PHILOSOPHY - GENUINE AND PSEUDO

There is a difference between philosophy-proper and metaphysical philosophy, the pseudo-philosophy which has developed with increasing tenacity along mainly petty-bourgeois lines over the past 150 or so years - indeed, ever since Schopenhauer, that great 'anti-philosopher', took it upon himself to dig into oriental metaphysics and preach a doctrine of self-denial in the interests of spiritual salvation. To the extent that Schopenhauer was metaphysical, he was an anti-philosopher, that is to say, a pseudo-philosopher. For philosophy-proper in the West is not concerned with the essence of things but, on the contrary, with their appearance, and this whether it is on a grand-bourgeois, a bourgeois, or a petty-bourgeois level, as pertaining to a critique of nature, a critique of ethics, or a critique of language. A distinction, in other words, between the natural, the human, and the artificial, as applying, in various degrees, to the works of, say, Bacon, Kant, and Wittgenstein respectively. Of course, the critique of nature or, more precisely, the classification and study of natural phenomena, is the root concern of Western philosophy, and this is more likely to be carried through with consistency and thoroughness in a pagan age than in a Christian one. Thus Bacon could not hope, in this respect, to emulate the work of Aristotle, who had the ideologically naturalistic integrity of pagan civilization behind him. But neither did Plato go quite so far, in his ethics, as Kant, and doubtless because pagan ethical thinking reflected a lower scale-of-values, relative to an earlier stage of evolution, than its Christian successor in the West. Needless to say, there was no attempt at a critique of language by the ancient Greeks, since such a critique can only materialize in an extensively urban civilization, presupposing a greater degree of evolution.

Each civilization tends, within limits, to evolve according to its own capacities and technological capabilities. If the civilization of the ancient Greeks was unable to evolve beyond a town stage of evolution, then it need not surprise us that its thought was likewise unable to evolve beyond a level commensurate with such an environment. The Christian civilization of the West fared rather better in the long term, though not without having had to pass through intermediate environmental stages corresponding to those of the ancients, in which a philosophical concern with nature (Bacon) and ethics (Kant) took precedence. The evolution of philosophy to the stage of a critique of language had to wait until Western civilization was at a comparatively advanced environmental stage, as it was in Habsburg Vienna at the turn of the nineteenth century, where Wittgenstein set the trend for subsequent philosophers, including Berlin, Barthes, and Merleau-Ponty, to follow. Wherever philosophy has been diverted from this central twentieth-century concern with language, it has entered the realm of metaphysics, as in the cases, to varying extents, of Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, and Weil, and thereupon become a pseudo-philosophy, descended, at least in part, from the metaphysical preoccupations of Schopenhauer.

More overtly than this largely essayistic writing, the utilization of novels and short prose as vehicles for the exposition of metaphysical speculation, as in Aldous Huxley, Hermann Hesse, and Simone de Beauvoir, developed in the twentieth century to a point where such writings may be said to constitute the bulk of contemporary pseudo-philosophy in the West. As Western civilization is nothing if not relative, suspended between the pagan and the transcendental absolutes of naturalistic philosophy on the one hand and of abstract theosophy on the other, we cannot dismiss such pseudo-philosophy as an aberration or unwarranted intrusion of the theosophical into the realm of speculation. On the contrary, pseudo-philosophy is an integral part of this relativistic civilization, particularly in its later stages of development, when an aspiration towards the theosophical, and thus extension of thought into essence, is becoming more intensified. If formerly, under the influence of aristocratic absolutism, academic philosophy had little or no competition from a metaphysical rival (Christian theology being something else), then with the advancement of Western civilization into an extreme, or petty-bourgeois, age there can be no question that such competition will develop and be intensified to a point where the 'pseudo' predominates over the 'genuine'.

In contrast to the West, the East has long maintained a metaphysical tradition - indeed, so long ... that one has reason to doubt whether there was ever a physical tradition behind it! Strictly speaking, the East cannot be described as philosophical; for where there is no critique of nature or ethics or language ... there can be no genuine philosophy. Rather, the Orient has long been theosophical, concerned with essence, and thus antithetical to the Occident, whether or not we include within that designation Graeco-Roman civilization. As the West, even in its Christian guise, has been philosophical and scientific, so the East has been theosophical and poetic, theosophy being to poetry what science is to philosophy - the empirical or experiential confirmation of intuitively realized speculation and occasionally, no doubt, its correction. And, being theosophical, the East has produced much instructive and devotional poetry, just as the West has produced - the famous exception of the so-called 'Metaphysical Poets' notwithstanding - comparatively little, since poetry in the West has more often than not been associated with nature and feminine beauty, partaking of a quasi-philosophical integrity which, in contrast to the East's theosophical one, may be described as physico-poetic. To Keats, 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty', and we have no reason to be surprised, given his apparent bias (and this regardless of Aldous Huxley's defence of Keatsian logic by reference, in The Perennial Philosophy, to a factual interpretation of truth!).

