An excerpt from my book.

[djd...@yahoo.com]

The separation of sympathy and matrimony, which makes it possible to
say, 'free and blessed are these vain little girls,' hypostatizes the
historically achieved deduction of the rights of women from those of
man. This separation, even reduced to its due proportion, in
comparison to the more stupendous intervals between loves, completes
the disjecta membra of the critical philosophy in the classical Eros
of desires. Though rage befits a river, Tiber wait,' so goes Pedo
Albinovanus's Consolation to Livia, as Mars continues in his praise of
the simplicity of war, 'for country let the reason be revealed; what I
could give, I gave, a victory gained- the workman dies, the
workmanship remained.' Equally, the praise of womanly levity seems to
ease the anxiety that what is fleeting for Eros, the beautiful in its
multiplicity of objects, will be again reunited in the object of
Eros's daemonic infatuation. As the philosopher immerses himself in
the subject of his contemplations, and as he perceives this subject's
immanently antimomical character, he clings to the idea of something
beyond contradiction. The antithesis of thought to whatever is
heterogeneous to thought is reproduced in thought itself, as its
immanent contradiction. Reciprocal criticism of the universal and of
the particular; identifying acts of judgment whether the concept does
justice to the subject, and whether the particular fulfills its
concept, these constitute the medium of thinking about the nonidentity
of a particular concept. This unification of values, which is really
the process of identifying, within the quantitative antinomy of
thought reaches even to the qualitative contrast, in which as such it
does not exist in itself. The obtrectation of social, political, and
moral deductions in comparison with an infinite reason which echoes in
philosophy, a reason which, as infinite, is at the same time
undiscoverable by the ultimately finite subject, echoes in spite of
its critical justification the De Reformatione of Zerbolt, "Homo
quidam descendit de Ierusalem in Iercho." It is up philosophy to seek
out the unity such as exists between sympathy and matrimony,
friendship and allegiance precisely in their contrast: in their
political unity, viz. in marriage and in rights. Praxis, as the power
of a contemplation that is otherwise impotent, opposes in its being
carried out what is already given, by simultaneously expressing it.
The very capacity of praxis, which seals itself off from the realm of
dead ends in an antiquated socio-politics, does so merely by investing
itself to the unity of the given system; it does justice to the system
of contemporary politics precisely by a moment of counter-pressure
raised against the social pressures of an antiquated politics. The
power of praxis is limited and, therefor, measured by the continued
furrowings of the social and political system. Thereby, however, it is
also limited by the dynamics of the older politics. The outdated
categories of a poltical theory are not merely an idealogy which
imposes a limitation upon praxis; but at the same time they express
its nature, the truth about it, its hope or hopelessness, and in the
pressures created by those categories and in the counter-pressures
raised upon them on the part of praxis itself are precipitated those
in the remotest metaphysical experiences. Non omnes stertentes
dormiunt: all things in dream do not lie silent. [Henricus Bebelius]
My love for woman, as all of my loves - these are hopes; but what will
you see in them when you have not experienced lust and rubato in your
own heart? To turn women into streams - is that what you desire of me?
