Ouroboros

Preface:

The following material was originally intended to form the nucleus of a small book. I discovered early into the project that I lacked the requisite volume to meet even a short page count without compromising on its scope and purpose. I justify its presentation in this incomplete form on the ground that at present there is a lacunae in contemporary discourse in the lack of a systematic elucidation of nihilism, both in its descriptive and prescriptive aspects. For two years I have walked and conversed with this uncanny visitor. In going down, I have found him in the hearts of the people and I have found him as the secret companion of the most penetrating authors, scattered indifferently across the tradition. At the end of the day, when I turn inward seeking rest and comfort, I find him staring out over my bed, expressionless. I have known him in turns as the object of despair, horror, joy, and friendship. I presume to have understood a fraction of his character and I hope in this work to convey some of that understanding. 

Part 1: Diagnoses

1

Man is a vessel. He contains within him communities, religions, conventions, that give form to this vessel and provide what is necessary for his survival and the survival of a political community under particular conditions. For instance, the laws and mores of a city-state are created and evolve in accordance with the geographic, historical, and political circumstances in which it finds itself. When man is faced with ideas and information that far exceed the scope of his given worldview, cracks begin to form in the vessel. There is a plot thread in the Bergman film Winter Light in which a simple man from a rural village reads one day in the paper about the Chinese nuclear program. The thought of this consumes him and ultimately, he kills himself. He was capable of an honesty few today possess. This has nothing to do with ‘existential angst’ or ‘anxiety’ —terms used to simplify complex phenomena and to thereby render them apparently comprehensible and harmless, a condition one can “treat” with therapy or SSRIs— 

2

‘Aesthetics’ and ‘identities’ are the flotsam that man clings to in the sea of nihilism that is modernity. He uses these, along with various banal forms of entertainment and hobbies, to  distract himself from the uncanniness that surrounds him, anything to avoid thinking and questioning. The most repulsive examples of this are those who aestheticize the profound: nothing is more radical and painful than authentic engagement with culture and philosophy because through it one comes to see the truth of our situation, one looks to the ground on which we stand and finds- nothing. Those for whom reading is a mere pastime, or a social activity they engage in to post pictures of books along with a coffee and cigarette online, know nothing of the horror.

3

Technology offers itself indifferently to all agents who would wield it in service of their particular aims, it also is often taken into the service of historical forces that only unconsciously manifest themselves, sometimes it acts as a preservative of ideas that should have long ago expired. In our time it presents a Janus face, as a consequence of it there is no place on earth that is untouched by nihilism but it also acts —more superficially, to be sure —to delay the practical realization of this consequence. Technology contains within it the specter of the metaphysical history of the West, a trace of all the paradigmatic advancements that made it possible. It also contains within it all the knowledge that it thereby opens both in breadth and depth. Faced with all that is contained within technology, the worldview of a tribesman shatters, whether he immediately accepts this or not he and his people can never again be “traditional.” This applies not only globally but, more importantly, also at lower levels of society; authentic “communities” and “identities” no longer have time to stabilize because of the rapidity with which technology undermines all grounds: the concept of a small-town farmer is contingent upon his horizon being “small,” access to the internet renders his existence an absurdity. Against this phenomena, technology simultaneously functions as one of the few threads holding man to stability through its promotion of material prosperity and the vague notion of ‘progress’ contained within it. The intellectual height of this tendency is the ‘techno-optimist’ and accelerationist theories that are current, all of which descend from the corpses of Fiorian eschatological notions, and ultimately are nothing more than annoying and facile distractions that impede a true confrontation with the character of modernity.

4

Nature loves to hide; death is one of the rare moments when it unveils itself to us. The first task in understanding beings is to delimit them in contrast to other beings; for us, temporally, this means to think upon death. All men of a certain minimum psychological complexity, and you’ll be surprised to find that this minimum is lower than you might think, walk through life always wearing a mask. The moment when a man confronts death, when he knows there is simply no longer any use for this mask and he lets it fall, is the most beautiful and interesting moment in most people’s lives. In this single moment they often convey more about their true nature than they have through the sum total of their actions to that point. When you are faced with death, will you think about comfort? Will you think about how you’ll amuse and distract yourself for the day? Will you think about your ‘identity?’ No- the core of your being will cry out, it will sweep away all this dross that has unconsciously accumulated on you to make itself heard one final time, perhaps for the only time. True artists are always on the hunt for this moment; they know through instinct the profundity of the secrets that are unveiled in it, they know also because they walk with death themselves.

5

This is not the only moment when their nature slips out. It happens sporadically, when they’re not around many other people, when they’re under stress, when they encounter something they don’t have a premeditated reaction to, when their routine is broken. You have to be attentive, you have to have the instincts of a psychologist, and most essentially, you have to be able to conceal your own disgust and contempt, to wear a mask yourself. Sometimes it’s revealed in only a few words or a single expression. What you’ll inevitably discover is that there exists within them a presentiment of the emptiness in the world around them and the emptiness in themselves. They have a sense that something is fundamentally wrong, that the ground has been ripped out from under them. They hide from this feeling in the pursuit of comforts and in the mundanity of their lives, they throw themselves into a career or they start a Funko Pop collection.

6

The predominating feeling the modern world evokes is torpor, everything one encounters wants to unwind one’s tension. It doesn’t take a great deal of intelligence to realize that the conventional paths to ‘success’ today are empty, that they don’t translate to actual power or constitute an actual test of one’s capabilities. Stimulus always comes in the form of resistance, in the feeling of being challenged. Great artists stimulate one because behind all art exists the drive to influence, to impose the artist’s vision and ideas upon the audience. Friends and public intellectuals, real intellectuals who are animated by ideas and for whom appearances in ‘prestigious’ outlets are a nullity, are a stimulus too, we admire them but we also want to overcome them, to challenge them on equal ground. Material hardship can be a stimulus, the feeling of hunger, of having death be a real possibility and overcoming it, that creates an intensity that’s hard to snuff out. These stimuli are all rare in the modern world, one has to seek them out and often get lucky in finding them. 

