The theme of “the turn” in my last post (“Wiki activity”) is probably due to the fact that I watched Into the Wild last night. As I’ve said before I experience this film as a philosophical tragedy – or maybe just plain old tragedy.

I keep wanting to relate this myth to Rilke’s “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes”. Is it a different kind of tragedy – perhaps a feminine analogue? – or is it the same tragedy seen from another perspective?

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Alaska, bears, salmon, cold, white, north, hyperboreans… tragedy.

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I’ve created a new theme (the third this morning) in my wiki: North.

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I wish now that I’d taken a picture of the stained-glass salmon I gave a friend of mine. All I have is the plan I used to build it.

I indexed all the direct (and some indirect) references to Logos in my wiki.  (When prompted enter “generalad”.)

Then I indexed several key passages treating what I’ve called “solipse“, or what is traditionally called “spiritual childhood”, “idealism”, and “existentialism” – the dangerous temporary autism (a state in which a thinker needs parental guidance) through which all genuine philosophers seem inevitably to pass. I also included some other passages describing the “turn“, moving beyond solipse into encounter with the Other, or Thou.

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I opposed “solipse”, the philosopher’s autism, with “eclipse”, the complementary modern state (which corresponds with borderline disorder), a world founded on a materialist metaphysic, where self is nearly wholly determined by reflections of “itself” in the eyes of others. The universe is composed of objective entities, including the self who occurs within the universe. The turn is the discovery that idealism is not necessarily founded in the individual (or not solely in the individual), but rather in a culturally-sustained, but also culturally-active self, who is one scale in an infinite transcendent nesting of consciousness whose form or image is Logos. [I just happened upon a diagram I made during Christmas ’07 of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis of eclipse and solipse.]

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A simple definition of “metaphysics“: interpretation of phenomena which extends beyond the phenomenal. We do it constantly without noticing, for instance when we believe in past and future, or in space or material, or in the unconscious… The hardest metaphysical extension of all –  the riskiest, most vulnerable,  but most rewarding – is opening to the full belief in one another as true Other, as Thou: saying “Namaste” without reserve.

Do you think you can be “reborn” if you haven’t died? “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle” than for a man richly overloaded with history to pass into a new vision of life. The encumbrance of history is what Buddhists call “karma”.

Philosophy is much stranger than magic.

Magic preserves the mundane structures of life but paints the skin of things with outlandish attributes. Philosophy attacks and changes life’s fundamental structures, rendering life – as a whole and in detail – spontaneously, weirdly new.

For this reason magic is perpetually popular and philosophy is perpetually shunned.

Your world stands on your immediate experience in the same way that a tree stands on its trunk.

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From Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, 54:

What, at bottom, is the whole of modern philosophy doing? Since Descartes – and indeed rather in spite of him than on the basis of his precedent – all philosophers have been making an assault on the ancient soul concept under the cloak of a critique of the subject-and-predicate concept – that is to say, an assault on the fundamental presupposition of Christian doctrine. Modern philosophy, as an epistemological skepticism, is, covertly or openly, anti-Christian: although, to speak to more refined ears, by no means anti-religious. For in the past one believed in “the soul” as one believed in grammar and the grammatical subject: one said “I” is the condition, “think” is the predicate and conditioned – thinking is an activity to which a subject must be thought of as cause. Then one tried with admirable artfulness and tenacity to fathom whether one could not get out of this net – whether the reverse was not perhaps true: “think” the condition, “I” conditioned; “I” thus being only a synthesis produced by thinking. Kant wanted fundamentally to prove that, starting from the subject, the subject could not be proved – nor could the object: the possibility of an apparent existence of the subject, that is to say of “the soul,” may not always have been remote from him, that idea which, as the philosophy of the Vedanta, has exerted immense influence on earth before.

(In a preceding passage Nietzsche distinguished between a Germanic “Northern” Christianity and a Mediterranean “Southern” Christianity. When reading Nietzsche, I try to keep his attitude toward surfaces in the front of my mind. Unlike things, opposite things are sealed into the same skin and taken for identical. Especially notice his designations for “Christ”. “The Redeemer” and “the Crucified” should never be taken for synonyms. The person designated by “the founder of Christianity” is ambiguous; the singular article is plainly ironic.)

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Extending this thought: the substance of thinking – the language, the metaphors, the methods, the sense of relevance – where does that originate? There is a sense in which all things are founded on the immediacy of phenomena, but the questions of what elements of the phenomenal life-world are taken up and structured, and how and for what purpose the structuring is attempted and accomplished leads off beyond both the immediacy of phenomena and the (apparent) immediacy of the ego. It is clear that our “individuality” is articulated from a culture who transcends us. This realization, if it persuades you, cannot leave your morality intact. It changes absolutely everything.

