The Equality of Strength: A Boundless Kinesis Against any Telos, or the Triumph of Pain Over and Against Suffering
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Dunamis (energy’s potential) has been hidden beneath the final cause, the telos. Dunamis is power, potential as the affirmative dance of a boundless (rather than determinate) kinesis has been hidden beneath the delimited surface of exchangeable plays of victory, in which power exerts itself in the repetition of its own demise as the cancellation of the other within a teleology who's telos is to terminate itself. A ghostly being which drags becoming through a life which ignores itself for the shadow of determinate status. The striving to realize but one possibility always devours the energy which actualizes it into the resignation to the oblivion of fate, in truth teleology is always the fate of a weak power for the strong power is that which generates more power without canceling the actuality of the energy which exerts it. A strong power, a noble power fuses its potential with its other rather than annihilate either potential into the fate of one of the power’s teleology; instead a noble power lets energies freely give themselves to an affirmative dance rather than a march of negation. There is beneath it all a raging sea of power let to power to the nth degree for every other power in the ocean of unique and furious metamorphoses.
Indeed the final cause had rather best be named the homicidal cause as far as life is found on the side of becoming rather than being. Power is not divorced from the actuality enacting it, in fact they are one motion of indefinite actualizing rather than any resolved actualized fate. The good of the one, and the good of the many seem only in conflict causing one to be favored over the other when 1) a being’s potential is divorced from its essence 2) this essence is delimited into fate (teleology). Before stories, bodies, and wars there are only dark horizons cast from the shadows of atoms whose potentialities covers the whole world in each other's different shades of darkness, as in kind the unique light of each individual’s power retexturing the field of the present into a kaleidoscopic foreground. Teleology by contrast emerges when any particular thing delimits itself into a constitution divorcing the world (or potentiality itself) from a thing’s power to actualize bringing birth to war. A determination toward any constitution beyond an affirmation of the whole of the world itself in its infinite possibilities is always a negating constraint that reduces the struggle or actualization to either war (teleology) or peace (terminated teleology -via teleology–), as any part of the world which resists this fate must be negated into its procession as one history, one story of suffering.
Indeed the defeat of suffering could never be to liberate man from pain, but liberate pain from the judgment of man; the innocent atomized sense which casts a shadow toward a future as dark as the shadow’s shade ceasing to be devoured by constitution and stories themselves which “enrich” the innocent pain into this play of flat games of narrativization. The fate of constitution which struggles to actualize itself atop the innocent dance of pains flattens the conflict of powers into an exchangeable play for or against its realization as teleology on the plane of war delimits its realization to the actual negating the heterogeneity within the future of the powers away from their constitution (or rather in-constitution) based on their potential from power itself. This is why in essence teleological powers are weak, as they are born from a privation of power; a subordination of infinite vectors of becoming to a delimited fate rather than expanding the roars of the fires of becoming into ever greater acts of metamorphosis.
By contrast a fate divorced from the world it occurs in becomes the judgment and condemnation of the world, as now any power which enters the exchangeable play of actualization is now measured by extensive units of the game, put against the game as if against a ruler causing all powers delimited into this game to be condemned or affirmed on account of the game rather than themselves. This is suffering where pain is judged by the values of extrinsic meaning rather than affirmed in itself as the most base driver of potentiality. Pains instead of being nodes of exploration of the cosmic play through teleology are reduced to speed bumps and ramps for one perspective resulting in a constitution of events of suffering in a story. Instead of the pure presence of aching, aching becomes aching of, and through the perspective of the of, pain is condemned; the aching of the foot is condemned by the frustrated telos of the foot. Indeed any delimited scenario of mere constitution without the infinite shadow it draws of in-constitution is moralized even at the most basic level once inequality is established within a framework of equal units of the game. Power is that which exerts itself, and can be found in either a weak and a strong form depending on if it exerts itself toward continued exertion or toward a resolved exertion.
