Infinity and the Supermen: Meditations on Possible Worlds and Time

By Loren Berengere

Looking behind all forms of life to the concealed abode of ultimate conflict the new philosophy overthrows previous critical theory's attempts to clarify the relations among the disparate social struggles of our time in light of a new full unification. The new eros driving the patriarchal Supermen who journey to alternative possible worlds with counterparts that time-travel to the actual world and matriarchal Anti-Supermen who affirm life in the actual world moves from consciousness to world history whose concealed logic it finally reveals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781499071634

Loren Berengere

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Copyright © 2015 by Loren Berengere.

Library of Congress Control Number:      2014917744

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CONTENTS

Prefatory Note to the Reader

Point of View of the Author

Theses Against Modern Philosophy: A Glance at NIETZSCHE

PART ONE

The Finitude of the Praxis Men and the Infinitude of the Supermen. Of the Character of the Supermen and their World. The Underworld and the Overworld. Infinitude Discloses the Worlds to the Supermen. A Glance at the Three Ekstases of Over-Time. Supratime as Tentative Prefiguring of the Temporality of the Counterparts of the Supermen. The Disclosure of Infinity in the Struggle of the Enantiads. The Anti-Supermen. The Enantiads as Opposing World Pictures. The Supermen and Space. Supermanhood and Buddhahood Attained in Over-Time. The Posthumous Birth of the Supermen. Mimesis and the Praxis World. The Irreal and the Real. The Non-Aesthetic Function of Art. Imagination and the Supermen. The Zenithpoint and the Nadirpoint. The Activity of the Enantiads Repeats Itself in the Activity of the Supermen and the Anti-Supermen. The Doubt of the Supermen. The Supermen’s Horror of Profane Time. The Re-Abolition of Time. Vanity as the Regeneration of Time. Visions of the Declining Supermen of the Externalization of the Enantiads in the Praxis World and the Discovery of Great Time.

PART TWO

The Aryan Imitation of the Supermen and the Creation of Androgenic Values. The Crippling of the Aryan Masters by the Pagan Priests. The Transformation of Aryan Humanity into an Active Mass. Cyclic Time, Linear Time, the De-Androcization of All Values by the Anti-Supermen, and the Matriarchal and Patriarchal Ideals as Absolute Valuational Teloi Drawing the Supermen and Anti-Supermen into Unconscious Activity. The Praxis Men Become the Undermen of the New Matriarchal Order. The Periodicity of Infinity as the Cosmogonic Repetition of the Primordial Acts of the Primordial Supermen and the Halting of Linear Time. The Supermen and Possible Worlds. The Anti-Supermen in the Actual World and the Progress of History. Symbolic Activity and Active Symbolism. Cosmic Justice and the Activity of Infinity.

PART THREE

The Supermen Create Possible Worlds with Actual Counterparts. Time-Travel From Possible to Actual and Actual to Possible Constitutes the Demonstration of Supreme Freedom. The Counterparts of the Supermen as Micropossibles. Freedom as the Power of the Possible Enmeshed in the Actual and the Possible. Freedom as the Exodus of the Possible from the Actual is Prefigured in the Acts of the Supermen. Actual Death and Possible Death as Grounds for Profane and Sacred Time. The Counterparts of the Supermen as Backward Movements from Possible to Actual with Traces of Possible Being.

PART FOUR

The Superwomen. The Primordial Superwomen and Praxis. The Matriarchal Suzerains and the Superwomen. The Over-Being of the Superwomen and the Supermen. The Superwomen and their Counterparts. Suicide as the Destruction of Counterparts and the Indestructibility of Possible Being. The Time-Travels of the Counterparts of the Supermen and the Superwomen from Possible to Actual and Actual to Possible as the Ground of Freedom for Possible Being and Being Itself as the Fore-Ground of Freedom for Actual Being. The Possible as the Ground of the Actual by Means of the Negation of Actual Being and Time. The Idea of Philosophy as the Bestowal of Uninhabited Possible Worlds. Truth is Confined to the Actual World. The Supermen and the Counterparts of the Supermen Confute the Platonic Tradition of the Philosopher-King. The Conceiving of the Possible as Against the Conception of the Actual. Possible Worlds as the Falsification of the Actual. The Scholastic Universals as Pure Possibles. The Inability of Actual Being to Perceive Possible Being and the Supermen’s Inability to Perceive Actuality Except Through the Counterparts of the Supermen. The Foundering of the Counterparts in the Underworld. Homesickness as the Motivation for the Time-Travel of the Counterparts. The Supermen View the Counterparts from the Windows of the Overworld.

PART FIVE

The Creation of Supermen versus the Repetition of the Primordial Hierogamies by the Matriarchal Suzerains. The Primordial Supermen and the Primordial Suzerains Function as Objects of Desire for the Young Supermen and the Young Suzerains Revealing Infinity as a Teleological Process of Cyclic Motion That Submerges Finite Time. Infinity as Love.

PART SIX

The Vast Creative Adventure Undertaken by the Anti-Supermen and the New Creation Story Advanced by the Cohorts of Matriarchal Suzerains.

