In July and August of 2021, James Bowery and I became embroiled in a productive debate about, as James eventually titled it, the causal structure of Dasein.  I am returning to that subject now, because I find I cannot proceed with my Part Two NSDAP essay without doing so.  My thanks to James for his participation and commentary on that thread, which was to his film review here .

With apologies to abstract artists everywhere.  I can’t title this “The Burnt Orange Heresy, which is taken.  But maybe
“The Burnt Orange Reflex” will do.

THE CAUSALITIES OF HUMAN BEING

Let us begin this essay by reminding ourselves why such abstract and theoretical subject matter, which attends to a primordial aspect of human existence of surpassing irrelevance to those contesting the politics of the day, is nevertheless necessary and meaningful for us as nationalists.

How we came to the point of needing new thinking

For the reason, in brief, that since the Greeks, Western thinking has been overly concentrated on the technical question of how can we know truth and not the existential what are we …

For the reason that Christianity’s idiosyncratic model of the sinner seeking a personal salvation post-mortem by the grace of God does not, in fact, tend to Man’s relational truth but moves him in a manner wholly consistent with the Judaic End-Time ...

For the reason that liberalism’s unfettering will - the guiding idea of our epoch and the secular child of Christianity - is likewise a non-real and non-possible desideratum, the pursuit of which can only consume our lives and distance us from our truth ...

For the reason in consequence that Western metaphysics has not been able to centre itself on the human principle but has surrendered it to science and technology, reducing the lived life to mere utility filled with economism, materialism, consumption and “progress” ...

For the reason that investment, banking, corporate, media and tech elites, and the internationalist institutions, hold sway over the liberal democratic system, and thus over the parties and governments of the West also, imposing their agendas on national politics and reducing it everywhere to a ritual of deception and betrayal …

For the reason that since the middle of the 19th century the Jewish ethno-religious paradigm has accommodated itself, via the leading Jewish intellectuals and activists, in the development of Western political and cultural life, colouring political decision to the profound exclusion of our own interests and freedom …

For the reason that we have no recourse to an active politics of those interests and of the truth of our person, indeed a war of false morality is waged against these even while our ancestral homelands are deliberately and wickedly flooded with foreign populations (which are no less wickedly presented to us as “oppressed peoples” and “ethnic minorities”) ...

… for such reasons, great and small, we are not only subject to the soft-genocidal power play of global elites but to an acquired inner condition of estrangement and confusion.  The modern life so ceaselessly and seamlessly manufactures artifice, the stranger within us reacts to the mortal danger to our kind not with love and commitment to putting things straight but with perfect insouciance.  “What does it matter to me?” the stranger may ask.  Because, of course, in artifice and its detachments lies self-referentialism and nihilism.  So we all sleep on while, to borrow from Enoch Powell, our elites and other enemies heap up the European demographic funeral pyre, and drag the European man and woman and the European family through their neo-Marxist sewer.

In such a compromised condition, from whence is the capacity to defend our life and being to come?  If it comes only from the anti-globalist and traditionalist right as represented by the phenomenon that is Georgia Meloni, and by the rise of Jimmie Åkesson and the Sweden Democrats, and AfD in Germany, by the revitalisation of Marine Le Pen, perhaps even in the person of Donald Trump, then we will see gestures in the direction of recovery, for sure.  But none of these will ever sweep away modernity and the mass man, or the Money Power, never mind the more subtly enworlding powers of the West’s deep religious and ethical, philosophical, social, economic and cultural forms … its very models of Life and Man and their complete possession by the Jewish spirit.  Likewise, none of our own discursive efforts to this point … on race and immigration, on the JQ, on cultural Marxism, on Islam, and latterly on globalism and the Money Power … will ever measure up to this task.  But any measure less and the formative default will confound, limit, frustrate, outlast, and swallow all the forces of reaction.  All that was before them will be after them.

