Lecture: Ontological Menippea (9/5/26)

I’d like to take some more time today to riff on the farce and menippea as a way — it appears to me to be the transcendental method of my fundamental lack of conviction that systems themselves, whether they’re biological or institutional or ecological, change by way of anything other than an enlargement of consciousness. And what I mean by that, and the reason why I think Bakhtin centers Dostoevsky’s poetics in communicating his insights on menippea and farce — which as far as I’ve read seem to me to be the most substantial in the modern era — is that with Dostoevsky there is this issue of sincerity, integrity, and morality, where the characters themselves are faced with existential questions and existential problems, and Dostoevsky posits those in the way of a philosopher exercising the narrative right to experiment with conditions through characters.

And I think “The Crocodile” is a great example of Dostoevsky’s — I’d say most extreme Gogolian. And Dostoevsky obviously says we all emerged from Gogol, and this is a common sentiment among the greatest fiction writers after Gogol. To posit it and attempt, for lack of a better word, the realization of the absurdity of the conditions which have been institutionalized — to see the crocodile as a child of the nose, of Gogol’s “Nose.” Conditions that have been institutionalized so thoroughly, both genetically in terms of a perspective, right, baked into the biome of the human being, but then again institutionalized in a second order, in terms of cultural, religious, political institutions, which redouble the essential human problem of almost total ignorance beyond immediate biological desires and needs. That this itself is the formation of the human world and the human psyche and the human condition.

And the Menippean farce, or the satire — and I’m thinking again of Don Quixote — is really the ability to relinquish any desire or need to actually influence those conditions, but rather reveal them to be what they are, and that itself being the only path forward. And in my experience with science, philosophy, systems theory, ontology, world history, world mythological history, all of it — it’s essentially a useless task. It’s irrelevant. It doesn’t accomplish anything. What it is, is it’s straining against a force that is so substantial, so self-deluded, because it needs to be. And I went deep into this with my work on psychology and neuroscience. Probably one of the better ones is the Atlas formation, which I wrote, I think, pretty substantial literature on and it’s been developed throughout.

That there is really no — I mean, outside of again the conditions of human genius, and I think, I immediately think of Goethe, or I think of Spinoza or Leibniz, these thinkers of such substantial consequence, that do not — and Newton is a good example of this as well — do not exist on the plane of self-affirmation. You can see this pretty clearly in their lives and careers. Galileo as well, right? These are real advancements that are made objectively into the foundations of not only phenomenological ontology — what is, or what is being immanently in the sphere of relations, which we experience as space-time — but rather what is the fundamental character of space-time, which is the problem or question that I’ve been asking and answering with persistence. My theory is of persistence and the character of being across scales. This is the project that is undertaken by such an extreme few. There’s no place in any of the world’s institutions for it, as we well know. I think Goethe’s popularity in large part relied upon his literary works.

And in encountering that problem — in my experience of encountering that problem — the farce itself is where the answer to that problem folds over on the reality of that answer essentially occurring or existing in a vacuum. And the farce is actually what allows the seed of that knowledge to perpetuate into the future. Because it can’t be received on the terms that it exists. And the acknowledgement of that — I think in large part when you look at the late life of Einstein, there’s this emergence of hilarity, really, as being the kind of primary principle at work. And I think this is particularly apparent to him after the nuclear atomic period, where he’s advising, I suppose, hopelessly, against the exercise of this political power by the barrel of the atom bomb.

This is, I think, the end point. And when I look at the history of genius — and it’s something I’ve very deeply [studied], to try to understand how people cope with that reality — you have different thinkers like Tesla, I think, is a great example, who ends up at a point where the farce is never really reached. And I think before the farce is tragedy. And that again brings me back to Dostoevsky, and that’s why Dostoevsky is such an interesting figure in Bakhtin’s relationship to menippea, but also as a modern bridge force who clearly inherits Gogol. And again, I’ll point to “The Crocodile” — I think that’s primary. I think that’s one of really Dostoevsky’s primary works. It is not really interested in being an epic, it’s more interested in saying something philosophical all the way through. Whereas Dostoevsky will often posit philosophical arguments through his characters, and I think those are his best moments, not necessarily the narrative moments that most people would consider literature.

