The Myth of the 'Philosophical Investigations'

1.  The World (language) is a Labyrinth in which the Lover and the Beloved continuously approach one another upon labyrinthine ways which equally continuously move them apart. 

The Purpose of the Investigations is to create a labyrinth of the “We” (‘language is a labyrinth of ways’) into which the ‘you’ is guided – conducted – seduced.  Every ‘you’ is a potential beloved of the lover waiting in his labyrinth. 
The lover=the Minotaur=the monster of the labyrinth.

Out of the ruins (of disciples) one builds a labyrinth – the centreless universe – the all-devouring monad – the plural monad.

Only by losing oneself in the labyrinth can one be found by the lover – you have to want to get lost before the lover can find you in the labyrinth.  Wanting to be lost creates in the potential beloved a vertigo of self-abandonment, surpassing any other sort of betrayal.  One places one’s own genetic uniqueness in the service of the genetic destroyer.  Is that a manifestation of the ‘death instinct’?  

The labyrinth is dark – darkest of all is the lover.
The Beloved is the light in the labyrinth.

The “We” is a labyrinth of (disembodied) voices – not necessarily in unison – but occasionally punctuating the darkness with a chorus-refrain or an amen – spoken as ‘we’ and at once in “Übereinstimmung”; the intimation, attuned and coinciding, coaxing and chiding the ‘you’ – the beloved – to ‘go on’. 

The voices of the labyrinth were once ‘you’.  They are now ‘we’ – the voices of the damned – the ghosts of the previous beloveds.  Once ‘you’ becomes a voice of ‘we’ – he becomes a previous beloved – no longer the present beloved.  These are the voices of the remembered loves.  The ‘We’ is the chorus of dead loves.

When the ‘you’ of the beloved becomes a voice of the ‘we’ in the labyrinth, the ‘you’ dies as a beloved but the lover=philosophy dies for the ‘you’ as well.  Or the ‘you’ does not know itself anymore.  It is an atom of the ‘we’ of the seducing chorus.  Which is the same thing as saying – the lover has died for the ‘you’.  Only the next ‘you’ will revive the lover for the time in which the ‘you’ still resists becoming a ‘we’.

For the lover is also the hunter of the beloved – and what the lover hunts is the Will.
This leads to Bruno – the myth of Actaeon.  The chorus of dead loves are those who have received the mystical ‘mors osculi’ – death of the kiss. 

2.  In the negative cosmology of Bruno, Hell is part of God.  His ideas finally entered English thought some 50 years after his death during the time of the English Revolution via the ‘teutonick philosophy’ of Jakob Böhme.  The annihilation of the soul – as portrayed in the drama of Faust – is a desired end.  Mystical enlightenment comes only in the deepest darkness.  Divine grace is to be found in the depths of hell because that is where “God shall retire himself within his own Center, to be truly Hell.” (“An Introduction to the Teutonick Philosophie”, C. Hotham, March 3, 1646 – Dispute at Commencement in Cambridge)

Ludwig Wittgenstein revived certain aspects of the ‘teutonick philosophy’ when he began his teaching career at Cambridge in the 1930’s.  He found many young disciples willing to follow him along the ‘via negationis’, entrusting him with their malleable souls.   “My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul.  I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Part II)
In the drama of their souls Wittgenstein’s role is never perfectly fixed.  Sometimes he appears to be Faust, sometimes Faust’s tactless crude apprentice Wagner, but more often Mephistopheles.  Wittgenstein is not evil, but he sees with the eyes of the Evil One – very far.  Who is really in charge of the obedience of ‘bare life’ if not the Master of Hell – where and by whom are the damned punished?  God may write the Law, but Satan enforces it.  Wittgenstein is the mystical personality – he transmutes evil into good and good into evil until the question of good and evil collapses into absurdity.  One of Wittgenstein’s sources for his ‘negative political theology’ is the vision of Church jurisdiction expressed by Ivan Fyodorovich in Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov”.  In a discussion in the cell of the holy man Starez, the simple monk Vasij sketches the utopia of the Church-State:  “It’s not the Church which will turn into the State (…)that’s Rome and its dream.  That is the third temptation of the devil!  On the contrary, the state turns into the Church, advances itself to Churchhood, and becomes a Church covering the whole earth.  This World Church is completely opposed to the ultramontanism of Rome and is reserved for the Orthodoxy on earth.  Light will come to the world from the east.” (Dostoyevsky, Die Brüder Karamasow, München, 1978, p. 93)

