The Great Cycle of Ages (re-edited)

I.

The so-called “philosopher” who appropriates or defers in an ultimate way to the language and modality of science immediately forfeits his credibility and authority as such.

II.

To reiterate, the man who aspires to “true” or, in this case, “indeterminate” greatness, that which he himself is required to define through his own deeds for his own time, must maintain as his governing eschatological image the unremitting yawn of Nothingness.

For eternal and unavoidable Nihilism, horrifying, debilitating and emotionally formidable as such a notion undoubtedly is, is the most potent existential obstacle available to man that has the power to develop in him the strength and resiliency of character needed to accomplish whatever difficult task may lay before him, if, alas, he is able to perennially overcome the realization of his own futility that such an obstacle everywhere awakens him to.

III.

The commencement of a decadent and therefore disintegrating age is always marked by a nagging doubt and an irrecoverable skepticism expressed by the “best and brightest” minds of a culture towards their fathers’ Gods and highest values; skepticism that sets into motion certain unalterable forces whose essential purpose is to break apart and sweep away all those prior and, as it were, “outdated” understandings of absolute divinity in order to make way for new “understandings” which, in time, naturally begin to mimic and ultimately embody the essential functions and expressions of the old God that the so-called “new” was intended to abolish and radically replace; this process which always begins in Sophistic rhetoric before moving onto cultic devotion and then general expansion before at last the widespread embrace by the great bulk of the culture at large, the latter stage which, after countless generations of clarifying, qualifying and entrenching its essential position, begins itself to grow stagnant, stale and eventually diseased, requiring, of course, the purification and renewal of that aforementioned erosion, breaking-up and flushing-out so that yet another iteration may come to the fore.

Snowstorm, Steamboat Off a Harbors Mouth, J M W Turner

So consistent is this process, so undeniable its unfoldment from people to people and age to age that one might well say that its perception by a people’s most sensitive thinkers is the very cause which not only brings forth the dominion of nihilism in the heart of a generation, but the cultural surrender to the hopelessness of life’s vain and interminable pointlessness wherever found; this Great Cycle of Ages which, slaying to the uttermost the metaphysical efficacy of a linear, monolithic and progressive direction of man, is the truest and most enduring manifestation of consciousness “as such”, that which, as the very phenomenon that awakens life to an awareness of itself, is similarly roused to the knowledge of its own inevitable end and unassailable futility.

IV.

The sole glory of the thinker of a decadent, disintegrating age is that he can perceive with clearest eyes the intricate mechanizations of this aforementioned Cycle where his less elevated predecessors necessarily could not, enabling him above all his wisdom-loving brethren a more prescient and therefore “everlasting” vision of the essence of life.

V.

Greatness of mind is best exemplified by the contrast between a Thinker’s loftiness of thought and the bestial sentimentality that epitomizes his surrounding culture, the discrepancy of which, incubating the thinker by isolating his thought and work to the subjective degree that it certainly does, ensures that he will seldom, if ever, be enduringly relieved of the anxious foreboding that leads him to wonder if his isolation is indeed driving him utterly mad; Madness which, irreplaceable with regards to the actualization of truth – providing as it does the resistance against which a man might move and thus become strong – indicates more than anything that the Thinker is embarking upon hitherto untrodden trails of aesthetic wilderness and epistemological potentiality.

VI.

Philosophical ages and metaphysically-receptive peoples are the unintended gifts of the lonely Thinker of Decadence to posterity, his sword which alone held out against the deluge of commonality and unexceptional goodness that always plagues degenerate and sense-mad ages; sensuality that principally devolves men into sentimental creatures: that greatest and most egregious affront to nature that man – as life’s fullest and finest essence – is capable of offending.

VII.

Ultimate freedom is: denying not the irredeemable truth of one’s own badness, but the undying need for a tonic, potion or atoning sacrifice to rectify such.

The Harrowing of Hell, Follower of Hieronymus Bosch