Though love is a warm blanket against the cold morning of life’s monotony, the philosopher’s cold intellect cannot seem to dare it and make a whole sacrifice of himself to it. He cannot stand the thought of years of being witnessed—for he is the witness and must make a distance from his subject. It is to a man’s shame that he is known by a woman. She already knows so much by intuition, that spark buried in nature—in her nature. How much scrutiny can a soul’s mask bear? And you’ll say ‘love is not scrutiny but acceptance’. But he does not wish for acceptance, does not accept himself; that is, he does not wish to make of himself a study by woman’s natural intuitions. Comprehension means naught but leverage. Understand him, understand his levers, and control is at the hand of an infinitely more powerful actor, the feminine mystique. Whether one means to love only to grow intertwined, toward alchemical salvation, or to make some masochism of themselves for complex reasons, nevertheless that comprehension is a hand which hovers her lover’s gearbox. It may rev him up into production or downshift him into his animalic state, each of these a threat to a detached and rational philosophy, to his comprehension of the whole of life. “A married philosopher belongs to comedy” says Nietzsche. Worse, she, being her master’s emissary, knows not her unconscious purposes. And if she does, she is instrumental, and he her personal instrument. In either case, Nature has ever sober aims: reproduction, for biological continuity, and even to seat consciousness, paradoxical to each man’s personal fate, progressively higher on her throne. These are her aims, and a sober man is wise to comprehend her, same as he is comprehended—this, a counterstrike to potently seductive unconsciousness. Despite the philosopher’s comprehension of the machinery behind Fate’s illusion, her machinery grinds on. His knowing does not impede the divine pair’s eternal telos.
The eternal embrace, the sacred couple who continually remakes the world, they can do naught else—Shu and Nut, esposada: cuffed in marriage for the reproduction of the world. But to know this—to know it by the book as fact, to comprehend the whole of the thing from the philosopher’s outside perspective is a hell of a burden, for it means alienation from the regular course of life. The philosopher is punished physically and mentally for this stance outside of substance. He foregoes the material grounds upon which to stake his claim; that is, via the marriage, with recourse only to metaphysical grounds. This is his (Kundera’s and Nietzsche’s) Unbearable Lightness of Being—he is unanchored to the mater, matter; and so it is with ease he slips into nihilism—the state of pure being in which ‘no material thing —nothing— matters’. It is probably the case that men —at least the generic bulk of men— are best kept warmly half conscious of their use case; left to labor and procreate, and to bear that burden side by side with other men who share his fate and can raise a beer in solidarity: to fate and labor and what is to the philosopher, the banality of it all—the banality of the eternal return.
I mean to say that I have the philosopher’s curse. It is not that difficult of a corner to see ’round. You just have to wait out the machinations of game play, to resist the feminine, long enough, in order to comprehend life’s eternally recurring patterns. In chess they call them complications, the issues into which a player runs when he engages the enemy on questionable territory. Complexity is the ambivalent domain of the divine; where the king loses his agency, where the infinite admixture of pure masculine ambition and stringent physical limitation his situation collide. Complexity itself wins every game, nevermnind the player’s machinations in the meantime. But most men play by compulsion. To watch the game from the outside, to commentate —to philosophize about it all— is little understood by those with their noses down, fervently collecting coins, but the commentator on this divine comic complexity, he is typically nonplussed in being mistaken for a player when, by accidental compulsion by the instincts, he sits at the chess board and engages the divine machinations.
It is his duty to proclaim loudly and clearly enough to those who will otherwise presume that he is a man like every other man a woman has known—that he is not in fact here to play seriously, but rather to contemplate the game itself, sometimes by quasi-accidental participation. A man must sometimes play a game in order to comprehend it. In this he risks his outsider status. He might get caught up, caught out, with his player’s cap on. And then he will find himself in a gambit, mired in complexities rather than observant of them, and the levers of fate will squeal with excitement to be oiled, ready to grind meat that has too long evaded the cogs of nature’s recycling method, a brutality to his individual consciousness. He might well crack, and fold like eggs. And she would be wise to cook them ‘low and slow’ if she is to keep this would-be enlightened man a flightless cock. If so, she gets her ‘love’ along with a romantic spice to cover the gravely belly of truth seeking. But this ambivalence (seduction/subduction) is but a blind highway to anonymity for the philosopher, and it deals in a grand and glimmering romance that he too —the feminine in him— secretly harbors. “What does he do?” is the first god-damned question the chickens all cluck. That is: ‘which type of tool is he to you—does he have much leverage, this instrument upon which you exercise your own —the mother’s— leverage? What are the quality of his hands? What can be attained, possessed, and borne, should you wrap fate around him?’ This is all cynical of me to say. There are couples who demand equally love’s illusion, hold it as reality, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. They are perfectly deceived by Pleasure in their re-creation of the world. But again, the philosopher means to avoid this pleasure trap, that he might escape it by means of analysis from without—even if he finds himself playing the game in order to better observe it.
