To zeroeth nature: NOTHINGNESS PER PRIVATIONEM.

You said the following:

" The way I see it—and note that I’ve been coming back to Nietzsche (and Hinduism, and religion in general) from within secular Buddhism or nihilism—, creativity is literally limited by Nothing… It is the Nothing or nothingness which is what I’ve called zeroth nature—that which alone gives rise to “natures”, “first natures”, e.g. human “nature”. Recall that thing I said […] about being bounded by boundlessness. This is the only true necessity: the maddening lonesomeness of the One or the Nothing, which impels It to WILL Its Other, Its Opposite, the loveliest being It could possibly imagine… "

Yes, the prohodos, as Plotinus called it.

Congratulations, you realized what I call 'Nothingness per privationem". It is a rare thing in the philosophical canon, however I reconstructed its wisdom-lineage, which I will detail below. It is, however, only one of four ‘vocities’: Nothingness per privationem, Nothingness per transcendentiam, Being per privationem, Being per transcendentiam. I explain each of these four here:

First, a preliminary statement on Bovillus’ concept of nothingness:

[size=85]Boehme’s quite original conceptualization of the Ungrund, preceding even God ontologically, echoes the thesis of conposition, [Refer to the
model of double negation found in Petrus Tartaretus, from the Isagogen Porphyrii ac Universos Logicorum Aristotelis; Philosophiam Naturalem,
Divinam, & Moralem.] or, more compellingly, Bovillus’ conceptualization of God’s metaphysical priority in terms of nothingness,- not per
transcendentiam,- (as is the case with all apophatic theology, like that of Pseudo-Dionysus, in which transcendence is simply the relation between
the finite and the infinite, such that, because no proportion at all can be discovered between the finite man and infinite god, the negative case is
given priority over the affirmative, and God is framed in terms of a transcendent nullity) but nothingness per privationem. Bovillus advances a
seemingly impenetrable argument to the effect that, because nothingness is impossible to conceive, there must be something, and thus there must
also be a Creator of that something grounding it ontologically in its interplay with metaphysical presence, viz. the world and God, in a manner
reminiscent of the nominalist reconstruction of mathematical Platonism. (Because zero is an impossible quantity, there must be instead a possible
quantity, which is 1, thereby ontologically generating the entire continuum from the impossible or ‘negative’ zero, which describes only the empty
syntax of a properly semantic content, eg. number as ‘possible quantity’ vs. a specific number as an ‘actual quantity’. Note: the ‘transcendental auton’
more rigorously captures the sense in which presence develops evolutionarily out of the Ungrund or regressive infinite dependency upon the
‘necessary quantity’, the ‘something’, the ‘ontological minima of difference’, etc.) Eugene Ostashevsky translates an exemplary section out of
Bovilus, in “Quintessence from Nothingness; Zero, Platonism, and the Renaissance”: “… the simple and immutable nothing non-exists infinitely,
and lies at an infinite and innumerable remove from being. It can be neither exhausted nor destroyed. The finite entirety of creation that God had
managed to extract from nothing is, when compared to the infinity of nothing, but a nothing, a mere point. In fact, had God one day changed all of
nothing into being, there would have arisen a being infinite in act, that would be equal to, external to, and separate from God, and the omnipresence
of God would have found itself limited and oppressed. Thus, just as God is capable of creating as many worlds as an infinite sphere has points, so
nothing can be converted into as many worlds as an infinite sphere has points.”[/size]

Now:

As Giraldus-Yeats associate a solar and lunar polarity to each of the two gyres, so each of the two
gyres may be thought to possess its own poles and antipodes which, when encoded by the
epistemes, give four categories in combination, between which the pattern of the spirogram is
plotted as a trajectory constantly in motion. On one gyre, we have the dual categories of nullity
per transcendentiam and nullity per privationem, while on the other, Being per transcendentiam
and Being per privationem, ie. the agon of Being and Non-Being alongside the agon of Dasein
and Sosein; the interplay of Absence and Presence, Nullity and Being.

Thus:

1) Epistemos: the Ungrund.