A strong power is not a power of a higher magnitude, but of a higher affirmation; a power which finds its joy dwelling in power, dancing in its boundless transformations. A strong power sees exertion as a means to maintain exertion itself, in other words to perpetuate the play of powers rather than complete the process toward the teleology of a victory. Exertion resolves when a power places itself against a power it cannot resist (war) or when power places itself against that which cannot resist it (peace), essentially where all conflict is reduced to one side of an encounter flowing through its other who has been virtually reduced to an empty space. Weakness in metaphysical battle utterly eradicates one of the exerting powers in the conflict. We see here that strength and weakness are not just characteristic of the powers involved in the conflict, but the conflict itself; for having the power to eliminate the other still exerts nothing but the other's weakness in the encounter rather than the strength of the eradicating power. Power of mere destruction is rather self abasement as the other is part of the very field of one’s own possibilities, thus to annihilate the other is to in a sense annihilate part of one’s self as well. No, power when expressed as a strong power is creative.
Teleology is an inequality that exerts weakness through the equality which undergirds a common vantage, it is indeed an equality of weakness. Equalities of weakness seek to reduce all conflict to an exchange of actualities where one redundantly asserts their being on another without dialogue with the co-constitutive potential that determines the body equally so as to her immediacy. There is however in contrast to this equality of weakness an equality of strength where the common unit of all entities is not their delimited actuality but unlimited potentiality, which is the infinite movements of the world of becoming as such. Equalities of strength affirm the enigma of the other by asserting one's potentiality against the other in which the battle becomes a dialogue between two infinites rather than two finites. I call this struggle of potentials in contrast to war and peace which constitutes the struggle of actualities, martial arts (I care not the historical connection or historicity of the term).
Strength is a principle of affirming equality, however let us declare now that we affirm equality not because we are exchangeable subjects of law but rather because we are all irreducible ruptures that are in fact greater than such an “empty” equality. The empty equality is an equality below the world as the spark in every singular spirit that can make the world shake is frozen in the zero entropy dance of sleeping in the subliminal order of the weakness of inequality. What we affirm is not such an empty equality, but rather an equality of strength. To declare an equality of strength is not to affirm all strengths are equal, but rather that a world of equality is far more befitting of the strong spirited than the flat homeostasis of inequality. Those of strong spirit have hitherto been duped by the inequality of weakness into believing it to be the inequality of strength, when the latter is really the complementary side of the equality of strength. The inequality of strength is always an inequality of differences rather than an inequality within homogeneous categories, strength when exerted homogeneously always reveals its opposite weakness in its exertion. This oppression power exerts in homogeneous comparison is always equally an expression of the weakness of those of lesser power. The call to the other the strong exerts on the weak in this interaction is answered back by a meek whisper. What disappointment! Does not the mighty long for nothing but a challenge? What challenge is it to oppress? What business does the strong have in such trivial pursuits? But what of the expression of difference? The expression that resonates with an alien call back from the shadows the strong barks into. The lion growls into the sky only for the falcon to caw back. The lion ruler of ground, falcon ruler of sky; equally rulers but on the non-homogeneous plane of difference where victory is always a different challenge against a different adversary rather than a monotonous repetition of an exertion of power of the same kind.
New adversaries require new powers, the diversity of rivals always enriches the power of the challenger, evolving this beacon of strength to new heights within his plethora of faculties. But in a true battle of rivals this evolution carries on to the adversary as well. Every strike the two adversaries evolve into a new stage becoming and over-becoming pushing their limits against each other. Would this battle of heterogeneous rivals be a battle to the death though? For the strong and challenge hungry the answer would be no. As aforementioned each stage of conflict evolves the adversary into a new challenge; thus to exterminate an adversary is to exterminate the challenge and reduce life’s excitement by yet another increment. Those who truly long for a challenge rehabilitate rather than neutralize their adversaries. For the martial artist of spirit conflict is the glorious harmony of contradiction that opposes both war and peace and enemies of the joy of becoming and vitality; war and peace are but the dialectical twins of the nihilism of death. Not simply the death of the body exerted on the other in war, but also the death of the spirit exerted on one’s self in peace.
