The origin of Philosophy in the Eternal Recurrence as the missing Totality.
I want to compare a process of “return” discussed by Gnostic and Druzean sages with the “return” of the eternal recurrence a la. Nietzsche, identifying the birth of philosophy. Combining them reveals a certain aporia intrinsic and essential to philosophy, involved in its very birth in the West. Nietzsche unconsciously used his eternal return as an evolutionary selective mechanism for reconstructing philosophy’s Totality in the absence of God-- this selective principle fails, and that Totality is not obtained in his philosophy; an empty shadow I call the “ontos” emerges in lieu of Totality, a shadow which separates the Ego from the Infinity of the uncontained presence of the One ie. God, the Absolute of Being outside the projective totalization, leaving the Ego stranded in the play of diffuse forces which is the Multiple. (I am using some of Levinas’ work on Totality vs Infinity.) Thus the Eternal Return is actually the origin of Nietzsche’s atheism, and its failure to construct philosophy’s Totality is one of the hard lines beyond which Nietzsche cannot venture, and it is one of the reasons I broke away from him more than a decade ago and restored my faith in the One he refused to his dying breath, that is, God-- the mono-god intuited by the ancient Sumerian-descended Jews who founded the Abrahamic religion. Nietzsche is useless past this line. Citing one of my books:
Agapeic love is an expression of the paradoxical One,- the One denied to itself, which generates multiplicity. God is the painful longing that weighs down every flower with drops of rain and dew in its desperation for the Sun, it is a melancholy radiated in the entire order of Nature, in all of this multiplicity of matter. Accordingly, true ethos is constituted by so many dechirures ethicques or ‘ethical tears’ wrought by ‘the movement of Being in the fixity of essences’, reversing the primacy of Kantian transcendental synthesis, or, in Hegelian language, that of essence over existence, re-submerging Being in the shadow of its ‘missing Totality’ or absconditus, ie. the pure negation left behind (occupying the “melancholic dimension” of ‘a separation internal to the paradoxical One’) in the wake of all dialectical exchanges,- exchanges which, unlike those of the Hegelian system, stand in their contortive eternity as unresolvable agonisms between vocal pluralities, [Andrew Gibson on Christian Jambert. See: “The Concept of Historical Reason in Recent French Philosophy”; Intermittency, p. 130.] as eternal recurrences, not of Nietzsche’s interpretative assemblages of active-passive drives, but of the singularity of the One denied to itself, of the Monon denied by the Mone, of the One denied by the Remainder. This, the impossibility of God’s returning to himself, (a continual withdraw from himself which we experience asymmetrically, namely as the flow of time toward an indefinite future, an empty continuum that swallows up all existence as so many “partial lights”, citing Valery, extinguished as they are in the absence of their source) which Schelling calls the “Remainder”, the dark Un-Grund of Being, the burial of the primal Will in matter, the ‘divine unconscious’ or God’s forgetting of himself through the creation of the World, etc. is his love; a melancholic dimension occupied by messianic revelation and the portent of a missing Totality that promises, against all reason, to rebind multiplicity together. Our love, however, (on the other side of this melancholy, on the rational or philosophical side of the paradox, counter-posing revelation and messianic consciousness, which exists always on the other; the Eros of the philosopher’s daemon vs. the kenotic agape of the saint) which we return to him on the other side of Golgotha, is just that; our re-submerging Being in the shadow of its own missing Totality, expressing these ‘ethical tears’ that prevent Multiplicity from returning to the One, that prevent the individual souls of men from returning to God. In this way, the tragic sense of life is fully realized in that love which, unlike Goethe’s angels, could draw the border and the shape of things. This is the great teaching of Christian ethics. The Greeks, in comparison, did not know tragedy. The eternal return of the self to itself in the wheel of Samsara,- of Desire, change, and multiplicity,- is only an inversion of the eternal self-separation of a God who cannot return to himself in the Unity of the One, with this reciprocity giving us an abbreviation of the great aporia of philosophy, the shadow of Being’s missing Totality.
