Authenticity (re-edited)

I.

Loss of Faith

… the irrevocable mythologization of the literal – i.e. material, apparent – life, death and resurrection of a one Jesus of Nazareth…

II. 

Crisis of Faith

… the linguistic evolution from the “who is” God to the “what”…

III.

Authenticity

It takes no special skill or delicate instrument to recognize the fabricated flower as cloth, as a literal attempt to literally represent something literally as literal.

And if flowers that are here today and tossed into the fire tomorrow, how much more Man through whom the essence of the cosmos is intended to be expressed?

IV. 

“Authenticity” (cont.)

… the act of living not behind or opposed to the spirit of the times – nor in front – but willfully in and with…

V.

The initial symptoms of man’s atomization did not manifest because we asked the question “what is?” merely in passing, but because we asked it a second time, then a third, a fourth, fifth. It manifested because we couldn’t “understand” what was taught from the onset; because we didn’t really want to understand; because we had the luxury of not really needing to understand; the luxury to freely express tiredness and boredom, laziness and disrespect towards our teachers without fear of immediate reprisal; the luxury of having indulgent teachers who were themselves perhaps tired of perpetuating a false immediacy that has still not been fulfilled after so many generations of vacuous threat.

Once “allowed” to ask “the question” again and yet retain his own life, man couldn’t help not asking it over and over: more clarity, more thinking, more suspicion, more distance, more, more, more. 

VI.

Intellectual Clarity

… the expressed discontent (however subtle) with the wisdom of “what is past” and “handed down”; discontent with the continual deference to the sagacity of the ancestors and the collective prudence of the race; discontent with the perpetual submission to the communal, expected, assumed, dutiful, right, just, good; with the endless sacrifice of the conscious “I” to the unconscious “We”.

VII.

Flesh

… an organ whose primary function is to actualize the emotional relationship between itself, the earth and others…

Rene Descartes

VIII.

As far as our linguistic faculties allow us to project, there seems little spiritual possibility beyond the consummated atomization of man. 

According to the phenomenological principle animating man’s metaphysical thrust toward Individual Sovereignty – whose primary role is to disentangle, separate and relieve – those races first to realize the full consequences of this atomization will themselves begin to disintegrate, disentangle, fragment and dissolve as a people into ever smaller, more numerous, solitary, trivial, confined and specialized “units” – each increasingly differentiated and foreign to his neighbor who, in the not so distant past, bore a resemblance nearly indistinguishable from his own. 

As we can already now see, these “first races”, well on their way to complete disintegration, will in a few generations be fully replaced (or effectually diluted) by those who are less self-aware and more unconsciously-minded, peoples who have yet to fully perceive the alienating effects that modernity, and by it, technology, inevitably brings.  

To be sure, however, these “less mature” races, unable as they will likely be to articulate their own atomization, will nevertheless express its symptoms more rapidly than did the first races theirs. In turn, the generation after that will realize theirs a little sooner, and the next a little sooner and on and on with ever increasing velocity until every living soul comes to mouth his own indefatigable “I”, whether he can fathom such implications or not.

…

It is to be expected in the coming years no small acceleration of the intermingling of the races, the former seeking in the latter that lost sense of inarticulate virility that accompanies the immaterial purpose inherent in the quest for Individuation, primordial and fecund as it is.  

The product(s) of these unions, however, as mere consequences of man’s will to attach himself, in the first case, to some arc besides that of ever-spiraling nihilism and, in the other, to prior embodiments of power (the kind that the European once projected throughout the world), will unfortunately be stricken with even more nihilistic burdens than either one of their parents; offspring whose internal natures, in addition to having no longstanding people or culture “of their own” in and through whom to actualize their muddled existence, will be so constantly at war for “spiritual” dominance that they’ll have no other choice but to subordinate every metaphysical consideration beyond that which is needed for mere psychological survival to trifle concern. 

IX.

The Wedding at Cana, Paolo Veronese

To become a philosopher one must first make himself homeless, friendless, family-less, culture-less, even history-less, however so brief.

If he is to achieve his role as the ‘authentic embodiment of the truest type of his age’, which in our case demands he know Himself as the one true God of his own “uni”-verse, the would-be philosopher must remove himself entirely from “them” and “their” language, their lower emotions and lesser physicality and stymied aesthetic; friends and family who – despising their own unwillingness to change in light of someone who has – will stop at nothing to dim that luminosity to an intensity nearer their own by goading the hopeful Thinker with the sublime advantages of “home”; advantages that will keep him forever grounded, implicated, included, assumed, safe and buffeted by the high thick walls of sensual, financial, familial, historic and linguistic familiarity, those that ring to the tune of:

“Oh, you haven’t changed a bit.”

and

“I’ll always know the real you.”

and

“Still the same ol’ crazy .”

and

“What is it you’re doing now anyway?”

and

“You don’t, like, have a job?”

and

“How the hell’s that gonna make money?”

and

“Y’know, you should’ve never left in the first place. I told you – I told you this would happen when you .”

and

“Well, there’s still opportunity here if you want it. I can get you a job. You and me – together, like we always talked about. Only, you gotta work your ass off. All this other shit, its gotta go. You gotta produce, man, I got a reputation ’round here.”