PART SEVEN

A Glance at the Foundations for the Ancient and Noble Ethics of the Supermen and a Foreshadowing of This Ethical Existence. Actual and Possible Ethics Arise from Contrasting Concerns with Time and Death. The Supermen are Subject to Non-Actual Ethics. The Counterparts as the Source of Guilt and Suffering. The Clash of the Possible With the Actual as the Ethical Dilemma for the Supermen. The Meekness of the Supermen. Kinds of Friendship. The Supermen and Resurrection.

And whereas Man in his

anguish grows silent,

A god has taught me to say

How much I suffer.

                                             Goethe

For they give justice and reparation to one another for their injustice in accordance with the ordering of time.

Anaximander, the

earliest surviving words of

Western philosophy

…and he will make me to walk upon my high places.

Habakkuk 3

My soul breaketh for the longing that it hath…

Psalm 119:20

DEDICATION

F or Leaza Anza Spencer of Tucson, Arizona, my proto-reader and first patroness who saw my light rising out of obscurity and read my darkness as the noonday.

I completed Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four in a desolate region of the Arizona desert; I wrote Part Five and Part Six in Tucson, Part Seven in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and reviewed all of it in a forsaken sector of El Paso County overlooking the glaucous heaves of the ghostly mountains of Mexico.

I salute the desert, for the desert led me out of the desert of talking polemically about philosophy and philosophers and stimulated philosophizing from my own being, as all of this, really, is brazen autobiography; on the other hand, do you think that you are dealing with a book?

I salute my teachers, alive and dead; their appearing thrilled the serious students at the University of Texas at Austin: Charles Hartshorne, O.K. Bouwsma, Louis Mackey, Robert Solomon, Doug Kellner, and Alex von Schoenborn.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

The Supermen

The Anti-Supermen

The Higher Men

The Patriarchal Praxis Men

The Active Mass

The Near Men

The Morons

The Young Superwomen

The Primordial Matriarchs

The Pagan Priests

The Superwomen

The Matriarchal Suzerains

The Arya

The Undermen

The Young Supermen

The Higher Women

LIST OF PLACES

The Underworld

The Overworld

The Sphere

The Zenithpoints and the Nadirpoints

SHORT LIST OF THEMES

Possible Being and Time

Life

Death

Art

Thought

Actual Being in the World

Praxis

Infinity

PREFATORY NOTE TO THE READER

P art One may seem simplistic to advanced readers, for there I only interface spirit with life dimly, so advanced readers may begin with, say, essay number 153, although I recommend more backstory even for advanced readers. Counterpart discourse and investigation of possible being and time soon follow, as we focus on Descartes; no, not on his philosophy, as this is a wearisome commonplace, but on his existence as a writer-thinker in a hotel room in Paris hiding from his father and from the real world. Because readers are already rare in a device-driven helter-skelter world, I say that there is nothing in my writings that my readers will not understand, if they only take the trouble to concentrate on what I say. Yet I have been told by people who know how to think and read books that this work loses them at times. For such I recommend that the elusive passages be read very slowly in a fresh perusal. Finally, philosophy is seduction, as we shall see, not veracious description of an actual world. Allow yourself to be seduced…

POINT OF VIEW OF THE AUTHOR

1

A s we human beings are so liable to delusion in what relates to ourselves it is with a little uneasiness that I report on the merits of this most unusual production that changes the dilemma of philosophy as we know it. I will not summarize all of my thoughts, least of all their claim to timely reception; our overtechnologized, cluttered culture is so frivolous that it is most reasonable to assume that because philosophy is nothing other than a response to shallow thinking I will be appreciated by a bare handful of intellectual adventurers at first, then later I will infiltrate the academic ranks, as the academy is not lacking in serious minds who hold out hope for philosophy in a faux age. In fact, I will be discovered by intellectuals in Jerusalem. Philosophy today finds itself in the state of stagnation bemoaned by Descartes, for he found the schools of his time ossified and dominated by glossators whose incessant glosses of tired ideas obstructed that gallant spirit of heroic breakthrough the philosopher so nobly embodied, but the coming breakthrough will consist not in the discovery of a new philosophy that will yield a new way to understand the world, but in the discovery that philosophy is a major force on the way to the creation of a new picture of man, and I mean that the picturing reveals the crescendoing of an ascendant proto-ideal that makes the classical ideal and the Renaissance ideal look like pygmies at its cyclopean feet, as we say that the various thoughts contained in philosophy, art, religion, letters, law, and popular culture necessarily express either the patriarchal ideal or its opposite, the matriarchal ideal, and by necessarily express I refer to the consequences of the thinking, such that some ideas trigger values that ultimately effectuate division and distances between poles or unity, for one ideal always unites whereas its opposite disintegrates, divides, and separates out; these opposites are at war, an original idea in Greek philosophy, but the Greeks never really worked out their idea, as to work out an idea is simply to look for and seize upon some application of the idea to values, for conflict means change and the values are always in flux, and we associated one ideal with the being of actuality, the actual, and the other with the possible, or possible being and possible worlds, as division and distance between poles originate in the proto-distance that is created when the Supermen create possible worlds for living spaces, but we also pointed out that when philosophers think they unmindfully create alternative universes or irreal worlds they try to pass off as true accounts of a real world, and I mean this world, never realizing that their imagined irreality is always pregnant with consequences for reality, such that because the philosophers fail to understand their own activity the impertinent question What can philosophy do? arises and the whole fact of intellectual pursuit appears vain, nugatory, impotent, and useless, but we say that pure intellectual activity is the most valuable and least impotent of all pursuits, for the thinker pursues the possible when thinking happens even though sometimes the consequences of the created possible world redound to the actual, for actuality strives to merge into one grand supposedly finalized unity that becomes moral when it declares division evil; for instance, Hegel created a possible world he preposterously claimed to be a true world, that is to say, a true account of the actual world, yet his possible world redounds to the actual, as the working of actuality is the ultimate convergence of all disparate elements in a unity we call the Sphere, as a perfect Sphere contains no distances, no discrete divisions. And the motions of the opposites we call Infinity.

