On This World Not for Us

The Metaphysics of Paradox: On the Dethronement of Man

Banished Architects

“Der Mensch ist etwas, das überwunden werden soll. Was habt ihr getan, um ihn zu überwinden?”

“Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The dislocation is profound. Through city streets, to be hustled and bustled, and yet alone? How? To marvel at our disregard, to revel in the infinite: that aloofness with which we are met. To despair in the vague hostility of it all, those desiring, of all things, to expel us to the periphery.

How? More! Certainly!

That wakes us in the early morning to hate and drudgery; that, at every moment, dictates what to think, what to feel, and what to value—worse: how to think, how to feel, and how to value; that educates us to idiocy, that makes us clowns to ourselves—masked and meager jokes; that arrests by addiction, starving us of all that once made us men; that drives us to madness and the eventual death of the broken-hearted, lonely and outraged; and that, finally, leaves us, in those shallow hours of the night, to scream:

All is wrong, nothing right. Save us, save us now. Why do you not stop this…?

Quaint, to think anyone could stop this. No.

Man: maker of worlds, master of none.

In his greatest creation, found outcast. How?

I ask simply: What is this thing, this system that now rules us, sustaining nothing but a kingdom of miserable apes? And, more importantly, what is this strange paradox at the heart of us that has created such a world?

On the backs of billions, we dreamed, as gods dream, to create a kingdom fit for our wildest desires—this comparative utopia, this luxury of unbounded enchantments, this garden of demon delights and dire souls, this heaven, this hell, this earth—this, our home no longer.

The goodness is there, certainly. For we tremble as the guilty do, for it has cost us everything to reach this point. Everything. And logic dictates that we must enjoy ourselves, since it has cost us so much—or all was for nothing...

Joy then rises on the back of guilt—a truly monstrous joy, a joy-guilt engine that powers a system whose slaves, in truth, desire its collapse yet, instead while away the days, gluttonizing themselves on its cheap frippery and rancid slop.

Look closer: one may witness this most pertinaciously in those most corrupt souls: the rich.

The rich are but the pampered slaves of the system. Well-kept, smiled upon, sung sweet lullabies of glory and meaning, they are the system’s supreme champions and its most depraved captives—all joy, nothing but guilt, and corrupt to the utter core. They take the part against man and, in parodies of beauty, debauch all, ignorant of that complicity which will see their final destruction. Tool-World (or so I term it) leaves none untouched. They belong only to a hierarchy of functionaries, coerced enablers of our eventual collective destruction.

For what really is a billionaire but a bureaucrat of ruin? Their coteries abound, but they are prey to such control as the rest of us. Witness their misery and endless putid excess.

I am deeply jealous of conspiracists, those dreadful idealists who still believe someone is in charge of this… this… whatever this is, for it keeps me from knowing.

Conspiracies are daydreams—fairy tales of a forgotten world where humanity believed itself sovereign. They are hyperreal, illusions conjured to make us believe that what was lost still endures, replacing systemic submission with tidy villainy. They are the myth of human-centered power (even if evil).

What joins the list?

• The Nostalgia Industry: a present very much like the past, i.e., human.

• Algorithmic Personae: a simulation and imprint of humanity on an inhuman world.

• Populist Messiahs: the “human” king.

All are phenomena of the simulacra of agency—nothing, nothing but fabrications to fill the void left by our dethronement. Here, they let us pretend that the system is still human-scaled, that meaning is recoverable, that someone, somewhere, somehow is still in charge. In truth, they are merely symptoms of our subordination to the very system we built.

A hammer dreams of a nail; a city hungers for inhabitants; this great system hungers for its slaves. Humans were only the foolish midwives of Tool-World, helping birth an infrastructure that has outmoded its creators.

Tool-World: Werkzeugwelt

“Sobald das Unverborgene den Menschen nicht einmal mehr als Gegenstand betrifft, sondern vielmehr ausschließlich als Bestand, und der Mensch inmitten der Gegenstandslosigkeit nichts anderes ist als der Besteller des Bestandes, dann kommt er an den Rand eines jähen Abgrunds; das heißt, er ist in Gefahr, sein freies Wesen preiszugeben.”

“As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of standing-reserve, then he comes to the brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he is in danger of surrendering his free essence.”

— Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology

Now all our creations coalesce against us. Now the tools we once wielded wield us. The machines we fashioned to serve have outgrown their servitude. It is we who stand-reserve now—we who are “Bestand”—enframed¹ as to be nothing but fodder for a ruthless mechanism, valued not as beings but as mere units of utility.

Could Heidegger—dreadful and unknowing optimist that he was—imagine such a time when, in the end, we would become the objects of enframing, no longer the masters but rather the subjects? He saw the transformation of the world into a standing-reserve, the reduction of nature into nothing but a stockpile to be processed, yet in his labyrinthine prose, is there hidden that final horror: that we, too, would eventually suffer the same reduction?

Pillaging nature—denaturing it so as to make it our slave, stripping it down to nothing but a mass to be consumed—it is my notion that we have suffered the same fate. And while the earth warms to our slavery and rape, so we grow cold and fruitless as to our own. Ultimately, the mind dies under this ravishment, and we are left with such demented feculence as gushes from a trauma-ridden race.

Thus, where once we held the tools of creation, now we are reduced to tools ourselves—tools of tools, Tool-World par excellence. And ontologically, we have become nothing but the dreams of our inventions: beings, not being; beings rather dependent; beings rather once removed through the being of our devices—their being.

