The Metaphysics of Modern Cognition

A Guide for Free Thinkers and the Prelude to a Cultural Crusade

Chapter One: Axioms of Civilization

1. Axioms of Civilization. We organic beings have invented a technology— civilization—that is today very poorly understood; and this is especially why it is so important a task to derive from the very roots, the meaning of humanity, the purpose of all its institutions, orders, rules, norms, and establishments, what it is striving towards, and perhaps what it is running away from too. It is a virtue among us thinkers to break from the lack of historical sense, the congenital defect of philosophers and laymen alike, and to inquire into everything hitherto taken as apodeictic—religion, morality, virtue, sin—asking ourselves, quite earnestly, what have been the results of these millennia of experimentation? Should the remnant artifacts still today stand tall? It should be clear that to ratiocinate from axioms is the ONLY WAY to reveal whatever is gratuitous, decadent, in excess—then, in contrast, whatever really is necessary for holding the fabric of civilization together. For there can be nothing so absurd, but may be found in the books of Philosophers. And the reason is manifest. For there is not one of them that begins his ratiocination from the Definitions, or Explications of the names they are to use; which is a method that hath been used onely in Geometry; whose Conclusions have thereby been made indisputable [9].

2. The preservation and prosperity of the species. Whatever is truly “virtuous” or “moral” is anything that aims for the preservation and prosperity of the species. Salvation, religion, and—indeed—morality and virtue themselves—the structures which from our earliest age we have been wont to accept without hesitation—are mere instruments in service of our continued existence. The individual is innately legislated according to these goals, endowed firstly with existential needs that promote their survival, often raising to consciousness those objects which relate to this satisfaction: food, water, shelter, warmth, and safety. Once reaching childbearing age, one is tasked with reproduction, governed by sexual needs. And upon reaching sagacious age, the human being aims to preserve its posterity—whereby any thought, idea, or action which aligns with the preservation of our species’ descendants is said to bring PROSPERITY. Lastly, our inalienable desire for AUTONOMY, expressing itself as an unwillingness to subordinate our innate causality to other, has come to light in many a perplexing fashion…

3. The formation of civilization.The governing law of the human race is that of strength in numbers—the species is better equipped to realize the consequences of its innate endowments through society than in its natural state. This necessitates the formation of civilization through its social contract, whose foremost guarantee is this “right to life.” In recognition of the individual’s autonomous will, society must also establish a “right to liberty” as inalienable, preventing the acute, internal strife that might abound if this human faculty was suppressed.

4. We philosophical ones. Of ages and parties alike! It is the philosophical ones and free spirits—always us—who, reflecting on the course of human events and introspecting into human nature, determined why, how, and what civilization should be in place, writing “When in the course of human events…” and creating laws, institutions, and establishments to ensure these foundational principles previously espoused. And, finally, it is the philosophical ones, the counterfactual spirits run rampant that forever ask “how” and “why,” that have any hope of deducing new instruments for the preservation of the species in the face of evolution’s vicissitudes.

5. Day of judgment. The honor is ours! To wear the critic’s spectacles, morphing our own excitement or consternation into the discerning eye, a stature prior to that of our participation in this great—or malevolent—structure. To what extent does civilization LIVE UP TO its doctrines? And what is the consequence of the individual’s participation in it? Surely this “technology” has not merely been good. The cultural critic or political pundit is of no short supply these days, but of interrogation towards the axioms hitherto established, there is but too little discourse! To all perpetual inquirers and unrelenting interrogators of the grand madness we have been thrust into: this is our day!

Chapter Two: The Civilized Individual

5. Modern Indoctrination. The greatest form of modern indoctrination is that into civilization itself! How many a times when you were younger and your cognitive faculties much weaker did you really have the liberty or strength to choose whether to participate in civilization, its institutions, norms, and establishments, or not? Even those decisions which on their surface appeared to be up to you were never really a choice at all. “It was for your survival and protection,” they rightfully ascertain. Yet the result still stands, and what reform can be offered today? Instead of cultivating true individuality, you were forced into pre-determined civilizational channels and conflated these external structures, which happened to be the accident of your age and nothing more, with the flexible inner character surrounding that unmovable core of your identity itself.