7

Gen X was the last generation for whom having a family was a real and attractive possibility. One may sneer at this as banal and inadequately ambitious but the truth is that providing for a wife and children satisfies the desire most men have for a purpose in life. By the time Millennials came of age the attractiveness of this possibility had already largely evaporated owing to the rapid rise in neuroticism and obesity of women and the effects of the culture war. It’s this that accounts for the uncanny feeling that so many Millennial relationships evoke, in most cases they are attempting to consciously live out an ideal that isn’t authentically available to them. For Gen Z the pretense no longer even exists, a society in which nearly all women are on medication or in therapy is not one in which stable family units can form. Whether or not these women are actually ‘mentally ill’ is beside the point, they believe themselves to be and their behavior is altered accordingly. On the whole, I welcome all these developments as heralding a more radical age. The immediate result is that men of drive and ambition who would have otherwise settled into a comfortable suburban life no longer even have the option to do so and are instead drawn toward ideology. The other result is the creation of a class of men who, in the absence of any direction from society and no attractive path of least resistance open to them, idle their lives away with distractions and base comforts. It’s not difficult to exploit this class, they want in their weakness to become the organ of a greater man, all that’s needed is someone with charisma and reach.

8

Donoso Cortes hit upon something fundamental in human nature in recognizing that as the temperature of politics rises, the temperature of genuine religiousness, by which I mean a kind of ascetic fanaticism, necessarily cools, and vice versa. There is a fixed amount of energy within the masses, in times of crisis, when the social fabric begins to unravel and history speeds up, they are always pulled in one of these two directions. Herein lies one of the only potential dangers to the realization of revolutionary political aims, the stirrings of which are only beginning to make themselves felt. I think we are in the beginning stages of something akin to Spengler’s Second Religiousness, at least in America. One can see this on college campuses across the country, where Christianity is spreading rapidly among young men. There are two types among these converts. The first, and the majority, is the weak and tired young man, unattractive, sickly, reeking in every interaction and gesture of maudlin sentimentality. It doesn’t take much to sway this type, the siren call of ‘faith’ and ‘community,’ which promise rest and comfort, is enough to satisfy these exhausted spirits. To these men I have nothing to say, how such men choose to castrate themselves in modernity is none of my concern, it may ultimately even be an advantage. But it is immensely unfortunate that another, rarer type is found among them, that of the noble and strong young man, who feels instinctively revolted by the world he finds himself in and turns to religion because it is the only antithesis to modernity that he knows. He is filled with energy and desires duties, to impose burdens and restraints upon himself in service of ideals. These men represent a great source of potential. Unlike Spengler I believe that nothing about the form and effects of this ‘Second Religiousness’ are inevitable, it can not only be checked but, in a masterful and decisive stroke, appropriated in service of political aims.

9

In the collapse of the most high minded idealism into ruthless cynicism and in the creation of a class of ‘superfluous men,’ who stand outside and against their own society, Russia’s conditions in the 19th century approximated our own, a great deal of energy was built up. It’s this, the human material he had to work with, that makes Dostoyevsky’s novels so endlessly fascinating in spite of his insufferable moralizing and ignorance of good taste. In his greatest characters the leftist ideology that was current in his time is only a mask for their true nature and motivations, a weapon meant to serve their nihilistic orientation toward the world. One finds this phenomena in all revolutionary periods and it’s why these periods are more fruitfully understood as driven by a particular psychological type, one which lives and thrives in war and chaos. Of course, it’s true that in every case but one Dostoyevsky awkwardly has their arc turn in some way that justifies his Orthodox conservatism and thereby ruins them. That exception, Alexei Kirilov, is his most pure character, so much so that even Dostoyevsky seemed afraid of employing him in service of his moralistic aims. Kirilov stands in his corpus uncompromisingly, almost with a life of his own. Kirilov’s philosophy and final act stand as the most succinct and poignant literary statement of man’s place in modernity.

10

The idol of ‘utility,’ and its engine, technological progress, represents a more serious barrier to the realization of the West’s historical destiny than contemporary leftist ideology. Unlike leftist ideology, which is promoted by a resentful and diseased minority and appeals only to the resentful and diseased, utility very nearly is the natural biological end of the masses. While communism failed principally because it failed to deliver the comfortable material prosperity that it promised on economic grounds, liberalism has frankly been very successful in this endeavor. It in fact has been so successful that for the vast majority of people even among the so-called ‘right’ no higher good can be conceived of than this continual march of real GDP growth. Leftist ideology will, like Communism, go out with a whimper on account of this and that which most of the great artists and intellectuals recognized as the real enemy of all higher aims since the 19th century, bourgeois philistinism, will again come to the fore. 

11

In using the term bourgeois, what I intend to evoke has little to do with class, the bourgeois is found in all his essential elements among provincials and the ‘proletariat’ alike. There are entire races that are bourgeois in character, the Han and Indians for instance. The bourgeois is a particular human type who is motivated exclusively by the pursuit of ‘status’ and wealth only in service of ‘status.’ There is nothing spiritual in his nature, nothing sublime, there is no curiosity about the world. Any interest he may display in art and science is performed out of a desire to cement his social status, he apes what he perceives to be aristocratic standards and in doing so invariably reveals himself as a philistine in his judgments. It’s this type that was first recognized by Stendhal and has incurred the just hatred of all genuine artists and literati since, it’s this type that is the enemy of all art and higher endeavors, and it’s this type which has quietly assumed total mastery over the modern world and degraded it beyond recognition. I refuse to concede this term to Marxists or to allow its associations to be relegated to the realm of banal class analysis. It had a rich history before it was appropriated by the Marxists, a history in which it was used as the rallying cry for war against all that which poisons what is great and noble in man, and it’s in this sense in which I take it up again. The term ‘bourgeois’ has behind it a mythological significance, and it is through myths that movements are most easily given force, as Sorel recognized. Mythological language calls up images, it calls up heroism, and it reawakens primordial drives in man. All revolutionary movements from 1789 to 1932 understood this and called upon myths in order to mobilize the masses. The principle is even more important today, when the transient and unstable character of modernity rapidly sweeps away the semantic power of novel terms.

12

It is typical of our ignorant time in which a foundational work like Posterior Analytics is not read or understood that political analyses in which the origins and first principles of the disparate elements that form modern political dynamics are no longer distinguished. Liberalism and parliamentarism have their origins in the Enlightenment reaction against the arcanum and Machiavellian political tradition, they have as their first principle and unifying concept a rationalist metaphysics in which the truth is achieved through discussion or competition and revealed in openness. Democracy and the political theory of the general will has its roots in Aristotle. The Social Contract, excluding the distinctively Enlightenment contract theory on which it is grounded, is basically a classical treatise. In the case of liberalism, its actual enactment has, almost from the beginning, been an abortion. The pretense that parliamentary procedure represents an actual ‘discussion’ or that real political decisions are actually made by parliamentary representatives is not one seriously believed in by anyone, all real deliberation happens in closed committees, typically under the influence of various private interests. Democracy, by contrast, has become at the very least the unquestioned ground of legitimacy. 

