dsivjfdds Ascolo Parodites We are withheld, as by Anathema Maran-atha, by the God-given mandate Work thou in Well-doing, which lies written in Delphic characters upon our hearts, and urges us ever to, under persons, seek God without rest. Not so easily can the Old Adam, haunting us ante Vulcanum since our births, be dispossessed in sub Prometheo. Whilst the God-given mandate leaves us without rest, til it's Gospel be deciphered and obeyed, it must have competition with the living kerugma of our clay, namely, to eat and be filled. The moral sensibility, as the body, is attuned to experience of such an order that it bears some relation to itself; as the body bears relation to itself by virtue of the intuition of physical pain, so the moral sensibility has its own intuition which is of the order of terror. If the object of this experience grows out of proportion to the individual, he no longer really experiences it at all, but registers it directly, in concepts divorced from the intuition of ethical terror, as something incommensurable and extrinsic, for which he has the same indifference as this moral catastrophe has for him. Evil is derived not from the principle of finitude in itself, but from the dark and selfish principle that has been brought into intimacy with it as the Heraclitean ' pride without measure;' and this intimation is furthermore possible only insofar as one has been divorced from the intuition of ethical terror. Although the consciousness of defilement seems to be a memory inaccessible to any re-enactment in the imagination or sympathy, a moment that has been abolished by the progress of moral consciousness itself, it nevertheless contains in germ all possible moments of the life and future of the moral consciousness, even as 'the heart has its own order,' because it conceals within itself the secret of its own passing, which is of the 'order of intellect.' Through our corporeality, indeed through our own lived body and the course which our existence has conferred upon us, we are in the most immediate way imbricated in the world of perception. Nevertheless, we are blind and for the most part incapable of separating the sin of the lived body which, through habituation perpetuates itself, from our moral being, according to the measure of the consciousness of defilement, by which this sin can only be conceived of in terms of a temporary retardation of the lived body. For another matter is it, if your symbol has intrinsic meaning rather than merely extrinsic; the Greek Herkules had no peremptory Duty, but a choice - and for the Greeks he was no balance of pleasures and pains, but a needs betraying weaknesses - but if thou wilst conceive of how far the human mind has carried a Symbol, then look upon Jesus of Nazareth. In short, the world of ethical terror holds in germ an entire repressive history which makes moral sensibility incomprehensible. The consternation at Golgotha is not just an emblem for the desolation of human existence, it is the ethical vision of the world. God touches only for a moment the dwellings of men. Therefor at certain moments, the founders of the abyss must be consumed by the fire of what is deeply sheltered, and perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear in the light of redemption. The destructive character of the morality under this light knows only one watchword: tamen genio illius gratias enatavi. It knows only one activity: clearing away. Its need for fresh air is stronger than any hatred; more severe than any aims towards retribution and vengeance. Really, only the insight into how radically the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness by destruction leads to such an Apollonian image of the destroyer. The only morality which can be responsibly practiced in face of the Destroyer is one that would contemplate all things as they would appear from the standpoint of redemption. The Destroyer's eternal silence is frightening to me. How many kingdoms know him not? What, in fact, is man before his God? He is incapable of judging the nothingness from which he was born towards the infinite in Nature. This 'Holy Hypochondria,' this anxiety of the creation belongs however to a fundamentally different world from the nothingness, from the mataiotes which it apprehends. The question of whether it comprehends that which it apprehends, cannot be regarded as a criterion of its value, just as in the mannichean doctrine, wherein matter was created to bring about the de-Tartarization of the world. Just as a mother is seen to begin to live in the fullness of her life only when the circle of her children, inspired by the feeling of her proximity, closes round her, so is the nothingness of the creation seen to be truly a concern for the living, only when the triumphs of the anxiety which it incites are gathered in spite of it. When the God that the saint receives and