The internal self-separation of the One (from itself) constitutes the initial or ‘ideal’ bijection,- the first two extremities (Monon and Mone) of the four-degrees of exchange within the tetrapole, that is, the ‘inner dialectic’, while the agon between this separation and Being constitutes the later two extremities of an ‘outer dialectic’, namely that by means of which the separation of the One precipitates the absconditus of essences,- the missing Totality haunting the existentia in which Being confronts its own shadow as an irresolvable or ‘asynthetic’ negativity, a ‘pure negation’. [ie. the negation of its own totalizing movement,- a movement terminating in abrupture or an ‘abortive semiosis’ of the ‘generative moment of Speech itself’ capable of returning all exoteric signs to their esoteric, ‘unspeakable’ core. This “returning” of the Sign is named, in the works of the Druzean sages and the Kalam-e Pir, ta’wil; a process through which the “Law reverses the truth it represents”, (in both an anti-Kantian and anti-Hegelian sense) inasmuch as the esoteric subject, when run up against the countervalent pressure implied by the absence of any totalizing force, finds itself unable to sustain any mediation (that is, any dialectic) with the One or Absolute, engulfed as this Subject is in those excesses of its own creative principle which it experiences thereafter,- as does the daemon in its descent into the prohodic depth of Nature,- in a succession of pluralist agonisms whose phenomenologically reducible Grund is to be disclosed, not in any Descartean cogito, but in a ‘cogitor’ whose singular ‘verbalizing’ emanation (Much like the Lullian ‘homoficans’; the inner dialectic is constituted by the self-separation of the One, accomplishing an ideal bijection, while the outer dialectic is constituted by the essence of man as the homoficans or that-which-makes-man by a reunification of the creative principle through that which is precisely ‘not man’, this being the Brunonian daemon.) draws upon the very chiasmus between Thought and Being the Lacanian schema would mistakenly utilize for the purposes of deconstruction,- (for the purposes of deconstructing symbolic constructions through interpenetrations of the Real) the gap between Real and Ideal,- or the res extensa whose true delimitation lies in an external discourse of the Other,- a discourse which must remain forever ungraspable by the very Subject who would experience it as the “unfounded freedom of the Real” standing as guarantor of its own capacity for self-reflection, that is, its cogito, or the reflective subjectivity arrived upon only through the irresolvable processes of the outer, secondary dialectic in its continuous ‘metaphysical venture’ or ‘speculative ethic’ toward a Meaning unamenable to the kind of phenomenological closure Heidegger had found for his own formulation of the human subject (as bound to the horizon of temporality) in Dasein,- a Meaning whose historical impossibility is infinitely interpolated upon the structure of Time, as endured by particulars caught up in the movement of Being and their symbolic order, from the transcendental auton.]
While the Hegelian philosophy reconstructs the telos of History and positivizes the negative, (by negating it, ie. the negation of the negation) we find in Nietzsche and the critical theorists, for whom all existence may be reduced to assemblages of active-reactive forces, “a case of repression, which, unable to dialectize or accept the negative, simply seeks to exorcise it in one gesture of creative selection,”- [Paul D’iorio, in: “The Eternal Return: Genesis and Interpretation.”] that is, the diffusion of all reactive energies through Markovian evolution and the dissipation, attenuation, and finally, the extinction of these forces over the trillions of years in which the eternal return operates at the scale of probabilities imagined by Boltzmann, with only an active force able to reach beneath the abyss of the Return into the heart of Matter, beneath the veil of incomprehensible Time, to imprint itself thereon and maintain the ‘das Gleiche’,- [Nietzsche’s original term for the “same” which recurs. See: “Shapes of Time in British Twenty-First Century Quantum Fiction; Shape Two: Concertina”. There is an eternal return, but only what is ‘real’, returns; only that which affirms itself is real, while all reactive forces dissipate to total nullity; only joy returns, for all sorrow, unable to affirm itself, sinks down into the heart of time and is forgotten. In Nietzsche’s phrase, joy is deeper than sorrow, and it alone survives into this depth.] its “pattern”,- as something that can in fact return, much as the souls of men are recycled in the Platonic account of reincarnation and, across their many lives, gradually purified and raised up on the ‘scale of Being’ to the height of the philosopher-soul which marks their perfection and stands alone as that which truly “returns”. In Schelling of course, the Primal Will cannot reach into this Night of the Unconscious, (This is the basis of Scheler’s self-sublation of the ego and the impotence of Geist, of the Spirit unable to reach into the creative reservoir of “images” in which the contents of the imagination are torn away from their objects.) and so an irreparable separation of power from its own Grund is established, leaving Being incapable of imposing itself upon Becoming in the hope of expelling the Negative: hence the self-separation of the One. We may now succinctly formulate this aporia, the great aporia of Western philosophy, the aporia of the choreia or “participation”: the One or Being fails to return to itself eternally, creating Multiplicity or Becoming; Multiplicity succeeds in returning to itself eternally, therefor unifying the multiple into a single pattern of difference, paradoxically creating the One. Levinas would tell us that no philosophy can connect the One and the Multiple, the ego and the true Other, such that a turn must be made to a kind of higher faith in a presence that cannot be reduced to an ontology of Being.