7. Identity in civilization. Predetermined channels suggest an identity and many unquestioningly accept it, and so they become intertwined—even indistinguishable—with every supplied institution, norm, or establishment, blindly anchored to the accidents of their age. It remains lost on them that their identity could be INDEPENDENT of their age—perhaps they think this is only a feature of the past. Philosophers even, with the facade they wear in this “everyday masquerade ball,” boast the same defect by identifying as “philosophers.” Where was this title 5,000 years ago? Thus the cognition of themselves in terms of pre-determined civilizational structures begins!

8. Propaganda. “Propaganda is only used during wartime to corral the troops,” is the great deception most of us carry around—in reality, all of time is wartime against nature, and we are all soldiers of civilization.

9. Shaped Desires. Out of mimetic proximity to peers we are taught beneath our knowledge to bask in the predetermined delights enjoyed by society: entertainment and the like, never questioning “how” or “why,” instead concerned with “what” at every step. A select few occasionally question as far as the first pangs of conscience and reverse course, while we free spirits are the handful that can never retreat!

10. Vestigial. When in the course of human events, a people becomes so inundated with the luxuries of “modern life” that all existential needs have been quelled, but what was once the impetus for social behavior, and to such a great extent that sociability was hereditarily endowed so it need not be learned, dissolves before their eyes, then the people find themselves social without a cause: as a species still in motion after the guiding hand of circumstance has been lifted.

11. Contaminated Air. The wrong culture is contaminated air, invisible. It covers the entire horizon and arrests any gaze beyond it. Doubly oppressive! Really the only recourse is that emancipating and unbinding event in the journey to a new and different land. Side effects of the wrong culture come to appear symptomatic of chronic illness under the untrained eye—consider when too many people lack a serious commitment to the truth, and by evil chance a genuine head is placed among this uncommitted frivolity. And then! The downpour of side effects due to participation in the wrong culture. The wretched truth-seeker, suffocating in his culture’s polluted air, is systematically misled by the very proponents of the culture that contaminate his air that he is suffering from some internal sickness of which he needs a cure. Not always out of malice! Magnanimity steadies the arrow but intellect aims the bow. The wrong culture, invisible to the untrained eye (so nobody knows how to discern it), gets confused with some inner malady. This external contamination poisons the body one interaction, institution, norm, and establishment at a time: how rare might true pathology then be when the oppressive circumstance of the wrong culture is removed!

12. Escape. “Of what account is a thinker who does not know how to escape from his own virtues occasionally! Surely a thinker should be more than ‘a moral being!’" [2] To escape from every virtue that surrounds him—that is certainly a transvaluation of all personal values. Who stands most in need of it? Someone who has for too long been subjected to the wrong culture.

13. Aptitude. Predetermined paths will convince you, quite injuriously, that your ability to perform according to their demands reflects some indelible aspect of your character. This is precisely what is convenient and necessary for the system, despite your true aptitude being that which is precipitated by intrinsic desire and interest. These civilizational constructs and examinations instead measure another aptitude closely related to the facade you wear in the everyday masquerade ball—civilization—where everything is “commonplace” and each cognitive movement gets subordinated to some preordained mechanical routine, of which you had no share in authoring. But nowhere is it taught that this is the case, and it is impossible to measure the former, so too many still conflate this outer aptitude with their true, inner ability, wherever it may lie! And moreover, anyone who inquires into his true, inner aptitude, “though the customs be both good as customs, and suitable to him… yet to conform to custom, merely as custom, does not educate or develop in him any of the qualities which are the distinctive endowment of a human being. The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used. The faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing merely because others do it, no more than by believing a thing only because others believe it” [1]. Civilizational constructs and examinations, meanwhile, are mere custom, and the door into civilization demands the subordination of perception, judgment, discriminative activity, mental activity, and even moral preference upon entrance. This grand injuriousness suppresses and denies emotion in the name of reason, but really at the expense of reason—it even teaches it too! Some courses must be reversed, some habits unlearned.

