Draped in finely filigreed silver and filaments of technicolour light, my luminary teacher appeared through the woods. As I eyed his crimson cape flapping gently in the breeze he said 'Evil is in the one but not of it: how do we explain the (relative) autonomy of the World without deriving it from the radical autonomy of the One?
There's no such thing as antinomian dualism because a real dualist would never extinguish his hatred of evil: so-called antinomian "gnostics" can only recoil off the same veil the non-dualist does.
The polarities of good/evil, unity/multiplicity and permanence/change are in a sense equivalent to formlessness/form. One might call such polarities "tetralemmic" in that one establishes the reality of such a polarity by going through the four horns of what is called the "tetralemma". The horns are, given the possibilities X and not-X: to affirm X alone as fundamental, to affirm not-X alone, to affirm both X and not-X, and to affirm neither X nor not-X. It is by running through the tetralemma that one recognizes such a polarity as being, on the one hand, not categorizable in any ordinary way (like "is" or "isn't"), while on the other hand, one finds it is necessary to make sense of our experience.
This is the Hindu logic and tetralemmic darkness that impersonates the non-ontological to reinforce the ontological, because even in raping and killing with no-mind, I do not accrue evil: as implied by the coincidence of Zen and militarism, "I do not act through the sword, the sword acts through me". Because even in "going with the flow" I am piloted by Time: don't I embody the then, the infinite evil of space, though I've vanquished the petty evil of egoism?
If good and evil are colourless, how do we staunch our tears for the murdered, and overcome the nihilism of the post-intentional? By going all the way, beyond every genus of amor fati: this is our task, and our Golgotha.
Imagine modernity as a kind of transcendental coalescence: two bodies becoming one, the gladiators of positivism and romanticism raging in the bridge, or Nietzchean rope. Subjects bound to the World in the mode of its unbinding, or exorcised completely: the quintessential gnostic procedure.
For Henry, "life" had no biological meaning, but an exclusively phenomenological one, which means that it refers to this fundamental mode of appearing that is, as self-appearing. Henry also used the term "transcendental affectivity" to characterize this self-appearing proper to his phenomenological concept of life: it is transcendental in the sense that it is the condition of possibility of every possible phenomenon, and it is affectivity because the self-experience that characterizes the living is a form of primal suffering or pathos.
"Pathos" refers to the fact that, because of its self-enclosed nature, such an experience cannot cease to adhere to itself. But, like the flip side of a coin, this self-adherence is also the condition for the greatest joy, namely the joy of living. Joy and suffering are thus fundamental tonalities that both express the fact that life cannot escape from itself, that it is irremediably tied to itself. This explains for instance why the concrete experience of suffering can become unbearable.
As you have comprehended, we must love our enemies and recognize ourselves in them; phenomenologically our joy of life and primal suffering is indistinguishable. Only by transmuting our qualia can we overcome this; love suffering and you may wield it with dignity. And even fate itself neither "is" or "is not". I believe you also comprehended this through the metaphor of a coin: Fate can only be experienced through the things of this world.
The ineffable coin may flip either way and we are chained to fatal fulfilment of that myth, but we may flip the coin again, through the generation of unity from multiplicity in the dormancy of heroes; it is ennui which reinvigorates the memory of the blood, and all who know it are initiated to flip the coin of Fate.
We must become stoics without a Logos, or a Logos alchemically changed, giving everything up: is not Henry's self-enjoying life which "cannot cease to adhere to itself" nothing but Schelling's God which is "never free to be unfree"? Cease on becoming, and you will have arrived. Stop being chained to Fate and you will flip the coin again.'
Image: The Triumph of the Guillotine in Hell by Nicolas Antoine Taunay c. 1795
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