Post 666: Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia

As numerical phobias go, fear of  666 - the number of the Beast - is certainly right up there within the cultural imagination; perhaps only the number 13 frightens or discomforts more people.    

Let those who have understanding reckon with this number, entreats the author of Revelation. And trying to puzzle out the precise nature and identity of the Beast has been something generations of scholars, theologians, artists and occultists have spent their lives doing. Aleister Crowley famously declared himself to be the Beast 666 and the number is key within his magickal system of Thelema.

According to Crowley, it's an important solar number; though whether this refers to the Ideal sun of Plato radiating Truth, Beauty and Goodness, or the malevolent sun of Bataille that decays and incites acts of sacrificial madness, I don't really know and, if I'm honest, don't really care - 'cos Crowley always rather bored me.     

Thus if, when young, I painted the number 666 on the collar of a shirt emblazoned with the words I am an anti-Christ / I am an anarchist, I was being more Rotten than Beastly ...       

On Writing

I have often been asked: Why write? 

I don't think there's a definitive answer to this. Ultimately, each writer is free to offer their own reasons for picking up a pen. But it seems to me that Roland Barthes is right to emphasise the need for pleasure. Writing isn't always easy or a great deal of fun, but it does strangely gratify (which is why it's essentially an erotic activity and not a moral or scientific one).     

And it does this both in a negative fashion - by warding off boredom, for example, or provoking enemies - and in a more positive manner; writing pleases because it enables one to become-other. By decentring language and deterritorializing the individual, writing produces not only new meanings, but new selves.

Writing, therefore, has a crucial task to perform; it generates difference and contributes to smashing the Stereotype and the hell of the Same (i.e. society's fixed symbolic order). Writing lets us lose face, waste time, and think dangerous new thoughts. 

This is why writing is also a distinctive politico-philosophical activity; it lends substance to the idea that there is greater value in playful poetic musing or posting bits of theory-fiction on a blog, than there is in an honest day's work.

Notes on the Kelvin MacKenzie and Fatima Manji Controversy

Let me say at the outset: I really don't like Kelvin MacKenzie. He's the sort of red-faced, reactionary bigot who brings British journalism (and white masculinity) into such disrepute.

Let me also say that I have nothing but respect and admiration for the Channel 4 reporter Fatima Manji, who's the kind of intelligent, courageous young woman that I find particularly attractive. If I were to be shipwrecked on a desert island or trapped in a lift with one of the above, it wouldn't be the former editor of The Sun that I'd choose for company. 

However - and it pains me to say this - I think Mr MacKenzie has a fair point when he objects to a hijab-wearing woman (i.e. one who proudly identifies herself as a Muslim) being deliberately used to front the news of yet another terrorist outrage (the Nice massacre) carried out by someone who also declares himself to be a member of her faith.

I understand perfectly the politics at play here and certainly don't think it was done "to stick one in the eye of the ordinary viewer" as MacKenzie suggests. It was, rather, a clumsy and patronising attempt by C4 to show unity and demonstrate that there are plenty of good Muslims, like the lovely Miss Manji; not an attempt at malicious provocation or insult.

And yet, in truth, there was something inappropriate about her staged appearance; in the same way that, for example, it wouldn't have been quite the done thing to have news of an IRA bombing reported by a newsreader dressed as a leprechaun, or to be told during the Blitz of another Luftwaffe attack by a reporter wearing lederhosen. It's a question of semiotics; of being sensitive to the ambiguity of signs and meaning.

It's also a question of style and the language of fashion, since it wasn't Miss Manji's onscreen presence as such that caused unease in certain viewers, but the fact that she was wearing a veil, thereby overtly signifying where her ultimate loyalty lies; not to the men, women and children killed in Nice, but to a God who is at best indifferent to human suffering and at worst fully complicit with it.

It would have been touching I think - and incredibly powerful as a symbolic gesture - if Miss Manji had dispensed with her hijab for one night and read the news as a woman of flesh and blood and not a woman of faith.            

The Case of Qandeel Baloch

How em looking?

