Speech in Praise of the Thinker
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Let’s give a toast to the debris of inquisition, a toast; a toast to the curiosity of the child, a toast. All of you raise your glasses in the air, not one of you should have them down; that’s more like it, raise them for the thinker. Praises upon praises to the thinker, praises for the sacrifices he makes, for the pain he withholds, for the selfishness that drives him and for the temporary salutations he waves to the creaking wheel that is our currently mal-social world. So often we praise the non-praiseworthy that one begins to wonder when we are going to awake from our numbing torpor and see the world for what it truly is. Yes, yes, I can hear you thinking my fellow readers. Waiting for me to slip up and reveal something through these words, so that you can jump at the opportunity to strip me bare. You’re thinking aloud my friends, “realism, he’s a realist, quickly let’s bear that in mind so that we can bring out everything that is epistemologically wrong with realism and demote his words into nothing”. Ah, my brothers and sister, my words are already nothing, what can you do to them that they have not done to themselves already – by simply being what they are.
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Words are nothing. What a monstrous proposition; yet we Epistemologists would kick heels, in earnest or in angst, at the harsh sound of the runny-on-the-tongue word: Nominalism. Let’s look at it a little closer, get out our philosophical bifocals so-to-speak: ‘words’ ‘are’ ‘nothing’. What are ‘words’, and what is ‘nothingness’ in this context, the shrewd Philosopher would ask; and how do these two relate to one another? The relationship needs to be one of a proud synonymy because the boundaries of nothing are much too thin; either it is something or it is not. Something or nothing is the limit of this abstract term; letting aside the notion of everything right now for that would send us on a metaphysical journey. Oh, what an insufferable tangent we fell into, what a trap. You must see it, don’t you? The metaphysician’s trap; it’s so elegant, so luring, like a good woman! Alas, like a Venus flytrap – what an ironic name for such a fascinating little plant. The philosopher is an insect. A multi-legged, multi-eyed insect that just cannot see itself, it cannot see where it is stepping. It creeps slowly looking for its next meal; on all the wrong places. Quick! This insect says, quick! – there’s a nice little place where we can find our next meal, our next self-satisfaction and justification. Look at how beautiful it looks – how vagina-shaped – surely there is bound to be some little insects there we can devour, some food, some self-justification! This foolish insect, it can see no further than what it sees, it cannot even see itself. It is blinded by itself, by its self-justifying instinct, but also the beauty and smell of the Venus flytrap. Eat! Eat! My philosophers eat away at the end of your day. Eat at yourselves, but never see yourselves; no, you must not! How dare you even attempt! Blasphemy! Who knows what’s lurking inside you! We don’t want that! Eat instead; move closer to that beautiful, vaginal, Venus flytrap that’s just too much for your indulgent instinct. That sensuous of all seductions awaits you! That seduction of having to answer everything, of having to account for everything – of having to justify everything, even yourself! What pity, what woe awaits thee my philosopher! What misery! As Nietzsche would say, “Enough! – bad air! bad air!”
