On the Affirmation and Negation of All Philosophical Systems.

On the Affirmation and Negation of All Philosophical Systems.

 

As an artist, I can see within my mind’s eye all alternatives at once, though some may not surface in consciousness, and I may choose to either side with my Directed Mind, in failure, or with my Non-directed Heart, in ecstasy and sanctity. Contradictions and inconsistencies are symptoms of growth, though the debater exploits them in his opponent, hints are the loudest of truths, though the aggressor takes the subtlety of one’s silence to be ignorance of the “clear facts” which in fact cease to be of import when they are brought from their mystifying shade.

 

In Heideggerian terms, things are revealed to us. The Artist and poet sees the best form as though it were a Platonic Form in one’s Mind, with no need to petition the senses. My attack upon empiricism was a rejection of the absurdity of sensory strain in the guise of a search for the best of all possible worlds, in actuality in the mere service of the empirical method. Yet my method of extracting the empirical splinter and extricating myself from the splintered rubble of a demolished empirical forest had relied too heavily upon the construction of a log cabin: Rationality.

 

Both my argument in defense of the Artist’s Insight (and in opposition to the Will to Ignorance) as well as the one that attacked Rationality are rowboats that have drifted downstream, out of reach. They are obsolete, yet I am not a hypocrite for having employed them in the quest of this shore. I sought Rationality as an ally to subdue Empiricism, and then I slayed Rationality itself. Yet I am not a traitor to Truth. All methods are mere vessels, and the abandonment of a system over time is not hypocrisy but Adventure, so long as what guides it is the fundamental childlike Spirit of Adventure and Wonder, by no means a mere Romantic naivete but a truly dramatic confrontation with the void, which would only be recognized by another solitary soul in quest of that Absurdity*.

 

*Possibly a quest made more dangerous, astonishing, and difficult to the intelligent minority by the endurance of apathy and the temptation to ignorance made unbearable in the midst of Authority.

 

Dm.A.A.