It is a very ancient idea that the good life consists essentially in a two step process: 1. Rising up out of the created world, turning towards the uncreated source, and 2. Returning to the created world, creating anew in conjunction with the source. One could suppose that in the essentials this notion is perennial, and that with every new age it simply needs to be updated to cast out dogmatism (which is actually a recursive use of the notion itself )
SURPASSING FORM
Sometimes I can taste and feel that I am touching absolute reality. It always lies at the far edge of form: a way of breaking a rule that somehow seems to fulfill it at the same time (rather than merely following it, which changes nothing). The interplay between Kel Valhaal and Reign Array is as simple as this: mastery over a form, disciplined work, clear focus, and then - kicking down the latter. I feel it composing music, writing poetry, sculpting, but also in relationships and professional situations (not to mention more by-wrote scenerios like fitness).
The counterintuive aspect is that the rupture with the form is never a sort of terrorist attack coming from the outside - it is always somehow immanent to the form itself, even if its (the rupture's) nature is not determinate. The transcendental isn't a blissed-out space of oneness and joy, it is a catharsis that is specific to a situation (and, ideally, at the same time ascesis, fervor and majesty )
IMPOSSIBILITY AS CONDITION OF POSSIBILITY
This is probably the basic insight of all ethics. An obstacle appears, but the obstacle points the way to a rupture of the fantasmatic frame and a higher freedom. This insight is as old as stoicism and as contemporary as Lacanian Marxism. Necessity is contingent and contingency is necessary
ARKANA
We can suppose that there is a law of life that holds true beyond the exoteric social, religious and moral determinations we know - and maybe even beyond the biological and cognitive determinations that currently appear to be absolute.
One can be made aware of this law via arcana that interact with affect and language to generate states of consciousness. This is the task of Qabala, most broadly speaking
But Qabala is generally 'metaphysical' in a way that lacks scientific/discursive rigor on the one hand, and fails to engage in political negativity, on the other.
Transdendental Qabala joins the method of Qabala (thought as arcanum) to the field of post-Kantian thought.
To acknowledge Kant we have to re-spell the term: not an Arcanum but an Arkanum
FOUNDATION OF ETHICS
One can argue that philosophy properly speaking is not needed for practical ethics - mental health, success in business or whatever, fulfilling relationships - these can all be gotten using practical wisdom of various kinds.
The philosophical rejoinder is that such a practical ethics is vulnerable to ideology, or at any rate does not truly have a foundation. Sure, you don't need philosophy to be successful in business - but are you sure that's really what you want? Are you sure that's the right thing to do? If you devote yourself to philosophy you might discover that you are not the master of the end to which you are devoting your life, and might thus lose the desire to achieve that seems so natural to you.
But philosophers cannot agree on what the absolute foundation of ethics is. We can suppose that it must be some version of dialectical materialism - that it comes down to naming and rooting out capitalist exploitation, and conceiving of and working towards an alternative that is emancipatory in the most radical sense, perhaps armed with a notion of the absolute or of desire (drawn from psychoanalysis, mathematics, physical science, the history of philosophy)
But it seems like philosophy can go no further than proposing such a foundation. And, because philosophy is a cultural and artistic discipline, especially in its continental lineage, most philosophers will seek to undermine these proposals and modify or replace them. The result is a sort of structural nipping-in-the-bud
What is missing is a sustained effort at engaging with affect, attention, habit and ritual directly. In other words, the dimensions of Majesty and Ascesis are missing from much of contemporary thought - it's power to transform consciousness and its power to be transmitted across wiser culture. Philosophy can't do this on its own, which is why Qabala is needed
VISION
Nothing is more empowering than the experience of being loved by God. Reign Array is a being-loved, a receiving-love from an impossible void. Reign Array sees without doing any seeing.
SUBJECTIVE NEGATIVITY
I am not entirely absorbed in the object that I have an intention towards. There's something else there, a not.
When I act, I'm not simply allowing my urges to gratify themselves - even if I do this, there's some type of reflexivity involved - another negativity.
