/lit/ - Literature

So this guy thinks becoming an NPC in this life and the next is peak existence? What's the appeal in that?

>>14394192
Metaphysic affirms the fundamental identity of knowing and being, which can only be questioned by those who are ignorant of the most elementary metaphysical principles ; and since this identity is essentially implied in the very nature of intellectual intuition, it not merely affirms it but realizes it as well. This is true at least of integral metaphysic ; but it must be added that such metaphysic as there has been in the West seems always to have remained incomplete in this respect. Nevertheless, Aristotle clearly laid down the principle of identification by knowledge, when he expressly declared that “ the soul is all that it knows .” But neither he himself nor his successors ever seem to have given this affirmation its full significance, or to have extracted all the consequences implied in it, so that for them it has remained something purely theoretical. Certainly this is better than nothing, but it is nevertheless very inadequate, and thus Western metaphysic appears to have been doubly incomplete : it is already so theoretically, as previously explained, in that it does not proceed beyond Being ; on the other hand it only considers things, to the extent that it does consider them, in a purely theoretical light. Theory is regarded as if it were in some way self-sufficient, an end in itself, whereas it should normally be looked upon as nothing more than a preparation, indispensable as such we admit, leading to a corresponding realization.

This step was pragmatism, to which we have just referred; here we are no longer even in the merely human domain as with rationalism, for the appeal to the ‘subconscious’, which marks the complete reversal of the normal hierarchy, brings us down in fact to the infra-human. This, in its main outlines, is the course that ‘profane’ philosophy, left to itself and claiming to limit all knowledge to its own horizon, was bound to tread, and has indeed trodden: as long as there existed a higher knowledge, nothing of this sort could happen, for philosophy was bound at least to respect that of which it was ignorant, but whose existence it could not deny; but when this higher knowledge had disappeared, its negation, already a fact, was soon erected into a theory, and it is from this that all modern philosophy has sprung.

But we have dwelt long enough on philosophy, to which it would be wrong to attribute overmuch importance, whatever place it may appear to hold in the modern world; from our point of view, it is interesting mainly because it expresses, in as clear a form as possible, the tendencies of this or that period, much more than it actually creates them; and even if it can be said to direct them to a certain extent, it does so only secondarily and when they are already formed. Thus, for instance, it is certain that all modern philosophy has its origin in Descartes; but the influence exerted by him, firstly on his own time, and then on those that followed— an influence not confined to philosophers alone— would not have been possible had his conceptions not been in agreement with already existing tendencies which, as a matter of fact, prevailed among his contemporaries in general; the modern mentality is reflected in Cartesianism and, through Cartesianism, it acquired a clearer knowledge of itself than it possessed before. Moreover, if a movement in any domain is as conspicuous as Cartesianism has been in that of philosophy, it is always rather more as a result than as a cause; it is not something spontaneous, but the result of a wider underlying activity. If a man like Descartes is especially representative of the modern deviation, so that to some extent and from a certain point of view one can say that he personifies it, it remains nonetheless true that he is not its sole or first originator and that one would have to go much further back to trace its source. In the same way the Renaissance and the Reformation, which are usually considered to be the first great manifestations of the modern mentality, completed the breach with tradition rather than provoked it; for us, the beginning of this breach is to be found in the fourteenth century, and it is at this date, and not a century or two later, that the beginning of modern times should be fixed.