Unbearable Ambition

Ah, Sauwelios - it seems one can count on you to make pertinent remarks, if there are such to be made. Indeed, this poses a question that may very well be of the same ‘family’ as my teeth-clenching. It seems I have thought/driven myself into a corner here.

What do I will to imprint on the world, if not my will?

Upon some reflection and some tea, I have come to the thought that it is my aesthetics.

Are you certain that Branson’s empire is in fact dominating? It seems to me that it is rather dominated, by the demands of the masses. The notion of Branson’s empire as a product of ambition to dominate fits this profile neatly:

“Our ambition is supposed to end at some petty riches, a couple of billion dollars or euros and then some charity for poor people in the third world. This is supposed to be the summum.” [from the OP]

I am interested in how you think he would have responded. What was his aim, you think?

Neither do the words rich, famous and successful describe the aim of my ambition. What I mean to establish is not my own wealth and fortune, but a lasting influence on the proceedings on the surface of this planet.

If this sounds megalomanic, then I think that is because it is heard from the pits of the deeply powerless nihilism in which our cultural mind is now entrenched.

I think that this depends on how we interpret the word ambition. If it is the quest for money and fame, then yes, this is like sugar. But I would define these two drives rather as greed and vanity.

Then Hitler is your man. He definitely imprinted his will on the world. All the moral/ethical questions aside, he was one of the most powerful/influential figures in the 20th century. Psychologically speaking, this will to dominate and be omnisciently powerful is simply your reaction to those who ignored you and did not take you seriously, this reaction then filters through dozens of your “personality filters” which results in such reaction. I do think it’s healthy though, ambition is confidence, and confidence is the king.

Ah, the will to power as art.
What, today, is worth imprinting upon the world, if not one’s art? Humanity needs a moulder, a sculptor – in a word, an artist – and I do place great faith in your declaration that the time is coming. While Plato has certainly been one of the most influential thinkers of history, it is indeed necessary to question his influence – and one need not delve deeply to uncover just how regrettable it was. And I do mean was, for we need to rid ourselves of our Christian roots; we need to destroy, after all, before we can create anew. I, too, find myself wrestling with this monumental issue – one must have such ambition for influence, of course, but for what kind of influence, that is certainly the question that keeps me up more nights than most. Currently, I intend to pursue my thought academically, as you know, to see how far I can get within that specific realm – always, however, with the intention to transcend it. Such a transcendence must, for we philosophers of tomorrow (and I do hope to be able to count myself among such a type; if not now, soon), remain open-ended, ceaseless, anti-teleological.

But Septimus, can’t you see that the kind of influence one has is precisely the issue at stake! This is the reason for philosophy, after all – is it not? This is the reason for FC’s clenched teeth, for my sleepless nights. Without an ethic, one need only to wake up tomorrow and start to impose his will on anything he can, without thought, without consideration, with intention only to dominate. But that is not the way of the artist, for how could it be? The barbarian, perhaps. It is true that the philosopher must too be a warrior, but a spiritual one.

FC: I hope that you will keep me/us posted on the panning out of your ambition. As an aside, I’m surprised this thread hasn’t been met with more ridicule – interesting…

It is my current view that the only right kind of influence is an influence beneficial to philosophy—“the world” be damned, if it weren’t for the fact that philosophy needs “the world” (I’m alluding to the last sentence of Nietzsche’s Genealogy, third treatise, section 7 here).

And his influence on philosophy is Plato’s true apology: for for the longest time, Platonism, Plato’s exoteric doctrine, was beneficial to philosophy… Nietzsche even says somewhere that the Church is a nobler institution than the State because it’s a hierarchy based on spirituality.

Only with the victory of Baconianism—i.e., of science over religion and its ostensible handmaid, philosophy—has Platonism truly become a threat to philosophy. And just as Plato rightly saw, back in his day, that his “noble lies” had become necessary for the sake of philosophy, so Nietzsche rightly saw that they had become detrimental to it.

But why would the only right kind of influence be an influence beneficial to philosophy?—Because only in philosophy does the object of human eros, i.e., of the human will to power, coincide with its true aim:

“We have been observing that, on Socrates’ account in the Republic, eros has a single aim but many objects. The case of the philosopher, though, reveals that we must amend that formula: however numerous its objects, eros as Socrates depicts it in the Republic has a limited number of proper or true objects, indeed, in the deepest sense just one true object. That object is the Good[.]” (Cooper, Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche, page 32.)

EDIT: This quote now reminds me of the following:

“The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers, that is, in principle of all men to the extent they desire to know. But in fact this includes only a few, the true friends, as Plato was to Aristotle at the very moment they were disagreeing about the nature of the good. Their common concern for the good linked them; their disagreement about it proved that they needed one another to understand it. They were absolutely one soul as they looked at the problem. This, according to Plato, is the only real friendship, the only real common good. It is here that the contact people so desperately seek is to be found. The other kinds of relatedness are only imperfect reflections of this one trying to be self-subsisting, gaining their only justification from their ultimate relation to this one. This is the meaning of the riddle of the improbable philosopher-kings. They have a real community that is exemplary for all other communities.” (Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, Conclusion.)