The murder of 26-year-old model and social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch by a sibling attempting to restore and secure his family's honour, has succeeded only in elevating her status and bringing genuine shame onto himself, his religion and his nation.   

Whether by accident or design, Miss Baloch transformed herself from just another Kim Kardashian wannabe and pouting selfie-queen, into a political activist and pop-feminist icon within the deeply depressing Islamic dystopia that is Pakistan today.    

Her death, far from being senseless - as some liberal commentators like to claim - actually makes perfect sense within the misogynistic logic of a phallocratic regime. As Afiya Zia writes, it's simply a continuation of the "historic and routine act of eliminating female bodies that are defiant of the male-defined socio-sexual order".

She continues: "The more threatening that fitna-potent women in Muslim contexts are, the more chances that they will be physically eliminated to prevent rupture of the order." There was, thus, a grim inevitability that Miss Baloch's fate would be a tragic one. And hardly surprising that it would be at the hands of a close male relative. 

Obviously, something needs to change: we need to stop thinking of young girls as symbols of family honour, or pieces of family property; we need to dispel the fear and loathing that continues to surround female bodies; and, as Afiya Zia, suggests, we need "more women like Qandeel to scale up the discomfort of those privileged hypocrites and morality-mongers who fear sexual women more than murderous men".


Note: I am grateful to Pakistani feminist and critic Afiya S. Zia for sharing her recently written and as yet unpublished article, 'A Problem Called Qandeel', with me and consenting to my quoting from it.

 

Reflections after the Atrocity in Nice

Marianne à bout de souffle face à la terreur ...

swahacartoons.blogspot.co.uk 

After Nice, a lot of people are calling for something to be done beyond putting out the candles and teddy bears once more or creating caring hashtags on social media; some are even calling for an act of reprisal not just against the Islamists, but the wider Muslim community itself. 

Such an act would, of course, not only violate international law, but effectively mark the end of how we in the West morally define ourselves; as Christians who forgive and turn the other cheek; as liberals who subscribe to notions of due process and human rights; as modern individuals who pride themselves on being such and having abandoned ancient notions of collective responsibility and collective punishment.  

This has nothing to do with Islam means, among other things, that we - as ideal individualists - find it barbarous to associate causal responsibility and guilt with an impersonal and collective form of agency. We want to hold individual terrorists to account, not blame an entire religion, because we need to believe in the autonomous subject who exercises moral choice and free will.  

But perhaps we should examine more closely the group mindset of a people who identify (and act) primarily as Muslims, unconditionally submitting to a faith in which God's will matters a whole lot more than free will. This is not to incite hatred or provoke violence. It is merely to raise the crucial question whether a whole community can be held - at least in part - responsible for the harms produced by particular members. It seems unfair, but that doesn't necessarily means it's illegitimate.

I have a Jewish friend, for example, who insists that it's entirely appropriate to hold all Germans responsible for the Holocaust, not just those who were high-ranking and fanatic members of the Nazi Party. Like Karl Jaspers, he's not really concerned with who did what, but with assigning Kollectivschuld on the basis of what one is.*

And, like Jaspers, he argues that if you belong to a group - be it a race, a class, or a religion - that is committing atrocities in your presence or with your knowledge - though not necessarily with your approval or support - then you too are tainted by association and, at some (metaphysical) level, responsible.  

I have to admit, the above argument is deeply troubling to me; where can it lead other than to a principle of Sippenhaft, i.e. group liability and brutal collective punishment? I know that some philosophers argue that punishment might take the relatively mild form of reducing the strength of group bonds or de-institutionalizing group norms, but I also know that it can become terroristic in its own right and lead to acts of genocide.

So ... what to do then, after Nice?

Well, I don't think we should simply mourn and then carry on regardless. And I certainly don't think we should resign or even accustom ourselves to such events. If we choose to reaffirm the values of the Enlightenment that France embodies - including, let us not forget, laïcité - then let us do so actively ...        

* See: Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans. by E. B. Ashton, (Fordham University Press, 2001). 