Every battle however needs a battleground, and this battleground itself becomes an adversary. The battleground of the mighty can be no less than the world itself, the absolute infinity of the cosmos and all its in-constituted forces left to their full power and freedom. The world as battleground is the distinct opposite notion of the world as home found in the equality of weakness which is the offspring of war and peace. The goal of war and peace is the same to reduce all battlegrounds to homes, to be homeostatic contractions of the wildernesses of this world, seeking nothing more than to make even the fire of the sun into a hammock in which to sleep this life away within. A drive to reduce this world to yet another homogenous plane of oppression depriving each corner of it of its unique adversarial character of a dialogical rival. The pretension of ownership is the key to the weak’s desires in this case for they believe if they are to never let go of the sand, not only the sand but the very earth itself will not let go of them in kind. Oh pity they who lose their sand to the wind! The weak can only own that which they can come to hold, but the strong are in no business holding onto the burdens of the earth. The strong do not even need to let the sand blow in the wind to have lost it for they have already chucked it from their own hands. The strong give the sand back to the wind for what truer proof of “ownership” is there than the ability to give what one owns? “I own the sand enough to be able to give it to you” says the mighty, “but it does not own me”. The mighty do not just take this attitude toward the sand but the whole world since for them it was never even a question that the world was theirs. The weak will be swallowed and spat out by the same world they wish to swallow for they have never learned the art of spitting out. The weak will be gluttonous consumers of the very parasites they claim to rule, as the parasites will eat their being inside out ultimately leading to them vomiting the will of their inequality of weakness into a whole world of living death. But for those who are not even strong enough to spit out the parasites will themselves be spat out by the very parasites they swallowed, spat out from the inside out as the chaos of the world drives them in their epiphenomenal “ordering” of it back into the same chaos they wished to curtail by “owning”. The weak intend to earn peace by owning love itself ultimately obtaining neither, while for the strong love was their only condition of ownership in the first place(if you even could call it that).
For the strong the world left to its freedom is the play of becoming but this play is always the play of living rather than the play of death for death is play’s very antithesis. Challenge is a joy, and in its joy it is utterly painful as those who embrace the challenge of becoming bear on them the very pain of the world itself. Pain is not suffering, pain is the awareness of an adversary that drives one to act. The act may be to counter and rehabilitate the adversary the act of lifting the world OR the act may be to simply to ignore the adversary the act of moving through the world; either option is possible to the strong. The pain of a broken leg can either be rehabilitated into health and restored to a new stage of our conflict with terrestriality or cut off (ignored!) leaving the leg to its own freedom of conflict with worms of the earth. Pain is a joy for it is pain that drives us to life, in fact the strong do not fear the abundance but rather the lack of pain for there is no greater joy to the strong than the constant rehabilitation and ignoring of a thousand pains (besides ten thousand pains) for this is the emancipation of the equality of strength to make everything in this world a struggle but a livable one nay one in which we thrive.
Suffering by contrast is not pain for suffering indicates what can precisely not be resisted or rather what we choose to accept as irresistible war, and that which cannot resist that which ends our struggle in nihilistic peace. War and peace are the two heads of the imp of suffering one coming from without: a pain or pains that has overshadowed the struggles of other pains in other words when we come to treat a pain as a god. The other head coming from within; when pains can no longer put up resistance toward us and we are left with a homogenous plane of oppression that can do nothing for us but hurl us silently toward living death. The weak are at home in the suffering of war for they need a pain to bow down to find their role in the totality of said war, as this plane or oppression is the only place in which they secure victory. Victory is the death of becoming, the eschatology of all conflict for the weak in which war is the tool used to construct such an end times with peace being the end times constructed. Suffering is meaningful pain, pain that has value only transcendently from without in its meaning rather being a joy immanently as a pain. Pain for the weak must be subordinated to the meaningful making the value of each pain disappear into the ascension or descent of war. War ascends and descends the ladder of pains to either sink all pains into a pit of meaning from below denying the ground of battle itself as the pain of the world is denied, reducing its vitality to the “home” (the nation, the world order, what have you). The sinkhole within the battleground freezes a pain’s immanent power to resist into the path of teleological construction in the name of another pain “the home” taken as a transcendent depreciating value of those who walk on its homogenous plane.