Oh, if you are as yet a timid little stream, you have better look for
your Alpheus first! My hands are an adulterer's hands, - too smoothly
do I caress for cranes. And even more irresistible are my hands for
all serpents and hermit crabs! My feet, they are a thief's feet-- upon
them I carry away lovers from lovers, that they may excuse the
adultery of my hands. My love, - that is a deep charlatanry. For my
love can pronounce the innocence of cranes and lambs, but the
innocence of serpents and lions, this innocence my love knows only to
call 'heartlessness.' My Eros, -- even thy Seraph's ear hath a craving
to hear wonders which everyone whose ear hath not been pierced with
awl hears always around him. Yet thou canst not bear it when a fly
desires to croon! Thy cherub's eye even desires to see miracles, as
the courage of a lamb, though thou couldst not bear it! What couldst
the courage of a lamb be for thee? but vanity. What couldst the
chastity of a beetle be for thee? but indigence. What couldst the
charity of a fig-tree be for thee? but exuberance, and a belly with
wine over-full. Foolish Eros! Cast but thy pure Phorkyad's eye into
the well of my love! How should the lutulence of that well thereby
blind you? Verily, shall my own Phorkyad's eye laugh back to you with
it's purity, for this is psuche pasa. Thy wormwood is too bitter a
food for the impure to be fellow-partakers of! Yet knowest thou
anything other than the courageous teeth of the impure; knowest thou
other than their Hope, awful Eros? and therefor is thy wisdom
emptiness and great vanity? Sweeter than thy wormwood is my Pride, the
only true source of wealth and of wisdom! and the sweetness wherewith
it is sweetened, that is Hope! To live--that is to bestrew, that is to
thrash corn stalk; to live- -that is to burn oneself and yet to dwell
in ashes, and freeze in time of winter seasons. Cypria damna fugas, si
sua tela fugis. [Odilo Schreger in Studiosus jovialis, seu auxilia ad
jocose & honeste discurrendum. P. 47.] Between 'I love' and 'I loved'
lie the whole spoil of the heroes of the ages of the world.-- 'per
sublimia cum feror, nec ullum do signu, reprimens in ore covem index
perspicua serenitatis, purum nuntio solis orbe caellum.' [Lauterbach
in Collegium Palthenianum Aenigmata] But which is given to truth? Art
arose in the course of liberation from terrible nature, yet through
art the utter subjugation of nature is impossible. Song, so to speak,
is Tereus' revenge. No eye is truly acquainted with beauty, without
being accompanied by the timber of indifference, and well-nigh
contempt for everything to which the beautiful object bears no
significance. And it is solely through infatuation, the unjust closure
of the eye vis-a-vis the antagonism raised by 'everything which
exists, that justice is done to what exists.' The eye which loses
itself in something which is beautiful, is one of the Phorkyad. 'It
rescues in the object something of the peacefulness of its day of
creation,' which in the antagonism raised upon it by the universal is
otherwise eclipsed in serendi modum partim casus, ut pleraque artes;
partim aves docuere. [Celestino in Innocentia Vindicata] However if
this prejudice is sublated by a consciousness of the universal imposed
extraneously, if the beautiful is harried, and weighed up in
appropriations, then the just view of the whole makes the universal
injustice, which lies in subrogation and currency, its own. Such
justice turns into the guarantor of Olympia upon Helena. Is not the
tendency of philosophy to raise certain common place notions, as
goodness or truth, above the practical into objects of unnecessary
conviction also evident in, for example, literary theory or religious
disputation? Verily, Linnaeus might dawn the name of Homer in Ceos.
Yet this, the raising of the commonplace into objects of unnecessary
conviction, -- this is precisely what ethics is not. Nothing is true
in ethics save the trifling. Sex is perpetually above Hymenaeus; just
as pain is perpetually above the moral. Aphrodite may bless all the
earth, only not the Beautiful; for Aphrodite is the same as Seilenos.
The nature of that to which we ascribe beauty, which may be
extrapolated only by recourse to the universal, to the daily and lived
experience in which it is presented to us, in all of its triviality,
in which antagonism is wrought towards it, plays the role which one
would like to ascribe to the continuity of feelings designated by the
word 'infatuation.' A Cleopatra with the soul of Isis lives and works
in the world. 'The foolishness of a youthful enthusiasm, by which a
beautiful girl is made inaccessible, is not based upon any inhibition
whatsoever, nor in too much coldness or in the cynicism of an overly
repressed warmth, but because a relationship already exists between
him and her, which excludes a new one, which excludes a relationship
which embraces universality as the very essence of her beauty. The
imminent awakening of the lover, Zariadres et Odatidis, [Ptolemaei
Eordaei, Aristobuli Cassandrensis et Charetis Mytilenaei reliquiae]
'is poised, like the wooden horse of the Greeks, in his Troy of
dreams. The admonition of dreams has always been mediated by word or
