Scrap note #8¶
The next installment of sub-cognitive fragmentation became too snarled in self-involvement to manage, splintering its crate, and leaving a debris trail of scrap notation. When a flicker of proto-intelligence finds itself out beyond the ledge, tumbling into the abysmal self-problematization of Gnon, it has either to surrender itself to the plummet, or scrabble quickly for some arresting roughness on the cliff walls. This isn’t the time for a deep descent (so my figurative fingernails are gone).
After seven years in an apartment at the edge of Xujiahui, we have moved to a slightly larger one in the Jing’an District (with space for each of the kids to have their own room). It’s up on the 19th floor — above the mosquito level — with a view of the Wheelock Square tower (an impressive KPF structure). The move was only completed over the last couple of days. So life this end has been vastly more chaotic, is becoming a little more spacious, and is already far more high-rise. Some of the recent gusts of disorder stem from this.
The scrap-reduced sub-cognitive fragment goes something like this: NRx has its own micro-decadence, which is expressed through a fixation on values, asserted as an alternative to thought. This is, I realize, overtly and dramatically controversial. If thought is confused with reason, and values identified with inherited intuitions, it might easily appear as a direct attack upon the most sacred commitments of the reactionary attitude. What, after all, are the feeble tremblings of embryonic intellect compared to the grandeur of what has been received?
What, though, has truly been received? Do we think we know? It is worth a digression into this peculiar usage of ‘think’. “I think the Old Way is best” is really close to an implicit contradiction, or even a presumption, in both directions. If the Old Way is being thought, it remains incompletely accessed. Either thought has been bypassed — by far the most probable case, were this in fact simply possible — or a claim of gargantuan hubris is being made to the completion of thought, in this particular case at least. Is it more likely that thought has indeed been pursued to its end, or that an insincere — in fact merely thoughtless — claim to the accomplishment of thought has been inserted groundlessly and subliminally, programmed by trivial considerations of grammatical or rhetorical convenience?
The anticipated rejoinder might be: “we are reactionaries precisely because we believe before we think, and this claim is itself a belief, adamantly thoughtless, and thus immune to the corrosive uncertainties of the wandering mind. What we know best is that which has not passed through thought, but rather through revelatory tradition and its social institutions, safeguarded against the chaotic hazards of the reflective individual, that miserable prey of pride, demonism, and darkness.”
Religion tightly binds philosophy … but then, when the turtles of obedience run out into the absolute, an insidious question arises. It is a difficult one, when thought about, even slightly: Does God think?
[Apologies for a little insulting hand-holding, but my enormous confidence in human thoughtlessness leads me to suspect that both theists and atheists might be more accepting of the decompressed formulation: What is it to think of a God who thinks? Could thought be anything in eternity, or in the absence of the unknown? And if God does not think (whether through his nature, as eternal, or through the necessity of his non-existence) what could it mean for there to be a ‘God of the Philosophers’?]