These are the basic facts of freedom, and conversation about them can get very abstract
But this is only one half, or even one small corner, of the discussion about deontology.
SHAME
Human beings are surrounded, so to speak, by a sort of forcefield or cage that is composed of repeated words and phrases that are constantly reminding us of our status, value, and qualities. You could call them algorithms, scripts, programs - they are literally speaking to us at a non-unconscious low level of conscious. We hear them and obey them, without even really hearing them. This is what I call Hyperborean reasoning. The Hyperborean forcefield-cage is value neutral, in a way - it is there to protect us even as it enslaves us. The Hyperborean is a low-level instance of the death drive. The scripts are integral to our early psychogenesis - they always came from somewhere else. We experienced a shame that was too great to bear. Maybe it was a shaming of our sexuality, our creativity, intelligence, looks, whatever. It was painful - terribly painful - annihilating. And in order to bind the excitation, we internalize the voice and words that put us to shame - so that it doesn't again. This process constitutes an entire identity, and gives birth to (alienated) desire. The reasoning is that if we obey the Hypreborean logic we get what we wanted - love and positive affect - or at least not be flooded with the unbearable.
The Sword of EFRAYN cuts this thread - or more specifically, it pushes reason further, back to its source. The thing about Hyperborean Logic is that it is without foundation - or rather its foundation is applied. It isn't conscious, or is only barely conscious. That last bit of the syllogism said under the breath, "and if I'm not able to be the person I've been told I should be, I'll be abandoned". ARK WORK requires a reconstruction of Hyperborean Logic by means of Transcendental Logic - which goes all the way back. Uncover the source of the script and realize the irrationality in obeying it. This is the basic gesture of becoming free.
THE SUBJECT
The difficulty with the theory of the subject is that one can speculate about it in three very different ways. The clinical approach, whether psychoanalytic, behavioral or Jungian-mystical, entails observing and interpreting symptoms, projections and so on. The neurobiological approach seeks to understand what's happening in the physical substrate. And then there are speculative approaches - what kind of thing (or non-thing) is the subject, are there other types of subject in nature, is the subject basically isomorphic with computation and so on
HELLENISTIC ETHICS AND COGNITIVE-BEHAVIORAL THERAPY
CBT is stoicism freed from grounding in any metaphysics. It exercises the subjective, cognitive aspect of reason insofar as it relates to will and affect, which makes it really philosophically important, but the scary thing about it is that its ability to be reasonable fades away once it kills off obviously painful and disruptive anxiety. No one, I think, would reconsider their entire way of life and make a decisive change because of CBT. They'd just learn how to bear and effectively manage whatever stresses currently afflict them given the choices they've made - without questioning larger issues around ideology, for example. Nevertheless, the way that CBT works is very profound, because it isolates reason's power, in coordination with will, over negative affect - even its ability to transform phenomenal reality.
The thing about reason is - reason is magic. The opposition between reason and myth or faith is false. The only real opposition is between open and closed.
THREE KINDS OF REASON
Theoretical reason, dialectal reason and practical reason. Theoretical reason transcends imagination and intuition, capturing objective reality and ultimately yielding technological and cultural transformations - an example would be Hilbert space. Practical reason coordinates desire with the material world, whether at the personal or a global level - here we have economics, government, and the projects undertaking by human beings. Finally dialectal reason involves repression, falsehood, and ultimate subjective transformation - equally for Plato's dialogues, Hegel's System and the logic of psychoanalysis. The endgame of the dialectic is sublimation or perhaps subjective aporia. It is tempting to imagine that these three types of reason are all one and the same. And certainly there is overlap between them. But are they really the same? As computer science develops and we ultimately create a massively super intelligent being able to astonish itself and revise its own axioms in light of new discoveries - won't it ultimately arrive at aporia, and weep with joy?