War also can depreciate that which is above itself standing above the ground through all potential adversaries in its “victory”, its virus of a war to the death undertaken in the name of ending war itself the black fire which eats the colors of every other fire burning wildly for a moment only to reduce all burning to its monotone silence. War either denies the ground for having adversaries in the first place “the world”, or denies all adversaries one by one as it spreads its nihilistic cancer of meaning. Meaning is the antithesis to the immanent joy of battle found beyond war and peace. In meaning battle is only valuable insofar as it produces peace, pain must prove meaningful in the peace or telos it generates. But what is generated in peace but the nothingness of conflict’s end itself?! Meaning or teleology are the bedfellows of meaninglessness or teleology’s very telos is to terminate teleology. The drive to meaning is the drive to death, the drive toward the death of the future and the death of the present that negates the immanent value of all pain as being subordinate to the transcendence of meaning. Meaning in a temporal sense is teleology, when beings (or pains) project themselves toward a goal that assimilates or destroys other pains towards its resolution in the construction of "ownership" (see earlier sections). When this teleology is realized the pain/being loses its "meaning" and is hurled into a state of living death where all intrinsic value is lost without the measure or meaning.
Teleology at once has an affirmative aspect to the pain toward the pain taken as a transcendent value for itself and secondly has a negative aspect of denying the ground of battle or the world itself putting the owned body it creates into a sensitive determinate status. This second stage realizes an internal decline process in the body the teleology sought to form from the top down as its own nihilism toward the world turns against itself and the body fractures due to lacking any affirmative character. Teleology as affirming a way for the world to be denies implicitly the world in its full possibility and thus degenerates into an oppositional nihilism that eats away the body the teleology constructed once the teleology is resolved into sturdy forms since the affirmative constructive character of the teleology is lost and thus the only uniting factor of the body is its neurotic nihilistic paranoia at the teleological other which is the world itself which seems to infect the body that was made to combat it in the first place.
Meaning can take a second degenerative form where the meaning is exteriorized rather than interiorized but in a negative sense, where one other pain/being is taken as a negative value to be eliminated and then like a virus spreads to every other remotely connected pain/being from the bottom up in a fire of hatred or resentment.
Those who embrace pain without meaning, those who deny suffering in the joy of immanence do not just affirm the world. They affirm the world to Nth power, with N being every adversary the mighty gives the world. When the mighty is confronted with the exploding nebulas in the sky, they do not shutter in fear like the weak, no in fact the whole display leaves nothing but a stoic look upon the face of the mighty. The mighty see the burning starlight eating away thousands of planets and think “not enough, more”... They see the sublimity of becoming and want to shock into an even more glorious sublime! And it is always a greater sublimity for the mighty as there can never be a greatest as the essence of greatness is to be greater. The mighty want the earth to shake, and they accomplish this shaking by allowing everything with even a modicum of power the full right to stomp upon its surface. What transcendence is needed to justify this shaking? The shaking dance of the world shutters on its own accord by the inner power of every one of its particles. The strong have no need for transcendence for them to find value in their life as they find it in the endless struggle against an indefinite number of immanent adversaries and a battleground ceded to the adversaries for good measure!
