Evil is he…
… who without a sense of privacy and a sense of honour penetrates so deeply into their lover’s soul that he finds their most secret hiding place, then forces them to take leave of that place. Evil is he who wishes to escape from his own depth into another’s, evil and stupid. Evil is he who uses all manner of strength to expose the inner world of their lover, and thence their own, to the point where they have nowhere else to hide but their surrender or insanity. Evil is he who finds with such methods that the lover can’t ever be in love with them, for their depth harbours a longing of another kind to them. Evil is he who realizes that all longing, all love, all depth is but a fabrication and that a person can love equally one as they can love all, for love is nothing but an excitation. Evil is he who rejects even this and hopes that love is the excitation to relax all the others, the master of excitations, the master of the house. Evil is he who hopes for this, for all manner of evil things arise from such hope and longing for the master, for the master’s arrival. Evil is he…
Against and in the face of such a master all evil is the sweetest, most enriching and divine good. Evil, and stupid, is the Lover.
Jason the Hedon on the Beautiful
Do not sit there on your imaginary horse and tell me you have no interest of any form in the thing which you judge to be beautiful. There is only one necessarily conjoined response to beauty: desire, or the movement towards its possession. One is fundamentally drawn towards that which they find beautiful, the beautiful is an excitation not a relaxation.
Broken Thoughts on the thing-in-itself
It is most inconceivable to build a theory of perception that grounds itself on an unknowable thing that appears and represents itself only conditioned by that thing which is perceiving, and have nothing of it whatsoever remain in the apperance and representation. This is akin to saying that one puts dough into a machine and the bread that’s produced has nothing in it to say that it was dough, and what dough is like before it was put in. The product of something must always bare traces of the process of production as well as the elements used to produce it — the elements do not suddenly disappear in becoming the product. Something of the dough in its previous form must remain in the bread. To speak of production without saying anything about one of its elements except that it must be the case that it is there, is to butcher the product. If the mind doesn’t actively produce the whole of perception, and neither does it passively present it all, then we have to re-evaluate carefully how and what we ground perception in. If we are going to use both activity and passivity in conjuction, like Kant, then we need to satisfy both ends. If the perception is wholly created by the mind then we’re in a peculiar Idealism, if the perception is wholly received then we’re bordering a peculiar Realism. Kant attempts to reconcile both by establishing a harmony between two faculties, which are mostly active in the subject. The only passivity that Kant allowed was in the distinction between matter and form in one of the faculties — speaking here of passivity and activity in a transcendental sense as opposed to an empirical sense. The passivity arising from the matter provided by the manifold. If there is a passivity in this, then something must be given in its purity, in the way it is in itself, or else all passivity, whether a priori or not, transcendental or not, is not really a passivity. To be given something fully is not to act upon that which is given, there is a fundamental distinction between giveness and conditioning that can’t favour one or the other. Thus, even if someone conditions that thing given completely, whatever the result of that conditioning be, it cannot be such that it is wholly and antithetically different to what one started with. How far can activity go? To the loss of all traces of the thing acted upon? Even supposing the making of a camel out of mud possible through activity, the constituents of the camel cannot be completely distinct in kind from those of the mud, whether we view the mud as composite or simple. For then we must admit that realism does not even enter the picture, transcendentally or empirically, and Kant was fundamentally, or rather, as is more to his liking, transcendentally, an Idealist. A ‘creative’ Idealist, a predicate we once bestowed on Berkeley.
Consequently, either the notion of the in-itself and its appearance is faulty on the whole, or the distinction and its role needs re-thinking. All readings of the Kantian in-itself, whether positivist or negativist, must ask the question: can there be no trace of the manifold that he presumes to be the matter in the aesthetic faculty be found in the perception? Is the perceived wholly different from the thing in-itself such that it makes us crunch with our teeth when we’re forced to declare: “this is fully conditioned by my faculties, nothing of it remains”?
However, and to be fair to the arguments of Kant, his concern was whether one can ‘think’ the in-itself as opposed to establish ‘traces’ of it, granted and presupposing that we keep the distinction of course. What exactly Kant meant by thinking the in-itself, and how it orients around the knowing of the in-itself is subject to consideration — for granted that all thought is categorical (done in terms of the categories of the understanding concerning the relationship to the aesthetic intuition for the experience/peception of an empirical object). Is all thought and/or knowing categorical however, or could there possibly another mode of relation to the thing-in-itself?
