After struggling for some time, she gave up and went back to shore, screaming for help. I had never done anything like it before, but some kind of daring feeling took hold of me, and I started running toward the sea as fast as I could. I felt so sure that I could save him that I felt no fear at all. Another guy joined me, and we both swam as fast as we could toward Charles, who had floated quite some distance away from shore.

As we approached, I could hear him attempting to scream. He had swallowed a lot of water already, but was still afloat. It was already difficult to keep him afloat. He was heavy with all the water he had swallowed, and after no more than five minutes of trying, the other guy gave up and swam back to shore.

So I was now alone, trying to keep Charles afloat, and I started to feel exponentially more tired. He was still making noises, but they were unintelligible. This man was almost unconscious. This is where I realized that I could not carry him much longer without getting too tired myself. The currents were pretty strong, and I realized that I had overestimated myself and put myself in mortal danger.

I dropped Charles in order to take a breath, and he immediately started to sink. I went down and pulled him back to the surface. I did this around four or five times until I dropped him without pulling him back up. I saw him sink like a rock, swallowed by the dark depths.

I felt impotent and screamed for help at the people watching me from the shore. All they could do was record it for Instagram. Around two minutes passed before the lifeguard got to where I was and helped me return to shore.

Once on shore, I saw the guy who had helped me. He was crying, and his friends were trying to console him. My best friend ran toward me, gave me a hug, and told me he thought I had drowned.

It was all extremely surreal. I felt dizzy, outside of time. Charles’s girlfriend approached me, and I had to tell her that we couldn’t save him. She didn’t understand, so I had to repeat myself and say, “Charles drowned.”

I couldn’t feel much. I couldn’t feel much empathy for her because I was absolutely dissociated, so we went away.

After some time, the authorities came and started looking for Charles’s body, which they found hours later near the shore.

Thinking is therefore incompatible with consuming, thinking is not reacting, but acting, as the expression goes, “exercising thought”. To think is similar to loving, it is a form of love, the love for sophia (philo-sophia). To think about thinking is a form of love and awe for the activity itself, and therefore a love and awe at the nature of the being called human, which we are, a being who contemplates beings.

The value of philosophy in an age concerned with nothing and distracted by everything is to learn to fall in love with life, the human life, and the world around us which is a magnificent world. To recover the reverence for life and the universe that we once had when we understood everything that existed as a creation of God.

And this reverence is recovered when we ask those simplest of questions, like, what is the human being? To be intimate with Being, and hold it closely, to not let time pass you by. To recover the feeling that things matter is to seek to know which are the things that matter.

Implicit in the word “Theory” is seeing (The root breaks down into theoros (spectator), which combines thea (a view, like in theater) and horan (to see), when we are not thinking we are not seeing, we might stubbornly refuse to see, this is the passive nature of consumption and idleness which never wants to confront or face the negative. Similarly, the prisoners in Plato's cave only see what is presented to them, and without any discernment accept it as fact, unless one takes on the effort to distinguish between the shadows of things and the things themselves, one remains a prisoner in the cave.

Seeing is not a matter of opinion (Doxa) since its concern is not the appearance of knowledge. If belief is held on the basis of assumptions then it's an opinion, if the belief is held on the basis of facts, or the actual seeing of the things talked about then its knowledge. Of course, the faithfulness of this correspondence is a contested issue, the perspectivist theory sustains that no knowledge of a thing is objective and that even logical judgements are at bottom approximations. But the issue here is not epistemological, it's an issue of the human soul, the being that thinks about beings.

What are we refusing when we refuse to think for ourselves? We refuse to see, most painfully we refuse to see the state we are in, the state of the world, the future, and the powers that be. We are also refusing to become “magicians” as Byul Chun Han said, that the philosopher is a kind of magician, that philosophy is magic. Because the philosopher uses words and dialogue in order to interpret reality, and therefore transforms the soul from a state of confusion to a sunlike golden state of clarity. Refusing to think for ourselves is to refuse to become ourselves, since to know ourselves and to be ourselves is the same thing.

I might sum it up by saying that the richness of thought is the richness of the unknown, that to think is to honestly and thoroughly say “I don't know” and be amazed at this fact. It's not just not knowing this or that fact, that is easy to recognize, but to understand that the most immediate thing is also the most obscure for you, that is, your own self, that is a major achievement in the pursuit of knowledge, and the promising realization that a hidden richness lies at the bottom of things.

Sapere Aude!

