Sun and Steel

The attraction of a book like Mishima's Sun and Steel is that its confessional nature is the embodiment of a life that has won back meaning for itself from the meaninglessness and aimlessness of the course that this life has taken. The writer is aspired anew; his life is rejuvenated. Of course, the reader finds that his attraction to this kind of book must soon snuff itself out, as the price of the life contained within the confession-book, which has won back meaning for itself, is the deathly momentum which leads to death. A confession is a summary, and more properly an apology, that is: a justification. The reader can only kneel at the graveside for so long.

But that is precisely why for me art can only be appreciated in concert with experience, as a means of invigoration and stimulation. In place of a 'deathly momentum', there is life. But that was precisely Mishima's point - the contradiction between words and action, between talking about doing things and actually doing them. Better to try to incite Japan to right-wing revolt than criticise the right wing for moral failings. I'm sure it's all been said before... In Tolstoy...

Theses on the 'arms race' of rationalism

1. The ‘arms race’ that proceeds apace in all aspects of modern life, arises from the entrenchment of rationalism as the objective touch-stone of society, and characterises the motives of present-day social and economic life.

2. All other objective forms of valuation – religion, art, culture, race – have fallen by the wayside, either through design or the passing of the years.

3. We have arrived at the reductio ad absurdum of rationality. We cannot avoid it; we’re placed so firmly on the lines of rationalism that no other paradigm (religious, cultural, social, or political) can compete. All paradigms previously ascendent in the history of mankind are truncations of this one.

4. The arms race arises from Western thought and mechanics. Materially speaking, it is determined by the division of labour as the maximisation of output. Perhaps it has always been man’s goal to exploit to the fullest the resources both natural and human that are to hand. But it is our modern age that has perfected this goal. In perfecting this goal we have overcome the problem of scarcity that has hung over man’s head since the dawn of his time.

5. One can observe the gradual entrenchment of rationalism reaching back to the use of tools in the hunt. But let us take an example from our time: Shareholding and profit. On a microeconomics level, profit is the objective indicator of an end in itself for a business. Shareholders do not get into the business of owning shares for any other reason than that they wish to improve the health of the stocks they own. If one gets into business for ‘sentimental’ reasons, then he is destined for hard times. In the business world, all principles, morals and values are ancillary to the production of surplus value, determined as the rational end to which the energies of a business are employed. In business, profit is the objective indicator of an end in itself for a business. The macroeconomic goal of a business is to provide value and output to the general economy, which makes all modern life possible.

6. The arms race described here is an offshoot of the development of a self-conscious normativity, which was the first revaluation of values for modern Europe. We are living with this normativity problem today. It comes originally from the development of Reason nurtured by the increasing self-confidence of the bourgeois class, and latterly from the incredible proliferation of rationality and the subsequent diffuseness that this proliferation of Reason has given rise to. The ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ is nothing more than an account of this latter diffuseness of perspectives and material progress that Reason enables.

7. The arms race – as the unification of the management of resources, populations (as labourers) and discourses – cannot be stopped. This is not in itself a negative judgment, but an outline of the likelihood of success for those who oppose it.

Experience and writing

A gap of a few days needn’t be seen as proof that I’ve done nothing interesting – on the contrary, it could – and perhaps should – be proof that I am doing something interesting.

‘A completely radical institution for truth is not possible here’.

Twats.

Nietzsche is justified in saying of the University in his letter to Erwin Rohde of 15 December 1870, ‘A completely radical institution for truth is not possible here’. Schopenhauer, too, was no fan of this institution.

The award-winning Friesan.com sees in contemporary philosophy only 'sterility, obscurantism, and tendentiousness'.

Cartoon video: 'Money as Debt'

View here.

It explains the growth of banking in Europe. At 08:53 it mentions the concept of the 'run on the bank', with which all Northern Rockers will be familar. At 09:50 we see the local bank affected by the run on its reserves (Northern Rock, USB, ) being bailed out by an infusion of real money by the Central Bank (the Bank of England).

