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PostSubject: On the Value of Suffering. On the Value of Suffering. Icon_minitimeWed Sep 30, 2015 6:24 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
1.
The good is ultimately always pleasure: if there is a God, the good is good because it pleases Him; if you say the good pleases Him because it is good, you’re setting up something beyond and above Him, meaning He isn’t really God at all. But what would a God’s pleasure be?–A Creator’s pleasure. Thus Nietzsche distinguishes between the “creature in man” and the “creator in man” (Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 225). The pleasure of the “creator in man” is in being “aware of form-giving energies and an artist’s conscience” (ibid.). I have therefore named what Dawkins has called “the moralities that are accepted among modern people, among 21st century people”, “victim moralities”: for they are characterised by identification with the “creature in man” as opposed to the “creator in man”–in the case of a stoning, for instance, with the stoned as opposed to the stoners. Now I’m not advocating identification with any petty motives the stoners may have–for example, righteous indignation, resentment, and the like. Identification with the “creator in man” is not about identifying with motives, for such things are merely foreground phenomena; it’s about identifying with power, with causes as distinct from reasons (“causes” in the sense of “causes and effects”),–with the power to cause suffering or enjoyment or anything else. And, inasmuch as it’s more difficult to cause enjoyment than to cause suffering, I advocate the former rather than the latter. But the highest joys presuppose the deepest suffering. Thus Nietzsche says that “only the discipline of suffering, of great suffering has created all the enhancements [Erhöhungen, “heightenings”] of man” (ibid., paraphrase). In order, therefore, to cause the greatest enjoyment, one must first cause the greatest suffering. The greatest enjoyment, however, is precisely in the feeling of causing the greatest enjoyment. It is the feeling of the greatest power, the greatest feeling of power.
“[A] creating one shalt thou create.” (Thus Spake Zarathustra, “Of Child and Marriage”.)
The above is morally nihilistic in the sense Nietzsche often used the word “morality”, namely in the sense of slave morality. For my “hedonism” must not be confused with the hedonism Nietzsche criticises in BGE 225: mine is concerned with “the feeling of fullness, of power that seeks to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the awareness of a wealth that would like to bestow and give away” (BGE 260). I don’t think that’s phallic in the sense of (time-)fetishes, though; as a time-fetish, the phallus is teleological whereas the vulva is nonteleogical: the straight line segment points to an end that lies beyond it, or at the far end of it, whereas the circle suggests an end in itself.
“Can we remove the idea of a goal from the process and then affirm the process in spite of this?–This would be the case if something were attained at every moment within this process–and always the same. […] Every basic character trait that is encountered at the bottom of every event, that finds expression in every event, would have to lead every individual who experienced it as his own basic character trait to welcome every moment of universal existence with a sense of triumph. The crucial point would be that one experienced this basic character trait in oneself as good, valuable–with pleasure. […] Morality […] taught men to hate and despise most profoundly what is the basic character trait of those who rule: their will to power.” (The Will to Power, section 55, Kaufmann translation.)
Nietzsche goes on to sketch the case that “this trait were essential to life and it could be shown that even in this will to morality this very ‘will to power’ were hidden, and even this hatred and contempt were still a will to power.” (ibid.) But how can one experience the will to power, as distinct from the feeling of power, “as good, valuable–with pleasure”? By realising that will to power “is not a teleological principle but a dynamic force, like a stretched spring or a dammed river.” (Cox, Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation, 5.2.4) Will to power is itself power, the feeling (pathos) of power… No will has a strength of zero.
My position is phallic insofar as “the blessings of peace and domesticity” (Harry Neumann, “Liberalism’s Moloch”) are rightly associated with women (goddesses). After all, all war is waged for a peace that is a victory (cf. Zarathustra, “Of War and Warriors”) (if it was just for peace, regardless of whether it be a victory, one should just capitulate). As such, it’s teleological: compare Nietzsche’s criticism of the striving for happiness in Twilight of the Idols. If, on the other hand, the ostensible end is merely a means; if it’s the war that hallows the cause instead of vice versa; then the strife is nonteleological: one derives happiness from the striving itself. A happy Sisyphus is a Sisyphus who finds happiness in his strength, in his power to push the boulder up the hill. But to that end, there must be an ostensible end, as a means: and for the great philosopher, that is the victorious peace of the Superman. Homer, Plato, Machiavelli and Nietzsche were all dedicated to “let[ting] the shining blossoms of genius sprout forth” (Nietzsche, “The Greek State”)–in particular those of “the genius of wisdom and of knowledge”, the great philosopher… And in this age, the means to that is willing the recurrence: willing that the postmodern age become a new pre-Homeric age–whether it be by a circle or a spiral dynamic–, followed by a new Platonic age and a new Machiavellian-Cartesian age, as our age still is insofar as it’s still modern: the age of the scientific-technological conquest of nature. To counteract the conquest of human nature, its master or beast-of-prey part, it’s necessary to affirm the recurrence. May justice be done and may the world perish! May nature recur and may it be expelled with a pitchfork! Hail Nietzsche Caesar Dionysus!
