The Necroscholastic
It is in the nature of reason to perceive things truly, that is to say, as they
are in themselves, that is to say, not as contingent but as necessary.
Hence it follows that it is through the imagination alone that we
look upon things as contingent both with reference to the past and the
future.
I am not a scholastic. I am a necroscholastic. The scholars of our traditions
and histories, those upon which we are expected to comment or expound (and
today there is really only commentary) do not need to be reconciled with
anything, but rather resurrected. Born again in our own image. It is not my
intention to be particular to the intention of any author — which was the
vanity of the neoplatonists to reconcile Plato and Aristotle, which was the vanity
of the positivists to incorporate the mystical Wittgenstein into themselves
— but rather to construct my own meaning, my own figure of the past.
This is no revision of the past, but rather it is the absence of the
stubbornness that leads to its revision! The past is not a solid thing: every
act of history is a construction, an act of will in the imagination, as much as
it is a work of archaeology. And we have to construct to prefigure our future,
unconsciously or consciously. So I, longing for another, better world,
choose to prefigure the future I desire. While I may begin from them, I do not
necessarily hold our ancestors or traditions in inviolable esteem: I transform them,
laud those I desire, condemn those I despise.
Recently, there has been some talk of toppling statues of confederate soldiers
— monuments to genocide, whose destruction will constructively transform them
— and from that some more talk of toppling the statues of
other "historical" figures, notably Christopher Columbus — that other
great symbol of American genocide. The response to the latter however, has been
less enthusiastic, it being likened to a denial of history, or a denial of the
history's nuance or its "greyness", and likened to the stagnation of history in
Orwell's 1984 that comes from the Party's repression of the
possibility of change in the minds of its citizens... but this repression of
possibility is truly rather this conception that "history is too nuanced to
make real moral decisions about the characters of the past." That paralysis of
action that comes from being ever-contemplative and indefinite suspension of
judgement. It is less important to me to take history within the context of the
past than it is to take it within the context of the future.
Nuance can explain, but it does not excuse. This is true of ideology as well as
of tradition, philosophy as well as history. Do not tell me that the anarchist
excuses the antisemitism of Proudhon, or the thelemite the sexism of Éliphas
Lévi. So destroy, tear down the monuments to the past you detest, and resurrect
only those you choose to.
Though I sometimes read the scholastics, there is no need to really read them.
Only to resurrect their words in our own image: to transfigure the past into the
future that we desire. To take our traditions and interpret them in our
image. To manifest in the images of the collective unconscious from which we
find ourselves expelled those of our conscious, those of our individuation from
the collective, and to will and to imagine, to make new collectives on the
frontier of the unconscious.
—Philoponus Bindle
Jun 10, 2020
Updated Aug 14, 2021