2

Truthfully, there is no such thing as truth in philosophy if philosophers subconsciously create possible worlds, as these worlds are neither true nor false: we can only say they are non-actual, but truth pertains to the actual world; in other words, truth is sensible, but the possible abrogates good sense, for the possible negates both the abstract and the concrete. To think that only the actual world exists; to suppose another world is not possible or is true or false; that the possible is exhausted by Aristotle’s potential, as the potential is actual and not the possible, or explicated when philosophers of existence assert possibilities, as possibility pertains to freedom in the actual world, and that nothing non-actual exists: these are discredited and abandoned by the new philosophy.

3

The overwhelming majority of writers begin knowing where they are going and wind up saying less than expected, but I began not knowing where I was going and wound up saying much more than expected. For instance, it never occurred to me that the Supermen possess counterparts until well into my investigation; consequently, I will assert that the Supermen straddle worlds, but this is not the case, for possible being once created may not claim ingress into the actual world, the praxis world as we call it, for the possible and the actual exist as opposites: the counterparts navigate the actual tainted with a trace of the possible, as some possible being flees the Overworld to bedevil the counterpart in the underworld, or real world, for this is inevitable and accounts for the lack of facility of the counterparts to thrive in real life, as the will to power conceived by Nietzsche applies to life, but the Supermen exit life, for life is actual. At any rate, I say this to point out that this plotless, saga novel approach allows the reader to discover my conceptions the moment I discover them. What? Is this a new kind of honesty in philosophy? A restitution of the wide-eyed Socratic ingenuousness?

4

Some may say that when I report on Infinity as the interplay between the possible and the actual, an interplay caused by tension of opposites that never attune themselves and become reconciled one to the other, as the possible is asymmetrically placed in the cosmos in relation to actuality, as we describe the motion of Infinity as a lopsided and elliptical cyclic movement produced by a teleology wholly anthropologic in character, as we shall see, I fall into the famous paradox of the Cretan who said that all Cretans are liars, for if he spoke truly then what he said was false; in other words, if they assert that Infinity, the interplay of possible and actual in the sense that the creation of possible worlds entails the alteration of the actual world, is itself a possible world, a quixoteish irreality, we reply that the working of a possible is not itself a possible, but is actual, for history is actual, even though historical time is one discharge of a process, as we shall see.

5

We say that philosophy is not concerned with truth or truth claims in any universal sense, but this does not mean that philosophical creations possess no claims at all in light of their status as neither true nor false, for they are exemplary creations, and creations are fictions that do something, that promote some end; by promotion of an end I mean the tendency of a philosophic world to fructify and reach the real world, for when worlds collide and entail relations to actuality, and I mean direct relations to actual existence, but the possible worlds created by philosophers may only obliquely relate to reality, for they subserve the proto-ideals first, we witness the working of these relations as consequences. The grand error of philosophy hitherto is precisely the assumption of the thinking minds that both their minds and their ideas must be directly related to the actual, to the things, to objective reality itself, and this led to a preoccupation with sensory knowledge and certainty, in a word, the problems of knowledge, but only philosophy of science is concerned with knowledge. In fact, no correspondence exists between ideas and reality as long as these ideas are worlds or parts of worlds, for these conceptual anemones are irreal, non-actual, possible worlds that connect with the proto-ideals we call the teloi, as we shall see; and the motions of the teloi, the one seeking reparation from the other when it seeks to effect an unjust enlargement of its empire, initiate Infinity.

6

We have thought that concepts are structured and reality is formless and chaotic; that we falsify reality when we apply concepts to an unstructured in-itself forever subjected to becoming and whirling, but if it were the other way around we would have to recognize actuality as already structured by praxis and the possible as formless because it is imbued with formless force, and force cannot be checked in a true-false sense, only resisted by an opposing force.

7

It is just not possible to discredit a thought-agglomerate by an analysis of language, as pure thought is a fragment of a possible world; the thoughts are nothing actual, and we said they are not directly related to reality, but touch the actual only obliquely and certainly not immediately, unless the thought is practical and may claim, therefore, immediate results in the real world, whereas pure thought constructs agglomerates of non-actuals we call non-existential possible worlds, as these worlds exist as creations of possible being rather than as houses for possible being, for if the Supermen do not exist as actual being in the actual world subject to its finitude they exist as created possible being in created possible worlds. Language as actual, a kind of cultural actual in flux not unlike the law, is not determinative as an unraveler or disprover of the possible, as any possible world may only be discredited by the creation of another possible, another non-actual that overpowers it by issuing its own indiscernible command-language to actual being in the actual world; this new command-language is understood as retarding or countermanding consequences, as the consequences that flow from bold thought-agglomerates that debut as possible worlds are quite different from the practical pay-offs and cash value consequences trumpeted by the Cambridge pragmatists; in other words, it is error to link thought with thing, except in a practical sense, such that not correspondence but contiguity occurs, the segregation of mind and reality.

