The Shamen’s “Re:Evolution” (featuring Terence McKenna) can be found here:
In this post, I’ll be giving my interpretation or appropriation of the text. It starts like this:
“If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.”
This is an adaptation of one of William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” (from his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell):
“Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ’d.”
The difference, in my view, is that whereas Blake put the emphasis on understanding the truth, McKenna puts it on telling the truth.—This post is an attempt to make the beliefs McKenna expresses here true by telling how I understand them…
“Human history represents such a radical break with the natural systems of biological organisation that preceded it, that it must be the response to a kind of attractor or dwell point that lies ahead in the temporal dimension.”
McKenna suggests here that man broke away from the (other!) animals in response to some kind of call from the future. My understanding is that it’s the other way round: because man happened to break away from the other animals, he needs and therefore imagines such a call.
“[…] man is to be ‘re-translated into nature.’ That re-translation is altogether a task for the future: ‘there never was yet a natural humanity’ (Will to Power nr. 120). Man must be ‘made natural’ (vernatürlicht) together ‘with the pure, newly found, newly redeemed nature’ (The Gay Science aph. 109). For a man is the not yet fixed, not yet established beast (aph. 62): man becomes natural by acquiring his final, fixed character. For the nature of a being is its end, its completed state, its peak (Aristotle, Politics 1252b 32-34).” (Leo Strauss, "Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, paragraph 33.)
McKenna continues:
“Persistently, western religions have integrated into their theologies the notion of a kind of end of the world, and I think that a lot of psychedelic experimentation sort of confirms this intuition. I mean, it isn’t going to happen according to any of the scenarios of orthodox religion, but the basic intuition that the universe seeks closure in a kind of omega point of transcendence is confirmed. It’s almost as though this object in hyperspace, glittering in hyperspace, throws off reflections of itself, which actually ricochet into the past, illuminating this mystic, inspiring that saint or visionary, and that out of these fragmentary glimpses of eternity we can build a kind of a map of not only the past of the universe and the evolutionary ingression into novelty, but a kind of map of the future.”
Man’s open universe seeks closure, not in an object, but in a subject: the nature of man, the natural, “universal” man (uomo universale). As I wrote in my “Note on the First Chapter of Leo Strauss’s Final Work”,
‘As a Nietzsche specialist, the first thing that struck me about the essay was something it claimed about Nietzsche—in fact, the very first thing. The first thing it claims about Nietzsche is that the basis on which he “questioned the communist vision more radically than anyone else” was his disagreement with the Marxian view on specialization: whereas according to Marx “the members of the world society […] are free and equal […] in the last analysis because all specialization, all division of labor, has given way to the full development of everyone”, Nietzsche “identified the man of the communist world society as the last man, as man in his utmost degradation: without ‘specialization,’ without the harshness of limitation, human nobility and greatness are impossible” (paragraphs 6-7). What immediately struck me about this claim was that it seemed in blatant contradiction to what Nietzsche himself said about specialization, for example in the penultimate aphorism of the sixth chapter of Beyond Good and Evil: “In face of a world of ‘modern ideas’ which would like to banish everyone into a corner and ‘specialty’, a philosopher, assuming there could be philosophers today, would be compelled to see the greatness of man, the concept ‘greatness’, precisely in his spaciousness and multiplicity, in his wholeness in diversity: he would even determine value and rank according to how much and how many things one could endure and take upon oneself, how far one could extend one’s responsibility.”
The next thing Strauss says about Nietzsche did not at all strike me as odd. He says there is an alternative to the last man, namely “the over-man, a type of man surpassing and overcoming all previous human types in greatness and nobility” (paragraph 7). But why is the one extreme called the last man and the other the over-man? Would one not rather expect the opposite of the last man to be called the first man, and that of the over-man, the under-man? This subtlety is the key to understanding, not only the first thing Strauss says about Nietzsche, but his entire essay.