14. What matters. The ability to perform according to civilizational demands, for their sake in themselves, matters only to thoughtless and indoctrinated minds, those who cannot unveil the deeper subtext of every action or choice available to their “autonomous cognition.” Many in their philosophical youth read the scroll of progress and confuse themselves with the world’s author, proudly celebrating their chance to revise a word or two (if they are lucky!) off this great stroll—yet never the liberated spirits that follow the causality within and only APPEAR to be conforming to civilization’s demands, by virtue of moving hastily in any direction at all. These self-legislating beings immediately recognize one another by the voluminous clarity of their freedom and the weight of their words.

15. Words. Words indoctrinate too! The greatest of scientists have long known and acted upon this, even beneath their knowledge and intentions: trust primary process thinking, that primordial invention of resplendent imagery and imagination. In order to participate in language or civilization, one is convinced that he can be perfectly fit into either system, when in reality he is subject to “this quality of concepts by which they resemble the stones of a mosaic… on account of which perception always remains their asymptote” [7]. Remain faithful to the earth—that includes yourself—and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes—language itself is an otherworldly hope, as some approximation of reality necessitated by the governing law of the human race, serving the multiplicity above all so that it cannot unearth the true and complete nature of your inclinations, aspirations, experiences, and memories, quite “down below”—it even denigrates them.

16. The tethered sage. Too many great minds could still enjoy their vigor’s zenith by removing the safety-net shackles from their mind’s limbs! Yet the heteronomy of unconscious sensibilities always suggest otherwise—in fright of the consequences—and many a spirited intellect keep a limb or two connected to the civilizational edifice and its often arbitrary mandates, journeying upon little hills or tumultuous seas whose destination and effort are justified only by the thoughtlessness of the herd—a stupor that always lags behind the intentionality of progress. These fixed eyes live in a perpetual philosophical neoteny until an emancipating and unbinding event realizes the force of their zenith: that confident and proud demeanor the result of UNSHACKLING their limbs and hastening their pursuit—their yes, no, straight line, and, importantly, their goal.

17. Labor. Labor is an extension of civilization’s mandates and the mere accident of an age—therefore never a reflection of our unmovable inner core.

18. Actors. The rest are all actors—they follow the pre-written social script!

19. Obstacles at every step. Society tends to regard innovation and discovery as special-in-themselves, feats of human excellence, pursuits to be treasured, and rarities among men. Yet these are all illusions but the last, and the innovation and discovery we hold in such regard are but a symptom of something far more challenging: having surmounted the societal trenches, riddled with mimetic filth and artificial dictums, to pave an avenue of individuality and genuine inquiry. Today, solitude is an innovation itself! But who is willing to endure it, and when is this ever taught? “The most general defect in our methods of education and training: nobody learns, nobody teaches, nobody wishes, to endure solitude” [2]. From too young an age we are indoctrinated into society, a fate which exacerbates our congenital defect: the lack of historical sense.

20. The genius’s innovation. The first innovation of the genius is his solitude and extrication from mimetic structure, the bedrock on which any subsequent groundbreaking step—or misstep—rests. The elevation of Einstein, Shannon, or Nietzsche raises precisely that part of them which cannot be fit neatly into or interpreted within existing civilizational structures. For the latter rest on an imitative foundation that renders unintelligible any phenomena which cannot be neatly expressed in their “language,” and, most pernicious of all, they aim not towards universal truth but consider, merely, the reinforcement of affiliative ties—“untruth as a condition of life." We find persons of genius are… more individual than any other people—less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides [1]. Remain a “first cause,” cognitively—for this is a virtue among us thinkers—which entails a necessary departure from the civilizational cesspool of mimetic waste, but in doing so sacrifices the warmth of affiliation, where only the certainty in one’s cognitive development, his competence, can stave off the bitter cold that would otherwise freeze his soul.

