1.15.22

Judgment

I.

In the internal law court of the individual man, “judgment” – which in the individual will mirror both in form and substance the verdicts that our own temporal magistrates decree in our worldly law courts – is synonymous with “belief”. For, man’s internal law court resides in and also animates the machinations of his Reason. As such, Reason’s “judgments”, which result from Reason’s power of synthesis, have no bearing whatsoever in the domain of Faith, for there: “Judgment (and also “reason”) is the Lord’s”. By this, one could also say that in Faith, “belief is the Lord’s”, which is to say “the Spirit’s”; the Spirit who, according to God’s unknowable Will, is both the originator and the originated-upon within the domain of Faith. If this circuitous relationship that the Spirit of God has with Himself was not so, He would not be God.

II.

I am convinced, not by Reason nor by the pristine clarity of my rational mind but the obscure irrationalities of Faith, that my work – neglected, forgotten, hidden, ignored, moss-grown, ridiculed, and presently inconsequential as it is – will nevertheless stand for a thousand years, never mind how indifferent I may presently feel toward it. Of this, despite all the current evidence to the contrary, I have no doubt whatsoever. For “mine” is the work of God, to whom all praise must be directed lest I fall into irredeemable disingenuity. Indeed, every thinker who might come after me and follow my family of thoughts will be forced to deal with me and my God, by either passing through me or leaping beyond me, the same as I have dealt with and continue to deal with Nietzsche who also must be confronted if one so endeavors to engage with the moral trajectory of the Western Spirit, which is to say, Western Thought “as such”, both of which culminate in nihilism. For my nihilism is the only sufficient response to Nietzsche’s nihilism – similar as the two may seem upon first glance; his which also cannot be ignored or neglected; and mine which is the transatlantic response to the tyrannical rule of the “continent” and of Western European mentality in general, parochial as Europeans so often are, those who seem forever beholden to the linguistic entrainment of whatever menial plot of land upon which one was born; my birthright which is, of course, “American” through and through: audacious, naïve, foolhardy, stubborn, rebellious, big-minded, open, obstinate, boundary-less, relentless, and optimistic as the spirit of America and expansive her plains, and daunting her ranges, austere her deserts and impenetrable her forests, her fecundity without end, her tributaries without slack, her wealth without depth, her hope the whole hope of every man everywhere and for all time. Indeed, so megalomaniacal is this self-assessment of not only this work but of all the work I have hitherto wrought and will hereafter write that I am finding it impossibly difficult to even hold onto this idea long enough to complete this very sentence with even a shred of integrity or coherency…

III.

What is “real” and therefore “true” in the domain of Reason are those insights which are accompanied and often preceded by the most intense feelings of power, sensuality, and intellectual superiority that any one body is capable of producing. “Truths” that might originate within the domain of Faith, on the other hand, are most often relegated to a lesser status than those which might be otherwise apprehended within the domain of Reason, paradoxical and therefore incomprehensible as Truths so often are. In “reality”, most of the Faith-derived insights had in Reason are not even relegated to a lesser status but are, in fact, outright rejected by the reasoning capacities of man.

IV.

He who can feel more powerfully and ruthlessly than others will be, in a certain sense, as gods to lesser bodies who cannot feel and thus intuit as powerfully; “the genius” being he who, on the one hand, feels more powerfully than any of his supposed peers and, on the other, can yet coherently and consistently translate those feelings into an evolving work of art in a way that causes others to feel similarly but, of course, to a lesser and more subordinate extent.

V.

In order to exercise or else be properly overtaken by the feelings of superiority associated with the Will to Power in a decadent age so that one might, alas, begin to “revalue all values”, one must willingly endure physical and emotional hardships of diverse kinds, and of varying levels of intensity, and across varying lengths of time. For, how could one expect to rise above the hedonistic malaise which afflicts the vast majority of modern humanity, malaise which anesthetizes and thus prevents hedonists from pursuing certain ambitious goals which unequivocally require effort, consistency, confusion, and discomfort if one simply allows oneself to indulge in the same sort of endless pleasure-seeking as the rest?

This we all know but so few put into practice because, to the degree that one is dominated by Reason which does indeed intuit its own intrinsic purposelessness beyond the mere attainment of more powerful and decisive feelings (those with are associated with “The Will to Power”), one will have no other choice but to temporarily reject such pleasurable feelings in favor of displeasure, unease, confusion, and indeterminacy, all of which can be roughly said to, if not originate from then at least be a certain emotional vehicle for a domain contrary to that of Reason; Reason which above all seeks the safety of the known and the knowable.

Asceticism then, and self-denial more broadly, as vehicles, can be roughly considered values in and of themselves or else “practices” that have their origin in the unknowable domain of Faith.

If one, therefore, desires “power” and, moreover, to be overtaken by the superior feelings and the associated insights that might accompany the so-called “Will to Power” which, as alluded above, is the hidden, arbitrary goal or at least terminus of every act or thought conceived in the domain of Reason, then one must resort to the so-called “values” that embody the “domain” of Faith (should such a domain have any “values” to begin with); those, in short, being the denial of the self, the senses, mind, and body, denial which alone builds so-called “spiritual power” but also spiritual pride unless such actions are initiated, directed, and consummated with, in, and by the will of the Spirit of God whose boundlessness and eternal qualities are the domain of Faith in its entirety.