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PostSubject: Re: On the Value of Suffering. On the Value of Suffering. Icon_minitimeThu Oct 01, 2015 1:09 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Thank you for reminding me of what is essencial and terrifying in Nietzsche.
I hope this is a prologue…
Hail!
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PostSubject: Re: On the Value of Suffering. On the Value of Suffering. Icon_minitimeThu Oct 01, 2015 8:00 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
To the OP, thanks for posting this here. A very Nietzschean analysis.
“Be clever, Ariadne! …
You have little ears; you have my ears:
Put a clever word in them! —
Must one not first hate oneself, in order to love oneself? …
I am your labyrinth …”. -N
“A man is not great if he is not small, and he is not small if he is not great. Concepts flirt with the loss of their significance in the oscillation between ambiguous states, and this is in part the function and purpose of concepts.” -Primer on Meaning
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PostSubject: Re: On the Value of Suffering. On the Value of Suffering. Icon_minitimeThu Oct 01, 2015 9:51 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
The recognition of creature and creator in man is not Nietzsche’s- it belongs to Christianity, it is a fundamental possession of the existential burden first recognized by Judaeo-Christianity. Man is a breath but a breath of God; he is made of dust but formed in God’s image. It certainly is not a Greek idea, neither Roman. One crucifies the beast so as to liberate through its pain the energies accessible to the creative instinct. Christianity degenerated into pity of the beast in man, yes. But that isn’t surprising, since man likes to pity things, especially himself, and one can only pity the beast; you can’t pity the creator in man, because it does not suffer. The beast is easy to identity with, but how do you identify with the creator in man?
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PostSubject: Re: On the Value of Suffering. On the Value of Suffering. Icon_minitimeThu Oct 01, 2015 11:15 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Quote :
The recognition of creature and creator in man is not Nietzsche’s- it belongs to Christianity, it is a fundamental possession of the existential burden first recognized by Judaeo-Christianity. Man is a breath but a breath of God; he is made of dust but formed in God’s image. It certainly is not a Greek idea, neither Roman.
That seems right - it at least explains to me why I tend to experience Nietzsche a vehemently honest and positively erotic version of Christianity rather than an antithesis to it. His love of the Greeks is rather a question of what to create, than a recovery of the creative perspective.
Nietzsche overcomes the Greek notion of fate, the gloomy deathfate, by creating a way in which the good world is forever preserved. The Greeks had no such notion, they were too ‘true to the earth’ to have such notions, which means their immanent space had no power to held them as truth, they were inward still too small for the big lies, such as notably the 0, which transformed the world more than anything, and was surely a reflection and fruit and perhaps even lawgiver of the completed immanent transcendent space.
Quote :
One crucifies the beast so as to liberate through its pain the energies accessible to the creative instinct.
That’s hands down the best explanation of Christianity I’ve seen.
The first one to makes proper sense to me, basically.
The pain of the beast as the medium. There’s philosophy’s cruelty and suffering. I still clung to the idea of the pain of god, which is empty.
Then Nietzsche worked actively to release the beast from suffering.
Enough cruelty! That is exactly how I’ve always read him. His effect is: to cut open the pregnant spirit and let all the cultivated worth flow out over the the dried up earth-beast. It is not cruelty that Nietzsche wants to give, but justification to its pervasive presence in the hearts of man. Cruelty must become beautiful again. This meant to him to let the beast have its way with the mind - and this is the effect that his writings have, the orient the man entirely on his appetites, his tastes, as refined as they may be. Hence his amounting in value ontology, which is the theory of being that bypasses the epistemic dimension by connecting the ontic directly to the vectors approaching the absolute. It replaces the entire epistemic dimension with a single ideal, which is an angular one, convexing in an invisible point, which can only be taken as a reference to the absolute.
