Becoming

“The experience that we mean to indicate ceases to be philosophy, being that towards which all philosophising has reached out as towards fulfilment, and to which reaches out even now man’s action in his believing he wants given objects or ideals, in mutual contrast. The “path” to which we refer is not idealism, nor phenomenology, nor existentialism, nor Yoga, nor Zen, but something rigorously beyond them, which tends to disengage from various determinations the pure movement of consciousness that in those doctrines and in those methods is in any case identified with the objective put forward, each demand for unconditionedness falling unconsciously back into them in the manner of reflexity: which is constitutional to the psyche of modern man, who is the only interpreter of them : for which reason they are lacking the transcendent thought from which they sprang. It is the path of mankind at the point at which it is, at the limit of the contradiction of its being with its thought: not, certainly, with the thought with which it makes its culture, but with the autonomous process through which such thought is produced : according to a transcendence which is continuously present, but unknown. The perception of such a process, never reached by any speculation, is the secret of the identity between being and thinking, so that it opens to being in thinking. It becomes the harmony between living thought and existence, which is existence because it uses the life through which it is living. True being is thinking, if thought lives: so that life may be truly lived: according to the immediate Logos, rather than through traditional mediation. Therefore the path indicated by us goes beyond every system of the past : it demands the perennial Logos, as presence. Normally mankind limits itself to using life, without being in such life. To live in reflex consciousness, or in never grasped sensations, is not being in life, but to continually presuppose it and nonetheless unconsciously search for it beyond reflexity, without knowing about reflexity and about what may overcome it. For which reason one does not see in the present the possibility of resolving reflexity, and continually, in the following instant, one projects the search for life: never possessed, because always escaping one. In order not to be known. The thought that is definitively experienced is always lifeless thought, since the moment of thinking thought can only take place to the extent that it shall not be seen. It can in fact be seen and focussed on only as thought thought. The moment of thinking thought is possible only to the extent that a theme or an object commits it: the object of thought is seen, not the thought through which the object is thought. And this is right, because contemplating this thinking, by analogy, means seeing it through a further act that cannot be seen, being a movement superior to that of thinking thought, that thinks through abstraction. This is to reach up to the transcendence of thought, or living thought. But it is a re-arising to the “pure subject”, or the “unseen seer”, which ceases to have being as an object, being itself the essence of being: which to be has no need to place itself up against any object. The essence of the “pure subject” is the Logos of the world.”

Section 9 from A Treatise on Living Thought by Massimo Scaligero
Translation from Italian by Mark Nazzari Willan