ON SPECULATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY
It is as fashionable today as it was in the 1960s to suppose that the origin of human kind is the death drive, in one interpretation or another. Human culture lies 'between two deaths', the death of blissful animal homeostasis on on end, before an unbearable excitation shattered that homeostasis, and a return to homeostatic bliss by means of the detour of the entire history of civilization - or perhaps even to a nothingness simpler and more serene that life or matter. Certainly it is undeniable that a void of antagonism and contradiction is the driving force of economic development and technological innovation under capitalism. I'm not sure where I stand on this topic. Lets take the Deleuzean version articulated in Difference and Repetition: here the death drive is an utterly cosmic principle from the start: is is the very caesura between virtual problems and their actual solutions, functioning not just as a logic of human culture but also of (at least) biological evolution, and perhaps even geological formations and so on. If I were to explore this more deeply, I'd ask what originary excitation was too much to bear, so that the world began. Deleuze, as far as I've read, never addresses the question. I think it's in chapter 4 of DR that he says that God calculates, and calculates badly, which is why there is time - so God generates the virtual problems and natura naturata takes over from there to provide solutions - repeating partial ones over and over. But why does God calculate badly? The only answer would be from Lurianic Kabbalah: God accidentally shattered the world. Anyway, it would be possible to propose a more limited role for the death drive - perhaps it only accounts for human civilization, and we have atoms and galaxies for some other reason (or no reason at all). My only point right now is that Deontology has to posit an ethics on the basis of a theory about why we are (or at least I am) alive. The theory can only be speculative, if ethics is to be anything more than an administration of emotion in the name of smoother functioning. There are no fact about this topic. It is rational to accept the basic scientific account - that genetically modern humans have been around for about 1 million years, that the neolithic began 10 thousand years ago and so on. We don't really understand sexuality and natural selection well enough to explain scientifically why change happens... maybe sexuality, sublimation, fantasy and everything that makes human life meaningful has its source in biological tensions, or maybe it written more directly into the logical fabric of reality
DEONTOLOGY
Originally this field was called "anthropology". I am suspicious towards anti-anthropocentric philosophy, and I was looking for a name for a field that would cover topics like epistemology, ethics, philosophy of history, phenomenology, philosophy of art. But I think "deontology" is a better name. The main concern of deontology is to give an account of the torsion between the transcendental and the hyperborean. This account is extracted from art, psychoanalysis, history, phenomenology and so on - and what these all share in common are values. What is a value? Why are there values? What is valuable? The Four Figures operate only insofar as there is value [name eventually landed upon was Axiology].
THE FOUR FIGURES
KEL VALHAAL lives in a constellation of gears divided, partitioned eternally by horizons. Kel leaps across horizons, oriented towards paper stars. Kel's name is NATURANS as she chases and generates OLOLON. Kel lost her Caul and is no longer certain what to do.
REIGN ARRAY is a universal eye. Reign surveys, names, continues. A white backbone, chattering, chalky, writhing with form, structure, being. Reign makes himself, even though he is dead; he is born at the moment that he discovers and mourns his death. But he also emanates. In emanating he escapes from THE GENESIS CAUL by probing its very depths.
THE GENESIS CAUL moans and sprays clouds of blood onto the firmament. A crushed bug spewing roach guts - the Caul is a guide, a Cassandra, pointing towards the unbearable breach that should not be, cannot be, surely never was - calling Reign towards it so as to master it, to be prepared for the next time.
OLOLON is a gift, a transformed, redeemed, transformative and redeeming object, ever-absent, ever flickering, suggesting, untouched, untouchable. OLOLON beckons KEL but charges her to keep a distance at the same time. Holographic, OLOLON can never be touched or reached - but if she is not generated faithfully she dissipates.
ON FREEDOM
Anthropology [note from 2019: name later changed to axiology], as defined here, draws on the questions of psychogenesis, politics, ethics, human nature, and the nature of language. It considers the theme of the soul in pagan and christian thought and the theory of the subject in modern philosophy and psychoanalysis.
The name of the subject is HAELEGEN. HAELEGEN was constituted at the moment of the Loss of the Caul. But Haelegen is made up of four figures: Kel Valhaal, OLOLON, Reign Array and The Genesis Caul.