The Moral Instinct (re-edited)

I.

Morality or, better said, The Moral Instinct, is (in my estimation) the most palpable expression of the Will to Health perceived of man; Morality which above all seeks to limit, hold down and hew in life’s most exuberant and ecstatic accentuations, those which, in order to maintain the fleeting rarity which makes them at all exceptional and thus worthy of our highest and most passionate pursuit, must be buffeted, contrasted and their blazing ascent ruthlessly resisted by all possible psycho-emotional means so as to direct life’s greatest and loftiest actualizations through the narrowest, most necessary and essential bands whose choking constriction of ever-diminishing circumference ensures that, should any expression break through such an arduous and exhausting nay-saying carapace, that expression might be propelled far beyond anything hitherto conceived of and in the mind and spirit of man: beyond every god and even God himself who – if such an entity had the humbling power to acknowledge that which might possibly be Greater, Truer, Older and (more) Primordial – could only marvel at its unsurpassing beauty; the Will to Health which is, of course, not only the damning limits but also the audacious affirmation that, despite all a man might “believe” to the contrary, nevertheless still sears in him the pride and obstinacy to utter “what if?” — “what if?”

II.

The Will to Health is before, more decisive and thus “truer” than the so-called “Will to Power”; the latter which, because its expression has for millennia been continually reduced by the subject Man into innumerable symbols whose familiarity alone has rendered Power itself if not a caricature then at least a dead and hollow relic, specifically when compared to the luminosity of the former which, impossible as it is for “health” to be enduringly universalized, standardized, scientificated and otherwise objectified into expedient dogma and formulaic creed – insofar as its expression differs so widely from man to man – ensures that such a Will will never be reduced, never diminished, never symbolized nor fully delineated by man except through only the most abstract and oblique of terms which, far from limiting potentiality, continually opens new phenomenological frontiers whose impossible vastness will never fail to satisfy the subject’s inextinguishable longing and happy desire for more of it despite the ephemerality of health’s perpetual presence.

III.

The Will to Health is that which above all else provides the sensual, emotional, physical and mental justification by which the most dangerous and beautiful expressions of spirit may not only be launched upwards, but also find the needed respite from the downwards, lowly, negative and common.

Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still Upon Gibeon, John Martin

IV.

Any so-called “art” that does not concern itself first and foremost with the subject “Man” in all his beautiful contradictions (however tragic and impossible the expression) is not worthy to be counted as such.

V.

Christianity failed from the start through the blatant misrepresentation of its central theme and governing motif, that failure which doomed its every aesthetic potentiality to the same inevitable fate which afflicts every so-called “artist” and “work” that does not demonstrate the courage of conscience to recognize and actualize those Truths more honest, difficult and indeed lethal but also necessary to Life, the most primordial of which generationally demands the Son slay the eternal Father so as to assume his role as Man, not the Father who endlessly kills the Son which, whether Christianity desired it or not, is an affront and offense to the most cardinal reality of nature herself, nature who condemns every expression that does not conform to her unknowable will to inescapable temporality and eventual death without hope of resurrection.

VI.

The duty and function of the senses is to uniquely express themselves “as such”, which is to say, without hindrance of any concrete direction or predetermined purpose whatsoever; morality which here serves as the nay-saying constrictions that a man, in order to orient himself towards a certain goal, must voluntarily overlay each one of his faculties so that they might express themselves through the primordial struggle between the ecstatic impulses of the body and the devastating ruthlessness of the reasoning mind, each one that strives in ways unending to prove their own overriding necessity more cardinal than that of the other.

VII.

“Philosopher”, vulgarized as such a notion is at this point in history, is a terribly misleading term that hides the philosopher’s essential role in and to his people and age: that of trickster, usurper and overthrower of the established metaphysical order.

VIII.

Epochs of hierarchical integration, organization and standardization always require the suppression of the unique expression of the subject Man and a diminution of his beautiful potentiality.

Epochs of disintegration, on the other hand, first see in the wondrous bud of their springtime flower a resurrection of the admiration, love and fear of man and his limitless possibilities; admiration which of course cannot be sustained much beyond the generation that first inhaled the scent its sugary bud; disintegrating epochs which later accentuate themselves as expressions of exhaustion towards man and a disgust with the persistent overuse of his ideal, that disgust which silently but undeniably heralds with its every exacerbated sigh man’s moral holding down and lobbing off, his cutting down and dismembering to innumerable bit his every unique possibility which, paradoxically, supplies the only suitable atomized material with and by which the whole might be once again amalgamated, made coherent, sound and thus fit for greater collective purpose.

The Last Judgement, Stefan Lochner