Preparatory notes for a critical Heideggerian

So we return to this question of the abstract, the theoretical, because that is the language in which the formative is re-conceptualised and brought anew to the world.  Only thus could a new and complete philosophy for life and truth, emerging from the human fundamentals, be brought forth.  Only thus could nationalists properly defy our historical trajectory, change it and become the driving force of a revolution for existence.

But why being?  Why so tenuous and recondite a principle, and why Martin Heidegger’s idiosyncratic account of it?  Well, is it not the very substrate of the human existence and the witness to, and participant in, pure reality?  And was not epochal change Heidegger’s stated goal when, a century ago, he sat down to pen the first paragraphs of what would, four years later, appear as Being and Time?  And here we are, still waiting for the epoch of being.  While, in the meantime, his thought has become key to large swathes of later thinking, little to nothing of it doesn’t smuggle in marxian or freudian argument.  Change in our life there has been, but nothing to help us.

Of course, Heidegger never wrote Being and Time’s anticipated sequel.  What we do have is substantially modified by his much quoted “turn” from one central concept to another ... from Dasein as the principal active element in human being-in-the-world to Beyng as the principal piece in the great neurological jig-saw puzzle that is being-in-reality.  But, in fact, these are not the only two directions we could go.  In total, we might distinguish at least four:

a) Dasein as human being in the world, ie, the standing within our own being to witness the being of the organic and inorganic Other and the world-hood about it.  This is “early” Heidegger’s general model of disclosure with which he opposes classical Cartesian epistemology.  It is not detailed in such a way that it meaningfully incorporates …

(b) The tragedy that is the general absence of our native and optimal state of being-here-now from our consciousness, overtaken as it is by an habitual falling into self-obscuration and mechanicity.  The very stuff of the world of men, with all its error, darkness and travail, flows from this vast interior failing.  But, against that, even a small correction to the people’s consciousness must direct it towards the lodestars of individual and collective self-ownership and authenticity, and thus yield more vivifying outcomes.

Heidegger’s closest approach to this was probably Seinsvergessenheit, or oblivion of being.  However, his thinking tended to veer away into historical and historiographical argument (not least because of his quite marked sensitivities about his own place in the canon).  Certainly, the technological modernity he disparaged deepens the fall.  But there was a curse upon us long before the modern era, as also there was a possibility of at least some redress, however brief.  Actually, human evolution worked out one means: faith as an evolved, higher-emotional trait with the fitness gain of turning the subject towards its own sense of presence.  In that most human norm abides adaptive choice-making.  But any means of turning will generate benefit, the more practical and direct the better and the closer to the natural and inalienable, founded truth of us.

Redress itself may be defined as:

the perceptual process of the (attentive, still) man or woman in whom has occurred a separation of identity from the processes into which it had been merged, and its emergence in the witness of the organism’s function of being before the world

(c)  The “late” Heideggerian concept of Beyng as the praeternatural process by which factic being first manifests in our similarly factic world (which is only later mind-ordered into what we accept as reality).  Heidegger spoke of a rift facilitating this most mysterious progress.  But every generation of philosophers since Plato has poured over this mystery.  A common conclusion is for a prior, fundamental openness or space (an obvious parallel being a painted image which cannot be produced but on a canvas or similarly open and receptive medium).  Whether there is some sub-atomic, causal truth to that idea or whether it is an interpolation from elsewhere in the mind-scape remains to be seen.  Either way, for our purposes, as seekers of a life-philosophy for European Man at what is otherwise his end-time, this whole line of thought has no agentive product.  It’s the wrong causal focus.

(d) Being as be-ing, or the organism’s singular act of ongoing.  Heidegger made the claim not for ongoing-ness but for existence.  “Man alone exists, all other things are,” he said.  In other words, while the temporality of all other beings is fixed at a single point of Time’s progression, Man’s temporality renders him additionally historical and futural.  This is true enough, but it is not enough!  Arrayed with all the same, reflexive tenacity for life as every other living being, Man destines ceaselessly in the cause of his own survival and the continuity of his tribe.  This is a grand gesture of ongoing, not mere existence.  As seekers of agency, our interest must lie here.