Beyond this radical wipeout of the epistemic dimension there was nothing for some years. Not even the ideal ego could survive. Only developing the theory would do to keep the vectors alive and the coherence of the ego intact by identifying the ideal with the reference to the absolute. But all progress that was made was blueprinting for when things would start to roll downhill. Then I was attracted suddenly to the idea of Excess, as the world of the daemonic. Now I could see the stuff that would materialize what I had blueprinted before - the thing between self-valuings, which is not itself being, but the medium whereby being is not enclosed in its being-ness, but is also all other being-ness in the sense that that other being-ness is not self-enclosed. It is the potential that can never fully materialize because it contradicts itself in infinite ways, and that potential is the substance of the mind, its churning, its need to categorize, the overflowing of categories which adds to their beauty but not to their power, the constant iconoclasm of the known universe, the world as a breaking vase, never broken beyond its form, always suggesting a breaking back into being whole. Dionysos, the thought that lives as the will to the wholeness of the fragment in the sea of fragmentation, and is fulfilled as the glorious un-wholeness, the fact of a beyond, the whirling horizons of it close enough to the eye that it dizzies and time ceases to exist on Earth. Enactment of fragmentation, wholeness as blood-bond. But the excess was never transcended so as to take hold of its perpetual recurrence: an did not draw being into his becoming heart so as for it to know itself, until the beast was severed and instantly missed, replaced, with the substance of its own pain, as th many longings for the fire of the beast, longings which are made of that same fire, but thinner, finer, airborne. For many, this means terrible injustice to their instincts, because their minds aren’t fit to breath gold. But for artists especially, artists and women, Christianity has given the space to expand infinitely in their will, to identify it with the creator of the universe himself. It was only not to Nietzsche’s liking, what had been done with this freedom. And I don’t blame him. The second stroke of the baptizing sword stands as the second house stands to the first in astrology; from ‘i am’ to ‘i own’ - the gift of what one was born with, thus properly, as. The desirability of aristocracy, of inequality, the earth sign, being true to the earth meaning being untrue to heaven, to the equal dividing of being part of a whole - the earth separates, and so Nietzsche’s desire to bring back nature in the for of the splendid blond beast is only an engine, a means to a greater, chaotic end - the world as a pool of drives, where only those things that can forge a practical morality can survive. Christianity was pronounced dead on the basis of the resurrection of older an newer gods, and it was lame because it was not understood - understanding it then, is to understand Nietzsche as its self-healing, it’s separating the wheat from the chaff, because what remains is still the introspective Christ, the an who goes inward to explode in consequence, the one who does not like hypocrisy and finally defeats it by pronouncing all things lies, forcing man to choose the lie they think best, rather than believing the one that is presented as truth. The death to the truth of the law is the dawn of truth in man, and Nietzsche finally harvests this day.
To be creators now means to be creative beasts. But all creators were already beastly - perhaps too any positives? Is not the Nietzschean ideal already present, saturated in, almost as this very world? The long way to go for the outer rays that were born of the inner eye, perhaps we can only be stars now, ignorant of the men that are about to go own the mountains of the planets out there, beyond the light.
" The strong do what they can do and the weak accept what they have to accept. "
- Thucydides
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Sauwelios
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PostSubject: Re: On the Value of Suffering. On the Value of Suffering. Icon_minitimeThu Oct 01, 2015 11:59 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Parodites wrote:
The recognition of creature and creator in man is not Nietzsche’s- it belongs to Christianity, it is a fundamental possession of the existential burden first recognized by Judaeo-Christianity. Man is a breath but a breath of God; he is made of dust but formed in God’s image. It certainly is not a Greek idea, neither Roman. One crucifies the beast so as to liberate through its pain the energies accessible to the creative instinct. Christianity degenerated into pity of the beast in man, yes. But that isn’t surprising, since man likes to pity things, especially himself, and one can only pity the beast; you can’t pity the creator in man, because it does not suffer. The beast is easy to identity with, but how do you identify with the creator in man?
Good question. The Nietzschean pity from BGE 225 is indeed not pity for the creator in man, for the reason you give. It’s pity for those who do not know the joy of the creator in man, those who pity the creature in man. But although those do suffer at the sight or idea of the creature’s suffering, they do not suffer from not knowing the creator’s joy, as they do not know it… I have therefore renamed that Nietzschean pity Mitfreudlosigkeit (“congaudiumlessness”, lack of shared joy)–as opposed to Mitleid(en) (literally “compassion”). This, in my view, is the true teleological ground for Nietzschean political philosophy: I especially derive it from a comparison between BGE 225 and WP 367.
As for the beast: It is the beast itself that mortifies the beast (GM 2.16). In other words, the creator in man as well as the creature in man is the beast; there is no transcendent God.
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PostSubject: Re: On the Value of Suffering. On the Value of Suffering. Icon_minitimeThu Oct 01, 2015 12:10 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Nietzsche’s refinement for the creator: lol
Nietzsche’s refinement for the beast: joy
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PostSubject: Re: On the Value of Suffering. On the Value of Suffering. Icon_minitimeThu Oct 01, 2015 1:55 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Sauwelios wrote:
The Nietzschean pity from BGE 225 is indeed not pity for the creator in man, for the reason you give. It’s pity for those who do not know the joy of the creator in man, those who pity the creature in man. But although those do suffer at the sight or idea of the creature’s suffering, they do not suffer from not knowing the creator’s joy, as they do not know it…
We could also phrase this, as Nietzsche seems to do in that aphorism, as follows: that Nietzschean pity is pity for the creator for his unconsciousness. However, being unconscious, the creator is not suffering, so it’s still not really pity then.