suffers, liberates the mystic world from the world of Ideas, he then again and again finds himself subjected to the ‘victorious powers of life’ and, like the zodiacal creature, in which the telluric planet 'Saturn' stands, falls prey to that strong worldliness, whenever he calls out in search of his God 'non coerceri maximo, contineri tamen a minimo'. One of the most powerful sources of this symbolism flows from myth: in the superhuman type of the Redeemer, the hero represents mankind through his work on the starry sky. The primal words of the Orphic poem apply to him: it is his amalgmata -- his star-lit sky; his nyx, the one that is as changeable as the moon; his destiny, ineluctable like the seaward tethys. Where tranquility forsakes you, there are the boundaries of your Catholicism. The saint is never abandoned by himself; he may always elevate himself as far beyond himself as he wishes. He alone may, upon the ladder of the law, fall upward as well as downward. The latter is prevented by ataraxia, the flexible spirit, the former by the weight that lies in the tranquil presence of mind. The capacity for the Saint to remain moral, that is, subject to the 'victorious powers of life,' requires both strict inner discipline and unscrupulous external action. This practice brought to the course of the world Paulus Melissus's servata in isto celibatu virginitas mihi tum perennis or innocence enthroned; a Zaddik, a spiritual sovereignty matched in its ambiguity only by that fierce aspiration of the 'will to power.' Such a perfect conception of conduct on the part of the Zaddik awakens a mood of mourning in the creature stripped of all naive impulses. And it is precisely this mood which obtains to the paradoxical demand for saintliness on the part of the Zaddik. This quite simply figurative transformation of saintliness to the 'victorious powers of life' opens the point of departure for the unlimited compromise with the world which is characteristic of the Zaddik, his infinite mourning towards his peoples, and his forsaking the devekut. However, inspiration is probably the best tranquility and presence of mind for the saint, if it is authentic, clear, and strong. It is the spirit's bridle and spur. As poetic inspiration, ataraxia was a quieting force, akin to the Socratic virtue of sophrosune. Hence, even prophetic dream, as the hallmark of the inspired saint, is to be seen as descending from astromantic slumber in the temple of the ages, and not as sacred or even sublime inspiration. For all the wisdom of the saint is subject to the amalgmata; it is secured by immersion in the nyx of creaturely things, and it hears only of a destiny as ineluctable as the seaward tethys, and nothing of the voice of revelation. The saturnine nature is borne down into the depths of the Earth and, for the saint, the wisdom of a certain Triptolemus is preserved. For the saint the astromantic inspirations of mother Earth dawn from the night of contemplation like treasures from the very interior of the earth; the lightning-flash of intuition is unknown to him. Legends which have grown remote from the earth, return to him in visions of his own humanity. The saint fails sainthood; in the end he acts ethically, and must ascend the ladder of the Law. The internal relations of man would be for us the highest form of beauty if we could intuit them in one act of Will. When man, through an obscure premonition, is laid bare unto himself, in all the stages of his gradual becoming as though already complete; then and only in a moment such as this, can an act of will be said to precede moral being, having developed from a totality of strengths, such that it elevates man above himself, and rounds out the circle of life and of deeds. No humanity remains for he that would, as a good Thersites, measure man. Even in the midst of nature, wherein the animal takes life on account of mere hunger or self-defense, the empathy which afflicts the consciousness at the sight of a suffering animal is present. This empathy is at the heart of our very conception of morality because it serves to intimate the terror of the natural world, out of which, according to Ricoeur, the moral consciousness itself is to arise. The human mind can not remember the reign of Saturn. If all men were united as one pair of brothers the enmity between Saturn and Jupiter were at an end. The revelation of the human predicament and of the catastrophe of world history; its meaning, deciphered, is precisely what Cephalus calls 'the hopefullness of the passing away of things,' the vultus lumine. [in Manso's Erocallia.] Holderlin writes of the emptiness of this transfiguration: 'And yet with holy night the father will veil our eyes, that still we may not perish. Power expands but cannot suborn heaven.' The lowliest of botanical sciences studies the lily amongst lilies, the formation of the very flower,' just as common politics studies man amongst men, in short, the formation of a state.' 