What, then, of Heidegger, “early” or “late”.  Well, he remains an immensely valuable figure, not only as an original thinker and a champion for renewal of a canon ... the Western canon … which so completely fails the race of Man from whom, and for whom, it was extrapolated, but also as an avowed Swabian identitarian and German nationalist.  He was one of us, if a nationalist who thought rather than a thinker on nationalism.

As noted above, it has not proven possible to develop a functioning philosophy out of his thought.  For one thing, it does not extend to a systematic structuring of causality.  In fact, his account is unstructured, a jumble of ontological principles, chief among them Being-in-the-World, Dasein, Being-Toward-Death, Being-With, and Dasein’s Care/Concern for its being.  Some of them, certainly, must be adjudged primordial.  But some are surely contingent.  For example, we are informed by Heidegger that “the They” is primordial and, in consequence, belongs to “Dasein’s constitution”.  Happily, “the They” does not refer to transsexuals but to ordinary folk ordinarily unthinking about their own enworldment, and thus immersed in the social forms du jour, including religious forms, all of which Heidegger saw as the sign and source of inauthenticity.  Well, in my understanding, enworldment as the parent of personhood applies as much to philosophically aware – even notionally self-aware - intellectuals as it does to the dog-faced denizens of “the lower orders”, and personhood is as much a matter of mechanicity for one as it is for the other.  We are all “the They”.  Yes, there is a methodological line to be drawn, but it is not drawn by relative intellectual ability or even by a philosophical take on life, but by a particular use of attention.

The latter fact effectively compresses the whole of Heidegger’s position on “the They” into the term “ordinary waking consciousness”, regardless of anyone’s intelligence and schooling.  But, then, consciousness and psychology generally were non-ontological tools he vigorously eschewed.  He was always likely to draw his line in some intellectually exclusive quarter, which could not be without cost to his project’s potential.

Another issue is that Heidegger’s concept of Care, like his concept of Time, effortlessly expands beyond all limits, to the point where he declared at various times that “Being is Care” and “Being is Time”.  Obviously, he did not mean that these are synonymous and interchangeable.  But the effect is to over-generalise the whole question of constitution, which might be considered unhelpful.  As an explanation for life’s tenacity, Dasein’s Care implies that the being-there of a being settles (what is) a definite human emotion on causality.  But carrying any value or preference … love or hate, compassion or indifference ... or, indeed, any cognitive product of Mind into primordiality, no matter how generalised and de-contextualised it may be, how distanced from ethics as such, is an interpolation.

If one eschews Heidegger’s narrow focus on human there-being, and thus such ornamentation of the bare, biochemical mechanics of the organism as “preferring for” or “willing” being over non-being, we perforce arrive at the conclusion that those mechanics existed before Homo sapiens, before sapience itself.  There cannot be another rule for Homo sapiens whereby the driving truth of all organic life at all times in its 3.5 billion year history does not drive him also.  It is only reasonable, then, to conclude that they are no less part of being human than any non-human life-form, are cellular in origin, reflexive and abiding, and therefore Mind-independent.  Thus we have to look not for preference or will or any working of the mind but for a mechanical recoil which has the appearance to us of preference or will, and to which these latter things are easily and anthropomorphically imputed.

To be clear, then, and in principle, everything must begin in the ultimately prior, and emerge whole from what comes before, each stage in the sequence being a causatum and environmental modifier for the next.  For the reason of stage-modification alone, it is a methodological error to interpolate anything at all into the causes of life’s tenacity.

