February 27, 1992 5pm
I am spending far too time on this, to the detriment of my education. Yet I can console myself with the somewhat self-serving justification that surely this is the end of my education (and those who understand me will know that “self-serving” is no criticism). Yet reading Kaufmann's critique of Nietzsche is a powerful stimulant. He is such an academic, not that he is not clear and pleasant, but that he makes the act of clarification pleasant.
February 28, 1992
Back again, trying to deal with this oppressive sense of tension that has been growing in me since I began these essays -- God, only 11 days ago. A thought struck me on my way back from the library today, which I shall explain before blurting out. It is tied into an thought that came to me a few days after that Nietzsche lecture, which is that modern genius is neither born nor made; he is provoked. The sense of unbearable tension I feel is of the dichotomy between truth and individuation. We start life with opinions; the growth of the philosopher is the discarding of opinion for the sake of truth, which to a great degree is the discarding of erroneous self. Some psychologists would say that bias is the obscuring of self, but if self is an amalgam of thought, the discarding of bias is to some degree the negation of prior thought, and so the negation of prior character. The fixing of reason on the throne of the individual requires many banishings; the kingdom may be purer, but it is necessarily sparser. In other words, quality (which is rarity and appreciation) replaces quantity, hierarchy replaces egalitarianism, and sovereignty democracy. The tension I feel is probably the immense struggle of bias being displaced by the machine I have set in motion, the machine of reason. Like a plague, like a recession, it is weeding out the unconsciously unfit, and my self is devolving to my critical conscious, at the expense of my often-muddled unconscious. It feels dangerous, simply; there is little of the exhilaration I expected. Reason is the mountain-top, bias the snowy sides; by calling for truth I am triggering the avalanche from on high. The fear I feel is that my self entire may be swept away, the possibility of madness and Nietzschian inscrutability. Am I fit to survive the test I desire? Is it possible to relinquish the test in the midst of thunder? I am in the arena, the doors are locked and the crowd gone; it is only myself and my bias. Reason is the absolute; if it cannot survive, it will be destroyed absolutely.
But perhaps it is like the end of any addiction; it is pleasant to contemplate but hell to endure. The criteria for the revaluation of bias has been given to me by the principles I have recognized, but hitherto the cauterizing has all been external; Objectivism has given me the means to evaluate the world, but as an artist, the world within must eventually stray into the firing line. Whether I man the guns or duck them is becoming unclear to me -- what part of me is where is muddled. I cling to the shadow of reason, I demand its protection, but what if the armour turns on me and finds me shell-less and vulnerable? That which does not kill us makes us stronger, but still there is always the possibility of death. I feel on the verge of tears half the time, the other half is tension; it is a miserable existence. The utopia I've made is demanding its passport, and I am unsure of my documentation. I look back on my life and I see only the boredom, the frustration; the sunnier climes seem mere vacations and abdications. And a truth is growing within me, the recognition that most of the frivolities of genius are attempts to escape the demands of thoughts run wild, to escape the judgment so glibly passed on the rest of the world. Nietzsche's illnesses and his weakness with people strike me as entirely natural, as does his final escape from his criteria. This is the suffering of all true art, all unprecedented thought. At least, it better be. Otherwise I am only an embittered hypochondriac.
February 29, 1992 10pm
Things seem to be lightening; perhaps it was only chemical after all. Nietzsche's answer to psychology seems eminently sensible; sometimes we are just sick. Call it a happy cold.