Nothingness per privationem: Boehme’s Ungrund, Schelling’s Un-Intuitable, Bovillus’ concept of
nothingness, Damascius’s Ineffable. While serving as the first of the epistemes, this one also
proves the most obscure. Very few philosophers have conceptualized it, and those that did, were
for the most part left out of the canon simply due to the unusual or ‘aporetic’ (I do not use the
word aporia at a whim for, indeed, the ‘esoteric Plato’, often directly opposing the exoteric Plato,
must be placed into this small order of thinkers.) mode of argument. Bovillus and Damscius both
seem to invest to the philosopher’s experience of the “nothingness of first principles”, or the
nullity of Being per privationem, (what I call ‘pure negation’ or ‘gnostic fire’) a certain ethical
quality, in that it spurs us toward embracing an ethical struggle with the incommunicable for the
sake of our fellows, that is, a ‘speculative ethics’.* See Kalogiratou’s essay, “Damscius and the
Practice of the Philosophical Life: On the Impossibility of Communication about and Communion
with the First Principles.” Schelling articulates negation per privationem in the following way,
from The Ages of the World: “The beginning is only the beginning insofar as it is not that which
should actually be, that which truthfully and in itself has being. If there is therefore a decision,
then that which can only be posited at the beginning inclines, for the most part and in its particular
way, to the nature of that which does not have being. … Precisely the affirmative principle, the
authentic being or that which has being as not active, that is, as not having being, is posited in the
originary negation.” … “All birth is birth from darkness into light; the kernel of seed must be
implanted in the earth, dying in gloom, in order that the more beautiful configuration of light
[Lichtgestalt] arise and unfold along the beams of the sun.” This “originary negation” is elsewhere
indicated by the ‘der nie aufgehende Rest’ or ‘Futurity of being’, citing David Farrell Krell, “The
Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God.”: “For the remote past, having
been repressed, can only be our future. Nevertheless, something about languor exceeds all the
dimensions of time: Sensucht designates the ungraspable basis of reality, the remnant that is never
wholly absorbed and that remains eternally in the ground.”
[size=85]* The Socrato-Platonic equivalence of the Beautiful, as the perfection of the Intelligibles in aisthesis, with Being, and Being, in its perfection, with
the Good or Form of Forms, indicates a structural privileging of Being over Nullity in the philosophical discourse whose metaphysical asymmetry
has conditioned, for Cabrera, a morality of Being couched upon the leveraging of Affirmation and the disavowal of the Negative. For Bovillus and
Damascius, it is the very impossibility of making a determinate judgement of Non-Being that imposes a moral commitment to the Ineffable, such
that the speculative-ethic, as the secondary moral injunction to embrace Being as the aporia of that Non-Being, (this is equivalent to the insertion of
the determinate judgment into the phenomenological analytic of Dasein, which converts its ‘ontic-ontological closure’, or what Heidegger calls the
Horizon of Being, into the ‘scissure of discourse’) takes priority over the Spinozan conatus or Nietzschean Will, while not subordinating the Will to
the pure intellection (aisthesis) of a Schopenhauer or Hartmann either, nor subordinating Geist to a univocal recapitulation of the Absolute, as per
the Hegelian-univocal dialectic, (I would further note that the equally univocal Marxist inversion of this dialectic, whereby the Negative, instead of
being synthesized with the Abstract after conversion into positive-knowledge via the ‘negation of the negation’,- for the Abstract’s legitimacy as a
dialogical form is refused, with the Abstract therefor relegated to an expression of the false-consciousness, that is, a symptom of instability within
the social relations and modes of production,- is instead synthesized with the Concrete, such that the image of materialist-history is, through the
Marxist dialectic, gradually purged of Abstraction in a synthesis between the Negative and Concrete, producing, instead of positive-knowledge,
something the critical theorists call “concrete solutions”,- solutions which, coincidentally enough, almost always appear to be communist policies.
This materialist negativity is an employed negativity as much as the Hegelian formulation of Negativity is an obviated or, to use Heidegger’s term, a
‘forgotten’ negativity. The abstraction of human nature itself is refused and, in its place, we have the supposedly ‘empirical basis’ of a
species-essence, from which all critical theory derives its potency from what Marcuse describes as the “actual human condition”, vis. the
experiential, lived, and embodied reality of oppression, subjugation, etc. which, in its negative-dialectical synthesis with the Concrete, promises the
transcending of the limitations characterizing it, along with a dissolution of all arbitrary social hierarchies and their attending inequalities.) for here
the Will is maintained both as the Arche or innermost reality of Being, and, due to the abruption of synthetic reason by the unresolved
(unemployed) Negative, a pluralistic agon (like the Will in Mainlander’s inversion of Schopenhauer) instead of any singular entity accessible, as it is
in all systems of transcendental idealism, to introspection, whereby it comes to serve as a phenomenal projection of the noumenal,- or, in terms of
the epistemes, a multi-vocity within which the basic aporia of Nullity is expressed and the mystery of Being’s emergence and the passage of the
Plotinian One to Multiplicity and of the Multiple to the One is enacted. (In fact, the philosophical multivocity is, itself, this aporia between the
‘four-fould epistemological withdraw’ that is, the withdraw of the Multiple from the One, of the One from the Multiple, of Being from Nullity, and
of Nullity from Being. “Phenomena” become discursive assemblages of the tetrapolar exchange, while the ‘noumena’ is replaced by the projective
hyperobject upon whose higher-dimensional surface the four independent discourses are infinitesimally constructed or ‘stacked’ in topological space
to form ‘objects’.)