'How can we be fair, kindly, and humane towards others, let our dictums be as praiseworthy as they may be,' if we can not extinguish measureless pride as we would a raging fire, and 'lack the capacity to make strange natures genuinely and truly a part of ourselves, to appropriate strange situations, to make strange feelings our own?' Perhaps redemption has already begun the moment we begin to take kindness for others as the fitting measure of our deeds. From a patrimonium generis humani and a fiction of neutralized upbringing we are touched by the pantheon of classicism, by 'strange old lusts for deed,' by echoes of a metaphysics of the ethical that we long ago relinquished to dream: ta phainomen suzein. 3 The admonition of dreams has always been mediated by word or image, thus its greater strength has already ebbed away, the strength with which it strikes us at the heart and compels us, 'though we scarcely know how, to act in accord with it.' This moment is the Geramantian plow, beneath which fate is to be turned. The greatest consolation in human nature is therefore, paradoxically, the smallest guarantee and Empedoclean tear. What would righteousness be that was not measured by the immeasurable terror at what it is? Atalante's peril is become a wedding. To change a threatening future into a fulfilled now, - this is the work of a bodily presence of mind, a Prometheus Vinctus and labor omnia vicit, even as 'he to whom destiny speaks loudly has the right to speak yet more loudly to destiny. ' In boredom human life becomes am instant, not by sublating duration, but by decaying to nothing, awakening to its futility in face of what Nietzsche calls the 'crooked eternity' of time, - and this is the quite Tirolean moment upon the threshold to great deeds. Hence free time, this is the dialectical antithesis to boredom. Free time, as a complement to alienated labor, and whether this free time is supposed merely to reproduce energy that has already been expended, or whether it is burdened by the extraction of alien labor as a mortgage, remains, as regards production itself, merely reflexive, and imposed heteronomously, not as a threshold, but an individuum of production, a principle of its individuation. Labor, as it does not occur in free time, can only be concentrated on survival, on physical necessity - it is in free time that labor is individuated, that is to say, is first concentrated upon affairs outside of survival and physical need. Between horror vacui and the opiate of plenty, the ruling condition of the appetite permits no third choice. In the romantic self-trumpeting of our impractical expectations, as regard the beloved, lurks the intuition, that the objective Spirit is liquidating the subjective one on the stage of contemporary ethics. -- Umbras and Penumbras. The Romantics were down to earth like the mammalogical forborne, before this latter could cast off its gills and scales. Yet Romanticism is still, in all of its forms, a historico-ethical vacuum; even as De Quincey says that 'every untried path is a vast Hercynian forest, unexplored and unmapped, and where each several turn in your advance leaves you open to new anticipations of what is next to be expected, and consequently open to altered valuations of all that has been traversed.' The Romantic consciousness inscribes in all Spirit what previously Silence and the Unseen endured. Between 'I love' and 'I loved' lie the whole spoil of the heroes of the ages of the world. But which is given to truth? Love is the ability to find the similar in the dissimilar, according to Adorno. Then Expressionism is nothing but genuine Romanticism. What stimulus is to the feeling, beauty is to the understanding. The separation of stimulus and beauty, feeling and understanding, which makes it possible to say, free and blessed are these vain little girls, hypostatizes the historically achieved centrum of human endeavours in which the romantic individual is declared perdurable. Hence, Novalis says "A poem must be completely inexhaustible, like a human being or a good proverb." No eye is truly acquainted with beauty, without being accompanied by the timber of indifference, and well-nigh contempt for everything to which the woman bears no significance. And it is solely through infatuation, the unjust closure of the eye vis-a-vis the antagonism raised by 'everything which exists, that justice is done to what exists.' The eye which loses itself in something which is beautiful, is one of Eleusis. 'It rescues in the object something of the peacefulness of its day of creation,' which until this moment is perverted by the antagonism raised upon it by the universal. 