The mystical personality is a person who has a general reputation for being very virtuous, self-sacrificing, almost unnaturally good, no matter how much evidence to the contrary.  Anything he does or is no matter how remote from the conventional notion of good will always be interpreted in a positive or logical light.  This is the very essence of his negative influence.  The ‘essence of negation’ which eluded Wittgenstein in his philosophical writings – is captured in his life.  He speaks through his interpreters and they declare his words to be oracular.  The first sacrifice required of Wittgenstein readers is sacrificium intellectus.  As Cavell writes in “The Claim of Reason”: “(…) Wittgenstein’s writing is, as certain of his readers had shrewdly suspected from the beginning, beyond rational criticism.” (Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason, Oxford, 1979, p.20)
His personality is a paradox because his kind of dialectical harm, which is generally recognized as good, is a cause of holiness in others.

The proof of true love is the breaking of the will of the other.  Through his ability to break the will of others, without necessarily imposing his own will in its stead; the mystical personality is a prime mover of fate.  He is the embodiment of the negative principle.  He nullifies his ‘victims’, he does not posses them.  The negative principle is not the essence of the mystical personality – it is his prestabilized fate.  He may try to evade it in his youth when it is less obvious – being simply disguised by youth and its excessive vigour.  When the lethargy and solitude of age set in, the true mystical personality begins to shine through.  The mystical personality can no longer hide behind the living, it is reclaimed by the worlds beyond. 

The ‘riddle of evil’ is very close to the ‘riddle of holiness’.  To measure their nearness one must first familiarize oneself with certain principles and methods derived from a negative theology of coincidentia oppositorum (Nikolaus Cusanus, Giordano Bruno, Jakob Böhme) 

Negative Theology:  God is not redemption.  The Anti-Messiah.  Why shouldn’t there be a separate anti-force, which brings the Anti-Redemption.  With all the magnificence of the Redeemer?  Not Lucifer – he isn’t the expected one.  But a figure about whom prophecies have been uttered – a figure of the future.  As Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says: “Oh that someone would save them from their Saviour!”.  The characteristics of the Not Redeemer should be equally recognizable as those of the Redeemer.  The first axiom of negative theology – God is the Not-Redeemer, the star of not-redemption.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Waiters' Game

The waiters’ game of cards in a back room in yellow light on a cold quiet night in late winter.  An ordinary night scene without fireworks or stars.

One player arrived smoking as we turned the corner.  The room belongs to a black man.  They will wake up at midday.  The host will prepare breakfast for the losers.  You can see his profile, another’s face and some hands.

P.S.  There is no waiters’ game now, no waiters, no hotel where the waiters work.  The room is slowly dying with the rest of the corner building.  The waiters have flown south forever.

Omens of Resignation

A sort of omen – I looked for the meaning of Goethe’s concept of “Entsagung” (resignation, renunciation) and read in a “suppressed maxime” of de La Rochefoucauld that “One need not be astonished that self-love sometimes unites with the strictest renunciation.”  Then I noticed in his chronology, that he is the co-author of a novel remarkable for its “morality of renunciation” – “La Princesse de Clèves”.  In the novel the heroine renounces marriage with her lover, out of obedience to the wishes of an unloved dead husband.  Was de La Rochefoucauld’s ‘Faustian’ dialectic of self-love (l’amour-propre) one of the sources of Goethe’s peculiar concept of renunciation?  Self-love according to de La Rochefoucauld can even form alliances with its own enemies and work towards its own ruin.  But if self-love ruins itself in a certain place through renunciation – it is only because at the same time somewhere else it has already re-established itself.
Madame de La Fayette, the presumed author of “La Princesse de Clèves”, and her close friend de la Rochefoucauld were under the austere influence of Jansenists.

The key omen was that de La Rochefoucauld died on March 17th 1680 and on another March 17th I felt the urge to re-read some of his maximes – especially about the myth of the contempt for death – “de la fausseté du mépris de la mort”.

P.S.  La Princesse de Clèves reincarnates as the “Marschallin”, Princess Marie Thérèse von Werdenberg in Hofmannsthal’s “Der Rosenkavalier”.  The Marschallin resigns herself to losing her young lover, helping him towards matrimonial bliss with the lovely daughter of the “parvenu”.
The drama of “Entsagung” turns into a bittersweet farce in the style of the old Viennese theatre.  

 

Norman Habits

Fate seems to reside upon habits.  Habits are stronger than truth, because their sheer persistence seems to defy refutation.  They appear to self-verify through daily or regular use.  Like a scientific procedure, habits are repeatable with the same or similar results.  But they are also like fate as they conduct you in their repetitive cyclical fashion incrementally along your unalterable inexorable route.

