He told me that he was awaiting the second immanence, the return of the Aristotelian repressed, the Platonic revival of forms, substances and first-principles. ‘I can’t live like this’, he said, ‘without a meaning or purpose to it all’. ‘You can’, I said, ‘and you will’. ‘No, I won’t’, he keened, ‘I can’t and I won’t, never in a million years will I’. I grabbed him by the cinch of the neck and pushed him up hard against the wall. ‘You will’, I screamed, ‘you will and you must!’ ‘Give me a principal’, he yelled, ‘a form or a substance, anything that’ll ease the pain’. ‘You can’t have one,’ I said, pulling him closer into my chest, ‘you can’t and you won’t, not in a million years you won’t’. “I need it, at least something, one thing, a substance, a first-principle, anything, one of anything’. ‘But you won’t,’ I said, ‘not one thing or anything, nothing, that’s what you’ll get, nothing at all’. ‘I beg of you,’ he said cowering, ‘I beg of you, please, a meaning, a purpose, a principle, anything that comes first.’ This short dialogue between a Continental and an Analytic philosopher, two scholars at odds with each other, at opposite ends of the epistemological spectrum, is the result of faulty metaphysics, a belief, a hope in transcendence, substances, forms, first-principles and original meaning, none of which exist, is apparent, imminent, will ever be imminent, ever was at all. All hope is hope in a life after death, transcendence, a transmogrification, metempsychosis, a transmigration of souls and corporeality, a Nietzschean eternal return, but from where, from here, there, over here, over there, over there here, nowhere, no revival, no forms, substances and first-principles, a wasteland, a fen, a slough, a bog-pitch, a meaningless meaninglessness.