Either man or woman can subtly use love itself as a tool against the other, for one’s self. ‘Subtly’, because this lever can be both used by, and simultaneously hidden from, its users. Some worried and protective part of me has used love in order to grasp at a living claim; in order to essay really, instead of by semantics, to insert my own psychic position into nature’s reality. But to stake a claim upon a woman is to claim a lot, a fate, in life, as one claims a lot of land by staking its boundaries: ‘here, these four defined corners and whatever indefinable enigma between them lies, these are what I claim.’ A false claim. That’s a metaphysics of possession of the real. And what one claims, he claims, implicitly, to be able to defend, support, and make fruitful by his labor, as consciousness potentiates —makes a use of— matter. But matter is more adept, older, and winds up making use of consciousness instead.
Should a man ask a woman if this is not what she deeply desires, to be made good use of, he will quickly find himself in a fructifying position, trading his philosophical distance for personal knowledge of the feminine. Where man lays claim, woman has most often levered the intrinsic love of consciousness for material, in order to entice that claim upon her. She seduces him as ripe fruit seduces the animal —Adam— who can’t reasonably turn down the apple. The philosopher is unreasonable. And he, in turn, is supposed to subdue that lot of earth for further fructification. This, the sacrifice and sacred trade between male seduction and female subduction, is at the heart of all religion: “Be fruitful and multiply,” the mitzvah says. I am not so sure that the god of the bible is not —though it is heresy to patriarchy to say— Female. That’s how life gets on, by staking metaphysical claims to physical lots in life. Hence, consciousness experiences participation in life as fate. To choose a lot —a woman— is to choose one’s lot in life, his fate. And to her, this amounts to being claimed as one such prized piece of fate—and a fate chosen is a fate honored. It is the man who proposes, but it is the woman who entices the proposition—she offers a lot in life, a fate into which he may plunge his phallic potential, his power. To do so knowingly is legitimate faith, but to do so only semi-consciously is fate. He takes an oath to this end: the marriage oath is said to be pledged to (masculine) “God”, but truthfully he pledges to the bride and ultimately the Great Mother: “I will plow this land and tend to its fruit faithfully each season. You have seduced me and I will subdue you honorably in my dealings with your offspring.” —a shepherd wed to his flock, a promise to make good use of his lot in exchange for pleasure and temporal pride. These of course precipitate his fall from pure consciousness into seduced labor, all while fulfilling the oath which, as he soon finds, was not in fact an oath to the Father, but to Mother—God, who by these means is indeed almighty.
Because the eternal drama is played out through personal experience, it is easy for man to conflate the actions of the personal woman for the actions of the archetypal feminine—and for her to make the same error. As such, it is disingenuous to blame a woman for seduction while she is nature’s and not the other way ’round; that is, there is an implicit misunderstanding, a trick of semantics, when it is said that ‘it is in her nature’ —that is to blame the personal for the archetypal. Nature is not ‘her’s’—rather, she is the personal ecotype to nature’s impersonal archetype, the individual instance, subject to divine will’s desire: infinite creation. It is in nature‘s nature to seduce the masculine by way of the personal feminine. The gods work through us, and we are apt to confuse their desires for our wills. Most usually, we justify our ‘willful’ choices via post hoc rationalizations of Nature’s desires and Culture’s demands. If there is an argument against Free Will, this is it—for even the conscious philosophers are subject to it—to Her. Desire is constantly in service to Nature.
A patriarchy exists precariously upon men’s comprehension of their own susceptibility toward instrumentazlization by way of the instincts—which is to say, it rests upon both the comprehension and, paradoxically, the incomprehensibility of the archetypal feminine, manifest in the personal relation between the sexes.
The difference between agential men seduced by cultural power and those more directly seduced by natural desire, each stemming from Nature’s own desires at bottom, is precisely the difference between esoteric and exoteric religious knowledge. Religion has had longest to ascertain the telos of Seduction and Subduction. If man is religious or political or economic, all of these together at once, he is reducible to nature, bindable and controllable by the combination of these primeval forces; and all of religions occulted teachings, accumulated techniques and instrumentalizations, these set to work upon individuality with the seriousness of a mother bent on her own Eternal Return. That men, by the slight edge of their greater capacity for violence as final say in cultural matters, maintain control by culturally instrumental means, these means are but a confirmation and confession of man’s nature, which, as I have said, is a misleading phrase; for, he confuses both the woman’s and his personal desires for those of the gods that work in and through him: the mother, still aiming at reproduction, reigns over and directs that consciousness. If it is not clear, all of culture, in its effort to bind feminine seduction by way of masculine subduction, only confirms the Great Mother’s ambivalent power.
The only party partially immune to these complexities, these religious covenants to which we are infinitely and automatically subscribed by Nature, is the philosopher, and they are all he can write about.