Where are the feasts we were promised?
Where is the wine, the new wine, dying, on the vine?
—Jim Morrison, An American Prayer
An approximation of Lebensphilosophie, to me:
The enemy has been given many pseudonyms and noms de guerre: the City, the Desert, the Machine, der Geist. Despite vast differences in worldview at the hands of the spotters, they each recognize it as that intrusive, invading force which seeps into wounds and expands throughout the whole system like fast-acting venom. It thickens blood into a cold sludge, beats turning more faint and distant as the chest succumbs to the war’s attrition. Where did we go wrong? At what point did we lose the ability to generate new life?
Two thousand years have come and gone—and not a single new god! Instead, there still exists, and as if by some intrinsic right,—as if he were the ultimatum and maximum of the power to create gods, of the creator spiritus in mankind—this pitiful god of Christian monotono-theism! This hybrid image of decay, conjured up out of emptiness, contradiction and vain imagining, in which all the instincts of décadence, all the cowardices and wearinesses of the soul find their sanction! —Nietzsche, The Antichrist, §19
Those ancients! Why can’t we live as deeply as they? The source of all of our great inspiration and terrible yearning; how we look back upon those who lived far deeply and greater than we. What was it like to live in a time that knew only the outpouring of itself?
The modern miasma reeks with the unmistakable stench of stagnation. No culture in the history of mankind has dedicated itself so utterly to history, to the accumulation of knowledge, a specific kind of knowledge, which proudly displays among its ranks: scientism, historicism, and above all others—progress. In a paradoxical fashion it recognizes but one world and its finite development between beginning and end, towards which civilization must inevitably move. That is precisely why life appears to change at an unimaginable rate, and why it appears as if nothing at all has changed, all at the same time: progress knows only forward momentum, and lacks entirely the ability to change direction. Our culture, thereby, has grown into a great life-hungry beast that can only destroy values, never generating new ones. All life, all newborn youth, must be offered up to this great, terrifying, all-consuming God.
What use here are appeals to tradition or institution, current or lost? We now know more of them than those who actually created and participated in them, and it has granted us little of our own. Excavate, calculate, evaluate—soon we learned that the methods we employed to raise ancient tombs in search of antidotes were but more movements of the long arm of the Life-Eater.
The values endorsed by Christian philosophical systems are either ethical or logical, i.e., functional values devoid of living substance. With that one statement, however, we have judged Christian philosophy. —Klages, Rhythmen und Runen, p. 300
Now that we have entered upon the opposite movement, now that we immoralists are trying with all our power to eliminate the concepts of guilt and punishment from the world once more, and to cleanse psychology, history, nature and all social institutions and customs of all signs of those two concepts, we recognize no more radical opponents than the theologians, who with their notion of “a moral order of things,” still continue to pollute the innocence of Becoming with punishment and guilt. Christianity is the metaphysics of the hangman. —Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “The Four Great Errors,” §7
Those ancients! There! One can look back into history and find what we lack: noble simplicity, communion, enchantment, mysterium tremendum et fascinans. In fact, the further he looks back, the stronger the ability to produce life appears. Primitive man, unburdened with the weight of ego-consciousness, could only know life. Ten thousand years, give or take, of mankind growing too unsatisfied with his conditions and transforming the world into a crude mirror of himself—not even his gods were safe from it! Is it true that the key to liveliness and happiness is to throw off the shackles of concrete and fiber optics? Do we even have enough time?
In response to these proclamations of apocalypse, the prevailing retort against the panegyrist has been said in unison: here comes stumbling out of his cave, the great primitivist, ten thousand years too late. The understanding of this relatively new area of philosophy and religion is one that interprets its texts as a call to cleanse the world of its last three thousand years and its many accumulations; a lot of necromancers who merely wish to raise antiquarian history from its tomb above what exists in the present. But it is a misunderstanding. The Cosmic Man is not interested in the worship of the antiquarian, but in the generation of new life; it is not in the death of something which gives them great concern, but the fact that nothing since has been born.
That is the great calamity that the psychologists and clinicians of Lebensphilosophie had diagnosed: the life-cell had slowly ceased replicating. The past thus became like a calcified golem, an aging tyrant which refused to die and allow new forms to take its place. What could be more concerning to ancient man than a river which had suddenly stopped flowing?