It is sometimes said that Heidegger never fully relinquished the Catholicism of his youth, and perhaps Care is a sign of that.  After all, Christians do something similar with the doctrine of “For God who so loved the world”, not seeing that it is the needs of faith in the mind which create a fulfilling God, not the other way round (upon the verity of which the whole universe is, of course, silent).  It is a failing against which the humble ethologist Frank Salter, working scientistically from the opposite direction (ie, from genes towards ethics) is proofed.  Doubtless, both he and Heidegger would (at least formally) accept that the universe is the product of the perpetual and dynamic interaction of forces and mass, and not of design; and the appearance of life on Earth likewise.  But whether Salter could explain more readily why genes have interests than Heidegger could have explained why being-there-then has values is another question.

Let us look a little into that question.  As identified in Part One of this series, a reductive or evolutionary analytic upon such a question necessarily involves:

... sifting through and time-ordering the organism’s always elaborating grip on being.  I would reiterate that we do not speak here of the organism’s biochemical structure and interaction – an agglomeration of things dead in themselves.  We speak of its life-essence emerging unseen from difference elaborating as ever greater difference; and from confine, therefore, and the reflex, impulsion and movement which elaboration entails; and in what, broadly speaking, Martin Heidegger called sorge (care or concern), Frank Salter called interest, and we might call the sole imperative of the will to continuity; and, thereby, in the qualities of ownership and instinct which imbue that will; and in the procreativity which it imbues, and in the discrimination and opportunism which arrive with the light-seeker, sapience; and thence increase, inter-dependency, and belonging; and, ineluctably, death but also, triumphally, death’s deferment.  For all of this characterises the essential struggle, and all of this stands in absolute opposition to that cold state of mechanics which the ontological investigation of the universe logically must uncover.

So currently, anyway, and notwithstanding the differing methodologies involved and the vastly different intellectual standing of the pair, I judge Salter’s model to be the more fundamental because of its starting point, and therefore the closer to the “reflex, impulsion and movement” - reflexivity, for short - mentioned above.  This is what I believe to be the plain fact of life’s tenacity (which we might only ornamentally call, “the sole imperative of the will to continuity”) in critical contact with “the cold state of mechanics”.  It should be remembered that the organism’s origin is a result of inorganic processes occurring under those same conditions (because they are constant and universal).  Origin means integration within confines which gift separation and difference, but only until the organism is reclaimed by the cold state of mechanics, as it must be in time.  Part One puts it this way (framing the contest as between essence and existence, but the meaning is clear):

Integration necessarily has locality and therefore confines, for confinement alone gifts separateness from the prevailing All.  In separateness there is necessarily resistance to the claim of that which is separated from, which is a claim to absoluteness.  In resistance there is the tendency and leaning towards continuity; and in that leaning already lay the seeds, at least, of a “something” which is essentially different, and which preserves its difference only as long as it engages in a Manichean struggle with the blind and profane, homogenising forces without.  But that engagement limits homogeny’s realm and the priorness of existence is universal no more.  Within its own bold confines essence is now prior, for so long as essence differentiates itself existence is made contingent upon and a function of it.

This novel reductive or evolutionary analytic allows us not only to critique Heidegger and Salter on this narrow point but to go beyond interrogating both Dasein and natural ethics.  The final point of arrival is a singular and perpetual re-energising of separation and difference, by which origin was and is sustained on contact with that equally singular and perpetual “cold state of mechanics”.

What is ultimately “there-then” - and “here-now”, of course - is pure recoil rather than an interest, a preference, a will, a care, (each of which also express it, or part of it, but through the filter of higher mental function, and thus never more than proximately).  It is causally, temporally, and ontologically prior to the act of extension that is be-ing as ongoing-ness or differentiation, which is itself only possible because recoil exceeds the requirements for such.  In excess, it masses its actions against disintegration such that be-ing itself is a work of flowing and radical increase.

It is this utterly insistent, primordial and constitutional energy which propels be-ing.  Thought and feeling only come after.