Be Kind to Bees

Yesterday, struggling along the garden path, came an exhausted bee ...

Fond as I am of honey-producing insects, I decided to try and revive the poor thing with a spoonful of sugar dissolved in water. Happily, after a few sips of this simple but remarkably effective remedy the little creature seemed to perk up, so I left it to crawl among the flowers ...

In a world of climate change, habitat loss, disease, pesticide and colony collapse disorder, we should all be kind to bees ...  

On Masturbation as Sex in the Head

I: Opening Remarks

Whilst archetypal psychologists such as James Hillman and pagan feminists such as Starhawk may pleasure themselves and fantasise about invoking Pan or calling up doubles, D. H. Lawrence rages against masturbation as a fatal form of idealism, or what he terms sex in the head.

In fact, for Lawrence, almost nothing is as evil as jerking off. Not only, he writes, does it harm the individual, but so too is it socially destructive; perhaps the deepest and most dangerous sexual vice that society can be afflicted with in the long run.           

Ironically, Lawrence's views are ultimately rooted in the same metaphysical beliefs as those of Hillman and Starhawk - which obviously makes them just as untenable and just as fallacious - but nevertheless it's interesting to see how and where he differs from the above and why he ends up in such stark opposition ...

II: It's All That Lady of Shalott Business

There's an extraordinary scene in Women in Love between Rupert Birkin and his then girlfriend, Hermione, in which he savagely condemns the latter for her pornographic desire to see all and to know all regarding her naked animal self.

Hermione suggests that children shouldn’t be stimulated into consciousness; that to do so leaves them emotionally crippled and incapable of spontaneity. It sounds like a perfectly respectable Lawrentian viewpoint, but it infuriates Birkin who rages:

"'Knowledge means everything to you. Even your animalism, you want it in your head. You don’t want to be an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, to get a mental thrill out of them. It is all purely secondary - and more decadent than the most hide-bound intellectualism … Passion and instincts - you want them hard enough, but through your head, in your consciousness.'"

Birkin continues - tellingly in relation to the practices advocated by Starhawk: 

"'It’s all that Lady of Shalott business … You’ve got that mirror, your own fixed will, your immortal understanding, your own tight conscious world, and there is nothing beyond it. There, in the mirror, you must have everything.'"

Like Starhawk, Hermione thinks of herself as a woman of great sensitivity and passion, but she has exchanged real substance for shadows and falsehood:

"'Your passion is a lie … It isn’t passion at all, it is your will. It’s your bullying will. You want to clutch things and have them in your power. And why? Because you haven’t got any real body, any dark body of sensual life. You have no sensuality. You have only your will and your conceit of consciousness, and your lust for power, to know.'"

Birkin then goes on to dismiss the spontaneity claimed by Hermione and her kind:

"'You and spontaneity! You, the most deliberate thing that ever walked or crawled! You’d be very deliberately spontaneous … Because you want to have everything in your own volition, your deliberate voluntary consciousness … If one cracked your skull perhaps one might get a spontaneous, passionate woman out of you, with real sensuality. As it is, what you want is pornography - looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your consciousness, make it all mental.'"

For Birkin, then, as for Lawrence, it is clear that genuine sensuality is an affair of the blood and belongs to the darkness; something that marks the death of our voluntary, day-time selves. Masturbation is the antithesis of this; idealistic and head-bound. A distinction can be drawn between sensual reality and being and mere sensuousness or sensationalism: the former involves letting go of what we are and what we think we are; the latter is an affair of wilful narcissism and acute self-awareness.

Sensationalists, like Hermione and Starhawk, are so conceited that "'rather than release themselves and live in another world, from another centre'", they prefer to masturbate before mirrors and fool themselves that they are working magic.


III: The Great Danger of Masturbation: Our Vice, Our Dirt, Our Disease

For Lawrence, modern man has fallen into collective insanity and a crucial aspect of this is the tendency of the individual to see himself as a little absolute. This has resulted in sexuality (whatever the mode) becoming a form of self-seeking, rather than an attempt to experience otherness:

"Heterosexual, homosexual, narcissistic … or incestuous, it is all the same thing … Every man, every woman just seeks his own self, her own self, in the sexual experience."