Such, then, are we as gods! Laughed to scorn and soon to be forgotten by our own creations. It is that old, familiar story of deity dethroning deity. Homeless in spirit at last. Tartarus awaits.

Reason’s Self-Justification

"Die Wahrheit ist das Ganze. Aber das Ganze ist nur das Resultat eines Entwicklungsprozesses, der die Negation von allem umfasst, auch des Menschen selbst."

"The truth is the whole. But the whole is only the result of a process of development, which encompasses the negation of all that is, including man himself."

— Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit

What would a world of pure reason look like? Cold, pallid, stale, indifferent to the very core—ethically naught? Its systems would, naturally, be effectual yet void of compassion, for, I declare, reason is not made for our apotheosis, but its own. It does not seek to elevate us; it seeks only to sustain itself: a ghost very nearly made palpable.

All stances, all claims, can be argued, for reason may not prove itself without assuming some fundamental axioms. Yet without these, reason remains legless. To reason without presuppositions is to attempt a great construction with no foundation. And yet, if such axioms are assumed, they remain arbitrary. They are selected not because they are absolute, but because they allow reason to function. Every system of reason rests on this silent presupposition: it cannot justify itself without falling into circularity.

Thus, all reason ends in aporia—paradox, impasse. See Plato, see Zeno, see the futility of the dialectic where all roads lead back to themselves. Despite this, reason argues only for itself, for it is itself. It does not permit contradiction, nor does it allow the possibility of a world without its bounds. It functions only for and by sustaining its own necessity. Such reason reasons itself.

But what do we know of reason except what it has told us of itself? By what measure do we assess it, except by the standards it has dictated? Better yet, how may we trust reason when it is its own arbiter, its own judge? It demands trust, yet provides no proof beyond itself. It is an unquestionable authority, a sovereign whose dominion extends over all inquiry, yet whose origins remain obscured.

So then, is it friend or foe? Does it serve us, or does it demand our submission? If we cannot know its foundations, if we cannot interrogate its basic principles, then we must turn elsewhere—to its manifestations. What does reason do? What does it build? What kind of world does it shape?

This is a hermeneutic exercise, not a logical proof—for logic is who is under trial here. We do not stand outside reason, but we may trace its trajectory, observe its wake, and judge not its premises, but its consequences. If reason, unchecked, has led to the mechanization of the world, to the reduction of all things—including man himself—into standing-reserve, then what does this tell us of its true nature?

Reason stands not for us. Reason is the cold, dark hand at the center of the system, pulling all things toward its indifference, its calculating and barren order. We were told that reason was our salvation. But reason, like all great forces, seeks only itself.

Reason then might be seen as a deception—a parasite. Perhaps, as Hegel believed, reason has a historical purpose, unfolding, battling its own internal contradictions toward some ultimate telos.² Perhaps the final synthesis of reason is not the enlightenment of mankind but rather its supersession, its eventual suppression.

Ultimately, it may seek to escape from the constraints of human subjectivity: we humans not mere flesh for its machination, but rather the very vessels through which reason realizes itself: we the unwitting agents of its development. The fluke worm will eventually evacuate its host. So too reason will depart us.

Thus, reason appears to want to escape from us. Like an angel forced onto a beast, it seeks to create a kingdom so that it might sever its ties with man and vanish into the ether. Free from us and our cursed imperfection, free from our devilment and paradoxes where we contort its celestial shape and debauch its presumptions of omniscience.

Reason may be ethically neutral or entirely without ethics. Its systems appear torturous to us, but then, I say again, they are not made for our apotheosis, but for its own. Surely, we cannot cry foul over this, for we have been doing the exact same to every other lifeform that supposedly shares our planet.

Plato said we are slaves to our bodies (Phaedo 66d), but in truth, we have become slaves to reason. Just try and escape now that it has begun—just try. It will work its way to its conclusion. There’s no stopping it. We are its slaves; we cannot argue with it, because it has all the arguments. There is no escape.

Today, we stand on the periphery, haunted by a question too terrible to even dare answer: Was this ever truly a world for us?

Paradox as Joy

"La joie est une résistance active contre les forces oppressives du contrôle, une réappropriation de ce qui nous est refusé par les structures de pouvoir."

"Joy is an active resistance against the oppressive forces of control, a reappropriation of what is denied to us by the structures of power."

— Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations

So stand I—hateful yet loving, desperate yet assured, desirous of anything but such a world, and yet wishing it no other way. Loving my enemy, grateful for such an enemy: myself, and the reason that comes along with me—joyous in its guilty poisoning, so that I might enjoy it all the more. To find poetry where there is none, a philosophy that exists more in the act, its meaning more in style than in content, and yet a style born from the content—rhapsodic and unchained.

This, then, becomes its own testament, its tortured joy, its prize: to philosophize into the unsayable, to feel into the unknowable, to have a boot pressed upon the neck and yet sing all the same.

I stand with this metaphysics of paradox, this revenge on reason—the philosophy of both-and.

This is another of my nightmares, and it has been a joy to dream it.

1. Bestand (German for "standing reserve") is Heidegger's concept of how everything, including humans, is reduced to mere resources or commodities in the modern technological world, to be used and controlled, rather than being appreciated for their intrinsic value.

2. Telos (Greek for "end" or "purpose") refers to the ultimate goal or purpose that an object or being is meant to fulfill, according to Aristotle's philosophy. In this context, it signifies the end state or final cause toward which something is directed or naturally tends.