8

Praxical thinking wants to change the world and brands all non-praxical thinking, or pure thinking, as mere thoughts of philosophers engaged in interpreting the world, but we said that philosophers create possible worlds that exist as articulations of ideals, such that all thought always must trace invisible and heretofore unknown trajectories that display the working of the ideals. Philosophers, then, do not interpret the world, although they claim to, as all of their truth claims are nothing but dishonest attempts to legitimate fantastic activity; in other words, they may create the possible only under the guise of interpreting the actual, such that philosophy’s pretensions to knowledge conceal the taboo that to think is to create in direct opposition to actuality, to the real world, to life. When I say that philosophers do not interpret the actual world I do not mean to deny the activity of interpretation, for some philosophers interpret into the actual, as the consequences of the irreal creations of the philosophers can occur only when interpretations occur as basic attempts to connect incommensurables and make ideas clear. But this making ideas clear by putting them to work, so to speak, always occurs as shreds and splinters of a gigantic dialectic philosophy has yet to discover. Thus the dilemma I initially adverted to: either philosophy is victimized by its own artifice that philosophers only interpret the world and do nothing to change it or in their necessarily truncated attempt to change it they focus on the shreds and splinters.

THESES AGAINST MODERN PHILOSOPHY: A GLANCE AT NIETZSCHE

9

W hat I relate here is the philosophy of the future; that this sort of panorama subsumes the history of philosophy is an understatement, for philosophy itself is caught up in universal becoming, as all thinking of Being is caught up in universal becoming, as moving points carried along in the flux, and because this incessant yo-yoing of becoming shows us a lunar structure of appearance, increase, wane, disappearance—followed by reappearance after three nights of darkness—it is folly for philosophers who take nihilism seriously to think of this crisis as any collapse of a brooding transcendent realm, as Nietzsche asserts, with dire consequences for reality, for this realm presents itself as peripheral to the structure.

10

The highest values devaluate themselves; this is correct, but no one asks the question why? and we become discouraged and confused. A revaluation of all values?—For sure, we experience it day by day; but what does this mean? What does it point to? To life? To the Earth? Yes, necessarily so, but what does this mean? Have we upstaged traditional philosophy with its reason such that our triumph has made us so cocksure that when it comes to reading the cases in every case we fail to locate, decipher, and interpret the rule of the case? And the rule is?—That in every case of art and philosophy we locate behind the artistic-philosophic imagination a universal in the service of, such that the artist and philosopher become symptoms, albeit for the most part unconscious, of an active procuring force at work; that every intellectual creation becomes either an aid or an impediment to a unifying-female or discretive-male proto-force with the upshot that art and philosophy function as means to ends but never as ends, for the cyclic peregrinations of the proto-forces are the only ends.

11

We could even assert that the productions of genius release the primordial forces, and Nietzsche’s basic mistake is that life cannot function as a virile force, for life and the Earth are synonymous, and this means nurturing values, the cosmological presupposition of which is certainly matrist unity, never division, for the archetype of division, of boundary and inequality in every sense, is the primordial act of the Sumerian king-god’s construction of the prototypical pick-axe by means of which he separated Earth from Sky. Therefore, God is dead is the negation of the Sky-god, the personification of the virile values and masculist perspective Nietzsche longed for, and the letting loose of the forces of life, of the Earth with its perspective. Thus, we may comprehend a psychologist-philologist’s myopia and the results of his idle hours.

12

The age does not know what is happening to it, let alone where it is going. Just as the Sumerian king-god uses the pick-axe to separate Earth from Sky, thus creating and enforcing distinction, segregation, and dis-unity, he uses this tool to separate the sides of the furrow into which humankind is sown; the tool is also a weapon to weed out rebellious cities and protect loyal cities, and the slave chops out weeds, understood as rebellious plants, to cultivate useful vegetation. All these ordering acts are equivalent: they mean separation, division, distinction, dis-unity, and thus represent a proto-perspective at war with its opposite: mixture, synthesis, convergence. Our process of nihilism is nothing other than the steady measured expulsion of the king-god in order to effect a reuniting of Earth and Sky, and I mean, of course, the annihilation of the Sky; the intrusion of a Platonic-Christian exegesis of being that slanders the real world of sensuous reality, as Nietzsche asserts, is a rather embarrassing red herring: a counter-movement to nihilism can only come about by the eclipse of all patriarchal values, and this process of de-androcization proceeds apace in the Western democracies.

