The Book of Non-Existence, Vadim Filatov [top 100 books of all time checklist .txt] 📗

know about inevitable defeat. Proclaiming determination, Mishima professed his extremism. He considers that a confluence of an extreme measure can serve as a spiritual springboard for comprehension of value of death. Usually the philosophy is based on calculations in which life is considered as an acquisition, and death as a loss - to turn this cosy and habitual world, it is necessary to ennoble violence over ones own common sense and intelligence. That is why Mishima stands on anti-intellectual positions which in some ways related his views with the early forms of the European fascism. “Intellectuals hide their feebleness and avidity behind conversations and philosophizing”, - he contemptiously notes. Unlike them, Mishima acts as a supporter of extremism and of a direct action. “Fidelity and honouring will come together with obsession”, - he said, opposing to empty philosophizing his ideas concerning power and spontaneous harmony of pure action. Only if a person has reached a high degree of obsession, then gate of death opens before him. Thus there are no distinctions between voluntary and compelled death. It is impossible to die “for the sake of a just cause” as a nature of death is absolute, and any purpose is relative.

Staying at the crossroads between life and death the Samurai chooses ANY death. … The condensed silence was broken off by his shout: "Long live the Emperor!" Having exhaled last words, he has driven edge of a sword with a great force into his stomach. He felt as if a heated rod has pierced him through. Burning like an ice, a heat of a wound was instantly replaced by an intolerable pain enveloping all his body. He has seized steel with both hands and, having ploughed guts, has finished an edge to the right part of a stomach. According to custom it was a second (“kayshaku”) who should stop torments of the Samurai. Моritha in excitement could cut out his head only with a third blow. But other sources assert that he could not make it, and other Samurai has finished business. A head of Mishima, spoiling with blood, has swept on a red state carpet. Moritha, executing his debt, has unstitched to himself a stomach too. Then stupid and scared police has rushed at last into the office filled in with blood.
“Even a senseless death which will no bring neither flowers, nor fame - possesses an advantage of the Death of Person. If we so highly appreciate advantage of a life how we can not appreciate advantage of death? Nobody dies in vain”. (Yukio Mishima).
If we should argue from positions of unconditional pessimism, every natural death simultaneously is a violent one, or execution, a kind of punishment for a sin of existence. And suicide represents a voluntary death when a person carries out a function of executioner for himself. Probably sometime a practice according to which people will choose their term for final returning into the Nothing will be established everywhere in the world. Our perfection reaches its top in death. Ancient wise men named died - “that who has returned to the beginning”. Die on time! –thus Zarathustra spoke. But now still there are numerous interdictions, semiinterdictions and various arguments against suicide. However a most convincing argument against suicide was offered by all the same Emil Cioran: “To get rid of a life - this means to lose a pleasure daily to laugh at it”. On the other hand it is fine that a life gives us many occasions not to live every day. Life and death of Mishima has shown that he obviously was mistaken with the world or, at least, with an epoch to live in. It is impotent to understand that his last action was not a banal suicide. It was his direct action representing sense-creative Refusal. As to suicide, it, as a rule, is made not because of philosophical negation of a life, but only because a person does not agree to accept his place in a life.
Even known philosophers – pessimists (with exception of Philipp Mainlander) made fair intellectual efforts to stop development of their thought in this critical point. After all, every fair philosopher can divide metaphysical despair of Philipp Mainlander, but quite another matter – to share his fate. Certainly, it is possible to live to a ripe old age, sadly arguing on caducity of a life, but much more fairly it seems to be hung up joyfully and so to prove for temporarily surviving persons ones own intellectual honesty.
So from statements concerning absurdity and imperfection of life a conclusion about suicide directly follows. Various attempts to reject this conclusion undertaken by Arthur Schopenhauer and Edward Hartmann, could only demonstrate extreme weakness of their argumentation. The first says that suicide is an error because as a result of it not the essence of harm (World Will), but only its phenomenon is exterminated. But no person puts to himself such a ridiculous aim, as a destruction of essence of things. Being a suffering phenomenon, he wishes to get rid of his life as a painful phenomenon — and he undoubtedly reaches such purpose, even from point of view of Schopenhauer, who with all his pessimism cannot confirm that dead men suffer. And Hartmann, quite recognizing that main purpose of everybody is suicide, demands that a person abstained from suicide in interests of the Universe and in interests of the mankind and devoted his forces on preparation of means for general Universal Suicide in which historical and space process should terminate. It is consumed as the higher moral duty whereas to kill himself, to get rid of own sufferings, it is peculiar for the people standing on lowest step of ethics. The last is, surely, fair, but Hartmann’s own principle of unconditional pessimism logically excludes any other ethics. On the contrary, our Anti-philosophy of the Nothing considers a sense of a concrete human life on a context of universal problem of all the mankind, connected with comprehension of Absolute Nothing. In such a context everything including apocalyptic fears of mankind, get opposite, positive sense.
It is prominent that there is a representation about inevitability of Doomsday which can be found at collective consciousness of the various people. Eventually, the mankind does not have any future, but it have many variants of death. “The sky is not opened for anybody - it will open only after disappearance of our world”, - as an early medieval philosopher Tertullian confirmed. In the western philosophical tradition there is so-called eschatology - a motion about Doomsday, expiation and afterlife, about destiny of the Universe or its transition in qualitatively new condition. Hear it is possible allocate the individual eschatology, that is a doctrine about afterlife of individual human soul, and eschatology of the world, that is a doctrine about the purpose of space and history and also about their final. The eschatological moods are present at many religions and beliefs of various nations of the world. Thus, eschatology has received its special development in Judaism and in Christianity ("Last Judgement"), then in Islam.
The eschatological ideas were usually perceived as fatal threat or – if to consider a material world as a painful wound of the body of the Non-existence - as a light hope promising to everybody last and definitive termination of sufferings. As told the French philosopher Blaise Pascal: “Jesus will be in deadly torments till the end of the world – should not sleep at this time”. It is interesting that in Russia, during the reign of tsar Alexey, the Russian peasants periodically stopped their work on fields and, having closed in a temple, joyfully waited a destruction of the world. But, as a Doomsday unfortunately did not come, they were obliged to come back to their senseless agricultural activity. However, though predictions for concrete terms of universal transition in the Non-existence, made during different epochs, did not come true, it is necessary to remember that treatment of the world from illness of existence is in any case inevitable. Unfortunately people during a human history, one generation after another, pass in the Non-existence without having seen the most interesting. However would be desirable to believe that we become a happy exception and that the world will incorporate with the Nothing already during lifetime of our generation. Then God should be carried out as an explosion, and an explosion should be carried out as God. The Universe will disappear when the human spirit will be quiet and clarified. The mankind will forget about all and will come back in the Non-existence which was present prior to the beginning of time. The Outcome is an act, opposite to creation. What can be better for a person, rather than worthy death? Also what can be better for mankind rather than light and joyful doomsday? Daily waking up, people start to prepare for perception of the day hallucinations which make our world. But one fine day they with simplification will find out that the fog dissipates. An impressing picture of collapse of universal illusion was drawn by Sartre in his philosophical novel "The Nausea":
“Once in the morning people will wake up and, having opened windows, will be surprised by some terrible sense which has taken root into things and waits for something. It would seem these are trifles but if the situation lasts, people will start to make mass suicides… And then I will burst out laughing and I will shout to running by: “What have you achieved with your science? What have you achieved your humanism? And where is your advantage, a conceiving reed?”
Just with an expectation of approach of this fine day, full with delight of despair, people, following an example of the first Christians, take cover in vaults from time to time. It is requires a certain kind of internal scope for a purpose to cripple ones own life.

