Archenoumenon: Theory of Agonistic & Existential Semiotics (ÆS)

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Agonistic & Existential Semiotics (ÆS) is the philosophical reconciliation of my youthful Nietzscheanism and my present-day Mahayana Buddhism. As a result, it assumes (rightly or wrongly) that the majority of the apparent contradictions between the two are myopic and superficial. Therefore, its purpose is the formulation of a unified, scalable substructure for understanding experience across epistemological, ontological, and axiological domains; this is informed by the following nine principles:

1. Consciousness is primary. It is noumenon; it is embedded in reality and it is irreducible to anything else.
2. Consciousness is dyadic. It creates categories of antitheses; these in turn result in more sophisticated categories of spectra. In their essence, however, all conceptual categories are rooted in dualism.
3. Consciousness is symbolic. It entails distortion on at least four points: 1) Dualism oversimplifies reality; 2) knowledge about reality is limited and therefore unreliable; 3) perceptions of reality as a static system ignore that it is dynamic across time and change; 4) transmission of information across media- from the material to the cellular to the neurological, for instance- necessarily distort reality insofar as it is unknowable in essentia.
4. Because it is dyadic, consciousness is expressed first through the primordial binary representing its dual aspects: On the one side is Logos (yang, or will / projection); on the other side is Chaos (yin, or mind / perception). However, its primal nature is always one; its binary aspects are only aspects.
5. Because it is dyadic, the primordial binary expresses itself through all sets of binaries, including the secondary binaries of identity (self and non-self), locality (internal and external), capacity (positive and negative), and integrity (order and disorder). And it will force phenomena into these categories.
6. The individual personality (i.e. the self) is existent only to the degree to which these various binaries- which as dyads entail fundamental self-opposition- can be integrated into a cohesive identity; therefore, in absence of psychic integration, the self only exists in potentia.
7. The individual personality (i.e. the self) is the ordering (the Logos Principle) of the various constituent elements of the psyche- that is, the archetypes of the collective unconscious-, which is itself an unordered and unbounded repository for all possible psychic phenomena (the Chaos Principle).
8. All psychic mechanisms (such as primal oneness, Logos and Chaos, or the need for integration of self and self-identity) apply at all scales- the personal, the cultural, the national, etc. First, the psychic mechanisms underlying consciousness apply equally to individuals as to organizations; furthermore, the psychic mechanisms underlying reality modeling and reality distortion apply equally to individuals as to organizations; finally, the psychic mechanisms underlying selfhood, threat-perception, and crisis-navigation apply equally to individuals as to organizations.
9. Finally, the ÆS worldview necessitates an ethos of self-mastery- whether at the individual scale and at the organizational scale-, which is necessary for self-realization. The final result is to become a real human being, a coherent, well-integrated self-personality, which is the first prerequisite not only for psycho-social existence but also for psycho-spiritual existence. This path / process entails 1) self-integration; 2) identification with other selves; 3) immortalization through other selves; and 3) transfiguration of consciousness via communion with non-dual reality, which is the Archenoumenon.

These nine principles form the foundation of the ÆS worldview, which I will delve into in more detail at some later time.

~ Joshua van Asakinda

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