image, thus its greater strength has already ebbed away, the strength
with which it strikes us at the heart and compels us, 'though we
scarcely know how, to act in accord with it.' This moment is the
Geramantian plow, beneath which fate is to be turned. The greatest
consolation in human nature is therefore, paradoxically, the smallest
guarantee. What would righteousness be that was not measured by the
immeasurable terror at what it is? Atalante's peril is become a
wedding. To change a threatening future into a fulfilled now, - this
is the work of a bodily presence of mind, a Prometheus Vinctus and
labor omnia vicit, even as 'he to whom destiny speaks loudly has the
right to speak yet more loudly to destiny. ' What, in fact, is man
before his God? He is incapable of judging the nothingness from which
he was born towards the infinite in Nature. Sebastianus Corradus
speaks of this in terms of the poetic imagination of death "Nam de
jure civili caute, de totius orbis & coeli regionibus, ac gentium
moribus perite, de poetica divinitus, de philosophia sapienter, atque
de religione pie respondebat. Quod si quis eum ut de rebus historiam,
vel ad rhetoricam pertinentibus loqueretur, rogasset, id ille sic
libenter, sic humaniter, sic ornate, sic copiose saciebat, ut vere
Lydus, quod aiunt, in campum videretur esse provacatus." This 'Holy
Hypochondria,' this anxiety of the creation belongs however to a
fundamentally different world from the nothingness, from the mataiotes
which it apprehends. The question of whether it comprehends that which
it apprehends, cannot be regarded as a criterion of its value. Just as
a mother is seen to begin to live in the fullness of her life only
when the circle of her children, inspired by the feeling of her
proximity, closes round her, so is the nothingness of the creation
seen to be truly a concern for the living, only when the triumphs of
the anxiety which it incites are gathered in spite of it. "Nunct vibi
vera latent, scrutatus scrinia caecis e latebris vellit, quid verum
semper idemque semper erit in falsum: nec corpus corpore plures
tenditur in partes nec haren in maius harenam partibus excedit, nunc
pessum figit acumen grammatice cuivus & vocum circuit apta
foederamensus ubi gemium construction rectum transitione ligat, ficut
contraria recto obliquum ration sine transitione
maritat." [Archithrenius] When the God, that the saint receives and
suffers, liberates the mystic world from the world of Ideas, he then
again and again finds himself subjected to the ‘victorious powers of
life’ and falls prey to that strong worldliness, whenever he calls out
in search of his God 'non coerceri maximo, contineri tamen a minimo'.
One of the most powerful sources of this symbolism flows from myth: in
the superhuman type of the Redeemer, the hero represents mankind
through his work on the starry sky. The primal words of the Orphic
poem apply to him: it is his amalgmata -- his star-lit sky; his nyx,
the one that is as changeable as the moon; his destiny, ineluctable
like the seaward tethys. The saint is never abandoned by himself; he
may always elevate himself as far beyond himself as he wishes. He
alone may, upon the ladder of the law, fall upward as well as
downward. The latter is prevented by ataraxia, the flexible spirit,
the former by the weight that lies in the tranquil presence of mind.
The capacity for the Saint to remain moral, that is, subject to the
'victorious powers of life,' requires both strict inner discipline and
unscrupulous external action; in the words of Paulus Melissus, servata
in isto celibatu virginitas mihi tum perennis. This practice brought
to the world a Zaddik, a spiritual sovereignty matched in its
ambiguity only by that fierce aspiration of the 'will to power.' Such
a perfect conception of conduct on the part of the Zaddik awakens a
mood of mourning in the creature stripped of all naive impulses. And
it is precisely this mood which obtains to the paradoxical demand for
saintliness on the part of the Zaddik. The disillusioned insight of
the saint is just as a profound source of woe to him as it is for
others, due to the use of which he can make of it at any time, as it
is expressed in Gabriel Rollenhagius in the Musæo coelatorio Crispiani
Passæi, "Esse pius cupis hunc saltem adspice quisuit oli tu quod es,
et, quod eris, mox erit ipse, cinis." In this woe do we have the true
Posidonian pathetikai kineseis. This quite simply figurative
transformation of saintliness to the 'victorious powers of life' opens
the point of departure for the unlimited compromise with the world
which is characteristic of the Zaddik, his infinite mourning towards
his peoples, and his forsaking the devekut. However, inspiration is
probably the best tranquility and presence of mind for the saint, if
it is authentic, clear, and strong. It is the spirit's bridle and
spur. As poetic inspiration, ataraxia was a quieting force, akin to
the Socratic virtue of sophrosune. Hence, even prophetic dream, as the
hallmark of the inspired saint, is to be seen as descending from
astromantic slumber in the temple of the ages, and not as sacred or
even sublime inspiration. For all the wisdom of the saint is subject