At 09:10 it touches upon the fact that government had the opportunity to outlaw banks, but they preferred not to stand in the way of the inevitable. The creation of the concept of banking - of lending money at interest on funds that don't physically exist - is a particular feature of the arms race of Modernism. Banking facilitates the maximisation in output of the availability of credit. If we discover a better way to do something (and production-output is an objective indicator of success), are we to revert to more primitive methods out of fear? No. Once the idea is introduced to the world, then competition becomes a fact. The law bans only the forms of competition which are counterproductive to the economy as a whole. As the availability of credit allows the flow of commodities to increase, and the increase in commodities increases the number labourers employed in the market both as waged producers and individuals with needs that need to be met with money. Consequently, credit is good for the economy. To illustrate the success of the 'credit model', we should note that (at 18:27 in the video), of all the money in the economy, only 5% of money is government-created 'hard cash', whereas the remaining 95% comes from bank credit (money created out of debt). Moral and ethical concerns are secondary.

A problem: at around 31:00 we are introduced to a solution to the problem of exponential growth. Sustainability, as the sustainable solution which would avert the collapse of an economic system predicated upon infinite growth (such as ours), is made possible by the division of labour as it exists in the present system. The reduction of all value to labour and commodities from debt and securities would mean a great decrease in the amount of money in the economy, partly because the source of funds which enables loans to be made would shrink to a 1-to-1 correspondence between value and money. The decrease in value would mean cutbacks in funding, because there is no incentive to lend money, part of which contributes to the upkeep of the workers, and no worker wants to pledge labour without receiving value in return. Workers would be forced to work without receiving pay, and pay is only created in this new system by exchanging actual value created in the product they are working on.
Of course, the government could own the money and lend without interest, enabling projects to be completed and the worker to be paid along the way, but we would have an economy that had halted almost all possibility of developing new forms of technology and medicine through lack of funding; the only way to increase funding in this 1-to-1 economy is to increase the amount of actual value created, which is marked against the labour producing the commodities that are available. How do you increase the money in such an economy, making funding of new projects possible? By introducing new people to the labour-market and by producing more goods. There is no escape from the 'arms race', and its destiny in Mutually Assured Destruction.

On the bankruptcy of the synthetic a priori

1.

For Kant, an analytic proposition ‘contains within the predicate the identity of the subject’ (cf. ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’). Quine had something to say about the vagueness of a predicate's being able to 'contain' a definition within itself, but this point of his 'Two Dogmas' was already attacked by the time Wittgenstein invented analytic philosophy.

2.

For Wittgenstein, an analytic proposition is something which is defined by its 'results' (i.e., its application) and the way in which these results co-determine the definition of the subject of the predicate. For example, the proposition 'the straightest line between two points is always at the same time the shortest distance' is for Wittgenstein an analytic one. Like Kant, an analytic proposition is for Wittgenstein not determined by experience. Unlike Kant, however, Wittgenstein thought that the same applied to synthetic a priori knowledge. For him we define a shortest line to be the straightest within two points. This is not something which we test against our representations (not a synthesis of regulative principles in the mind and the intuitions of our experience); nor is it something which we recognise as having no criterion against which to test it (as Hume said in book one of his Treatise on Human Nature). Empirical information simply doesn't come into it. The shortest distance between two lines can't be 'shown' to be analytic; it is simply defined as such. The shortest distance is in all cases the straightest line because the definition is co-determined by these two constituents. So, analytic propositions cannot divine the consequences of their rules because their meanings are contained in their results (e.g., the angles of a triangle add up to 180°; if they did not, we’d be talking about a different shape). In spite of this, such propositions must count as analytic because they are valid by definition, because if their validity is affected, then so is their meaning. To those geometries which show the actual shortest distance between two points to be a curved line (through the assumption that space-time itself is curved) we attribute a different meaning than the geometry in which the rule concerning shortest lines applies. We recognise that the rule does not hold in this case, but we also recognise that this is a special case of the rule, which exists alongside the ordinary rule. Of course, one could argue that the ordinary rule about the shortest distance between two points is determined by the limits of our powers of mental representation, even if it has no absolute ontological validity.

