This is a thread on the topic of the mind of Capable, as he revealed it to me in the duration of my correspondence with him.
I will start with a quote of the article he wrote on Kitaro. It is not so much what he says, the implications of which are infinite, but how he attacks a subject. I’ve learned from this guy that it is possible to not be Nietzsche, or Nietzschean, and still be a philosophic predator; Capable unites the worldly with the metaphysical predation, he surpasses thus a great deal of historical philosophers. The fact that Capable so swiftly fully understood my own supreme accomplishment, something which no other man has managed that I know, quickly evoked the question of what else he is capable of. Being more than ten years younger than I am it is logical that he had, in that time, from 2011 to say, 2017, his best, most productive philosophical years ahead of him. We fell out over Trump in the end, the whole phase of immersing in politics was less than ennobling, politics being politics - and every attempt here to explain what ‘was the case’ will be equally debasing - Capable always maintained a noble rage, which Sloterdijk sees as the foundation of consciousness. His yet ununfolded mind could naturally tolerate no lies at all, no trickery, none of that sort of thing, and he was not inaccurate in his prognostications, even though James S Saint was right as well, where the two of them are fundamentally incompatible thinkers as shown in a phase where Capable was investigating the merits of RM, a study I will never know the depths of but which ended in Capable’s utter denunciation of the whole system as something that produces incredibly deep subtle errors, which vo can fairly easily indicate by the lack of the notion of subjective value as primacy to consciousness and thus to the experience of reason and this to all that goes by the name “Reason”, but here I go again – still the same old G – James was right too in what would happen. But he got the reasons slightly wrong. Or he was just playing me. In any case, this thread is not about James S Saint but about the philosopher that presumably likes to hide in the capacity of depth for its own sake, which would be nature’s abode. Here is a quote, from an early thread on the forum he built with his the help of his spouse, thanks be to her as for that, by the way.
I dont know if I will cone back to add to this thread. I want to, as there is a literal infinity right there for the grabbing, in the published exhibitions of Capable’s Method. All that is of value, all that matters in philosophy and much outside of it as well (as what matters in philosophy is after all the world in its fullest sense) Weary Locomotive once said, is method. Here’s a method of attacking a subject so as to extract value from it in the cadre of producing a philosophy of the future.
Note that the following is by no means the best writing Capable produced, it is simply one of the first ventures into a subject I had no knowledge of that I encountered. And everything that he wrote in these years is seething with life. The post makes references to and use of self valuing logic but simply as one would use a fork, which is not to eat soup.
All that follows this is a copy of post 1
CAPABLE ON KITARO
Tue Jun 18, 2013 2:29 pm
Kitaro divorces the notions of space and time from each other, space being the dimension of immanence and extensivitiy, time being the dimension of transcendence and intensivitiy. Space being the realm of simultaneous existence, time being the realm of successive existence. The “physical” world is essentially the spatial world, while the biological world is the temporal world. Time is reversible in the physical world, while time is irreversible in the living, biological world.
The “absolute contradictory” identity of the self involves the contradiction between “the many and the one”. The self, attempting to reconcile its biological element with its physical element (its world and socio-history) is thrown into the contradiction between the many (the physical world of reversible time and distinct entities existing in space) and the one (the biological world of irreversible time and unique self-expressing entities existing in time). Human acts express themselves, the biological self-identity from which they arose, but they also express the world, and therefore through human consciousness the world exhibits “both a spatial and a temporal character”… “As an order of simultaneous existence it appears as a form of self-negation, and yet it is infinitely occurring in its temporality. Affirming itself in its temporality, it transcends its own spatial character by being a creative transformation.” The temporal unity of the biological being across time, from the perishing of one spatial moment to the next, gives this living being its creative-transformative character; even as it is always perishing, it is also always being reborn. And it is out of these “biological centers” vectoring together through time which the conscious self emerges as the self-expression of the operations of these centers and by their continuity in the world.