This field of dancing pains realizes itself in phenomena as the true fulfillment of experience. However this fulfillment and saturation of experience back into the purity of life is not the silent light of a flat image, but the lens of a potential so transparent to the senses that penetrate through its surface that the passing of each sense through the glass in their utter suchness and dynamism fill the foreground and the background of the lens in a single harmonious and momentous stream that can only be called the glorious freedom of a texture of power. It is not at the time when the world drains into the empty pit made between the distance from our ego and our environment that we feel fullness of life as if the world was some toxin polluting its stomach, but rather the utter presence and immediate realizability of the world into a place of action continuous with our body as one mighty flow where the ground feels a place to run and the air an energy to inhale into our continuity without the distance of frozen potentials that forestall the immediacy of what can only be called life. No, these are burning potentials that animate the very texture of the world as a combined potential-actuality that realizes the capacities of the world in the very enacting of the world, rather than forestalling them in the distance of observation and application. When the ground feels ground, a place where I can do things, with my feet as both mediator and actualizer and this mediation of the body in dialogue with the world as utter contact extends omnipresently and saturates experience, this is freedom in its true suchness as the texture of power…
Play is heaven! The impure motions of life moving together in the name of the good of battle. All suffering will disappear into the joyous pain of battle. But this world of battle will not arise from a new superior transcendent individual. The world of affirmation is not the world of the “superman” but the “superfamily” born immanently by a new way of relating to others. This superfamily is what is born when we cease to abandon the adversary to the home of suffering, war, and peace and drag their hand into the glorious world of eternal battle. The weak see gods of suffering within all the adversaries of the future they encounter believing anything new, anything that may even remotely surpass them will surmount the home they have built for themselves. The mighty agree these new adversaries will surmount the home but do not have faith that it will be toward the end of pain, the end of this world. No, for the mighty the onset of new adversaries is a new beginning; a new member to the superfamily that will bring with them all the terror (yes!) but also all the joy of the adversary with them. Let this be a message to you who seek the glorious chaos of becoming, do not fear the future for her terror. Embrace it with all your strength! For this terror is always a new glorious adventure, a glorious battle to be overcome! This encounter with the home shattering horizon must be confronted again and again to the Nth power for every encounter as is the art of over-becoming! Let us battle each other in the joy of pain, for we are not an empty equality; we long for equality because we are always greater than it. To give every adversary the whole of the world, and to make everything alive an adversary; this glorious madness is the equality of strength!
The Gazer (a brief illustrative fable...)
The unyielding Thanatos of boredom gazes at the chaos of the stars, screaming:
"Not enough! More!"
Becoming rattles through the heavens, yet those fearless eyes want this rattling to shake the earth, and once she has shaken the earth she would then shake our skin. But even this is not enough for these eyes that shimmer with Thanatos, a wild soul like this wants becoming to shake even their heart and the blood inside that heart. Endless shaking, endless power.
But those who look to the earth want a home, conserving the dirt on which they stand they bury themselves in this static “home.” How does the drive of destruction shake with more life than the meek who sleep in their “homes"?
“I know why.”
The gazer mutters under his breath,
“They have no faith in their own lives so they lay lifeless atop another’s. And then they have the gall to say they love this world on which they sleep, that in fact they are defending the world from the rootless hunger of I. But they are wrong. This world yearns to dance, this world yearns to be free as she basks in the endless challenge of love’s glorious imbalance.”
These feeble diggers began to build a whole city beneath the dirt so as to never have to even see the sun again, let alone dance with her. They build tunnels through tunnels rooting a whole “home” together for the worms they are, as the germ grows in reverse away from the stars deeper and deeper into the earth.
Ignoring the weed these diggers have grown, the gazer begins to hear the rhythms of the wind. And in her rhythms he could sense the glory of becoming. The gazer begins to pat the earth to the wind’s beat. Then over yonder he saw another man patting the earth in the same rhythm, The gazer looked at his eyes and saw the glorious passion of Thanatos. He too hungers for becoming. As they pat the earth something strange happens. The diggers begin to climb out. They are curious what could make such a racket, yet in shock they see it is only two men and the rustling of the wind.
In rage some diggers try to drag the gazers into the earth with them by their ankles, yet the gazers resolutely continue to drum across the dirt. This begins to shock some of the diggers making them stop and shutter in fear. But then the diggers start to look at each other and back at the gazers. There was something oddly admirable about the gazer’s unrelenting will to becoming. And then, from quiet to loud the drumming increased. Not just from the gazer but also the diggers. The drumming of the wind began to reverberate through the city of diggers as those trying to cling on to the static earth started to fall through it. Soon the entire world was shaking its song to the stars. Finally the earth itself began to ride across the wind, a wild spaceship hurtling through the stars. The gazer now winded by the flying earth falls to his rear. The diggers are dancing, singing, even fighting. And in a stunning revelation he saw the stars in those who were once diggers, a rattling song of becoming that longs to dance with the world like he. And in this realization he knew, that equality was always the greater and more fun challenge than standing above the diggers like a God. And in this challenge the gazer could finally smile resolute.
--- Anthemic Lullaby (Joshua Wiley) ---