If Heidegger’s very general claim for Care is open to question, so is his claim for Time and temporality.  As claims go, it is extensive.  In The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, a lecture paper from 1954 but published post-mortem, he wrote:

This analytic has the task of exhibiting the basic constitution of human Dasein and of characterising the meaning of Dasein’s being.  In this ontological analytic of Dasein, the original constitution of Dasein’s being is revealed to be temporality.

In the round, Heidegger rated Space as strictly subordinate to Time.  Neither as the universal fabric nor the Cartesian situant of all matter was he especially interested in it.  Similarly, the conceptual unity of theoretical physics, in which Time is always local, seems to have held less appeal than it might, given its gradual emergence during his formative intellectual years and Einstein’s preliminary paper on Space-Time which was published in 1926 at the height of interest in Heidegger’s original thinking.  In the event, he proposed that being flowed beyond location and into an extra-locative with-ness demonstrated by the exchange gifts and love letters at a distance, or likewise the entering into contracts, giving of legal opinions, sending diplomatic notes or, in our age, playing chess online or visiting a message board.  Locales may de-severate, as he put it.

However, other thinkers, notably Jacques Derrida and the postmodernists and, latterly, the German essayist and hyper-modernist Peter Sloterdijk, have sought to balance the books and give Space its due.  To that end they have presented it as the primordial field of ontological realisation, in which any living being takes on its ownmost truth; and on this issue they are surely right.  We will do that too.  It remains, therefore, to structure the process, tracing its causalities to arrive at the constitution of the human reality.  Which, after our fashion, we shall do.

To that end, we have one further task, which is to supplement both Space and Time with a third cosmic determinant.  We have already mentioned it just above.  It is the ceaseless flux of mass and energy in Space-Time.  From its cycles of integration and disintegration arise all material creation but also all systemic decay.  In the Heideggerian context it supplies the cessation of the organism’s being, without which Heidegger’s commentary on Time and temporality would have no dynamic content, for there would be no approaching end towards which organic being must face.  Dasein’s futural (but never purposive) standing could not be conceived.

The table below, therefore, proposes three principal determining grounds, each working through the same short, staged sequence of causal inter-actions with human being.  Ground as, say, Time, is obviously different to its respective determining power of temporalisation.  But temporalisation belongs solely to Time.  It is a property of Time which is, as we have seen, both characterising to the universal fabric as a whole and local within it.  From this we can ascertain that Property acts as a causatum conditioning the further sequence as a matter of absolute law and universal government.  Everything, organic or inorganic, is subject to it from its origin, dependent upon it and, within its range of possibilities, in conformity with it.  Accordingly, ground and its property are not in themselves responsive to anything, and thus not relational to being, or even primordial, or anything that constitutes an orientation towards being.  Only being responds, relates, and orients - all of which is reflexive.  But ground and its property are always mechanism and everywhere cold and dark, and implacable, and port no meaning.  Meaning would require design, and design would require Mind.  In the broadest terms we are accident or we are design, and if we are design then everything is design, everything is meant and has meaning.  But no part of Man’s factual knowledge ever demonstrated one scintilla of design.  Faith in design is an exercise of the higher emotions.  If we exclude it, therefore, and guide ourselves only by what we know and, presently, can know, we really are left with a life in a universe of forces acting blindly upon us as an organic anomaly, just as they act upon everything.

The perpetual question for the study of cause, then, is wither fact or myth, and if our way is selected for us by fact then we cannot rest.  Only the faithful can rest.  We are obliged to uncover being’s coherent developmental sequence as it is conditioned by ground.  That sequence must yield being’s founded solidity, such that the human truth may then flow and all our historical and historiographical factors, with which this essay began by listing, may be compared to it without favour.

