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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Thursday, 5 April 1923
12.5 A.M.
Cold and restless. Depressed. Doubtful whether
h
[Heroin] would send me to sleep or keep me awake. Will try:
I can hardly be worse!
5.0 P.M. Slept after some time,
and then well. A fairly comfortable day. Violent sneezing at
4.50 hence
Have been re-reading "Back to Methuselah" as I first thought, it is utterly worthless as "work of art": but it gives one much food for thought. I have been feeling for years—since 1912, at latest—that the sexual act, no less than eating, sleeping, and the like, is only defensible as a Sacrament—see Gnostic Creed Liber XV—but of late I have resented the necessity of performing consciously any such operations. Also I feel with RFB "Hardly we learn to ply the pen ere thought and fancy faint with cold". Hence I understand Shaw's wish to get all such matters as love and act over as early as possible, and to have the bulk of one's years free for concentrated aspiration to a higher state of Being. I understand even more acutely that it is terrible to face such an arrangement, although one wants it. I am now at 47 1/2 able to formulate my desires as follows: "I want all those things which help me to concentrate, and freedom from the interference of all that might hinder". Yet, being at this moment (on the whole) about as free as any man might reasonably hope to be, I find myself hopelessly bored, and unable to turn my powers to any definite purpose. Hence the "will-to-die" as the only practiced form of the "will-to-live"! Yet no doubt this is largely due to feeling that 47 1/2 is too near 60. If I could on 200 years of active mental life, I think I should be encouraged to tackle all of Life which I have found.
Why do I esteem Truth as the one goal of all my striving? Can I define it, even now? Let me set out one or two obvious points.
(a) Every true proposition is meaningless (rather) destructive of meaning. For S=P (or S=p) asserts identity between two ideas that we previously thought diverse. Both S & P (or p) are therefore destroyed as such by S=P (or S=p).
(b) If S=P, the S should have been written Sp. We were therefore talking of something of whose nature we ere ignorant.
(c) If S=P, s & p must be altered accordingly. The whole universe is thus deformed.
(d) S plus s = All P plus p = All. Then is S=P, s=p; which logic forbids. Any truth is therefore a falsehood, either in fact or as repugnant to the Laws of Thought.
(e) By continuing the process S=P, S1=P1 ———Sn=Pn, there is ultimately established a series of relations between all possible Subjects and all possible Predicates. If the sum of these equations is positive or negative, there must be a further equation to complete them—contrary to the hypothesis; if it is Zero, only the total is true, so that each part of it must be false.
(f) S=P merely registers the coincidence of some (apparently external) impression with a prejudice in the mind of the observer. (This produces pleasure, by flattering him that he is One with Nature). There is thus no means of knowing whether S=P is meaningless identity; if objective, it asserts an identity between external and internal which by definition are not identical; it is false.
(g) S=P merely asserts the definition of S: i.e. it is the servant of an arbitrary assertion.
9.0. (4) Enema—good.
9.50
(h) Truth is peculiarly deceitful, because it pretends so elaborately to rest on observation, while it is really appealing to intuition. The more objective its nature, the greater the liability to error, because of the increase in the number of "middleman". E.g. a photograph of a star asks one to believe in the fidelity of its instruments, official laws, chemical reactions, measurements of time and space, physical theories, conventional interpretation of images, etc, ad libitum: why should so lengthy a sorites be more reliable than the direct evidence of touch as to the temperature of water—which is notoriously worthless? Yet we accept such witness, even when it overthrows the simplest dicta of common sense, such as the rectilinear propagation [?] of light, or the existence of Matter itself.
(i) Since S=P invariably destroys the previous conceptions of S & P, and since it is always possible to assert either Si=Q or Si=q, it follows that any possible S, Si,S2 ——Sn is not itself. Every idea is therefore potentially false, and becomes actually so as soon as we know any thing whatever about it.
(j) If S=P be true for A, it is either untrue for B in some sense or another, or A=B, which implies solipsism. (Not only is the interval S-S, (the striking 9 and 10 of Big Ben) measured by a solar and a terrestrial observer in different coordinates, but "Socrates was a wise man" can never mean exactly the same to any two independent minds. There is thus no adequate definition of either S or P, so that S=P is an indeterminate equation with an infinite number of possible values. "Truth is relative" therefore implies that "Truth is incapable of being stated fully": that is, it is always necessarily incomplete, and so in some respects false.
(k) Truth is "that which has the power of exciting the reaction called 'agreement' in the mind". S=P is thus not a statement of relation at all, but a form of energy, like a ray of light or a perfume. It is then an arbitrary and unintelligible manifestation of Nature; and its apparent Form is no more than a quality which we attribute to it, as irrationally as we do sweetness to sugar—our description of its reaction with certain specialised nerves. When we say "S=P is true", we really mean that it has modified our minds in a certain manner; and this tells us nothing about S=P or about our minds, but only that the contact has caused a certain reaction. S=P may be false, as when we accept "The sun moves round the earth", or it may not be a proposition at all, but a mere definition. Our judgement depends upon many unknown and undiscoverable factors; the reaction is a single positive phenomena, to which S=O contributes only one element; to ask "Is it true? is more absurd than to ask: "Is Q to Kt sq the best move?" without knowing the position of the other pieces, and being an ideally perfect chess player.
(l) "S=P is true" modifies the mind; we can therefore never be sure that previous reactions "Si=Pi is true" etc will take place when next presented. E.g accepting Einstein's equations, we have to discard Newton's. So S=P cannot be taken as final. Thus S=P is unknowable, the mind indeterminate, and any reaction incapable of verification. The relation between our intellectual structure and Euclidean geometry having been modified, there is no warrant that we may not have to reconsider the basic assumptions of arithmetic. Thus 2 plus 2 = 4 is either a disguised definition, or a deduction from certain postulates which may not be true. "Counting appears to be an absolute operation" says Eddington: but it clearly depends upon the structure of the human brain. It is easy to imagine a mind in which the idea of equilibrium was so highly developed that odd numbers would be unthinkable to it; or one so pervaded with the conviction that the union of any two things involved an 'unearned increment' (as when the congress of man and woman produces a child) and that it would deny one plus one = 2, and insist that the truth was one plus one = 2 plus x. Such minds would interpret all natural phenomena in their own way, and construct a mathematics and science accordingly.—————
Why then do I seek Truth and pursue it as I do? Only because the 'reaction' above indicated adds to my store of experiences which help me to interpret myself to myself. (Of course, falsehood recognised as such serves the same end.) This object, self-interpretation, as elsewhere explained by me, is that proposed by incarnation, and the entire device of formulating the Formless and Unknowable Reality as a Cosmos of conventional and illusory hieroglyphs. Truth is naturally bound by the same limitations as these symbols: there is nothing surprising in its being relative etc just as they are. But for this very reason, it is the measure by which I determine their relationship; by its virtue, I maintain the validity of my investigations.
Similarly, when I wish to discover the properties of the inconceivable sq. root of -1, I bring it into relation with other ideas according to a fixed (though arbitrary) series of conventions.
Truth is consequently my sole and sufficient instrument whereby I perform the Great Work; its apparent defects are inherent to the nature of my whole method and plan; they are all allowed for and capable of being corrected. No other principle possesses these unique advantages, or is so identically congruous with the elements of my experiment. For this reason it is the first and fundamental requisite in each and every operation of my mind.
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[Heroin] (1).
[Cocaine] (