It strikes me that your arguments are very similar in form, though not in content. Yes, to one who has discovered a secret, it's no longer a secret; yes, if you posit a goal then it's not true that there are no goals. In the latter case, the problem is that the goal in question is either completely arbitrary—namely, if it's posited by free will—or it's not really posited by oneself, but only
through oneself—namely, if there are any factors (co)determining one's positing of the goal.—Now to be sure, Neumann would have been the first to agree that he's contradicting himself:
Objection: Does not your claim that nihilism is true require a nonarbitrary distinction between truth and falsity?
Answer: No. The gist of your objections implies that genuine communication and community is possible. It implies that the 'we' who communicate and 'things' communicated—including this exchange!—are more than nothing. In reality they are meaningless impressions, dreams whose dreamers are themselves dreams.
Source: Neumann, ibid. Note that elsewhere in the book, he speaks in the singular, of a dream whose dreamer is himself a dream. This makes no real difference, however. Like I said before, 'in order to make myself as aware as possible of the truth about myself and my world, it is helpful to formulate my thoughts for others (and I may even learn a thing or two from them).' In fact, I was putting it mildly there;
"Rousseau, who in the writings of Jean-Jacques finds himself, is no longer alone, since he recognizes [
erkennt] in Jean-Jacques a kindred nature." (Meier,
Reflections on Rousseau's Rêveries, my translation.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogues ... an-Jacques
"In Rousseau's essentially private, incommunicable world of scientific reveries or methods, there is no place for philosophic dialogues or indeed for any real communication or community. That is why Rousseau—or any [genuine] scientist— can write only for himself." (Neumann,
Liberalism, "Review of
The Reveries".)
But does Rousseau—or
any genuine philosopher—even
have a self or a nature? Well, in fact he does, though it's basically "Buddha-nature"; or, as Aleister Crowley puts it:
"Now the grade of a Magister teacheth the Mystery of Sorrow, and the grade of a Magus the Mystery of Change, and the grade of Ipsissimus the Mystery of Selflessness, which is called also the Mystery of Pan.
Let the Magus then contemplate each in turn, raising it to the ultimate power of Infinity. Wherein Sorrow is Joy, and Change is Stability, and Selflessness is Self. For the interplay of the parts hath no action upon the whole." (Crowley,
Liber B vel Magi sub figura I.)
Compare my translation, from nine months ago, of this famous untranslatable Zen koan:
Student: "Does a horse have Buddha-nature?"
Lama: "Nay!"
And what Crowley calls "the Curse of the Magus", the last thing that keeps him closed to the grade of Ipsissimus, is this:
"O divine princes, the astonishing singular difficulty for those bodhisattvas is […that] those sentient beings whom they would lead to final nirvāṇa are utterly non-apprehensible.
Those great bodhisattva beings who think they should seek to train all sentient beings […] might as well think they should seek to train space. If you ask why, sentient beings should be regarded as voidness because space itself is void. Similarly, sentient beings should be regarded as emptiness because space itself is emptiness, and sentient beings should be regarded as essencelessness because space itself is essenceless. For this reason, divine princes, it is difficult for great bodhisattva beings". ("The Transcendent Perfection of Wisdom in Ten Thousand Lines", 26.37-38, translated by the Padmakara Group.)
In other words, unenlightened beings are already enlightened, they just don't know it yet;
"[A] humanity that, though it belongs to man as man, is not open to every man, since what he is necessarily he is not necessarily unless he knows that that is what he is necessarily." (Benardete,
A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey.)
