In the previous entry of mine, I alluded to many, seemingly, far-reaching things. I, see myself, aligning the agreements of what is "best", and the "laws" it presupposes, equating it with what is considered to be "necessary", "calculable", or, as we know today, what is "human".
These various agreements and qualities may be known under one banner, or name, as it is worshipped today: "Necessity". Necessity carries with him his a house of being. Within this house-hold, he holds lady "Truth", who has no will of her own--it is given to her by the arrogance of men willing to know the law of the Lord. Together with lady Truth, Lord Necessity rules the lives of all of those men who know the laws of the Lord. Today, nobody who calls themselves human and only human (or should I say "All-Too-Human") is spared of this arrogance, this is how Necessity has become the law of man, and we no longer see men of law willing to challenge it, these are the dangerous men, they risk their own law and by that risk virtue. Without this house and marriage, life, as we know it, would be meaningless--or so they think; so they hope!
Here, I commit myself to the dangerous meanderings of the Russian Lev Shestov, a man we most certainly speak of seldomly. Shestov, in his journey of Athens and Jerusalem, asks exactly why philosophers, and the people they have raised to this day, are burdened with a need for agreement of all men with the Lord Necessity.
However, it is the thoughts of such a dangerous man, that it is this Necessity that we can do exactly without. Today, we know, that Necessity is everything restricted; constrained. It is where we meet with the "wall" I speak of in the first entry. Overcoming it, is impossible, or so they hope we, and all men after us, will believe! To state this otherwise: the human needs to believe that this is not possible or even if it is: it should not be conscionable It is said that only through discovering the embodiments of Necessity can we know at all, it is through this knowing that we come to know what is good. It is learning from the past that we know how to be good in the future. From this what is "best" is born. Without knowing and remembering there is no virtue, they will have us believe! So do not forget, unless you risk danger. In this way Truth, as Necessity demands her, is indispensable to Necessity. Without her, he holds no threat to man. In this way, he will ensure that he keeps her, and only he...
In this way, we find knowledge to be the only source of Truth and Truth to be the anchor of Necessity, and together they rule. However, the dangerous man may be tempted to question this Truth and question her right to Necessity, or maybe Necessity's right to her. Here, we find a paradoxical man, who is willing to let Truth play, to risk all that is virtuous and conscionable. A dangerous man indeed. Here, is a demonstration of a man like Lev Shestov, hell-bent on dishonouring the union between Necessity and Truth.
Life no argument.-- We have fixed up a world for ourselves in which we can live--assuming bodes, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content: without these articles of faith, nobody now would endure life. But that does not mean that they have been proved. Life is no argument; the conditions of life could include error. By Friedrich Nietzsche. From The Gay Science (1882): 121.
Is this what I mean when I say be dared? Is it this challenge, where truth describes the origin of life? Is it the audacity of playing with truth? This can be expressed further by another quote from the same dangerous man:
Sense of truth.-- I think well of all scepticism to which I may reply: "Let us try it." But I no longer want to hear anything of all those things and questions which do not permit experiments. This is the limit of my "sense of truth": for their courage has lost its rights. From The Gay Science: 129.
Truth bound with Necessity is the wall I have spoken of. But, it is not a wall simply, it is a wall that is approached by man. This wall, for the human, is, and must remain, unclimbed. Insurmountable. It is here that we meet the, perceived, inseparability of the eternal union between Truth and Necessity. It is here that we realise that it is not so without us. Even "God himself cannot exist without wise men", for Nietzsche, the famous Christian, Luther, knew this. However, Nietzsche, being the dangerous man that he is, there is a further truthfulness that Luther obscures here: "God can exist even less without unwise men". Is it us who makes the union of Truth and Necessity the wall which may not be climbed?
Why do we forget that life is not born out of Truth, but it is indeed the other way around. Only with life coursing through his veins does man assist Necessity to shackle Truth: naked forever, truth for her own sake; we say! Whether you call this nudity explanation or revelation--you know it leaves you naked too! It knows no bounds and will stop at nothing, not even life, to have its way. Why do we tolerate its tyrany? When will the desire to desire, the will to will become too much to bear. When will it overwhelm us and break our addiction to the laws of the Lord? when will we demand our Lord and not the one of our fathers?
This is indeed a good question Why these laws and not others? We are, here, offered an idea of truth which does not make her into a tyrant which weights heavy on the shoulder of man. Why do I name it the idea of a "dangerous man", what makes it dangerous? It threatens knowledge and the knowledge of virtue, that is why! If truth is not this tyrant, how will we know what she is at all? How, then, may we agree about what is necessary? Oh, how we clench to her image so! It is for her sake, or is it for ours? No, these waters are too dangerous: take us back to land where we can stand again! I do not think I will float with the fate of the world on my shoulders, this is unconscionable!
But, my friends, we have already set sail: do you not see? Why are you here? What brought you here?: In your hearts you know that in this, old, dominating, light--it is you, too, that is naked, not only lady Truth. What is this nudity? What is this fear of dangerous waters? Why do you scare yourself so?: It is because you look backward. This nudity is being stuck outside without any clothes to be had. It is being stuck, petrified in fear. You feed your consciousness with this looking-backward, beware, you yourself will become backwards. Stale and dead, like history; the past!
We, my friends, are living the legacy of philosophers, we carry the same burden that was carried by the great Socrates, which is: knowledge as virtue. Indeed, we have become strong, wealthy, dominant over the ages and now the free radicals are all-too recognisable in an ocean of only humanness. We have been taught to look back and never look away, the past will guide us we can see Necessity, our Lord, there. Do not look away, they warn! Do not forget it!
