Reality is made up of particulars, which is unique, singular and subjective, hence it cannot be reexperienced either by me or anyone else, partly because the experience making up reality is a particular, partly because that n individuals experiencing the same thing never experience the same thing.
What happens, of course, is that similar, though not identical, Point-Events happen to many of us, and so we are able to construct a symbolic language. My memory of the mysterious Reality resembles yours sufficiently to induce us to agree that both belong to the same class. (Magick Without Tears p. 46)
Put differently, Crowley actually reasons that reality is symbolically construed so as the particular is substituted by its class, which, of course, is very Aristotelian as what is actually happening is that in defining reality we move towards the general or we conceptualize in such a way that the generic level is sustained by differences and similarities. But this also means that the symbolic order of magic is defined by its generic levels.
This, of course, is quite ordinary reasoning in philosophy if one is reckoning philosophy to be metaphysical in the pseudoreligious way we discover in Plato and Aristotle both of whom were inspired by Pythagoras. However, this can hardly be the conclusion of it all.
I mentioned both Lacan and Deleuze in an earlier post. Lacan sees the symbolic as what is constituted as reality, i.e. reality is symbolic. Crowley thinks the same as he holds that both life and language is symbolic. So far so good. The problem with the symbolic is that it is always not quite that which can get a grip of reality as reality is made up of the real of which the symbolic is the excremental communicational order. Hence the symbolic can never be anything else but reflective. In trying to communicate the Lacanian real it fails and has to find something else, what Lacan calls objet petit a. We live in a world of excrements, which curiously is what the gnostics described this world as being. So being a gnostic what should one do? What can one do? Crowley’s transgressive philosophy might very well be the answer: either that or nihilistic celibacy.
Very well the symbolic is left with the excremental real. Being impossible to communicate the Lacanian real causes the symbolic order to be a pure signifiant, i.e. a signifiant without any signifié. As it is impossible for the symbolic to signify the real and as the excremental real is but a reflection of itself it is left with being a pure signifiant – a pure abstract, a pure concept.
The idea is as follows. Reality is excremental as Reality, the crowleyan real is nothing but the symbolic order which is trying to get a grip of the Lacanian real. The symbolic, then, cannot be anything like the generic levels of Aristotle’s semantic metaphysics of definition. Being pure signifiant the symbolic cannot signify anything outside of itself, its (ever so Freudian) desire cannot be anything but excremental, always not the Lacanian real. The Crowleyan symbolic defines a knot in the underground, only as being solely abstract is it possible for the symbolic to let loose of the excremental Reality. The symbolic is the rhizomatic (cf. Deleuze) knot and only in this way is it possible as gnosis. At least that is what I think.