Lawrence encourages us to shatter the great mirror before which we all wank entranced and form new relations with the outside world and with one another. This clearly has particular pertinence to those practitioners of solo sex-magick and Lawrence cleverly reminds his readers of a famous occult image which shows a man standing, before a flat table mirror, which reflects him from waist to head. "Whatever it may mean in magic," writes Lawrence, "it means what we are today; creatures whose active emotional self has no real existence, but is all reflected downwards from the mind."

This introversion of the modern individual, in which the lower centres of psycho-sexual energy and being are aroused and dynamically polarized by the spiritual upper-voluntary centres of consciousness and will, seems to be precisely what Starhawk advocates. But the result of diverting the deeper sensual life of the body upwards is, first and foremost, acute self-consciousness.

"Then", writes Lawrence, "you get the upper body exploiting the lower body. You get the hands exploiting the sensual body, in feeling, fingering, and in masturbation. You get a pornographic longing with regard to the self … eyes and ears want to gather sexual activity and knowledge. The mind becomes full of sex …"

He continues:

"The thought of actual sex connection is usually repulsive. There is an aversion from the normal act of coition. But the craving to feel, to see, to taste, to know, mentally in the head, this is insatiable. Anything, so that the sensation and experience shall come through the upper channels. This is the secret of our introversion and our perversion today. Anything rather than spontaneous direct action from the sensual self. Anything rather than merely normal passion. Introduce any trick, any idea, any mental element you can into sex, but make it an affair of the upper consciousness, the mind and eyes and mouth and fingers. This is our vice, our dirt, our disease."

As much as Lawrence may loathe the phenomenon of sex-in-the-head, we should be clear, however, that he is not arguing for sexual ignorance; nor a return of what he terms the dirty little secret. He wants men and woman to be able to think sex "fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly" - even if it is impossible for them to act sexually to their complete satisfaction. Only when we learn how to both think and act our sex in harmony, neither interfering with the other, will we, says Lawrence, get to where we want to be; a state of accomplished bliss.

For Lawrence, this is a state of grace wherein we learn how to have "a proper reverence for sex, and a proper awe of the body’s strange experience"; neither fearing the body, nor going to the other extreme and treating it "as a sort of toy to be played with".

Lawrence, then, rejects the popular liberal line that posits masturbation as harmless, or positively a good thing for the health and well being of the individual. He writes that whilst in the young a certain amount of auto-erotic activity is inevitable, it becomes a destructive habit once formed and induces in the adult practitioner only a "secret feeling of futility and humiliation". In a particularly important passage, Lawrence argues:

"The great danger of masturbation lies in its merely exhaustive nature. In sexual intercourse, there is a give and take. A new stimulus enters as the native stimulus departs … And this is so in all sexual intercourse where two creatures are concerned, even in the homosexual intercourse. But in masturbation there is nothing but loss. There is no reciprocity. There is merely the spending away of a certain force, and no return. The body remains, in a sense, a corpse, after the act of self-abuse. There is no change, only a deadening. Two people may destroy one another in sex. But they cannot just produce the null effect of masturbation."

Lawrence also refutes the claim made by James Hillman and Starhawk that masturbation is a means of raising psychic energy which can then be put to creative usage:

"The only positive effect of masturbation is that it seems to release a certain mental energy, in some people. But it is mental energy which manifests itself always in the same way, in a vicious circle of analysis and impotent criticism, or else a vicious circle of false and easy sympathy ...”

We might conclude that the thing that characterizes the work of both Hillman and Starhawk is this mixture of conceit and egoism. As authors, they seem incapable of escaping from the lie of themselves and their writing is nothing more at last than an exercise in self-promotion.

Of course, some might say the same of Lawrence ...