This ‘speculative ethic’ rejects equally, the possibility of subordinating morality to a Sittlichkeit grounded on the State, (In Hegel, this of course
refers to the political superstructure transcending the normativity of individual morality as might be discovered, in a Kantian sense, purely by
exercising one’s own rational faculty, as Hegel regards the faculty of Reason as being nothing more than that Geist within whose dialectical
movement the unstable image of History is brought into focus and stabilized through the gradual reconstruction of absolute knowledge,- a process
necessarily historical, or secondary to the primary reality of the dialectic itself, which can only be worked out as precisely that, the process of
History) as well as the Nietzschean proclamation that the individual is sufficient for constituting a self-consistent framework of values. (the ‘creation
of one’s own values’)[/size]

To this order of thinkers we must not forget to add Levinas. In precluding the appearance of
metaphysical presence, Levinas resists the Hegelian approach, which would convert the infinite or
true Other into a de-limitable, positive abstraction, (thereby uniting the Self and Other in one
vocity) as well as the Heideggerian approach, which would privilege ontology, (or technically
conceived, the subsumption of the ontological to the account of the ontic, ie. Being) replacing
ontology itself, as a reflective modality, with a transcendental ethics of the irreducible Subject
upon which to re-ground a novel orientation to the Good without any dependency upon a
cognitive hypostasis and orientation to Being,- one fully detached therefor, from the greater
dialectic of metaphysical presence and absence,- an orientation at odds with that tradition
established since the Platonic equivalence of the Good, Beauty, and Being had been formulated,
whose signature had been carried through the entire canon of Western morality,- from Greece, to
Kant, to Hegel, to Heidegger, to even the supposedly ‘supra-moral’ Nietzsche himself. The
rejection of any equivalence of the Good and Being (the possibility of a cognition of the Good
without any dependency upon that of Being, of a vocity of the Good separate from that of Being)
marks Levinas as perhaps the most modern example of negation ‘per privationem’. Like the other
thinkers in this order, we find that his contemporaries could not make much sense of him,- an
indignity we must not stand too incensed about, given the fact that this new ethical vocity, wholly
detached from ontology, required the derivation of a new philosophical language entirely,- and
even now he is a notable obscurity in the history of philosophy, as remain the others. For Levinas,
the impossibility of knowing, that is, attaining consciousness of the transcendent Face of the
Other,- upon which the Self infinitely recoils in that very reflectivity whose infinite depth or
Sensucht gives rise to consciousness itself,- forces an abandonment of categorical ethical relations
with this Other and the adoption of a similar ‘speculative’ or, as Levinas would call it, ‘pragmatic’
ethic.

