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A rejection of death lies at the basis of Western everydayness: little by little, the dead cease to exist. They are thrown out of the group’s symbolic circulation. Contemporary daily life rigorously proscribes death: the fact of being dead is not normal; it is an incredible anomaly. Unlike primitive cultures, which are established on a basis of an intense relation of symbolic reversibility between life and death, modern Western civilization pronounces a virtual prohibition on death, excluding it from the sphere of existence. This pretension to eradicate the experience of death is linked to the effort of material production and accumulation in the part of the capitalist economy. This is why it is in modern society that death becomes death drive insofar, precisely, as it is repressed, rejected, and kept in the Unconscious. Thus we can provide a historical-social interpretation of the Freudian concept of the death drive, which removes this from the metaphysical context in which psychoanalysis locates it. Death becomes this repressed drive which returns everywhere in daily life, doing so in the form of anxiety about death: the absence of channels to enact symbolic exchange with death and its acknowledgment within society considerably amplifies death’s force by transforming it into a hidden, subterranean psychological power that is all the more obsessive for being the less evident: if the cemetery no longer exists, that is because modern cities have entirely taken over its function: they are dead cities and cities of death, precisely because death is symbolically absent from them, but subteranneanly sovereign.

Unlike fear, anxiety does not involve a threat from some determinate entity in the world, but remains totally undetermined: that in the face of which anxiety is anxious is Being-in-the-world itself, namely the nothing and nowhere that characterize it phenomenally. Anxiety is linked to the fact of feeling estranged or uncanny, of not-being-at-home. This uncanniness harasses our Essence and threatens it, if only implicitly: everydayness is constantly engaged in acts of diversion in the attempt to eliminate it. But that flight turns out to be futile: anxiety can arise in the most innocuous Situations; it constitutes the basic affective situation of everyday life.

it often happens in philosophy that by too much exalting something you in fact debase it

Plato critiques materialists for precisely the simple reason, among many others, that their account (logos) destroys the very ability to give an account, a logos. That is, materialism cannot account for intelligibility, and thus cannot explain how things are explained, i.e., how things are thought. Moreover, these giants fail to account for immaterial realities such as justice, virtue, and truth without reducing them to the material, which would be, in effect, to deny their existence or their ontological status as independently existing entities, for essential to their existence is the fact that they are not material. Thus for Plato, the materialist often becomes trapped in the paradoxical claim of neither being willing nor unwilling to affirm or to deny the ontological status of intelligibility, of forms. To deny them would be to argue that truth, goodness, justice, etc., do not exist, a claim that most are unwilling to concede. On the other hand, to affirm them is to displace and contradict their prior claim to materialism.

Nietzsche, who himself defined his own philosophy as precisely an “inversion of Plato,” argues that intelligibility and meaning are mere consequences of the constructions of will to power, which itself is rooted in a natural process. Moreover, anything and everything metaphysical, concerning truth and/or being, proves to be a mere “stabilizing” of becoming. “What is” then is ultimately reducible to the natural, to the material, and anything seemingly transcendent or mind-independent, i.e., anything metaphysical, remains ultimately fictitious. Plato, on the other hand, as a proponent of the forms or Ideas, seeks to ground the material world of nature—the sensible world of becoming—upon the intelligible world of the Ideas, which constitute the “being” and the “truth” of sensible beings that become. Being, thus grounds becoming, as that which exists ontologically independent of the things in the sensible realm. In short, intelligibility, being, and truth are mind-independent and serve to ground the changing sensible world upon a fixed, invisible world of being.

Excuse me while I touch the sky

If one writes in blood, one surrenders one’s soul. But if the author puts themselves into what they write, we will see that they claim the same from the reader.

Written with one’s heart, words in blood express the passion that belongs to philosophy at its inception as thaumazein, as pathos itself, which is the key to the attunement of philosophical astonishment, the sustained wonder or amazement that things are, and that what is is as it is — and not otherwise. One can keep this wonder only in authentic questioning, a questioning that opens up its own source. In this self-tending tension, philosophy never makes things easier but only more difficult. This same difficulty is the reason that philosophy might, indeed, it we concern ourselves with it, do something with us.

Live with ideas as one lives with companions — as real flesh and blood — and write in blood. Of everything that is written, I love only what one has written with one’s blood. Write with blood and you will learn that blood is spirit.

Words in Blood, Like Flowers

Nietzsche’s project, along with the atheist and reductionist accounts of Being proposed (axiomatically) by modern science and technology, fails to account for precisely why the world is intelligeble rather than unintelligible, and this fails to adequately explain not only particular intelligibles such as numbers, logical rules, causes, etc., but more importantly, intelligible grounds such as being and truth.

layover

Making love in the sun, in the morning sun

in a hotel room

above the alley

where poor men poke for bottles;

making love in the sun

making love by a carpet redder than our blood,

making love while the boys sell headlines

and Cadillacs,

making love by a photograph of Paris

and an open pack of Chesterfields,

making love while other men—poor

fools—work.

That moment—to this . . .

may be years in the way they measure,

but it’s only one sentence back in my mind—

there are so many days

when living stops and pulls up and sits

and waits like a train on the rails.I pass the hotel at 8

and at 5; there are cats in the alleys

and bottles and bums,and I look up at the window and think,

I no longer know where you are,

and I walk on and wonder where

the living goes

when it stops.

Making love in the sun, in the morning sun

in a hotel room

#bukowksi

Decadence: worship of the letter at the expense of the spirit.

Hardware is of no relevance to metaphysics. You talk about metaphysics at the software level, and you cannot explain metaphysics in a way that is of any use to anyone at the hardware level. Higher level facts about organization have a kind of autonomy.

The nature of all tragedies: the hero dies, and the story goes on forever

Time to die

We used to be human

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