Hiding sincerity behind irony – even hinting at irony – is often pure cowardice. Just fucking say it and be out there. Shelter your own kind.

“You do not know men. Men are difficult to understand if we want to be just. Do they know themselves? Can they explain themselves to themselves? Most of those who have deserted me perhaps would, had my luck held out, never have suspected their defection. There are vices and virtues born of circumstance.” – Napoleon

One must learn to love. — This is our experience in music: we must first learn in general to hear, to hear fully, and to distinguish a theme or a melody, we have to isolate and limit it as a life by itself; then we need to exercise effort and good-will in order to endure it in spite of its strangeness, we need patience towards its aspect and expression, and indulgence towards what is odd in it–in the end there comes a moment when we are accustomed to it, when we expect it, when it dawns upon us that we should miss it if it were lacking; and then it goes on to exercise its spell and charm more and more, and does not cease until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers, who want it, and want it again, and ask for nothing better from the world. It is thus with us, however, not only in music: it is precisely thus that we have learned to love everything that we love. We are always finally recompensed for our good-will, our patience, reasonableness and gentleness towards what is unfamiliar, by the unfamiliar slowly throwing off its veil and presenting itself to us as a new, ineffable beauty–that is its thanks for our hospitality. He also who loves himself must have learned it in this way: there is no other way. Love also has to be learned.

(Nietzsche, The Gay Science)

The the word “text” comes from the Latin verb texere. The word “text” is a thread stretches back into Rome, and on further back to where our collective memory fails. Whenever we speak we knit distant, ancient places into ordinariness, and that is miraculous. We don’t need invisible forces to account for collective being.

The words around memory are beautiful if you look at them closely. “Remember”, “Recollect”, “Recall”. The Greek word “anamnesis”, to unforget, is an interesting word to think about. I like to think of unforgetting as reordering reality according to its experiential proximity, being faithful to what is, and to the truth of what is closest and what is further out. Forgetting is allowing distant derivations to conceal what is nearest and most immediate. Explanation is often forgetting.

Sometimes we think in order to forget, but sometimes we think in order to unforget. The test: when you are finished, can you stop thinking it and simply see it?

Sometimes I think Charlie Kaufman is a better interpreter of Nietzsche than Walter Kaufmann:

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Exhibit A:

…Then, however, there happened that which in this astonishing long day was most astonishing: the ugliest man began once more and for the last time to gurgle and snort, and when he had at length found expression, behold! there sprang a question plump and plain out of his mouth, a good, deep, clear question, which moved the hearts of all who listened to him.

“My friends, all of you,” said the ugliest man, “what think ye? For the sake of this day — I am for the first time content to have lived my entire life.

And that I testify so much is still not enough for me. It is worthwhile living on the earth: one day, one festival… has taught me to love the earth.

‘Was that — life?’ will I say to death. ‘Well! Once more!’

My friends, what think ye? Will you not, like me, say to death: ‘Was that — life? …well! Once more!’ ” —

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Exhibit B:

To lie about subjective truths: that is the easiest kind of lie to pull off, and it has the deepest and most devastating consequences. The denial of the existence of something shared and precious – and precious for the very fact that it was shared – is to die alive. To die this death, but then to return to life and to trust again is pure recklessness.

Idealism (the recognition that the seeming solidity of this world is entirely founded on geist – spirit, mind) seems at first to offer a sort of solipsistic refuge, a sort of artificial autism for those who have been hurt too much in their contact with others. But if you are existentially scrupulous you’ll notice some anomalies. First of all, you never lose the impulse to speak about what you’ve seen. You cannot shut up – you just can’t. You’ll also discover that the one pain you wanted most to go away increases alarmingly: your words are unwelcome. You are turned away at every door. You lose the ability to remain blind to the fact that people prefer their images of you to you.

In theory, so what? But the immediacy of truth cuts straight through the theory, and it demands to know: Why this hurt? Where is it coming from?

Would you like to know where all this leads, so you can make an informed decision on whether to turn around?

One day, if an idealist has adequate courage and honesty, he will be forced to recognize that love is always and without exception rooted beyond the phenomenal (that is, in the metaphysical). We cannot dispense with the metaphysical without losing our capacity to care. We cannot protect ourselves and remain fully alive. And at this point, the one who meant to armor himself with spirituality discovers to his horror that he not only lacks armor, but also his skin. He is right out there, exposed, stinging, feeling everything and he has no choice in the matter.

Idealism – even existentialism – will not protect you for long. Find some other strategy – drugs, entertainments, a hectic and numbing lifestyle. Lose yourself in phenomena. For the love of God, don’t try to transcend this world if you’re seeking to escape it.

Please, be careful.