As the very fact that you and me are is
We believe in things like higher powers, afterlifes, and higher principles. But point A to point B is pretty much a given.
Via an ancient analogy we can solve this: a phased system of transmutation of no-thingness to thingness.
1 - Energy (being)
2 - Conceptual limitlessness (positive subjectivity)
3 - No-thingness (negative objectivity)
4 - Electrical discharge in to no-thingness (establishment of dream-environment, suggestion of suggestion)
4+ - Generating dream-content, suggestion of logic, thingness - waking up to physical environment.
Please forgive my drunken indescretions here.
Once again. I didn’t even think I came on here.
what is the A and what is the B?
For philosophical context we are bound to uninspiring matter, I see that as the main problem. We agree unspokenly or so I assume that what is happening to nature by it turning upon itself by means of the tooled up ape that is proud to call itself man is unpleasant to behold and the awareness makes us if only slightly uncomfortable at times, that it is an issue, that it breaches what we experience as natural values. We must either change values or evolve through a very dangerous passage. So far, it is more economical to not care - values are declining. Or dedicate our life to change it, even a small bit, just to ease our conscience - values are exaggerated. Bi-polar. Clearly this creature called “man”, who is supposedly one kind but use tools in different kinds and ways, and distinguishes himself from ape in various, not always obvious ways, is not really able to deal with his drives as far as his environment is concerned.
He has been disciplined regionally, oppressed, maimed brutalized and killed, and become better at what he does. He won’t stop. But now he has become a monster, a being made out of millions of beings at once - billions, some day soon.
You cannot blame governments for trying to contain people - they are maniacs. But the government is made of maniacs as well, just of a more sublimated mania. Mans power holders are entrenched in their self-serving mania - they can not bring into focus the full extent of their influence.
I wonder if Nietzsche could have pulled off the ER after the twentieth century. I wonder how we will pull off the twenty-first century.
I agree, it is time we address the beast.
I have been aiming at the position that we must project a value to him.
Now, the beast is tamed by a red flag -
terror-horror (fear of fear) tames us, exhausts us.
we become docile, and are sleeping, and wise men take over the Earth,
starve continents and then rebuild them, as docile economies of useful talent.
Nietzsche: useful to what?
This ultrapowersuperhypermanipulation is the only way we could immediately conceive of mass-survival without shedding all hereditary beliefs. Method: reduction to the most common denominator in groups - apathetic insanity. The only thing philosophy has to determine is whether or not this beast will have a value or not, whether it projects itself out of the vicious circle of drives prior to a positive logos. Is the world just aimless chaos of self-exploiting energy, or is there an ‘essence’? Essence, understanding of value, culture - how long and to what extent of damage will we remain a slaves of our bad conscience - is there a thing in our hands that we may use to justify this frenzied outburst of weird and not necessarily benevolent powers to increase our power to manipulate and interpret it as good?
What are our most advanced means of of manipulation? How are we manipulated into organs of the beast? Can we not manipulate the beast?
Forget the world. That’s too big. Each man has to be his own savior. It is man’s thinking that tells him his life appears to have absolutely no meaning so he goes searching for a meaning, he searches for a goal. As long as man is searching for a goal, and as long as he is searching for meaning he will remain wandering around restlessly.
For some reason or another he wants to be at peace with himself. Why can’t he be at peace with himself? That’s the very first question that I ask. Why does it always have to be tomorrow or the day after tomorrow? The same is true for his neighbor and for his neighbor; that’s the world, do you understand? Every individual is seeking certainty for himself and therefore there can be no certainty in this world. It is not that I am pessimistic or cynical, but that is the reality of the world. What man has tried up to now has done him no good at all!
That’s correct, we don’t know. But , interpretations are always interpretations of something. Thus we intuit that there is reality to which our interpretations refer. Even your above statement implies that the fact that all we know is interpretation is the case. The case refers to the real situation, hence it implies reality, a true state of affairs.