The CONCLUSION.

Twelve principles of the sense of life

Whether a pleasure to roll stones in steep depth is familiar to you? And whom you do not learn to fly, than learn them to fall faster!
(Friedrich Nietzsche).

1. Such concepts as "the Non-existence", "the Nothing" and "The Void" are quite independent and simultaneously form trinity.
2. The absolute Nothing exists owing to its non-existence, constantly absorbing isolated fragments of life. Movement is an eternal process of destruction. Such is the basic function of the Nothing: it destroys everything.
3. The Universe is a lost life of the primary Void in which existence and non-existence did not resist each other. The absolute Nothing realizes itself by means of human thinking (or God learns itself by means of its creation), and thus existence of world becomes comprehended. As a result a function of the Universe is finished.
4. The God of Absolute Nothing is born owing to destruction. It is necessary to dare not to be at all for the aim to be perfect. The creation the Nothing by means of death consists in daily overtaking death. Our life is too short to spend it for a life.
5. All our life and all our sufferings are illusory, because the Non-existence is present, so life is absent. A position of some person in his life offers nothing from his position in a coffin. A person is captured by fear when he hopes. He is afraid to die, because hopes for a life. But a hope dies first. Hopelessness is a property accessible only by very strong.
6. Having overcome various material world illusions person becomes involved in releasing the Truth of the Void. And this Particle is unique real value which it is capable to find throughout the life. The value connected with formation of a form and its dissolution, with infinity of restriction and with limitation of boundless and with abolition both of that and of another.