NOEMAYA

What is the essence of Ubermensch? What does this felt transformation entail? It’s about the life of life, a modality of transcendental subjectivity. And what is life? Life is the life of meaning. The substratum of life is meaning; it’s not physical or biological, neither is it psychological or spiritual. Or if we designate life as essentially spiritual, this must mean spirit as that which lives meanings. For this man that has roamed the earth so far, and at its so-called best marked with the so-called progress, meaning is furnished via a transplant, much like the infantile state where a certain authority, the god-parents, provide context in which the child sucks meaning from the bosom of an authoritarian structure. Meanings used to be provided by myth, the most primitive and liquid form of meaning; then they solidified into religious meaning which still had a connection to liquidity, but then solidified further into structures that now we call modern rationality, i.e. the scientific worldview. This last man thinks of himself, and himself in the world, as a thing among others with a psychophysical structure, and he has simply accepted this meaning from recently formed authoritarian institutions called the scientific community, those who measure and quantify, and in this measuring they are entirely concealed to the unmeasurable dimension of life.

Ubermensch, on the other hand, is that state of Being where the new form takes full responsibility for its meaning, where he/she frees himself from the reign of imposed structures that have so far confined Being to its least creative form, a frozen and rigid state of meaning. Ubermensch determines the meaning of its own Being creatively and according to the spontaneous nature of life. Neither science, nor religion, nor any ideology or dogma, tells him what he is. His being doesn’t precede his action but is rather creatively determined by it.  

The last man doesn’t know how to be free; he is akin to a prisoner for whom freedom extends only behind his cell but still confined within walls erected by outside sources of meaning. But to be truly free means to be fully responsible, and the highest responsibility is for one’s own meaning, the meaning of one’s Being. 

This freedom begins with an opening of the eyes, where one first sees and ponders the erect walls. When one notices that everything that one is and one means has always been a captivity in acceptance; that none of his meanings are his own, that he is this psychophysical entity simply because he has been told that he is that; a belief that is standing upon another belief, that the gods of science have done their due diligence in their experiments to lay out this worldview, and who are we to question that, so let’s accept and go with it! Little does he know that the propositions of science and logic, too, derive their meaning and significance from himself. He’s been told what he should mean by people who mean authority for him. So he’s still in an infantile state because he doesn’t have an active role in the construction of his meaning, i.e. he has not yet lived creatively and responsibly. 

Why am I telling you this? To reject the erected walls? No. It’s to realize that the erected walls are of the nature of belief; that there are no walls. It’s akin to the situation of an elephant that thinks he’s tied to the tree, and hence he doesn’t bother to step beyond his confinement. It’s the chains of the mind, of the belief sold to us as realities, from which we must break free, to notice and then realize that all belief-structures derive their power and influence on us in light of our own consent.      

This is the core of my philosophy. I’m certain you have picked up on it through my writings, those that smell of a higher form of freedom, freedom from fragmentation, from a semblance of a life that’s butchered by calculus, where quality has been reduced to quantity, where the infinite has been reduced to the indefinite, where the beautiful arc of your eyebrow is understood in terms of Taylor series.

The essence of what is spoken here is about getting in touch with life itself, with the spontaneous, creative, and essentially immeasurable substance of life. You remember the Great Man, laid in shackles hand-made by small minds that dared not stare into the primordial flux, those who in their ineptitude to comprehend higher truth dragged them down to the level of that ineptitude they call understanding. And yes, it is in their understanding, in their standing under, that Aletheia had to become a thing for them, a thing to be captured in snapshots and hung from their timid walls, their theories about life, that it is a this or a that, as if life were susceptible of any lasting and formal determination. 

Oh that’s the fix for philosophers: formal determinations, systems, propositions, etc.. But life has played them well, just like the Whac-A-Mole game! The moment they beat life into a form, it sprung back up in another, and yet another form. They speak of determination as if they’ve managed to stand outside of life studying its behavior! As if anyone has ever stepped out of this river to see its true course! How is it that most philosophers’ lives have always had at least two phases: the early, immature phase followed by a later phase rejecting everything that was laid out in the preceding phase. Early Wittgenstein and late Wittgenstein, early Heidegger and late Heidegger. And life said to all of them: late Wittgenstein and late Heidegger, for when it lifted the rug of time from underneath their feet, all that had come had to become late, and wrong too! I tell you this though, that everything is relatively true and absolutely false! All men speak of the same thing; they just put it differently. 

When flood breaks down the potter’s shop, his family sees it as a manifestation of violence. But did water destroy anything! Did it wash and vanquish clay? Nay! Clay did not change a bit, and there was never anything in the potter’s hands and shelves but clay. Every man, too, is a potter and his shop the mind.

To be guided by life is to be just, and Socrates understood by justice to mind one’s own business. To play one’s role and say one’s lines according to the directions of your souffleur.