Anyway, while doing the washing-up after dinner with Niara, an idea came to me, not with the flash and pomp of late (which may be just the desire to strike sparks from ignorance) but with a certain calmness. Here it is: Satan is the metaphor for the Endless Revolution. Christianity was also hated by Marx because Satan embodied the notion of the futile revolution, the revolution against reality. God was as real to Satan as reality and man's nature were to Marx. The metaphor of Eden lies opened in all its intestinal glory: worship is the childhood of man, Satan is the principle of futile rebellion; the tree was the knowledge of good and evil separate from God and reality -- a man-made good and evil (say, the evils of class or wealth), the sweat of the brow, murder and the alienation from morality is the state of man in perpetual revolution. What was that saying of communism? -- he who does not toil shall not eat. The enshrinement of the worker is the echo of the curse of Adam to eternal labour. Eve's pain of childbirth was the curse of God, and violence is the midwife of the revolution. The revolution must give birth to man in the image of Christ to succeed, but Christ was crucified, and so must man be in the image of the divine. Why is it lapsed Catholics run to communism? Marx, you crafty old devil, you built bureaucracy in the shadow of the altar! America had no need for the permanent revolution because the constitution did not rebel against man's nature -- it was not essentially neurotic, as one who lacks the serenity to accept what he cannot change. Marxism saw the nature of man and could not stand it! This was the root of Lenin's pathology -- if man is not fit to be moral then he must be destroyed -- but he made morality impossible and antithetical to man through both his premises and his executions. Man demands rewards related to his productivity -- none of it! Man does not live for the unknown -- be they neighbours or state -- none of it! Man requires the freedom to choose his own goals, the freedom to error, to succeed by his own criteria, to live in the light of his own reason -- none of it, says Lenin, you are ours now, and those that disagree are to be shot for the good of the premise that man shall live for his neighbour because we would rather lose man than what we value. Never mind the value of your neighbour, never mind the your own values, never mind that you strive for immortality, there is to be none of it because we are rebelling against the nature of man and if you remain a man you are finished.
Milton saw it, long before anyone else -- he knew what Satan rebelled against -- not against tyranny, not against evil, but against an entity he recognized as the good. That is the sin of pride -- rebellion against reality, rebellion for the sake of rebellion, rebellion in the belief that reality can be changed by the act of revolt, the imposition of the desire. The existentialists too, they knew the perpetual revolt, but at least they knew it was futile. Surely that is the principle behind the demands for statism, for welfare, when the evidence is abundant enough that it swells the ranks of the poor. No, there are no questions, because “somehow” it will work, we are told, because reality waits upon desire. The fate of the poor is unimportant, because in the perpetual revolution it is the desire for change that will bring it about. And somehow, if welfare did work -- against all rational principles -- then the ethic of the permanent revolution would have to reverse itself and deify the rich. What it seeks to avoid is predictability -- cause and effect is rationalism, not revolution. The only thing permanent is change -- eternally. Modern subjectivism is required to give the revolution an out, to allow it to never be called into account, because the moment it is called into account is the moment that it recognizes that there are some things that cannot be rebelled against! -- and that moment is when the prospect of the all-embracing, endless revolution collapses to the ground, a stinking cloud fleeing the rising girders of light. Virtue is resistance to all -- including the criteria for transcending resistance! But such criteria is virtue itself, the means to effective action (and all that means) -- the permanent revolution must be futile, or it is no longer permanent. “Rebel without a cause” is a misnomer -- the cause is clear: the abolition of cause and effect. But a man who rebels against physical reality is a madman; he walks off cliffs and grows no crops. The eternal revolution must be social -- what did Satan do -- try to change the orbits of the planets? No -- he went straight to man. One cannot talk a rock out of the embrace of the earth, but man -- ah, how easily man can be talked -- or forced -- into betraying his essential nature. The revolutionary builds his world on the slipperiness of men's souls -- but reality does not change, nor does the nature of man despite his choices -- “A” remains “A”. You can force the peasants onto collective farms, but no power on earth can change the seasons -- or the peasant's desire to plant in the right ones. You can starve a man, but you cannot force him to live on air. That is why the eternal revolution must rule people -- not because it allows him to change the possible, but because due to the malleability of men's souls it wards off the inevitable revenge of the possible. That is why controls always lead to more controls -- because the first controls reveal the wishfulness of the think-ing. You can crush people with taxes, but you cannot prevent them from shopping in the States -- or if you can, you cannot prevent them from quitting their jobs, or if you can, then you cannot force them to work, or if you can, you cannot force them to think. From impositions to guns is only a matter of degree.