'However if this one-sidedness is sublated by a consciousness of the universal imposed from outside, if the particular is harried, substituted and weighed up, then the just view of the whole makes the universal injustice, which lies in exchangeablity and substitution, its own.' Such justice turns into the guarantor of Olympia upon Helena. Is not the tendency of philosophy to raise certain common place notions, as goodness or truth, above the practical into objects of unnecessary conviction also evident in, for example, literary theory or religious disputation? Verily, Linnaeus might dawn the name of Homer in Ceos. Yet this, the raising of the commonplace into objects of unnecessary conviction, -- this is precisely what ethics is not. Nothing is true in ethics save the trifling. Hymen is perpetually above the sexual; just as pain is perpetually above the moral. The sibyl may know everything, only not the Good. The nature of that to which we ascribe beauty, which may be disclosed only by recourse to the universal, to the daily and lived experience, in all of its triviality, in which antagonism is wrought towards it, plays the role which one would like to ascribe to the continuity of feelings designated by the word 'infatuation.' A Cleopatra with the soul of Isis lives and works in the world. 'The foolishness of a youthful enthusiasm, by which a beautiful girl is made inaccessible, is not based upon any inhibition whatsoever, nor in too much coldness or in the cynicism of an overly repressed warmth, but because a relationship already exists between him and her, which excludes a new one, which excludes a relationship which embraces the lived experiences with the beloved as the very essence of her beauty.' And it is for this reason that the youthful enthusiasm just mentioned is no other enthusiasm than infatuation proper. The imminent awakening of the lover 'is poised, like the wooden horse of the Greeks, in his Troy of dreams.' Truth, bodied forth in the saltation of represented ideals, resists being projected, by whatever means, into the realm of knowledge, which it obtains only by strife against itself. In the great philosophies the world is seen in terms of the order of ideas. Yet, now that we have conceived of these ideas in forma formans, rather than as mere forma formata, and even though the conceptual frameworks within which these world views have been articulated has, in the passage of time, become fragile; these frameworks, such as Plato's theory of ideas, the aestimatio and mensuratio of Nicholas of Cusa, the Kantian deontology, and Bergson's duree vecue still remain valid attempts at a description of the world. The more intensely these respective thinkers strove to outline an image of the universe, the more were they bound to develop a theoretical order which, for latter interpreters, would be seen as serving that original depiction of the world of ideas which was really intended. The metaphysics of life does not, of course, shrink from this final consequence, but it must thereby, at least in this one point, itself enter into the sphere that it would close off for us, that of theory. Aesthetics and Epistemology can only be united in a metaphysics for the former, through the infinitude of reflection with which the Romantic philosophers dealt, implicitly denies, through providing a proof of the ‘absolute actual existence of the ego,’ the theoretical distinction between subject and object, 7 which is the very mechanism by which epistemology is developed into genuine knowledge. It is in this sense that we must appreciate Cohen's claim about Cusanus, that he was the first to discover the epistemological significance of infinity. The metaphysics of life must make use of the intellect's administration of judgments, which it rejects, and in doing so it indirectly accepts the use of judgment. The acceptance and recognition of such takes place whenever a metaphysics does not merely perceive and interpret but makes evaluations. Art arose in the course of liberation from terrible nature, yet through art the utter subjugation of nature is impossible. Song, so to speak, is Tereus' revenge. This is to say that art, called upon to legitimate itself before the world of nature, art - a thing negating that very world - appears, from the outset, helpless. All the same, art cannot simply shy away from the responsibility of legitimating itself in the eyes of this world for no poetry, no song is innocent, insofar as it permits one's own lived experience to become an object of unnecessary conviction, for it is in this moment a mere sentiment or personal taste can become something more dangerous. The poet Giacomo Leopardi says, "It is not good for the innocent to search into nature's secrets; and random suffering cancels all such unripened knowledge." Lingua serpentina unto ashes, and the sower soweth the word, just as Nestia cryeth and the tear is scattered. But if the seed die it bringeth forth great fruit. This is evident above all in the Phaedrus and Symposium, which contain