A Universal which is Particular and Sensuous

The idea, for me, is to get behind the symbols. But, no! There is nothing “behind” the symbols. If I am to have any satisfaction at all, it will be found within this symbolic realm, filled as it is with pain, suffering, injustice, hardship, ugliness, and omnipresent bestiality.

But, then….Can I hope to change the symbolic realm, modify it so that it is more to my liking?

We do receive a world…It comes to us pre-packaged, and it is given. The real question is whether we want to take this world, and if not, on what grounds we could refuse it, and on what strength we could wish for something better. If we refuse this world which comes to us laden with the conventional and the dead weight of the past, with its soul-vampirism, and its threadbare thoughtlessness, is there an assurance that what we’ll build up out of our refusal will be something more and something better, that our refusal is motivated by more than ugly ressentiment and infantile regression?

I am answering these questions through my recourse to Nietzsche’s parable of the bird of prey and the tender lambs.

Now, as I’ve tried to point out, the symbols involved here are atrocious. It is nearly impossible to think in Nietzsche’s symbolic terms without thought becoming weirdly mired in the horrors of human history which are embedded: the Nazi eagle, the Christian lamb; the male attacker from heaven – Zeus’s thunder bolt—the female earth which is struck; the bird of prey as the act, the tender lamb as what is acted upon; bird of prey aggression opposed to tender lamb passivity; and so on and so forth…I wish I could catalogue all of these symbolic relationships, but perhaps they are as extensive as human culture itself.

Also, as Orla has pointed out, there is the strong conjuration of the aristocrat as the bird of prey and the hapless and pathetic peasant as the tender lamb; it intrigues me to remember that aristocrats were falconers, and in the last important hereditary aristocracy in the world, Saudi Arabia, they still are.

I have to think Nietzsche, working from within the great German philological tradition, was not unaware of what he was dredging up with this choice. I am asserting, as strongly as I am able, Nietzsche’s intent in this choice is to intervene, scramble, and in a sense destroy this symbolic order he has received—he delves into this infantile and fantasy-laden symbolic order which is CHARACTERISTIC of what the human being has been, and he smashes it wide open and thereby offers a potentiality for maturity.

My contention is that this is a sensuous maturity, a powerful knowledge, not only a symbol-receiving but a symbol-creating maturity, which re-establishes contact with the body, rather than negating such, as our enlightenment heritage has demanded, with all the dire implications for autonomy, let alone health. Sensuous maturity post-enlightenment has meant little more than sensuous renunciation; powerful knowledge is a kind of oxymoron if power has retained its political meaning; we've had symbol homogenizations - have we had any symbol creation any time recently?

Change is bodily; sundered from the body, the mind can't change anything. Vis a vis the symbolic, the mind must simply accept what's there. There is no inspiration, no conviction, just obedience to whomever or whatever has retained a connection to the body, even if that connection was made hundreds of years ago. I believe it was- the aristocrats had this connection. The aristocrats are long gone. Desire is aristocratic. Desire is long gone.