21. The juxtaposition. Mimesis ushers a juxtaposition in which borrowed minds and lackluster characters are jubilant and self-assured, whereas greatness–always beyond—hibernates alone and doubtful. Some minds of intellect invert this madness and boast a manufactured conviction; we free spirits, nonetheless, pierce readily through their facade. The higher altitudes our intellects soar and the deeper our cognitions dig… the smaller we appear to those weaker wings who cannot fly, minds who cannot dissect. One can only praise so far as he understands. Language, furthermore, the host infected with mediocre values, creates a tool which, by virtue of its necessity in communication, even the genius finds in his possession from time to time, despite it carrying infected values that reinforce the mimetic order he seeks to abandon.

22. Temporary abnegation from group membership. Any form of community whatsoever impedes the notion of cognitive impartiality, one’s “autonomous cognition.” Therefore, when the need for affiliation, the inclination towards group membership (prescribed through a now obsolete evolutional mandate for sociability) takes hold of one’s causality in identification with a political party’s tenets, participation in an academic institution, or involvement in some customary activity, one is no longer a cause but an effect, so long as the libidinal ties at the foundation of the group membership remain entact. This “caused” cognition results from a retinue of unconscious sensibilities rather than the aluminum of pure reason alone. Whereas moral behavior must be done for the sake of conformity with maxims of the universal legislative form, emotionally precipitated behavior is contingent on a heteronomy of unconscious sensibilities, themselves amoral. Solitude, that temporary abnegation of group membership, then is a necessary pre-condition for cognitive impartiality, “which divines that in the contact of man and man—’in society’—it must be unavoidably impure. All society makes one somehow, somewhere, or sometime—’commonplace’” [5].

23. Opposition. It is all too common for an innovation to be unduly criticized by the very proponents of the system it innovates upon as a challenge to their authority and threat to their livelihood. It takes a truly remarkable head to praise beyond itself and surmount the many emotional barriers—jealousy, fear of the unknown, and the egoistic attachment that it “knows better”—standing in the way of such magnanimity. “If one wishes to praise at all, it is a delicate and at the same time a noble self-control, to praise only where one DOES NOT agree--otherwise in fact one would praise oneself, which is contrary to good taste” [5].

24. Wisdom. The wisest among us are not those that pay attention to what they are thinking, but those that ask why they are thinking it in the first place—perhaps, upon discovering why, negating the revealed premise and thereby inquiring into this imagined, counterfactual world and its immense veracity. This is precisely how one first STEPS OUTSIDE of himself.

25. Indoctrinated in “themselves.” To wear identity like clothing—or whenever circumstance demands it, to cognize as freely as a river flowing through time, only a passerby to each era or ideological system, including one’s own. It is at one time a virtuous disposition for one to consider, simultaneously in all of time, stepping OUTSIDE of himself: of venturing onto the land adjacent his river and extricating himself from his happenstance “identity” and traits. And it is nonetheless necessary for a truly autonomous cognition to recognize the forces which make possible its thought, and then invert, vary, or disarm them, from a higher faculty of reflective self-awareness that underscores the possibility of thinking as a “first cause.” One should therefore take caution not to be indoctrinated into himself—by which one conflates the “self” with an instantiated personality and its various socially acceptable, perhaps socially reinforced, traits.

26. Imagination and desire. There is often more truth in these imagined, counterfactual worlds conjured by the mind, if by truth we mean something which must be verified through experience, than aspects of concrete, instantiated life themselves—we should be wont to listen to the former.

27. Means to an end. Philosophers have forgotten that thinking is a means to an end (action), not the end-in-itself. Thinking intends to support action.

