Sousarion Reacts #1

January 1 - January 15, 2025

This is the kick-off post to this corner of my Substack. I’m going to regularly share what I am reading, practicing, writing, and recording. I’ll also share some brief reactions to them. This is off-the-cuff, unvarnished, and unfiltered. Raw Sousarion. I hope you enjoy!

Philosophy:

Aristotle, Prior Analytics, Book I, Chapters 1-46.

The Prior Analytics is the first of Aristotle’s two works on logic. The other, titled Posterior Analytics, I’ll be reading as soon as I finish the current volume. Both of these works comprise the third and fourth books, respectively, in what is traditionally known as Aristotle’s “Organon.”

This volume, the Prior Analytics, is itself divided into two books. Book I consists of 46 chapters, all relatively short, which lay out the foundations of logic. Logic is a process, comprised of the construction, presentation, and analysis of arguments. The best construction of an argument Aristotle calls syllogisms. Syllogisms consist of two premises leading to a conclusion, all based on clearly defined terms and relationships. The most crucial (and famous) component of the syllogism is the “middle term,” which connects the premises together to the conclusion. The glue of the middle term performs much of the work to determine whether the syllogism is true, false, or indeterminate. Other important frameworks include the identification of universals or particulars, affirmative or privative premises, major and minor extremes, belonging or not belong to all, to some, or to none, to name a few of them.

Whether my distillation of Aristotle’s framework was haphazard or clear, the reason for his framework is to ready the would-be logician to answer the most important question in logic: is the syllogism, true or not? Aristotle then introduces the deductive method to analyze and test the truth, falsity, or indeterminacy of any syllogism. There are three primary types of deductions, which he calls Figures. Aristotle spends the majority of Book 1 performing deductions of different types of syllogisms (affirmative, privative, belonging to all, belonging to some, and more variations) and applying the deductions to the respective Figures. All in all, this book operates very much like a manual to equip the reader to conduct rigorous analyses.

While that might not sound very riveting, I do find the Prior Analytics to be a breath of fresh air in the Aristotelian corpus. I have spent the past year studying Aristotle; reading him is a chore at times. He’s dry, elliptical, can zig-zag through complex and abstract arguments, writes in a 2,300 year old way, and presents a world that is sometimes completely foreign to how we experience the world today. Very often, he’ll introduce puzzles, problems, questions, contradictions and new concepts on the drop of a dime. Sometimes, he’ll (intentionally?) misquote other writers or make what seem like important references to works contemporary of his age that are lost to us. Other times he will begin to make an argument, digress to another topic, while promising to to return to the original argument later on but never returns to it. I’ll grant that some of these criticisms might not be his fault, but it all too often makes for a frustrating, toilsome, and uninspiring slog of a read. (If you really want to torture yourself with Aristotelian inscrutability, take his Metaphysics or, especially, de Anima for a test drive. They’re also two of the most important texts in the history of Western Civilization.) By contrast, I’ve found the Prior Analytics to be refreshingly straightforward. I think If you are going to lay down the foundations of logical reasoning and analysis, you will have to write with clarity, straightforwardness, and thoroughness. Aristotle delivers.

To take it a step further, Aristotle also spills the ink at several points with several contradictions in his definitions, rules and even deductive outcomes. Academic commentary (which I have not bothered to consult with too much care) faults him for this, but I have a different take: I am more under the impression that these apparent contradictions were written by Aristotle on purpose. I cannot prove this assertion beyond a reasonable doubt, and doubting my comment is reasonable. And I’m not inclined to tumble down the rabbit hole to study this text carefully enough, but…. Even on a more superficial level, there is so much demonstrable care, painstaking clarity, and step-by-step explanation abounding in the text. A sudden ‘mistake’ warrants calling into question whether the mistake is, in fact, a mistake or placed for some reason or another. One reason might be that Aristotle is interested in training his readers to think more carefully. Learning how to conduct a rigorous analysis is one of the most powerful ways to achieve this, and Aristotle is at pains to share the tools. So why not test his readers with puzzles and contradictions, bringing the would-be logician to take the next analytical steps on their own, thinking for themselves more deeply, and grasping more profoundly the foundations Aristotle has so systematically presented. Food for thought.

The Prior Analytics is an incredibly helpful book for thinking and analyzing with greater rigor and precision. This is the first systematic document of the foundations of logic that we have, and it was a core part of the trivium for 1,500 years. Communication and logic still rest on many of the principles which Aristotle lays out here. Incredibly valuable, even if it’s technical and very meta.

Keep Your Friends Close

Yanis Varoufakis – Another Now, Forward.