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PostSubject: Re: On the Value of Suffering. On the Value of Suffering. Icon_minitimeThu Oct 01, 2015 10:33 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
“As for the beast: It is the beast itself that mortifies the beast (GM 2.16). In other words, the creator in man as well as the creature in man is the beast; there is no transcendent God.”
Indeed, as a philosophy of pure immanence, Nietzsche lacks the component of the ideal and transcendent, and this was surely his viewpoint. The mortifying of the beast so as to generate creative energies is a drive and is either commanded by or commands other drives in Nietzsche. But I am unsatisfied to say the least by this psychology.
ΑΝΤΗΡΟΠΑΡΙΟΝ,
in formis perisseia mutilata in omnia perisarkos mutilatum;
omniformis protosseia immutilatum in protosarkos immutilata.
[ The Ecstasies of Zosimos, Tablet
the First.]
BTHYS TOU ANAHAT KHYA-PANDEMAI.
-- Hermaedion, in: the Liber Endumiaskia.
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PostSubject: Re: On the Value of Suffering. On the Value of Suffering. Icon_minitimeFri Oct 02, 2015 7:49 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Parodites wrote:
“As for the beast: It is the beast itself that mortifies the beast (GM 2.16). In other words, the creator in man as well as the creature in man is the beast; there is no transcendent God.”
Indeed, as a philosophy of pure immanence, Nietzsche lacks the component of the ideal and transcendent, and this was surely his viewpoint. The mortifying of the beast so as to generate creative energies is a drive and is either commanded by or commands other drives in Nietzsche. But I am unsatisfied to say the least by this psychology.
I don’t think I can accept the teleological-sounding expression, “so as to generate creative energies”. Nietzsche’s theory (found in GM 2.16-18, actually, and not just in 2.16) is that man’s creative energies–his will to power–, because they were hampered by his environment, had to turn back upon himself, upon “themselves”. To be sure, this presupposed a self-misunderstanding on his part:
“If the suffering and oppressed lost the faith that they have the right to despise the will to power, they would enter the phase of hopeless despair. This would be the case if this trait were essential to life and it could be shown that even in this will to morality this very ‘will to power’ were hidden, and even this hatred and contempt were still a will to power.” (WP 55.)
It was, according to Nietzsche, really some of man’s creative energies that turned upon others. But you seem to suggest a dualism of sorts. Don’t you think man is just a beast (an animal), a product of a development (an evolution) that could be traced all the way back to the Big Bang? Do you think there has been transcendental intervention since then?
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PostSubject: Re: On the Value of Suffering. On the Value of Suffering. Icon_minitimeFri Oct 02, 2015 10:01 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
This is beyond the scope of your post and I don’t like derailing things, but since you asked: No. I don’t think consciousness is reducible to physis. Man’s consciousness is not reducible to matter or physis. Part of our brains at least have incorporated a relation to what Pierce called the Third Universe, and our symbolic reasoning as well as the nature of our psychodynamic have created an epiphenomenon that cannot be reduced. Besides the transcendental psychology, I understand Being as a kind of self-negating “principle of nonidentity” that explodes itself into dialectically irresolvable conceptual tensions within human consciousness, which we inter-relate and cohere in the transcendental horizon of meaning through the aforementioned symbolic order, in the basic eroto-philosophic movement and production of meaning, and that the world abstracted from this consciousness does not exist- that there is no Being behind beings. So it’s not so much of a transcendental intervention, it’s just that nothing actually exists and that the whole of physis is an illusory construct utilized by the real-ego to fortify itself against dissolution. I will paste a few not so long passages about it.
I use the word discontiguity to refer to the appearance of contrasting, differentiated modes of subjectivity or self-perception. Topos is just my term for different stages in the evolution of the human subject’s understanding of itself through history. I also use the word affect more than drive, since in my philosophy drives are just organized causal sequences of affects, properties of the real ego, which the architecture of the brain reconstitutes given certain situations.
…
The experience of the animals exists
only as an unbroken, undifferentiated stream of sensations which internally represents the physio-organic
reality of various series of neural tracts which the process of evolution has organized as a causal chain, so as
to incorporate in the internal universe of the animal’s mind various beneficial coordinations of muscle tissue
and hormonal response, but our neocortex (where all the neural correlates of higher philosophical thought
lie) receives input from the entire brain, re-integrates it, and feeds its own output back as input to the rest of
the brain, actually rewiring the connectome or synapses- which is where our mind really is, it is far more
important than the brain structures themselves. Our amygdyla, limbic system- everything is transformed in
this operation and is no longer even analogous to the evolved counterparts in the animals.