To be alone is the least lonely thing in the world. All other company has the character of the outside, of the different. It is only alone that one achieves a perfect inter pares, a perfect friendship. Solitude is a way of conquering independence, or rather, self-dependence. The more independent the spirit, the higher, mightier, and stronger it is. All company lowers one to the common language. The air is pure up here, and there is a lot of space for great thoughts, unconcerned.

II

Not wanting to speak, to say anything at all. The feeling that words contaminate the perfection of things.

III

Thoughts which, at bottom, have nothing to do with the appropriation of language. Ineffable thought, unconquerable thought, the regret of the excess of words, the regret of nonsense.

IV

The feeling of possessing a sublime inner wealth, God right there, waters of creation waiting to be discovered. The feeling of having betrayed oneself by muddying the water with so much nonsense.

V

Music speaks a purer language, the language of water that refuses to stand still. It is not thought but language which confuses things. When we stop thinking about things and start to think about the word more than the thing. Why do we do this? Vanity, perhaps.

VI

When it is silence that speaks, every word is perfect, and the whole sentence becomes a window into something pure.

VII

To see deeply into the essence of things, something we cannot do if we focus on words and not the things. Sight precedes reason; all sensation precedes reason. We first see and then make sense of what it is that we see. Observation is a condition for achieving a pure cognition of what is. Observation is, in a sense, something impersonal. We submerge our focus into the thing observed. We do not need to explain it away.

VIII

I am here, in the silence beneath the fog. There is very little of what we write from our innermost silence that is truly communicable to another. If he remains in the text, all he gets away with are vain superficialities, no matter how eloquently they are vomited out. Again, what I write is a window to myself.

IX

For someone to fully understand you, they will have to share similar experiences, similar approximations with words. No one is similar to another. The deeper one goes into oneself, the less opaque everything looks.

Only when the body is still and static does consciousness reign. When the body is in movement, it is better to move under the flow of unconsciousness.

Melancholy, the feeling that something holy has been wronged. And that something holy is yourself.

Do not underestimate the power of your insecurity to achieve great things. Great voids swallow greatly. Fill the hunger with beauty, it might not make you happy but it will make you shine.

Silence speaks the purest voice, the only true voice, the natural voice.

You are only a part of me, and I do not want my totality to be a victim of this singularity!.

An abyss opens as you acknowledge the infinite character of pain!. The more you care the more it hurts.

I often try to Think of lofty things. Hence why I have no money.

what is a desire? It’s something that kills you faster by making you feel alive.

I seek myself!

a magnificent tree carrying the wisdom of time,

the breeze caressing me like the soft hand of God.

At a distance someone plays the flute and the atmosphere is full of joy.

Everything washed by the gold of the sun.

Inside of me, a terrible jealousy, an abyss of hunger. Outside of me superfluous joy, song and dance slowly dissolving my hate.

An exposition of spirit, attempt at a coherent whole.

Part I — What Good Is Our Happiness?

Every day we engage in an active devaluation of time, experience and feeling by polluting our minds with an endless stream of passive, mindless entertainment. I belong to a generation that lives in silence, if we judge by external appearance. Internally, our lives lack true silence, leisure, solitude, and boredom. Un-interesting, superficial and un-interested in the manifold of experience, lives lacking in danger, absorbed by the comforts and seductions of modern life, numbed by technology. There is a sense that a lot of experience has been lost in screens. And a weakening of the spirit due to the pollution of algorithms and images. But it may be that because of this sense of emptiness and mindlessness that the opposite tendency can arise with antagónic force. A desire to unchain, to react and find your force, an ever growing will for freedom to live life at the fullest, to experience real, felt intensity. 

Let us look at our faces—are we not disfigured? We live in a two-dimensional world, perhaps we even think in two dimensions. Disfigurated animals, ugly in both appearance and substance, because of the weakening contracted in modern life, what good is our happiness?. The outer is flabby, fat, un athletic, the inner is un focused, depressed, anxious, worrisome, a pitiful sight. 

We do not have a free relationship with technology; we do not know how to exist without consuming. Like a kind of container for foreign content. We do not need to get along or learn to coexist with others, because we can easily escape into a world of endless stimulation, a flow of nothingness, of emptiness.

Do we not hate this emptiness? Would we not wish to be more than this contemptible poverty? Where is the original flow of our own voice and spirit? Do we know?

What we lack is not purpose, but essence. Spontaneity, and excess of inner content—these should be our virtues. Has the spirit ever before reached this level of impoverishment? Do we dare take that question seriously?

Let us look at our happiness—how much poverty there is in it. Likes, comments, praise, anything that barely amuses. A child has real happiness in imagination and dreaming; we are beggars.

And this detestable sensation produced by the screen, like a vacuum of attention, like a dementor.