It’s certainly historically true that in the modern West these two movements advanced in lock-step and were seen as natural allies, but they share no fundamental principles in common and it is readily apparent which of the two rests on weaker ground, both under the scope of contemporary political analysis and in terms of metaphysics. There is further no reason in principle why the general will must be expressed through the practice of voting, the private ballot box represents the peculiar synthesis of the liberal and democratic ideas. It can and has taken the form of acclamation, or of a select number of representatives of the general will, or obviously a dictator.

13

In a democracy, in which the ideal is an identity between the governed and governing, what is essential is that homogeneity in one dimension is preserved in opposition to the homogeneity of other states. Historically and most naturally, this took the form of nationalism, but there is no reason in principle why the dimension of homogeneity must be national. It could, for example, be economic, and one could posit an international democracy of producers or, to use modern parlance, ‘elite human capital’ against less ‘productive’ economic classes thereby subsuming the conventional political sphere under the economic. The most vulgar universalism of this kind in which a concept of ‘humanity’ was posited is already becoming passé in our time, the question now is whether the economic internationalism that has worked quietly to attain the levers of power will triumph in its wake or if it will be met with a new, more radical concept of politics.

14

This Schmittian analysis of modern political dynamics remains as acute and applicable to the political situation today as when he wrote it. The reason why in the intervening 80 years the empty edifice of liberal parliamentarism has not collapsed is simply because there have been no crises. In the face of a crisis, the weakness of the parliamentary form is revealed: a body of inept figureheads for various opposed and often unpolitical interests is entirely unequipped to respond with the decisiveness and force that is necessary. Once the masses have been unleashed, revolutionary politics culminating in a dictatorial leader is almost an inevitability, but they need a push, they need to feel the presence of an existential threat leering over them.

15

Communism and Germany’s defeat in WWI created conditions of this kind, and it will be when the masses come to know the same material suffering and fear that the Germans of 1932 felt that they will turn in desperation to great and revolutionary men. Hitler in this respect is the archetype. He had a completely cynical attitude toward the masses, this is abundantly clear even in Mein Kampf which was expressly written with rhetorical considerations in mind. The German conservative revolutionaries in criticizing him as a demagogue did not understand him and did not understand politics. Different human types require different conditions; it is necessary for the contemplative type to remain aloof from politics, to concern himself with eternal problems rather than the tidings of the ephemeral day, he seeks his refuge beyond and outside the state. The political genius has different needs and different immediate aims. For him, what is necessary above all else is an acute understanding of the present cultural and political situation and the engagement with contemporary productions and news that feed that understanding. His studies will center primarily upon recent history for the same reason. He is not driven away from the masses but rather walks among them as a leader by virtue of his charisma. To ignore the value and necessity of such men in realizing ideological visions as well as the value and necessity of politics as a whole in favor of a vague notion of an ‘artistic and spiritual’ movement is just as idiotic now as it was in 1932. The contemplative type and the political genius have historically been drawn to one another, they emerge from the same stock and, as the implicit drama of Plato’s life attests, many of them are defined in their youth by the struggle between these two paths of life. 

16

Schmitt was in his disposition a conservative, his prophecies were always expressed in a tone of resignation. The Concept of the Political is his attempt at a reassertion of the boundaries of the political domain in the face of the dissolution of classical determinations; he wanted a return to a more contained and moderate form of politics, a fact that seems lost on most of his modern ‘commentators.’ I am not a conservative. What I desire is the acceleration of these processes, for the political to attain mastery over the lives of more and more people, for them to become politically fanatical, and the subsumption of the political domain not under the economic but under the ideological dimension. Trump’s appearance on the political stage was the first decisive break from stasis in this respect, the spell of suburban idleness was broken, masses of people began to live and think politically again. The pretense of ‘civility’ in politics is a sign that it is not actually politics, that it’s a sham intended only to pacify. Politics is a domain in which existential struggles are fought. Trump reminded people of this, regardless of his success in office this constitutes his greatest accomplishment and how he will be remembered, as the harbinger of the first storm of radicalism.

17

The object is to manufacture crises. To that end, I favor the declining total fertility rate, I favor the breakdown in conventional social and sexual relations, I favor the growing cynicism and rancor in the hearts of those youths who recognize that all paths to the exercise of their powers have been systematically cut off. I see nothing but positive signs that a deluge is building, that the barriers that hold it back are collapsing of their own accord- let us give them a push.

18

It is one of the great ironies of philosophy that Kant has come to be known as a revolutionary and was called the “all-pulverizer” in his own time. Kant is an archetype of the reactionary, he is entirely rooted in the philosophical tradition of the West. His own words on this matter have been ignored: he sought, in reaction to Hume, to establish a ground for traditional metaphysics. Kant is “merely” Aristotle translated into the Western subject-primary philosophical tradition that begins with Descartes. He has been perceived as otherwise because Kant had a brilliant and lucid vision into the trajectory of the West. He reacted by erecting a structure that he believed could survive the coming onslaught, in making the compromises necessary to do this he appeared to his less lucid contemporaries as ‘nihilistic’ but in truth his aims were entirely defensive. 

19

There are moments in Kant’s writing, otherwise so austere and cold, when he reveals his consciousness of the magnitude of the crisis facing the West and his consciousness of the paths that lead into that abyss. How are synthetic a priori judgments possible? Through the relation of “the formal conditions of a priori intuition, the synthesis of the imagination, and its necessary unity in a transcendental apperception to a possible cognition of experience in general,” Kant says. But let us dig a little deeper here, for this is not really an answer. How are the transcendental unity of apperception and the taking-in-stride that constitutes pure intuitions possible? Kant again provides the answer: through the faculty of imagination. It’s this faculty on which Kant’s system is built and around which it turns, but let us again ask, is that really an answer? How are synthetic a priori judgments possible? By means of a faculty? And Kant certainly had some awareness of the inadequacy of this answer and where further questioning would lead, for before this faculty in a rare moment of emotion he recoiled in terror, he turned away from the path and after the first edition sought to conceal it. It leads, as Kant said, into the abysses of the human soul, where reason dare not tread and the deadly truths of what supports man’s rationalism lie dormant.

