On Humanism and the Arrogant Assertion of the Self
To believe that man is the measure of all things, one will first have to convince himself – surely not all men.
Humanism only makes sense if the human, on the basis of which one moulds an ‘ism’, represents something, something beyond the mere animalism of massed-man. I have come to think, or rather believe, that a human ‘in a crowd’ isn’t truly very different from any other animal. In fact, when a man speaks as one of the crowd, it is rarely the voice of the man that speaks, but almost always a ‘crying out’ of the crowd through him.
Where there is no individuality, that rejects the crowd, there is no possibility of transcendental humanism, there is nothing that aspires to something more than mere biology and chemical-emotionalistic ‘response’ to aggravating stimuli. There is no passion.
Passion is a purely individual self-actuating assertion of meaning by the self, for itself. It can only be cultivated in the solitary chambers of a mind that aspires to great things, which sees itself as a bearer of a destiny that is more than a mere unfolding of routinised life. Passion ruptures routine. He who cannot be contained by routinisation, only he is free.
For this, one most first accept, the desire to be such a man, begins with a separation of oneself from the great binding masses of grouped humanity. To be as one-self, one most first annihilate the trap of boxed identity. Identity is imposition. It is the entrapment lf the soul.
Identity destroys personality.
And personality, when it truly exists as a powerful passionate force, destroys identity.
Liberation begins with this demand of the overself from the deeper-self, the assertion of self over all, above all, beyond all. The all in all, the circular recurrent self-actuating-self. The man. In himself, for himself.
To be bound in empathy with some abstracted notion of a supra-individualistic identity, is the ultimate entrapment of the soul that distorts this chain ot actualisation.
What is the measure then, where is the man?
The true humanist cannot identity with a grouped identity. That would imply an identification with the limitations, failures and followed of that group at large, a decentering of purpose from the self. A revocation of meaning. The annihilation of self creating passion.
True purpose, as a moving impulse of an unfolding great life, requires such a passion to burn as its own soulflame, not as borrowed reflected light. An assertion of one’s inwardly forged destiny over the unfolding plane of time and space, that which is preordained gradually revealed to the world in its preferred increments, the heroic life revealing itself to history.
That is the path which begins from such a reckoning of things.
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