While animals certainly have feelings, they are parts of the causal-reflexive series organized by nature and
evolution in order to reconstitute a particular sequence of neural events that had been proven beneficial to
the organism; in the state of discontiguity, in which this causal stream of affects has been dis-integrated by
introducing symbolic reasoning into conscious life, man utilizes a negative-conceptual space formed out of
the asymmetries of psychic variances in which to reify the object of consciousness- the real as ideal,
immortal, Ego. Humans possess the real ego only because it functions as a necessary center for this
disintegrated psychic interior, in the manner of a libidinal threshold: experiences that cross this threshold
get truncated and pushed into the unconscious, so that all experience can be re-interpreted by the conscious
mind in terms of a semiotic relationship to the real-ego or immediate sense of self, a representation of the
feeling of organo-affective unity holding the individual back from dissolution and death. There are then in
humans two modes of emotion which are different from animal-feeling, namely negative and positive
emotions related to this libidinal threshold, and discontinguous states of consciousness which are far more
comprehensive than simpler emotions like anger or lust, more like peak experiences, in which philosophic
and creative revelation takes place and the real is reified as ideal ego, and in which the daemonic is given an
eroto-daemonic horizon.
…
One of the central points in my philosophy of consciousness is that the apparent stream of consciousness is
only the residuum of reflex-affect carried through the domain of the real ego struggling with death and
dissolution, and that fully human consciousness is the product of something almost opposite to a stream,
namely discontinguous states of acausal abruption within the order of affects, whereby linguistic-abstract
symbols, which stand outside of temporal relations in the manner of the triads of Pierce, are utilized to reify
the real ego, that is, the feeling of affective unity, as ideal, thereby cohered in the transcendent horizon of
meaning. Because of this, consciousness is impenetrable to the two main philosophical methodologies:
Hegelian dialectics and phenomenology, for the former relies on synthesis, and the later on the analysis of a
causal sequence of events or stream of consciousness- Nietzsche’s principle of Will to Power, whereby all
drives are made to interact with one another purely on the basis of which has a greater internal quanta of
force, organizing thereby into causal associations of subjugation and enslavement, is a fundamental
phenomenological model. In my philosophy of mind, when we hear a sound, the mind is actually
experiencing a discontiguous state formed from the juxtaposition of the lowest and highest tones, in which it
reifies the primitive, immediate, bodily experience of temporal succession throughout the whole
development of the particular sound, rather it is a piano chord, a ringing bell, or a siren: to the animal, every
seemingly individual sound is an un-composed sequence of neural events, and has the impression of a
multitude of different, unconnected sounds, that is, a true stream of consciousness. There is therefor a preexisting
structure, a continua of affects or a field, upon which sense experiences are organized in the human
mind into periodic intensifications of a basic, liminal affective unity which serves as a kind of threshold of
potentiation, namely the real ego- that is, a field upon which the undifferentiated conscious stream is
separated out into variances of height and depth, low and high levels of excitement, lower and higher tones:
the goal of philosophy is to reify this real ego in more comprehensive states of discontiguity, thereby
enlarging the scope of possible intensification around which affects are organized, for as long as we are
operating on the basis of the real ego, only a tiny sliver of consciousness can serve as the libidinal threshold
or limit to the potentiation and intensification or separation of experience into height and depth- any
intensity that crosses that boundary is pushed into the unconscious and cannot play a role in the reification
of the primitive conscious stream into a more human and awakened, transcendent consciousness. This is the
neuro-physiological-scientific theory. At a higher level of abstraction these discontiguous states become the
conceptual oppositions of the daemonic, and that is the transcendental psychology theory, while at a still
higher level they become the topoi of self, etc. and that is the cultural-historical theory and comparative
religion, which finally gives way to the category of pure negativity, the concept of primordial excess and the
inequality of being, which constitute the pure philosophy. All of my writing is, however seemingly
separate, talking about one thing at different levels of abstraction.