20

Plato is the first dogmatic philosopher of the West, in the sense that he was the first to impose a moral framework upon the West, one that Christianity directly inherited. He himself inherited from Socrates a concern for the crisis of faith in which Athens had found itself but in all probability the grand metaphysical ground that Plato constructs for the Socratic pursuit of virtue is his own invention. Both of these men saw themselves as physicians of a kind, treating a burgeoning nihilism. Plato’s order of priority in this matter is thus clear: the morality he sought to impose is antecedent to the metaphysics of the middle dialogues. This order of priority perhaps indicates something essential about the nature of man, but at any rate it was also transmitted to us. The last several centuries of Western history have made clear that it is moral valuations that are most deeply ingrained in our natures. It is always startling to see how, long after the edifice of Western metaphysics had begun its collapse, otherwise intelligent authors so clearly reason toward and in reference to a pre-existing moral system, morality is treated almost as an unquestionable empirical reality. The possibility of dispute over it is never seriously considered. And this is of course true today among the masses, they have imbibed some skeptical ideas about God and metaphysics that are frankly beyond them, and a superficial discussion about these topics is possible, but the same cannot be said about morality. When you attempt to inquire into the ground of their morals they short circuit, it exists outside the horizon of questioning for them.

21

Nihilism, understood in terms of its fundamental cause and sufficient reason, means this: that the highest values devalue themselves. It was present even, and especially, at the beginning with Plato, as with all organic things the germ of its death lay in wait at its inception. The drive for truth that Plato set up as man’s highest ideal gradually worked its way into our nature until it was at last compelled to turn upon and devour its own metaphysical and moral foundations. 

Part 2: Arrows

22

The position that all things are Becoming, regardless of its metaphysical veracity, has utility as a kind of polemic and weapon for dissolution. By tracing the genealogy of something ‘divine’ or ‘inexplicable’ back to barbarism or materiality one thereby demystifies it and takes one more item forever away from the realm of God and puts it in service of man. Through this act of incinerating man’s idols in the fire of Becoming he is made less grounded and more afraid. The masses live and thrive in ignorance, the slightly more intelligent among them on the grounds of vague and superficial scientific narratives. The more that is brought into one’s horizon of questioning, the more one is forced to live in a state of terrible uncertainty, the more one suffers. The most pernicious lie perpetrated by philosophers, so egregious and so contrary to the instincts and wisdom of the Greeks that it leads one to suspect it was promoted deliberately, is that knowledge is identical with happiness and leads to serenity.

23

Descartes, in seeking a ground for metaphysics and science outside the scholastic tradition, defined ‘the world’ as res corporea, he further assigned extension to the substances that make up the world as their essential attribute to which we have access. This designation was taken up by Newton with some modifications, namely the substitution of space for a plenum of substance and a theory of space as the sensorium of God, that are not unimportant but need not detain us here- the salient point is that this novel grounding, and the corollary that beings come to be securely grasped through mathematical knowledge, comes to be defining for mechanics. Newton further advanced (hesitantly, to his credit) the procedure of reducing all scientific phenomena, to the extent possible, to special cases of mechanics. This spirit has animated science down to the present day, and it is owing to its apparent success that figures like Penrose feel bold enough to advance the ‘Platonic’ (his implication, not mine) thesis that the world is ‘ontologically’ math, as well the popularity of the exasperating prejudice that a phenomena has not been and cannot be scientifically understood unless it has been quantified. 

24

I don’t dispute that this ground has been very useful and that it has produced a great number of technologies, however, ‘utility’ is not a criterion of truth and in fact the more useful a principle is to us, the more it has become indispensable in our daily lives, the more we should be skeptical of its validity- utility and ubiquity create forgetfulness and discourage inquiry into their ground. All considerations of utility must be ignored if one is to examine the veracity of Cartesian metaphysics, and by extension much of modern science, in the domain of metaphysics itself, on which alone it can be meaningfully assessed.

25

The Cartesian proof for extension as the essential property of substance ultimately amounts to demonstrating that all other attributes reduce to extension, for instance ‘resistance’ is conceived of as an indication that the relevant Thing in the world is not changing its location with reference to other Things in the world. All perception is thus understood as presence-at-hand. Leaving aside the questionable assertion that ‘resistance’ and touch are reducible to the velocities of corporal substances, it may be conceded that this is an adequate approximation for mechanics. One cannot, however, concede that it is an at all appropriate approach to organics, in which, far from being characterized by presence-at-hand, phenomena irreducibly manifest themselves as coming-into-presence and in self-concealment, there is an inherent ‘playfulness’ and self-activity in organics that cannot in any way be grasped solely in terms of the relative velocities of substances. 

26

Nor is there any reason in principle why a study of Nature beginning with the science of organics, or for that matter psychology, would be less intellectually fruitful than one founded on the science of mechanics. There are even certain obvious advantages, such as the lesser need for apparatuses (in which the veracity of the information provided is itself contingent upon theoretical presuppositions) owing to the immediately given richness of both fields’ content. 

27

Artists are one and all lovers of life, they are entranced by and driven on toward the world, they find stimulus in that which is apparently banal. The sign of an artist is always in his accumulation of information, his fascination with the smallest details. One can see this for instance in Homer, who displays a knowledge of physiology that has been compared to that of an orderly. In the particular angle with which light reflects off a lake or in a few words and a slight glance, secrets are revealed to him. The universal, not an empty universal but the universal in its totality, is grasped in a single particular. Artists aren’t prone to reflection and when they do engage in it they almost always misunderstand themselves, true subjectivity is poison to their natures. When the artist protests that this life means nothing to him, that it’s all empty suffering and he’s simply waiting for death, his activity always belies these statements. The pain and disgust the world evokes in him is only another stimulus to him, he is compelled by an instinct to confront it again and again. It is the artist who most commonly epitomizes the strong and healthy human being. His danger consists not in paralysis but rather that he will be carried away like Byron by the currents of the world, that in the struggle within him between overflowing life and the measured objectivity necessary for an artist the former will finally win out completely.

28

I know of no more beautiful historical spectacle than the internal differentiation that occurs when a people of great energy settles and forms a state. New faculties are developed, an incredible sensitivity to the world, a dialectic of truth and lies rapidly climbs to sublime heights. Their energies are turned inward, they become reflective, they begin to Shine: the individual and fame are born under the aegis of the state. Man becomes for the first time polytropic and interesting. It’s to this process that all higher culture is owed and it provides a lesson in the ground from which all further high culture must be generated.

