The two all-essences

This is a translated version of an older Trilema article, Cele doua atot-esente. Together with Peri metaphyseos, in English this time and On essences it forms a trilogy, which should ideally be read in that order.

That essences have no flesh does not necessarily mean they can't move the flesh of others.

It's quite the mystery this, how and wherefore, but the fact remains that there's no rule requiring that essences remain forever "silent". My mind can identify without much effort two that regularly move the whole population of the globe.

The first is expressionⁱ. Expression, which exists since forever, even before any one given language (be it "natural" or "synthetic") was born of its substance. Expression, which will doubtlessly survive all of them - the simple presence or absence of given tongues has no effect over the existence of expression, only the disappearance of the possibility of communication could possibly unweave it from the world.

Expression forms languages by its own rules and criteria, pushes and pulls on them by its own taste or need (admitting we are human, we will taste the sweet fruit of the aforementioned personification, it's more convenient), exposes them to the risk and sometimes the certainty of their own extinction should it be necesary, with no interest given or consideration paid to ulterior effects, just as white water will carry logs or cattle with no consideration if that may result in smashing them against a rock or bridge, and with no worry as to "what will become of them".

Language obeys, and draws the limits of human representation, which limits in turn draw, in a certain, mediated manner, the borders of individual humans' experience and activity. In this manner, thrice mediated (once through experience, which in turn through representation, which in turn through language), the universal essence of expression drags you back and forth, picks your children by picking your lovers by picking the experience through which you imagine you're choosing them and limiting your actions on the basis of which they imagine to be picking you.

The second is... well... the second doesn't, in fact, have a name. Would this be a sign that expression doth not approve ? Why is it the case that the second essence is not representable in terms of the first ? Coincidence, I wonder ?

Let's call it... changeⁱⁱ. What money is for this second essence are words for the first.

Change, like expression, has existed before people, the chemical exchanges within cells through respiration are, in the end, a matter of change, of merchandise and capital, the relation between a saprophyte and its host purely economical, like all political choice. Something as simple as the flow of water, in appearance a physical phenomena is in fact an exchange : capital as potential energy, time as gravity, constraints of various surfaces indistinguishable from any other environmental limits. Water flows just as economically as any corporation, no matter how sophisticated, there are no differences of essence.

The very evolution of life on Earth is, in the end, a matter of economics. And so here, this second essence controls your existence : it being cheaper you have no wings, you have no wings. No matter how much or how little this suits you, and even it seems to you that this is who the world "is", for you to have no wings. Were three eyes cheaper you'd have had all three and imagined it only natural, while poor blind fishes in the depths of the sea or captive in caves are not only blind, but perfectly happy to be blind. Because that's what it's to be.

And looky how, together, one coming from representation, the other from action, these two essences limit your very imaginary freedom. Surely, from a certain perspective regarding the entire matter these limits come out as beneficial, at the very least because absent them we'd have never found the two essences.

It's a postulation that to me seems absolutely evident that the two have nothing in common - and thus irreductible to a single essence (which, incidentally, offers just about the best possible argument against any conceivable monotheism, if there was any need for such arguments past the immense boredom imanent in any monotheism).

Why have they found to dispute in man the same tiny point of the world ? Is it happenstance ? Does this happenstance hide a purpose (and if yes, how would we go about transforming this metaphysics into teleology ?) Mystery.

But at least we have the satisfaction that we've spent a few hours in a pleasant manner together.

1. The original had an easier job, Romanian distinguishing between "limbaj" which is a more general term, and "limba", which is more particular. As such a programming language is "limbaj de programare" in Romanian, whereas the English language is "limba engleza". To try and best reconstruct this distinction I'm going to use "expression", but really, it should be "lingus" or something.

   There could exist alternatives, but in my eyes "expression" works because of "genetic expression". [↩]

2. The original said "economy". Meanwhile I have realised this is wrong, and that's exactly why these three articles had to be translated before I could proceed to the Complete Theory of Economics.

   As a sign of this error, the original had a paragraph we no longer need here, which went something like "but let us not misunderstand the term economics in the naive-bombastic sense people give generally to the term, under the fundamentally broken assumption that it'd be their creation, that it obeys them, that they can control it through laws and other bullshit of this kind, infantile nonsense roughly on the level of expecting the moon disappears every time one covers his eyes. [↩]