[size=85]* Deleuze formulates the eternal return as a kind of principium individuationis or selective principle: “It is sufficient to relate the will to nothingness to the eternal return in order to realize that reactive forces do not return. However far they go, however deep the becoming-reactive of forces, reactive forces will not return. … Because Being imposes itself on becoming, it expels from itself everything that contradicts affirmation, all forms of nihilism and reactivity … The eternal return is the Repetition, but the Repetition that selects, the Repetition that saves. Here is the marvelous secret of a selective and liberating repetition.”
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The true “presence”, for Levinas, emerges as an unconstrained, illimitable, and non-integrable Other, outside the boundary of philosophy’s discourse, which transcends the privation of the self constituting the “Non-I” of the dialectic, namely the thetic relationship in which the self refuses the infinite doxological presence of the Other and maintains the stricture of discourse against which Levinas proposes a novel ethics not dependent upon metaphysics and ontology, upon which basis all ethics has progressed in the West thus far, following the Aristotelian and Platonic traditions. In this way Levinas maintains the negativity of philosophy’s discourse and grounds ethics beyond the reductive dialectical “Totality” of a new, athetic relationship between the self and other for which the Infinity of the absolute Other absorbs the “inner separation” of the self and confesses the presence of Being without the stain of Becoming, or what Levinas calls the carceratory influence of “universal time”. Here we see that the effect of the Totality, that being the inner separation of the self from itself in the face of the absolute Other, comes before the cause, that being the thetic injection of the self (as cogito, ontologically considered, and as ego, psychologically considered) to the discourse of our logoi as something distinct from the Non-I and separated from the other, such that the Aristotelian movement of kinesis toward moral perfection is inverted, (aborting the purely deterministic, causal universe) as this discourse (a discourse, more generally, we call “philosophy”) finds itself continually unable to reconstruct its own past (What Levinas calls the “totality of the same”, totalization indicating the objectification of the other and the establishing of ontology, eg. metaphysical presence) and therefor unable to grasp its own Grund. (What Levinas calls the “infinity of the Other”) In the absence of the Other, we see that Levinas defines history in terms of an illusory interiority or ‘cogito’,- a detached ignorance in which the ego defends its merely psychical existence through regressive detachment and separation, finally exalting the pretended Totality over the Infinity of the Other, the victory of illusion over the uncontained doxological rupture of transcendence escaping all stricture of discourse, inasmuch as “life” (meaning our social lives as well as the basic laws of physics) cannot contravene or subvert this illusion and even encourages it as an evolutionary stratagem. We recall here those illusions necessary for the preservation of life, which Nietzsche speaks of. What Levinas proposes is then a kind of anti-philosophy, for if life cannot challenge the triumphant ego, that Other beyond the field of discourse can: it is just this, which gives us the moral challenge of Levinas’ work, what he calls a recognition of the Face of the Other,- something that, in his work, functions like the specter of negativity haunting the philosophical reconstruction of Being a la Western metaphysics.
Because the “true life” is steeped in absence, that is, a life capable of meeting this challenge, the metaphysics of Desire reveals an instinct turned ever toward the ‘outside of being’,- (or what Levinas calls the Infinity of the Other; a motivation, reversing the terms of Schopenhauer’s principle of sufficient reason, as seen from without.) regardless of our preferred formulation of this compulsion, be it given in the Platonic Eros, Nietzsche’s Will to Power, the Spinozan conatus, etc.- an exteriority in whose “alibi” philosophy keeps its illusory history from accessing the nullifying Grund of its existence, yielding an “ever yonder” in the shadow of which Desire feeds itself upon “realities” on this side of the ‘horizon of meaning’,- eg. the phenomenological closure of Dasein as the recursive construction of the identity (ontology) of a Being capable of understanding itself,- (the ontic, or authentic) realities that, however artfully wrought, cannot satisfy the Ego which reabsorbs their alterity into its own identity.
The question is, how to connect the One and the Multiple in philosophy’s discourse, reconstituting Totality in the face of the Infinity of an uncontained presence. Positivizing the negative of that presence’s absence as Hegel does, does not work; (that is why preserving negativity and resisting the dialectical equivocation and conversion of it into positive knowledge is so important to my own philosophy, something I write of often) the eternal recurrence does not work, as I have demonstrated its aporia in these passages; etc. etc. This is all rhetorical though, since I propose my own philosophy as the solution to this question. The result is a discourse that transcends both philosophy (the discourse of the Logos) and religion, (the abandoning of discourse in the face of the Infinity of the uncontained presence, the One un-absorbed by the Totality and left as a Schellingian Remainder outside the physical universe, in which we invest our religious impulse) creating this new “thing” that is neither philosophy or theology, neither reason or faith.
I will have to read further into the matter, to find out.