Seduction, a preamble
Seduction is a word that carries with it an air of discomfort; it makes people’s ears prick up with fear and curiosity, a truly dangerous combination of emotions. It is taboo. Convention, from time immemorial, has had a general aversion to this word and specifically to its application. Like most taboo things however, human beings are drawn to it like moths to a flame. We are fascinated by it, we yearn it and the transgression it promises.
To approach such an emotionally packed discipline in any way requires a certain strength of character, which with a little shift in perspective can even be seen as weakness. You require a certain amoral standing; not to be confused of course with immoral. The difference between the amoral and the immoral is that the immoral presupposes a subscription to a certain moral system, whereas the amoral is immune to such an infection. It knows not what is good or bad, it only knows actions and results; it only knows its end, blind and distant to all else. More often than not the end of Seduction is seen as immoral when subsumed under a particular moral interpretation and prognosis. Hence the negative ring it has to convention, because convention is invariably subject to a pandemic in the form of a moral system. Enough, no need to make Seduction look good, or try and offer arguments for why it’s actually not as bad or evil as people make it. The only thing that must be said however is simply this, “it works”, and that is all one needs to say to find themselves justified. One can’t blame evil for trying, even for succeeding, because in this context, it is nothing without that which the evil is affecting. A person can’t seduce without the seduced wanting to be seduced, or having an affinity towards seduction prior to the person’s attempt at seduction. Only someone who wants to be seduced can be seduced, the others are immune.
The higher the boredom/space, the higher the imagination, the higher the intelligence, the higher the vanity, the higher the proneness to seduction. The more civilization grew, the more eminent and elaborate has seduction become. It is everywhere and most of us do it without knowing; we have no name for it. Those of us who know we’re doing it are either repulsed or pleasantly ignited by it; there is no escape from it. In this time and age, with all the laws, niceties, formalities, humanities that we’ve made so important, how can we satisfy and quench certain needs that are often beyond our control; our needs for ambition and prestige, sexual pleasure, power over (cruelty) another. When looked at morally, it is sick, how can a human openly accept those needs? Who would trivially confess that they enjoy holding power (or sway) over another; and should there be that brave soul, whose folly is big enough to be the first to say, “I do” - woe to him! What’s left for him but tears and guilt – a fear and trembling – because of that deeply ingrained moral system that still haunts him, no matter how hard he tries to champion his amorality. That sense of ‘I am being watched’, ‘I am being judged’, ‘I am being hated’… how sick for a human to live with those maxims. Alas, they are the maxims of that germ-like morality, that sickness that has cunningly befallen us, that sickness that poses itself as salvation, the mask of the salvation of humanity that conceals its doom. The redemption of the animal that is man, into the ‘higher’ creature, into hu-man. This has given Seduction its power. It is its very own antithesis that has fuelled its growth and fashion into our epoch. Seduction is the residue of a moral system that has sickened man, but has likewise made man a whole lot more interesting, more elaborate, more sharp on the edges. It’s quite amusing seeing us trying desperately to run away from ourselves, from our passions and needs, and ending up back in the same place no matter what road we take. Our instincts rule every aspect of our lives, without fail, and Nietzsche was not too wrong in his genealogical observation.
Pardon my digression, after all it is quite important to the topic at hand, I haven’t gone too off the course. Seduction is a necessary component of the world we live in, nothing inconsequential (in the eyes of the seduced) can happen without it – and the seduced dreams of nothing else but the inconsequential. You will notice that nowhere in this post have I explained what I mean by Seduction, or given a definition. We leave that endeavour to another post. This is only a minor preamble, the honey is yet to come you insatiable bees you… meanwhile allow me to seduce you a little…
The Subjective Problem
I want to take you through a process of the thinking through of a question.
How do we know each other?
First and foremost this is not a question that concerns the existence of other people. I am not interested in whether I can know the existence of someone else or not, I presuppose that they already are. I am more interested in the extent of my knowledge of that person, presupposing that I know that they are independent from me. I wish to draw the limits of knowing about someone; more precisely, how far can I go into knowing someone else, how much I can know about them. To my mind arises that the only way, which is friendly to depiction, that one human being can know another is through language. Knowledge through feeling is much too problematic to even begin to entertain in this conjecture. It is thus less of a burden for us to maintain that the only way one human being can know another is through a judgment about that human being. We have no access to their thoughts and motives (given that we allow them to have thoughts and motives), but we do have access to their gestures, their actions, their appearance etc. These work as indirect roots that we use as rope to climb into their motives, feelings and more specifically their being.
