YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE… PART I.

(Having reread this entry about the exoteric and the esoteric, I have found it slightly esoteric, that is, in need of a serious simplification. However, any simplification will be ruinous to the splendid mystique of the interplay of Richard Strauss’s Frau ohne Schatten with my own Schatte ohne Mann. For this reason, I shall leave this entry as is.)

 “You only live twice: one life for yourself and one for your dreams,” as we have a chance to learn from the song in the eponymous 1967 James Bond movie. Ironically, in any creative activity, philosophy prominently included, we are indeed invited to live a second life where our dreams through the magic of putting them on paper, or on canvass, or into marble, or bronze, are transformed into solid reality, while never losing the ephemeral quality of a dream. There is an incredible charm in such a combination. Creators are very lucky people, indeed!…

There are two perspectives on living twice: synchronic and diachronic. We are living horizontally, in time, and vertically, in our “dream life.” Nietzsche, in the passage quoted below, contends that the philosopher’s perspective, be it exoteric or esoteric, is not horizontal but vertical, seeing things either from below or from above. Here is the passage itself:

(Jenseits 30): “The difference between the exoteric and esoteric, known to philosophers who believe in the order of rank, and not in equality and equal rights, does not so much consist in the exoteric coming from the outside, not the inside, but that it sees things from below, whereas the esoteric looks down from above. There are heights of the soul, from which even tragedy ceases to look tragic.”

Interestingly, and quite instructively, in both the philosophical and the psychological senses, the difference between the exoteric and esoteric seems to be horizontal for those who have experienced both perspectives in their lives. The exoteric may be called the ‘learning perspective.’ The learner, to his credit, much as the creator in later life, does not settle into the hoi polloi routine of identifying himself with the world, but he distances himself from it first in order to study it. (Let us not forget that he studies both the very best and the very worst of it, before becoming an accomplished creative philosopher.) In the capacity of the student, that makes the world the teacher, and it explains the exoteric perspective from below. Thereafter, having earned high grades, he graduates and can now afford the esoteric perspective, which is a higher, more sophisticated form of escapism from the vulgar plane, allowing the creation of the fiction of parallel reality, so strong and so powerful, that his life now acquires an independent existence in a world of wishful thinking of one’s own (“You only live twice: one life for yourself and one for your dreams,” sort of!), and, having thus acquired a comfortable and happy intellectual existence, one can finally enjoy the luxury of looking down, esoterically, on the world down below, and the only reason why even tragedy ceases to look tragic is that one no longer belongs below that world of tragedy, so the danger of the tragic collapsing on you and crushing you to death simply ceases to excite the corresponding emotion of fear…

(This is the end of Part I. Part II will be posted tomorrow.)