immateriality + irrationality

One of the tasks of philosophy and literature in the 20th and 21st centuries is to map an 'immaterial but intelligible' world beyond Judeo-Christian conceptions of God, the soul, and original sin. We're using new words; the word 'soul' itself is a holdover, a laziness, a call to tradition. It is also egotistical, 'this 'I' is me, not that staring at me in the mirror.' The soul is a pretty answer to the question 'what is behind, or beside, or beyond... myself? and those I love?' For the getting to the bottom of something, or behind it, or beside it, is one of the main preoccupations of Western thought. There is a pull to believe the image and consider the image everything, and a contradictory yet complimentary provocation to find out what is behind that image. Did not Nietzsche refute the soul-body dualism? Let us, once again, move past the soul.

(I say us, when I mean my soul)

We're just beginning to understand that there are big ideas, often irrational, that can consume and control masses of humanity in direct contradiction to their rational self-interest. We're beginning to map these irrationalities; Deleuze's BwO and War Machine are just two concepts that scratch at the surface of the immaterial world we still are so far from understanding. There is so much still to map, so many concepts left to invent, that the dwindling number of real philosophers presents the very real possibility that this irrational world will never be understood. Perhaps that is an impossibility; perhaps understanding our irrational impulses through the rational building of concepts is quixotic.

Marc Guillaume's method consists of “. . . operating like an archeologist or paleontologist: finding the piece of rock or bone fragment from which we can construct a reality. Paleontologists attempt to reconstruct entire animals from bits of skeleton. They recreate something that cannot be proven. Yet it corresponds to a supposed reality.” That may be close as we can get to truth in this new frontier, the frontier of the irrational.

To understand the irrational, we must become irrational. We must think irrationally, act irrationally, and formulate concepts we know in advance will fail. There was certainty in rationality, it was cleverly mapped by Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and others. Europe held on to that rationality, arguably one of its most beautiful cultural achievements, up until the Great War. It can do so philosophically no longer.

Rayuela, Julio Cortazar. Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain.
Essays, George Orwell. Radical Alterity, Jean Baudrillard + Marc Guillaume.