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Any intense sensual experience can lower us into transcendence; the taste of flesh, whether in the dining room or the bedroom or the battlefield is always a precipice
We imagine animals have no sense of the past or the future, that they exist in an eternal now, that their consciousness has no object and that this makes them effectively immortal, morally if not literally, because they have no attachment to the past or the future
It isnât true, of course, because we know that both elephants and crows mourn their dead, and that whales have very long memories, as many other animals clearly do, but grant me that there is some phenomenological threshold beneath which lies blissful atemporality
Let us call this âanimalâ modality of timeless consciousness âtranscendentââthis mental state is fearless, because it has nothing to lose; guileless, because deception requires planning; innocent of resentment; because resentment requires remembrance https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1118918856041385984
One thinks of Nietzscheâs contention in the genealogy of morals that the most painful lesson that German man had to learn was to keep a promise, a feat that he learned through generations of brutal discipline that he inflicted upon himself.
Inhibition is the next level of consciousness above mere temporal awareness, (what good is the former without the latter?) and as Nietzsche observed, it is a genetic memory formed across centuries of pain. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1025739449446019074
The horror of contemplating these kinds of transcendent mental states lies in imagining a continuum of awareness of temporality, inhibition, and pain that begins even at the simplest and lowest levels of life, without which we would have none of the traits we cherish as âhumanâ
We might think here of Blake, who wrote that were our senses closed - were we made blind, deaf, dumb, and so forth - we should see all things as they are: endless.
What is the conscious experience of animacula? The fact that we would prefer it to be nothing speaks volumes. As with anything that touches this notion of transcendence, which is a kind of anti-awareness, the question is simultaneously intriguing and repulsive.
Humanity must be defined in contrast to something apart from humanity. This may seem obvious but it becomes fraught when we attempt to specify precisely what those outsides are. The most obvious choice is to juxtapose men against animals.
The boundaries between human and animal are the boundaries between the temporal and the transcendent, which are the boundaries between the profane and the sacred, in that order, and they are delineated by rules called taboos
Taboos vary substantially across both history and geography and yet the existence of taboos and rituals for breaking them is universal. In every human culture there are codes that govern the ways that we engage in sexuality and violence https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1053456596561354752
Taboos are not merely prohibitions on animal behavior, they are interfaces into transcendent experience. When an action is wrapped in a taboo, it becomes an object of fascination and fear, whose proximity fills us with sacred terror.
Transcendent âanimalâ mental states are never far away, but the imposition of taboo allows us to exist apart from our animal inclinations, and to engage in a uniquely âhumanâ existence, which we understand to be rational, particular, and above all temporal https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1037330250961575936
Just as taboos envelop our humanity, transgressions give shape to our primality, which is our animal necessity: to mate, to kill, to eat. Transgression is not merely violation of taboo; it is structured and codified by rules no less rigid than those it inverts.
In transgression we momentarily enter the transcendent realm of animal consciousness, but we are not endowed with primal liberty. Transgression is orderly; it leaves the taboo in tact; it preserves our humanity while paying beastliness its due.
The world where we observe taboos is the profane world, and the world where we transgress them is sacred. The opposite of transgression is desacralization, wherein we attempt to elevate sacred animal things into the profane rational world, and obviate the taboo
The profane world is the world of every day. It is the world of work, the world of society, the world of emotional temperance. "Profanity" does not mean wickedness, it refers to what is common, as opposed to what is sacred
For example, sex outside of marriage is not profane because it is wicked, but rather, it is wicked because it is profane, because it happens in violation of a taboo, but not according to the structured rules of transgression
The same could be said for killing outside the context of war or state-sanctioned punishment of crime. Killing itself is not wicked; war is a ritual transgression, and killing, like sex, becomes wicked when it is profane
The attempt to attenuate the strictures of taboo, especially w/r/t sexuality, is an attempt to make sex "rational", to claim it in the name of humanity, but it always has the opposite effect, dragging humanity down into the transcendent world of the animal https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1060964318890516480
It is not possible to overstate the fact that the object of taboo IS an object of sacred horror, and that a religious sensibility is fundamentally an appreciation of this horror, and religious rules are a kind of border that makes humanity possible
The desire for desacralization is born out of cowardice. A small and stupid person is unable to bear the sacred horror of transcendence on which humanity is constructed, and he reacts by trying to destroy these boundaries. This is called "emancipation" https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1024461099477790721
Now, a word on Christianity. Thus far we have discussed the mechanics of sanctity and profanity in a way that could be characterized as pagan, but Christianity performs a rotation of taboo and transgression within sacred space
From a mechanical perspective, what's forbidden is sacred, and the sacred is accessed through the violence of a broken taboo, but in Christianity, the taboo is absolute, and transgression is always a sin; access to the sacred is Evil; simultaneously, Evil is profane
Christianity splits the sacred and the profane in half: sacred good and profane good merge into one sphere, sacred evil and profane evil into another, and redraws the borders around taboo. This spiritual gerrymandering is the definitive feature of the Christian world
Christianity replaces actual transgressions into the transcendent world (cannibalism, sacrifice, death and rebirth) with symbolic transgressions (the eucharist, the tithe, baptism), and in post-modernity, the sign becomes denatured
With no socially sanctioned gateways into transgression, the sacred slowly loses its aura all together. In this sense, secular ideologies may be seen as hyper-Christian, as Christianity's orientation to the sacred taken to its logical conclusion
Progressive, or enlightenment, or rationalist ideologies are all phenotypically Christian in the sense that they all share this Christian trait of closing off the forbidden sacred, and absolutizing the taboo, and trying to deny even the possibility of sacred evil
It's no wonder young people search for ever more vile forms of self-destruction. They are looking for an affordance into the sacred; for transgression; gladly sacrificing their humanity for it, but the post-Christian paradox demands they desacralize every transgression they find
