Sept 1 – The First Subjective Civilization and Evolution (re-edited)

I.

It should be emphasized that the Greeks, though probably not “the first” to experience the fall from the “Objective Collective,” were undoubtedly the first successful Subjective Civilization to mitigate that fall, which is to say, the first to prove themselves capable of enduring with, adapting to, and even making best use of the specific demands that self-consciousness imposes upon the mind, body, senses, and emotions of man “the individual”; the expression of which they sought to continually memorialize through literature, playwriting, architecture, scholarship, government, and art, all of which, perhaps because of the timeless accomplishments in each one of these fields, have successfully passed down to us in these latter times, despite the collapse of classical Greece and the ceaseless rile and roll of pitiless History that will ever seek to cover with innumerable sands that which she cannot outright obliterate through the hands of conquering peoples and more powerful gods.

II.

Such could also be said for our “First Subjective Man” as well, he who was most likely not the first “individual” to “perceive” his own isolating breach from the collective consensus – that “perception,” and by it, the autonomic expression of experience, brought upon him from the start – was the first successful Subjective individual who did not, amid the alienating horror of his own subjective awakening that witnessed the incomprehensible quieting of his gods, seek to regress back to the old, now impossible delusion of the collective continuity, our Man who instead boldly, naively, and with as much stupid courage as he could muster, strode forth into the existential unknown to bring forth from the creative void of limitless possibility a truth upon which he – and all those who would subjectively come after him – might stand and do likewise forever and for all.

III.

Man’s judgment of the times he cyclically finds himself will ultimately be dependent upon the specific physical, social, psychological, technological, and even “spiritual” conditions that predominate his cultural environment, those that will, quite naturally, influence his opinion of the past, and dictate his aspiration for the future by grounding his appraisal of the present according to the degree that he affirms his present “good,” or at least “the best” that history has thus far managed to actualize: man who is either falling – or “descending” – from the lofty heights of a mythological “Golden Age,” from the so-called Platonic Forms of the Objective and Universal Collective toward the degeneration of the Temporal and Specific, that sentiment which held sway over the West from, say, the late Roman empire to close of the Middle Ages, the contrary view which sees it their destiny to reach such heights again, presumably (to the man bewitched by this side of the delusion anyway) for the first and only time, the teleological structure of the latter opinion which will naturally be based on something akin to “the theory of evolution,” the notion that low proceeds to high by chance and happenstance, luck and good fortune, buffeted of course, by prudence, and conservation, reason, efficiency, none of which give evolution a transcendent goal or unifying purpose whatsoever, only a vague reassurance that the future will be better than the past because, paradoxically, it can’t get any worse than this (the “best” that life has thus far produced), the same as the past inversely said about the direction of their own fall: “things can only get better.”

Such hope in “the better” must all men be imprisoned in order to persist on the earth and to feel their sacrifices have some sort of constructive and life-redeeming power of objective purpose.