Through the functional structures of a system’s means of information dissemination, the ethos of culture, its central beliefs, and the values therein active, all come forth and manifest through the language-games utilized, e.g., language paradigms of economic benefit, ideological advantage, religion, the pathos of humanism, and myriad of other manipulative game-theory-based tools. In this way, the answers deemed “right”, “good”, and “true”, are made as such for “everyone”—they are spoken categorically as universal answers, are imposed through both direct and indirect methods, and thereby act as mediums which instill the affective effects which further the macro-hermeneutic agenda of the dominant paradigm. Direct and overt methods for manifesting these “answers” often takes the form of outright conflict or war, while more diffused and insidious modes of cultural dissemination are more often the norm.26 Nonetheless, and regardless of how cultural and corporate hegemony is expanded, the results are typically the same: a kind of creeping malaise advances that, over time, inculcates and effectuates an entire culture’s thought paradigm. This activity eventually leads to its zenith in the idea that God, salvation, economic prosperity, and “right thinking” are all derivative results from being on a specific culture’s “side” of history.27 Too be sure, we are touching upon what will be developed below through an explication of nihilism. Suffice it to say, if merely placing newly transformed answers-as-truths sufficed as a sufficient bulwark against nihilism, there would be no issue; as we would merely continue evolving new valuatory juxtapositions, creating new false truths as today’s “answers”. These latest and greatest new truths would yield new beliefs, and the ever-recurring recontextualizations of the feel-good narcotic of self-deception that has been so liberally dispensed for the last 2500 years would advance unabated. When subsequent “new truths” fade in their power to manipulate or hold sway, we would merely create new answers-as-truths so as to provide a `new’ focus for belief. Newly postulated and codified “answers” would eternally come upon the scene and provide an ephemeral sense of satiety. Just as we have done for millennia, we could continue as we have always done, merely repeating the cycle of self-deception through the destruction and creation of falsities-as-truth, new value tablets to replace the worn-through and outdated, over and over, with each period adjusting to the specific contingencies of its time. Like a phoenix, we would continue the recurrence of the same, creating new “truth-sets” from the contingencies which spawn any new answer’s need.28 It is in this way that the eternal recurrence of the same (Nietzsche’s most abysmal thought) advances: Newly postulated and codified falsities as “answers” eternally come upon the scene, providing some sense of ephemeral and transient satiety. We have self-deceptively repeated the cycle over and over, destroying values and replacing answers that no longer serve a utility, with new answers that meet each new historical period’s necessity of demand. Like a phoenix, truth and answers have continually sprung up to pacify and mollify our need for surety and stasis. Clearly, this is how things have been done for millennia. The underlying rationale for such a meandering mode of comportment is: If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. The belief in a lie as truth is no less potent to effect `right action’ than any “real” truth; for, at bottom, what is the difference? And insofar as one cannot know what one does not know, there is no fault in this method of historicity. One concludes, together with Nietzsche, that man is a rope which spans between beast and Übermensch, being far more closely akin to beast, requiring falsity-as-truth and the nihilism therewith inherent.29 Heretofore, we have simply plodded along as we have done for millennia, either subsumed under the pacification of the answers created and spoon fed to us, or we approach an epoch’s answers with some sense of rebellious cynicism during periods within which an epoch’s answers near their overhaul; this via the creative transformation of the `old myths’ qua new more relevant “truths”. However today, with the explicit disclosure of the nihilistic breach and how our most highly held values invert into the morass now ubiquitous, we move headlong into a collective sense of transition. Hence, we enter the post-metaphysical Age. --FOOTNOTES-- 26. We often spread culture through the development of ideological imperatives which are based upon normative and deontological claims, utilize economic tools and mechanisms to further political and social agendas, or merely make a hit movie or sell a certain soft drink throughout the world, thus making the dominant culture ubiquitous. (Just watch a TV commercial or political campaign commercial.) 27. And thus Holy Wars of theo-economic impetus are born. This is something that has been with us since the dawn of recorded history, i.e., this is not something that advents with the Crusades or the notion of an Islamic Jihad. In essence, the providence of history and all the fortunes of destiny therein possible—all such metaphysical claims—are to be seen as products of being a certain way, believing in certain things, spending on specific products within a singular system of exchange, behaving in a like manner to that which is deemed “correct” and “proper” from the center, and thus from being included or admitted from the hinterlands of what resides outside and excluded from the dominant cultural paradigm. 28. Parenthetically, it should be noted, this so as to put an end to inane interpretations regarding Nietzsche’s declaration of the eternal return: an eternal recurrence of the same is precisely that: a recurrence of that which does NOT break from the underlying ground of that which comes before. It merely poses as a semblance or simulacrum of something `new’. To quote David Bowie: “Same old thing in brand new drag comes sweeping into view”. Hence, the abysmal nature of the eternal return’s revelation: that one is destined to relive the `same’ underlying falsity-as-truth eternally save some mode of getting through to a different hermeneutic set of historical premises. Hence, why the revelation of the `overman’ in Nietzsche is an “achievement” the likes of which has never before occurred. The realization of the eternal return merely signals the overt event of nihilism’s disclosure and how every door premised through appeal to previous foundations runs bankrupt. 29. Heidegger’s proclamation in Der Spegal concerning “a god” is here appropriate: “Philosophy will not be able to bring about a direct change of the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all merely human meditations and endeavors. Only a god can still save us. I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god”. ((c) 2011 Lyrics of Bell; (P) Metaunstable DCCosmos ArtifexAstrum)
Posted on: Sat, 17 Aug 2013 04:42:43 +0000
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