THE CAUSAL STRUCTURE

With that, we will proceed to the proposition.  It isn’t remarkably radical.  There are no surprises.  After all, we are dealing in the common currency of human fundamentals.  This is detection, not invention, and once detected the outline ought to be reasonably apparent to any Philip Marlow of ontological investigation.  Detection extends to the only novel element in this investigation, which is the (tolerably tight) sequence, whereby final products articulate from an at-hand given ground:

One should acknowledge at the outset that an evolutionary ontology will always be narrow in focus and fact-bound compared to the philosophical norm.  For example, in his late epistemological thinking Heidegger developed an aesthetic theory of four-fold being, the four-foldness comprising earth, sky, divinities, and mortals.  His assertion was that humans dwell in a given natural or nurtural relation with these.  It feels like a foray into the structure of experience advanced via allegory.  It may also be an attempt to integrate the transcendental into the everyday or exoteric life, or to sacralise that life.  Whichever it may be, it is very far from the narrow detection” with “no surprises” that I am perpetrating right now on you, dear reader!

Anyway, methodically right or wrong, we are now embarked upon a quest for constitution – the real, inhering, causal grounds of human being.

The primary structure

This investigation has identified three grounds, interlinked certainly but each inviolate and unsurpassable in its own domain:

(i) The ceaseless flux of mass and energy.
(ii) The uniquely localised phenomenon of Time.
(iii) The parent of locality, which is Space.

We have also touched upon ground’s property, which is the aspect of it to which all matter is passively subject.  While conformity is inevitable and, of course, conditioning, still it belongs to the passive component as a separating, differentiating entity.  We are then concerned with being as it emerges from that first stage and unfolds. 

To a greater or lesser extent, that thing emergence conforms within its own range of reflexive possibility.  What is reflex?  As a practical example, its presence may be inferred in the “survival of the fittest” evolutionary strategy.  So, say, common household microbes with genes most conducive to resistance tend to survive serial applications of a chemical-based cleaning agent such that, over time, an increasingly resistant population arises.  The conforming act in that case is not only the extinction of large numbers of the population but also its orienting towards greater resistance, thereby maintaining its state of differentiation from “the prevailing All”.

While the above example is drawn from the line of flux - or Flux - those of Time and Space proceed after the same fashion.  The separating, differentiating organism cannot be as inorganic matter is before Space-Time’s respective and co-active properties of locality and temporality.  It cannot be arrested in either as mere lumpen matter is arrested.  Its separation has a vote on the question.  Après Heidegger, Time is “an issue for being” because Time is consonant with disintegration.  From the Part One essay again:

Always, Time and Entropy drag this life back towards discontinuity and disintegration, and the cold state of mechanics.  Always life’s essential, voracious appetite for continuity, born of that initial happenstance, impels it forward and proves itself, within its own confines and by its perfect integrity, as equal as equal can be to the vast forces without.

Heidegger wrote at length about our formative experience of past → present → future, representing it as a product of Dasein’s temporality.  “The future is not later than having been, and having been is not earlier than the Present,” he wrote.  We need take no issue.  We are not discussing here whether Time is indeed linear or is in some hidden way non-linear, but how linearity is human being’s singular reflex under temporalision, as it is under the like impacts of disintegration and locality.  In the question of Time’s form it may be a fair copy of the thing that is or it may not.  But it is what’s possible, and it is the real starting point for an ontological consideration of human being – not, of course, as the mere factic thereness of it, which is the passive thereness of any thing at its point in time and in space (including its initiating point), but as the plighted, ceaseless struggle for be-ing or ongoing-ness which truly characterises human existence.

In a general sense, it is Ground’s property occasioning this inhering, reflexive impulsion in being, such that the latter’s conformity can never be held by it at nought.  Being is a three-part emergent process and, so, primordially directional.  As we see, linearity orients as futurity.  Reflexivity (as recoil in the table) is most directly apparent where the existential threat is most immediate: on the ground of “the ceaseless flux of mass and energy”.  It is being’s only possible recourse to orient itself away towards homeostasis, which is, though, still always and only a partial rebuke to disintegration, as noted in Part One:

giving up phenotype to disintegration, yes, but withholding genotype for continuity.

