Carlo Michelstaedter353 is one of those writers of the modern epoch who affirm the individual’s need to rise up to being, to an absolute value, by putting an end to all those compromises which mask an ἄβιοϛ βίοϛ,354 a life that is not life. Through this one brings oneself to that which man fears more than every other thing: facing oneself, measuring oneself in relation to “being.” Michelstaedter calls the state of being “persuasion,” and defines it essentially as a negation of correlations. When the I places the principle of its very consisting not in itself, but in the “other,” when its life is conditioned by things and by relations, where there is subjection to dependencies and to need—in this kind of existence, there can be no “persuasion,” but rather only the privation of value. Value is only an existing in oneself, not asking another for the ultimate principle and the sense of life itself: it is “autarchy” in the Hellenic sense.355 Thus not only the whole of an existence made of needs, of affects, of “sociality,” of intellectualistic adornment and the like is included in the sphere of non-value, but also the corporal organism and the system of nature itself (the experience of which is understood as generated, in its indefinite spatio-temporal development, by the incessant gravitation with which deficiency pursues being; however, insofar as being is sought outside of itself, deficiency will never succeed in possessing it).
The I which believes itself to be insofar as it persists, that is insofar as it ignores the fullness of an actual possession and carries its “persuasion” back to a subsequent moment, on which, moreover, it makes itself dependent; the I which in every present flees itself; the I which one does not have but seeks, and desires; the I which however in no future can ever be, since the future is the very symbol of its privation, the shadow that runs alongside the one that flees, at a given distance from the body of its reality, which at every point maintains itself unchanged—such an I is, for Michelstaedter, the meaning of daily life, but also of “non-value,” of the “must-not-be.” Against such a situation, “persuasion” postulates rather consisting, resisting existential deficiency with all one’s own life and at every point, never ceding to the life that is lacking to itself by searching beyond or in the future. It postulates not asking, but grasping “being” in one’s very fist: not to “go” but to endure. While existential deficiency accelerates time in its continuous anxiety for the future, and barters a present emptiness on a future one, the stability of the individual pre-occupies infinite time in the now, and arrests time. Its firmness is a dizzying slipstream for those who are still in the current. “Every one of the instants of such a man is a century of the life of the others—so long as he makes of himself a flame and reaches a consisting in the ultimate present.”356 To clarify this point, it is important to comprehend the nature of correlation which is contained in its premises: given that the world is understood as generated away from the right direction and toward deficiency, of which it is almost the tangible incarnation, it is an illusion to think that “persuasion” might be realized through an abstract and subjective consisting in that value (as in Stoicism) which has being (experienced nature) against it, such that, though it has no value, it is. He who tends toward absolute persuasion must arise instead to a cosmic responsibility. That is: I must not flee from my deficiency—which is mirrored by the world—but take it onto me, adjust myself to its weight and redeem it. For which Michelstaedter states: “You cannot call yourself persuaded as long as something is, that is not persuaded,” and he hints at persuasion as being “at the extreme consciousness of him who is one with things, who has all things in himself: ἒ ουνεχές.”357
To clarify Michelstaedter’s central problem, one can relate the concept of insufficiency to the Aristotelian concept of the imperfect act.358 The imperfect or “impure” act is an act of potencies that do not arrive in themselves (κάθ αὐτο)359 to the act, and for this have need of an other. This is the case, for instance, of sensory perception, whose potency of perceiving is not sufficient in and of itself: by itself this potency does not produce perception, but has need of some correlated object. Now, the fundamental point which connects this to Michelstaedter’s position is the following: in the transcendental realm the imperfect act resolves the privation of the I only apparently; in reality, it reconfirms it. To formulate an example through comparison, the I is thirsty. As long as it drinks it confirms the state of him who is not sufficient in his own life but who, in order to live, has need of “other”; water and the rest are naught but the symbols of his deficiency. (On this point one must fix one’s attention: one does not desire because there is a privation of being, but there is a privation of being because one desires—and, in the second place: there is not a desire, for example that of drinking, because there are determinate things, for example water, but the desired things, just as the privation of being which urges toward them, are created at one and the same point from out of the relative desire. Desire is, therefore, the prius360 which creates the correlation as its two ends, namely privation and corresponding object, or in our example thirst and water.) And insofar as one feeds of it and asks one’s life of it, the I feeds only of its own privation and endures in this privation, fleeing from that “pure” or perfect act, from that eternal water, of which speak the very words of Christ,361 and wherein every thirst, and likewise every other privation, would be forever conquered. This yearning, this dark emesis,362 which carries the I toward the external—toward the “other”—is that which generates in experience the system of finite and contingent reality. Persuasion, which burns such emesis in the state of absolute consisting, of the pure being-in-itself, has therefore also the sense of “consummation” of the world that reveals itself to me.
The sense of such a consummation is clarified by arriving at consequences which Michelstaedter has not completely succeeded in bringing out.