28. A first cause. To always remain a first cause, an autonomous cognition, which is to maintain a distance from every external, civilizational structure that undermines one’s own intuition. For life cannot be conceived without attributing to it this magic of “causing itself.” Though speculative reason may never suffice in its confirmation, the autonomous will was nonetheless postulated by Kant in regard to the possibility of the moral law, and today, in the wake left by the depth psychologists, it is indisputable that a full experience, as ebullient as all human emotion demands, requires stepping inside this causal duty, namely, in terms of cognition, where one should boast no antecedent, and their thoughts should self-legislate.

29. Enforced cognition. Cognition arising from natural, intrinsic means nourishes the mind, recruiting its utmost faculties and enhancing the character of its thinker. For something to come from the causality within, there is a vast sameness that shouts “this is me” in every breath, and any thoughts conceived singly will justify themselves at a later date—act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now [8]. A conformity to external demands, necessitated by participation in civilization and unconscious deference to its structures, attempts meanwhile to shape cognition itself—so does language—and this conformity explains nothing. Actions precipitated by the “first cause” are genuine and will explain themselves, for of one will—of one autonomous cognition—the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem in their hour [8].

30. Be careful what you extol! What gets revealed when we invest any form of cognitive energy into an object of thought at all? More than you would believe! Someone makes a judgment praising their own actions—do they not realize we extol what we stand most in need of, that cogitating something in the first place may be a sign we lack it? Because we regard our psyche as a singular phenomenon, rather than the dual and dueling dance between the conscious and unconscious, we conclude that we produce our thoughts, not that we are produced by them. We have the causality inverted! The very fact SOMETHING was raised to consciousness—this strangeness is immensely telling. Is the object of our thought not in some way related to that which we lack, seducing us to go seek it out? This strangeness is even more confirmed when we acknowledge and applaud these excitations in the face of peers. Anything highly regarded by others we never extol, for this would be boastful. Instead, when praising these images that rise to consciousness, we pass a secret message that the content of our thought may contain something we lack. Solve this puzzle as you may—and be careful what you extol!

31. Entrenched Interests. Would it not be incredibly degrading for a “wise” old man to submit to those younger legs that run faster than he can, acknowledging also that the head upon those legs knows better about where to run? Where else do the old derive their satisfaction besides this belief that they “know better.” Would it not be a sign of incredible weakness—or strength—for him to submit to this younger spirit?

32. The biggest flaw. “The biggest flaw of the youth,” the old will say, “is that they lack knowledge and the experience of life” and for this reason the old tear down the opinions of the young as founded on false premises. “The biggest flaw of the old,” the youth will say, “is how they maintain that the unique experience of their life will unfold in the same or a similar way over again—history occurred one way, and it is likely to move in the same or a similar direction again, or so I think!” To be young and old at the same time then!

33. Spoiled soil. You hear too often “this mentor believed in me, and it changed my life!” Why should we ever stand in need of such approbation in the first place? Is it not that in the course of conjoining ourselves with society, we nurture a self-perceptive parasite that feeds on precisely the opposite—the earthly in ourselves, quite down below—that spoils our natural and childlike soil?

34. On science and philosophers. The congenital defect of philosophers refers also to a lack of scientific sense. Countless discussions and thoughts would be resolved, transformed, or altogether abandoned had these “thinkers” ventured deeply enough into existing scientific paradigms to put their positions to the test. Yet one requires a map, patience, humility, literacy, and causal proclivities if he wishes to successfully navigate these mazes—so which of these do philosophers lack?

35. I am Nietzsche. A word with the academics, dilettantes, and unconscious falsifiers of reality who “identify” themselves as Nietzsche scholars—you study Nietzsche, a great philosopher, and may today or someday wish to bestow the same honor upon yourself, but he who is really of Nietzsche’s class will not be called by Nietzsche’s name and will instead be his own man, the founder of a sect. Therefore, you study Nietzsche, but I am Nietzsche. But for this reason I may never be him or wish to.

