Getting the Life-force into Perspective. It has been said that the life-force, the so-called élan vital of Bergson, is neither evil nor good: it just is. And evidently this was the belief of the composer Nielsen when he wrote his fourth symphony in 1914-16, at the time of Word War I, a time when the life-force was in full throttle. But some genuine philosophers would beg to disagree with that, not least Schopenhauer, who was of the view that the life-force was precisely the thing that had to be rejected if one was to secure any peace of mind and effective salvation. But Schopenhauer was a lone voice in his time, and his opposition to the life-force, to the will and even, I would argue, to the spirit, was more negative than positive, less Christian than orientally atheistic in the sense of accepting a cessation of will as tantamount to salvation rather than going on, beyond such an unchristian stance, to an acceptance of soul as the godly prerogative of the Saved. There is, in a sense, no salvation with Schopenhauer but, rather, a refusal to play the heathenistic game of will and/or spirit and to regard such a refusal as the best, in the absence of a kind of transvaluation of values commensurate with the rejection of Devil the Mother hyped as God, that can be done. Yet, even with his want of a genuinely godly alternative to what are fundamentally devilish or womanish proclivities which conventional religion has sought to cover with the lie of Providence, Schopenhauer is morally preferable to the advocators of the life-force in one or other of its principal permutations, as either free will or free spirit, and thus a viable alternative or even antidote to the likes of Hegel, with his evolution of Geist, or, subsequently, to Nietzsche, with his paganistic amor fati in the service of the ‘will to power’, and certainly to those in the twentieth century who took affirmation of the life-force a fatal stage further, as did the aforementioned Bergson, with his élan vital, and prepared the way, via Spengler and others, for the Hitlerian apocalypse of World War II, out of which orgy of free will and spirit there emerged the Existentialism of the immediate post-war generation, with its Sartrean doctrine of freedom through action. In fact, it is difficult to think of a philosopher in the post-war generation who, with the possible exception of Camus, could have stood up to the avalanche of heathenistic life affirmation with a Schopenhauerean or even Baudelairean, not to mention Sadian, refusal to believe in or advocate it. For despite the lessons to be learnt from the Second World War, with its monumental clash of Nazism and Bolshevism, the post-war age has been increasingly dominated by America, and America, though less evil than Nazi Germany, is hardly the country to spearhead a rejection of the life-force, being, to all intents and purposes, its principal exponent in a never-ending succession of wilful and spirited acts, productions, declarations, inventions, or what have you. America, for all its checks and balances, believes in the life-force as it believes in free enterprise and the right of those who can to enrich themselves through the legal forms of such enterprise and at the expense, it goes without saying, of others. America now spearheads everything that is rooted, heathenistically, in the life-force which, contrary to what the Danish composer Nielsen may have thought, is anything but neither evil nor good; on the contrary, it is the root of all evil! For what is this free will and this free spirit if not the metachemical and chemical modes of somatic freedom such that issue from a female hegemony at both the northwest and southwest points of the intercardinal axial compass in what is a distinction between the evil of the diabolic and the pseudo-evil of the feminine, between absolute evil and crime in metachemical free soma and bound psyche, and relative evil and crime in chemical free soma and bound psyche, neither of which owe anything to sensibility but are manifestations, purely and simply, of sensuality, and thus of barbarous and natural proclivities. And who or what does it dominate if not the absolute folly and sin, the pseudo-folly and pseudo-sin, of the antimetaphysical in the one case and the relative folly and sin of the antiphysical in the other case, the former no less antigodly than the latter are antimanly, or antimasculine. Thus acquiescence in the life-force, whether at the noumenal level of free will or at the phenomenal level of free spirit, while it may be natural to a female, whether devilish or womanly, is the mark of male folly and sinfulness, and consequently something not only to be regretted but rejected and repudiated from a standpoint, beyond Schopenhauer, that affirms, in sensible male hegemonic fashion, either ego or soul, the former physically hegemonic over what could be called the antispirit of antichemistry within a state-hegemonic/state-subordinate axial integrity, the latter, appertaining by contrast to church-hegemonic/state-subordinate axial criteria, metaphysically hegemonic