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Oh, how we infect the air. How we move from the top down; or is it bottom up? – I forget. The biggest mistake a philosopher made was label himself as such, and not even philosophize! What’s that? Do I hear you asking: “so what is philosophizing then?” How impudent of you! You know not what you practise!? How indulgent of you, that you should ask this question; what a thinker you are my good friend! Worthy of admiration – you know not what thinking is. Alright, alright, joking aside; if that be a joke. There was once a man who wrote, “No thought has frightened me so far. Should I ever come across one I hope I will at least have the honesty to say: ‘This thought scares me, it stirs up something else in me so that I don’t want to think it.’” What a thinker! Let’s raise our glasses to him! To Johannes, everyone! To Johannes de Silentio; the silent one! This thinker who fears no thought, to this philosopher par excellence. Perhaps his incognito made this thinking power easier for him; but who am I to judge? Think my thinker, my philosopher; thinking is all that is asked of thee. But how little does thee thinketh? Metaphysics is the only escape for the thinker who’s afraid to think of himself. It is Suicide, non-other than that Venus flytrap. It is the only way out for a thinker who cannot think to the extent where thought is directed at itself. The Venus flytrap is the only escape for that insect that’s too indulgent for its own good. Let it die I say! Let that degenerating life-form perish, it is the course it has embarked upon – let it do what it set out to do! Need I spell it out for you? How dreadful, I actually worry that you won’t understand. How dreadful that I have to force the birth of a thought, and risk damaging it in the attempt – woe to the stupidity of modernity, woe to it! Brace yourself my thinker, brace yourself for my exclamation: you haven’t had a thought in your whole life! For your thoughts haven’t been your own; no thought that is not self-reflective is. Your thoughts have not been your own, my thinker. They have been manifestations of an instinct, an instinct that has been decaying you without your knowing! The instinct of self-indulgence, of self-justification, of self-preservation! How stupid that life would breed a decaying life-form that is able to preserve itself, and multiply! How stupid indeed. What would allow life such an undertaking; what would push life in such a direction? Yet, not many thinkers have had the courage to think this thought through: not even our hero Johannes! Not many I say because I can think of one who thought it, but did not given it an end. That great epochal paradox, Nietzsche, that great villain of all that is human; he thought it. But how far did his thought go? How far before his untimely death? What stopped him from thinking this through to the end? – From grounding the whole of Epistemology and Metaphysics, those two wenches of philosophical thought, to the psyche and moreover, life-itself and its historical endeavour. Sympathy to monsieur though, we must show sympathy! After all it is not easy living alone and against the whole world, against even those Andreas-Salomés who you desperately yearn for and love, but whom so desperately harbour apathy for you.
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Lou Andreas-Salomé: a one in a million wench; a woman that justifies woman herself so that all men can see her in admiration, and fear. But, most importantly they can rejoice in the hope that there is truly a woman that glorifies all women. The kind of woman who places her hand in a fist and exclaims, “Yes, we are different (men and women); but look, we can be the same too, should we deem it prudent. Woman is what she wants to be, and no man can categorize her!” Salomé was a woman with all the attributes of a man. She was Nietzsche’s only hope for a normal life; his only hope for love. What a woman he chose for such an endeavour! She was a woman who had taken the word normal and burned it to the point where no trace of it was left in her life. How destined they were for each other: the loneliest man in the world falls in love with the most abnormal woman in the world – a match made in heaven! A reality forged in hell! How necessary this was though, for the growth and flourishing of this man’s thought; for him to break out of the cocoon and flourish, spread his wings into an amazing writer and thinker. This little period of great spiritual hell shaped him. It defined him! It made him explode with greatness! His loss of faith in friendship, in love, in humanity; these shaped him into the great thinker that he became – the great villain of the world, but the only way he could say something worthy of saying. The only way he could offer an antithesis. It grew out of him, out of the hell and mess that had become his soul. How mandatory this is for the thinker, for him to let go of that last bit of weight that holds him down and doesn’t allow him to fly – to break out of that insufferable cocoon that entraps him; to awaken from torpor and redeem himself. In this redemption he failed though, he held on too tight, and instead of flying he tore his wings and entered despair and bitterness. This however didn’t stop him from saying what he had to say, it only stopped him from happiness. He still said what he had to say but with a turn that caused him to be doubted. A turn that was self-destructive to his endeavour – a self-destruction that you would expect from a heartbroken man. The question must be brought from the depths, “would he have written Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Genealogy of Morality without Salomé’s rejection?” Controversially, one must answer – “no”! He went from damaged to bitter, instead of damaged to fixed! In this damage was his production at its highest, without it he would have stayed mediocre. Ineffective. Thus Spake Zarathustra and the Genealogy of Morality are manifestations of this spiritual hell.