13

The philosopher is deeply occupied with the problem of decadence? And this means being engaged with decline, exhaustion, impoverishment? Certainly. But Nietzsche’s myopia again produces gross misunderstanding, betrays it, and cavalcades it through street markets, bazaars, and haunts of satyrs and Socratic-faced sileni: he adds to these designations a prime designation—"life—; we now must define decadence as declining life, impoverished life, etc. Next—after the obligatory verbal pirouettes, for philosophy has progressed from dour system-building to pirouetting, you understand—he says that his health, which is another term for life, demands that he, the philosopher of life, must take sides against the whole of modern humaneness. But life and humaneness" belong together; they are not antipodes: modern life is humane life, and Nietzsche wears the rhetorician’s black cape when he disparages one side of the coin and champions the other side of the same coin; the increase of life means the decrease of spirit, and conversely; otherwise, one philosophizes about barbarians and animals. We, on the other hand, segregate actualities of life from irrealities of every sort and our separation of unlike things is strict and unequivocal, as you will see. Declining life exists when spirit escalates, expands, and piles up, and I mean as a fortification against life; on the other hand, declining spirit exists when vigorous life marginalizes spirit, chokes and suffocates the contemplative type of man, and hands him goblets of hemlock to drink, for this type of man is the enemy of the active type bent on survival. Nietzsche, the philosopher of life, never rises above Darwin. Let us learn to think life and humaneness as two peas in a pod, so that it is absurd to say that humaneness means a decline of life. To exalt life is to oppose the spiritual type of man, for these rare, extremely delicate infrequent ones negate life when they exit the actual for the possible, as we shall see, although Darwinists, pragmatists, and periwigged English logicians will demur and kick up a fuss.

14

When humaneness takes a step forward, nurturing values take a step forward also, and life becomes more humane, more nurturing, less mean, hateful, hard, Draconian, cold, spartan, violent, intolerant—what do the words matter?—so that finally, and I mean today, life becomes so humane that it makes no sense to oppose life to humaneness. Nurturing values are feminine values, and I mean, of course, matriarchal values. Nietzsche focuses on the beyond as a Platonic-Christian fiction that devalues life, as if only one kind of life exists; moreover, he focuses on consequences: such devaluation of life makes life softer, suppliant, more humane, etc., and this robs the strong; but who are the strong? These strong are the active types of man, for barbarians are strong; yet, Nietzsche believes in spiritual men? Nietzsche overhastily and perfunctorily makes life the focal point because of the harm posed by the beyond, and he is too brilliantly harum-scarum to think this through; he champions incident over master plot, character trait over the character himself; I beg your pardon, I meant to say herself, for matricization of values is Nietzsche’s blind spot.

15

I put this at the beginning: Nietzsche’s perspective is majorly limited; even his perspective on perspective is limited. He will boast that you rob reality of its meaning and value to the extent that you make up an ideal world, yet, for us, reality itself expresses an ideal; this ideal is in conflict with an opposite ideal (—we call them proto-ideals or Enantiads—); we teach that one ideal creates and maintains distance and division in the world, but its opposite works to destroy distance, and that this working, in and through one type of human being—as opposed to another type of human being—finally achieves its goal, but at the expense of spirit; that action, the active life, is the privation of thought or spirit just as spirit is the privation of a life that is lived only for the sake of action. In opposition to Aristotle, who observes that philosophy is useless but beautiful and valuable because it imitates an archetype, and he means the divine condition, we place force in the possible itself, for thought itself is not real, but plainly irreal, and this irreality possesses force as it is prompted by a proto-force, and I mean that the Supermen created this force when they created distance by the act of creating an Overworld of Over-time, as we shall see. This creative act sets in motion a cosmic process that necessarily implicates the opposing force of the opposing ideal, and with this upshot: the Supermen, and I mean the self-creation of possible time and being in possible worlds, will perforce disappear, only to reappear in history after the passage of an indefinite time period, a period during which the Enantiad of the ones we call the Anti-Supermen reaches its supremacy, its Zenithpoint, and reality becomes a perfect Sphere, as we shall see.

16

The higher men attribute insanity or absurdity to Nietzsche’s assertion that he splits the history of humanity into two halves, but the insanity never touched his work, and it is absurd when a prophet is without honor in his own house, for the house of Nietzsche is the house of higher men, and I mean the scholars and intellectuals who receive the word, interpret it, and choose the high calling of disseminating the works of their superiors, the Supermen; but this can occur only during the ascendancy of the Supermen’s ideal; once this ideal is on the wane, it is difficult to distinguish between these higher types that range from, say, Varro, Quintillian, and Cicero in Rome, the real comtemplatives in the scribal schools of Babylon, Xenophon and Plutarch in Greece, Bede and Alcuin in the Middle Ages to the French Encyclopedists, the host of modern litterati, academics, and even select jurists;—today it is difficult to distinguish these contemplators from the Anti-Supermen themselves. Nietzsche himself believes that his discovery of the death of God casts the world adrift into emptiness—hence the two halves—; but, as the Anti-Supermen rush out to fill the void, claiming the passing of God and even the symbol of the Superman as they seize the reins of history, we teach that history as a linear progress is surely restricted and partial, and the world is far from straying in an infinite nothing. Nietzsche misunderstood what was taking place—what is taking place—; he saw the Enantiads, one gloomily descending, the other swinging upward, peeping over the horizon, as it were, and he understood the thrill of the spectacle as an opportunity to press on through nihilism for the glory of the distant shore, and I mean for the triumph of the affirmation of exuberant virile values, but nothing could be further from the truth, for he saw the initiation of the eventual triumph of the opposite values and it is most unseemly for a seer to misread what he sees.