over what can be called the antiwill of antimetachemistry, its female counterpart. Therefore unless males elect, as they have done in the past but remain to do so on truly contemporary terms, for sensibility and the hegemonic advantages that accrue to such a civilized or cultural stance, they will remain the foolish and sinful victims of evil and crime, of female free will and/or free spirit in metachemistry and/or chemistry, and have little or no prospects of salvation in either case. For salvation is to be delivered from out the shadow or the blinding light, as the case may be, of evil and crime, of wilful and spirited manifestations of the life-force such that constitute, in their own terms, immoral rights the price for whose continual hegemonic existence is the antimoral wrongs of their male dupes and, in a sense, upended ‘fall guys’. But salvation for males is also more than deliverance from the evil of metachemical and/or chemical free will and spirit (coupled to anti-ego and antisoul in the correlative criminality of bound psyche); it is, more importantly, to be delivered from their own folly of antimetaphysical and/or antiphysical free will and spirit (coupled to antisoul and anti-ego in the correlative sinfulness of bound psyche), and to be delivered, more significantly from a church-hegemonic standpoint, from their sinful acquiescence in such folly, the sort of deliverance that can only transpire if the antiphysical elect for metaphysics and have the effect of dragging the chemical along with them towards the underplane subordination, at the northeast point of the axial compass, of antimetachemistry. Salvation for males is principally metaphysical, and therefore it has less to do with physical ego at the southeast point of the said compass, which is constitutive, after all, of a sort of counter-salvation vis-à-vis the counter-unsalvation of the antimetaphysical, than with metaphysical soul at its northeast point, the point that only institutionally exists – and then imperfectly within the Catholic tradition – in relation to church-hegemonic/state-subordinate criteria. The salvation of man is less morally significant, in ego, than the salvation of God, which is to say of the antimanly to godliness, in soul, which can only come to pass within an axial system which is torn, according to gender, between the antiphysical and the metaphysical on the one hand and the chemical and the antimetachemical on the other, a system that offers both salvation (to males) and counter-damnation (to females) as the antiphysically sinful and foolish rise to grace and wisdom in metaphysical free psyche and bound soma and, correlatively, the chemically pseudo-criminal and pseudo-evil counter-fall to pseudo-punishment and pseudo-goodness in antimetachemical free psyche and bound soma, the former position in each instance church hegemonic and the latter position state subordinate. To some extent Catholicism in predominantly Catholic countries like Eire permitted this and to a limited extent, despite all the gains of quasi-state-hegemonic criteria under American commercial pressures, still does; but if the American influence is to be significantly countered, then it will take a lot more than Catholicism to save and counter-damn the relevant types of people more efficaciously. It will take, as I have argued all along, Social Theocracy and its resolve to counter the outer and somatically-based forms of freedom with the inner and psychically-based forms of freedom on an equally, if not more radically, synthetically artificial basis commensurate with the global requirements of universality. For freedom, like sanity, is actually a relative term. Those who believe in the life-force, call it élan vital or what you like, only have a somatic take on freedom, as indeed on sanity, which they conceive of in outer terms, as though life were a perpetual supermarket. Those of us who have come to reject such an evil thing from the standpoint of wisdom and, more importantly, grace know, on the contrary, that freedom can also be inner, and that inner freedom manifests as an inner form of sanity which has nothing to do with the outer light and everything to do with the inner light, be that light natural or, in the contemporary case, artificial or, more to the point, synthetic. Just as the inner sanity of ego countered, in worldly times, the outer sanity of spirit, ushering in the so-called Age of Reason at the expense of irrational faith, so the time has come for the inner sanity of soul to counter the outer sanity of will in order that the otherworldly may replace the netherworldly as the dominant characteristic of the age, bringing to pass an Age of Truth at the expense of illusory facts. And the more it does so, the more, by a correlative token, will that which relativism holds to be an outer form of sanity appear, on the contrary, as positively or, rather, negatively mad, the fundamentally instinctual or irrational madness of that which is driven by somatic freedom of either a wilful or a spirited order … to the detriment of psychic peace.