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“People do not have ideas”
An idea is atemporal, and as such, has the capacity to become eternal. Most ideas are derivative, but some are fundamental. The more parsimonious between its possessers, the more fundamental an idea necessarily is; the more fundamental, the more eternal. Ideas resonate in the abstract —in the aether or non-euclidean or hilbert space if you like. There is such a ‘non-space,’ a non-geometrically constrained dimension where our thoughts live—you’re experiencing that space in reading each of these words as they light up images in your imagination; that is, this non-cartesian plane is as functionally real as your ability to read. Ideas’ homes being between our minds, essence (verb) or radiate (for we have linguistic recourse only to material metaphor) immaterially. They are stereotyped vís-a-vís collective acknowledgment, and when acknowledged, become pluralized (pleuralized) concepts, serving as nomologies, dialogically determined names, for categories either basic to or derivative of others. That is, ideas become concepts in relation to their intersubjective ratification between conscious agents, conscious of concepts as such—plurally—in the realm of the pleroma. Every word an idea, indiosyncratic at start, became eternal by way of its functional utility, its telos, to subjective agents in need of coordinated categorization for their survival—in need of the word.
Evil is one such timeless nomological category, a word who’s utility is both the constraint of violence —evil— and the perpetuation of peace—good. But herein lies a slight of hand that only Girard detected: the peace, the good, is only brought about —that is, ‘created’— by that same violence—a paradoxical category, “sacred.”
We moderns call peace good and violence evil. But what is good but the absence of evil. The privatio boni, the ‘privation of good’ defines good itself. Here we are at the base of categorical thought: without the not-thing, the netti-netti, there can be no thing as such. One category is categorically dependent on another, and such is the nature of our consciousness—concsciousness of differences, at bottom. Evil generates good in its function: negation. Hence Satan is called “the great negator.” Thus, “evil” serves a great function, and, as Nietzsche would have us, if we are to move beyond this simplistic and errant ‘good and evil,’ this modern misconception and categorical error, we must look at evil as generative and co-constituent alongside good—alongside God. Nothing is significant, nothing can sign, without negation. Without a theiving, without a hostile brother, a great negator, no sign, no semá, no word, which the western christian mind believes to be solely the logos and domain of its singular good God, there can be no God, no word as such. So the devil fights for his due, and rightly so perhaps, for a bit of recognition for his work of negation, his via negativa—life given, from life taken.
Beg then, we, for the first word: No. A law. And a negation. Without the first murder, the terrible consciousness that came from our first primal re-cognition of a murdered brother mimicking our violence, a formerly hostile ‘twin’ felled at our hand; man would not have his recognition as such. Violence is generative of the first law, the logos, and that law is stated as a negative: Thou shall not kill. This is the essence of Girard in my opinion, though he does not come quite so far as to lay claim to the birth of consciousness, good, or evil directly—such is the work, and ambivalent brilliance of Girard.
This category then, evil, is man’s oldest concept and, though immaterial, it is as functionally real as violence and peace themselves. It is finally manifest materially through him as he is the crux, the axial point between violence and peace, good and evil, concept and material—he is the crux of category, thought, the word, and consciousness itself. Man then, is the word, the symbol—a resonator-detector of resonance and dissonance; these ideas resonate in the aether or, ‘interdividually’, between conscious agents, and these agents, men, bring them into fruition. Man is the center from which evil, and thereby too, good, both flow. His word begets actions between men. It mediates peace or stirs the devil in him. Either way, man’s word, the logos, is indeed “made flesh,” made functional in material reality. Man is the crux between mind and matter, I can see it no other way.