Having included Levinas in this lineage, * we might also here include Kierkegaard. We see that,
for Kierkegaard, the infinite face of the Other,- conceived of as the face of God,- imposes the
‘teleological suspension of the ethical’ within which alone ‘subjectivity’ may be said to come truly
into existence; the ethical serves as the primordial Grund of the human Subject in Kierkegaard’s
more general philosophy. Echoing Levinas, we read in the Danish philosopher-theologian that
self-love prompts the ‘movement’ out of the Self in which the Other is discovered, which again
redoubles (reduplicates) the movement of the Self toward the inner mysteria of reflective
cognition and its own immanent nullity when the impossibility of truly uniting with this Other is
come upon in a moment of ‘fear and trembling’. As the face of the Other forces the ego into an
illimitable self-reflective depth for Levinas, so it forces the human subject into what Kierkegaard
calls a state of ‘immediacy’,- a concept he inherited from the ‘immediate actuality’ advanced by
Schelling in his own critique of the Hegelian dialectic’s limited formulation, ie. the propaedeutic
system, which had too reductively dispensed with the existentia of human Becoming in following
through the ‘necessary laws’ of transcendental reason. Schelling in fact came upon the seeds for
this critical engagement in a re-reading of the Aristotelian text, namely that concerning ‘kinesis’ as
a movement from Becoming to Being shown through the movement from Potentiality to
Actuality, (the infamous puzzling ‘entellecheia’) as well as the formal categorical logic
underpinning it, which, for Schelling, came to imply a ‘constitutive process’ at odds with any
Hegelian reductionism,- that is, an irresolvable agonism for which there is no hope of establishing
the kind of monolithic vocity or hermeneutic locus (an Ur-Grund, in face of the abyssal Ungrund
of true philosophic consciousness) upon which to dialectically stabilize ethically, politically, and
socially neutral syntheses of transcendental reason,- an agon in which the Imagal and Imaginal,
Reflection and Representation, the post-Freudo-Lacanian Imaginary and Symbolic, the Monon
and Mone, or, in Spinozist terminology, natura naturata and natura naturans, etc. have in fact
become mere partial terms hopelessly ventured in the attempt to circumscribe the same process,- a
process carrying forward, however obliquely, the Sensucht of a certain metaphysical surplus
inaccessible to both,- a process Kierkegaard came to call ‘repetition’, involving a ‘reduplication of
the negative’ within the movement of the Subject through progressive sublations (per privationem)
of the existential modes. As I have noted elsewhere, Kierkegaard’s ‘modes’ offer
pre-conceptualizations of the multiple vocities of the epistemes, inasmuch as kinesis describes
what is conserved in the movement, as an entelechy, through the structure of Repetition, from one
vocity to another. This conservation is responsible for generating ‘ideas’ from an otherwise
impermeable metaphysical surplus, as opposed to generating ideas through a synthesis of
presence and absence, namely as a skeletal, reductive approximation of the Absolute within Geist.
The final episteme generated by Being per transcendentiam, and the ultimate vocity in the
movement from Nullity per privationem to Being per transcendentiam, signifies the great aporia
of Philosophy,- the lepsis of Eriugena, in which the superimmanent and supertranscendent ‘prime
cause’ co-participate,- the central import of the new Platonism, which, in the greater re-reading of
Greek philosophy explored here, is not at odds with the relevant Aristotelian concepts, but is in
fact further supported by them.**
[size=85]* OOO, from an opposing, or, more properly stated, obverse perspective, seeks to ‘think the Real beyond human experience’, (recalling the basic
‘xenohumanist’ motivation of accelerationism and the CCRU) that is, beyond the bifurcating tension of the Symbolic-Imaginary described here, in
such a way as to derive from the ‘scissive veil’ and the very process driving it a kind of ‘antimaterial materialism’ [Note Lemke, in “Materialism
Without Matter: The Recurrence of Subjectivism in Object-Oriented Ontology”.] of ‘forms wrapped in forms’, while the ethics of Levinas seeks to
think human experience beyond the Real’, that is, beyond ontology. Though seemingly opposing, we see that both approaches depend upon a
similar conceptualization ‘per privationem’, with the two projects enfolded all the more comfortably at the level of the epistemos.
** Thus, we have a kinesis from Nullity per privationem to Being per transcendentiam; a kinesis from Nullity per privationem to Being per
privationem; a kinesis from Nullity per transcendentiam to Being per privationem; a kinesis from, etc. etc. In this way, we work out the many
independent vocities associated with the four epistemes and their relational, ‘spirogrammatic’ structure.[/size]

2) Ontic Episteme: the Grund.

