Post-nihilist praxis and pessimism: rehashing some old ground

In the last few months I have begun to explore philosophical pessimism, although not in writing and not on syntheticzero. It might seem strange to do…

Post-nihilist praxis and pessimism: rehashing some old ground

—- I appreciate this writer’s sense of calmness and work towards clarity of his thought.

Although I tend to move away from the ideas of the writers who present in synthetic zero, I do sympathize with their plight and expression, if simply because — And I do not mean to sound better than or to devalue such intellectual synthesis — I went through that. Where my ideas indeed resonated with everything that they talk about in this blog.

My blog is called “the philosophical hack”, and this name and project came out of its original name called “constructive undoing”, and “constructive undoing” came about after this period that I see synthetic zero reflecting for me.

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This post was very, very long, and so I didn’t quite get more than about a third of the way before I had to start skipping down the essay and read various paragraphs to get an idea of where it was headed and what he might be saying.  

This author expresses a key idea that I could associate the project of synthetic zero with. This idea is trauma.

One of the issues that I have with philosophy, and indeed the issue that brought a head to me the ability to move upon what we could say was my initial trauma, but then also that post traumatic space in which and through which I attempted to dissolve that traumatic element which remained in me to be able to attempt to argue against it, is the refusal or inability to get over itself. See, I was attempting to carve out my own legitimate space in the midst of a trauma which would not go away.  My ideas were indeed “trauma informed” in the sense that they indeed were sculpted out of the traumatic environment for which I was invested despite my best interest.

And so one could say that what happened to me was that I gave up on that project. For I realized in the end of that approach to philosophy all I was doing was reifying and maintaining the initial trauma in the attempt to get rid of it. For, philosophy tends to take real things and turn them into intellectualization and then argue itself within a Kantian Sort of a priori To find its various discursive categories and areas within it. It takes the very real fact, the very visceral and encompassing effect of trauma in places it into An intellectual category to dissect as if trauma itself is nothing but an intellectual category, a definition.

Ironically, philosophy itself does this to reality itself. To me, this is what Nietzsche was saying, and other authors, and this is why capitalism is nihilistic: because it places everything in a reductive motion where philosophy is intimately bound up with rationality, such that such association becomes the supposed ground of all things that are real, such that “nothing” becomes the foundation of reality. This is the ironic manifestation of our current ideological paradigm. And this is to say that the reductive method of a particular orientation upon reality, one which usurps reason itself onto its own resources Such that it has no recourse from which reason could arise except to say reason itself, which is the synthetical a priori — Every time what is actually real encounters this assumption, the trauma is reified, and that argued limit for a reason just pulls further back into itself to look for a way to get rid of that automatic traumatic response. 

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When we understand that the current modern ideal of a reason is it self a disassociation from reality, then the transformation which can arise is one that begins to understand that reason indeed has a real ground and that 20th century existentialism and indeed postmodernism, was just a further attempt to own the traumatic situation of the prior trauma of that particular category, or for that particular orientation, upon reason.

Once someone divests oneself from that ideal category, Then what is left is not a world that is going to bring it self to destruction because of the post traumatic response of “rationality”; rather, It is a seeing the world for what it really is, where human beings are merely a part of the world and not the container of the world.

Discourses of power are only against what is ultimately functioning as the trauma. In that particular paradigm, the human being sees itself as destroying the world at every turn, ultimately destroying its own body, eating itself away, hurting itself, self harming, suicidal, nihilistic.

Once that trauma is healed, then we find the actual reality of the situation: It it’s not “the world” which we are hurting, rather, it is how we are viewing what the world is that is the significant philosophical issue.

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