17

Nietzsche bemoans the cowardice of the idealists who take flight in the face of reality. Reality?—Here we go again.—Reality is surely another name for the real world, or sublunary world, that is apt to act and is practical and productive, and it is on the money to repeat Aristotle’s line of thought here, for he says that human beings redolent of the stamp of Thales and Anaxagoras, who were notoriously impractical in the real world, the world of human reality concerned with production and practical details, knew many marvelous and wonderful things, but did not take care of themselves as men, and he means that they could not be at two places at one time. In other words, Aristotle is very keen to appreciate such things, for there is nothing exceptional about the real world, as even brutes provide for themselves and possess forethought for subsistence, and had he continued down this road Aristotle would have made the discovery that the actual world is actual because actual human beings inhabit it, and actuality is best contrasted, not with potency as in his metaphysics, but with the possible, and I mean the idea of a possible world, an idea boldly pioneered by Leibniz and rather rudely co-opted recently by American logicians bent on utility, for American philosophy since Cambridge pragmatism, and indeed since Franklin and Emerson, has been unable to joyfully disengage itself from the notions of use-value and practical need. To return to the real world. The contemplative person would be wholly distinct from the practical and productive if, considered as an extreme case of the vita contemplativa, the artist-philosopher lived in another medium wholly distinct from praxis: exorcized of the struggle to survive, the Supermen make themselves at odds with those who strive in the praxis realm. I only wish to throw light upon a peculiar condition, its implications and consequences, for thinking has always occurred pursuant to the condition of the thinker, this condition for this one and that condition for that one, and we locate two antithetical conditions for creative activity, actuality and possible worlds, the one a life-condition, an expansion of the life-force, the other one the expression of a purposively created, non-finite temporality—along with its concurrent spatiality—most divergent from the temporality of practical concern, and I mean the everyday temporality of the praxis world. We call this praxis world the real world, the world of life, for it is the world of action, and action posits itself as real as opposed to thought which posits itself as irreal, and I refer to thought pursued for its own sake as free thought animated solely by wonder, for the Supermen are full of childish wonder at existence, but the praxis men are full of action, so to speak, because they have no share of this wonder; in the case of the higher men, because of their share of praxis, we think of them as peculiar hybrids in the sense that these most valuable specimens keep one leg in life, but the Supermen have transcended life and death, for the Supermen gain posthumous birth in future possible worlds, and I mean in the glory of the Overworlds of the young Supermen, as the Supermen exist in a space and time wholly distinct from the space and time of praxis. Nietzsche has Zarathustra say that his type of Superman is not alienated or removed from reality, but is reality itself; not just a mistake, an impossibility, for the real Supermen do not exist in reality, but exist, and will exist, in possible worlds of irreality constructed for their survival, for their survival is of another kind from that of Darwin’s utilitarian hominids: the most highly developed types are useless in reality; only the weak survive: the exceptions, in reality, are unwelcome. Rather, the real Supermen exist alongside the fictional characters in another possible world, in the wonderland of the Overworld, as the fictional characters exist as possible, non-actual objects of imagination, and thrive in created, although not self-created, possible worlds with the Supermen much the same as the animals live with man in the actual world, and I mean the world of praxis, for reality must be a subdivision of existence: Don Quixote is accessed by the imagination, but Quixote’s world, for this world is akin to the world of the Supermen, can only be found by praxis men via practical imagination, as only the Supermen may find the Overworld as a temporal dimension, and I mean that the time of the Overworld is Over-time consisting of the Over-past, the Over-present, and the Over-future, as we shall see, but praxis men are bound by finite time, and hence, finite death, or as Heidegger says, being-towards-death, for just as Heidegger captures man and confines him inside Heideggerian temporality, and he means the temporality of praxis and concernful dealings with things and with others, Nietzsche obstreperously confines man to the terrene, and I mean to the reality of life, as Christianity, says Nietzsche the prosecutor who persecutes his victims, is a crime against life, and he means an escape from life. But the time of living as Nietzsche’s fool is over.—Am I understood?—Quixote escapes from life. Cervantes directs this escape when he makes Quixote spend too much time with his books of fantasy. And where did Quixote escape to? The Overworld. And what did Quixote escape from? Life. Nietzsche indicts Christianity for eloigning man from life, yet this same prosecutor identifies with Don Quixote? And we may add quietly that this kind of violation of the canons of prosecutorial conduct is the same kind of violation that he perpetrates when he assesses the Jews: he will condemn nationalism, then rightly applaud Jewish nationalism. Nietzsche loved the Jews only because Wagner hated the Jews. Did he envy Wagner? Did the bourgeois racket at Bayreuth unnerve him? Well, yes, but he envied the composer for a deeper reason: the grown-too-large active element in Wagner’s nature, for these higher men, as we said, are hybrids, and owing to the active-pragmatic element in their constitutions, cannot enter into Overworlds in an existential way, as the actual cannot penetrate the possible, yet they devote their lives looking at possible worlds, and sometimes creating them, but not as dwellings, for only Supermen may so dwell.