3.

Kant thought that Euclidian geometry held in all cases and determined the possibility of mental-visual representations. This seems to be true for the majority of our actual visual representations (our 'intuitions' as he put it in the 'Transcendental Aesthetic') – with the crucial exception of the parallel postulate. This is disproved on so simple an object as a globe bisected with lines of latitude and longitude. The globe shows that parallel lines - which are defined as the sum of two right angles each - converge at the apex of the globe. The fact that we can actually represent this to ourselves in our field of vision sounded the death-knell for Kant’s theory of the transcendental limits of representation. Modern speculation about ghost particles, etc, too, shows that our knowledge of the world needn’t be predetermined by the limits of what is in some sense directly representable to us. In other words, the theory of transcendental idealism has no ultimate bearing on our knowledge of the world, and cannot provide a foundation to a fruitful and realistic ontology.

The problem is that Kant’s doctrine of Transcendental Idealism led him to treat propositions as if they were the tools of a static thing – the mind – projecting its results onto the world, as if a synthetic priori proposition belonged to a storehouse in the mind, which ensures its correctness in virtue of its transcending space and time, which form the basic constituents of empirical experience. Wittgenstein demolished this transcendental ontology of the separation of mind and world by suggesting that the binding force of an a priori proposition is the formulation of the sentence and the use of the constituent terms in relation to what already exists in space and time. The analytic proposition, therefore, is not a ‘regulative principle’ or doctrinal postulate that determines the possibility of existing and future objective knowledge. This point is made forcefully in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Grammar, and certainly more succinctly than this. Wittgenstein thereby avoided the ontological problems to which transcendental idealism succumbed.

Fucking epiphany

I introduce to you a welcome moment from my life. Writing on Wittgenstein's existentialism reminds me of one of the first great 'epiphanies' of my life, where everything seemed to resolve itself of its own accord, as if the problems resulting from the imprisonment in my own consciousness suddenly seemed solved. I experienced for the first time the truth of Nietzsche's Dionysian experience. This clip = Genius plot-structure + genius soundtrack + unabashed nationalism (Herodotean/ Periclean nationalism, not the nationalism of the present day, which is a proletarian and self-abasing attempt to grasp votes) + purity of ideal. I am still grateful to the moment in November 2003 when I stumbled accidentally upon this film. It proves the truth of Hegel's philosophy of the master-slave dialectic, that the truth is on the side of the happy man (Ch.4 of the Phenomenology).

NOTE: there is actually dialogue in the theatrical version.

Wittgenstein's early existentialism

When Wittgenstein said early on in his career that 'The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man' (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.43) he was following his doctrine of 'hard' solipsism to its logical extreme. What he meant, in his inimitable way, was that the life-circumstances of a person - a happy man, say - is entirely informed by personal, privative experience, and that when an unhappy person seeks to solve his or her problems, he or she thinks firstly of the external conditions that go with - or were formative to - the life of the happy person, and secondly thinks that the internal conditions of his own life refer to a ground of experience that is universal (which Kant called 'transcendental apperception') and universally translatable, i.e., the person denies or simply does not recognise the fact that solipsism - that one's thoughts and feelings are in fact one's only concrete reference point - is the actual blunt fact of consciousness. This does not imply that the person is in fact the only 'real' mind in the world, as Cartesian solipsism does, or that knowledge is impossible, as the Pyrrhonists thought.