Part II — All I Do

I have lived in a desert of vanity for a long time, ruled by what they say, by what my screen desires. What good is any of this?

Nothing anchors me to the world anymore. I used to have an anchor called lust and love, for a real woman who possessed my fantasies and imagination. An unsatisfied desire, a frustration. She had an intuitive wisdom… okay stop.

Now I am just thinking and wandering. I entertain myself with deep questions so that my wandering feels a bit more productive. But I don’t gather much other than wisdom. Oh, but how important, right? I don’t know—what worth is my wisdom?

It is just this sea, a sea of thoughts and small feelings. Contemptible happiness.

Knowledge for Knowledge’s Sake

I expand on concepts, clarify them, polish them, and integrate them all the time. I wonder about man and his nature, about desire, I wonder about thought itself and what a concept is, about myself, about virtues and vices, good and evil, and what it means to be beyond them, about spirit and what being is.

I wonder and look here and there; sometimes I open a new window with my questions. But it is just this—I am just looking around. Perhaps all I want to be is a great observer. A contemplative.

But there is a tragedy. I am young and full of energy, everything cannot be merely contemplation. What am I doing with all the vigor I still possess? Nothing, I remain a sailor in this sea of vanity.

Part III — Creativity and Coherence

Perhaps all I want is to paint the canvas of my personality with beautiful pictures of reality, to embellish and give some form to my consciousness. Something worth looking at.

Having said this I dared to think that perhaps I might even understand what the fundamental experience of being a woman is, and I know I’m sounding idiotic by speaking of woman, but most of my friends (including the male) are and have been woman.

I have complained about work, but I can spend all my free time in creative work, and live like this forever. To create great things, to think great thoughts, to harvest all the fruit and delight in my spirit for the rest of my life doesn’t seem like such a bad fate.

The attempt of creating coherent wholes, literary works. This sounds like a proper purpose.

I have learned the value of sleeping eight hours, of having a clean room, and the importance of time. But this lifestyle is not sustainable for someone like me; it’s just too depersonalized. I even started smoking weed again just so the day would not be as boring, but it gives me dissociation.

I have also realized something obvious: René Descartes was wrong, and thinking is not a substance. While at work, I am a productive and useful substance—I work, therefore I am—and thinking just gets in the way. Work forces me to think less, to be less creative.

don’t even have much energy left to feel the existential dread necessary to be authentic, according to Heidegger. In terms of human beings, labor makes one less human, but it has given me something I urgently needed: discipline. It has motivated me to get back into making music and writing, and it has increased my love for others and for beauty, because love and beauty are things lacking in labor.

And I am not the romantic picture of the peasant worker Heidegger jacked off to; I am better described by Marx, so it’s not like my job fulfills me or anything like that. I am an instrument of technological reason.

Anyway, there is no conclusion—I just wanted to get this off my chest. Please like and subscribe, so maybe one day I can become the “based aristocrat” Nietzsche talks about.

But I had taken this for granted, a dangerous perhaps. What if not? What if reading, and more specifically , reading abstract subjects like the soul, mind, existence, and other philosophical matters is an error. An error, in the sense of folly or stupidity?. But this is not possible, increased consciousness has to be, “a good in itself”. Quite pre-critical in the Kantian sense if I may say so myself. Quite, anti perspectival. It never occurred me to ask seriously the infamous “for what? just here. Increased awareness/ knowledge, but… for what?

but I thought this was noble!.

I thought that, it made me different

It made me, special

It gave me power

It made me more respected

It showed me, the truth

But have I ever examined these values themselves?

Here I lie, at the door of the abyss.

I argue that, in Nietzsche’s philosophy, the meaning of life is to become an existential artist, someone capable of reinterpreting existence through value creation. This kind of individual, who went through the stages of “purification” of the spirit—camel, lion, and child—and became innocent again, sees life as a divine game with unlimited possibilities. He is like a god because he creates out of himself. The existential artist took, or rather stole, the right to decide what is good and what is bad when he imposed his I-will over the you-shall (individual will over collective duty) , turning himself into what I call an existential legislator. The existential artist exists to express his power of creative potential by establishing a meaning and a purpose to existence. By the act of reinterpretation and revaluation, this artist engages in an act of creative self-transformation, productively channeling his power drive to give form and elevate himself together with the whole of existence. The meaning of life is inherent to the act of self-overcoming. Evaluation represents a triumph of the will, a new perspective, a new outlook on life; it is how we go beyond stagnation and rigidity. It is by overcoming ourselves through the imposition of form upon the Dionysian madness of the blind instincts and forces that we can create a meaning for existence.