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This man thought. He was perhaps one of the few people in history that thought to the point of breakdown; he thought of everything and left nothing out, because his investment in anything disappeared with that last wench. His self-indulgence left him; his self-satisfying instinct had marinated itself by eating away at itself with its own experiences. Salomé’s disappointment was his making; this heartbreak was his making, or arguably his breaking. What a necessity this was though, there was no way out of it – as if it was preordained! He caused it on himself in order to prepare himself for what was to come! How much he knew of this is questionable, and perhaps superfluous. Nonetheless, he was thought productivity of the highest caliber. He was productivity of thought in its finest and most affluent expression! We must learn from such a man. Philosophy is no easy task; it is not like other professions – any man seeking to make Philosophy less than what this crazy man did is doing nothing but mockery! He is raping Philosophy! More is demanded. We must provide it. Thought is either taken to its depths or it is not thought at all. If thought is to be undertaken, then one must be wedded to it; he must be possessed by it. He must be the daredevil of the mind; the one that jumps. He must be this or else he is nothing; nothing but another expression of the forces that have a tight hold on him, and use him to their own ends: custom, morality, community, state, the hive. He becomes nothing but a drone, a little bee that gathers such sweet honey that he will never taste. Alas, he is less than nothing, a coward! Most people don’t try or claim to jump; but this make-believe daredevil, this philosopher that doesn’t think, he kicks up a big fuss about jumping but never does! Instead he turns back, and what does he do; this foolish being? He chooses the Venus flytrap instead. These admirable insects, we always expect more from them, these thinkers of the world, these shapers of it. We give our lives for most of them; we follow them blindly into any abyss they desire for us! We follow the customs they erect, the sickness they allow to enter those customs, we sacrifice our lives and happiness for them – we are their children, we love them unconditionally. The least they can do is think properly! So a toast ladies and gentlemen! A toast to the thinker! There are so few left, they demand a good toast! They also deserve it! They deserve our love too!
Aphorism #1: Questioning
We Philosophers are insatiable creatures. We feed on enquiry; the one and perhaps only thing that nourishes us is ‘a question’, or questioning. We feed on asking, and asking, and asking some more. The more we ask, or ‘can’ ask, the more hungry we get for asking. To what end? Our hunger seems like a manifest proposition ad infinitum. Yet our asking is not without reason, we are seduced. Seduced by the very nature of a question, the power it holds by the delusion it offers, that sweet honey at the end of every question whose smell is enough to send us into frenzy: the answer. The potential answer has a hold on us that no analogy is fervent enough in its application, elegant enough in its meditative import or correct enough in its standing to adequately depict this powerful bond of ours. If viewed from the outside one cannot but admire this madness that has befallen us, this endless desire to ask and be driven to the asking by the promise of an answer. To the Philosopher an answer stands as a light at the end of a tunnel promising salvation, promising nourishment and promising a telos to all enquiry. No ‘true’ Philosopher asks without wishing to find an answer, for by his very nature a Philosopher wants to know, alas, he needs to ‘know’. The relationship between the question and answer is the Philosopher’s lungs, the question is the air he breathes in and the answer is the preservation, the equilibration of his state of mind, the satisfaction and fulfilment thereof.
All enquiries, of one form or other are driven solely by the need for an answer; it is the answer that seduces a Philosopher, not the question. The question is nothing but a vehicle, a momentary lapse, a medium to unity. Nonetheless, those of us who are Philosophers at heart, and not frogs of the swamp who wish to strip life from its greenness, are driven by a desire to understand, a yearning to be one with that which the question directs itself towards; the answer provides the possibility for this unity. No lover of knowledge asks because it pleasurable to do so, rather he asks because it is pleasurable to understand, it is pleasurable to be close to that which the question directs itself towards, to be one with that item of enquiry via the salvation provided by the answer. The answer is the primary drive of the Philosopher, and the answer is nothing but a manifestation of understanding, a manifestation of being close with that which the answer concerns, that which the answer favours. We favour the question for the answer it produces, but we give it no more value than that; our favouring, our value is directed always at the understanding, the oneness, the unity – the answer. Is there an end for us, or are we born specifically for this purpose alone, for this silent suffering of never being close enough to that which we require unity with? Is this our a priori; the tendency of an infinite regress of questioning without ever attaining the unity promised by an adequate answer?