You’re still positing something extra, though. When all we know are interpretations, why suppose, why “intuit” that there must be some-thing behind them? On a different forum, Sauwelios proposed the following line of reasoning (toward a different end, an end we disagreed on, as it were; but it will serve its purpose here as well):
This problematic finds its roots back in Lockean epistemology. Locke proposed the “veil of ideas” separating man from objects-in-themselves, for all man has are his ideas of those objects and so can never hope to access them directly. Locke, a confused philosopher if ever there was one, initially questioned whether we had any reason to suppose the existence of these objects behind our ideas of them at all, but eventually appealed to God’s benevolent grace to conclude that these objects do, in fact, exist.
The point is, we have no reason to suppose the existence of something behind our interpretations – perhaps all there is is further interpretation. To claim that definitionally speaking, the term “interpretation” implies “something to be interpreted” recalls, of course, Nietzsche’s criticism that our philosophy finds its footing in an age-old faith in grammar.
Indeed, I do imply this. However, I am making no claim to fact; just the opposite, actually. I am proposing that all there is is interpretation. This too, then, is interpretation! For how could it be anything besides?
But surely we can’t so radically re-conceptualize the way we understand the world (that it is interpretation, and nothing besides) while still holding onto that out-dated definition of reality. Philosophy need not weigh itself down with word games: grammar enjoys no privileged claim to the world itself.
With respect, that particular criticism backstep but thorough fling doing or climb.
“Interpretation” is not my choice of words, or the Realist’s choice of words, but yours/Sauwelios’s. Pick another one, an intransitive verb, at least so you can’t be accused of appropriating the propriety of objects grammatically to your argument because it would sound weak without it. “Interpret” describes an action that a subject performs on an object. That’s not my rigid fascination with grammar, it’s just how the word is always used. There are plenty of sensory actions that a subject can do without any reference to an external world - dream, say, or hallucinate. But interpret gives that comforting ring of being grounded in something, doesn’t it?
My take on it is that it’s misphilosophising, the grammar more reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s fly-in-the-flybottle than any claims of Nietzsche.
Stronger: philosophy must rid itself of word games wherever it can. And I believe that a word game is what this is, ambiguity and metaphor covering the weaknesses in the argument and a Brave Nietzschean Disrespect for Grammar covering the ambiguity and metaphor.
According to Occam’s razor everything should be made as simple as possible. But as Einstein noted, not simpler. Your proposition that all there is interpretation is too simple for adequate understanding of the situation. It is, in fact, a self-defeating tautology. If all is interpretation, then interpretation can say nothing definitive about the all. You can’t help but refer to an objective world you seek to deny. Ironic that you would accuse me of word games when that is what you seem to be stuck in. You unwittingly demonstrate that objective reference is indispensible to conceptualization.
In all honestly, Jakob, these posts were the result of me coming on here when I should have known better. While what I posted was the result of things I think about when sober, I have an unfortunate habit of bring them out at the worst time, in the worst possible places (I apologize to without music for even attempting to take this string totally off subject), in the worse possible shape to express it.
I sometimes wish I could find a way to hook a breathalyzer up to my computer and develop some programming skills in order set up an application that, once activated, will for a given amount of time prompt one every hour to blow, then once a certain BAC level is read, firewall out all access to social networking pages. I would appropriately call it The Face Saver.
But I really appreciate your willingness to turn my moments of silliness and embarrassment into something of some worth. In my own defense, given your generosity and that of the others who mercifully choose to ignore it, even sober, the affection I feel for you guys (as sloppily as it gets expressed in my more ecstatic moments) does not seem totally beyond reason.
That said, what I’m really glad to see is that are other people who recognize the emergence of some malignant thing that seems to be taking over our system. I came up with the concept of The Beast in the semi-facetious manner of recognizing how silly it was for our Christians to stand in most powerful country in the world and act as if the prophecied Beast could only emerge “over there”. It’s also based on the concept of systematic imperatives and the tendency of social systems to gravitate toward things that supports its needs even if those things work against the needs of the individual members of that system. It generally finds its most obvious expression through the higher ranking beneficiaries. The joke for me was if there ever was a candidate for this Beast, it would be the very system these Christians were embracing.
