In “What is Metaphysics?”, Martin Heidegger says that metaphysics is the fundamental occurrence of our Dasein (in simple terms, humans constantly inquire about the world to form mental models about how the world works). As long as we are alive, we are always doing metaphysics. We do metaphysics to inquire about Being and Nothingness. Our moods configure our experience of the world.
Our moods intertwine with our sense of aesthetics to shape our worldviews. Our desires reflect an urge towards a certain aesthetic configuration that is always changing. This is why we can never permanently satisfy our desires, and that carrot-on-a-stick pursuit for aesthetics lead to suffering.
“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” - David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature
The prefrontal cortex is responsible for higher level thinking and it is one of the newest evolved structures in the brain and only present in mammals (although birds and octopi have structures that perform similar functions). Rats have smooth prefrontal cortices and the granular prefrontal cortex first evolved in early primates. Humans have the largest granular prefrontal cortices ever evolved, and this is what biologically separates us from other animals. This evolution transformed humans into a new category of being — the Dasein — inquiring and conscious beings who are able to conduct metaphysics, craft stories, question the meaning of existence, and think logically.
Most modern humans pride ourselves on the achievements of the prefrontal cortex, but we must not forget that they are dependent on the primitive structures and the subconscious methods of knowing that are embedded in them. Sigmund Freud noted that for psychic evolution, every previous stage is preserved rather than replaced. The primitive psyche is indestructible due to the need to gratify primitive impulses, while the higher levels can collapse and reform when impulses unite with each other, change their objects, and in part turn against one's own person (Freud, “The Disappointments of War”). The more we ascend up the Jenga tower of knowledge, the further we will fall into cognitively dissonant madness when we realize that our rationality fails to help us survive in an absurd world.
In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt demonstrated that social intuitionism drives people’s beliefs about politics and religion. These intuitions get sublimated and rationalized into particular aesthetic orders. Politics is simply the imposing of one’s own aesthetic sense onto the rest of the world. These with the same aesthetics band up to form tribes and go to war with tribes with different aesthetics.
“Lo! how each of thy virtues is covetous of the highest place; it wanteth thy whole spirit to be ITS herald, it wanteth thy whole power, in wrath, hatred, and love.
“Jealous is every virtue of the others, and a dreadful thing is jealousy. Even virtues may succumb by jealousy.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, “Joys and Passions”, Thus Spake Zarathustra
Aesthetics are uncompromisable, because they structure order in the configuration of your phenomenological reality. Disturbing that order collapses people’s whole subjective realities. Thus, trolling people to induce cognitive dissonance is more violent than causing them physical harm. This is the art of meme warfare in the age of virtue signaling. Virtues are axioms that defined the topology of your aesthetic space. These with different virtues conflict with your worldview, in a way that's intuitively ugly. Virtue signaling is what people hate about (post)modern art. What we call political ideologies are actually aesthetic orders — they aren’t rational; they are based on mood, not reason. Even reason itself is simply another aesthetic configuration of metaphysical order. Aesthetic sense comes deep from within and it’s futile to debate about them to change people’s minds.
People often assume that everyone wants happiness, freedom, peace, truth, rationality, and/or equality, but as Freud revealed, our values are not universal, but contextual to our contemporary cultural milieu and ancestral civilization. Each of these values are an attribute of a particular aesthetic. Each of these values conflict with each other and imposed different types of aesthetics.
We actually want alignment of desire with reality, not any particular static ideal. Each desire produces other desires. Desire is driven by mood, and in turn shapes the flow of culture and history. Society is made up of a complex network of desiring machines, where the output of one person’s desires is the input of his own and others’ desires. Cultures are clusters in the desire network that share a common aesthetic.