But how is this process done, how is it possible? The only way I can know the motive of an action is through the action itself, and what preceded it (given that you allow me the distinction between acter and action). Alas, even the postulation of a motive is so shaky. What is a motive but the end of an action, the willed end of an action, what the action was ‘for’. How do I bring this out in another? It would seem that I pick up the action, represent it in my mind’s eye; accompanying the action is a series of preceding facts and actions regarding the said acter, and I use these to bring about the motive, the inner world of the acter. My constituents are actions, preceding facts and the links I draw between them in order to infer the motive. This process is invariably crawling with problems. Here are a few: How can I be sure of the acter’s motive? How do I know that action X and preceding facts Y entail motive Z? The only means of grounding a motive is within myself, my own experiences of actions, motives, preceding facts and their relationship according to my interpretation. Problematically, there’s always the possibility that I missed out a fact that was essential to the motive – it seems by this that I would need to know everything about that person, all their actions and events, at the very least those of major significance, in order to even get close to inferring a motive. Even given all these, the further problem arises of the interpretation; can there be a flawless interpretation of the constituents (X & Y)? It seems that I use myself as a map to the inner world of another, as a grounding for the synthesis between action and motive. The synthesis would not be possible without a collection of motives and behaviours of my own to use as indicators for the said motives in others. I need to know a bit about myself in order to begin to know anything about another.
Given all this then, I must presuppose that all human beings will act like I act, and as such all human beings act the same, given the same constituents for action, namely the above XYZ. It would seem then, that even subjectivity is wrought with objectivity, the human being always seems to objectify all other human beings, as well as herself, for her desire to comprehend another.
This betrays something. It betrays that subjectivity must see itself in an objective sense, for if it doesn’t, it cannot even begin to comprehend the synthesis between action and motive. As such, the synthesis between action and motive, and the attempt to reveal another human being’s inner world needs a prerequisite step, namely, the step of abandoning subjectivity altogether. At the very least abandoning subjectivity in its absolute sense. Without myself becoming objective, I cannot ‘know fully’ anything about another human being; even if they told me. It would be impossible to know, one can only have a shaky belief, a very shaky belief that should one wish to maintain their subjectivity they’d have to abandon the belief altogether. For I need to objectify what I’ve done and why I’ve done it, so that action can become adhesive to a motive. I must use what I have stored in memory as an inference to another person’s inner world and storage of memories. This is because a motive is altogether distinct from an action, a motive has an end that is resistant to the action, in that the action itself is not the motive, but the motive is the reason for the action. The action presupposes a motive, but that is all it does, something more needs to be added to the action to bring out the motive. Alas, even in the initial step of a presupposition of a motive there is an objectification of the person’s (the one who is judging, not the one judged) subjectivity. This thing that is added is almost sacrificial, their subjectivity is added, or its death thereof. To know somebody else is to know oneself, to know oneself is to objectify oneself, otherwise there can be no knowledge of another; only a very shaky belief, that should not even be had without suspicion in the most rigid sense.
The Birth of Seduction
Today we celebrate the birth of a new Thought Pot. A brand new category will be added to the Art of Flux Thinking, so that we can really take into consideration the background of some of the most penetrating thoughts of the Lover. This section will deal with that part of human life that is out and out taboo, yet so eminent that one wonders how we missed it. It will be oriented around the social, the inter-personal interaction between one human being and the next.
This section is paradoxically more important to the Lover than the Ethic. For it covers the Lover’s engine, his fuel, what drives him to flock to the direction he’s flocking to. What’s necessary to a thought is not so much its content but it’s prerequisite, what gave birth to it, it’s source. Seduction is one of the sources of the Lover.
Woman’s Sexuality
A point is reached in bed when, no matter how artful and amazing a lover is; if he has made thousands of women come and knows all different spots in the woman’s body — from the g-spot to the deep-spot and back again — there comes a point where his efforts are in vain. There comes a point where the woman is so protected from emotionality, so aversed to her sexuality, so unknown to her, that even if he is a multi-orgasmic man, he cannot satisfy her. She may need more from herself than from him in order to be pleased by him. The woman needs surrender. She needs to shed the guilt instilled in her by her mother, father and society about her sexuality, or else she is doomed to never feel the kind of pleasure she can feel. She is doomed to never feel the kind of intimacy with another human being that is so damn vital to her. In matters such as these, not even Love can prove a worthy remedy to, a worthy excuse for, bypassing the guilt and bad conscience that consumes a woman in bed with a man.
Enemies
An enemy made a friend is so much better than a friend made an enemy. The damage that can be done by the latter is conspicuously more powerful than the damage done by the former in his/her state of hostility. A friend turned into an enemy is a worse enemy than any rival or adversary.
Envy
Be wary of success and its effects. It is better that you are successful and be a prick in other people’s eyes, than be good in their eyes and still succeed. The envy that comes from the latter is infinitely more poisonous to you and them than the former. The former, people expect and can quell the green beast by hating the way the world is, but the latter causes a cognitive dissonance whose after-effects are uncontrollable by you or them. It is wise to encourage those who view you as successful, to also view you as a fool who got lucky. If they can’t do that, then at a least a prick. For their envy of you can be eased by their hate of the world a lot more than their envy of you because you are a good person and they can’t be. You will find this phenomenon most laden in the bosoms of the religious, they are the most prone to envy and the biggest haters Nature has ever bred.
Philosophy’s Courtship
A philosophy that does not court necessity, is like a tree that bears no fruit and doesn’t filter air.