But that you have late Einstein, and I think the only salvation for late genius, as in Goethe, when he talks about the madhouse of the world, is the salvation of the realization of the necessary insanity of a species which is not adequately equipped to confront reality at all. And I think this is a pretty common experience, which again I’ve significantly detailed in my work on neuroscience and psychology: that the protection, the self-protection of the individual or the organism, to survive and persist in an otherwise hostile and unknowable world — which the vast majority of people and organisms exist in — knowledge of the world is not possible. Right?

And that knowledge of the world not being possible is not digestible coming from an external source. It’s not possible to reach an ontological ground. So what is planted, or supplanted otherwise, is an artificial ground. And we know this as religion, or the manufacturing of the personality, all of which are coping mechanisms for the failure to acquire or reach reality. It’s the necessary structure which upholds the organism in space and in time. It’s a learned, acquisitive neurological pathway of survival through the larger path of the river of space-time itself. So the necessity of acquiring these traits is effectively the personality of any given individual. And any given individual moving through space-time will shore up, over time, these traits, will wear these pathways like a neurological mask — you have to wear these pathways over and over again in space and in time. These become the pattern of the character, and beneath the character is an abyss, because there is no ontological ground of the being.

And this is precisely what menippea is, or what the farce is. It’s the revelation of that bottom dropping out, and it’s the boundary which I think the ancient Greeks understood quite well as the boundary between comedy and tragedy. And really what it is, is a very thin line. But in my experience, at sufficient depth, it’s comedic. It’s not to say that loss of life or suffering are comedic or tragic necessarily, but that they emerge from this massive, massive groundswell of the farcical lack of knowledge, for lack of a better word, and the failure to achieve knowledge, being substantially the human condition.

And so living within that terrain is necessarily the Menippean acknowledgement of genius: to have to exist within that terrain and to know, to think fundamentally, that the solution to the problem — even when clearly articulated and understood at an ontological level, which is a deeper ground than scientific, a deeper ground than even the conventionally philosophical — when sufficiently understood at the ontological level, solves nothing. Because what is required to actually make that excursion, or that incision into reality, is a real strength of character, which is only possessed by those who are able to achieve even a sliver of objectivity in terms of their relations to being.

And so when you have Hölderlin talking about, and continually in his works increasingly working towards, relationship to being — you have the closed project of the poet. And I think this is the danger, in my experience, of the multiple different spheres of relationship: that the poet can find the center of being and have this central encounter of and with being, but the capacity for metacritical reflection and this kind of humor about the reality, I could describe as a prophetic or visionary consciousness encountering the substratum of reality. And you see this in Zarathustra , you see this in the life of William Blake, you see this in Rimbaud. It’s just a common state in terms — it’s not common at all, but it’s common among truly visionary poets who strike the ontological ground. Hölderlin as well.

This encounter — what it manufactures is just a deepening, an endless deepening of the depths. It’s just recursive and folds over on itself. And really what the deepening of the depths does is just accumulate space between, for lack of a better word, the masses and the visionary poet. Effectively the same could be said of any sort of scientific revolution. What it does is it just rearranges the deck chairs on a sinking ship, to use the idiom, right. These scientific revolutions, as well as ultimately the visionary revolutions, offer us much less than what we would hope. Because these knowledge conditions themselves don’t change the ontological conditions. The human experience is an ontological failure. It’s not a lack of knowledge. If anything, the capacity to know, and knowing, has been greater and is greater than ever before in human history, especially in terms of direct incursions into deep, deep, deep substratum — disciplinary substratum, whether that’s about particle physics or the knowledge of the structure of the brain or mapping out cosmological terrain. Very, very sophisticated knowledge platforms, and we in our ignorance presume these to be things that are actually helping us. This also goes along with technology, as we discussed in the last lecture: everything from artificial intelligence to advanced computational devices, robots, self-driving cars, right?

