Notes for “Transcendental Aribtration” #1
Do note that this is by both Erik and I
The Problem — Evan Jack
Why not just embrace speculation and conjecture? Why not follow Friedrich Nietzsche in asking “why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance?” Ultimately, we are going beyond that. We are not stopping at truth, nor certainity, nor knowledge. These categories are no longer our basis for thinking. That truth has untruth as its opposite is seemingly unquestionable within any logical framework. From an illogical position, it may be so: truth is without an opposite. Nevertheless, we must finally be the answer to Nietzsche’s question, whose implications have not yet been understood.
That Nietzsche’s question haunts our dreams is realized once the crust of our sleepy and light-stung eyes is wipped away. Let us chase this ghost away! Since all of this is about determination, it is about things being determined by something and as something. Arbitration is therefore immanently a part of the process. To answer the question that has caused us nightmares and daydreams, let us put forth a new qualifier, one that does not have an alternative: transcendental. By transcendental, Erik and I mean unable to be surpassed, unable to be transcended. So, for example, if Zarathustra came down the mountain and then through a question greeted us, “Why not rather that which is transcended?” We could easily answer, “The problem is about alternatives. Transcendental arbitration is without an other, without an alternative, for it is the very nature of transcendental entities to have no alternative that can transcend it. If an alternative cannot take its place, and because taking the place of a transcendental arbiter would be to transcendit , then it really was never an alternative in first place.” In other words, if an alternative has no ability to supplant that which it is supposedly is an alternative to, then it was never at all an alternative to that which it was supposedly an alternative to. With transcendental arbitration, there is no “Why not rather,” and thus, with Nietzsche finally answered, philosophy can begin again!
With philosophy fully having woken up from its great nap, we must ask about those who are even more Godless than Nietzsche himself? And, no, I’m not talking about Georges Bataille and Nick Land here. I’m talking about Johann Kaspar Schmidt, better known as Max Stirner. With Stirner, things get tricky because of his resistance to truth. In his magnum opus The Unique and Its Property, he says, “All truths beneath me are clear to me; any truth above me, any truth I must follow, I do not recognize. For me there is no truth, because nothing goes above me!” But, here, does Stirner not express what we are saying almost exactly? For Stirner, not even nothing transcends him, and thus, “All truth by itself is dead, a corpse; it is alive only in the same way that my lungs are alive.” Stirner agrees with us, transcendence is the criterion for arbitration and its ability to determine things, or, in the words of Stirner, its power. All Stirner is trying to argue is that the Unique is the transcendental arbiter. Stirner was nothing less than a transcendental egoist then! Of course, description eludes the Unique and Stirner’s doctrine is not a doctrine at all, but transcendental egoism sums it up nicely:
I am owner of my power, and I am so when I know myself as unique. In the unique the owner himself returns into his creative nothing, from which he is born. Every higher essence over me, be it God, be it the human being, weakens the feeling of my uniqueness, and only pales before the sun of this awareness. If I base my affair on myself, the unique, then it stands on the transient, the mortal creator, who consumes himself, and I may say: I have based my affair on nothing.
Reading Stirner while listening back to the music I listened to in late 2019 and early 2020, it takes me back to when I was really happy, when I thought I had everything figured out. And while I did believe in a transcendental doctrine, Stirner’s transcendental egoism, that it was circular in its formulation and basis was the reality of the matter.
Ultimately, what this is all a question of is this peculiar qualifier of transcendental. Therefore, it is a question of not just transcendence in the sense of going higher than some other thing, but it is also a question of sovereignty in the sense of being higher than some other thing. Being and becoming again come into the picture, inextricable from any philosophical investigation. Thus, what is transcendental is also that which is sovereign and without a prince, which is to say, without an alternative that could usurp its sovereignty.
Having now identified sovereignty things take on a more interesting turn. Transcendental systems are those systems which effectively conserve sovereignty the most. As Moldbug says, “Sovereignty is conserved.” Land, following Moldbug here, says, “anything that appears to bind sovereignty is itself in reality true sovereignty, binding something else, and something less.” But the word, “the most” sort of bugs me. It isn’t that transcendental arbiters conserve it the most compared to other entities, but they conserve sovereignty the most it is possible to conserve. What systems are these? I guess we will have to find out!
The Problem- Erik Schulz
Some of the most pressing questions one can ask in philosophy are as follows: “how can one go about determining that truth exists?,” and “how can one go about proving logic?” These are the questions whose respective answers are that which all beliefs are founded upon, for if truth and logic were not to exist, then all of which is asserted and believed is therefore untruthful, and illogical. This has prompted many to attempt to prove such concepts, but ironically, the crux of these arguments rest upon that which is supposed to be proven- truth and logic. Conversely, and also ironically, the criticism of such concepts rests upon the same crux (as seen in Neitzsche’s criticism of the law of identity). So, the problem boils down to this- how can one prove or critique truth or logic without utilizing truth or logic? For if truth is simply presupposed via propositions that both assert and fulfill the truth-conditions which are asserted, which is self-grounding, then there can be other similar assertions, for which there is no meta-justification to appeal to. It seems, therefore, that truth and logic must be proven by some means other than themselves; otherwise, we fall into baselessness and nihilism. There therefore must be something which does not fall under these categories the mind submits itself to through a process of “self-negation,” as Mou Zongsan coined, and is instead something beyond the “sensible world,” which “contains the basis for the universal bond of all phenomena.” We must appeal to the intelligible world, which “proclaims an objective principle, i.e. some cause of the binding together of all noumena, i.e. things that exist in themselves,” to transcend these categories. The arbiter for truth, therefore, must be transcendental.
One may attempt to subvert the problem in its entirety, and ask the question, “why not untruth?” or “What if I say no to this transcendental arbiter?,” to which I would reply by asking this question: how can saying no to the transcendental arbiter be construed as anything other than a futile attempt to surpass it? Saying no is an attempt at negation, and therefore must be interpreted as an attempt of competition. However, competition with a transcendental arbiter is useless, as competition is transcendental, as to attempt to surpass competition would necessitate competition by definition. One is wholly unable to surpass that which is definitionally unable to be surpassed. Ergo, this attempt at subversion is self-defeating, as to negate the transcendental arbiter would be to affirm it. So, the answer of “no” is not unwelcome — it only helps competition and strengthens the project.
One may also object by crying out “all of your arguments presuppose analyticity to make the claims that it does!” I would object by saying “if someone says we are presupposing analyticity they are already engaging in conceptual analysis for the content of the propositions which we purport, which itself causes some notion of analyticity to be presupposed.” And any response to our response presupposes such as well, ad infinitum. This counter-argument launches us into an infinite process of competition, once again affirming our position. The one who disputes for the purpose of disputing (or without any purpose at all) is disregarding truth, in light of competition- the very source of truth. So once again, the answer of “no” is not unwelcome.