In a sense, social media does connects us, but it does on the basis of the lowest possible forms of human experience and interactions. A hive mind is formed, we are all similar now, with similar thoughts and experiences (and possibly with less of both). Nietzsche says that there exits a natural tendency towards the ordinary, because those with common experiences are able to effectively communicate with the many and thus securing communication in cases of danger, but what is our most common experience today? and who are the successful communicators of those experiences?. Being understood nowadays might imply being the most mediocre human being possible (until now), the homo doom scroll.

Your mind is being used as an empty container of content, and you like this because it might feel like connection, you form part of the group that understands that “tralalelo tralala” is a very funny thing to say actually.

Misunderstanding each other is one of the greatest dangers for community and relationships, its highly inconvenient to be friends with someone who thinks different things with similar words. Thus also, one feels a breach broadens as a relationship becomes “distant“, it means that you and I no longer share a similar experience, that when I utter a word for you it sounds empty and vice versa. Added effort is now needed to understand each other, “we are simply going in different paths“. Or, when I am possessed by love or a “friend crush“ on you (both empowered by the imagination), and this erotic experience unites us, but eventually the infatuation dissipates, what is left? we are fundamentally different, Nature is funny like that. Or when we understand each other, our words signal similar experiences, but you don’t feel any erotic attraction to me and thus I get friend zoned, Nature and her unfair enchantments.

Thus for Nietzsche “Ideas” are “"more o less definite mental symbols for frequently returning and concurring sensations”. This raises questions about the possibility of understanding someone with fundamentally different experiences, it also explains the difficulty of understanding the customs and traditions of others, and human beings tend to ignore what they don’t understand as absurd, unimportant or false. We have thus a natural tendency to invalidate the experience of those different than us, because the effort of understanding is too great and possibly impossible in any deep sense. Of course there are shared experiences between all members of the human race such as pain, pleasure, cravings etc., simple animalistic instincts. But intersubjective bonds (in civilized cultures at least) are formed trough the understanding of more or less complex experiences (such as living in a colonized country and the meaning of this), what do we know about the experience of the average American living in Texas? what do we have in common with them? their language and thoughts are for us false and absurd and vice versa. This goes to show of the inherently prejudiced and “unfairness” inscribed in human nature, because we would naturally put in higher value what is easy to understand and familiar, we naturally think of whatever resonates with our experience as truth, thus its always our truth, but “"truth” has a positive valuation and this implies the negative valuation of the experience of the other (if differs) as untruth. The truth (in any deep sense) of the religious fundamentalist is false for the atheist and vice versa, even if they use the same words they express different experiences.

What if we express similar experiences with different words?

Music is always concrete and non vague, it describes, (articulates even) a precise experience; music is in this sense like science, like philosophy, like art. As philosophy and science, music reflects upon some phenomena or experience, mostly subjective (the more individualized the better), sometimes convectional, the point is that music articulates trough sounds the same phenomena philosophy does by words. The articulation of the most individual experience is the task of the artist/philosopher, which for me are the same thing.

Music can “affirm life”, better than philosophy (philosophy as science or objectivity), —because Taylor swift is closer to objectivity (even if polarized) than boards of Canada. —. Objectivity makes things boring and plain, in this sense vainilla ice cream is the most objective food ever, and philosophy (as science, universality or objectivity) wants to turn the world into an objective vainilla ice cream — English teachers, the very left leaning liberal kind (you know who I mean), they also want the world to be an objective (equalized) “vainilla ice cream”. Look, this probably makes not much sense, and that’s precisely the point.

Sounds are more direct than words, words are always a mediation, and its not metaphysical. The mediation of words lies in that they are always socially acquired, words never (at least directly) represent your individual experience.

Music affirms life because it can give an identity to the blurry, courage to the scared….. . . .. . oops. Anyways, the spirit is something of a different nature than the body, is a different matter, a different affair, everyone knows this, do you know this?.

At what moment does one stops listening to the sounds, and begins to understand what they mean, and what does this means?

How irritating, to like a song and don’t know what the song is about, feels like a dead end.