And this is where menippea becomes so powerful, and the farce becomes so powerful. And it really is such a sophisticated device. It took a while for me to come to this, and I think the reason was a self-conviction — the idea that the answer would solve the problem. And I think it’s ultimately a self-, I guess for lack of a better word, like a narcissistic conviction. Like a conviction that with the right knowledge presented at the right depth, that this would actually be a solve. And I think on a personal level, it is. And I think without that right knowledge, it would have been impossible to graduate to menippea, or to graduate to the ontological farce, or the existential farce.

And you see this terrain — it teeters at mid-century, in the 20th century, with Albee and Beckett, as well as Camus and Sartre. Céline, I think, is one of the great birthplaces of that, Journey to the End of the Night , in the European tradition, the French. But the problem there is, we haven’t reached a full commitment yet. A full commitment to the true absurdity. And that’s why I would call Gogol or Rabelais the great inheritors — and Cervantes. You kind of have to reach a little bit further back, before the birth of industrial modernity, to see these moments, and they are very isolated moments. I would almost call them sage-like moments. So you have Zhuangzi in the Chinese tradition. I’ve just recently started learning more about him, but I know a good deal about Gogol, Cervantes, and I’m reading more about Rabelais.

But understanding this — the farce is a beautiful marriage of the Heraclitean conception of eternity, or time, as a child at play with colored balls, or a child at play with draughts. This idea that the creation or existence of the universe is a game. And it’s very, very much so, and very well married to Percy Shelley’s primary metaphysical intuition and ontological awareness of the primacy of the imagination. And when Percy Shelley speaks of the primacy of the imagination, he’s speaking of the primacy of the imagination of genius, which is the capacity to create substantial vision from nothing. And that to me describes very much so Shelley’s project of encountering the world and encountering the self and transcribing it. It’s almost Jungian in a way — and Jung’s encounter with the psyche — but Shelley’s is more so an encounter, I would say, with the world, with relation, relationship. Whether that’s a mountain or a series of individuals.

So with this in mind, the farce to me appears to be the highest state of revelation and awareness, because it is really making light of what the experience is of history and the human condition and the cascade of mortal failings, which I think describe humanity. We could take this all the way back to Greek theater and the tragedians, Aeschylus, right? We could take this all the way back to understanding the rise and fall of civilizations, which describes very much so Percy Shelley’s work. He’s trying to find what persists — what is life, he asks at the end of his life. These are all just objective historical truths about the various different ends of epochs and lives, which can be understood scientifically in terms of entropic reality. Thermodynamic reality, right? Heat escaping pseudo-closed systems at all levels, right? There’s various different scales of that occurrence, from the human body to galaxies, et cetera, in the birth and death instantiation of heat systems within those microcosms and macrocosms. And those themselves are gravitational fields. You can even look at the Milky Way and the solar system in terms of the space-time relationships of planets and the sun itself. It’s a gravitational field. It’s a heat density which pulls our local cosmos towards itself as it moves through space towards a greater heat density or heat sink, which we don’t really know that much about, but is likely to be like a supermassive black hole, right? So everything is moving towards this high density. It’s a good way of thinking about death.

But the farce, being an equanimity of consciousness — and reading about Zhuangzi, I think, has been very helpful for me to see. It’s the marriage of creative play and the lightness of being which necessarily comes with the awareness of the human condition, like a very, very coherent awareness of the farcical nature of the human condition. There’s one story in Zhuangzi where he’s — I think he’s fishing, or he’s in the rice paddy — and these government officials come with this big banner and they say, we want you to join the king’s court, and you’ll be acquired to all of these different devices and golds. And he’s sitting there, and he’s like, I heard there was a turtle in your court. It’s covered in gold, but it’s dead, right? Would I rather be a turtle out in the rice paddy, or the pond, and alive, or be in the kingdom dead? And the messengers say, I suppose, alive. And they just leave him alone. Right? So he says, I’m not interested.

And this is the awareness, right? It’s like a private gold in many ways, but having it be depicted in a literary farce, there’s the joy of the imagination and creative play. [Plug this in.] There’s the joy of the imagination and creative play, which I think is critical because it’s a cosmological or ontological primordial foundation. It is being itself, the character of being, and I’ve elucidated this in terms of my scientific findings and philosophical findings in my master theory of persistence. Because the character of being is critical to understand how being functions across scales in terms of creating in space and time and manifesting itself. The game of hide and seek, I think Hölderlin calls it at one point in his late poems.

