Preliminary Considerations
If you aren’t caught up, please take it upon yourself to change that. I’ll answer to most any questions in the comments to the degree that’s felt appropriate, as well. In terms of my background with the Divine, it wasn’t too long ago that I was looked up to for my takes on spiritual practice—in regard to the Tantric Yogas of Tibetan Buddhism and modern Kundalini, my views on life, and even further back to religious inquiry in general—this article is albeit a not dissimilar creative act. It is not that I have completely rejected those traditions, per se. That would be as though I am a born-again Christian whose abstinence acts as an extra-sensuous substitution for genuine sexual gratification. I simply no longer think these traditions, or tradition at large, have the capability to genuinely challenge our current age.
We would be doing nothing more than pretending if we put forth that any of these spiritual practices and “specific ritual subservience” could be a replacement for our very legitimate relative reality.1 Furthermore, the genuine trauma it does regularly inflict upon us. In this way my views lie closer to the Left Hand Path of the heretics and ostracized indulgences; so often looked down upon by the priestly caste, by the bourgeoise, and most disgustingly by kleptocratic factions of our current elite.2 The lattermost in political times has had a bad reputation of asserting their “superiority” over lower castes.3
Introduction
In my previous post, I mentioned Gans had wrote around 7 books in approximately the last 40 years. They are as follows: The Origin of Language, End of Culture, Science and Faith, Originary Thinking, Signs of Paradox, Scenic Imagination, and A New Way of Thinking.4 Franklin Merrell-Wolff has published three books, but I’ll only be pulling from Pathways Through to Space and Philosophy of Consciousness without an Object. Finally, I’ll be adding quotes detailing an aspect of Nietzsche’s affirming life-philosophy. Our ultimate goal is to showcase where faith ends and prevents us from travelling towards. That is to say, how parts of us have been sequestered and made “off limits” or deemed “unknowable”.
1.
What has been a wall to new students of Generative Anthropology is that a strict specific case for the Originary Hypothesis can only be stated in an ephemeral gestalt. We are not destined to set up an institutionalizable narrative and mythology in the traditional sense5 but rather to discover a way towards a formal theory of language.6 Merrel-Wolff states similar approaches, where there is only so much that can be logically entertained, and we must identify limitations to the devices of conscious use “afforded” to us.78 One can think of Wolff's introceptive mode of consciousness, here. We have not just perceptual and conceptual knowledge but also knowledge of identity, what is intimately ourselves.
2.
The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments.
-Nietzsche
Most paradoxes are resolved through the everyday going on of “human activity”.9 For if one can ‘poke a hole’ through and everyday language (your actions and fundamental agency) emerge with an explanation of one’s own birth then one would have successfully re-created our own origins. Not only that but even more impressively within, and in due diligence to, our progression out of said origins. The old guard in GA remark upon this mysteriously religious quality within GA. There exists a kind of reverence with this kind of genetic and co-existence with the origin of language. Wolff has stated a similar mechanism as “Recognition”, where we see the true nature of our identity presented to ourselves. Do not mistake this for simple solipsism.
We can, in this way, “know” the origin of our language through our hypothetical proliferations and necessary consequences of such origins. GA is correct in stating itself a science of human self-knowledge. There is no mistake that it is only through minimality and discussing what is purely essential that we necessitate the continued intimacy that stems from such aberrations.
3.
We might ask; does the ontological primacy of Consciousness or Commune (through the Originary Hypothesis) matter? If we are presented our own identity(consciousness) through commune, then why would the Originary Scene be the primary bosom from which knowledge unfurls? This really isn’t anything different than simply re-stating the Originary Hypothesis in its first iterations. The unconscious (the aborted gesture of appropriation as begun by hesitation) must develop into paradoxical relation to the first use of language (which has to be conscious usage of the sign as if it “always-already” existed in the first place).
The Eternal Return:
1.
When I was younger, I had a déjà-vu that at times became crippling, and I’ve yet to find anyone else plagued by it. At indiscriminate times I had been stuck in loops of thought akin to, “I’ve been here before, and I’ve been aware that I’ve been here before. That I’ve also, simultaneously been aware of that too, and of right now whence I was made aware to that awareness of awareness, etc...” To contrapose, Merrell Wolff describes conscious introception as: “it is the knowing of the know and the how of the know”. Metaphorically one may think of déjà-vu as the square to conscious introception’s rectangle.
2.