I read Yanis’ most recent book publication, Technofeudalism, and was impressed with and convinced of many aspects of this book. Toward the end of the work, wherein he sketches a way out of the techno-feudal slavery in which humanity finds itself, Yanis references his novel from a few years ago, Another Now. He states that this novel presents a fuller picture of his vision. As a result, I wanted to investigate Another Now. (I am leaving his more rigorous and academic works in Economics for later.)

I have only read the Forward of Another Now, which amounts to a few pages. Still, I can confirm that it is not a well-written novel. I do not like Yanis’ writing style. It’s sloppy, overuses cheap turns of phrase, and the storytelling/foreshadowing is just less than stellar. It’s unclear why he chose to write a novel. Yet, even with these flaws, I’m not reading the book for his qualities as a novelist – Yanis is a public intellectual, an economics nerd, and one of the best commie professors in the world. I’m reading him for the presentation of his ideas for a more equitable and genuinely open world, free of exploitation. A world in which humanity can truly thrive. Do I expect him to be perfect? No. Is this former finance minister of Greece a pie-in-the-sky utopian? Also no. Am I excited to read this book and consider his vision of a society of the future? Absolutely, yes!

Keep Your Enemies Closer

Julius Evola – Ride the Tiger, Chapters 1 – 15

This book is what Evola himself calls a “survival manual” for the contemporary man. Woman not included. Evola’s manual serves as a sort of spiritual guide for the right kind of man to awaken and adopt his (Evola’s) system of values. He reappropriates values into the more old-fashioned term, virtues. By virtues Evola really means an aesthetic. The dissolving of values (and politics) into aesthetics is a move so typical of far-right thinking. Still, what interests me and what I anticipate (having only read the first half of Ride the Tiger), is that Evola will apply the aestheticization to his ideal man, whom he calls the traditional man.

The values, or virtues, Evola describes belong not to the era of totalitarian fascism or even divine right monarchy, but the aristocracies (read: oligarchies) of the ancient world. This is the tradition, and it is a return to this tradition that Evola’s traditional - his so-called higher men - must return. Such a return requires a rejection, if not outright erasure, of all essential aspects of modern society. In other words Evola dreams of the re-subjugation of women, the reinstitution of indentured servitude, if not slavery, and an aestheticization of the men, reborn with “strength,” to name a few. Of course, Evola knows that such a return is implausible, not to say impossible, so he narrows the scope of his wish for a societal change to that of a change within the individual, man, of course.

Evola studies the individual man through the prism of an analysis of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, especially the consequences of the credo from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “God is dead, and we have killed him.” The consequence of the death of God is nihilism. Man has therefore opened up the abyss and fallen in. Setting this context, Evola goes on to analyze, criticize, and sparingly praise the various flavors of existentialist philosophy, especially Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. (Evola critiques others as well, but praises Kierkegaard, who is close to my heart.) His critique of Existentialism may be summed up as follows: in facing the reality that human life is meaningless, our existence is degraded, reduced to animalism. Without God, humans are “free.” But in their freedom they choose to pursue animalistic pleasures, from plastic goods to cheap sex to mind-numbing entertainment. As such, traditional values are completely ignored, forgotten, and lost. This sets the stage for the post-human, AI-governed hellscape we find ourselves hurtling towards.

I expect that in the second half of the book, Evola will begin to share his positive doctrine, insofar as this is possible, the tools whereby the individual man may fend off the animalism around him. He will be empowered to pursue the aesthetic life of “virtue,” whatever Evola exactly means by this.

Many of Evola’s recommendations are, frankly, horrific in their implications. However, as a man of the far right’s aesthetic fetishisms, he is an excellent writer. He meets the lofty standards he sets for art and authorship.

The criticisms Evola has of modern society, that it has been corrupted by existentialist thinking, especially by Nietzsche, are very powerful and contain elements of truth. They are therefore worthy of further thought and reflection. I anticipate that Evola’s recommendations to combat the trajectory humanity is on, will require the very debasement of most of humanity he writes in opposition to throughout his critique of existentialism. In his framework it very much looks like the indentured servant, the slave, the illiterate and baby-producing housewives, are all as good as regarded as animals. They cannot have virtue, for virtue is embodied solely by his traditional man. On the one hand the world has become animalistic; on the other hand is an envisioned world in which almost all of the very same animals remain animals but conduct other animalistic activities, only this time in service of a few men. The difficulty is so baldly obvious, but it does not appear Evola will address it. We’ll see.

Wrap it Up

To wrap up this first Sousarion Reacts post, I noticed a tentative theme that links these texts together: the power and perils of foundational thinking. Whether it’s Aristotle’s logic, Varoufakis’ alternative futures, or Evola’s aestheticized traditionalism, each asks us to question our assumptions and consider new (or old) ways forward.

What are your thoughts? Have you read any of these? Share them in the comments. I’d love to discuss them further with you.

Or, until next time, keep exploring and questioning—happy reading!