If a man’s words’ functional effects are violence, then his basic idea —an essence, not his by possession, but an essence which, rather, possesses him (for, the eternal possess the temporal and not vice versa)— is that of evil manifest. If then, he stirs others with is word, and all people exclaim and proclaim that violence, mimetically, lie in one another (however blind to its presence in them—for if it has resonance with them, it surely resonates through them just the same), then evil inhabits all —and not abstractly or ineffectually, but in as far as men do violence to rid themselves of violence, which is the history of men and violence both; and if the concept of evil is indeed collectively held, as we’ve said concepts are, then in fervor, ambivalence, and ecstasy, they will assuredly govern their impulses only by first indulging them, as is their imperative (by way of impulsive mimetic retaliation, that is), through the only concept then-presently available to their violence-crazed minds—unto a collapse, an exhaustion of violent unanimity, a collectively-held evil they can all only denounce once their brothers have passed, and they’ll do so by means of paradox: violence en route to peace. Such is the tradition of the Jew to leave not a rose, but a stone on the grave of the dead—a subtle hiding and simultaneous Freudian show of guilt in honor of that frightful beginning. The people of god are paradoxically, but not hypocritically —for temporary insanity is, by judaic law itself, a righteous plea— a people begetter and begotten of violence; and theirs is only the best documented. The criticism of religions as violence doers is similarly not a hypocrisy to be ridiculed, for that can be done only on the shoulders of stone-throwing generations of giants, but a history of generative violence to be understood.
Times of tragedy and irony, incomprehensible after the vertiginous fact of numinous violence, the symbolic being born of paradox, will be amnesiastically mythologized, and will produce white-washed bones and hands, just-then used in collective murder, cleaned of sin; they will celebrate in holy terror of their former frightful possession and declare themselves reasonable men—having been either temporarily insane, or, in full denial, wholly incapable of such horrors despite their garments red. But Jung had it that people don’t have ideas —that ideas, contrarily— have people. I’ve here described the process by which they –we– conflate the two.
Violence is a paradox generative of peace, is the centripetal force primal to that of the centrifugal, the line between primate and gottmensch; violence is primary, fundamental, and parsimonious to man across time as he loses himself to the somatic and remerges, grateful for the victimage mechanism’s consciousness-restoring properties: a frightful night followed by the warm morning sun’s worship. It prepends and creates our religions, which are psycho-technologies meant —evolved, that is— to keep violence at bay through breaking (taboo) and waxing (festive) mechanisms; and it lives at center of each of their first stories thereby. Man’s god of peace then, if his god begets him, depends on violence—on the devil to rouse the evil in the group, and to provoke and perpetuate the good in contrast. God needs the devil in man, or the Word, the law preventing his devilish animalic tendencies, is never born—and what is man without peace and war and the word but an unconscious animal? Man is the animal which recognizes these, his own doings, and their terrible and wondrous —ambivalent— effects.
Hence man’s annual ritual celebrations are for giving the devil his due. Perhaps “he,” evil (for evil is only ever affective by way of a “he”), eternal basic concept, visits like any god; just as he senses those subjective agents beginning to pay him too little mind to sustain him —a noticing by the collective unconscious, whose essential pleroma of archetypes lives atemporally in mystic sympathy to its (their) existential psychic counterparts, men— an appearance is felt merited and Dionysus come for a ratification by all that she exist; biology will not be ignored for long—she demands as fervently as our instincts, for she is and was and forever shall be them. Such is the nature of our celebrations of evil: drunkenness, madness, death—all to remind us of its sacred contrast, that “good” god of consciousness.
Perhaps it is best to see, hear, and speak some evil then, to give him (the [d]evil inside us, that is) his due, and to rejoice —religiously— in his temporary coming and going, by way of the negation of order. Such are our Dionysic reenactments of evil’s transience: Carnival, Saturnalia, Dia de Los Muertos, Corroboree, and on and on, the world round.
Order then, the word and warning, law, God, society in stable state (stasis of the state—status quo), the foundation stone of consciousness— is mediated by man’s self-sacrifice. For, when these are not practiced, evil reliably returns —our unarrestable violence as evidence— and the sacrifice then becomes the lot of us, enacted at our own hand, possessed yet again. People do not have ideas; ideas —spirits, the animal denied, Dionysus’ Bacchae— have people.
Such are the turns of mythic tragedy whose real tragedy is to be found in our disbelief that their monsters’ are mere ideas—for ideas are frightful things and spirits; these stories are those of man, who makes a monster of himself. A Hermétic covering of our footprints by a backward wandering across the beach at night, or a blaming on the temptations of woman and snake, of apple’s first bite: we hide our evil in the aether, and disbelieve not only that it is in us —that we its crux— but even in evil itself. Material science is yet another hiding place for our violence, for it negates the Word, the law and reminder of our inward evil, all the while depending upon it for its theses (theos, god-law). Science, hubris of man, then, and denial of oldest law—do we not provoke return of the great negator. Clever devils, we.