March 2, 1992 1am
One of the greatest dangers arising from the identification of self-interest with evil is the appeal to self-interest that often accompanies the attempt to turn men from evil. All men act from self-interest, say the cynical, yet like the equation of selflessness with the good it is a concept that demands critical examination. The premise “do unto others etc.” may well be the case when a brainless thug starts a fight in the midst of a rational discussion -- he could be wishing that others would do unto him as he does unto them -- lacking the brains for reason, he would prefer that others settle the fight by force so that he could participate as an equal. “Do unto others” serves the rational well -- but then they are not the ones who need it, since they already prefer reason to force. I watched “Europa Europa” earlier tonight, and I was struck by the emptiness and pathology of the Nazi's -- surely they created a world where they were king, a world where the obedience was the rule of law and violence the law of life. Mindless creatures love to be told what to do -- doing unto others means telling them what to do.
Acting on one's real self-interest is one of the hardest goals to achieve -- it requires great knowledge as to the nature of man and the values resulting therefrom. To say that evil is selfish is only the outcome of a far greater crime -- the belief that the self can be benefited by evil (which is another surfacing of original sin). The self-destructiveness of evil men cannot be called self-interest. To be continued when I don't have to get up so early.
March 3, 1992 10pm
That was it. Those 24 years -- one less that I've been alive. And in the time it took for me to stop drooling saliva to stop thinking it, Western civilization was destroyed. 1890-1914. A simple nutshell, but then dates are always metaphors for change. This horde of infertile devaluers who thrashed through the Trees vacated by the rationalists in the name of equanimity and open-mindedness, who were hunted on the open fields of classicism by the myths of metaphors and the priests of the unconscious. Why, oh why! was the battle given up with so little fight? Why did the advocates of reason crawl into their shelters stripped of the laughter that would have exposed the wounds of their enemies? Why, I ask? But of course the answer is simple. Because they were the worser poets! Because they had stripped the plains of reason and in came the mountains and valleys of metaphors, infinitely lusher and buried under the prose of passion. Man's heart could not see in the light of their reason, and rather than face the pitiful sight of passion waddling around with its hands outstretched, bleating, they enshrined the blind beast on the golden throne of man, the beast that knew nothing about gold but that it glittered and could be granted. What do people remember of the industrial revolution? The blind satanic elephants of Dickens. He was the spokesperson for the only century of light mankind has ever known, a century turned dumb in the face of feeling. He spoke as the average understood, appealing to their instinct that the destruction of privilege was also the destruction of martyrdom -- and what Christian can survive that? How easy to be poor, to be downtrodden -- if that makes one moral. Take the restrains from top and bottom and the middle empties in fear, because it is no test to be poor or to be privileged (and if any think me facetious, I have been both) -- the test comes with reason, for the reason that opens the wall to the sky also demands that one climb or fall. All stasis is a comfort to the frightened -- the stasis of both privilege and deprivation had comforts that nurtured mankind into eternal childhood. Stasis is the cementing of the distance between high and low, with no uncomfortable movement to disturb the complacency of the relationship. Reason demands motion -- set loose among self-caged men it draws only resentful stares. To teach men of their cages, that is the first job of reason; without it all else is insult. To leave a single man in a single cage -- be he suspended from a mountain-top far out of sight -- is to limit the reach of the infinite good. No cages, no force, no irrationality -- leave one -- leave taxes, leave torture, leave tariffs -- and the kink in the knitting unravels the sweater. Inconsistency, that's what crucified the modern world. It's so much easier to be consistently irrational, but it is more attractive (being an absolute) than the sometime demands of hedged integrity. Go back and check, check absolutely, and iron out the kinks. It is all, or it is nothing.