…
What does one say…
… to a man whose interests do not consist, even mildly, of possessions, sex or esteem? Is such a being even possible?
If such a being is not possible, then what are our religious men and women?
The thought…
… of eternal essences, in fact its mere mention, is simply ugly and can, without our awareness, signal the imminent appearance of that wondrous phenomenon: guilt. A human soul cannot hold on to such thoughts and beliefs without laughter or misery.
The Dynamics between Man and Woman
There are still, even in this time and age, a vast number of women incapable of principles and of an answer to the two-fold question: “who am I and what do I want?” These women have only one answer and it lays in the man that enters her life and gives her his principles, or her principles according to him. It lays in the conviction with which he gives them to her. Man still commands woman, and it is perhaps because that particular woman desires his seed. Perhaps, the drifter form of woman, the woman without principles that are beyond and outside her counterpart, is the one that courts pregnancy, the one with the drive for pregnancy.
This dynamic relationship of command and obedience through conviction has been such a customary means of engagement between men and women that it has hardened into a drive within our women — it has become a hereditary trait in woman. Leaving open, of course, the possibility that there is no woman alive in this world that cannot be lead or made to obey if the conviction is strong enough. “If your conviction is weak, then stick to the women whose principles are weak or not present” suggests the Seducer. “Encourage her to find her principles, and if they coalesce with yours, great, if not, leave her be” sounds the gentle words of wisdom from the Lover.
Principles and convictions come hand in hand, like young feminine twins hopping subtly along and around each conversation, even around all forms of communication. The higher the principle, the higher the conviction — height is measured by the quantity of energy and time expounded on it. The result of these two is command and obedience, there is not one woman alive who is not ready to obey a man with principles stronger than hers. Quite often women lack principles altogether and it has been their source of misery. Now that woman is faced with the push – the command — and encouragement to find her own principles, now she must jump to the opportunity and define herself, as opposed to letting man define her, for whether she likes it or not, he will do so in his favour. What is there left from this but sublimation, but destruction, out of its ashes one hopes for a new set of principles.
The woman with the highest principles will be a force of nature, and mother to a beautiful human being. If she so chooses, or if nature has chosen her to do so. The mother with the highest principles is the highest mother.
Look you at some of these traits we once affixed to femininity:
gentleness, patience, kindness, care, quiet, compassionate and aware of others, motherly, timid, elegant, mannered, obedient and many more of a less fruitful nature i.e. yielding…
I need not say much more. Woman has been defined under the convenience of man and his needs, his desires, there’s not doubt about it, but then again who could blame man for doing so? This has been and is still the case on a high degree, even in our enlightened era. It is time for women to define themselves, and the only way to do so is strip bare all the customs and hereditary constraints that bind her, even those in the form of drives. This if and only if woman desires to express herself and be a person in and for herself. Perhaps and with the arising of this, man can begin to define himself too in his own image, and regardless of woman.
The golden question arising from this:
“Is this possible?”
My personal opinion in the matter without much thought into it, is at the moment, that it’s not possible. And I bemoan the pessimism, but I haven’t been able to think this whole thing through completely. How full can the thinking of a 22 year old man be? Unless, definitions take a new form, that are other than linguistic and grounded in the fluidity of the social realm of communication that is apparent to us now, this cannot be possible. Principles need to be established in forms other than the linguistic, and this is the hardest part of the endeavour.
…
Questions #1
Is it possible to think away the grammar of subject/predicate, and the metaphysical baggage it affords, and still be able to think in linguistic form? Or is such an endeavour meta-linguistic, after and other-than language, which leaves room for the possibility of another form of thought?
Jorge the Torch on women
When I was at a tender age my mother rested her weary eyes on my face and held them steady with a warm intensity befitting any loving mother, it was as if she was drinking my vision. She then began to bestow me with the following words of wisdom,
“Son, always remember, every woman is special.”
Meanwhile, her actions and decisions were of a different flavour. Later, I was to realize–she was lying to me.
But does…
… Kant’s thing-in-itself, the noumenon, as the negative and critical evaluation of knowledge, and as the crescendo of his life’s work, satisfy the sense of temporality and becoming that each and every human experiences in their daily life? Is Kant’s view of becoming complete? Or is it, as Nietzsche summarized, nothing but a hope and faith in truth as the unknown that we all hope to expand towards from our daily experiences, but never really reach? Is this empty negative noumenon satisfactory to the becoming of the human? For what possibly arises from this supposition and conclusion to Kant’s work?