Before all, to say that I must not flee from my deficiency signifies, among other things, that I must recognize myself as the creative function of an experienced world. The justification of so-called transcendental idealism (that is the philosophical system according to which the world is posited by the I) might follow from this, based on a moral imperative. But according to this premise the world is considered as a negation of value. A second point thus proceeds from the general postulate of redeeming the world, of taking on its deficiency—a second point which is as much a practical postulate as a moral one: the very negation of value itself must be recognized, in a certain way, as a value. This is important. Indeed, if I consider the impulse which has generated the world as a pure, irrational datum, it is evident that persuasion, insofar as it is conceived as the negation of that datum, comes to depend on it, and so is not absolutely sufficient to itself but depends on the “other,” on the negation which permits it to affirm itself. In such a case, that is, in the case in which the same yearning is not reclaimed as the affirmation of value but remains entirely a datum, persuasion would therefore not at all be persuasion—the initiatory mystery would inevitably reduce perfection to an illusion. For which it is necessary to admit as a moral postulate that the same antithesis participates, in a certain way, in value. But in what way? Such a problem carries us to admit a certain dynamism in the concept of persuasion. Indeed it is obvious that if persuasion is not reduced to a pure, unrelated sufficiency (that is, to a state), but if it is rather sufficiency insofar as it is negation of an insufficiency (that is, an act, a relation), the antithesis certainly has value and is explained: the I at first must pose privation, non-value, if only under the condition that it is posed precisely so that it might be negated, because this act of negation, and it alone, generates the value of persuasion. But what does it mean to negate the antithesis—which in this context is equivalent to saying, nature? One recalls that for Michelstaedter nature is a non-value insofar as it is symbol and incarnation of the flight of the I from actual possession of itself, insofar as it is correlative to an imperfect or “impure” act in the sense mentioned above. One does not treat therefore of negating this or that determination of the existent, because with such negation one would strike only at the effect, the consequence, not the transcendental root, of non-value; nor even of eliminating in general every action, because the antithesis is not the action in general, but rather the action insofar as it is flight from oneself, insofar as it is “going”—and it is not a given that every action necessarily has such a sense. What must be resolved is rather the passive, heteronomous, extroverted mode of action. Now negation in such a mode is constituted by the action sufficient to itself, which is also potency. To live every act in perfect possession and so to transfigure the whole of the forms until these do not express anything but the very body of an infinite potestas363 —let us say, of the absolute Individual made of potency—this is therefore the sense of cosmic and, (at the same time), existential redemption. Just as the concretization of “rhetoric” is the development of the world of dependency and of necessity, so the concretization of persuasion is the development of a world of autarchy and of dominion, and the point of pure negation is only the neutral point between the two phases.
The development of Michelstaedter’s views on that which one might call a “magical idealism” appears therefore to proceed according to a logical continuity. Michelstaedter in a certain way however remained fixed in an indeterminate negation, and this, in great part, because he did not consider sufficiently that the finite and the infinite should not be referred to a particular object or action, but that they are two modes of living any object or action. The true Lord does not in general have need of negating (in the sense of nullifying) nor, under the pretext of rendering it absolute, of reducing life to an undifferentiated unity, almost, if you please, in a species of lightning flash: the act of potency—the which is not an act of desire or of violence—rather than destroying perfect possession, attests it and confirms it. But Michelstaedter, for the very intensity in which he lived the need of absolute value, did not know how to give this value a concrete body and simultaneously to develop it in the doctrine of potency; the which perhaps is related to the tragic end of his mortal existence.364
However Michelstaedter himself affirmed that “we do not want to know in relation to what things a man is determined, but rather we want to know how he is determined,” which is to say, beyond the act, one treats of the form or value according to which the individual is to be seen. In fact every logical relation is in a certain way indeterminate, and value is a higher dimension in which it is specified. One of Michelstaedter’s merits is his reaffirmation of the importance of value in the metaphysical order: indeed “rhetoric” and the “path of persuasion” are distinguishable not from a purely logical point of view, but rather by the point of view of value alone. It is very important here that Michelstaedter in a certain way recognizes that there are two paths. This duplicity is itself a value: because the affirmation of persuasion cannot count as affirmation of liberty when one does not have the awareness of the possibility of affirmation as a value of non-value itself, a kind of indifference: for only the “Lord of Yes and No” is free and infinite (on this problem, cf. our Theory of the Absolute Individual, I, §§ 1-5). The other justification of the antithesis, introduced above, evidently takes as its presupposition the positive option for “persuasion.”
[←353 ] Michelstaedter (1887-1910) was a Jewish Italian writer, philosopher, and man of letters who was remarkably productive in the short span of his life. He was a student of the classic philosophers, especially Plato and Aristotle, and his work bears a decidedly classical stamp of rare purity. He attempted, as the classical philosophers, to extract himself from a tragic existence by becoming internally complete. His life runs in intriguing parallel to that of the Jewish Austrian Otto Weininger (see note 178 to Chapter 15 above). Michelstaedter’s most important work is thought to be his Persuasion and Rhetoric. All quotes in the following chapter, unless otherwise noted, come from that work.
[←354 ] Ancient Greek: “lifeless life.”
[←355 ] Autarchy comes from the Ancient Greek αὐτάρκεια, meaning literally “self-rule,” but coming thus to mean to the Hellenic mindset total self-sufficiency, perfect independence.
[←356 ] [Evola’s note.]Taken from Michealstaedter’s Il dialogo della salute. [The Dialogue on Health, yet to be translated into English. -Trans.]
[←357 ] ἒ ουνεχές is Ancient Greek, meaning “really or truly being ones own self” or “really and truly possessing one’s own self.”
[←358 ] That is, an act which requires something external to itself for its realization.
[←359 ] Ancient Greek: “just as the self” or “according to the self.”
[←360 ] Latin: “first or primary thing, the prior thing.”
[←361 ] [Evola’s note.] John 4:14. “But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.”
[←362 ] Italian: conato oscuro.
[←363 ] Latin: “power, ability, potency.”
[←364 ] On October 17, 1910, the very day that he finished the appendices of his Persuasion and Rhetoric, and following an argument with his mother, Michelstaedter took his own life. Evola’s speculation that this might have had something to do with Michelstaedter’s failure to bring his own ideas to necessary conclusion, his remaining on the plane of mere negation, is certainly an intriguing one. It is made all the more intriguing by the fact that thoughts of suicide were not altogether foreign to Evola. Indeed, in a kind of spiritual crisis following the First World War, Evola was almost carried away by such an urge. (See note 343 to Chapter 32 above; also, The Path of Cinnabar, “Personal Background and Early Experiences.”)
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