Art of Flux Thinking

… if not fully, characterized by our incessant chasing of excitation of nerve-endings. Everything we do is aimed at some sort of excitement of the nerves. To be human is to wish to excite oneself, to raise oneself to a state other than that of rest, not to bring oneself back to rest… there is no bigger fallacy than the view that permits of the human a constant state of excitation in which the state of rest, or equilibrium, is where the goal of the individual lays. To give a drive to becoming that is aimed at equilibrium is the biggest mistake in the interpretation of becoming, the very interpretation implies an error in the interpretive organ, or body. It is in the absence of excitation, they say, that we find ourselves and our ultimate goal, that we find happiness. But what is this if not death or a morbid state — a state of decay to the body? How much can such a theory hate the body; how far does this hate go?

This view is broken and indicative of a life of anxiety and torment as its natural state of being, as the being in becoming, or as its normal state; but is every life like that, or is it only the broken life, a particular life, that is like that? Indeed excitation implies both torment and exhiliration, but not all excitation is only one or the other. In no way is the natural state one of excitation whose qualification is torment, or the equilibrium, the bringing back to null of that qualification; exhiliration is then not even included in this picture. They (torment and exhiliration) are both excitations, and the normal state is indeed itself an excitation, but there are degrees of excitation, the normal state is that of a weak excitation of the nerves. The higher this rises in the appropriate places and in the appropriate way for the body, the more a certain qualification of an excitation is made apparent. There are only degrees of excitation and each harbours a qualification; the absence of excitation is either a stupid linguistic and formal anomaly, or what we call death, the decay of the body.

The body pushes for a higher degree of excitation, at every possible opportunity where its energies afford it. It does not however, wish to maintain that degree, on the contrary, it wishes to tend towards it, little by little, but not maintain it in its qualification. The body wishes its natural state to tend towards an excitation with every expounding of energy towards that excitation, but not maintain the peak of that excitation; rather it attempts to subtly alter its natural state. Those who hate the body thought that because excitations always go back to the natural state, it must be the natural state that is where pleasure to the body comes from. It is the dropping back to the natural state that made the body feel good, and the excitation just made it feel bad, the excitation was a torment, it is never the rising of the degree of excitation. Foolish thinkers and haters of the body. If the whole body is always in a degree of excitation, whence arises this feeling of pleasure at going back to that degree after deviating from it, and whence arises the constant and incessant movement towards a higher degree? The body doesn’t hate itself, it just wants more of itself, it wants to increase itself. The body is invested in itself and its rising in degrees of excitation, it shows it strength, vigour and good health. A health body is an active and excited body, not a numb and borderline comatose body.

These doctrines that preach the numbing of the nerves will make of humans nothing but simulacra of living things, it will make us machines. 

I reject a philosophy of death and numbness from the start. If your Philosophy smells of death, take it with you and be on your way.

… like fire, it consumes everything it can digest and makes it a part of itself. All else cause it to die and force it into silence; but, look how much fire can digest.

Thought in language is like a simulation. It is distinct from activity, of movement in the sense of the body. Thoughts within language open up possible movements or possible activities, but nothing more. It must be distinct from activity. Activity is other than thought, even if preceded by it. 

Look at how many distinct forms of simulation there are. To simulate is to establish boundaries and rules for possible action. The moment that action is acted, or actualized, the fleeting nature of the action itself is revealed and the boundary holds only if the rules hold, and further if the actions hold. The boundary doesn’t fully determine the action while it is acted, some may find it soothing to say it doesn’t even determine it before the action in thought. The action rather determines and generates the boundary anew with each actualization, with each movement. It does this or it destroys it with a movement contrary to the boundaries, whose possibility is always implied. There can be no boundary big enough to encapsulate all possible action, because possible actions contradict each other or render each other superfluous. Thus, any complete theory of possible action is incomplete by virtue of its project and the means to it. Actions are limitless, not in thought, but in action — they are temporally bound. Thought can bring out this temporal boundary, which is no boundary at all, and in so doing reveal the lack of limit in an action. A limit can be drawn, but the temporal quality of actions rubs off all limits.

Language only organizes action, but it does not more. Action itself either maintains that organization or not.