several pronouncements of decisive importance in the present context. The one invites us to contemplate the relationship between Eros and recollection, between Eros and the fall and incarnation of the soul; the other offers a profound meditation upon the relationship of Beauty and Truth. To interpret their sentences in terms of the logic of their system, as no more than part of a time honored eulogy on behalf of those great sages of the Socratic tradition, would inevitably mean leaving the sphere of the theory of ideas; which is where their existence is illuminated. Throughout the Phaedrus defilement is conceived in terms of an objective event; defilement, in point of fact, is brought upon the soul in 'being yoked together with things of the Earth,' as Hierocles says. Yet, even as those who lose their footing turn somersaults in their fall, so would the Soul, in the intentations of its own defilement, fall from symbol to symbol, from Idea to Idea, down into the vertigo of its bottomless depths, were it not that, even in the severest of them, it has so to turn about that all its apprehension, vainglory, and godlessness seems to be nothing but Narcissism and self- delusion. For it is to misunderstand the Phaedric conception of the soul entirely if we make a distinction between the defilement, in which this anabasis into salvation and redemption takes place, and that grim signification of death and damnation in light of the divine's espesura. Rather, if we are to understand the doctrine communicated in the Phaedrus and Symposium, we must consider it in terms of its own immanent presuppositions, we must return to the primal phenomenon in which it is rooted. Beauty taken in itself does not already contain in its womb the images of things, which Eros then only has to receive passively from it. No matter how we regard it or proclaim it as the original source of philosophy, beauty in itself is never the source of the ideas in which this philosophy is first comprehended and understood. Eros does not betray its basic impulse by directing his longings towards the truth; for Truth is beautiful not so much in itself, as for Eros. And so it is with human love; a person is beautiful in the eyes of his lover, but not in himself, because his body belongs to a higher order of thing than that of the beautiful. The law to which Eros is subject and by virtue of which he is continually reborn - not what is created by Eros in the acquisition of ideals - provides the true content of the erotic impulse. If this law were completely antagonistic to beauty, it would at the same time have to destroy its own essence, for it exists and has application only insofar as it is active, and it cannot become active by any means except through constantly resubmerging itself into the object of desire. Always changing, but ever itself, Eros in all of its productions always stands opposed to the life of the beautiful without ever turning itself upon it, without ever rending it, without ever being antagonistic towards it. For it is precisely visions of this frenzy of destruction, in which all earthly things collapse into a heap of ruins, which reveal the bounds set upon the Phaedric contemplation, rather than its ideal quality. Eros is himself a representation of the soul, of the soul that is most soul, that of the Saint who desires the Just because he is not himself in possession of it. Now, Eros carries in himself that cardinal wound which is the emblem of his mother, Penia. The very object of Eros is determined by the fact that it must be taken possession of - even if in a transcendental sense - into the consciousness through an aesthetico-epistemological negation of all the ontological assumptions about man. The defilement of the soul, of course, thereby loses everything that was most peculiar to it: Saint John's 'a solas', the secret and privileged knowledge, the arbitrary rule by birth and death, superfluity and poverty, in a Natural world, the supposed freedom of a world without hope or the grace of a deity. All of this vanishes in the anabasis, in which the immersion of Soul in defilement has to clear away the final illusion of the objective and, left entirely to its own devices, rediscovers itself, not playfully in the earthly world of things, but sternly under the eyes of heaven. And this is the essence of the Soul's immersion therewith: that its ultimate objects, in which it has faith that it can most fully secure for itself that which is vile, turn into forms, Ideas, symbols; and this order of ideas fills up and denies the void in which it is represented, just as, ultimately, the religious intention does not rest in contemplation of the faces hippocratica, but in resurrection. Longing requires moral courage; to truly sup from the draught of wine, requires religious courage. The true struggle, the inner frustrations of love - which are its genuine