March 4, 1992 4pm
I am fearful of succumbing to the “demands” of genius. I feel more impatient, I feel I have put myself in quite a state. But state is not the right word -- rather I feel I have put myself in motion. I am climbing the heights of knowledge -- hitherto it has been arduous -- now something within me seems to be sucking me up, I am both climbing the mountain and understanding it, and so the climb becomes less important. Objectivism was a step to myself, to the power of my mind. It is the criteria for judgment, but it is not my judgment. I feel again in a dangerous state -- I had to stop for a moment and think of madness, the incompatibility of my state of mind with life in general. At some level I reject utterly the genius as madman (remember Aristotle) but at an another I know what it means. I am becoming less prone to making generalizations and becoming more obsessed with the particulars -- but one cannot stay sane on particulars. The question of what to do and how to live is becoming less important in the face of what is the essence of this or that. Perhaps it is because I am so in opposition to the modern world that I feel so alone in my thoughts. Even if there are those who agree with me, there will always be a fundamental difference, the difference of acceleration and the panic of a mind overheating with exultation and exhaustion. I cannot stop thinking. Self-righteous unreason is so prevalent (Bourassa today in the paper: “Nothing is impossible in politics -- Satanism) that I am more and more uncomprehending of my fellow man. To look at the paper and not recoil in horror, to evade the fact that we are self-destructing as a civilization, to be told that fact and say we will muddle through in defiance of all precedent and reason -- what can draw a man into such a state of self-willed blindness? What can I say to such men? And the question of what in me is generating all these thoughts? It is hidden behind the mask of the first cause -- I have no right to question my intelligence, no right to say: whence comest thou? The feeling of possession is constant, because I am thinking, but I have not discovered how to think. I was talking to Nicole today, and how was my break? A break it was (and a fundamental one), but not a rest. I try to explain too quickly, it is all jumbled, even to myself. The alienation of incommunicative information, of only being able to type, not express, and no-one taking me seriously if I tried, is hell. The lives of detail and planning, the lives all around me, with heads in the sand would require a lessening, a burrowing to talk to. And what if someone disagrees with me? To take the Freudian path and widen the road to only one-way traffic is reprehensible, but my explanations are so scattered that dis-agreement is both infuriating and frustrating. To avoid the sin of Lenin, of unifying belief with belligerence, is the fundamental trap of the philosopher. I must stick to my unifying values if I am to emerge from this unscathed -- or at least with that which is whole remaining whole. Now the question remains -- if I could change my path, would I? That question must wait. I have rehearsal.
March 7, 1992 4:30pm
Spent the afternoon with Isiah Berlin, who is the archetypal VOR, or Voice of Reason. Strange how rationality is seen in this context as the calm mediator between -- what? Two extremes? Question: How do you calmly mediate between two extremes? First Answer: By eliminating them -- rationally, of course. Second Answer: (gleaned from the Academic Handbook) By noting stimulating countercurrents, examining the development of each perspective, regretting excesses and consistency, lamenting the absence of the “larger picture”, and the substitution of banal analysis for rigorous passion, intelligence for integrity.