But to continue to participate in that, and to participate in it with ever-deepening awareness, I think is critical. And that’s where the play of the scientist or the philosopher or the metaphysician crosses over into the play of the artist of the farce. Because what the farce allows at the highest level is like a dialectical redoubling of consciousness. And when Kierkegaard speaks about dialectical redoubling, I always think of it as the highest power of the advent of the forebrain, biologically. The highest power of the capacity to reflect upon existence itself, reflect upon being, reflect upon the self, and thus realize the farcical nature of the appearance of the way we perceive existence to be — and then to observe that all around you as effectively a survival response. It’s not actually grounded in anything.

And this creates what we experience in mid-century, 20th century, going all the way back to Gogol, Rabelais, Cervantes, back to Lucian, back to Menippus: the condition of the farce itself. And this is not a new mode. It’s a mode that has existed, I think, as long as we’ve understood human culture to exist, in various different states and stages. Obviously in accord with the severity of historical bookkeeping. Which — obviously a farce is incredibly dangerous to an empire, because it strips all authority from power, or the illusion of power, the delusion of power. And it grants sovereignty to play, to the imagination, and to the ontological ground which is possible to reveal through the farce.

And this is critical, because the farce, as we understand it I think very clearly in Gogol, at least at a civilizational level, right — and I think this can be extended very clearly to ontology, as well as you can see in Cervantes. Don Quixote is more so a philosophy of perception, a philosophy of the way of seeing, which you could call effectively a phenomenology in literary clothes. Which we see really taken to the next stages with Dostoevsky, and then again with mid-century existentialist literature, Camus and Sartre. These are philosophical questions and exercises and experiments in [dressed?] prose.

These works — the possibility there, again to go back to Gogol, is to embed and seed a deep philosophical, scientific, ontological revelation in the clothes of the reality of, for lack of a better word, objective truth encountering the madness of humanity, which sets in contrast the madness of humanity. And I love the term — I suppose it’s an invented term, it’s kind of Caravaggian — chiaroscuro, right? It’s the high contrast of light and dark. It’s seeding actual ontological truth in the terrain of humanity and allowing that ontological truth to play out.

But that’s only possible with a sufficient level of awareness. So you understand, this is a kind of folding over, it’s a recursive model of experiencing reality. The necessity of philosophical, existential ripeness in relationship to communicating and writing the Menippean farce is crucial, because without that there’s not sufficient world awareness, there’s not sufficient ontological awareness as in the ground of being, and furthermore there’s not sufficient self-awareness for the transformation from the visionary poet or the philosopher or the scientist to occur. Because there’s that break point. And the breakpoint is the realization of the absurdity of the project to begin with, and that there is a possibility of private realization, right, which I think is really the goal of these projects in the first place. Any serious scientist or philosopher or poet is seeking the character of existence itself and knowledge of the ground of being.

But once that is, let’s say, at least superficially acquired for oneself, then what becomes possible is — it’s like this progression, right? You acquire that knowledge, you attempt to communicate that knowledge, which is Zarathustra , right? It’s a very modern thing, because previously cultures were entirely indoctrinated, by force of exile, to believe the same thing everyone else believed. Very boring periods of human history, effectively, irregularly pierced by a sort of Copernican rebellion. It’s just more of the same bullshit. But then you get the fracturing of the community structure, which I’ve argued previously is critical to the emergence of ontological sovereignty. Because if you can’t think for yourself, and you can’t build cosmology from actual experimentation into truth, you’re nothing but a pawn for ideology, which is the condition of most of human history and most of humanity.