By contrast to the East, however, the West has produced a substantial body of academic philosophy, the most recent manifestations of which will find few parallels in the East. And yet there has been a slight shift of emphasis, in recent decades, from philosophy to theosophy in the West, and, as a corollary of this, a corresponding shift of emphasis from theosophy to philosophy in the East, so that an attempt at attaining to a compromise is under way in deference to evolutionary requirement. For a world civilization - which is what evolution would seem to have in store for humanity - cannot come about if the two main hemispheres of the world are at loggerheads. On the contrary, it presupposes a compromise between science and theosophy, as between physics and metaphysics, the one in the service of the other as man struggles towards the post-Human Millennium - an epoch when science, as technology, and theosophy, as meditation, will be brought to a pitch of harmonious compromise, transcending all hitherto-imagined formulae on the subject. An epoch, I mean, when human brains will be artificially supported and sustained in communal contexts, first as Supermen experiencing upward self-transcendence through LSD or equivalent synthetic hallucinogens, then, following the removal of the old brain from each superhuman individual by qualified technicians, as Superbeings, or collectivized new brains experiencing not merely upward self-transcendence but the nearest thing, prior the heavenly Beyond, to pure self, as the interconnected new brains of each Superbeing hypermeditate towards total transcendence in salvation from the flesh (or its remnants thereof) and consequent attainment to Heaven ... conceived as pure spirit expanding and converging towards other such transcendences in order to establish, with the eventual culmination of heavenly evolution, the Omega Point, i.e. the definitive globe of transcendent spirit, the supreme being of the One, at the opposite pole of evolution to the most infernal doing of ... the Many, i.e. the stars (large and small), which constitute the Diabolic Alpha, but which old-world religions paradoxically describe in terms of the Divine, i.e. the 'heavens'.

Be that as it may, men of the future absolutist civilization won't follow suit, since they will have their minds turned to an exclusive aspiration towards the Divine Omega through self-realization, with no time, in consequence, to worship the alpha or its theological successor in some kind of Christ-like anthropomorphic compromise. For as the 'Three in One', Christ combines, to a relative degree, both Father and Holy Spirit within Himself as man. Like all men, He is thus a combination, as it were, of alpha and omega, neither wholly one (the Father) nor the other (the Holy Ghost), and therefore a distinctly 'Second Person' entity worshipped by Christians as God. The future transcendental civilization, however, won’t have any time for the worship of such a man-god, but will concentrate, through transcendental meditation, on self-realization as a step towards ultimate divinity. That such a divinity won't be fully attained to during the duration of this final human civilization ... can be no argument against the practice of TM. Men will simply have to make the best of their situation and do what they can to create a society closer than any previous one has ever been to the heavenly goal of evolution.

The fact that this society will eventually be bettered, come the post-Human Millennium, is no argument against its short-term existence, since evolution proceeds by degrees towards a long-term goal and cannot proceed straight from the Christian or petty-bourgeois (yoga) civilizations to the Millennium in question, jumping over the need for and justification of a transcendental civilization. Neither can it jump over the post-Human Millennium or, rather, act, through men, as though the millennial Beyond were unnecessary because some people wrongly assume that Heaven can be attained to, in the pure spirit of transcendence, from human effort alone! Unfortunately that is far from being the case, and the Christian West is not alone is assuming the contrary! Given its traditional disregard for technology, the non-Christian East is even more exposed to this fallacy, with consequences all-too-painfully familiar to warrant further mention here. For unless men are eventually superseded by Supermen (brain collectivizations), and they in turn by Superbeings (new-brain collectivizations), there will be no eventual attainment of spirit to the heavenly Beyond, in the absolute purity of total transcendence. Neither the West nor the East has realized this fact, but the world will have to realize it in the future, as it adopts my truth as a means to Heaven, that is to say, to the ultimate truth ... of pure spirit.

Clearly this truth has nothing to do with academic philosophy, with a critique of apparent phenomena, whether natural or artificial or somewhere in-between, but corresponds to the furthest development of the pseudo-philosophical, the most metaphysical of writings, suggestive of prose poetry, to have yet arisen. Not the climax to a petty-bourgeois tradition, but the inception of proletarian absolutism on terms which transcend the relative. This absolutism I distinguish from the relative as philosophical theosophy - the root universal guide for the pioneers of the final human civilization, global and transcendent, to follow. May they learn from me well; for theirs is the road of pure essence, the culmination of all spiritual striving!