This recursive consciousness is the inversion of the subjective pole, i.e.: the objects presented for us to comprehend are where we now apprehend our own identity. Disassociation is under this umbrella, but the pole of subject-object consciousness has not been flipped. In such cases of the latter, our “I”, is fundamentally situated within our mortal coil while the field of objects our awareness presents proceeds to commemorate the self, or body, within its purview. We might, and only after this step, see our identity to be outside of ourselves. The déjà-vu experience, to note as I’ve outlined, is where we are ostensively presented our own identity (in full respect) to ourselves, not simply the faculties of perception being subsumed into the object-field. If disassociation were to take on this flipped polarization of consciousness, that the former has, I would see no difference between it and Nirvana as Wolff describes. Such is as the retreat of self-consciousness into the pure subjective pole.
3.
The Eternal Return is what has been outlined. The flipping of the subject-object orientation of consciousness, wherein every decision that has been made is that which illuminates the self to yourself. It is the war cry of Nietzsche. To affirm all that has come into picture and all that could ever come into picture as resting upon the individual. There is more than enough reason why he states his views as not being for the weak hearted.
Conclusion
Priesthood, in the parameters of we’ve discussed, would be avoiding the trauma of the Divine presenting itself as His own identity inside the field of objects presented to him. It would be too horrible of an act, akin to sacrilege, for his God to be consciously “understood” and de-consecrated from its metaphysical pedestal.10 He must reject and hold the dogmatic faith, for never are we to put the Divine within our powers.
The end of the quote I had put earlier details Nietzsche's solution and vision of a man beyond this. One that can come to terms with the genuine capability of intimate knowledge of the Divine (and of all things):
Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge-a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest
‘See to it that strength may find true countenance here’ was the ultimate rally cry herald by a man beyond his time. Beyond all time:
I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.
Imagine the solution to a multivariate function always having the same answer for all variables or being of the same proportions. It would no longer be exactly what we set it out to be, multivariate, instead just a more complex function to fit a single variable. Mathematics, and dogmatism, are bloated in these ways, where declarative logic takes hold over ostensive sign-usage.
What it means for theory to coexist with your everyday life. How often do you think about philosophy when buying apples? If you do … well that says more about you than it does about the everyday man.
Never do they think to establish means of communication between economic and culture castes as was the American Dream originally.
Links to physical copies of each book mentioned here, and the editions I’m using when appropriate: The Origin of Language, The End of Culture, Science and Faith, Signs of Paradox, Scenic Imagination, A New Way of Thinking, Consciousness Without and Object, Pathways Through to Space, The Essential Nietzsche.
Every kind of discipline has set of invariable ostensives, of which their declarative rules and structures adhere to.
This isomorphism is essential to understanding why Gans is so ardent about the parsimonious equivalency of the Originary Hypothesis with maximal demarcation. Minimality qua minimality is a fundamentally different mechanism to minimality qua “The Origin of Language”. In The Origin of Language (2nd ed.) this methodology takes the form of naturalism, notably with how the Originary Scene is set up, e.g.: proto humans surrounding some dead animal, the aborted gesture of appropriation may have failed but only needs to succeed once, etc. In Signs of Paradox the scene relies less on that ‘threshold of natural assurances or assumptions’, so to speak, and goes deeper into where exactly parsimony begets paradox.
Herein there’s two moments of framing, one in which the Origin of Language takes hold as founder and one where Consciousness-without-an-object is the prima-facie transcendentalism. These only lead to epistemological disputes.
It seems increasingly we are to be gelded by what we are told “consciousness” and our “I” must be. E.g.: it must contain the five senses, we must be subject to this, there is no other way. I’m not and would never make the case for an anti-intellectualism, here, but when the frame in which we approach these dialogues is tainted by an idealogue’s (or disciplinarian's) interpretation of how these consequences must make us feel, or even be, is absurd. In becoming a part of this process of being outside of a discipline’s declarative framework (e.g.: the five senses, conceptual thought, etc) we can gesture to their invariable ostensives. Ritualistic formalities stemming from declarative ideology might initially prevent us to gesture to these invariants, to contrast.
Nietzsche will describe this as “the labyrinth of existence”, whereas Merrell-Wolff will call it relative consciousness.
For GA, all signs are the name-of-God in this respect. Thus, there isn’t a metaphysical God to deconstruct as the first sign is in actuality “man-creates-god-creates-man”. For further study into how “identity” and “God” can be understood, I would recommend reading the part in Originary Thinking on The Originary Self where Gans states, “The center appears to be the only independent actor in the scene; it is the locus of the divinity, which provides the model for human personhood”.