So it functions in stages, and so you catch the development of that stage in Nietzsche with Zarathustra , where he effectively dramatizes the process of attempting to bring back his substantial existential and ontological knowledge to the world. And he realizes this is not really — I mean, they can’t even understand what I’m saying. They’re so invested in their ideas, which I can see clearly are patently survival techniques. They’re so deeply invested in living in delusion that it’s pointless to attempt to articulate these truths. Because, one, they can’t really hear them or understand them, they don’t have the sufficient capacity to receive them. But then furthermore, even if they did, they’re so deeply invested in this narrativization of reality, which is the ground at which they tenuously exist until it’s broken by just reality, that I am actually perceived as an enemy or an outsider, an interlocutor upon their collective dream.

And that’s what Goethe means when he says the world is a madhouse. It’s just a delusion. And the path there — right, that juncture, that junction — you can see it in Nietzsche’s history. Of course, we don’t know the full extent of the details, but there are two paths. There’s the path of raging against the delusion of humanity, or enfolding that delusion of humanity into the absolute comedy, the absolute farce of existence. And there’s great power in the humor there, right? Again, it’s these junctions of comedy and tragedy, which I suppose Nietzsche in some ways would call the Dionysian and Apollonian. And this is critical, in terms of when you think of the Dionysian and Apollonian, it’s the continuation of the life impulse, the continuation of Eros.

So there’s a choice to effectively commit a death, for lack of a better word, and to rage against the injustice of human idiocy, human stupidity, right? I mean, that’s an endless project. It doesn’t change anything. But I think there’s just such a high degree of emotionality in realizing the gold, or the philosophical gold, is entirely for oneself, in one’s experience of existence proper. And that it is not necessarily — it’s not really for anyone else. I mean, until they reach that point with themselves. And then it’s more of a companionship than it is a — I don’t know, whatever the word is, teachings, receptions. It’s not — none of that’s necessary. Never was.

And so from that position you are granted the gift of the choice, which is to rage, or to participate in the comedy. And to not only participate in the comedy, but in many ways write it for the first time. And write it from the level of ontological perception accumulated in the grand inheritance of this project, which extends across all disciplines, of course. To communicate it in such a way that it unfolds the actual life-sustaining force of laughter into the cosmological realization which elucidates the ground between inhabiting reality and the hilarity of the lack of inhabitance of reality, which characterizes effectively the entire human project, outside of maybe like Newton and various different philosophers, scientists, and poets. It’s a small — it’s very small, very small list.

And that to me, I think, is the great gift. And to understand that there’s already such a lineage, which is a lineage of entirely humorous, farcical play of the imagination, is simultaneously the highest philosophical, ontological, and existential achievement. Not only in the play itself, but the realization which is within the play itself. This is the great richness of the philosophical and ontological menippea [?] that we’re talking about: continuing to further the highest achievements of consciousness, what is possible in being conscious, right? And that is the entire human project — becoming conscious, or becoming aware, right? And that’s genealogically true just as much as it is historically true, just as much as it is the history of every disciplinary lineage and attempt, because all attempts of existence are attempts to understand existence. The Niels Bohr quote, where it’s like a physicist is just the atom’s attempt to understand itself. You could just say the universe’s attempt to understand itself. That’s what all of these projects are.

But to exist within the knowledge that this is an extremely young project. That humanity is by no means ripe for these kinds of revelations that slip through unguarded and unguided, which are the revelations of genius, that pierce the veil of existence into perception of creation itself, ontological ground itself. That at the crossroads of Nietzsche there are effectively these two paths. It’s the path of railing against this unripeness, continually making that a high-contrast event, or unfolding it into a comedic exploration of the reality of high consciousness emerging into a terrain of very, very, very low-valence and low-resolution consciousness. And that to me is still the potential within the Menippean farce. And it’s even greater and more so possible when this ontological work, or this groundwork, has been done with such substance — to then insert it, in a Bakhtinian or Dostoevskian way, or Rabelaisian way, or Gogolian way, into the play of the cardboard institutions and personalities of the mask of the abyss, which inevitably fall out when the structures that really don’t exist — right, plastic structures of identity and self, which are created by cultures and civilizations and desperately affirmed by them in the attempt to constitute selves, which can only truly be constituted by real philosophical inquiry — inevitably fall apart.