29

Taste, considered from the perspective of the artist (and it is this perspective which has been more than any other neglected in theories of aesthetics), consists in holding a blazing inferno within oneself and only letting fly sparks- selectively, with the greatest caution and knowing when these sparks will produce the greatest possible effect. It was men with such a sense of taste who formed the highest cultures hitherto attained on earth, men with a superfluity of energy and an equal knowledge of the dangers of this energy. The three unities in the golden age of French drama serve as an example of this. They seem absurd, arbitrary, but what was above all necessary for these only recently settled beasts of prey was restraint and regulation, whatever form it came in. They understood this instinctively. One can see this portrayed, for instance, in Corneille’s Le Cid. These men were not so far removed from a time when noblemen would run each other through with their swords at the slightest provocation. It was no doubt the last echoes of this instinct that compelled Voltaire, an exemplar of the strong and healthy French type, to his invectives against Rousseau.

30

What prevails here is the historical principle, seen so often, of the emergence of one social state out of its diametric opposite. The more violent and terrible a people is the greater their capacity for high culture, and likewise behind all high cultures hitherto we can be certain there was an accompanying period of barbarism. It’s in this light that the Bronze Age Collapse is of particular interest. The Greeks are, after all, possessed the highest culture yet attained on earth. What horrors lie in this pre-Homeric abyss? One can find hints of it in the Greek consciousness, in their deathly fear of exceptional individuals and in the ornate conventions organized with the intention of relieving their competitive natures. The event is further exceptional because it appears something fundamental in man’s nature changed here; in a single moment of revelation a new god was born and on his thyrsus he carried the seed of metaphysics. It’s this event that illustrates better than any other that nothing in man’s development, nothing in his highest cultural peaks, has ever come gratis. It is earned through an overwhelming excess of destruction and cruelty, and it is toward this event that one must look if he dares to place the further development of man as a goal for himself.

31

The noble soul is distinguished by his sense of reverence, he knows, in his blood, when he must either speak with gravity or not at all. He has reverence for men, for ideas, and for art and beauty. It’s this sense of reverence that is totally absent from academics today. It’s this that makes modern academia such a contemptible institution, academics understand nothing of the grand subjects and figures they treat because to them they are nothing more than material to support the endless, empty scribbling that is their livelihood. Ideas are something one lives and fights and dies for, to handle them with indifferent and clumsy hands is the eternal mark of a philistine. Formerly, the ironical and patronizing smiles with which such sentiments as I am now expressing were greeted were more justifiable. Scholars held themselves to a certain standard of rigor—they knew their Greek and Latin, they knew some Hegel and could justify their supposed liberal objectivity on seriously argued ground. They felt a genuine sympathy, if an all too universal and weak form of sympathy, for the subject matter that was their profession. One cannot say the same today, there is simply no comprehension whatsoever. The prestige of an institution is dependent upon the quality of men and work that it produces, when it ceases to produce anything of value at all it can only, at best, drag its miserable existence out until someone puts an end to it. To those of you in whom the burning drive for knowledge rests, who scoff at those for whom erudition is a mere ornament, your path and star lay outside these musty and decaying halls. Ignore the temptations of comfort and leisure and place before your hearts the countless examples of men who chose to stand against their time, men who, with their eyes fixed upon a higher ideal and standard, cheerfully sacrificed the comforts without which the easily satiated and base masses cannot live.

32

Prescriptions: simplicity in diet and habit, consistent exercise, the cultivation of indifference to all privations, the satiation of oneself on politics and ideas, mastery over and subordination of all drives which do not serve the goal one has set for oneself, the sloughing off of all that is superfluous and superficial. In a word- to be cruel and inexorable toward oneself.

33

All dualistic metaphysics are antithetical to life. By positing an infinitely ‘good’ and unchanging world above our own one necessarily devalues Nature. Catholics may protest all they like that our finite and political existence is one thing and eternity another, but the fact remains that no rational man could possibly aspire to anything other than the life of the ascetic on the grounds of such a metaphysics, every other path only representing various degrees of failure in the human being. And in the periods when Christianity was at its most honest with itself, it was precisely this type of man that it brought forth, the fanatical ascetic who had the apocalypse always in his mind. Incidentally, I have always been suspicious of the concept of ‘the infinite,’ whatever form it comes in, and have yet to see a single convincing rebuttal to the proof Aristotle offers against it in Physics.

34

Nothing about life is comprehensible without understanding that it possesses an active principle within itself, one that goes beyond mere self-preservation and procreation. This is revealed in the phenomena of death, sleep, play, and glory and it’s not coincidental that these phenomena have proven the most universally fruitful artistic and philosophical themes. We might with some levity say that if the teleological assumptions Darwinists impose on life were correct then they would be at one with Spinoza in his metaphysics and the world would come to a halt. Whether, in any case, this ‘active principle’ is the Will or the monad or the Absolute or something else is not an unimportant question, but let it be noted that this is the one strain that runs through all of German philosophy: whatever their faults and mistakes may have been they were all philosophers of life. 

35

The problem in the neo-Darwinian paradigm that prevails in biology today is not only this ignorance of this active principle but more crucially that it is, contrary to their own pretensions, too teleological. From a theoretical standpoint, teleology and mechanism are not in conflict. If there is a vitalist, organizing force of the sort Driesch posited it would have to occur by means of mechanical forces. Teleology in biology is a heuristic we are compelled to reference owing to the nature of our Understanding; Kant on this point completely anticipated and resolved the debate between ‘vitalists’ and ‘mechanists,’ and as Cassirer noted, the consensus in biology was approaching this Kantian view in the early 20th century (excluding the Idealistic framework, which strictly speaking isn’t necessary). It was the discovery of DNA and the rapid advances in biochemistry that decisively overturned this emerging view in favor of the ‘mechanistic’ camp. But whenever biologists turn away from biochemistry toward life itself you will always find them sneaking in teleological judgments: “the animal does this in order to ensure greater reproductive success” and so on and so forth. 

36

These teleological judgments are not necessary. Concepts, teleological and otherwise, are organic, in both the species and the individual they can be created and destroyed. The state of free contemplation, from which all artistic and scientific genius proceeds, is induced by the destruction of our Concepts. One finds this state in all the really great minds as their almost typical state of existence, in Goethe, in Da Vinci, in Aristotle’s natural studies. Burckhardt, Nietzsche, and Goethe were all aware of this state and all made attempts of varying success at describing it with some rigor. One of the reasons for the poverty and creative sterility of our art and science today is the sheer dominance over our minds that ossified Concepts and theoretical frameworks have attained, these Concepts cast a veil over our eyes and prevent us from confronting Nature and man in all their grandeur. 