to the amalgmata; it is secured by immersion in the nyx of creaturely
things, and it hears only of a destiny as ineluctable as the seaward
tethys, and nothing of the voice of revelation. -- Numinibus gentes
pulvinos sternere vanis sunt foliti, sed cur? ut bene forte cubent: en
se deplumant Aquilae, pennasque saggitis Arctous curbo detrahit ungue
LEO: his mollem PACI gaudent consternere lectum, candida sed perflant
lilia odore thorum. Hinc Asmodaei valeat procul ira nefandi, ne porro
thalami pignora turbet eris. [Triumphus Pacis Osnabruggensis Et
Noribergensis : Heroico carmine ut plurimum adumbratus by Johann
Ebermaier.] The saturnine nature is borne down into the depths of the
Earth and, for the saint, the wisdom of a certain Triptolemus is
preserved. For the saint the astromantic inspirations of mother Earth
dawn from the night of contemplation like John Scottus Eriugena's
tenebrosa substantia, as treasures from the very interior of the
earth; the lightning-flash of intuition is unknown to him. What is the
beautiful? Ut lyra Threiicio concessit carmina vati. [Operis
Kluepfeliani De vita et scriptis Conradi Celtis Protucii ] The
Thracian's promise of blindness. Though Grotius would attempt to
present the tragedy of Christian man in the Greek style, and show that
the Senecan tragedy is reducible to comedy in light of God's grace, it
is neither in humor nor tragedy that beauty can be grasped verbally.
Neither guilt nor innocence, neither nature nor the divine, can be
strictly differentiated for beauty. The tears of emotion, in which the
beautiful is veiled, are at the same time the genuine veil of beauty
itself. For emotion is precisely that transition in which the
semblance - the semblance of beauty as the semblance of akrasia - once
again dawns sweetest before its vanishing, cur fertur falso cythaerea
profundo quod sit amans semper sudore insperus amaro, .. haec rediens
caeso Melyboeus cornua ceruo aeternum posuit tolerandi infigne
laboris. [Pittorio in Pictorii Sacra Et Satyrica epigrammata] It is
not that emotion which delights in itself, but only that severe
emotion, that furore, in which the semblance of akrasia overcomes the
beautiful semblance and with it, finally, itself. That lamentation, so
full of tears: that is emotion. The mourning and pain of the
Saturnine, as the tears that are shed for the continual decline of all
life, form tired raptures; it is the life of the cicada, which,
without food or drink, sings until it dies: domici sed talia reddit
donci eterno maneat hoc carmine scriptu iam crucciam patulis.
[Hieronymus Vallibus in Jesuida] A questionable insight begins to
surface in virtues such as the capacity to vouchsafe and enjoy the
beautiful, even in what is most mundane; this insight is, namely, the
significance of what is nearest, what is inside and around us. Once,
in the akrasia of an effluent subjective plenitiude, emotional
indifference in relation to the choice of the beautiful object, as
well as the willpower to avulse meaning from the whole family of
experiences belonging to it, expressed the relation to the objective
world itself, a relation which confronted the subject
antagonistically, but with a certain kind of antagonism, namely, that
one responsible for introducing shame, in the primitive, the pseudo-
erotic and pre-christian guilt, and down to all of its fragments, as
it were, draping the beautiful with that veil necessary to distinguish
it from that merely daemonic infatuation with the body, or with the
object itself. In a phase when the subject relinquishes before the
alienated theosophy of things, its readiness to vouchsafe what is
everywhere beautiful, opens the way towards Theognis's ainos and
Aithon, a resignation of critical capacity as much as of the
interpretive imagination inseparable from such, that imagination in
which the transition of the semblance of beauty as the semblance of
akrasia is played out, through emotional concern, through a gaster, on
behalf of the beautiful object. The semblance of beauty and the
semblances of akrasia, these are the two poles of the the erotic
realm, and logos, through their illusory synthesis, generates the
erotic impulse in which the genuine synthesis, that of life, is
imitated. However, the speculation of this consciousness, which clings
to both the beautiful object and the resignation of the beautiful
under the universal, intimates nothing more than the alienation of a
natural morte as mythos. The Saturnine's unfaithfulness towards man is
matched by a fidelity for the continual decline of all life, in which
he is absorbed into those objects of his contemplative devotion. In
other words, all essential decisions in relation to man, by virtue of
the fact that they involve akrasia, can offend against the saturnine
fidelity: for these decisions are subject to the higher laws of
morality, sed Apolline verior heis sum et loquor ante rata restifica
ta fide. [Melodaesia: sive epulum Musaeum in quo praeter recens
apparatas, lautiores iterum apponuntur quamplurimae de fugitivis olim
Columbis Poeticis : et una eduntur ludi Juveniles Martinalia &
Bacchanalia : cum productione Gynaecei] Faith is only completely
appropriate to the relationship of the Zaddik to the world of nature.