"Discourse daily about virtue" Plato has his master, Socrates, say. What is it that happens when we look anywhere other than backwards, to the past? When we venture outside of what we know, why must we always come back to the virtue that we already know? This is what the dangerous man asks, when he looks at himself and his future, he wonders out-loud: is it not, perhaps, best to forget of the past and make a future which is new?
We fear this man. He will take away our shepherd--our Lord Necessity, who will we follow? Why do we want new! Given this threat to the herd, it is this questioning of our Lord, of our virtues, that must be forbidden, must be evil. Now, we know why these men are dangerous: they are targets for execution! Stay clear if you wish to stay here! And although these men allow us our lady Truth, they cannot stifle their laughter at our utterly stifled existence. "They can't even float: that is how burdensome these 'men' are".
Plato, our ancestor, said "Not even the gods fight against Necessity" but he also said that "It is necessary to challenge everything". This is why the dangerous men even bother to speak to us, they know our suffering and they also know the end of it, the end of man. We find our the origins of our existence in the same place as we find the source of its destruction, Truth provides the conditions for its own destruction, this is her grace. She will not die ugly, like our Lord Necessity, she knows too much. This is what we see when we see Nietzsche stumble upon the idea that it may be true that the conditions of life contain errors, untruths. This is a higher truth than all others yet! But, indeed, a dangerous one which should not be fed with resistance; just as with life, it is through starvation that danger cannot grow the environment it flourishes in.
My friends, we are petrified. We resist everything like stone, we have become hard to penetrate, to move. As long as we enslave truth to necessity, as long as we hold them in their dead house we take this prison to be the only source of our own home, our being. We may be in even more danger than these dangerous men! We have no choice, "volition" to use a dangerous man's words, why do we give it away because we fear that we cannot overcome the wall, or float in the sea! We choose to fear let us not deny it! If Lord Necessity leads us to death, and life provides us this desire, then is it true that we may only have death? We may have life, if we do not give it unto death! But, if we choose death, let us do it with grace as Lady Truth does! She may be bitter but she does not die ugly. Let us not be fools like Lord Necessity, a stubborn, unfeeling tyrant!
We have turned our future into the past, and therefore are always looking back. The imagery of the fear-stricken mortal who runs from the Medusa, forgets how to escape her petrification: don't look back--you fool! Now, because of the morality of fools, we are all petrified and the laws dictate that you only look back on pain of getting lost! But, how good is home when it makes you into stone? Do you not want to move those calcified joints? Stir the evaporated steam? Drive the fire again which once led into this petrified ash. This is what it means to be human in our world: to stay human and only human! Come, you are already here friend, let us carry on sailing and see where we find ourselves. This is the prospects offered by Nietzsche's Zarathustra in the form of a "new nobility" and thus a new Lord, maybe one which is not tyrannical--for now, to us, and hopefully not for our children!...:
O my brothers, I direct and consecrate you to a new nobility: you shall become begetters and cultivators and sowers of the future - truly, not to a nobility that you could buy like shopkeepers with shopkeepers' gold: for all that has a price is of little value. Let where you are going, not where you come from, henceforth be your honour! You will and your foot that desires to step out beyond you - let them be your new honour![...] O my brothers, your nobility shall not gaze backward, but outward! You shall be fugitives from all fatherlands and fore-fatherlands. You shall love your children's land: let this love be your new nobility - the undiscovered land in the furthest sea! I bid your sails seek it and seek it! You shall make amends to your children for being the children of your fathers: thus you shall redeem all that is past! This new law-table do I put over you. From Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Of Old and New Law-Tables: 12.
Here, we find the dangerous man in the light, for a moment, as he emerges from a slither of the underworld. He once knew his nudity in-front of his fathers, the Lord. Like us, he clenches the shame of the past to his heart, but now he wills to forget it! He has come out of the dark to tell us it is possible...to forget. It may not be conscionable, that is our will and he cannot change that, but he wishes to discourage us from mistaking our will, our fathers gift, as the only one. He wants his own children and to be his own father: this is why he is dangerous! He threatens everything we believe in and on-top of this he dismisses our Truth as lie--simply because he cannot tolerate it. Is his problem, our problem? Why does he dare question the authority of our Lord?
There is a pause as the dust settles from the impatient stomp of our Lord's soldiers. The dangerous man waits and looks you in the eyes with earnest carelessness, he asks: "Why else are we here if we are not here to dare?..." We respond incredulously: "Dare to what? You mad fool!" To exist in our own right, is there any bigger risk of meaninglessness? Of being disagreed with? To be our own fools and not the same fools as our fathers? I do not think we fear anything higher than this and with good reason. It is unconscionable. Without Necessity, there is no fear.
But, this does not mean it is not possible. The realisation of this mere possibility is what it means to dare. It is to take a step outside of your father's house and a step towards home. Is it worth it?: it is worth all virtue, to be sure, says the new Lord.
Come, my friends, I beckon you to start a new home with me, one where we may mourn the loss of our fathers and honour their memory by building something new, as they did, something to lose; forget--all over again. Do you dare to carry on with life? This is what it means to dare. And why, again, do we love our fathers? Is it not their will to dare, to live with life instead of living with the burden of life? Well, then, how do we love ourselves if we are willing to deprive ourselves of this creation of law? Let us love and be loved, then!
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