36. Convention. The very philosopher who BROKE with conventional structure, whose anti-mimetic character admitted the possibility of his positions—you call yourself a “scholar” of him, yet proceed down pre-determined civilizational paths and wave “commonplace” linguistic constructions to convey your thought? What! Are you so incapable of stepping outside of yourself and “your” circumstance?

37. Self-Reliance. Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique one. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare [9]— He who looks for a master in another may never be himself nor the one at whom he looks.

38. How Big? That granite of spiritual fate at the bottom of our souls, quite “down below,” do we underestimate or overestimate its size?

39. The illusion of self-actualization. Maslow, through an ingenious stroke, recognized this notion of “self-actualization,” but failed to note that this concept of finding one’s inner purpose, of achieving one’s full potential, owed its very existence to the unnatural demands and constraints society imposed on the individual. No such thing could exist in the natural state. Society, standing in the way of ego equilibration, was the only backdrop in which this deceitful notion could shine as a false light. What Maslow had REALLY discovered was some liberated state masquerading as enlightenment, and only in a serendipitous few that had successfully navigated a path to pursue natural desires within the oppressive maze of society, a system so demanding that propaganda made it invisible, disguising every aspect of existence the system required as apodeictic, so as not to bear scrutiny. Everywhere anyone is now taught to pursue self-actualization, it is through a tacit prescription to find a channel from which natural desire can flow within the gluttonous landscape of civilization; and, yet, who has been distrustful enough to realize this juxtaposition, and gregarious enough to descend from the prodigious hilltops of reason to spread this liberating omen to all? So still today everyone goes around prescribing: self-actualization, finding your inner purpose, experiencing a sense of meaning—! It was in you all along! Civilizational demands—the tyrannizing extrinsic cries demanding you work… more than this, what you work on—just repressed your inner nature. Despite liberty being a blessing, which as men they hold from nature, their parents have no right to strip them of it; so that as to establish slavery it was necessary to do violence to nature… [to] have gravely pronounced that the child of a slave comes a slave into the world, have in other words decided, that a man does not come a man into the world [6]—when we vivisect modern civilization what image do we find? Truths, deep as these, may only be discovered with a counterfactual distrust as harrowing as the abyss in which they lie, and I myself do not believe that anybody ever looked into the world with a distrust as deep as mine [4]. Meanwhile, the pessimistic and customary attitude decides in favor of custom, concluding “nothing can be done.” And this is precisely how, for generations over again, the oppression continued innumerable times more, beating man’s natural desires out of him one blow at a time, the complacent and decadent standing helplessly aside. A wretched degeneration, and our ancestors were all bystanders to it! The undiscovered self had been KNOCKED UNCONSCIOUS, locked away, and trapped beneath a mendacious retinue of civilizational propaganda: every interaction, beating it further to a pulp. Today, who knows of it? Man has for too long regarded his natural proclivities with an "evil eye," so that eventually they have become in his system affiliated to a bad conscience. A converse endeavor would be intrinsically feasible—but who is strong enough to attempt it? [3] That is, besides US PHILOSOPHICAL ONES.

40. It was all mere accident and nothing more! You tend to regard everything as you are today as that which had to occur, by some appeal to a granite of spiritual fate, of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined, chosen questions. Yet it was actually through the vicissitudes of circumstance that your character began to mold—not according to any fixed destination—and that character today could have taken innumerably many forms. You envisioned your identity as the result of a CHISELING away at a marble to reveal the sculpture of a figure that always lied within–! It was not! The only mandate was, at every step, you acted to equilibrate your needs, but it was never set in stone HOW. You let circumstance dictate your life, fell into habits out of false necessity, relationships out of convenience. Whenever you could have transgressed the accident of your existence you resigned to the spider web of habit. But you could have looked to something greater, you could have become something else entirely—the person that OUGHT to exist—not the one that formed by mere vicissitudes of fate. The identity you believe was fixed and so destined was all mere accident and nothing more! And still you, the free spirit, have the liberty to transvaluate all of your values as a rewriting of the legislation itself which assigns the worth of everything in your life—the free spirit to determine what ought to exist tomorrow! Can there be anything more liberating than this?