Shortly before introducing Nietzsche, Strauss says that “for Marx human history […] has not even begun; what we call history is only the pre-history of humanity” (paragraph 6). This implies that what for Marx counts as human history, we would call post-history. Now in the first chapter of his Second Meditation Out of Season, Nietzsche calls his counterpart to this post-historical epoch the supra-historical standpoint. Even as Nietzsche considers his vision supra-historical whereas Marx considers his post-historical, so whereas the last man would be the man who comes after all specialization, the over-man is the man who is above all specialization; whereas Marx’s vision is one of serial order, Nietzsche’s is one of order of rank. This explains why Nietzsche “questioned the communist vision more radically than anyone else”. For according to Nietzsche, “the full development of everyone” is an impossibility; only a minority can be noble and great, which is to say free (frank) and fully developed; and this only inasmuch as the majority is limited. This difference between the few on high who are free and the many down below who are limited is the same difference as that between the supra-historical and the historical, respectively. The few on high, the philosophers, have a comprehensive view; the many down below have a decisively limited view.’
https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/t/note-on-the-first-chapter-of-leo-strauss-final-work/37017?u=zeroeth_nature
Strauss almost immediately continues his note:
“Man reaches his peak through and in the philosopher of the future as the truly complementary man in whom not only man but the rest of existence is justified (aph. 207).”
But let’s get back to McKenna, who immediately continues:
“This is what shamanism has always been about. A shaman is someone who has been to the end. It’s someone who knows how the world really works, and knowing how the world really works means to have risen outside, above, beyond the dimensions of ordinary spacetime and casuistry, and actually seen the wiring under the board;”
This pretty much describes the Platonic philosopher, exoterically understood: the man who has climbed out of the Cave and seen the Ideas whose shadows occupy it—occupy the minds of those inside.
::
At this point I’m completely abandoning McKenna; one should read my ‘Dionysos the Bodhisattva: a study in Nietzschean religious philosophy’ thread instead. (Note that I simply forgot to put quotation marks around the first Nietzsche quote.)
“The will to power is not the solution, but the core of the problem for the philosopher.” (Heinrich Meier, “Nietzsche’s Will to Power and the Self-Knowledge of the Philosopher”.)
‘I’d compressed my “solution” into a formula which is reminiscent of the futuristic teaching of the Superman: “Let your will say: This world shall be the will to power—and nothing besides!” Perhaps once on a time, it wasn’t will to power at all, perhaps even today it’s still many things besides; but even if only the will to truth be a will to power, it still has to say to itself, “be will to power!”—that is, “come again as will to power”, “come again eternally as will to power”… For the will to truth couldn’t know itself as will to power without willing itself as will to power, and that means: to will itself into the future, for the will cannot will backwards. And if it wills itself into the future, then it also wills its willing-into-the-future into the future…’
‘If “philosophy […] rests itself on an unevident decision, on an act of the will, just as faith”, it can still be established as superior to faith in revelation if it not only admits to itself that it, too, is faith, but also affirms that faith, in turn, rests on an act of will! It isn’t just etymologically that “to be-lieve” basically means “to want to believe”. Yet “true” believers are too weak-willed to admit this to themselves. They cannot (ken not!) put their will into things, they have to believe that a will, for example the will of God, is already in them. Philosophers, on the other hand, should be able to avow that Yes, philosophy is a will to power, and we want it to be! In fact, we want all reality to be will to power and nothing besides—for all eternity!’
‘It’s asserting philosophy against the tyranny of religion. And yes, will is only a feeling. I don’t believe in a universal willer (freely) willing our wills. So yes, [will is] the feeling of freedom, an illusion of freedom. […F]eeling is a fact—that is to say, it’s a fact that there are feelings. And I think conviction is a will that is projected outward (the belief that another’s will—a god’s, say—is already in the things one is convinced of). As for restraint, i.e. “self-restraint”: I think that’s a will that’s projected inward (the belief that one is putting one’s own will into things, i.e., that the feeling of will actually affects things, one’s convictions in this case).
I would agree, though, that restraint cannot be truly relentless, that conviction is needed as a contrast… Truth has no power without illusion, just as illusion has no power without truth.’
‘If devotion to a God is good for us, there’s still a good to pursue and a self to pursue it. But what’s really the case is that there’s a need, a desire, an eros, and what’s “good” for this eros is devotion to the beautiful illusion of a good to pursue and a self to pursue it! For it’s only in the felicity this illusion provides that eros can become aware of itself, of its own “activity”’.
https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/t/challege-to-zeroeth-nature-viz-self-lightening/49414/23?u=zeroeth_nature
“[I]n a manner the doctrine of the will to power is a vindication of God, if a decidedly non-theistic vindication of God.” (Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, page 181.)
He who hath ears, let him hear!