We recognise in this that we are tied by the neck with the millstone of the experience of our own solipsism and with the frustration of failing to break out of ourselves. Whereas this sounds pessimistic, it is in fact the key to the overcoming of the Angst of existentialism, of the problem of Sisyphus. Sisyphus's problem is that he is trapped in his own consciousness, a consciousness that is shackled to the eternity of a self-defeating object. What will solve Sisyphus's problem is if he ceased to be who he is, either by transforming his identity, or in the extreme sense, by ending his life. The other alternative, the one Camus advocates, is to take to the absurdity and make it part of oneself, as one triumphs over a disability in accepting it. Of course, one may try to transform the material conditions of one's life, but that brings us back to the first point of the unhappy man above, that he projects the conditions of his failing life into a future state of affairs without accounting for the problem of his own solipsism. It is summed up in the proverb: 'When you go on holiday, you take your problems with you'.

What, then, is Wittgenstein's solution? It is one with his view of philosophy - you strive to dissolve it, not attempt to solve it as if it were a problem of mathematics or science. Its dissolution comes from within consciousness and according to the conditions of its existence, but not as a formula, or even as a piece of poetry. It is really rather a feeling, completely pre-linguistic and pre-cognitive. Psychoanalysis fails (and Wittgenstein talked about this at Cambridge in the 1930s - see the book Philosophical Occasions 1912-51) because it attempts to deal rationally with the life-conditions of the individual, as if a series of propositions about that person's experience could untangle the problems of a person's life and show him how best to live on. Wittgenstein tries to show that those classes of propositions dealing with the materiality of the world fail utterly to express the privacy of the mind, which is where the problem lies. Where they succeed, we are talking again about something that you and I can talk about, and what you and I can talk about can be understood, at least in some way, by others, through the mechanics of translation and linguistics.

'The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?... There are indeed things that cannot be put into words' (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: 6.521-6.522).

The decline of friendship and the rise of 'acquaintanceship'

Whatever Friendship might be, its postmodern replacement, 'Acquaintanceship', is mutual pleasure-seeking. The bonds of affection go no further than this. Friendship, of course, doesn't even base itself on mutual agreement. Where friends compromise with one another, acquaintances are based on agreement on the most superficial things (favourite film, songs, beer, clothing label, etc) because mutual acquaintanceship would be compromised and doubtless dissolved if core values (spiritual, political, ideological) were ever discussed. The advantage in this is that it frees people from the obligations of friendship. The disadvantage is that it frees people from the responsibilities of friendship.

Geldof was one day late

'Tell me why I don't like Mondays?' Fuck that - would someone please tell me why I abominate Sundays?! It could be the residual religious dourness handed down over the generations, and which Nietzsche recognised (in Beyond Good and Evil) as a 'piece of English genius' - that is, if you make Sundays incredibly stifling, the worker is eager to get back to work. Perhaps my aversion is just biographical - I've never liked 'em. I actually prefer Mondays. Sundays is full of hopelessness and ; at least on a Monday my dread has dissolved. Late on Sunday night is the time when the private citizens peel themselves away from the privacy of their pursuits and prepare themselves for the return to the hive. It's like a bird migration. The return to work of millions of people who hate each other and dread their lives so much that they have no self-consideration, a self-loathing trait that is reiterated by having to internalise all of their joys and interests just as much as their frustrations and sense of outrage, is an artwork of the modern day. All acculturated leisure time revolves around keeping up morale, around that pop song or film that pats you warmly and empathically on the back and says 'Chin up, son, life is great when we're in this together' (decent film, actually). Morality, too, in a large part revolves around maintaining the morale of workers. Quote me on this - I'll return to it later. In researching this post, I came across this interesting, and inevitably American, campaign.

For those 8 out of 10 who work in the service industry

Read this.

'Lenin's' superlative cynicism reminds me of a time when I was gripped by the spirit of the Feederz and their ringleader Frank Discussion. I once emailed Frank, who offered me some interesting advice on how to spice up my workday. Needless to say, I didn't follow it because, as Adorno and Horkheimer said, art promises you something that just isn't possible, it is structured according to entirely different categories; art is nothing like real life.

Ah shit, just enjoy the song.

Irony

Following up on the humour/ satire angle, here is a classic statement of irony against the 'protest poets' (skip to between 1:16 - 1:31).

This is from the 1970s, bang in the middle of a load of postmodernism - Mutual Assured Destruction, the Sex Pistols and punk rock, swearing on TV, striking industrial workers protesting the transition of the industrial economy to the service-based economy (the objectivity of the machine workplace gives way to the subjectivity of language-based service workplace), Foucault, environmentalism, mass tourism, etc, etc. (someone could perhaps suggest some more factors?). The irony of 'Clive's' attack is that it reduces even the most well-meaning sentiment seen here - of the human yearning for freedom and equality - to ridicule. The implication is Nietzschean: the rights-fighter is just a crap version of someone who exercises rights; he desires power just as much as the one who possesses it, but seeks to obtain it not by 'open combat' of the virtues that that society recognises, but through appeal to the supposedly objective conditions that apply to man's nature itself, rather than to the 'external' customs of the society of the rights-fighter, the roots of which are arbitrary and enforced through social rules and codes. Whether these factors are in fact objective is another discussion entirely.

There are many examples of this kind of scepticism and opposition to the Enlightenment - a hidden history, in fact. It's a subject that captivates me, because we are still in some senses living in the discourse of Enlightenment.

A Slap in the Face of Public Taste

The Russian Futurists (Mayakovsky and some forgettable Russians) once wrote:

The past is too tight. The Academy and Pushkin are less intelligible than hieroglyphics.

Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity.

'Less intelligible than hieroglyphics' - this is a line of genius! Like Modernity I've characterised below, what this line of thought attempts to do is pierce through the 'shell as hard as steel', to pierce through the essence of the pre-planning and deadly rational modern life, through the drudgery and shitness of modern life - let's not beat around the bush. Pushkin is of course the Russian Shakespeare - all too intelligible, and all too naive. Pushkin didn't have to live with the fact of being an epigone. But is that his 'fault'? Who cares, said the Futurists.

Adolescent rebellion against the Elders. They became legendary to themselves in striving to create legends. To us they cannot be legends in the sense that Shakespeare is a legend or Chretien de Troyes is a legend or Homer is a legend. The modern curse of reflection ruined their chance - as Kierkegaard noted. Their failure to create an actual body of legend was determined by the categories of Modernity, just as they kicked out against them in attempting to make the impossible possible. Did they care?

The Problem of Modernity

I'll characterise Modernism after the fashion of Habermas. We are living in Modernity’s shadow, the shadow of the completeness and exhaustion of all forms of life, like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, who chillingly finds himself bored and sated with heaven as with hell and everything in between. We are at once trapped by the bureaucratisation of all life, to which we can offer no original contribution (Weber's point), and by the stunning emptiness of this bureaucratisation, whose grip is not so firm that it provides a set of values by which we can live as people used to before the 'curse' of rationalism. Modernity is:-

The fleetingness of time and experience (recognition that fashions become outmoded, that one will oneself be outmoded; that history marches on and the past is simply 'left behind');

Revolutionary (rebellious) spirit of the age - we see countless rebellions against the strictures of our civilisation. We see liberal revolutions against the lingering traces of a feudal or aristocratic order (1789-1848); socialist revolutions against capitalism, against property (1848-1917; the latter continues in a rejection of consumerism); nationalist revolutions against the entire discourse of modern life (against capitalism and socialism) (1923-45); bourgeois counterrevolutions against the radical revaluation of modern morality by Fascism and Communism (1939; 1945-1991); uprisings against the social order (May 1968), etc ad nauseum. Every rebellion takes it upon itself to revolutionise and subvert, or to defend and make permanent, the rational order of life.

Longing and yearning – for myth (return to the gods of the blood; Völkisch yearning for unity), for community (Gleichschaltung; yearning for consensus); and the longing for freedom from history or authority (Marxist, anarchist).

Belief that one is in a state of perpetual ‘crisis’;

Overcoming ‘closed’ systems of knowledge and representation – refusal to accept the canon of arts, sciences and morals;

Irony and cynicism;

The ‘sin’ of having too much knowledge to cope with it meaningfully (as in Goethe’s Faust), and its poignant obverse, the torture of not having enough knowledge to solve all of the world’s problems.

If one views Modernity thus denuded, one can look on it like a comedy. This is a cast list of a comedy. I hold no truck with the perpetual revolutionaries; I want to laugh at them. The choice is either to struggle against the inevitable discourse of Modernity or to wait for its collapse, as Nietzsche did (and which Spengler predicted).

Escapism and Pascal

Shockingly, I have developed an interest in escapism that I had not cultivated since childhood. A child's escapism is - if we push the fact of the resourcefulness and creativity of children aside - partly attributable to the fact that it does not have mastery over itself in a way that the fully self-conscious adult does.

Pascal wrote that if we spent as much of our lives dreaming as we do living in the physical world, then the dream-world would be as important and as real as the actual world. For my part, I am still struggling with the work-life balance - 8 hours work + 2.5 hours commute; 6.5 free time; 7 hours sleep. My free time is only 61.9% as real as my 'dead' time, as the Situationists put it.

'Life is a dream a little less inconstant'.

The media and the banking crisis

The poor status the media has in the eyes of the public is something that is widely known, satirised and passed on, like a fact of ‘idle talk’, as Heidegger called it. However, the viciousness of the media cannot truly be appreciated until one experiences it first-hand, as it were. And the Northern Rock crisis has certainly changed my perception of the media, and radically so. The alacrity with which the pressmen yearned to extort comments from the perplexed staff – who were misfortunate victims of circumstance – shocked me, as one wrong word from one of these employees – and the wrong word is precisely what a journalist will seek to latch onto and amplify – this wrong word could and almost certainly would cost that employee his or her job. His livelihood disposed of because of the rapacity of the press. The media is evil. The methods it uses in pursuit of material are an exaggeration of the effects of the ‘arms race’ of self-interest that we see everywhere in our civilisation.

On one side, we have the journalist, whose purpose is to bring news to the people. On the other side, we have the people, who endorse journalists in demanding news. That 6,000 jobs could be lost - which would exact irrevocable damage upon the economy of the North East of England, that is without doubt - is indeed a moral problem, but not morally urgent enough to invoke a moratorium on the dissemination of harmful news. After all, 'the people have a right to know', as they say. But it is not simply the 'ontological' aspect of the journalist's place in society that influences the way in which this crisis has been read to the public. Behind the journalist is the phenomenon of journalism - an industry, like any other. The purpose of this industry is to pursue its goal of reporting news. If one member of the industry refrains from reporting news, then another one will take up the task, having recognised that its competitor has voluntarily removed itself - in a manner of speaking - from the struggle for resources. Had all industry media refused to report on the situation out of a responsibility to avert crisis, then one or more of the fringe-industry 'guerrilla' media would have been provided with the platform it needed to penetrate into the mainstream and siphon off significant parts of the market share. I’m granted the example of the Drudge Report.com, which broke the story of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal after the mainstream media demurred to run it. The mainstream industry consequently raises its hackles, just as every industry and business and employee and worker does when it is threatened by the possibility of being out-matched by a competitor.

The underlying fact that was recognised by Adam Smith at the outset of capitalism is that competition creates optimum efficiency. But the intensity of competition that reiterates optimum efficiency and the subsequent need to exhaust the potential of available resources – into which bland concepts we can insert the flesh-and-blood story of the funding crisis at Northern Rock – is raised to a tragedy.

Epigraph

Formerly, one wished to acquire fame and be spoken of. Now that is no longer enough because the market has grown too large; nothing less than screaming will do. As a consequence, even good voices scream till they are hoarse, and the best goods are offered by cracked voices. Without the screaming of those who want to sell and without hoarseness there is no longer any genius.

This is surely an evil age for a thinker. He has to learn how to find his silence between two noises and to pretend to be deaf until he really becomes deaf. Until he has learnt this, to be sure, he runs the risk of perishing of impatience and headaches.

– Nietzsche