…
Eros designates the whole psychic phenomenon of organo-affective unity; it is conscious of itself as the self
or real-ego, and projects itself into the other as erotic love and the flesh’s self destructive longing and
submergence in flesh- at a higher level it expresses itself as artistic creation, and at the highest, as
philosophy, which reifies the real as ideal, timeless ego: in the words of Aristotle, through philosophy one
immortalizes [apathanatizein] one’s self. The erotic fixation belongs to the domain of the real ego, and in
fact is in one sense the mask of the real ego- of the real ego which represents psychologically the feeling of
organic unity, fortifying conscious bodily existence against dissolution into the primal forces of nature that
gave rise to it- that is, fortifying itself against death. The erotic fixation is also spoken of as the thought-arresting
image and the episteme, for which I named the epistemic topos[place]: when the reflexive-affective unity
of animal consciousness began disintegrating due to human symbolic reasoning, it required an image of
itself in which to stabilize itself while awaiting the formation of a new center of gravity for the
psychodynamic movement, and this image is the immediate or real ego: the real ego becomes the new center
of the whole causal formation of the various chains of neural impulses: all nerve impulses are reinterpreted
and reorganized following its appearance so as to reconstitute the feeling of the real ego, of organic unity,
whereas, in the animal’s undifferentiated consciousness, the affects self-organize in a purely causal-reactive
fashion, namely on the basis of individual interactions between this nerve and that nerve- if one nerve
activates another and this leads to beneficial behavior, the later becomes dis-inhibited or more reactive, and
with more activations a causal sequence will solidify as part of the brain’s physical architecture in the form
of bound synaptic connections- in humans this causal series must lead back to reconstituting or
strengthening the new center of the psyche, the real ego, or it simply becomes part of the unconscious and
does not dis-inhibit new nerve tissues. There is a deep connection in all of this between eros and thanatos,
organic unity and disintegration: the erotic pathos, the sexual experience in general and its various related
phenomenon, intimate something of the flesh’s self-destructive longing for the flesh, the flesh’s self-cannibalism.
In normal, healthy sexuality Eros is strong enough to maintain the sense of organic unity: in
pathological sex, it is not. The ideal ego, whose appearance is coincident with the origin of philosophy,
reifies self-consciousness in discontinguous states, in states of disassociated and juxtaposed affect- in
variances and fissures introduced into the organo-affective unity of the real and its causally formulated
universe. Philosophy is about employing the symbols to realize progressively greater states of discontiguity
(which the real ego interprets as pain and emotional disturbance, for it threatens the organic unity with
dissolution), in order to reify more and more completely the real ego as ideal, as the ideal represents deeper
stages in the enfoldment of topoi, and more expansive levels of consciousness; a deeper inwardness in
general. Each of the religions have realized such discontiguous states and realized new stages of subjective
existence, the last one so far having been attained by Christianity.
Not that I’m a Christian or even religious. The word God simply refers to that transcendental horizon of human consciousness for which we lack words, given our not yet complete stage in history, of the human subject’s progress toward self-understanding.
In short: our neocortex gets too big, somehow we formulate abstract symbols, these disturb the purely causal organization of affects, we “evolve” the real ego or immediate self to get rid of the feeling of dissolution the transcendent experience induced, the feeling of disintegration of the sensory world- we “evolve” in other words the real ego as the feeling or organo-affective unity, and that accomplished by reinterpreting those affects in relation to a liminal threshold rather than simply other affects as the still animal brain does- this reinterpretation achieved by semiotically and falsely connecting all sense-affect phenomenon back to an imagined source- our real ego, and this threshold is periodically overwhelmed by traumatic experiences creating discontinuous, dissociated states of consciousness in which the real ego breaks through its own fortifications and experiences transcendence, reorienting itself with that symbolic order from which it was estranged- and it is from this that philosophic revelation descends.
ΑΝΤΗΡΟΠΑΡΙΟΝ,
in formis perisseia mutilata in omnia perisarkos mutilatum;
omniformis protosseia immutilatum in protosarkos immutilata.
[ The Ecstasies of Zosimos, Tablet
the First.]
BTHYS TOU ANAHAT KHYA-PANDEMAI.
-- Hermaedion, in: the Liber Endumiaskia.
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PostSubject: Re: On the Value of Suffering. On the Value of Suffering. Icon_minitimeFri Oct 02, 2015 10:13 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
The material-tectonics or the logics of existence are inadequate, incompatible with, those of the mind. Mind is not the reality, as a lot of mysticism preaches, instead there are essentially two realities: that which exists (being), and that which knows (man, or “mind”). Of course mind too exists, but in a different and “higher” sense than existence exists.
The universe achieves its highest “purpose” in the creation of minds, but the logics of these minds goes against everything else in that universe. The Third Universe, yes I like this idea, this is exactly correct; the realm of facts, transcendent simply means “mental universe”, a reality of reality itself, a kind of shadow, an ‘aegis’ even. The fact is, consciousness cannot be reduced to the material stuff from which we think it comes, nor can that stuff be reduced to consciousness. There are two orders of logic, two realities, at work here. But “dualism” has been taken to mean something it is not, namely a kind of religious positing of pure metaphysical substances rather than a more Deleuzean, “transcendental materialist” sort of deeper tectonics. The deep tectonics exist because, at a certain level, mind and reality do unite together, there exists a logical framework in which being and knowing are “one”. But that is the truth of pure negativity, and doesn’t mean they somehow therefore in that truth become reconcilable to each other, for that threshold is totally unaccessible to either… but philosophy strives for it. The impossible ideal, the only truly impossible thought.
