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Enduring Sadness |
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Parallels can be drawn between Nietzsche and the Pythagorean life; life obviously meant as ‘something’: something in which ‘to partake’. Tough Nietzsche’s thought seemingly goes rather directly against the pseudo-religiousness of the Pythagorean ‘way of life’, there is a similarity however with that element of ‘ecce homo’, of being man as man, as a being not in the sense of Heidegger’s Dasein , but a being brought back to a proper enduring of ecology. Though the notion of that transmigration of souls was an ‘actuality’ (?) for Pythagoras and Nietzsche really was in agreement with his great hero Heraclitus that Pythagoras was just a religious quack; there remains the possibility of a reinterpretation/interpolation of Pythagorean thought. Why would such a remodeling be feasible and useful? I think that the importance of Pythagorean conception is that the idea of number is not a quasi mathematical and scientific reflection or consideration! Pythagoreanism is not a numberisation of ontology, rather like the importance of number and geometry in Plato; the importance of number in Pythagoras is not of number as something descriptive, of being-istic essentiality, rather it is about the metaphysical importance of interaction, so the Pythagorean ‘idea’ of number is similar to Spinoza’s ethics: it is not that numbers become absolute merely as numbers, rather what is important, the essence, is the ‘formula’ existing between numbers. So it is not that numbers exist as some a priori abstraction, it is not that there is some independent ‘life’ to the number; it is not a numerical interpretation seen as an individual statement which exists, rather what exists, what is given before anything is given (indeed before there is even that which is given) is the numerical interaction, and the word ‘interaction’ in the most of proper accentuation because there can only be an exchanging of giveness, if that idea of exchange is something pre-existing and pre-determined. The attempt of Pythagoreonism is thus a certain return (a revolt) towards ecology, which is why the idea of ‘harmony’ was so important. The biggest failure of Pythagoras was hence a musical failure, because he did not understand or foreshadow that which Wagner and Schoenberg gave birth to: a stepping away from that which is mistakenly perceived as the proper structure of ecological harmony. Of course that Pythagoras and Philolaus were essentially epistemological thinkers (rather than ontological) explains why their shortcomings are of a cognitive and humanistic concern. Strictly speaking, there are two issues they forgot … (1) the existence of atonality and (2) the dynamics of chaos which are caused by the interactions between tonal harmony and atonal harmony. That we have need for philosophical consolations, is because we always are caught in that complicity of tone and a-tone; that we are indeed caught in that flux of Heraclitus, for nature indeed prefers to hide, because the wavelengths becomes obscured and this is the whole crux of the anxiety of our being; we always are our own worst enemy and that causes a clash between our sensibility, our structuralist needs for post-structuralization, that we need to hear according to a priori notions of harmony because the flux-ability of ecological wavelength is something which our brains cannot possibly deal and cope with. It is, ironically, in this forgetfulness of Pythagoras and his followers that we find the most important contribution towards philosophy and epistemology, because it is precisely that we find the genesis of consciousness, because that which gives rise to man’s being-here is that duality which is our mind’s crisis, that confrontation of the ecological and the metaphysicality of man’s desperateness towards a tonality in an even more desperate world of pure atonality. It is in the passage of transmigration that Pythagoras comes close to understand his own self and struggle, when he shows mercy to a beaten dog (just as Nietzsche showed mercy to a beaten horse), the quasi mythological and spirituality of that statement is that he saw in that dog a friend who had died and been reborn as a dog; what is important however, is the ‘how’ of this recognition, he recognizes his friend through his tears, through his crying (sadness). So this numerical interaction that we call ‘formula’, is an emotive kind of expression, so the parallel with Spinoza and Nietzsche is, that there is an affirmation of that which is ‘sad’, not to dwell in it, it is not a pessimism a la Schopenhauer, rather it is in that enduring moment, that enduring loneliness, that we find a clear cut affirmation of life, because this is exactly what is the meaning of that which we call the Human Condition, it is what we mean by the grammar/meaning of that verb ‘to endure’ because it does not mean to surrender, at least not in the standardized obviousness of the word, much rather ‘to endure’ shares a page with that word of Kierkegaard: ‘Faith’: it all points to a ‘leap’, thus nothing short of absurdity. There is a strange connection here between Deleuze’s Spinoza (that persona of anti-sad passions and affections) and the transcendental notion of Pythagoras’ transmigration, because if we indeed do read Pythagoras in an epistemological sense, then this really changes our conception of transmigration, because perhaps (be it by the actual intend of Pythagoras or not) what it really means to have a transitory migration is not a numerical flock of ontological actuality, but much rather it is a systematization of relation qua relation. So it is not really that Pythagoras saw his deceased friend as a physical entity, rather he ‘saw’ his friend because he ‘saw’ his suffering. But what exactly does it mean ‘to see’? Seeing is not believing in a materialist/empirical sense, perception is not concerning tangibility; this is something we have been mistaken about ever since Aristotlean phenomenology; what has been overlooked all this time is that in the apprehension of reality’s giveness, what is really given is not the form as form, but rather the form as Platonic Ideal; and what this means is (and here of course we find and re-discover Pythagoras in Plato) is that form is the eidetic embodiment of relation. Take the seeming similarity for instance between the square and diamond: how could we possibly have an eidetic differentiation between them, if it was not for the way lines, corners and angles interact? What is it that makes up a solid? Is there any such thing as ‘solid-arity’? The idea of the solid is its partaking in a solid relationship, so not the solid is solid, but the solid only is solid (begets solitude!) by its inter-action. The abstraction of number is thus not an ecological structuralization in which number becomes an a priori abstraction of things; rather the numbers themselves become the structure, number is not a thing-istic referential, rather number (as the essence of logical postulation) is the referential descriptiveness of that all important prefix, that word ‘inter’; the transcendental importance of that idea of transmigration, is thus an emotional transposition of a prefixial movement through which we come to see movement as movement. What it means to endure sadness, is to recognize sadness, to find that pattern of abstraction; as such the movement towards the Nietzschean Übermensh is thus a movement of inter-humanistic recognition, something which moves beyond Buber and Levinas, not into this importance of other as other, but rather in the importance of the other as someone we confront in our very own dwelling.
Orlando, April 2007
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