Notes

The lines quoted from D. H. Lawrence were taken from the following works:

Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
'Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness, by Trigant Burrow', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover' in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

Readers interested in James Hillman on masturbation and the invocation of Pan should click here.
Readers interested in Starhawk on the role of masturbation within the practice of sex-magick should click here.   

This post is a revised and edited extract from an essay on masturbation in The Treadwell's Papers 1: Sex/Magic (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). 

On Masturbation as a Form of Sex-Magick

According to Starhawk, a leading figure within the earth-based spirituality movement, esoteric teachings about sex identify a quality called polarity, the currents of which "are very powerful forces" and magical training "often focuses on learning to recognise and channel those currents".

The simplest polarity flow is between male and female principles and many Craft groups make this central to working magic. According to Starhawk, however, polarity can also be created internally within the individual via a process of magical masturbation. She writes: "If a woman creates an inner male, or a man creates an inner female, polarity can flow between the person and what we call the companion self".

Starhawk explains the procedure: Firstly, remove your clothes and stand naked before a full-length mirror. Secondly, study your reflection, taking pleasure in every part of your body; "do not diet or attempt to change the way your body looks", says Starhawk, "work on learning to love it the way it is" (for Starhawk the body is not only always beautiful, but also always innocent; a natural object outside of culture and history).
 
Finally, it's time to invoke the double by imagining one’s reflected image to be someone both to love and be loved by: "let a feeling of warmth and affection flow from you to your double", says Starhawk; "you can talk with your double, or, if you like, make love with him/her. When you are done, thank your double".

This process of amusingly courteous occult ritual and magical masturbation is taken a stage further when the double becomes a full companion self - no longer just a reflection, but a virtual other of the opposite sex. Again we are instructed to feel "affection and attraction for the person you have created in the mirror". Starhawk also suggests naming the companion self: "Have a conversation. Play. Make love."

She further advises that mutual masturbation between flesh-and-blood partners is also a valuable way of building a "deeper-than-superficial bond between lovers", before advocating a form of al fresco masturbation with plants that, apparently, enables us to get closer to the natural world. Let’s briefly examine each of these options in turn ...

Firstly, mutual masturbation between partners. Not only does Starhawk insist that a partner should be carefully chosen and preferably be someone with whom one has already established a close relationship built upon trust and affection (Starhawk doesn't approve of promiscuous, irresponsible, or anonymous sex), but she says that both parties involved should also "be familiar with the workings of polarity".

I have to say I find the latter point particularly curious. I can’t help wondering why it needs to be the case; either there’s a cosmic law of polarity that exists independently of man or there isn’t. How can knowledge or lack of knowledge of it make any difference to its working?

Anyway, let us return to our masturbating couple:

"Retire to a warm and private place. Sit opposite each other. Look into each other's eyes and call up the current you felt with your double or companion self … When you are ready, trade. Let your lover send while you receive. Lie down next to each other. Place your hands on each other’s bodies - in whatever places please both of you. Call up the current of polarity … Then you can both send and receive simultaneously. As the currents build, make sounds or movements that help them. Let the process reach its natural conclusion".

Although Starhawk doesn’t explicitly say what this natural conclusion is, we can only assume she means (in a rather banal and functional manner) orgasm. She also adds an amusing end note to the above in which she once again insists that magical masturbation works best “in a long-standing love affair or partnership”. Such curious moralizing is, alas, all too typical of many writers within the Wiccan world.

Having briefly discussed mutual masturbation in the context of sex-magick, it’s time now to examine outdoor auto-erotic activity or loving nature as Starhawk both euphemistically and all too literally puts it. Perhaps we find here elements of the invocation of Pan that archetypal psychologist James Hillman celebrates (click here). Writing in those short, often two-word non-sentences that she seems to favour, Starhawk instructs us to:

"Go outside. Find a plant (or you can do this with a tree … or some other natural object) … Call up the current you felt with your double or companion self … Let the current flow into the plant until you feel its energy radiating back. Enjoy it."

Again, rather coyly, she doesn’t actually use the word masturbate here - but what else can it be that one is encouraged to do but wank with the vegetation?