A thought struck me on the way back from the library, about the relationship between revolution and rape. In an old John Fowles novel, The Collector, a crawling nonentity wins a lottery and goes about chloroforming and imprisoning a girl he has an attachment for in the blind hope that through exposure will grow appreciation. This is very close to the revolutionary ethic of forcing an ethic down disobedient throats, and the parallels in thinking are identical. As Alexander Herzen noted, the “new” sacrifice in the 19th century was the sacrificing of man to ideals (which was scarcely new, given Christianity). This kind of imposition is the same in both Fowles' hero and the strained revolutionary -- the question is whether these men hold their ideals as worthy of sacrifice, or sacrifice as the only worthy ideal. Rape primarily an act of violence; degradation of both parties is the end, sexuality is only the means. Could it be that the revolutionary holds the revolution as a means to the end of sacrifice? Certainly in thinking of Russia this holds true -- Lenin and company quickly shed their ideals on achieving power, and those ideals they allowed to continue had the common effect of sacrificial destruction. One can think of contemporary welfare in this context -- all criteria of sympathy for the poor would surely have by now been reevaluated in the face of their growing numbers and bitterness. If sympathy is not the motivation, then what is? It is very sad to see the dreams of the mixed-economists, the Keynsians who thought that the imposition of government controls would smooth out the blips of capitalism and guarantee wealth and plenty for all. Now such controls are seen as the last bulwarks against impending chaos -- how far has the dream fallen! The elevation of the poor over the rich is only a metaphor for the elevation of incompetence over competence (not that all poor are incompetents -- or all rich productive -- but the language used implies such an inversion; from each according to his ability etc.) It is this inver-sion of values that the statists seek -- the degradation of value by means of non-value -- welfare is only the means. The fact that capitalism is the only proven means of allowing the industrious poor to elevate them-selves is not the essential criteria, cry the socialists -- what of the poor unwilling (usually called “unable”) to elevate themselves? These are surely a tiny minority, yet it is this minority that gains the greatest attention and is used as a club against society at large. Why? If human welfare is their demand, then surely they would be advocates of capitalism. Their refusal to recognize laziness, parasitism and downright evil is part of their inversion of values -- capitalism recognizes and rewards rationality and productivity, so for the socialist's criteria to be valid they must claim that human beings in general are not capable of rationality. By denying general rationality, they are required to seek sanction through force -- for surely those incapable of rationality cannot be persuaded by reason. Yet even if the welfare of the incompetent is their cause, then by what criteria do they suffer the present Canadian system? Poverty has been increased, general incomes have declined, and the opportunities for the poor to elevate themselves have disappeared rapidly. Obviously the socialists require the presence of the incompetent poor to justify their system (and the more the better), but that is no answer, since their stated goal is to end poverty. What, then, does their stated goal mask? To answer that, we must ask: what would the socialist do if (against all reason) poverty were eliminated under his system? The holy trinity of the politically correct -- sexism, racism and homophobia -- is now the new cause in the fight against human rights. Each of these can neatly be played off against the other -- witness the rejection of the painting “Woman with Bananas” by Concordia (painted by a woman but deemed racist, for no “black woman” would paint such a portrait), or the blind spot generated by the sexist depictions of women by black art-ists. What is important is to find the underdog -- poverty has become embarrassing, for too many questions can be raised in light of its increase, so the trinity must be invoked, even if its demands are contradictory each other -- but the fundamental question is: why is the underdog so important? Poverty has not been solved, it has been increased, yet it is no longer a pressing concern -- why? Since it was a concern, and it has spread, why has the focus shifted? Quite simply, because the socialist's motives would become too clear if they pursued that fight any longer. Their answers to the problem of poverty (training programs, increased welfare and taxing the rich) have become stale due to their proven ineffectiveness -- why does this not force them to question their premises? Because the poor were never the central concern -- the premises were. And what are those premises? Simply, the afore-mentioned inversion of values. Damn! Another rehearsal. This has to stop. 5:15. What can be clarified in 45 minutes? Hopefully something.