….
Jason’s Judgment
A toast to the double genitive.
There has only even been one judgment for Jason: “sinner”. The foam of fury that accumulates at the corner of their mouths every time they utter his name has lead to the baptism: Jason the Hedon. He’s always been a peculiar person from birth, the black sheep, with a sharp wit and an unusual self-resolve and self-confidence — he’s always known how to make himself happy. Yet, these two abilities coupled together have been the source of both his pain and wonder. They label the former as pride and the latter as hedonism, as heresy, and both as sin. In his pride they hang their monstrous paws with a heavy torment, they hold their breath in anxiety as they await his fall — their holy book says so.
Jason’s notoriety grew throughout the years and the older he got, the more insipid he became to them, and the more wondrous as the black sheep that he is he became to those outside and sometimes inside their circle. He has now become a phenomenon, a test to their faith by his very presence. In the good ol’ days they would deal with someone like him by simply picking up a rubber and erasing him from the book, so to speak. In this commercial and media-infused world of ours, people are waiting with a camera and story, an unflinching capacity at reinterpretation, at the ready for such an occurrence — they, unfortunately, are wiser than that, and as fortune would have it, infinitely more stupid. They opt for the one thing they’ve lied to themselves about, they opt for a miracle, for the power of their faith and innocence — viewed from the distance, one can only smile and admire as much as feel nausea at such an endeavour. They set on Jason the Hedon, their most powerful item of faith; their glower, their staff of God. They give Jason exactly what he wanted, what he would have hoped for, they give him the attention and spotlight that when viewed from a certain distance, one can do nothing but admire and proclaim, “at last, a real miracle.”
Jason is to be visited by the holiest they possess, by the Pope himself in a direct flight from Rome. They hope to make him see ‘reason’, to make him reform and repent. They believe in the power of their almighty. They believe that ‘he’ can give him ‘faith’, that ‘he’ can ’save’ his soul.
The Pope arrives to Jason’s homely welcome, whereupon they converse for six hours over tea and lunch in the topics of life, death, god and the world. He sets his blue eye upon Jason for the last time, a subtle flicker is to pass through it almost to signal an impending tear of surrender and a feeling of what they call compassion. Jason doesn’t doubt that the Pope is a beautiful soul. A caring and motherly bosom emanates from the Pope’s eyes and Jason can only set forth his ironical smile in both admiration and an unyielding sadness at the sight. Breaking away from that motherly state, the Pope brushes aside his gaze as a fire ascends from the deep blue – he smiles. The smile is that befitting an imminent winner, a proud smile with a furrowed brow of anger that screams one word: irony. He addresses Jason for the last time,
“You and I managed, beautifully, to conclude that indeed you are not sure whether God does or does not exist, but it is more likely that he does and that you, with your set ways, impudently ‘hope’ that he does. Granted that he does, please grant me this, and you are likely to find out the truth with your death. What are you going to say and do when and if you appear naked in his presence before all your doings and intentions, with the heretical and sinful life you lead, with that incessant pride that blazes from your bosom, with that unflinching and unmalleable will?”
Jason’s head dropped, and the Pope thought himself victorious as a smile of relief began to ignite his face.
Jason, head down, eyes closed and a sigh of relief bubbling up to the top he thought to himself, “The stench of victory is like the sweet and sensuous odour of a wet and glorious vagina, everyone is ready and fully energized for the experience, men and women alike.”
He took a deep breath and slowly brought his head back up with a smile mixed with half-mockery and half-relief as the blazing pride in his chest began to utter, looking dead into the Pope’s cold and victory-infused gaze,
“I would bend down, take his hand and kiss it. Then I would thank him for giving me the strength to do what I did. For if I didn’t I would have never been happy, life for me would have been an utter misery, a complete torment. I would thank him for making me who I am. I would thank him for allowing and giving me the means to be happy — happy no matter what. Then, if he so wished, I would spend an eternity in hell tortured and in torment. For nothing is more valuable than happiness, and if God wished that I’d be not happy but miserable, then let the Devil and the pain he promises be my home, my eternal resting place, my loyalty.”