18

Experienced novelists grow apprehensive that the characters in a story seem to take on a volition of their own, a kind of self-assertion that wants to claim things for a given personage in the plot that serves to prompt the writer to give the claimant of this right the license to act in the way the character fancies, and it is probable that the idea of Quixote sought mysterious ingress into the imagination of Cervantes before the plan of the novel ever took place, before plot, setting, or any other element occurred to Cervantes, for example, his core idea to launch a caustic satire of romances of chivalry.

19

Against Leibniz who saw possibles as claimants to actuality we see Quixote as a claimant not to actual existence, but to possible existence in a fictional-possible world; and yet, Leibniz fell victim to the thought that this world, and he means the real world, the praxis world or realm which we will later call the underworld, is the best of all possible worlds, and this simply because God chose it for existence; thus, this world was related to God the same way Quixote was related to Cervantes, for we said that Quixote was a claim or demand to exist. As usual, philosophers don’t say enough, and I mean that they are notorious for omitting things, and Leibniz should have added that the praxis world is best for praxis men, and it is actual because the praxis men inhabit it. At any rate, the Leibnizian natural theology tainted the best of all possible thoughts, and I mean the thinking of possible worlds. Perhaps he meant that the praxis world was the best of all possible worlds for Leibniz himself when he visited the actual world, for he loved to span the ramparts of the worlds, and as we shall see, this was the proximate cause of his intellectual fecundity. At any rate, Cervantes directs Quixote to deny his world; this is a denial of himself, so Quixote dies, but this is not like any other death in any other novel. The dead Quixote is the one who disagreed with Sancho Panza over the question whether windmills were giants, the Quixote who had taken to his books of fantasy. Quixote could have survived, but this would not have been Quixote, only an approximation to Quixote, the Quixote who found reality, and as Cervantes wanted to show the connection between life and dream he has both Quixotes die at once, and yet, the real Quixote and the irreal Quixote lived at once, a transworld identity denied to praxis men, but granted to fictional characters and to the Supermen, for, as we shall see, this temporal straddling of the worlds, by means of the time-travels of the counterparts of the Supermen, opens the space for creation, and I mean the intensity wrought by the contiguity of the Supermen to their counterparts upon returning to the Overworld; in other words, the creation of the Overworld is the proto-creation that makes all creation by the Supermen possible, and I mean that the Supermen created themselves free to create, as the possibility portrayed in modern ontology is the possibility of the praxis men, but for the Supermen creation occurs only on the basis of a created possible world that creates a primary distance between possible and actual, as imagination always negates actuality and creates worlds.

PART ONE

20

I isolate four types of action-oriented souls, denizens of the underworld who act in the praxis realm in differing capacities. The higher men, the intellectuals who interpret a creator’s work and create nothing themselves, cocoon new ideas with a view to making them actual; they impart actuality to pure potencies within the possibles, as ideas are possibles endowed with the potential to become actual in contrast to potencies in the actual world promoted by Aristotle, when they translate the command-language in the idea, a decoding that remains inexact, and endow the idea with an active ethos to activate the capacity to form and shape the circumambient world. The higher men are productive men in the highest sense, for their activity seeks to activate the quiescent vis viva in ideas, while the active men only produce, and can only produce, chairs, cars, skyscrapers, space stations, tools of all kinds, and other human beings. These men of action, although supremely active and endowed with the capacity to enjoy the active life to the highest degree—this is to say they are the best adapted for continued survival —are in reality acted upon by the mobilization of the supernal, the proper activity of the higher men. Below the clangor and scramble of the most active class in this realm, I isolate a category of strugglers, for they also struggle to possess, struggle to be free, I nominate near men. These human beings, frustrated by the active realm not because their nature is any less active than others, but because they suffer from some defect, must limp behind the successful men of praxis who achieve practical ends seemingly effortlessly; the near men are always near success, i.e., near the success of the producers who achieve their purely material ends by piling up material thing upon material thing, and who, to put it in an American idiom, as the Americans are active to a morbid degree, know how to make a quick pile(—notice the quick—), yet they remain have nots all their lives because of some defect. Just below the near men stand the morons; these morons suffer from greater defects which hamper the achievement of active ends. Some morons are born morons and other morons have become morons; i.e., they have made themselves morons. I am referring, of course, to the tendency of over-achieving populations to reify themselves by way of technology, e.g., screen addiction, the creation of a virtual space and time through dependence upon too many gadgets, the enervation brought on by all electronic alcoholica, and with this result: the class of morons grows more populous as moronic activity proliferates. Today, although the active men have always enjoyed the distinction of being close to nature, even the closest to nature, for whole active men constitute the most active class in the realm of praxis, it is commonplace for many an active man to abjure contact with nature and behave moronically. It is far from impossible for the entire realm of praxis to be dominated by morons; indeed, the gulf separating whole active men from morons is tenuous at best. Having said this, the defects of near men and morons are defects in their capacity to turn out as whole active men, which defects have made them exist as near men and morons, so it ought to be stated clearly that the Supermen, those who legislate from their Overworld, those incarnations of the greatest splendor of which the human type is capable, suffer even greater defects. These voluptuous hermits have been bred out of the world altogether, for they exit life and its praxis; in other words, Goethe is not a sublimation of any life-force: the creator negates the life-force; I mean the creator exits the actual world to create non-actual worlds, for pure thought as the negation of what-is acts to negate the what-is.