And this is the beauty of the experience of the journey of real philosophical inquiry into self, which is I think a long-term journey, and there are various different junctions or stages in that journey. The preparation of the self to accumulate knowledge, the kenotic stage of emptying of the self to receive knowledge, the humbling of the self. It’s very much so like kind of Herculean trials. And the ancient Greeks, again, they understood this quite well. It’s the path of the preparation, or the readying, of the body. The alchemists would say the readying of the vessel to receive the vision, and then the metabolization of the vision, the transmutation of the vision within the self to adequately hold that vision in existence and in the world.

And that is, I think, the path of true philosophical genius. It’s the path of being able to hold that vision with increasing delight and hilarity and comedy and laughter, which is the life-affirming force, right? It is the force of Eros in this world — laughter and comedy, the ability to laugh at the farce, right? And so you see the kind of thanatonic existence, which is extremely serious, extremely compulsive, extremely desperate, because it doesn’t have that expansive capacity within it. It’s an extremely new bio-phase of consciousness. It’s not even conscious. It’s just existing within the terror. And that’s what constitutes the vast majority of human experience. And I would say, in many ways, natural experience. It’s unripe.

So what do we do with that unripeness, right? Do we rail against it? Or do we proceed upon the path of the ripening of the self and the soul, and reach a point where there can be an equanimity and laughter at the farce of consciousness encountering a vast world of almost entirely unconscious beings? And I think that there’s incredibly fruitful — there’s incredible fruit that’s possible there to bear. Because that’s what we strive for. Strive for evolution, strive for growth, strive for knowledge and understanding. And that’s not just self-understanding, it’s not just ontological ground understanding, it’s understanding of self and ontological ground in relationship to world. And that’s where I think the true beauty emerges.

And that’s the transition for me between visionary poetry, philosophy, metaphysics, cosmology — all of which are really private projects of vast intellect — into Menippean farce as a deeper ground. Because it’s the ground of relationship. Establishing that level of cosmological sovereignty is so rare that there is really very little precedent for it. And then what happens beyond that, there’s even less. So looking at Spinoza or Leibniz, these are lifetime projects of attempting to understand what is being, what is being in time. Hölderlin, Heidegger, Nietzsche — these are lifetime projects. But what can come after it?

And the discovery for me, and understanding, of the farce, specifically the Menippean farce, as has been traditionally deployed in Lucian as well as Cervantes — these are more so farces of phenomenology, farces of civilization. But that’s because that is the awareness, or the valence of the awareness, from which the author, the literary figure at hand, is injecting. Gogol is really a farce of Russian civilization. It’s a valence of relationship and awareness, but there is a lot of existential understanding in Gogol, of course, and that’s what Dostoevsky means, and the rest of the world means, when they say we are inheritors of Gogol, or we emerge from under Gogol’s overcoat. That with the deepening of ontological awareness, that also deepens the possibility of high-contrast relationship in the creation of Menippean satire, which is just extremely fertile creatively.

We talk about philosophers and the relationship to death, the juxtaposition of life and death, from which emerges philosophy — being and non-being. High-contrast events create space for the possibility of thought, contemplation, and action. This is what I’m extending into the Menippean farce, as a graduation of the philosophical, cosmological, scientific, and ontological project into another terrain, a paradigm shift, which is the emergence of the crystal, or the gold, from that project — which is really just sovereign, existential gold. It’s really not going to be communicated to anyone, because people have no idea. You have to walk that path to receive it.

But that is the high-contrast relationship that is then formed between a deeply articulated individuality itself, with a cosmology of scientifically grounded relationships, a cosmology of reality which is cohesive and comprehensive across scales — that that can enter into relationship with even the greatest farce, right? The farce of Russian civilization with Gogol is, you know, it’s still somewhat contained. It’s contained within the milieu of his time, his culture. These are the things that — this is the work. That is the Gogolian experience, which is simultaneously existential and Russian, and grounded firmly within his time. The work of Dead Souls , which was both finished and unfinished, as well as “The Nose” and “The Overcoat,” et cetera.

So that possibility, to me, is the next step, or the next stage. So I kind of wanted to give some thoughts there. I think it’s interesting. Hope you all have a good one. Thanks.