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Ode to Man
Tho’ many are the terrors,
not one more terrible than man goes.
This one beyond the grizzled sea
in winter storming to the south
He crosses, all-engulfed,
cutting through, up from under swells.
& of the gods She the Eldest, Earth
un-withering, un-toiling, is worn down,
As the Twisting Plough’s year
into Twisting Plough’s year,
Through the breeding of horse, he turns.
& the lighthearted race of birds
all-snaring he drives them
& savage beasts, their clan, & of the sea,
marine in kind
With tightly-wound meshes spun
from all-seeing is Man.
Yet too, he masters by means of pastoral
beast, mountain-trodding,
The unruly-maned horse holding fast,
‘round the neck yoked,
& the mountain’s
ceaseless bull.
& the voice & wind-fast thought
& the passion for civic ways
He has taught, so from crag’s poor court
from under the ether’s hard-tossed arrows
To flee, this all-crossing one. Blocked, he comes
upon nothing so fated.
From Hades alone escape he’ll not bring.
Tho’ from sickness impossible
Flight he has pondered.
A skilled one, devising of arts beyond hope,
Holding at times an evil,
But then to the noble he crawls,
honoring the laws of the Earth, &
Of gods the oath so just,
high-citied.
Citiless is the one who with the un-beautiful
dwells, boldly in grace.
Never for me a hearth-mate
may he have been, never equal in mind
He who offers this.
Ode to Man
A BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. Still, the BwO is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. It has nothing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree—to the degree corresponding to
the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. Matter equals energy. Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero. That is why we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent
of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as pure intensities. The organ changes when it crosses a threshold, when it
changes gradient. "No organ is constant as regards either function or position, . . . sex organs sprout anywhere,... rectums open, defecate and close, . . . the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments." The tantric egg. After all, is not Spinoza's Ethics the great book of the BwO?
Ode to Man
But human power is extremely limited, and is infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes; we have not, therefore, an absolute power of shaping to our use those things which are without us. Nevertheless, we shall bear with an equal mind all that happens to us in contravention to the claims of our own advantage, so long as we are conscious, that we have done our duty, and that the power which we possess is not sufficient to enable us to protect ourselves completely; remembering that we are a part of universal nature, and that we follow her order. If we have a clear and distinct understanding of this, that part of our nature which is defined by intelligence, in other words the better part of ourselves, will assuredly acquiesce in what befalls us, and in such acquiescence will endeavour to persist. For, in so far as we are intelligent beings, we cannot desire anything save that which is necessary, nor yield absolute acquiescence to anything, save to that which is true: wherefore, in so far as we have a right understanding of these things, the endeavour of the better part of ourselves is in harmony with the order of nature as a whole.
Very interesting. I agree with Spinoza on this and almost always have, since before I’d ever heard of Spinoza. Intuitively, for some reason, I’ve never felt this “freedom” of will that most people take for granted to be theirs. I’ve always been acutely aware of the fact that what “I” am is a serious of impulses that mostly feels like a distinct and coherent whole-unto-itself but in fact isn’t fully distinct even if it persists in cohering.
(After I was told I had TLE, this intuition made a little more sense–depersonalization, absence seizures with strange auras, difficulty with language, spatial disorientation, very intense moods coming out of nowhere…perhaps the illusion of free-will breaks down just enough for me that I can’t cling to it.)
Will or intention is not the only sense or feeling about what we are and how we work that’s been all but explained away by neurology, either–there are so many now.
I suppose I would resist the idea that neurology “explains” away any particular experience. Neurological descriptions are just that, descriptions. It is never the case that experience “x” is “nothing but” processes “y” (some description). What neurology does, at least in my opinion, is allow us to conceptually re-orient ourselves to our experiences. For instance in this case, our experience of freedom and intention apparently is closely related to our experience of appetite and desire, something that conditions our very perception of what we are “doing” or have done.
I do certainly agree that “volition” has conceptually overdetermined our sense of what “I” is. Most importantly, neurology insists upon the embodied sense of anything we are, the manner in which any mental or abstract events are always material ones, something Spinoza deposited at the foundation of his approach.
I like the potential comparison here to the flying man and floating statue thought experiments, which I am familiar with through Daniel Heller-Roazen’s Inner Touch. My next project is basically about how the flying man would cry, something the philosophical discourse does not seem to consider. Or maybe that is what the stone does when it realizes, and how does it realize this?, that it is not self-moved.
But what I like here more specifically (and why I said “thought is a flying stone”) is the way the metaphor of the stone’s motion finds the distinction and gap between will and thought. Among other things this indicates the way in which we/consciousness/whatever appropriate thought as will or self (identify our thinking as self-willed) precisely because of the evidence to the contrary (thought as purely given, out of nowhere, invisibly contingent etc) that thought gives. Unspooling,
Nicola
Nicola: “My next project is basically about how the flying man would cry, something the philosophical discourse does not seem to consider. Or maybe that is what the stone does when it realizes, and how does it realize this?, that it is not self-moved.”
Kvond: I’m not quite sure that I follow your project, but I do like the sound of it, and look forward to what you make of it. I would say that at least in Spinoza’s vision, it is not just that the stone realizes that it is not self-moved, (in that it is moved by a non-self that is external), but also that in being moved by other things, it is “self” moved, in that the “self” is part of a community of effects. In otherwords, the result is not alienation.
Nicola: “But what I like here more specifically (and why I said “thought is a flying stone”) is the way the metaphor of the stone’s motion finds the distinction and gap between will and thought. Among other things this indicates the way in which we/consciousness/whatever appropriate thought as will or self…”
Kvond: I like this very much, that the will appropriates the thought for itself. I think for this reason Spinoza denied, much against Descartes and the entire Idealist tradition afterward, that there was any independent faculty call the “will” or “judgment”. All perception, all thought, is already an affirmation of the body in a particular degree.