Friday, February 4, 2022

THOUGHTS ON DIALECTIC AND THE INTELLECTUAL DOMAIN

 
[1] To be an intellectual is to be adverse to culture. One does not merely replicate it, one learns to criticize it.

[2] To be an intellectual is to be a critical thinker; to be a skilled thinker is to be a dialectical thinker. These are not the same. The former self-destructs under its own narrowness and instrumentality, while the latter comprehends its existence as a quality of development and tries to consciously replicate it. In dialectics contradiction is not isolated from the quality of being but remains an essential component of its realization -- something to be embraced, incorporated, explored. As Hegel said, "contradiction is the rule of the true."   

[3] To pursue the intellectual life, in one context, this is what it means to torture oneself. Why? Because to be human is to begin with an anti-intellectual disposition. The intellectual pursues a path that renders him the enemy of mankind, a provocateur, a disturber of the peace. Humans want what makes them feel safe and comfortable, to be an intellectual is to transcend these psychological desires; to be an intellectual is to offend man at the subconscious level.

[4] Intellectual work is the work of thought; the work of thought is the work of criticism; the work of criticism is the work of exploding impulse, is the work of shattering the idolatry of dead images posited as totality [identity-logic]. Identity is the moral foundation of the inquisition of anti-intellectualism. Dialectic is the foundation of thought's emancipation from the impulse of human psychology.

[5] No one who understood what it meant to be an intellectual, in the context of society, would ever want to be one. Standing against the rituals and superstitions of society is a path to alienation, and if done with polemical power, a path to persecution [annihilation], prison or death by violence.

[6] An intellectual who transcends linguistics will provoke the impulse of the animal against himself, the animal is violent, he smashes anything that makes him feel psychological pain, and in this sense, nothing has the potential to cause more psychological pain than [dialectical] thought.

[7] Oh intellectual, abstraction is your friend, but beware, for it is also your greatest enemy! Those who get lost in abstraction forfeit thought's relevance and value, they forsake it for the false authority of a dead image [identity-logic]. To live in abstraction [idealism] is to live in the delusion of religion, even if one has transcended the cruder forms of religion. 

[8] Many will pretend to flow with us into this abstract sphere, but in so doing they are motivated by vanity, they want to obtain some kind of social validation from the appearance of thought, this can never be the case with concrete thinkers, they are after progress in the comprehension of reality, and in the highest form, a praxis derived from the genius of theory that leads to the increase of social quality.

[9] One can simplify the intellectual life: thought aims at the concrete cultivation of freedom toward the emancipation of the species unto the proliferation of mankind's creative powers so that life itself is worth living. All meaning is the product of innovation [technology] and production, the silent, cold, dark universe is indifferent, man must learn to do for himself and this is a matter of the cultivation and application of intelligence, and intelligence cannot reach its climax without dialectic!   

[10] There is no such thing as an independent or individual thinker, all thinkers are born into the progression of a historical line, into a culture, they inherit ideas, they inherit logic, every linguistic and cognitive technology. The man who posits himself as a solitary unit of value is either deceived or a liar. Such a self-confident stance is a manifestation of a primitive logic, that of identity. In contrast, dialectic comprehends its quality as the result of [to have developed through] a historical, social process.

[11] Just because one is an academic doesn't mean that one is a Thinker: to be a Thinker one must be able to transcend the cultural categories of academia; one must be able to extract value from academia without getting lost in academia. Woe to those who desire praise from their peers, this desire marks an unconscious boundary that their thought cannot pass. 

[12] There are almost no Thinkers in the world; there have hardly been any Thinkers in the world; Thinkers are the most rare kind of being: suspended beyond matter through matter's ascent to abstraction and yet they must return to the world to alter it with abstraction. The real social question is, how can we, as a species, make more Thinkers?   

[13] To be a Thinker is to possess the greatest power in the universe, and at the same time, be susceptible to negation through the most mindless power in the universe. Contradict the shallow logic of a violent man or system, and, through automated impulse, he, or it, may lash out and kill you.

[14] Thought is still a power untapped by man; dialectic constitutes a progression in thought. If mankind will ever advance it will never do so apart from thought. Dialectical thought is the necessary, logical foundation of an advanced species, anything that progresses beyond dialectic must first pass through dialectic.

[15] Man, as species, has not yet reached the stage of dialectical consciousness. What is pit against dialectic, as its enemy, as a power to thwart dialectic, is man's psychological impulse; identity thinking is a form of impulsive thinking (though the practitioner feels it to be a form of objective rationality). He is deceived by the logic of identity as it strives to justify and bring itself into existence. Dialectic explodes identity by demonstrating that it's a logic that proceeds from, and is ultimately founded on, man's psychological impulse.
  
[16] Identity-logic amounts to man deceiving himself through the presuppositions of symbols [taking appearance as totality] as his impulse makes unconscious assumptions about the ontological nature of those presuppositions.

 

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