Chapter Three: Counterfactual Re-Orientation

41. A new dawn. The axioms of civilization were postulated in regard to the dilemma “why should civilization continue to exist today?” It has been earlier established that society should remain erect insofar as it guarantees our preservation and prosperity. The question we face hereafter is how far an opinion or judgment is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing [5], and it is thereby the degree to which a maxim preserves or propels the species that renders it any moral value. When in the course of human events, we are endowed with this capacity to genealogize the biological fabric from which our species has been woven, are we obligated to play a GUIDING HAND in our evolution, insofar as this further guarantees our preservation and prosperity?—namely, choosing from the stature of an “autonomous cognition” whether to partake in particular doctrines, volitional principles of actions, moral valuations, emotions, aspirations, and norms, thinking back to the signposts left by our predecessor… To have, or not to have, one's emotions, one's For and Against, according to choice; to lower oneself to them for hours; to SEAT oneself on them as upon horses, and often as upon asses:--for one must know how to make use of their stupidity as well as of their fire [5].

42. To have or not to have. The human being was once gifted with a multiplicity of needs—existential, sexual, affiliative, certainty, and competence—suited for survival in past environments, and cognition, among its other uses, became an instrument for their satisfaction. Today, our species finds itself under radically different conditions of existence, and we now suffer from a juxtaposition between our innate legislation and contemporary aims. The suffering of man from the disease called man… [3] this age-old strangeness has come to light in many a perplexing fashion. Yet our innate endowment of a trait or emotion is for us no justification of it—for evolution could very well have unfolded in a different manner. It is the moment of a faculty’s derivation, in the name of preservation and prosperity, that serves any logic of why it must remain today—and many inclinations like sociability, which once served the purpose of uniting the species against danger, bear little use in a society which has already quelled such threats.

43. The social need. Modern man’s cognitive autonomy is DOUBLY shattered!—by virtue of his social need, he continues to pursue friendship and group membership despite the species-preserving quality of this conduct having dissolved, as now demonstrated. Then, upon integration into a social group, his cognition is unconsciously infiltrated by group attitudes, disintegrating his autonomy a second time over, and precipitating his participation in activities of little intrinsic interest absent the collective valuation provided by the group. Society is presently engaged in an OVERABUNDANCE of these activities without any species-preserving quality, but whose participation staves off the despair that would otherwise result from abnegating these instinctual, yet vestigial, obligations at their motivation. The mimetic forces which might have earlier, in the youth of our species, cemented group membership in tribes, are largely obsolete in this post-industrial society where safety, food, and shelter are already luxuries afforded by the prosperity of advanced economies. This need for affiliation, a once-useful heuristic which compelled our ancestors towards group membership as the predominant condition for their satisfaction of existential needs, subsequently became a naturally-selected biological trait, as perhaps only those who sought groups enjoyed this strength in numbers that could stave off the threats of nature. Affiliative desire continued to find ways to express itself even as society advanced and the dependence of the individual on the group diminished. As this division of labor became more pronounced, the circumstances which were once associated with the satisfaction of social instincts, perhaps through hunting, the fortification of shelter, or the equilibration of water supply, became swept out from under man’s feet, yet the species—seeking a continued discharge of this innate gregariousness—paved avenues for these instinctual, yet now vestigial, obligations in the form of “places for congregation:” bars, taverns, sporting events, and the like. These places, regardless of their originally established purpose, became loci of social interaction where one could be embraced by the mystic unity of group membership, yet their vestigiality now prevails due to the lack of species-preserving quality which they offer. The hallmark of a philosophically neotenous mind, therefore, is its concern with activities of little species-preserving quality… for example: travel for its sake in itself—a maxim which infects by observation and imitation, without any enhancement of their one’s character, and as a reciprocal mimetic “duty” the result of one’s indoctrination into culture. Not one of these characters has stopped to ask himself why he engages in this conduct, other than that it coincides with his emotional volitions, faculties which, as has been hitherto established, are no justification alone. The wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet [8].