Nothingness per transcendentiam: Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriguena; Apophatic theology;
Parmenides, Thales, etc. In this category we must also include concepts like Lacan’s model of
desire,- a metonymic propulsion around an empty core or existential lack,- and the Cartesian
cogito, whereby a differential ontological minima is established in the form of the empty
subjectivity of the self-observing consciousness likewise appercepted from the mental schemata
in Kant’s formulation of transcendental imagination.

3) Immanent Episteme.

Being per privationem: Being(s) exist as privations from an ultimate being. Pantheism. Spinoza;
(all qualities as variable quanta of a central affect, a ruling qualia a la. joy) Nietzsche; (all will as a
variable quanta of the Will to Power) Heidegger.

4) Transcendent Episteme.

Being per transcendentiam. Being(s) exist, that is, are qualified, only in their participation within
an ultimate Being, (Being itself) from which they inhere those qualities and are temporally
differentiated. Hegel. Most metaphysics. The common interpretation of Plato. No satisfactory
theory of participation (what Plato calls the choreia- the centerpiece of the entire world of Greek
classical philosophy, namely the relationship between Multiplicity and the One, plurality and the
Monon, etc.) has emerged, though the philosophers named here, and countless others, made the
attempt to formulate just such a theory, with it often becoming their singular, overwhelming
ambition. Schelling too, advanced through all three epistemes in a unique way throughout the
course of his own writing in pursuit of a theory of participation.

Concerning these four approaches to the interplay of absence and presence, it should be noted that
the nominalists, tracing their own intellectual heritage from the likes of Plato and Pythagoras, or
what Hamman called the ‘hohere Hypothese’,-- the sublime hypothesis of the origin of language,-
the ‘most worthy Dulcinea of the kabbalistic philologist’, that aims above all else to avenge the
individuality and majesty of what we would call here the nominalist position,- taken by the
Enlightenment critic as an Idea more ‘elevated’ and thus closer to the Truth in having proposed a
divine origin of Speech,- a sacral umbilicus between the Signature and Signified, at least at the
highest-most level of abstraction, or ‘elevation’,- that truth from which ‘all systems and languages
of the old and new Babel alike draw their subterrene, bestial, and human origins’,-- claim a direct
connection between sign and signifier, such that magic can occur by activating sympathetic
associations between language and the world, like that employed by talismans and amulets, by
literal ‘magic words’, kabbalistic exegesis, the ritual re-enactment of divine dramas seen in the
Eleusinian, Orphic, and especially Mithraic rites, etc.

Pseudo-nominalists like Dee affirm that there is such a direct connection, though one available
only to some signs and their signifieds, namely at the highest level of abstraction, in which the
structure of reality itself can be semiotically reconstructed or simulated by certain powerful signs,
like the monad. Mathematical Platonists would also fall into this category.

The Realists, in whose camp the entire field of modern linguistics is contained, claim meaning to
be related by signs only through their syntax, that is, their arrangement with other signs under a
given system of grammatical rules and contextual or idiomatic conventions, such that a number
like zero, which literally refers to nothing external to the semiotic, and thus cannot possibly have
any ‘sympathy’ with something outside the sign-system, can generate meaningful statements only
when used in correct or ‘meaningful’ syntax with other signs.

Accepting that all other signs are similarly arbitrated, the CCRU’s tic-decoding, along with a
variety of ‘post-structuralist’ modalities, give us a formula for a kind of hyper-realist position in
which all semantic content is reduced to a pure syntax, such that any sign or sign-system can be
reconstructed from any other purely through syntactic recombination, therefor rendering meaning
itself in a state of radical contingency.


And beyond any one of these vocities, there is the structure out of which all four emerge. And the philosophy of that ur-form, is my philosophy.