Aristotle calls habits hexis, although this word has many interpretations  - it usually refers to a ‘state’ which is nearly permanent, a kind of second nature.  Habits increase the general level of predictability in human life, as quasi-individual conventions they acquire the status of instinct.  In Aristotle’s Metaphysics hexis is opposed to energeia (activity or operation) – as whatever energy once entered the creation of a habit is thoroughly digested in the shortest of time. 

I have lost my habit of reading at the breakfast table – although I used to learn all sorts of useless information from it.  In particular about habits.  Habitual activities tend to produce habitual results.  Losing the habit may have increased my stock of energeia, or at least demonstrates that one can reverse the flow of nature or quasi-nature.  I never tried to lose the habit - it was probably driven out by a new and stronger habit.  Nietzsche advocates “short habits” thinking that one could distract a repeated action from becoming a habit by cutting it short.  A habit does rely on the temporal dimension but its shortness is no guarantee against its fullness or longevity.  Indeed it is within the realm of conceivability that a habit takes place only once.  Everything else about Nietzsche was long or at least not short.  His thought would be finally thought through in a thousand years, no philosophical system big enough to contain it.
He clung to friendship and family like a Virginia creeper, and one knows there is nothing one can do to annihilate those plants.  Most indestructible of all is his euphoria, it is no short habit.  Habits have the virtue of not always being in evidence; they are discreet if largely recurrent.
A lost cause is also a habit – any fidelity to such a cause merely rehearses a played out melodrama.
Something which is always there, like gaiety, is certainly not a habit, but it is not short either.  Aristotle would have referred to such a semi-permanent state as hexis as well.  But this is confusing.  Something which is always there, never goes away, needs no cause, in this case groundless good cheer, lacks the sine qua non of hexis – privation or a time in which the habit is in abeyance.  No matter how long a habit, even an infinite one – a habit (whatever size, quantity) will never reach “the sharpest point of infinity”. (“la pointe… plus acérée… de l’Infini”, Baudelaire)

One is lucky if one is able to choose to give up one’s habits, more likely the years will take them away, as one can learn from Horace.  “Each year of life as it passes takes something away from us as its prey: they have bereaved me of jest and game, they have deducted wine and kisses and now they wrestle the lyre from my hand, what else do you want?” (“Singula de nobis anni praedantur euntes; eripuere jocos, venerem, convivial, ludum; tendent extorquere poemata: qid faciam vis?” Letter to Julius Florus, Horazens Briefe, translated and edited by C.M. Wieland, Nördlingen, 1986, p. 508)

Once at the breakfast table I learned an old Norman rhyme about habits.
“lever a cinq, diner a neuf,
souper a cinq, coucher a neuf
fait vivre dans nonant et neuf.”
(rise at five, dine at nine,
sup at five, to bed at nine,
you’ll live to be ninety nine.”)
The Normans in Britain lived in their castles according to this strict routine.  Their habits distinguished them from the Saxons whom they conquered.  Were their habits instrumental to this conquest?  The historian G. Macaulay Trevelyan calls them “methodical barbarians”, suggesting they were people of strong habits but not civilised.  Life in a Norman castle was not very refined.  The habit of cooking everything in a pie is at least 6oo years old, as is the use of ginger as flavouring.  Recipes tended to hew everything to dust (hens and pork together) mix with breadcrumbs and egg yolk and boil.  Retainers of both sexes slept in a hall on rushes around a fire.  Everything seems dirtier and less comfortable than in the palaces of Ulysses or Menelaus.  The Saxons were in awe of these sombre piles – never having seen a castle before the Normans arrived on the island.  “The Saxons were slow and difficult to move: they were farmers and herdsmen, who did not mind fighting, if their crops were in and they had nothing to do; and it was difficult to keep them together as an army, unless the call for their services were very urgent.  They (…) thought very little about Art, or Literature and, so long as their neighbours left them alone, showed little interest in other people’s doings.  Saxons lacked the art of combination, and it was because of this they failed against the Normans.” - according to an illustrated children’s book published in 1918. (Marjorie and C.D.B. Quennell, A History of Everyday Things in England, London, 1918,
p. 2)

It occurred to me that a few hundred years before William the Conqueror came from France to trounce the dull-witted artless brutal Saxons another Frank (William was a Norman but ‘Frankified’) massacred and subjugated the Saxons on the continent during a kind of medieval Verdun.  The other Frank was Charlemagne.  The Saxons were so easy to beat because they had learned nothing from the Romans about fortifications.  They tore down all the walled cities or settlements built by the Romans in Britain.  They did not like being confined, preferring to live in clearings in the woods, near their fields.  They only knew how to swarm out in hordes but had little perseverance and only enough engineering to erect some flimsy wooden palisades.  Their idea of fortification was to dig long ditches – like the trench warfare of World War One.  The battle was fought already halfway into the grave.  The Normans fought from above – from the castle mount, on top of which was the keep, on horseback with spear and sword.  The Saxons were as helpless as the Incas or Aztecs (who had a higher civilisation) at the appearance of the conquistadors.  Whether they heeded the cold ‘bells of Angelus’ or warmed themselves at the fire of Woden’s blood sacrifice – all the Saxons succumbed to the Norman habit.  Even before the Norman invasion – the bells used to lead the Danish ‘host’ to where the unmapped Saxon settlements were nestling amongst the trees.
The place where Charlemagne had the Saxons slaughtered was Verden – renowned as the Massacre of Verden of 782.  Later in 843 the Treaty of Verdun divided the Frankish Empire between the three surviving sons of Louis the Pious, son of Charlemagne into Middle Francia, East Francia and West Francia.  

  

       

Conversation of the Enemy

Scene:  A baroque hall of mirrors on the outskirts of fin de siècle Vienna.  Two gentleman of the first society in formal dress, but without their tailcoats, are standing at opposite ends of the long hall.  Their voices echo across the void. They have just come from a ball or a soirée in a town palace or an urgent consultation at the Hofburg but not the same one.  Their tailcoats lie in the exact same position on the ground next to them.  The distance is so great neither can be sure he isn’t looking at his own reflection.

Count A:  The enemy is nothing personal, it is the condition of one’s existence, the only natural boundary to one’s will besides the exhaustion one carries about.  Without an enemy one withers between agues of languor and seizures of enthusiasm.  One’s enemy can tire one without ever laying eyes on it, without even engaging it, but somehow there is for the enemy the same intangible boundary, which it of course tries to violate as often as it dares.  But it always is a dare.  Not every generation of the enemy has nerves equal to the dare.  One need not meet one’s enemy; it is highly undesirable to do so, yet the lineage is as certain as if one had been brought together in an arranged marriage.  The enemy is the supreme habit.  One knows the genre.  Like every habit it belongs to the order of the world only more so.  It must also observe a délai de carence like any other habit.  The Kabbalah calls it the other side.  Like most habits it may begin as a striving for perfection and turn into a tyrannical routine.  There is no habit like the enemy for drawing one towards perfection.  Every move in the direction of the enemy is a move towards perfection; every move away from it is a fall from grace.

Count B:  A will beholden to the will of an enemy is freer or as free as a will, which denies itself.  The relationship is not transitive nor stricto sensu reciprocal.  Krishna revealed this dialectic of the enemy to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita.   Speaking to or speaking about the enemy is a habit.  One is hypnotized by the enemy’s suada.  Habits are character, character is ethics – or habits are ethics, ethics are character, character is will, will is unconditional and immutable and timeless.  Remorse is the emotion, which precedes and accompanies corrections in the reading of the will – and the motives, which are its instructions to the empirical character.  One’s enemy is the reverse or the antidote to oneself.  Every action of the enemy is the manifestation of its immutable will, any or all of its actions may wrongly interpret this will, the enemy may appear unlike itself for a good while, even indefinitely, this period in which the enemy does not recognize its will, obfuscates one’s own will in equal measure, even though no such effect is intended.  One must pray that the enemy be guided by its faculty of reason to finally recognize its own will, because its clarity will illuminate one’s own reason.  On rare occasions when the enemy remains stubbornly misguided disaster takes place all around like in the Eulenburg affair.  Or it is narrowly avoided as in the case of Colonel Redl.
Clarity cannot be achieved through rational means alone.  A science of logic is a chimera.  But the absence of logic is also a chimera.  Logic has an intermittence of the heart.   Clarity of thought only exists within the precise radius of the enemy.  The enemy in the abstract sense is negation.  As wills are not subject to change or influence there can be no thought of losing one’s enemy, if one is so fortunate as to have been born into a will which is existentially bound by the will of another.  Bondage of wills differs from bondage between empirical characters.  In the world of the will, bondage means an enhancement of the original and irreducible freedom of the will.  A will with an accurate enemy will tends to err less in the discovery of itself; once discovered to stray less from its line, so being true to itself.  My own economy serves me as it does my inimicus – never eat before you are hungry and always stop before you are full.   

A long silence is broken by three shots of a revolver.