Taking it up again at 2:30am. Economic controls have proven disastrous -- is there a reassessment of their worth? No -- by and large there is only a call for more controls. Could it be, then, that controls were only a means to more controls? Let us not be deceived by the desire to perceive virtue in our enemies; that may have been possible in the face of ignorance, but all the evidence is now in. They are not misguided visionaries, they are advocates of state power beyond all criteria of the good. One of the sickest aspects of hard-core altruism is that it requires the sacrifice of higher ideals for lesser ideals (under the cover of irrational “ideals”); by the innate logic of sacrifice, if the best is sacrifice, then the best must be sacrificed. For the sake of irrational ideals one continues to sacrifice until one is forced to sacrifice all idealism. Where can it end if the ideals are not rational to begin with? Rational ideals eliminate sacrifice by positing a hierarchy of values that ensures one will never sacrifice greater values for lesser; irrational ideals have no such boundary, no such limit -- thus they may well be the means to the elimination of all morality. Christian ideals are more rational than socialism, for they say renounce everything but God, and God implies many other things. What can the socialist not renounce? Statism -- which also implies many other things, most of them negative. This is why the advocates of controls never renounce their advocation, even in the face of disaster, for to reject controls is to reject the system. Rationalists hold the initiation of force as inferior of reason; to legally force men in this way is to hold them as irrational, both force and irrationality are only the means to the end, which is the inversion of values. How, then, is the revolutionary similar to the rapist? The strained revolutionary seeks the elimination of rationality; the rapist seeks the elimination of self-esteem. The hero of The Collector does not want to raise his self-esteem through love; he is enforcing his low self-esteem through abduction. By kidnapping and imprisoning the girl he is admitting that he is unable to win her attentions voluntarily, and he holds her as a value primarily because of this. Why not find a girl, no matter how feeble, who would value him as he is? But no, instead he chooses a woman of beauty and accomplishment -- why? He may tell himself that he wants her for these values, but that is a lie. What he needs is the distance between his void and her values. He wants her near him to reinforce his void, to enshrine it and so exalt its lack of value. This can only be accomplished by force; she is valuable, but she is unfree, and so at his mercy. This is the reason for the eternal combination of force and fraud in the pursuit of the inversion of values. Force, because values assert themselves properly in the face of freedom; fraud, because to lie about the inversion is the only way to make it appear valid, and the inversion of values because that is the only way for the sick to inherit the earth. And inherit it they shall, unless the pathetic sham is exposed in the full light of unapologetic reason.
Tuesday March 10, 1992 1:45pm
Nothing terribly new today, so I suppose the flash and fire of an intelligence impacting on its misconceptions will be missing, but there may be a greater treasure in the stillness of development that today's topic has undergone in the past few days.
I'm afraid it's essence.
Essence is the fundamental problem of epistemology. How is it that while riding through the country we can see a creature we have never seen before and call it a sheep? And how is it that we have ideas of creatures and things that have ceased to exist materially such as dodos and carrier pigeons? The problem can be best described in this way: there is such a thing as a tree of genealogy, but there is no such thing as a genealogy tree, or a genealogy forest, and we cannot munch on a genealogical fruit. Nowhere in our dissection of the sheep can we find its essence, for it is composed only of matter. That essence cannot equal the form of the matter is proven by our concept of the dodo; its form has vanished, but those in the know would know one if they saw it. Furthermore, matter is individual to the entity, but the essence of an entity is common to all things which embody its characteristics. Yet the law of identity states that those characteristics exist independently of conceptual consciousness; i.e. there were characteristics of matter before man existed, and animals can distinguish their prey from their children. Since essence is not present in matter but is rather derived from the characteristics of matter, and matter has characteristics independent of their identification, it must be the identification of characteristics that is the source of essence. Obviously, inanimate matter does not identify any characteristics, either of itself or other entities, but behaves in a manner consistent with its nature, so the identification of essence must exist only in animate matter, since the requirements of sustenance require the identification of essence. Even the lowest form of life (which are viruses) can tell food from non-food, and so identifies certain characteristics in the matter around it. Yet we would not say that the automatic identification of characteristics is the same as the conceptual identification of essence, for conceptual identification has two qualities not found in automatic identification. First, it can identify essence in non-sensual entities (i.e. numbers) and second, it can serve as the criteria for creating artificial entities (and therefore new essences) that are derived from both sensual and non-sensual identifications of essence -- in the case of bronze, it is the combination of copper and tin, and in mathematics it is the combination of numbers and logic.
The relation between non-conceptual essences and the senses is important, for if they are not derived from the senses then they must have a cause outside of sense-reality (since everything that is created has a cause) and, for the sake of simplification, we must try to define only one source for the existence of essence. In the case of the practical sciences, the relationship is an easy one, for chemistry, physics and biology all seek to describe the behaviour of matter, both organic and inorganic -- in the former two it is primarily inorganic, whereas biology seeks to explain the effects of the relationship between the organic and the inorganic, or a creature and its environment (the environment being composed of the organic, such as predators, and the inorganic, such as climate).