“Be clever, Ariadne! …
You have little ears; you have my ears:
Put a clever word in them! —
Must one not first hate oneself, in order to love oneself? …
I am your labyrinth …”. -N
“A man is not great if he is not small, and he is not small if he is not great. Concepts flirt with the loss of their significance in the oscillation between ambiguous states, and this is in part the function and purpose of concepts.” -Primer on Meaning
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PostSubject: Re: On the Value of Suffering. On the Value of Suffering. Icon_minitimeFri Oct 02, 2015 10:50 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
I don’t think it’s impossible. I think transcendence is possible.
First
Kierkegaard called god what I call meta fear. Fear of fear, if you will, the ultimate discomfort. This in fact is a bridge to a bridge, what Fixed Cross calls soulcancer. To treat it, one must seek out the deepest discomforts and give them flesh: this or that, and chase them down. Slowly, through what is externally percieved as a self-destructive spiral the meta fear is destroyed, and all of meta along with it. They continue to exist, but something has been attained: ownership. Nietche called this self-overcoming, meta is below us. I call it ownership. If meta belongs to us, what doesn’t? The bridge this bridge leads to is temporality. Temporality brings into view the opposite of meta: our deepest held transcendental hopes. It is realized that these hopes are one with the external world, that they can be made to belong to us. How? The world reintegrated and reunifyied through ownership dictates the logics needed: the same logics a man who owns a house uses to make of it what he pleases.
Second
Transcendence is not of another world, as Capable notes. But it is achievable, as Parodites notes, within a frame of mortal succession. If one mortal act has built towards it, following acts need not repeat what Nietzsche did, but own it. Not as a seeking of immortality through immanence, but as the placing into service of mortality, not to immortality, but to transcendence, which is of the only world there is: the world of the creator, the world of man.
Knowledge, too, can be owned. Tremble in fear, those who seek death in life!
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PostSubject: Re: On the Value of Suffering. On the Value of Suffering. Icon_minitimeSat Oct 03, 2015 1:36 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Yes Pezer. What you said about that self-destructive spiral is similar to what I mean when I say the daemonic. The tragic-daemonic is when you get to what you call ownership of one’s sufferings, embracing your fate and eating your own heart in secret like Achilles- the heroic-daemonic is when you can say with the dying words of Herakles, in splendor it all coheres: that is, when you break through into transcendence. An aphorism that encapsulates that mortal succession best is by Walter Benjamin: Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope. My hope- if I have any, is not for myself and my life, but for the life that is without hope, for those who died with tumor filled lungs and failing livers while unsatisfied by the delusions of another world in the after-life, for those who could not make it cohere splendorously like the demigod Herakles; I hope it coheres, and that hope is the coherence, and transcendent.
But again I apologize for derailing your thread, something I do not like to do, but all this on the other hand does concern suffering, if not Nietzsche’s particular concept of suffering.
ΑΝΤΗΡΟΠΑΡΙΟΝ,
in formis perisseia mutilata in omnia perisarkos mutilatum;
omniformis protosseia immutilatum in protosarkos immutilata.
[ The Ecstasies of Zosimos, Tablet
the First.]
BTHYS TOU ANAHAT KHYA-PANDEMAI.
-- Hermaedion, in: the Liber Endumiaskia.
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PostSubject: Re: On the Value of Suffering. On the Value of Suffering. Icon_minitimeSat Oct 03, 2015 5:01 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Parodites wrote:
This is beyond the scope of your post and I don’t like derailing things, but since you asked: No. I don’t think consciousness is reducible to physis. Man’s consciousness is not reducible to matter or physis.
There’s a big difference between matter and physis. In fact, matter is not a fundamental concept in contemporary physics, having no universal definition. Before I can venture further into your post, which seems very specialistic and abstract, I will respond to Capable’s response to it.
Capable wrote:
The material-tectonics or the logics of existence are inadequate, incompatible with, those of the mind. Mind is not the reality, as a lot of mysticism preaches, instead there are essentially two realities: that which exists (being), and that which knows (man, or “mind”). Of course mind too exists, but in a different and “higher” sense than existence exists.
The universe achieves its highest “purpose” in the creation of minds, but the logics of these minds goes against everything else in that universe. The Third Universe, yes I like this idea, this is exactly correct; the realm of facts, transcendent simply means “mental universe”, a reality of reality itself, a kind of shadow, an ‘aegis’ even. The fact is, consciousness cannot be reduced to the material stuff from which we think it comes, nor can that stuff be reduced to consciousness. There are two orders of logic, two realities, at work here. But “dualism” has been taken to mean something it is not, namely a kind of religious positing of pure metaphysical substances rather than a more Deleuzean, “transcendental materialist” sort of deeper tectonics. The deep tectonics exist because, at a certain level, mind and reality do unite together, there exists a logical framework in which being and knowing are “one”. But that is the truth of pure negativity, and doesn’t mean they somehow therefore in that truth become reconcilable to each other, for that threshold is totally unaccessible to either… but philosophy strives for it. The impossible ideal, the only truly impossible thought.