… have a vested interest in language, because we seem to believe that without it we cannot speak, and without it we cannot think. We aggrandize language to such a degree that it becomes cancerous to us. It moves so far away from living and acting that we might as well be sitting on a chair for the rest of our lives with a pen to table scribbling things that will never be applicable to our world, things that would have no immediate effect on our surroundings. Such a philosophy is a con and brings out the mode of life that is decaying, philosophy in this moment is a doctrine of invalidity that prolongs invalidity instead of offering something else instead. A culture where language is the main form of communication, or even the centre of being, is a culture at the heart of an imminent ruin, or an impending transformation. Only philosophers can do this to a culture, only they can rape experience to the point where they become raped by it as if by accident. We betray our incapacity to live with our love for language and its mode of thought; it’s reproductive, preservative and ultimately useless mode of thought.

… Philosophy’s most ardent drives is the desire to look up the skirt of possibility. It is one of the maxims that it will go by for as long as there are human beings. Possibility has a seductive aroma, which the slightest hint sends the Philosopher into a mild frenzy they seem to call–wonder. Philosophy is wed to possibility, regardless of their usual concealment of this betrothal through their so-called desire for necessity. The subterranean corners of Philosophy is crawling with the possible and it is what motivates thought itself. Possibility is, one might say, the condition for the possibility of thought itself.

Reaction is the revelation, the disclosure, of somebody’s internal system, the foundations of their internal system. In reaction one’s internal system bubbles up to the top and leaves a foam that we call thought. This thought is the putting to question of that system, the doubting of that system — the imminent destruction of it. Reaction is perhaps indicative of an immense internal weakness and instability. This process of bubbling and foaming is the only way we can ever begin to think our situation in hope that we can move beyond it or be illuminated by it, or so it is assumed. To react is to think. If all thought is direction at possible movement, then actual movement will be the only cure to this process. Something that Wittgenstein intuitively grasped. A thought that is not reactive is not a thought but a movement. All movements are active, thoughts are simulations of movements by the possibility of many different movements at one particular time, this is accounted for by the human capacity to forsee events and then to forsee possible movements within events. In this sense a thought is always there in response to possible action due to the impeding situation one finds oneself in. Each reaction, each thought, is such that the action may be prolonged in an attempt to maintain the internal system one has stabilized. However, all thoughts presuppose in them the destruction of a system, especially when taken to their conclusion concerning action. The internal system is more easily stabilized perhaps by action without thought.  A thought is always against itself and reflective of itself — hence perhaps the incessant circularity of thouht. They naturally ward off and kill instinctual movements contrary to the internal system, at times prolong them to such a degree that the person’s mind collapses due to this warding off, and the flow that overwhelms it. Madness is the internal system’s incapacity to maintain itself in the face of the incessant need for movement in a particular direction. The repettition and constant coming back of that movement guarantees madness. The instincts, the movements, either collaborate with the mind or they destroy it using its own tools — thoughts.

Clarity is needed on what a thought is and how it relates to movements and instincts. I take instinct here as a particular movement towards something, an adhesion between movement and thing — thing here used in the broadest sense.

…

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? 

…

… 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?

….

… of the Philosopher’s sense of wonder is not without its place and ill-founded. Philosophy indeed begins with the state of wonder, with the state that is both a mixture of a bold squiggly line and a finishing dot, as well as the most distinguished feeling of eagerness. No, do not depreciate wonder to the simple theoretical state of “questioning” and thereby render it banal. The state of wonder is more than that, it is an active state, a sense. It is a sense that is propelled and propels one into questioning, it is something akin to a reaction as well as an action. It is a disease of sorts, but the most pleasant and affluent disease one that most of us wish to not be cured from – with the couple of exceptions, which saw in this wonder only a means to the consolation of life and suffering. In the state of wonder one is both pleasantly and momentarily paralyzed by the phenomenon that is associated with the wonder, as well as sent into an active state of desire for the possession of the phenonenon. Understanding is akin to possession, and the state of wonder being a feeling is also a motivator towards possession, it induces desire. To understand the wonderful has been Philosophy’s founding motivator. Understanding is activity, a drive. Albeit a very rare drive whose catalyst is wonder.