In the theoretical sciences, the relationship is more complex. To take the case of numbers, we can define them as the theoretical quantifiers of the relationships between entities with similar characteristics. By positing the criteria of similarity we are again dealing with essences -- we can say five lions because lions share certain characteristics, or we can say ten organisms for the same reasons; we can even say something as general as six items on the assumption that the items are congruent in some manner. What we cannot define is a number of things that share no characteristics with any other entities, or on the basis of existence and non-existence. In other words, what does not exist cannot be counted. Something that shares no characteristics with any other entity is not an entity, for the ultimate entity is matter, and even things as disparate as the sun and a protozoa both share the characteristic of containing matter. Yet the problem then becomes: what is the relationship of things that have no material existence with things that have material existence, or the relationships between numbers and the entities they quantify?
All things that are created have a cause, yet not all things that exist are created. According to the second law of thermodynamics. matter can be neither created nor destroyed, therefore there can be no cause of matter. The same can be said for laws of nature such as gravity and magnetism. We can say that these forces are the cause of both events and entities, but not that they are caused by anything else. We can also say that material entities are not their own cause, i.e. a rock does not exist because it is itself, because that would be a denial of the agent of change (i.e. the transfer of energy) which must be present to transform matter or form. In the same way, biological entities also cannot be their own cause, and neither can their parents, since that would be like saying that the boulder that splits in two is the cause of the smaller boulders, which would be incorrect -- the cause is rather the energy that results in such a change. Immaterial entities such as numbers can also not be their own cause, for since they cannot refer to non-existent entities they must refer to existent entities, and since existent entities are not their own cause, and numbers are dependent upon them, numbers cannot be dependent on themselves alone. Therefore, if numbers are dependent upon material entities, and material entities are dependent on another cause, then numbers must be dependent upon that other cause. Since the first cause is matter (and therefore its properties, which are natural laws), it is very tempting to say that the first cause of numbers is matter. Yet this is not enough, for there are many immaterial entities that can be numbered, such as the Aristotle's three laws of logic. However, it is quite obvious that the numbering of material entities preceded the numbering of immaterial entities, for if it didn't then concepts would be their own cause, and we have already said that immaterial entities are dependent on material entities.
To clarify, we can say that gravity is analogous to numbers in that gravity does not exist as a material entity, but only as a force dependent on the relationship between material entities. If we were to imagine that only one thing existed in the universe, we would never know the existence of gravity, and furthermore, its existence or non-existence would be inconsequential to the behaviour of that entity, since there would be no other entities to affect or be affected by. Thus for gravity to be perceptible requires the presence of more than one body. The same can be said for numbers. For numbers to be perceptible (and thus for the concept to exist) requires at least two material entities; one that is numbered in relation to another that has the capacity to perceive similar characteristics (which in its basic form is matter itself). The concept of numbers is thus the perception of the relationship between individuated entities that share certain characteristics and the entity that perceives such characteristics. Since concepts require perception, and perception requires matter, and numbers cannot exist without perception, matter can be said to be the first requirement of numbers. I say “requirement” because it does not follow from this that matter is the cause of numbers; the fact that numbers cannot exist without perception does not mean that perception is the first cause of numbers, for all organisms perceive matter, but not all can conceive of numbers. Conceptual thought is the generation of theoretical constructs from the sensual perception, or (to put it another way), the art of deducing immaterial identification from sensual identification. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification; it is dependent upon the non-contradictory nature of reality. The identification of essence is not limited to entities capable of conceptual logic (for animals can identify sensual essence), and essence itself is not dependent on the organic, for essence exists prior to (and independent of) its perception. Yet essence would be imperceptible to any organism were it not inherent in matter, for if matter acted randomly its classification would be impossible. Thus the first requirement for essence must be the law of identity, or the physical laws which compel an entity to act in accordance with its nature. The first requirement for the identification of sensual essence must be the existence of a non-contradictory reality, while the first cause of the identification of essence is the ability to perceive the actions and characteristics of matter -- and this ability human beings share with all other forms of life. The first requirement for the identification of conceptual essence is the same as that of sensual essence, i.e. the presence of both a non-contradictory reality and the ability to perceive it, but the first cause of the identification of conceptual essence is the ability to create information that is first derived from, but then independent of, sensual perception. In this way the idea of the dodo exists after all sensual perceptions of it have ceased to exist both in reality and in memory; after all who have seen it have died, the idea of a dodo exists only as a conception of essence, not perception of essence, for no-one can say that they know a particular dodo, but only the concept of dodo.