As noted above, the recoil from imminent disintegration seems to have no stopping point at actual homeostasis, at least not as mere sufficiency.  How that is so, whether by a lack of a means of recognition of stasis or, given disintegration’s constancy, by Nature’s seeming downright cruel and unnecessary erring on precaution (as, for example, in the extreme earliness of puberty in humans), I cannot now say.  But the undoubted result is excess beyond the requirements for basic ongoing-ness or differentiation.  The previous statement suffices: “in excess, it masses its actions against disintegration such that be-ing itself is a work of flowing and radical increase.”  It is increase, therefore, that imbues human being constitutionally.

For its part, locality-as-confine is the site of the vitalising entity whose extreme fragility would otherwise be exposed to “the vast forces without”, and whose physical integrity would be quickly undone.  Apparently, Derrida spoke of a womb, and perhaps he also had in mind this idea that life’s coming into being is an event which could occur only in a certain confined locale.  Confine, then, is the accidentally arising precondition of viability for that second accident which is vitalisation of the organic.  Confine does not know vita as the womb knows the foetus, of course (and if Derrida is speaking of this idea then he is doing so poetically and not philosophically).  But vita knows and relates to confine, or relates to it enough for the organism’s act of attenuation, its “reflex, impulsion and movement”, to proceed.  Confine, meanwhile, does not change one whit in itself, and does not even exist except as locale.  Its existence is a fact only of the organism’s relation of dependence.  In that relation, certain particulars of confine facilitate the attenuation of the organism’s first-being into be-ing.  It is be-ing’s particularity, then, which transforms confine into an environment in the classic Darwinian sense as a process-bound causatum of ever-increasing differentiation in which relational dependence always moves towards relational independence (and specificity).  It can never truly arrive at independence, not even with cloning and transhumanism.  But we see pure mechanism in the transmission of traits for fitness eventually become will-dependent selection, and in the sublime trajectory of independence which is the life of European Man we see nature itself brought ever more under his audacious hand.

This entire history of relation is given over to particularity.  It is particularity which is constitutional to human being in his spacial context.  The wicked and deliberate flooding of European living spaces today with foreign peoples, and the imposed political culture of human sameness and racial equality, is precisely a stamping out of particularity in the European being, by generational replacement and by miscegenation.

We conclude by returning to the temporal context, which we left at futurity.  Be-ing’s orientation towards the future never leaves the present moment.  Heidegger spoke of ecstasis but I struggle to see how one might make a convincing case for that from a constitution for which Time is ground, and which, by its sheer existence, is itself and commands from the centre of itself.  Rather, its futurity inheres in the massive positivity which emerges – Heidegger would have said unconceals – with “normal” consciousness of, or presence to, be-ing.  I have previously referred to this as an emergent and reclaiming self-affirmation and appropriation in which the restless power to live life intentionally is available and the future is full not of the foreboding of death but of life’s possibility.

Apologies for the polyphony, but the opening Allegro vigoroso of Michael Tippett’s little-played Second Symphony from 1957:

... is 8 minutes 6 seconds of the pure and primal energy and massive, abiding optimism I am trying to convey.  Just the forging reverberative chords and the commanding brass above offer the sense of that.  You need to begin listening a little way in, though, since at the piece’s live premiere by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1958 this opening section went awry.  The conductor Adrian Boult halted everyone, apologised to the audience and began again (at 2 min 45 sec in the video).  Polyphany, btw, which somewhat ironically became a cultural artifact of the period, was intended to free composition from all cultural attachment.  In our case, that tender hope of cultural detachment must stand for the disentangled abstraction we need for this pursuit of constitution (which can never really end, for understanding is unquantifiable).

On that musical gesture we will end for now.  We have arrived at a three-fold constitution of increase, affirmation and particularity.  In the next essay in this series we will investigate the secondary structure which exists by an error of Nature, and from which we humans derive error everywhere and the saving evolutionary strategies of transcendent action and religious feeling.