The stronger urge of the Mediterranean peoples to create idols secures them a longer life, but too hastens their calcification. Idols are places of keeping, like cells, but at times also fossils of life, like mummies. What is a cradle to germinating life becomes a coffin to dying life! —Schuler wants to make relics anew, wants to kindle archaic symbols: but life never repeats itself in the same forms. —Klages, Rhythmen und Runen, “Heathen Signal Fires”
When the sense of a people is hardened like this, when history serves the life of the past in such a way that it buries further living, especially higher living, when the historical sense no longer conserves life, but mummifies it, then the tree dies unnaturally, from the top gradually down to the roots, and at last the roots themselves are generally destroyed. Antiquarian history itself degenerates in that moment when it no longer inspires and fills with enthusiasm the fresh life of the present. Then reverence withers away. —Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, §3
A Romantic is no primitivist, and for two reasons: mere primitivism is not desirable, and it is not possible. It is not desirable because it only continues the error of calcification and necromancy, preferring the known-but-lifeless over the confusion of rebirth. And it is not possible because the Romantic is, by definition, on the outside—“the essential condition in the holder of a traditional faith is that he should not know he is a traditionalist.” It is against himself. His motivation lies in being pulled by the distance and contrast, even as he gives sermons on unity.
No teaching can return us to that which has once been lost. Regarding all such attempts, we feel that man simply does not have the ability to bring about a transformation of his inner life on his own. —Klages, Man and Earth
Paradise!
But there you are. Try to go back to the savages, and you feel as if your very soul was decomposing inside you. That is what you feel in the South Seas, anyhow: as if your soul was decomposing inside you. And with any savages the same, if you try to go their way, take their current of sympathy. […]
And that is what really happens. If you prostitute your psyche by returning to the savages, you gradually go to pieces. Before you can go back, you have to decompose. And a white man decomposing is a ghastly sight. Even Melville in Typee. —D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, Ch. 10
But is it not true that the past can, must, serve as a source of great inspiration? Does the veneration of the dead and the images of the past not serve as the basis of the greatest art and expression in contest of everything that man has produced, as the purest form of religious experience? Indeed, the man who knows only the future is just as sick as the one who knows only the past. The past is nourishment, divine nourishment, but its vitalizing capacity lies precisely in its distance from us! The closer we bring the past to us through our many weapons and tools, the weaker it appears.
I despise everything which merely instructs me without increasing or immediately enlivening my activity. —Goethe (Preface, Use and Abuse of History)
There is a knowledge that kills and a knowledge that awakens… As has been said of the latter type, he lives his life to the full as long as he inhabits the earth. He renews himself as if by a perpetual series of rebirths. The other sort is merely the mummified ash-heap of a once-living fire, the fossilized relic of a perished substance. —Klages, Rhythmen und Runen, p. 309
Therefore: cosmic man searches not for mere history, for long-buried temples adorned with many artifacts (as important as they may be). What is it then that he wants? Does he want a new system of philosophy, yet more stone tablets bearing commandments? Is “the establishment of new societies” dependent on one’s ability to delve into a discourse on ethics and dedication of new laws? No! He desires firstly: a new mythology! Where values are gleaned not from reason, nor morality, but from the facts and conditions of his own life, his ecology.
We cannot go back, even if we wanted to. The way of life known to the primitives, the steppe-riders, the Athenians, the Normans—all of it is lost, it was never ours and nor shall it ever be. Everything would be lost in the reduction of romance to autoeroticism. But we have not yet succeeded in excising her womb, and not by lack of trying. What is required is therefore not yet more investigations into antiquity, but a relationship with that which produced all of these great civilizations and those to come, “to dive back into the still unfinished stream of life”. The great and distant past must be digested and metabolized by the living body and circulated in its hot blood. The danger of reconstruction—that is, necromancy—is that it is not, and instead wraps around us like a plaster cast: hardening, restricting, suffocating.
The soul must take the hint from the relics our scientists have so marvelously gathered out of the forgotten past, and from the hint develop a new living utterance. The spark is from dead wisdom, but the fire is life. —D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, Foreword
In Dionysian art and its tragic symbolism the same nature speaks to us with its true undissembled voice: “Be as I am! Amidst the ceaseless change of phenomena the eternally creative primordial mother, eternally impelling to existence, self-satisfying eternally with this change of phenomena!” —Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, §16
The way of the creating one, his cosmic command: create, germinate; rejuvenate—before it is too late!
—
Notebook Aphorism
Plotinus believed that from the One emanated the world like the light of a candle flame in a dark interior, its spiritual-intellectual glow fading away into the black darkness of chaotic matter. He would’ve been wiser in reversing the order: only from primordial chaos—the life-womb—does the world emerge, and it is that lofty and enlightened notion of “eternal oneness” which stands at against this ceaselessly bestowing and ceaselessly destroying principle which serves as the true source of creation. It is not the opposite in a polar tension, but a force which is caustic to all contrast.
Where values are gleaned not from reason, nor morality, but from the facts and conditions of his own life, his ecology.
I’m cool with doing cowboys or knights again