character - defy representation in the aesthetic ideal. For either love triumphs or it is defeated. In the first instance, one does not know what was represented by the woman or why; in the second, it is abashing to have been the woman's voyeur. For in the end, one moment or another must indeed give the sensual preponderance over the spiritual and ideal element of love, and precisely to this moment the voyeur does not accede but demands an even more striking moment, for, as in such representations the sensual must gain preponderance, so the sensual's punishment under fate, that is, by moral nature, is demanded, which salvages its freedom through death. If the grounds of a mythical primal guilt are sought in the bare, vital drive of sexuality, then Christian philosophy finds its most distinct counterpart where that drive is furthest removed from drastic reproduction and expression through art: the life of the virgin. As is the case with natural guilt, there is also a natural innocence in life. The latter, however, is tied not to the sexual aspect of the body, nor even to the mode of its denial, as through chastity, but rather solely to its antipode, the spirit. Accordingly, the mode of this denial as it is and must be presented in sensual terms, viz. chastity, abstention, mortification, is far from being the sole basis of the spiritual life's existence; indeed, strictly speaking, it is ultimately not a constititive element of the spiritual life at all, which is equally natural. Rather is the basis of the spiritual life's existence revealed in the naturle morte of a realm of absolute, that is to say godless, materiality, bound to the spiritual as its counterpart, such as can only be concretely experienced through the vision of Good. Hence, the dominant mood of the spiritual life is one of longing, which is at once the mother of the Christian ethos and its content. The absolute meaning of the Earth, of corporeality, which is what Christianity amounts to, destroys itself in emancipation from what is profane. Spirituality, but here soulless spirituality, which is concentrated in the image of virginity, becomes its dwelling place. The absolute materiality and this soulless spirituality, this ultimateley negative theological principle, are the poles of the Christian realm; and the moral consciousness is their illusory synthesis or the logos, in which the genuine synthesis, that of life, is imitated. However, the speculation of this consciousness, which clings to the two poles of the illusory synthesis, intimates nothings more then the terror of the state of nature as mythos in Schelling's tautegorical sense, and, ultimately, in its remoteness from life, discovers the assimilatio, the Medusan glance in which humanity becomes a stage upon which an objective process. The saint must go away empty handed. The body of the virgin as such, the innocent body, which is cherished as the enduring profundity of the profane order, exists only for the saint, and means nothing other then what it is, namely, an absolute corporeality which, in the saint's longing, destroys itself in being emancipated from the profane order. The virgin means precisely the non-existence of what she represents; namely, the innocence of the body, a body not subject to absolute vice, an absolute corporeality. The absolute vices belong only to the saint, -- they are not real, and that which they represent, the profane order, exists only in the saint's subjective longing; they are this view, which is destroyed, like Chronus, by its own offspring, because they signify only deafness before the law to which they would be trumpets for. They point to the absolutely subjective longing, to which alone they owe their existence. Evil therefor arises in the saint himself, through his longing to find the basis of his own spiritual existence in the Earth, through his staring down into the earth's depths, from the symbolic desire for the innocent body. The tautegory of the virgin, the triumph of subjectivity and the onset of an arbitrary rule over things, is the origin of the saint's longing, and therefor of the knowledge of evil. Knowledge of evil is therefor primary, and ensues from longing; knowledge of good is secondary, and ensues from the realization that the innocent body cannot be touched. The tautegory of the virgin, then, suggests the idea of a relation that has broken off. But the negativity of the profane order remains implicit in it. The saint's longing is a naive projection, in the sphere of innocence, of a negation issuing from the profane order itself, which is represented by the saint's vices, and obtains to guilt only through the saints realization that the virgin signifies precisely the non-existence of what she represents, the explicit negativity of the profane order, that the innocent body as such, cannot be touched. 090125 what's it to you? who go blather from