egoism / ironism / nihilism

I write my own philosophy from a sense of completion or more-or-less perfected self-knowledge. Of course this is audacious, laughable, taboo. I know. Believe it or not, I'm a pretty smooth in the real world. I don't drop this stuff on anyone but those who  might  get or forgive or hopefully relate to it. Anyway I generalize my spiritual history as "spirit" that evolved from agency, or mastery from the slavery of indirect and therefore unstable, unsatisfying pseudo-mastery (mastery-in-the-name-of or castration). Wearing the phallus is appealing to X as one's justification or badge. Being the phallus is eschewing such appeals, at least theoretically. Or more cynically we might say that being the phallus is wearing the self-referential phallus. Obviously practical life requires various credentials. But the "ego-ideal" or notion of virtue is that of Bloom's "strong poet."

Yes, this "one who is supposed to know" is at the center of my own philosophy/worldview/personality. The death of "the one who is supposed to know"  is  the leap from "agency" (embodiment) to "spirit." In my teens and 20s, I lived my own Phen. of Spirit, went through a series of epistemological-ethical positions. Since I was seduced utterly by the "knower" version of the hero myth, the epistemological  was  the ethical. Eventually this knowledge version of the hero myth appeared to me in its contigency --but only because I wanted to  know  the truth about knowledge. So the identification with truth-seeking-as-nobility was self-subverting. That's how I take Hegel. These positions collapse on their own terms. Indeed, a proud man won't accept criticism except in terms of his household gods, if even then. He has to suffer self-mutilation. His frustration with the contradictions in his myth of hero lead to the abandonment-replacement

>We might say that philosophy is God learning to own himself, overcoming the illusion-truth that he is outside himself. This is illusion-truth because he's only "really" God once he owns himself. But since he potentially owns himself, this alienation to be (potentially) overcome is an "illusion." The reader who intimately "gets" me knows that this is an obscenely arrogant statement. I am God. He is God. But there is also great humility in this statement, in that we allow one another to be God. We are grateful that are other kings out there among all the mere bishops with their tedious false humility. Death is God. You (we) have faith in death, in mortality. We have a dark faith in the nullity of all that accuses and imposes. "They" come to us with systems, millions of systems. They do not, however, offer to do our dying for us. They _cannot_ do our dying for us. To face this void (to believe in the void of death) is to perceive the fra

What we are talking about here is an _invisible_ _background._ The most important message is the medium itself. It is the authoritative _pose_ itself that tends to remain invisible and unthought. In our earnest questioning in the pursuit of the Truth-For-All, we forget to question this questioning itself. We have _assumed_ both the existence of this truth-for-all and the nobility of pursuing it. Our actions betray these implicit assumptions. This is the "first wrong move," which is only "wrong" in its blindness and according to its own implicit standards. The philosopher is, ideally, a skeptic or a critical mind. But as philosopher (or as an earnest metaphysician) he is constituted by an unchallenged belief --that his thinking is and ought to be universal. This is Spengler's "ethical socialism" as opposed to "confession." By _confession_ I mean the confession of faith _as_ faith or the presentation of one's beliefs in the context of

Here's Kojeve >In other words, the very being of this I will be becoming, and the universal form of this being will not be space, but time. Therefore, its continuation in existence will signify for this I: "not to be what it is (as static and given being, as natural being, as 'innate character') and to be (that is, to become) what it is not." Thus, this I will be its own product: it will be (in the future) what it has become by negation (in the present) of what it was (in the past), this negation being accomplished with a view to what it will become. In its very being this I is intentional becoming, deliberate evolution, conscious and voluntary progress; it is the act of transcending the given that is given to it and that it itself is. Spirit is the "I" that _knows_ _this_ _about_ _itself_. I am a "transcendence of the given" conscious of myself as such. But I was already a transcendence of the given before I became aware of this, and it

The "spirit of seriousness" possesses the objective man, the responsible man, the mature man. Our seemingly opposed friend, Mr. Infinite Jest, is not , however, anti-serious or seriously irresponsible. He's not seriously anti-serious. He may even remain more serious than he might like to think. It may be nothing but his seriousness in one sense that urges him to question "the spirit of seriousness." He is aware of it as a role . He knows the words. He can write them. He can include (create) a fierce critic of his ironism within its exposition. He does this to impishly exhibit the depths of this ironism. In his domination of mere words by mere words , he may even be a friend to the serious man. But the serious man is perhaps pained by the impotence of his words. For him they were and are decisive. The ironist throws him up against the finality of his final vocabulary. His holy words are dust in the ears of the ironist. A nothingness behind them is made visi