Exegesis

I think the key here is provided in the metaphor of childbirth and the “whole procedure of heredity,” the act of birth being analogous with consciousness in the following sense: Consciousness emerges out of the instinctual the same way the child emerges out of the whole procedure of heredity, totally chained by it. It’s not clear if this implies hard determinism, but it implies a radically reduced potency of consciousness in relation to the instinctual (direct hit on Kant and the Enlightenment); in fact, it collapses the distinction. Logic and truth judgments reduced to subjective value judgments for “the preservation of a certain type of life” is more erosion on the whole idea of objective truth, scientific truth, reality, reason—in particular, the view of reason as opposed to or lording over instincts; rather, the opposite is true. So, what is behind the philosopher’s “lines and fingers”? Instincts, values, desires, ultimately the desire for power, as their philosophy ultimately is their expression of their way of dominating spiritual reality, the reality of culture (think Hegel with absolute spirit and the idea that history ended with him). What is philosophy for?…

The Philosopher of the Future, as presented by Nietzsche in The Gay Science and further developed in Beyond Good and Evil: A Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, is a character central to Nietzsche’s mature period—the period of the transvaluation of all values. Philosophers had traditionally been seekers of truth, lovers of wisdom, scholars, ascetic saints, and justifiers of popular prejudices, like Schopenhauer, mainly driven by epistemological questions or by providing grounding for morality.

A Philosopher of the Future is instead a legislator, a ruler, a herald of life. His task is tied to the concept of the death of God and the problem of nihilism. Culture needs new values and thus requires those creators: the Philosophers of the Future. Their task is primarily cultural. Out of this inversion in values, the direction is shifted—they make the Overman possible. For this goal, for mankind to rise above itself, new values must be created, new conceptions of good and bad must emerge, and a new perspective must rule: the perspective of life and power.

From this perspective, our conventional morality must be examined. Is our morality a sign of ascending life? Nietzsche thinks not. Struggle instead of comfort, hierarchy instead of equality, war instead of peace, dominance and obedience—these, he suggests, are the principles of life. Our morality rejects the principle of struggle. It attempts to fix nature through reason and science. Christianity invented another world, denigrating this one. Together with the body, the flesh, the instincts, our drives, ambition, and egoism, these were turned into evil by the meek and the many.

To invert those values is the task of the great Philosopher of the Future. The reason modern values are nihilistic, Nietzsche argues, goes back to their attitude toward the principle of struggle. He thinks they are, at bottom, utilitarian. We could say they are regressive, decadent, focused on mere comfort and survival. It’s common to see life as something that merely survives—a great many over the exceptional few. What is at bottom? Perhaps a desire for safety, perhaps fear. The tired Homo sapiens projects his illusions beyond this life.

The spirit of gravity, Zarathustra’s devil, that force which pulls down, levels, and equalizes. Why is life worth living? Where have our values taken us? The Philosopher of the Future must be beyond good and evil to establish a new and greater good and a new and greater evil. The tension of the bow—individuals who affirm life by affirming their will to power, by rejoicing in their creativity, and by dominating a culture that ascends through fully embracing life. For the higher types legislate for those of the future. This is the meaning of aristocratic radicalism.

I think many will be incapable of understanding Nietzsche’s critique of the idea of free will for its seemingly contradictory nature—but I find it quite profound and strong.

Nietzsche’s proposition about free will goes like this:

“There is neither free nor unfree will—there is only strong and weak will.”

This seemingly paradoxical proposition is both an attack on necessity (cause and effect) and metaphysics, and a very brutal one—and at the core of it, it’s an attack on reason.

First: There is no free will.

This is a direct attack on the idea of a detached, eternal, and transcendental human subject, contained in a proposition that would likely be presented like this:

“The laws of necessity that reign over all of nature do not apply to the human will, for he is always free to make a choice—because man has a soul, an ego, a consciousness.”

The notion of man as something above nature is at the core of this ideal—therefore, it is also a humanist ideal and a Christian one. This is not knowledge, but intellectual intuition—faith.

Second: There is no unfree will.

Now, why is Nietzsche contradicting himself here? Didn’t he just say that there is no free will?

—No. This is perfectly clear and consistent if one goes a little further.

What Nietzsche means by “there is no unfree will” is that cause and effect is an artifice of reason—a very useful and descriptive one, but nevertheless, it is also a metaphysical proposition. This was already called into question by David Hume in the outlandish (but nevertheless valid) claim that one could never truly know if the sun would rise again tomorrow. Cause and effect is based only on induction—it is nothing we can, for certain, find in nature nor in ourselves.

Then what is left?

If free will is the illusion of the soul and the detached, fully conscious subject—and unfree will (determinism) also rests on metaphysical presuppositions of the materialist kind—what remains?

Will is power.

And our human will is also power—and power is neither an intellectual intuition nor a materialist metaphysics. Power, by itself, is nothing that could be reduced to anything that reason could ever understand—therefore, it escapes metaphysics (in this sense, at least).

Power need not follow causality nor any law of physics. Power, by itself, is unbounded. It knows no limit at all, knows no necessity—and it is always there, as something felt and undeniable.