Now, let me say at this point that I have no problem with any of this; not the wanking, the floraphilia, or the elements of objectum sexuality. However, one does worry that what's being advocated here is no more than an intellectual game played with smoke and mirrors; a deliberate and wilful prostituting of the body to the mind or what Lawrence terms sex in the head. And for me, it's disappointing that pagan occultism should be complicit in exchanging the sheer intensity of libidinal pleasure for mere representation.

Disappointing, but not surprising. For as the great Gardnerian witch-queen Doreen Valiente readily admits: "Practitioners of magic have always emphasized that … in the last resort it is the mind that holds the power of magic".


See: 

Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark, (Beacon Press, 1982) 
Doreen Valiente, An ABC of Witchcraft, (Phoenix Publishing, 1988). 

Note: this post is a revised and edited extract from an essay on masturbation in The Treadwell's Papers 1: Sex/Magic (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). Readers interested in two related posts, also extracted from the above essay, should click here and here.

On Masturbation and the Invocation of Pan

According to archetypal psychologist James Hillman, masturbation is a universal practice which is legitimate as a form of sexual behaviour in its own right and not to be considered a poor substitute for coition. What's more, masturbation is not for Hillman merely a simple pleasure; it exemplifies rather the important relationship between mythology and pathology and is divinely sanctioned by the great god Pan whom it invokes and enacts within the flesh.

It would, of course, be easy to laugh at this line of thinking - a line that I know all too well and followed all too closely in my youth - but where I think Hillman is to be commended is in his insistence that masturbation is not an eruptive sexual urge and that the association with Pan is therefore not merely a means of dressing up the old idea of the uncontrollable beast in man.  

Despite the language used, Hillman's analysis is sophisticated enough to allow for the fact that both the will to masturbation and the will to inhibition which accompanies and diverts it, belong to the same instinctual matrix; i.e. that the latter is not merely socially constructed in order to frustrate a more primal desire.

Just as moralists mistakenly branded masturbation an evil because it seemed to serve no biological or social purpose, so too have sex radicals confused the shame which accompanies masturbation with an internalised authority in need of overthrowing. Hillman recognises the traditional moral standpoint to be misguided, but so too does he interrogate the attempt to liberate masturbation from the restraining prohibition which is such a crucial element of the compulsion itself. For Hillman, sex radicalism and secular humanism ultimately risk making masturbation meaningless:

"Deprived of its fantasy, shame and conflict, masturbation becomes nothing but physiology, an inborn release mechanism without significance for the soul".

In other words, in seeking to make masturbation a harmless activity, we reduce the mystery of Pan - and for Hillman this is a bad thing. For Hillman wishes to re-enchant the world via a "re-education of the citizen in relation to nature". However, he's keen to stress that this re-education "goes deeper than the nymph consciousness of awe and gentleness" and that a Romantic love of the countryside is not enough:

"The re-education of the citizen would have to begin at least partly from Pan’s point of view … But Pan’s world includes masturbation, rape, panic, convulsions, and nightmares. The re-education of the citizen in relation to nature means nothing less than a new relationship with these ‘horrors’, ‘moral depravities’, and ‘madnesses’ which are part of the instinctual life …"

Rightly or wrongly, Hillman insists that by intensifying interiority with a complex mix of joy and shame, masturbation “brings genital pleasure, fantasy, and conflict to the individual as psychic subject" and ultimately opens the way towards a neo-pagan future ...    


See: James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare, (Continuum, 2000).

Note: this post is a revised and edited extract from an essay on masturbation in The Treadwell's Papers 1: Sex/Magic (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). Readers interested in two related posts, also extracted from the above essay, should click here and here.

Heidegger's 'Letter on Humanism'

If there's one essay by Heidegger to which I still regularly return, it's his Letter on Humanism. First published in 1947, Heidegger provides a robust and brilliant defence not only of his own thinking, but of all those authors with whom he shares philosophical affinities.