It’s a subject I hope to discuss more, if not on this string, then on another.
Thanks again, guys.
I would also note Neitzche’s distaste for those whose will to power finds expression through conformity.
But your point here about the hegemony involved hits the nail right on the head. It’s what interests me most and it’s why I find Semiology such an important tool. It was what I was getting at in The Semiology of Rock and Country.
But, once again, I really don’t want to hijack WM’s string here. I will try to start another one based on it.
We use the same word for a table, or object. The object is there and the known coresponding word, but still we do not know what the reality of the object is – we do not know fully what it is. The word that exists in thought as an idea, having no physical or concrete existence, is what is interpreted.
How can anybody say anything about the ‘state of not knowing?’ We have necessarily to use words. Can we use words without indulging in abstract concepts. We can. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a non-verbal conceptualization. That’s a funny thing – there is no such thing as non-verbal conceptualization at all.
I understand without-music to be saying that there is no object, only interpretation. I agree we don’t fully know the object, we don’t know a thing as it is in itself. All we can know is phenomena which we interpret via concepts.
We must infer the extent to which our thoughts correspond to things by our observations of phenonmena. We can acknowledge that we don’t know everything about anything. An object may be nothing more than an object of inquiry.
There must be an object upon which light falls so as to produce an image on the retina which, when stimulated, transfers signals to the brain. There must be things around you for there to be a "you’ as a reference point, as a subject in relation to the objects.
Yet, ‘you’, the subject, has no existence without knowing (via interpretation of something in memory) what the signals are. Like being blind from birth and suddenly being able to pick up the signals – everything would be an incomprehensible occurence incapable of being perceived by the mind. So, in a way, you could say the objects around you do not exist, until you, as the subject, as a reference point come into existence. But your existence in this scheme will not occur until a ‘you’ can project its knowledge (recognition) onto the things around it.
OK
OK
I don’t follow this. It seems a subject could exist and might observe the signals without knowing what they are.
Again, the blind person might hear the signals and not know what they were.
Just because objects don’t exist for me, it doesn’t follow that they don’t exist independently.
It seems to me you are conflating existence with knowledge of existence. Knowledge of something depends on it’s existence. But, something might existence independent of knowledge of it. If not, everything would have to be invented. Nothing new could ever be discovered.
What if he has a goal? Then he will not be “restless” but active and not wander but move.
These are not bad things - according to my personal valuation. And I do not think that everyone should agree with me.
I only agree with this if ‘being at peace’ means an active state of increase, of exploration, of building-creating, with at root the impulse to play (which is the undiluted form of activity).
Life itself is an assimilative process. Homeostasis is an activity, a continuum of attainment. If one wants passive peace, there’s always death.
I have to try hard, but I think so. Your thoughts seem highly transcendental. A poetic approach may be a possibility.
I disagree. I think that it has done quite a few people a great lot of good, and indeed a hard to justify amount of people unbearable misery. But, man has not yet been a whole. We have not even thought about beginning to try to understand the world as a whole. Nobody up until now has known enough.
"I imagine a future thinker, in whom the european-american restlessness is connected with the hundredfold inherited asiatic contemplativeness: such a combination brings the riddle of the world to a solution. For the time being the observing free spirits have their mission: they all throw out the barriers,that stand in the way of a melting together of humanity [Verschmelzung der Menschen]: Religions, states, monarchic instincts to wealth- and poverty-illusions, health- and race-prejudices - "
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Summer 1876
There is a critical distinction between the liveliness of harmony and the lifelessness of peace.
By obtaining the right meanings and therefore the right goals, one can arrange for the momentum of self-harmony (harmony inside and harmony surrounding) yet the peace is merely the lack of conflict, not the lack of motivation, action, and liveliness.
All Joy is by the perception of progress toward that goal.
- What is it that you have always been attempting and by what means?
- What are others attempting and by what means?
By learning those, one can then harmonize both inside and out.
That which remains in Self-Harmony, cannot perish.
Nothing can die until if fails to try.