{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

"The point of this short but important chapter is to illustrate (Carlo) Michelstaedter’s key concept of persuasion (persuasione), by which the author means to translate and amplify the Greek word pithenon, in the sense of complete conviction. He begins by claiming that all beings, inanimate as well as animate, are defined by what they lack. A weight, for example, always seeks to fall. If having been let free it comes to rest, it is no longer a weight. “Its life is its want of life.” The general implication is that, as centers of desires, nothing (and in particular nobody) can be entirely satisfied and remain what it actually is. Michelstaedter infers from this that anything that exists is also future-oriented, as he illustrates in the story about climbing to the top of a mountain. Every entity, he claims, indeed every person, is both alone and lonely, for, as long as we remain individuals, by definition we are separate centers of in-satiable desire. When Michelstaedter puts this point by maintaining that “the weight can never be persuaded,” he implicitly defines persuasion as a hypothetical, counterfactual state in which an entity is at one with itself and its environment. Only those beings, we are given to undertand, who will the suspension of their own will can ever approach such a state. The theme is Schopenhauerian. But the sources on which Michelstaedter relies are classical. For Parmenides, the majority of people who live immersed in the Way of Seeming, and who accordingly take what is transitory and contradictory as reliable Being itself, are in a state of self-deception and illusion. They can never be “persuaded,” Parmenides says, for only the Way of Being, which recognizes that there is nothing stable in experience, is 'the path of persuasion (peithos). For it alone attends to truth (aletheia).' It is in this sense that Michelstaedter uses the term persuasion throughout his work."