The Pride Paradox

By Alex Garcia Topete

An anthology of philosophical essays about time, life, and ethics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nowadays Orange Productions LLC
• Release date: Apr 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393586135

Book preview

The

PRide

PAradox

Philosophical Essays

Alex Garcia Topete

Copyright © 2020 by Alex Garcia Topete. All Rights Reserved.

Published under licensed by Nowadays Orange Productions.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review. 

Alex Garcia Topete

www.GarciaTopete.com 

Printed in the United States of America 

First Printing: April 2020

Nowadays Orange Productions LLC 

To my Mother & mi Abuela Tina, who taught me everything there is to know about strength, ethics & good philosophy just by living...

CONTENTS

Absent Writing

From high Aether down to the low Abyss

Deinos Man

The Matter of Justice

Man’s Just Poetic Tragedy

History, Time & the Messianic

For the Love of Zarathustra

A Timeless Will to Life

The Gravity of Pride

The Pride Paradox

Foreword for All and None

Phenomenal Man

Proud Belief

Proud Inquiry

Proud Reasoning

Proud Ethics

Bibliography

About the Author

Absent Writing

How does writing happen, when it cannot be authored? How does the disaster happen without ever being present? These questions, among many others, implicit and explicit, explode from Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster[1], existing in individual fragments, in collections of fragments, and even in the fragmentation itself, overflowing the text and its language. For this same reason, such questions have no answer—absence answers the questions inasmuch as it turns these into mortified questions (31). To answer the questions would mean to find a meaning, to totalize through a code (thought and language) something that belongs to infinity. The code no longer suffices. The translation is infinite. (136).

Thus, the madness of writing, to which one abandons oneself in an attempt to master it (43). Yet, writing refuses to be mastered, to be appropriated. Rather, writing is a gift, close to the Heideggerian idea of Being (and language, its dwelling) as a gift too. In a Levinasian notion, writing [language] is in itself already skepticism (110)—writing distrusts writing.  The gift of writing is precisely what writing refuses. (99). Language perpetuates itself through this skepticism, an-archic, writing without desire; an absence of origin and end; every beginning is a beginning over. (117).

How to write of the disaster? How to give form to that which is absent? The disaster is always to come (much like Derrida's hauntology), always passed, and never present—it's beyond ex-perience, belonging to infinity (1), and breaking away from the totality, breaking away from the star (75); but not denying a need of fulfillment, a vacuum, a lack of light without darkness, a clarity without light. (36). Writing of the disaster does nothing. Writing does not explain the disaster, nor does writing help prevent the it. Writing doesn't instantiate the disaster either. How is it possible to say 'Auschwitz has happened'? (143). The disaster effaces any questions and answers (52), rendering itself absent of meaning, a thunder and silence. (99).

Silence, just like the gaps in a fragmented text or the lexical gaps of a language, might be what answers Blanchot's questions—answering by not-answering, by not writing. He wrote, whether this was possible or not... Such is the silence of writing. (100). Silence exceeds all language, addressing no one, encompassing everything that cannot be said, what remains to be said. (146). The writing of the disaster—let us leave to silence this sentence which only means, perhaps, silence. (138).

From high Aether down to the low Abyss

How to begin to understand humanity’s relation to physis, one that has no beginning and no end because humanity belongs to physis and because physis transcends delimitations of time? In his hymn As on a Holiday...[2] (AH), Friedrich Hölderlin perhaps gives us a glimpse towards understanding, for the poem represents a manifestation of physis while unfolding our relation to physis through the power of poetry For those who have ears to hear, the warning song (AH).

Hölderlin begins evoking images of nature that represent timelessness, from rain and thunder to a Heraclitean running river to green groves and Bacchus’ grapevine, all witnessed by both the countryman (German: Landmann ‘man of the land’) who belongs to Nature and the Poet who sings to us about it all. The Poet goes on to re-present Nature, physis, making sure to reaffirm Nature’s transcendence as miraculously omnipresent, / God-like in power and beauty... older than the ages // and higher than the gods of Orient and Occident... begotten... on holy Chaos (AH), thus not only singing but divining (or rather, meta-divining) Nature, making her more than divine and intuiting beyond of what’s seen, for poets are always divining (AH).

A fire has been lit in the soul of the poets (AH), Hölderlin claims right after his dividing ode to Nature, reminiscing of the fire of apostles and messengers and placing his fellow poets among such dutiful ranks. The poets of Hölderlin’s hymn not only carry The thoughts of the communal spirit... in the poet’s soul but also find the all-alive, all-animating powers of the gods (AH) because those stand out more meaningful and more audible to us (AH)—only poets can translate between the divine and the human, the works of gods and men, / To bear witness to both, the song succeeds (AH).

Ultimately, we humans, oh so humans, may attempt to grasp the Father’s ray and approach to see the Heavenly (AH), in a misguided effort to appropriate physis and impose our nomos, our measure, upon Being. Instead, the former tasks belong to the poets, those wrapping in song the Heavenly gift / To offer it to the people (AH). Fellow poets, to us behooves to stand (AH), the Poet sings—to stand out between the Heavenly and the Earthly, to exist as interpreters who sing that which cannot be said of our relation to physis, and to make our own being and time a holy-day through poetry, one of our own making.

Deinos Man

How to understand man and his relation to justice, an elusive phenomenon which man can neither make present nor challenge for it manifests on its own? Perhaps, the answer has already been provided by the ancient Greeks, mediated through the poetry (poeisis: to make) of Sophocles[3] and his influence from Heraclitus and Anaximander.

In Antigone, the dramatist summarizes the essence (essere: to be) of man by declaring that "none is more deinos than what is man" (174). An ambiguous and ambivalent word, deinos qualifies something as awesome and awful at the same time, thus defining in that quote the existence (ek: out; stasis: stance) of man, in the best of Heraclitean senses, as a contradiction. Man, an awesome and awful being, stands out as a chiasm both within himself (a cross between wonderful and terrible) and within physis (nature), for man belongs to physis but does not dwell in it appropriately because physis manifests as chaos, a disorderly infinity without an arche (origin) or an escathon (end). Similar to Heraclitus’s comparison of physis with an ever-changing flowing river, to man, physis represents a "sea with the south winds storming and the waves swelling, breaking