37

The Greek philosophers understood this principle from the beginning and it is part of the reason for their meticulous attention to form and presentation. “The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither declares nor conceals, but gives a sign.” Heraclitus structured his writing to point the reader to apparent paradoxes the meaning of which must be uncovered by the reader himself, he could do no more. Plato, likewise, certainly wrote his aporetic dialogues with this in mind. His more conclusive works, in light of this, have not been approached with the skepticism they require. His remarks in the Seventh Epistle should also caution the credulous reader. 

38

It is imperative to always be on guard against dogma, against theoretical frameworks, against anything that promises an easily achieved intellectual rest. Many weak intellects have fallen under the spell of thinkers like Spengler and Evola, who promise simple and schematic answers to the exceptionally difficult problems of history and mythology, owing to this temptation. Nietzsche took the greatest pains in his late period to avoid encouraging dogmatic thinking in his readers. It is not without reason that the doctrine of eternal return, the core of his thought, is presented only twice in his published works. Nietzsche is the prophet of our age, he was the first to recognize and describe nihilism, he furthermore did so with genius, and for that reason he is the greatest educator we have. But I would advise caution in approaching Thus Spoke Zarathustra and his unpublished notes. An unbelievable amount of garbage has already been written about these works, the time is not yet right for them to be understood in their full significance. Heidegger, although his lectures on these works and Nietzsche are far and away better than any other commentary, did Nietzsche a great disservice in approaching his thought from a principally metaphysical standpoint.

39

Consider a man of titanic strength, who gleefully traverses through the labyrinth of his Understanding, destroying Concept after Concept, causality, substance, modality, until he arrives at that most fundamental of conditions for our cognitive existence, the principle of noncontradiction, and even here he does not hesitate, with a laugh he casts it too aside. How would such a man perceive the world, what after his wanton destruction would he find in it? Perhaps the Urphänomen?

40

Heidegger was correct in identifying Descartes and his role in heralding the shift to a subject-primary metaphysics as decisive in modernity, he was further correct in recognizing that this shift came to dominate and consume the Western mind. But he made a characteristic mistake in identifying Nietzsche as the consummation of this tendency. Nietzsche evolved his epistemological convictions precisely in reaction against this tendency, he was following Goethe in this regard (and let us be clear here, there is no thinker to whom Nietzsche owed more than Goethe), to the point that he even gestured at a phenomenology of the facts of consciousness themselves. It was this hidden antagonism around which German Idealism turned, with Kant, Fichte, and Hegel pressing onward toward the icy heights of solipsism, and Goethe, Schopenhauer, Schelling, and Nietzche sounding the call to return always to Nature, to the body, to art and life. These two camps struggled violently against one another and thereby stimulated one another to produce more radical, more expansive, more brilliant ideas. 

41

The Germans ran through and concluded this drama with dynamite in the span of a single century, and it has now become the possession of us all (it is not, incidentally, the only drama the Germans anticipated us in). Faust gives us this drama and its resolution in artistic form, it is this work more than any other that conveys the particular meaning of the down-going for the Western man. 

42

It is undeniably odd that we appear to be the first civilization in which subjectivity has heightened to the point of disease, and this suggests that consciousness is not as old of a faculty in our development as is typically understood. The early Greeks understood their Fate and even their passions as outside themselves. The concept of freedom, that word which evokes so many sublime associations for us, was totally absent in them. This may in the final analysis be one of our virtues, but it was precisely this lack of subjective development that made possible the incredible Greek perspicacity in their examination of nature and things.

43

I believe in love. It’s through love that we are most easily able to access the sublime, to enter into that state of intoxication with the world that is necessary for art. Love forces man’s vision outside of himself and toward an ideal, it is consequently the most broadly accessible and effective curative to the diseases of the modern West. That the lover inevitably discovers that his idol is false and base, that he inevitably comes to know despair and betrayal, this constitutes an advantage of love. Should he survive these vicissitudes he will come out with greater self knowledge and objectivity, he will have had a sentimental education. And if he does not survive this discipline, if he is ruined by love as so many have been, then so be it- knowledge and strength are never gained without risking oneself.

44

In the face of this collapse of all idols and traditions, these questions only must be asked in the problem of what is to be preserved, what is to be exalted, and what is to be destroyed. That is: does this serve life? Does this serve youth? Does this serve to stimulate man’s most basic and natural passions, to drive him on to a state of a nihilistic frenzy? And I am afraid that, for all of the beauty that has been produced over our history, only a small portion of it will satisfy these criteria. This is the real meaning of sacrifice and cruelty, not the extermination of worthless biomass but the loss of that which is truly esteemed and loved by us. 

45

The value of the family unit beyond its most basic functions is highly questionable. It was Leopardi who noted that among geniuses a disproportionate number lost their fathers at an early age. The qualities necessary in a genius—force of will and desire for mastery over others—in the person of the father tend toward a domineering and tyrannical personality. Against such a father, the genius must often, like Cellini, struggle against an exacting vision that runs contrary to his nature and, unlike Cellini, he is certainly not always successful in this struggle. How many such geniuses have been lost in this way? How much beauty have we been deprived of because the conditions for genius are only rarely and accidentally attained? 

46

To the inevitable appeals to ‘natural law’ and analogies to the social dynamics of random animals with which such statements are protested against, I reply by saying that to my eyes it is Napoleon and Michaelangelo who seem to approximate the natural and healthy type of man rather than the banal and spiritually empty life of a bourgeois ‘family man.’ To will the ends is in every case to will the means. Man is rational and he is free. It is consequently his right and his duty to set his own goal and his own law. The diversity of man (I mean within European populations) in comparison to animals is partly a result of this right he has arrogated to mold himself. 

47

“One would like to have Greece and the Renaissance without the conditions and causes that made them possible”- the extent to which one has internalized this maxim is the most reliable measure of the extent to which one has expiated from their mind the vestiges of the fundamental Marxist error that genius is merely the product of ‘leisure.’ In order for one’s energies to become concentrated on a single point, in order for a monster of will to be molded, one must know desolation, hunger, uncertainty, discipline, and proximity to death and tragedy. In order for great cultures and states to be formed, the suffering and toil of an immense number of slaves is necessary. Everything in this world is zero-sum. To convey my understanding of the term ‘Justice’ one word only is necessary- efficiency. 

Part 3: Of Last Things

48

Man is an animal of practical reason, he requires for action an end worthy of him. I know of no greater method of elevating man and unlocking the full force of his passions than to offer him a goal, an ideal. With an ideal before their eyes even mediocre natures can become capable of intense discipline and self-sacrifice, and heroic natures, who without such an ideal tend toward despair, can be transformed into world-shaking historical personages.

49

The alternative to a science of history resting on man’s dialectical progression toward Spirit and the Absolute (although I am not wholly unsympathetic to this thesis), as well as the more crude forms of historicism, rests on one point only: the immutability of Nature. Nature does not change, likewise the as of yet theoretical potentiality of a natural man does not change, and history is best understood as the ascending and descending series oriented around this potentiality. The moment when man turns his eyes toward Nature and his horizon is expanded beyond the petty and dogmatic constrictions of community, religion, and state represents a great leap in man’s development, one only attained under the rarest circumstances. It is portrayed symbolically in book X of the Odyssey and in Petrarch’s ascent of Mont Ventoux. After this moment there is no going back: great forces are unbounded, and the appearance of the notion of eugenics becomes an inevitability. 

50

However, and it’s on this point on which I am in sympathy with Hegel, it’s true that we have accumulated more potential energy than any civilization prior and that we are more prepared for the task of achieving this natural man. Two millennia of Christianity have trained us in certain faculties that were undervalued by antique man, the drive for truth and the moral conscience for instance. A dialectic of a kind, if we can use an impoverished function to describe what is really a rich, biological phenomena, was necessary.

51

The effect of philosophy on the artist is nearly always deleterious. As the science which has for its subject matter the highest and most abstract Concepts, it stands as the exact antithesis of art. When the artist does make use of it he always holds the philosopher haughtily at a distance, he knows that philosophy can only ever be artistic material to him. The French, as the highest modern Western culture, and the Japanese, an anti-philosophical people par excellence, have produced the only artists that have shown themselves capable of this. Every other supposed counterexample proves the rule: Hesse was simply a bad novelist and Borges, in the words of Nabokov, could only construct the literary equivalent of beautiful porticos. Schiller, as the one true plausible exception, is probably the most tragic example of this kind. A genius placed into a culture and time that lacked the spiritual nourishment he required, he was obligated like Lessing to a universalism in his search for material. Schiller overcame his circumstances through sheer genius but it wasn’t without a cost, his writing certainly suffered from his engagement with philosophy. Artistic natures in our time will I think find Schiller to be a sympathetic figure, the cultural poverty he faced has become the omnipresent status quo, the aspiring artist will face the same struggles with universalism and solitude, and he may not be so lucky as to have a Goethe for a companion in this solitude.

52

I see no reason for despair over the possibility of art in our time. It’s true that the innovations in the realm of form and convention have largely been exhausted, it’s true that the ground of tradition has been eroded, it’s true that the disease of subjectivity and the historical sense present novel obstacles. But conditions have in the not too distant past been far less propitious and in such conditions Nature always presents itself to those who have the courage to face it. Our time is, after a brief intermission, now turning in favor of the production of stronger and more lonely men. I anticipate the appearance of a single hero, who, to be sure, will have to struggle and suffer horribly, against his time, against himself, but will at last attain mastery over these obstacles and turn them in service of his task. He will lay the groundwork for that art form which is barely possible and one that Hesse attempted but bungled completely, a true form of historical fiction in which the consciousness of a time is grasped and entered into, a Ulysses of the past.

53

Philosophy has developed a reputation over the last two millennia for being a purely academic exercise. This reputation is not unjustified, for it was subordinated to religion under Christianity and then later subordinated, at least in most cases, to the state. It is only recently that its true significance for us and its true meaning are being rediscovered. My concept of the philosopher is this: he who sets his own laws for himself, who lives at every moment philosophically. According to this concept only a handful of men throughout history may in truth be called philosophers and a not much larger handful may be said to have been philosophical disciples, and it is not without reason that most of them are found among the Greeks, for it was the Greeks in whom the purest archetype of philosophy was lived and elucidated. That their philosophical schools warred in the streets, that they employed all measures available to denounce and slander one another, indicates that they understood what was truly at stake. 

54

Heidegger conceived of history as a series of metaphysical systems, both as an expedient and owing to his nature. There is an element of truth to this but it is a premature conception. The influence of philosophy on history has been great but it has not been total, the men who have directed history have not in every case had their beliefs and actions entirely dictated by philosophy, either directly or indirectly. It is further incorrect because Heidegger could not conceive of philosophy developing on the basis of anything other than tradition, it was odious to him that philosophy should principally draw on Nature. On the whole, tradition is the most impoverished material a philosopher has to work with. That is not to say that it is dispensable, and I am at least in agreement with Heidegger that, especially in the last two centuries, the prejudice that has developed that philosophy is not a discipline, that it can taken up by any dilettante without consideration for the great depths with which past philosophers have already dealt with these problems and without rigorous study, has been very damaging.

55

The prevailing historical trend is toward a more ideological form of politics. Our time represents an interruption in this trend but in the grand historical scheme 80 years is really not much and there have been no changes in the underlying conditions to point toward anything other than its eventual resumption. That which formerly provided a ground for man—traditions, nations, religion—is dissolving, all that can survive nihilism are ideas and only those ideas that can contain within them an encompassing world-concept, which is to say, philosophies. The twin stars of the political genius and the scholar, the saber and the philosopher, will weave ever closer to each other in their orbit. The conditions of nihilism are, if not necessarily the best suited for the emergence of the philosopher, at least the most conducive to his influence. Man will become more rational or he will perish from the Earth. 

56

Monumental vision, the capacity to think and live in the grand style, does not exist in our time. One only need glance through Plutarch to see the distance that separates us from this style, the Roman style. Discussion of political theory will remain idle theoretical chatter until the underlying obstacle is grappled with, namely the lack of human material both on the side of those capable of command and those capable of obeying. How many men today are capable of the cruelty Napoleon displayed when Duroc pleaded with him to end his suffering and Napoleon simply replied 'I pity you, my friend, but there is nothing to be done, you must endure to the end.’ It’s this cruelty, cruelty that proceeds from universal principles that the great man adheres to with inhuman rigidity, that’s necessary for any truly great civilizational endeavor. 

57

The fundamental principle of democracy rests upon homogeneity and the positing of political equality in accordance with a particular dimension. In reality, there is always a distance between this theoretical equality and actual equality. As a consequence there is the perennial emergence of the dictatorial representative of the general will and the education of the populace toward greater homogeneity. This dialectic was present at the very beginnings of democracy, it emerged again under the Jacobins, and it reached its apotheosis under the Nazis in which “education of the general will” was taken to its logical conclusion with eugenics in its extension down to the racial level. The Idea of the state—and the Nazis were, despite their nationalism, the precursors of the ideological-democratic politics I am describing—is molded into the very biology of the populace. Through technology and the evolution of state apparatuses, form and content in politics come ever closer to an absolute identity.

58

There is nothing about the teeming masses and massive bureaucracies that constitute the political situation of modernity that I find particularly despair-inducing. Sooner or later, the conditions will be right for political actors, animated by philosophical world-concepts, to exploit the conditions I have described and ascend into the ranks of power, they will wield these states and populaces as Hobbesian automata against each other in ideological wars that will convulse the earth. It is in the nature of such men to expend the vast amount of potential energy that has been built up in our time. Only through wars of this kind can a stronger caste of man worthy of the title of masters of the earth be forged, only through wars can the apocalyptic conditions necessary for the shattering and remolding of man’s consciousness be made possible, only through war, always war, can a new god be born. 

59

What presents itself is the possibility of a greater widening of the gulf within man than has ever before been achieved. The moral conscience can be employed to mold various types of humans who have their entire worldview oriented solely toward performing their functions. A caste who has physical labor not imposed on them by force but who believe in the depths of their soul that their labor is a duty, a caste who has a similar sense of duty toward financial and economic functions, and so on. This will support a higher caste of men who will be humans in a truer sense, utterly free and holding in their hands a state that will be an extension of themselves. The problem of the slave revolt will in this way forever be quelled and the most efficient system for the production of genius possible attained.

60

The ultimate political problem consists in the relation between civilization and genius. Civilization is made possible through constraints, and in the case of a state consisting of wild natures, these constraints must be all the more firm. It was for this reason that the Greeks, who had one of the wildest natures yet achieved in man, were all the more compelled to practically worship the law and the founder as holy. But it is in the nature of the genius, who is produced by the sublimation these constraints induce, to violently oppose precisely those constraints that made him possible, anything less than total mastery is unacceptable to him. The genius is always a destabilizing force. 

61

It is difficult for modern man to understand the meaning that a Republic held for the ancients. Brutus provides the key to their conception of this political form; whereas Dante put him in the blackest pit of hell, throughout antiquity he was understood as a paragon of virtue. Brutus loved Caesar, and he was not taken in by petty ambition. His act was that of one who values his freedom and his rights above even the most precious friend. A Republic, for it to survive, must be made up of such men, such uncompromising egoists, who hold each other in a state of perfect tension. And it is my suspicion that if an answer to the political problem I have raised exists it is to be found in this tension. 

62

Centuries of political and social upheaval have made it such that modern man is a confluence of races, and consequently of drives, instincts, and valuations, all designed for different conditions and for different ends. It’s this that is responsible for the exhaustion and weakness that prevails amongst most men today. In most cases this internal diversity renders his existence a continual affliction, but there are rare, all too rare, cases in which these drives in an act of cosmic fortune come into harmony with one another and a comet is born. Alcibiades, Plato, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, and Da Vinci, were all comets of this kind, formed under conditions analogous to our own but on a smaller and isolated scale, and the time is not far off when the Perseids will streak across our political and cultural skies. 

63

It is not yet decided what man is. Our war to become what we are began on the steppe: in a single burst of power and freedom, man declared that he would no longer tolerate the filth and constriction of neolithic life and a new front was opened in Nature. It is this Promethean fire which serves as the spark of all human genius. From where could this fire be renewed? Nowhere, we have no barbarians. It is we who are its final carriers, and it is we who will decide if man’s history shall resemble a ring of fire or if he will instead slowly recede into darkness. Consciousness is a peculiar development in man. There is no doubt that it is, for now, necessary in the functioning of reason; however, being man’s most recently developed faculty, it is also his most flawed and the most likely to lead him into error. It’s that which has become unconscious and instinctual for us, after the painful and arduous road of the dialectic, that serves us most readily. And it is this that gives a hint to what the realized end of the rational faculty in man will look like. Hegel, in recognizing the continuity between mediate and immediate knowledge, had some vision of this but it was incomplete in scope, he thought that the end of man had been achieved in a chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin. The rational faculty in its full potential forms a more perfect analog with the instinct of animals than he realized… 

64

What is colloquially called intuition forms the faculty that will come to elevate man to his proper sphere of being. This faculty, through which in an instant the track of the dialectic is circumscribed and the truth given immediately, biologically, has only begun to make itself felt in a few great intellects as their Ariadne. Aristotle spoke truly when he designated man the rational animal, man has for his object and goal the truth, he has not yet attained it. Knowing the truth of this world with the same immediacy and certainty that the leopard knows to stalk his prey, the coming man will walk the earth containing within him all of humanity’s essential moments, all of its passions, but nonetheless sublated beyond consciousness, beyond uncertainty, beyond subjectivity. He will gaze out upon the earth with his eyes forever fixed in a state of terrible serenity. 

65

I will tell you a secret. It is this- that Nietzsche was a partisan for the truth, that he numbered among those great men in whom the drive for truth dominates and viciously takes all other drives into its service, that he suffered horribly under this drive, that it ultimately destroyed him. And this profound and lonely soul concealed this struggle that defined him above all others, he wore a mask and never once let it slip because he knew his role and his duties. That duty was to prepare the ground for us, to give us an example of a free spirit who indiscriminately sets himself up against all idols, all the empty ‘truths’ that have accumulated in our canons, who sneers at those who cannot live without certainties and know not the joy of living dangerously. My friends, he has waited long enough to be understood. With his example before us, will we not prepare our ships and set out upon the open sea, knowing that most of us will capsize, knowing that we will all be condemned to that same suffering, that same uncertainty and fear, and that in all likelihood our only reward will be to drown, cursing our fate? We free spirits, we nihilists, we know our fate, and we will not hesitate to descend into the underworld and give our blood to commune with the dead. The time for man’s second sailing is at hand.