In this excerpt I use an eclectic vocabulary taken from general philosophy and Schelling in particular. I use terms like ground, repetition, (iterance) irrational, etc. all of which are talked about in Schelling’s writings, who provides the only antipode to my knowledge with respect to Nietzsche’s philosophy of will.
- Veritas patefacit se ipsum falsum; Philosophari patefacit se ipsum contra philosophicum.-- With the psychologist’s nose I have searched into and out the writings of the philosophers, as well as rang upon a great number of the bells of their sins or campo venale taceamus, [Cassiodorus] and having done so for quite some time I now must render unto myself the following dictum: the forces at work in philosophy are not, as Schelling and Nietzsche both say, merely the irrational, instinctive forces themselves which constitute the ground of the understanding, but are the true philosophic powers themselves which, strictly as an actuality, as an actual, active, and living understanding, ever assert their distinction from the roots and reins of thought.
Neither can philosophy be denounced as a product of purely psychological dynamism, as a determination and work of these reins, for that dynamism is strictly an engenderment and operation of the subject in question, namely, philosophy, as an expression of it; our great paroxysm, Athenanian birth, and fever. Philosophy cannot be counted amongst the caste of instinctive forces if it has qua the instincts this expressive function and, moreover, if this expression is fundamentally not heterogenous but homongeous with the different but similar operations realized by consciousness. In this sense philosophy is not susceptible to analysis on the basis of any motivation other than its own. As Schelling writes: "“Will is primal being, all philoosphy strives only to find this highest expression.” The philosopher’s truth is ultimately not a kind of divine inspiration but, to speak again with Schelling, “the devouring ferocity of purity that a man may only approach with an equal purity.” May we not allow as our little portenta dictionis in fictionis, too, occasionally- with greater purity?
Moreover, it may be said that an inverse relationship exists between the grounding and iterance of philosophy; what grounds, iterates- what iterates, grounds. This phenomenon Walter Benjamin named- the Penelope work of forgetting, which may be compared to Schelling’s statements:
"The deed, once accomplished, sinks immediately into the unfathomable depth, thereby acquriing its lasting character. It is the same with the will which, once posited at the beginning and led into the outside, immediately has to sink into the unconscious. This is the only way the beginning, the beginning that does not cease to be one, the truly eternal beginning, is possible. For here also it holds that the beginning should not know itself. Once done, the deed is eternally done. The decision that is in any way the true beginning should not appear before consciousness, it should not be recalled to mind, since this, precisely, would amount to its recall. He who, apropos of a decision, reserves for the himself the right to drag it again to light, will never accomplishing the begining. "
Each form of iterance will call forth another according to Benjamin, by an irremediable pathos- just as in the dream, we may find two seemingly different things similar- opaquely similar. The grounding iterance following the iterated ground is not the negation of the first, but the first ‘dragged again back into light,’ as a perversion of the ‘beginning,’ a subversive ghost of the true beginning. From the forms of repetition created in the gap of this diffrence a third thing is generated by the echoing of the two dissimilar things or opaquely similar things: this is strictly the grounding of the iterance and the iterance of the ground as a simultaneity, as will.
Basically what I am saying here is that what Freud would call the unconscious does not exist merely as a repetition of the ground of experience, ala. trauma-- but as a repetition that itself provides the ground of experience, namely, will. So in my aphorisms I do not analyze human experience and activity in terms of will and power, - a will which always touches power for Nietzsche, but in terms of a will that is confined to what Benjamin would call ‘opaque similarity,’ which neither touches the ground in Schelling’s sense- or power. My concept of rationality amounts to philosophy’s self-expression, and I use it to justify the essential difference between philosophy as a self-disclosure of the will and the will itself which is privated from the ground, ie. I use it to justify philosophy’s basic rationality, in distinction to both Schelling and Nietzsche. This self-expression of philosophy, this self-disclosure of the will is not merely tautological because it asserts in terms of the ‘actuality of understanding’ what cannot be understood on its own terms, as opaque similarity.