This leads into a perspective that is at basic not unlike Parodites’ daemonic consciousness:
And as he continues, we can see how this also adopts and moves into a perspective along the lines of what value ontology proposes:
We see how he arrives at what we have called self-valuing. He also situates this self-valuing within the larger “objective” world that in its physical dimension (its spatiality) both opposes and also conditions the valuing self. From the vantage of the world itself, human-like consciousness’ are created in order to give the world greater expression and depth, to (re-)interpret the world constantly in terms of a dimension which is foreign to the physical world itself, the dimension of the organic, of irreversible, unique and absolute time. The active consciousness expresses the world through itself while it is expressing itself through itself; the contradiction of the one and the many, subject and objects. Both the world and the self-consciousness take on a contradictory character: the world takes on the character of temporality, which is otherwise entirely foreign to it, while the self-consciousness takes on the form of spatiality, of simultaneous physical existence, which is foreign to the temporal condition of the self.
Kitaro grounds religious experience in the ideation of God, God being the principle by which these two contradictions can meet each other and thus may enter into productive relation. Human experience of the eternal is grounded in our understanding of death, of the inevitability of the total oblivion of form, which of course includes us, and in this insight the experience of eternal life is also born at the same moment as this is just the intimate and endless novelty of understanding and creativity, which has been named, among other things, philosophy.
Against Kant’s transcendental forms of the understanding, Kitaro maintains that “content without form is blind, form without content is empty” and he locates here a principle of conscious growth and over-growing progression toward higher forms and orders of experience. He grounds this, quite simply, in thinking. The “thinking subject” arises as a representation of the essential contradiction of the self, as that which “cannot become an object of itself”, the operation is indelibly linguistic, the production of semantics and grammar. The term “grammatical subject” is a tautology. The self makes objects of its experiences but it cannot make object of itself, it cannot self-grasp and self-identify because its objectification and identification are situated in a reciprocal biconditional relation that can never become resolved or grounded, but remain always an irresolute chaos. This irreconcilability, this juxtaposing into contrast of incommensurate elements of conscious experience, this is what we experience as “thinking”. Kitaro’s absolute time of the self-determining act is also an absolutely divided moment, a space which cannot be entirely transferred into the dimension of temporality, and a time which cannot entirely be translated into the dimension of spatiality. Kitaro therefore defines the thinking subject in the negative definition as that part of the active consciousness which is unable to be made object of by our (objectifying-semantic) consciousness itself.
And yet, despite this insight, this purely negative definition does not suffice for Kitaro, and he wishes to proceed with a positive designation, wherein he finds a principle of conscious expansion:
This is indeed profound. Although he does not seem to draw the furthest implications from this, he locates a principle by which the self, trapped within its own impossibility for self-objectification and self-knowledge, is thrown at the junctures of this subjective interruption into alternate dimensions, from space to time, from time to space. From one purview within conscious expression to another, as the forms of this expression shift from one moment to the next. Where the conscious self meets an impassable wall it does not halt, some aspect of its experience always re-configures and escapes toward a new dimension of expression, is thrust into itself again endlessly as into a new avenue of its own self-expression. The negative condition of the self, its irreconcilable contradiction is also therefore understood to be also the condition of this progressive expansion of consciousness, its continual transformation into what which it presently is not. Transpositional logic is what Kitaro calls the logic of this contradictory consciousness existing as time within space, as space across time; objects within a subject, a subject as objects; and the thinking self which lies at the junction between the need for objectification and the threshold of impossibility of self-objectification. And of all this takes place within the temporal field of meaning of human world-history which gives rise to the possible forms in which our conscious acts ultimately take shape. The biological is always partially physical-spatial, but more so it is always noetic, teleological and dynamically reciprocal with its objects, cast outside of time… Kitaro again: “Self-conscious being pertains to noetic self-determination. Our conscious being has meaning in this framework. Each conscious act appears as a self-contradictory center of the noetic field of predicates. Reflection is nothing other than the self-reflection of the noetic field within itself. Our conscious acts are grounded in such a standpoint. That is the basis on which we are self-conscious and moral.”
The wider “noetic field” being that out of which individual organic self-determining centers rise and take shape, are colored with character and meaning. The irreconcilability of this self-determining active consciousness takes place within a wider noetic-teleological stage of human world-historical meaning, and is in fact, according to Kitaro, nothing but a particular manifestation of this field at a given point within it:
Kitaro succeeds as developing a rational understanding of the basic structure of consciousness and of the structure of this consciousness’ mutually-conditioning relations to the world, both to the physical world of objects as well as to the human history-world of ideas, values and meaning.
And finally, further to the above:
*All quotes taken from Nishida Kitaro’s book Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview