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296 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2016
It seems that we belong to a type of humanity that turned away from contemplation and waiting for something absolute and, forsaking transcendence as the absolute meaning of existence, instead embraced a kind of civilisation in which the ethics of the majority latches on to the incessant fluctuation of being as its vital principle.
Maybe we are no longer capable of feeling anything but the intense, which augments, diminishes, and varies. It might even be that this is what defines us.
[...]
Of course, the cause of this excitement is important, but it’s the excitement itself that counts the most. Only this feeling of excitement allows us to live our lives free from bitterness and resentment. We think that a person no longer capable of excitement is lost; they are still alive but their internal life has somehow ceased. They lead the life of the dead. They cling to old contents of excitement that they are incapable of renewing. We pity them.
Think of a scholar in Antiquity, an intellect of the Middle Ages, a subject of the Han dynasty, or a Vedic Brahman: would they have subjected, as we do, all their values (aesthetic, moral, political) to this criterion of intensification? Nothing could be less certain. The absolute, eternity, truth, or simplicity would have undoubtedly won out as the final criterion of judgement. We have inherited a form of humanity that is more suspicious of these classic criteria and that has replaced them through the fetishisation of intensity. [...] It is not the promise of another life or another world. Nor is it the perspective of equilibrium, or absolution, or self-erasure that exists in so many human cultures, internal extinction of the passions and their essential variations. The intensity that everything in contemporary world promises us is an ethical programme whose tiny voice whispers within all of our pleasures and all of our pains, “I promise you more of the same thing. I promise you more life.”
Just as a process of speciation took the place of species, gender and sex also made room for process of sexuation and ‘genderification’. It is hardly possible any longer to talk about men and women as absolutely separate parts of a whole called humanity. After all, deep within ourselves, and underneath all the masks of gender performativity, there is nothing to be found but variable intensities. [...] Genders are no longer nouns; they are verbs because they correspond to acts. They are intensive realities.
We almost always maintain two types of friendships, moral, adjectival friendships and ethical, adverbal ones. We feel an affinity for people who share our ideas, values, tastes, and principles, even if their intelligence and ways of acting, thinking, and living are different. But then we are also friends with other people who have unfamiliar moral or political principles. They might even shock us from time to time, but we see in them our same ways of doing things or thinking, and we can identify with them ethically. In this case, the way we relate to our values brings us together even if our particular values pull us apart. There can be no doubt that it’s up to each person to decide if they prefer moral or ethical friendships.
Now mediocrity is more commonly used to designate the irremediable lack that characterises the average person. The average person is ‘flat’. Any strong intensity, up to and including suffering, is better than a mediocre truth, a mediocre beauty, or a mediocre life.
Perhaps this conviction should in part be seen as the residue of an aristocratic ethics that persists in democratic times. Instead of judging the content of a behaviour, we now prefer to valorise the excellence of its features and assess its intensity. True nobility is a question of style, not names.
Is it really the case that being intensely one way doesn’t somehow also make us less intensely another way? The more committed people become to their ruses and the more they defend life’s intensities from being identified and neutralised, the more exposes and susceptible those intensities become to identification and neutralisation. Paradoxically, the very act of protecting the intensities of life is what leaves those intensities defenceless. Multiplying intensities is the same as dividing them. To add them is to subtract them, and to increase them is to decrease them. Even their variation is ultimately a kind of uniformity.
Let us imagine a ridge line high in the mountains. Our job is to walk that line without plummeting down into one side or the other of the ethical void surrounding us. Two precipices border the path of existence. On one side, there’s the temptation to use life as a model for thought; this is the desire of the intense person. On the other side, there’s the temptation to use thought as a model for life; this is the hope of sages and people of faith. [...] Giving way to either side makes one part of us a slave of the other, and we end up squandering the best part of life, its liveability. If we go one way, the liveability of life is exhausted by counterproductive affirmations; but if we go the other way, we find that the same liveability ends up being negated as we wait on the arrival of something else. In order to neither assert nor deny the intensity of life, we have to learn to find intensity in the experience of resistance. Only a thought that resists life can make us feel truly alive, and true thinking only happens in a life that resists thought.
... modernism has a more powerful hold on the mind than any other drug. It promises to pull humanity up out of the depths of banality through an unimaginable, overwhelming form of excitation. Of course, you can build up a tolerance for this drug. But that's okay. All you need is to increase your dosage, and to use thought to accelerate your movement even further.