Thus, to the question of what is essence, we must answer that essence is a relationship between entities, and for the sake of clarity we must divide essence into three classes. The first class is that which exists independently of its perception, which are the physical laws of inanimate entities. The second class is that which is dependent upon the perception of entities, but which remains exclusive to sensual perception. The third class is that which is dependent on sensual perception, but which is not limited to sensual perception. Thus there are essences of matter, of observation, and of conceptualization, each of which is dependent on the prior. In this way I hope I have satisfactorily answered the question.
Finished March 11, 1992, 6:45pm
March 12, 1992 4:20pm
Today in Jack's conference I came across an odd dichotomy -- not odd per se, but rather an illumination of prior problem. How is it that philosophical discussions can become so tense? It has a lot to do with Nietzsche, and yet is much more than Nietzsche. Obviously it is partly psychological in nature, but then so much of psychology depends on philosophy. Arguments become tense when they become matters of willpower; arguments become matters of willpower when there is no objective standard for truth. I say x, you say y -- if we have no common ground to explore. If I say if x then y, and you say if x then z, then we have common ground. To state x is not an argument; to embellish x with facts is also not an argument, since the statement of facts is simply more data, or more letters so to speak. The absence of objectivity, which can only be achieved in the light of objective reason, eliminates the possibility of a common ground. I was talking with Adrian, who was saying that the definition of certain societies as primitive is the imposition of subjective values, and this helps explain a habitual problem of political and economic arguments. When I advocate capitalism, people always assume I am defending America; when I advocate reason, people assume I am defending European civilization in general. The desire to unify argument with bias is the desire to escape the demands of objective reason; it is a rejection of all arguments as cultural defensiveness. The possibility of freedom from bias is at all costs to be avoided -- why? The rationalist knows that he has the means to escape from bias, so freedom from bias is a merely a problem that has a solution. A person whose ideas stem from a cultural bias needs to believe that no objectivity is possible because otherwise their own thinking would be open to objective criticism and they would have to question their own biases. When I said that the source of wealth in a free market system was primarily intelligence, Adrian responded with the problem of South Africa; when I pointed out that South Africa is far from being a free-market society, he shifted the argument to something else. Likewise, when I was criticizing the Canadian representative of the ANC last term for his inability to distinguish free-market companies from state-enforced monopolies, he dodged the issue completely. Why? Because to admit the existence of objective reason is to deny the validity of the will to power -- which is why Nietzsche had to consider it beyond good and evil. The will to power is the enforced bias of desire free from objective moral and rational qualifiers. This is also why Nietzsche was not a system-builder; at his best he is merely an impassioned analytic observer, and at his worst merely a dogmatist.
Those whose thought is dependent on bias take it personally when objective standards are introduced -- why? Because thought is personality, and their constructed characters are therefore under attack. They are told what is right, they live their lives around it, and if what they believe is right is questioned, they feel their very existence is threatened. A rationalist who is proven wrong is not attacked personally, because his personality is rational, and so cannot be displaced by any rational criticism. There is no personal conflict between reason and truth; if he is mistaken, he can only contradict his nature by rejecting the proof of his mistake.