I’m trying to approach this purely phenomenologically. Consider Mach’s Analysis of Sensations. To suppose that, when my eyes are closed, roughly the same stuff is still there as was there when my eyes were open is a metaphysical postulate. When I have my eyes open and I turn my head, my whole world changes. My body is as much a mere bundle of sensations as is any other phenomenon I perceive. My will, too, is just that.
But this negates the primacy of intention. Sensation is unthinkable without the notion of attentiveness, focus, concentration. Without this, there is just oblivion.
Thus far my “purely phenomenological” approach (for now). Perhaps my brain is a quantum computer that can model stuff beyond it precisely inasmuch as that is not quantum stuff or, more precisely, such large-scale quantum stuff that it seems to behave coarsely. My mind is simply how the quantum stuff in my brain experiences itself. I do not experience what’s out there, but only the quantum model thereof within my brain.
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PostSubject: Re: On the Value of Suffering. On the Value of Suffering. Icon_minitimeSat Oct 03, 2015 5:39 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Sauwelios, I believe this is instrumental to clarification of your concern:
“[O]ur neocortex gets too big, somehow we formulate abstract symbols, these disturb the purely causal organization of affects, we “evolve” the real ego or immediate self to get rid of the feeling of dissolution the transcendent experience induced”
I found this a very interesting read in this light.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocortex
It is the question of how our questioning relates to what it questions - Parodites expresses especially the case wherein it is questioning itself, or being conscious of “being”; i.e. ‘a mortal man’.
All ends obscure the end we truly believe in, either joyfully or full of hate.
" The strong do what they can do and the weak accept what they have to accept. "
- Thucydides
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PostSubject: Re: On the Value of Suffering. On the Value of Suffering. Icon_minitimeSat Oct 03, 2015 5:49 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Fixed Cross wrote:
Sauwelios, I believe this is instrumental to clarification of your concern, which is the question of how our questioning relates to what it questions - Parodites expresses especially the case that it is questioning itself.
“[O]ur neocortex gets too big, somehow we formulate abstract symbols, these disturb the purely causal organization of affects, we “evolve” the real ego or immediate self to get rid of the feeling of dissolution the transcendent experience induced”
I found this a very interesting read in this light.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocortex
I’ll check this out later, along with some other things, possibly with the aid of videos (lectures, documentaries, and the like). Right now I’m entertaining the idea of a “Quantum Idealism”, in the Berkeleyan sense: that I’m not experiencing the outside world, but only a model thereof within my brain, which includes what I perceive of my body. I’m not sure at this point if this idea is only absurdly simple or also ravishingly profound.
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PostSubject: Re: On the Value of Suffering. On the Value of Suffering. Icon_minitimeSat Oct 03, 2015 6:54 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Oops, it seems I meant Leibniz, not Berkeley. Whatever, right? As you can see, I need to read/watch up on these things…
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PostSubject: Re: On the Value of Suffering. On the Value of Suffering. Icon_minitimeSat Oct 03, 2015 7:22 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Caught up a bit, and it’s both Berkeley and Leibniz: Quantum Idealism/Monadology. More later!
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PostSubject: Re: On the Value of Suffering. On the Value of Suffering. Icon_minitimeSun Oct 04, 2015 1:05 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Ravishingly profound. I’ve been dipping my toes in Leibniz and he had the right idea: perfect separation and simbiosis of soul (as he called it) and matter. No extra-miracles, as he called it, enters this (i.e., no transcendentalism in the sense of pure other, maybe something like this is what parodites was pointing to in Nietzsche).
With Leibniz, the trick seems to be to replace grace of god with will to power. This is all very meta, perhaps necessary to get sure footing. But not in Leibniz or anywhere else have I had the feeling I got when I read your quantum post here. Idealism… Of idealism? The perfect chasing of what is there, with no perfect other escape? The only limit that keeps on giving, specially in terms of profundity or, more rarifyied, depth.
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PostSubject: Re: On the Value of Suffering. On the Value of Suffering. Icon_minitimeSun Oct 04, 2015 1:31 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
There is a lack of an adequate theory of mind, a rational understanding of consciousness. Because of this we have one category being confused with another, concepts that cannot be properly meted out and separated. We need deeply tectonic and daemonic inquiries into each concept, “God”, “quantum”, “sensation”, “intention”, “aware”, “matter”, “physis”, all of these concepts must be meaningfully exhausted.
Until that happens or until one at least starts down that path and realizes the former delusions and shitty ideas that have thus-far governed thinking in these matters, understanding is going to spin around its wheels in so much un-philosophical and pathological clinging to whatever idea allows a momentary stabilization of the psychological platform and “thought” at whatever given moment. But personally I’d rather elevate philosophy above all that, through it, into real understanding.