit this admit­tedly pri­vate con­cern: are the fields of psy­chol­ogy, phi­los­o­phy, and philo­soph­i­cal counseling—just so many means to the same end—a decrescendo into rel­a­tivism, at that? Here we must be care­ful to dis­tin­guish between “rel­a­tivism” and “Coher­en­tism.” The two are often mis­con­strued as syn­ony­mous, namely by pos­i­tivist ana­lytic philoso­phers who fear the destruc­tion of epis­te­mol­ogy in the hands of the skep­tic. Skep­ti­cism, how­ever, is pre­cisely an argu­ment against said construal—in that the skep­tic is as skep­ti­cal of the Coher­en­tist notion of Truth as he is of all others—positivist, exter­nal­ist, what have you. In short, skep­ti­cism doubts the exis­tence, nay, the value of truth in gen­eral. Thus, while the Coher­en­tist notion of truth as some­thing that is “based on the strength of sub­jec­tive infer­ences” prof­fers a threat to those con­cep­tions of knowl­edge as a thing to be objec­tively deter­mined, proven and agreed upon—it is not “the same as skep­ti­cism.” For a more in-depth analy­sis of this dis­tinc­tion I’ll refer the reader to my essay Between Coher­ence and Con­ver­gence, also avail­able on my blog.

The three dis­ci­plines here dis­cussed: psy­chol­ogy; its self-proclaimed antithe­sis, or phi­los­o­phy; and the hybrid of these, as achieved by the philo­soph­i­cal practitioner—can be inter­preted as three dis­tinct means to the same end. Psy­chol­ogy may be described as: “the will of the indi­vid­ual, trans­lated into space as a pur­suit of ‘peace,’ ‘health,’ and/or ‘func­tion­al­ity;’” Phi­los­o­phy, as “the same will, trans­lated into space as the cre­ation of tan­gi­ble prod­ucts whose value is mutu­ally con­tin­gent with that of The Canon;” and philo­soph­i­cal prac­tice, as a hybrid of these objec­tives, such that “indi­vid­ual sub­ject ‘S’ employs the Greek motto ‘know thy­self’ to derive psy­cho­log­i­cal effect ‘P,’ which in turn pro­pels her con­scious jour­ney, or life narrative—brought to com­ple­tion at death as a “true” work of art.