44. The philosopher’s trap. In the laborious but fruitful struggle, the great philosopher finds abnegation from group membership to be a condition for the possibility of an autonomous cognition, one which is unimpeded by mimetic influences, and amidst this prolonged renunciation of this social inclination, there appears to be a turning inwards of cognition, one of a metaphysical, truth-seeking nature that he can appreciate, one that concomitantly speaks now—he realizes, “perhaps this was the dungeon out of which every great philosophical illumination to date has surfaced,” namely, any discovery which can be said to “transcend”—yet nevertheless, in foregoing the mystic unity of the group, there is also an increased anxiety and irritability that begins to beleaguer his mind. In the absence of the group, man’s primordial aggression and guardedness gains ascendancy over him. To him, objects of experience are cognized foremost as threats. The suppression of the instinctual gratification introduces man to the problem of anxiety [10]—where a once-useful adaptation in nature now turns against him in society, its species-preserving quality having been lost. Here he finds dream and desire are manifestations of a similar interiority that authors our cognition, and for this innate function (or dysfunction), we are indebted to our biology. With the affiliative need left unequilibrated for such a duration, dreams, desires, and artistic inclination begin to use cognition as an instrument for this deeper, biological agenda, that of equilibrating the unmet need. How many a times had this instinct attempted to PERSUADE me in myriad ways in this or that direction, always the most convenient or habitual one, at that, towards objects of “desire.” Each time, only to find in this object, music, drama, friend, or place, that its emotional valence belonged only to an ephemeral nature, that the investment of cognitive energy in the object in reality HYPOTHESIZED its capacity to satisfy this unaddressed need, that, finally, the desire for the object-in-itself had been conflated with the desire for the equilibration of the need which this object represented! There are parts of us which are certainly unknowable to others—or is it merely in the absence of those who are legislated to understand? We intersubjective beings, in order to transcend these ontological traps, have to postulate the existence of other, purely imagined conspecifics to elevate our being, as is evident to us now. Nietzsche’s words are merely a reformulation of my own: I myself do not believe that anybody ever looked into the world with a distrust as deep as mine… and whosoever has experienced any of the consequences of such deep distrust, anything of the chills and the agonies of isolation to which such an unqualified difference of standpoint condemns him endowed with it, will also understand how often I must have sought relief and self-forgetfulness from any source—through any object of veneration or enmity, of scientific seriousness or wanton lightness; also why I, when I could not find what I was in need of, had to fashion it for myself, counterfeiting it or imagining it (and what poet or writer has ever done anything else, and what other purpose can all the art in the world possibly have?) That which I always stood most in need of in order to effect my cure and self-recovery was faith, faith enough not to be thus isolated, not to look at life from so singular a point of view—a magic apprehension (in eye and mind) of relationship and equality, a calm confidence in friendship, a blindness, free from suspicion and questioning, to two sidedness; a pleasure in externals, superficialities, the near, the accessible, in all things possessed of color, skin and seeming. Such "free spirits" do not really exist and never did exist. But I stood in need of them, as I have pointed out, in order that some good might be mixed with my evils (illness, loneliness…). They are some compensation for the lack of friends. [4]

References

1. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty.

2. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Dawn of Day: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality.

3. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Genealogy of Morals.

4. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human.

5. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil.

6. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality of Man.

7. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation.

8. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Self-Reliance.

9. Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan.

10. Freud, Sigmund. The Problem of Anxiety.