In a crucial section that could almost act as a foreword to this blog, he writes:

“Because we are speaking against ‘humanism’ people fear a defense of the inhuman and a glorification of barbaric brutality. For what is more ‘logical’ than that somebody who negates humanism nothing remains but the affirmation of inhumanity?
      Because we are speaking against ‘logic’ people believe we are demanding that the rigor of thinking be renounced and in its place the arbitrariness of drives and feelings be installed and thus that ‘irrationalism’ be proclaimed as true. For what is more ‘logical’ than that whoever speaks against the logical is defending the alogical?
      Because we are speaking against ‘values’ people are horrified at a philosophy that ostensibly dares to despise humanity’s best qualities. For what is more ‘logical’ than that a thinking that denies values must necessarily pronounce everything valueless?
     Because we say that the Being of man consists in ‘being-in-the-world’ people find that man is downgraded to a merely terrestrial being, whereupon philosophy sinks into positivism. For what is more ‘logical’ than that whoever asserts the worldliness of human beings holds only this life valid, denies the beyond, and renounces all ‘Transcendence’?
      Because we refer to the word of Nietzsche on the ‘death of God’ people regard such a gesture as atheism. For what is more ‘logical’ than that whoever has experienced the death of God is godless?
      Because in all the respects mentioned we everywhere speak against all that humanity deems high and holy our philosophy teaches an irresponsible and destructive ‘nihilism’. For what is more ‘logical’ than that whoever roundly denies what is truly in being puts himself on the side of nonbeing and thus professes the pure nothing as the meaning of reality?
      What is going on here? People talk about ‘humanism’, ‘logic’, ‘values’, ‘world’, and ‘God’. They hear something about opposition to these. They recognize and accept these things as positive ... they immediately assume that what speaks against something is automatically its negation and that this is ‘negative’ in the sense of destructive. ...
      But does the ‘against’ which a thinking advances against ordinary opinion necessarily point toward negation and the negative? This happens ... only when one posits in advance what is meant by the ‘positive’ and on the basis makes an absolute and absolutely negative decision about the range of possible opposition to it. ...
...
      To think against ‘logic’ does not mean to break a lance for the illogical but simply to trace in thought the logos and its essence, which appeared in the dawn of thinking ...
      To think against ‘values’ is not to maintain that everything interpreted as ‘a value’ ... is valueless. Rather, it is important to finally realize that precisely through the characterization of something as ‘a value’ what is so valued is robbed of its worth. That is to say, by the assessment of something as a value what is valued is admitted only as an object for man’s estimation. ... Every valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivizing.”

In other words, valuing does not let things be in their own right; it allows them only to be valid when useful to man. This is what Nietzsche thinks of as nihilism and what Lawrence describes as blasphemous living. It is this they challenge via their work and in this challenge one can locate a new ethic (of letting be); something that their critics claim it is impossible to find within an irrationalist ontology and/or an anti-humanist politics of evil.

Thus, despite what these critics say, there clearly can be a post-moral ethics - just as there was a pre-moral ethics in the ancient world. As Nietzsche says on a number of occasions, beyond good and evil does not mean there are no conceptions of what constitutes good (noble) and bad (base) conduct.

Indeed, there could even conceivably be post-moral or neo-pagan religions, should we desire to formulate such on the basis of a newly affirmative will to power. But Zarathustra insists that any such religion would have to be one that stays true to the earth and to the flesh. This is not to posit a spurious form of blut und boden idealism in the manner of the Nazis, rather, it is to acknowledge that “Mortals dwell in the way they safeguard the Fourfold in its essential unfolding”.

In other words, mankind secures its destiny by tending the earth, receiving the sky, awaiting the gods, and by initiating an unfolding into being. This may not be humanism in the classical sense, but, as George Steiner says: “There are meaner metaphors to live by.”


Notes

Heidegger's 'Letter on Humanism' can be found in his Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, (Routledge, 1994).

The line on the dwelling of mortals comes from Heidegger's essay 'Building Dwelling Thinking', which can also be found in his Basic Writings. 

The line from George Steiner is taken from Heidegger, (Fontana Press, 1989), p. 150.