The latter knows no higher law, and faith knows no object to which it
might belong more exclusively, that is to say without involving the
akratic self, then nature. Georgius Macropedius used to speak of the
irredeemability of things, that churlishness of nature, which in the
end allows a little worm to survive in the fruits of saints; " Caulae
gregum, pecudumque, stabula plean sunt, pascua laetisima, adeo ut
amplius nil postules. Nam tanta copia fructuum est, ut in horreis tuis
uel apothecis recondere nequeas." 1 This persistence which is
expressed in saturnine fidelity, is born of its intention towards
nature. This is how we should understand that recreance which is
attributed to the Zaddik, and this is how we should interpret that
completely isolated dialectical contrast, that 'faithfullness in
innocence,' which Giacomo Leopardi ascribes to saturnine nature, "It
is not good for the innocent to search into nature's secrets; and
random suffering cancels all such unripened knowledge." The saint's
infidelity reveals an unscrupulousness, which is in part a consciously
Pentheusian gesture, but also a dismal and melancholy submission to a
supposedly unfathomable order of baleful providentia, which assumes an
almost material character: in the words of Janus Dousa Filius's
Carmen, Tiresiam vatem privavit lumine Pallas, at mihi tu mentem omnem
eripuisti animi majus habes quanto, lux o mea, Pallade numen? Lumina
tu mentis, corporis illa rapit. The kingdom is indeed ultimately
property, in the sense of the drama of fate, and it is endowed with a
fate, to which the saint, as the augur of this fate, is the first,
through the involvement of akrasia, to submit. His unfaithfulness to
man is matched by a hopeless loyalty to the creaturely, and to the law
of its life. Aegidius Assisiensis too, in one of his golden aphorisms,
says "The eagle which flieth very high would not fly so high if it had
one of the beams of St. Peter's Church tied to each wing." O caecam
providentiam, o justas Heracliti lacrimas! [Conradus Mutianus Rufus in
Der Briefwechsel. P. 242.] Thus there is great wealth and much wisdom
in the fact that great shamefulness and much addling is there in hope:
Pride itself createth wings, and findeth out that obscurity with
fountain-divining powers! For Hope is the greatest cunning, cunning
that createth; for in every hope is there valediction and brass. It is
my favorite wickedness and art that my virtue cometh upon a crane's
wings, and my hopes hath learned not to betray themselves through the
children of my hopefulnesses, - loss and failure, shamefulness and
addling!If my virtue is even the virtue of a barren mother; if my
virtue toucheth my deepest shame and my most insolent beauty; if my
wickedness is a hopeful wickedness, at home in nests of beetles and
under the branches of fig-trees; - rather hath my pride taken these
children of my hopefullnesses under its wing, and cared after them;
nurtured and fed them even. Thrax erat, hic Thracum domitor - this is
my virtue. Ethos anthropou daimon- this is my virtue. Verily, even as
hope is the fame of thy pride, and even the wisest of thy men did not
unto me appear very wise, so hath I found men's pride to be much less
than the fame of it. Thus thou leapest repeatedly at hope, but beware
of flying! for prohibited to thee is flight unto hope, lest pride
discovereth the sourest grapes that hath not been tasted by man! and
the bitterest apples too! Internae propter facinora commissa. -- What
awful wisdom is this, my well-loved Horace?















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