21

What is so remarkable about Goethe is that he understood himself as a contemplative, quite frankly, as a force, for the types that resemble Goethe, the Goethe-types, constitute the primary force in that world that concerns man, whatever materialists may say and whatever delusions the praxis men may entertain regarding creative force, for our active human beings, after all, appear to create something though they create nothing at all. Higher beings see more than lower beings, though this colors their happiness with yellow melancholy and makes their unhappiness unhappier. Ordinary men carry ordinary burdens on their backs, but humanity itself, encapsulated in lofty moods, rides atop the shoulders of the Supermen: their refined senses accustom them to refined things, and of this one thing they are certain: the undiscovered worlds and uncharted seas they long for, and for the sake of which they are prepared to sacrifice all;—these worlds are invisible worlds that are there only to soothe the seven solitudes of invisible men.

22

You labor under one ontological misconception. Man is just a convenient fiction for the constant flow of individuals splayed across time, and these individuals, with exceedingly rare exceptions, are exclusively active. But even the rarest contemplatives themselves fall into this error—that there is one human ontology instead of many possible ones—; and when they catch the truth of their existence for one fleeting moment they forget it immediately. Quite unlike Goethe, they have fallen into the habit of underestimating themselves; they stroll through the modern world of obscene haste and ersatz like glassy-eyed somnambulists not knowing what they are, not knowing that ordinary people in every age, clime, and race exist as their unconscious tools;—yes, all these Supermen are neither as proud nor as festive as they might be.

23

Leibniz, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche loved to pretend not to care that the Muse could spend as much time with other spirits as she pleased, could flat out ignore them until the very last moment, until that magical moment of actual death and posthumous birth. But such is the fate of hard posthumous men; this fate had been prepared for these who endured, and will only be prepared for those who can endure. Here we detect the most intimate embrace of happiness and grief! Cicero, found wandering with his faithful slaves in the woods around Gaeta, had posterity in mind when he submitted his wan neck to gangland swords. But then: every refined soul in the ancient world dreamed of posterity as the target audience, and longed to walk through the gates made just for writers and thinkers into eternity; supply me, if you can, with some other reason why they were prized by kings and emperors (—and, sometimes, exile, the severing of the hands that made books possible, and assassination were the sincerest form of flattery and being prized—). In our modern world, on the other hand, everyone lives in the moment and no one wants to construct for millennia anymore. Modern men bow before the great god Speed’s abhorrent altar and believe that instant gratification is the most compelling ethical imperative.

24

And yet, in the end, it is the active type of human who pays the price for the appearance of a rare human being; what must his forebears have endured to fashion one exotic plant, one sublime work of art! What distress, renunciation, suffering, toil; what broken dreams must have been stored up over immense stretches of time to produce one whose entire life is one intense broken dream, one heroic deed! This is just the point: those who accumulated this human capital—the real capitalists—could, and did, take rests every day, and how long and enjoyable their Sabbaths must have been! But the Supermen hunger and thirst for such a rest from themselves, and they hunger and thirst in vain! For fear that their Sabbath may turn them into drunkards, pigs, and nerve-wracked debauchees, they push ever onward like Marcus Aurelius, enclosing himself in an aureole of silvery luminescence, conversing with the dead men of the Stoa while the barbarians rage across the frozen Rhine and the Danube frontier.

25

I recognize two distinct kinds of philosopher. One kind, personified by, say, Charles Peirce, aims at grasping events through signs. They are like surveyors, their space full of tripods and plumb bobs ready to ascertain complexes of facts, logical and moral, past and present, for the benefit, they swear, of man’s future, with their research always attuned to utility. Their activity is in full accordance with one kind of drive as opposed to another, fundamentally different, kind of drive-activity; all their categories were originally constructed by creative types, but they are not creative themselves. Who needs to be creative, they say, squinting through their apparatuses, when we can be pragmatists, testers of ideas? These men, after all is said and done, i.e., tested and made usable for mass society—for they believe in the mission of technology in the world; they have no quarrel with streamlining and herding; they say they believe in pluralism—; these men are scientists, not creators. (—When the Harvard dandies invented their pluralism and multiculturalism they were creating, but in a ragged hand-me-down sense.—) On the other hand, I should say, at the other polar extreme, we find the overseers, those dangerous types like Parmenides, Plato, and other royal hermits who say, Let there be, and It shall be. They dispose rather quickly of the work of scientific types, whatever those scholars who refuse to see the limits of science may say, for there need no longer be a foundation for such value-legislation as that continually enacted by these overseers as, say, there should be a foundation for a painting, a poem, or the colossus of Rhodes (—and it will take much more than an earthquake to topple these colossi!—) Hitherto, these overseers had to deceive themselves and finally convince themselves and their disciples that the good as they desired it was not the possible good they finally created—as the painter, poet, and sculptor craft their works—but was the actual good, because the good i.e., their created good, was good in itself as actual. This constitutes all cases, most notably Plato. It consisted in a comfort built into the idea-system that made Plato’s value-legislating less onerous and fearful; it inspired confidence in the overseer, put it that way, and this ensured