"essencing" a section of an essay

Hello friends! Well I am burning through this essay, which is mostly done: I’m sending out a section every two days. This next part of the section on Order regards Essencing, or how to see an essence in any thing, to be able to extract what essence we need from it, for us precedes essence. It is useful for daily life, love, work, and the Game to be able to posit an essence into a thing in order to get something out of.

 

I have been DEEP into the Natamyths, preparing them for publication. Maybe a few weeks of intense editing will make it ready?

 

Daniel

 

 

2. Essencing

 

            Understanding is the ability to say an idea in your own words; comprehension is the ability to summarize it. Nobody can understand nor comprehend what is completely beyond his experience. To be able to put a thing in order is to enumerate all its parts in terms of an essence, asking “What is essential to this system, to this structure, to this thing, without which, it would be changed beyond self-identity?” The answer is by no means obvious. To be able to discern between trivialities and essences is the mark of wisdom: open-mindedness is a virtue of the child; the wise man carefully filters out everything except the heart of the matter.

            The ability to see an essence, to understand it, to comprehend it, distinguishes the true philosopher: in this, Plato and Nietzsche are two greatest masters. The ability to formulate an idea, to give it a nickname, a handle, requires the greatest wit, the same sort of wit required to tell a joke. The scholars and geniuses do it all the time, but for a people as a whole to be wise and deep, this requires custom, just as every novelty requires a regularity, and every freedom requires a tradition.

            Myths get at an essence, abbreviate generations of experience, transmit and perfect that experience to open each new generation to the same. The Iliad is similar to Genesis, and the Greek myths similar to the Hindu. Yet what each set of myths did for them, the Greek myths, the Jewish myths, the Hindu myths, is summarize and transmit generations' worth of experience. Though we may read Genesis, or the Odyssey, or the Ramayana, with great joy and insight, it can never move us to the core of our national identity, being the myths of other peoples, just as I may respect and admire your children, but not as much as my own, no matter how my children compare to yours. Drink from your roots. We love best only what we are part of: no people chooses another people as “God’s chosen,” but every people centralizes on itself. Only a decadent would advise Europeans not to be “Eurocentric.” If my kidneys aspired to be hearts, imagining the heart to be more noble, then I would die from blood poisoning. For us Americans, who are something new under the sun, we must constantly rehash and improve our own stories, build our own citadel, strengthen our national originals, and use the literature of the rest of the world only as a foil, as an enemy, which once we have wrestled against, we must devour to take its strength into our own original flesh. Love Jesus as Judas loved him and you will become greater than him.

            The great minds abbreviate the past, epitomize the present, and open the future. The past therefore requires constant compression, and really exists nowhere else but in our guts, in the digesting of this compressed story. We must internalize all things, and center them around us, so that all history is a commentary on my present  life, the full of human history mere prelude to my place now, for this is it, I am the divine being, I am God in the flesh--let any government in existence serve me! My divinity is in the spirit of my style.

            Style is the face of essence. Every style has a grammar, and every style of grammar is an ontology. How I set my nouns, verbs, and prepositions is how I focus my eyes and where I place them. The full sentence is a structure of logical relationships; language is metaphysics; every sentence implies a philosophy, and the very nature of language is to subsume and transmit the thinking of all men who speak into the same omniscience, the all knowing mind of Lux Sophia, goddess of language. For the great mind, he sees all sentences as allegorical, all well-formed structures denoting and connoting their subject in their very form, and also in the music and the words. The masters do it best, and as for the Master of Language, he is the reason why the world was created in the first place.

            Hold the mirror to nature with your art, and hold the mirror of art to itself with your theory. Theory is art reflecting on itself; theory is the structuration of structure. Art becomes profound through the critical apparatus readers build around it. Art sees itself as the object of contemplation. No longer is “the study of nature” our theology, as it was for Emerson and Edison, the latter who took Nature as "the only true God," but we take method itself for a object of method.

            We do not find a heaven of perfect forms, but we make such a heaven. All forms are of one stuff, interchangeable, only their materials differ. Democracy has a structure that could be translated into an opera. To be able to see that an essence is also a form, that the informer transforms the gross structure to its own inner logic, that spirit is form, that soul is form, that all that ever existed was a form of matter and nothing else, we approach the secret of matter, that every last speck of dust is absolute and eternal. We build heaven from the image of this life, as if we had made a collage of our favorite parts of this life and said that those are the most real things, and therefore, by a trope of language, those are the “eternal things” the “final things,” the “true beings of the universe.” “Theology is anthropology,” a German rightly said, and again, “every religion is a flavor of humanism.” We take a thing for what it is worth, and not a cent more. Insofar as God created the world, so he is capable of creating this world, but not necessarily a better one. There is no faking results. What a man does every day is what he will continue to do; the past eternally recurs. As Emerson says in his sublime essay on Compensation: all things have a cost, all things render a benefit, all things compensate, with the exception that knowing that all things compensate, such a knowledge brings only gain without cost, and again, wisdom and virtue and such creations of the soul add to the universe, and only add to it, with no detrimental loss, as Anaxagoras taught, “the Soul is a self increasing Logos.” For if entropy decreases order, it increases experience, and a fully complicated system will be wiser.

            An object is not an object to us, is not real, until we have some idea of its parameters. We know a person by knowing the shape of his soul. The essence of a man is a certain shape our mind takes when considering him. The forms we learn in our youth conform us into adults. For this reason, I constantly devour the American Forms, and take the foreign forms such as Nietzsche's and the Tao's as balancers and placers of what is nearer to my soul.

            The Game of life is knowing the structure of its layers of games, of seeing how they balance, what they center on. Having the widest mind means being able to synthesize the most. Philosophers are gods, yes, and the Universe, when she created herself, was the first philosopher.

 

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Perfection

Is

Easy

 

perfectidius.com

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