And cannot Plato and Aristotle be understood as a (spiritual) erastes and eromenos? Aristotle started out as a pupil of Plato’s, after all… Not to mention Socrates and Plato!

But then, he failed dramatically. When Germany was on the losing hand, he wanted Germany to be laid utterly in waste, because the German people was apparently not worthy.
So even if we take the content away from power, which is what without-music objects to, he can not be an example.

Also, I have already given three examples of people in the category of power I am interested in: Plato, Jesus and Nietzsche.

Now you begin to reveal some assumptions I had not sought behind your words at first. To set you straight, I have never suffered from people not taking me seriously, and have never been ignored when I demanded attention. To the contrary; my problem, if this is a problem, is that rooms take on a different charge when I enter and I am almost always immediately the center of attention, the object of expectation. Since I have had no use for this, I have withdrawn into relative solitude. This automatic attention has been difficult on me because it is combined with a great sensitivity to others’ doubt and suffering.

It is unpleasant to become aware of how feeble people are at heart, because I feel that I have to comfort them, set them at ease, which means to refrain from asserting myself, which feels like holding my breath. If I would be less sensitive to other peoples doubts and sufferings I would probably be in military or politics, because I enjoy setting out strategies and am good at that. But I feel too much pity, which makes it a horror to be amongst groups of people (without exception group behavior reveals weaknesses as it desperately tries to hide them) for too long, as well as unacceptable to inflict suffering if there is not a very good reason.

I can only truly bear people who are strong at heart, and you seldom find more than one or two of them in one room. So this is how I have responded so far:

Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself. - Nietzsche, BGE 76.

But now I do indeed feel that the times are changing, and a time of war - philosophical war - is at hand. For this reason I have dared to compare myself with Nietzsche, Jesus and Plato - even to suggest that I place the rank of my will above theirs - which only a few months ago would have been unthinkable. Now, I feel that it is in fact necessary. We must forge ahead, think beyond all of them, aspire beyond everything that has been revered so far.

Let me say directly that I do not share this view and am fairly certain that I never will. It is therefore very useful that you bring it up. If I may ask, how did you come to this view?

I see the value of philosophy as I see the value of art - philosophy is the highest artform, the art of shaping the world. So, indeed philosophy has need of the world, but not only that - it would be inconceivable without the world.

It is hard to imagine this, but I do not believe that you would - imagine this. I would very much like to read this in context. If, whenever this is convenient, you might locate the source, I’d be much obliged.

Can you explain the reason that Plato’s exoteric doctrine was beneficial to philosophy? Which philosophies that can be seen as valuable by us were born out of it?

I cannot imagine that any exoteric interpretation of Plato has use to philosophy, not if there is also an esoteric interpretation to be made. I cannot follow you here, because I have very little understanding of (what you understand as) Plato’s esoteric philosophy.

What do you mean by the Good? Are we not aiming at, if not already departing from, a valuation beyond good and evil? I must be misunderstanding you, because what I read is suggestive of the adoration of the objective (God), and not the aim to enrich (the subjective experience of) man by creating (the conditions for) a higher type.

I interpret this Good then as conflict, war.

But you cannot possibly be praising Socrates here!

[edit - I reacted impulsively, startled that his name comes up, in relation to the highest value. You will perhaps understand that I am surprised. I still consider Socrates a ruiner of the Greeks, even if decay was already set in motion and ruin inevitable. ]

The difficult aspect of this destroying is that we cannot entirely eradicate Platos thinking, because it was based in part on things that are still useful and necessary to us. Before we can be free of Plato, we must understand him, and cut off what is bad, and keep what may be good/evil or beyond.

It has always been my impression that Plato has simply misunderstood Pythagoras / the Pythagoreans, who as their greatest accomplishment invented our musical system. They did so by applying the ‘Ideals’ or ‘True Forms’ of geometry to the physical world, in the mathematically guided combining of strings of different lengths. Plato then went on to transpose the notion of ‘Ideal’ and ‘True Forms’ to physical objects for which the Greeks happened to have names, where Pythagoras had conceived of them as a very limited set of geometrical axioms.

The silliness of Platos (exoteric) error / lie is almost incomprehensible. I have at least some hope that it was indeed a lie (or a joke), because he allegedly had written above his door “let no one who is not a mathematician enter here”, which can either mean that he understood what he was interpreting very well, and deliberately distorted it, or that he was simply very impressed with mathematicians as agents of the Truth, and wanted to be among them.

Reading Sauwelios’ post, I find myself asking if there was more to Plato than his error. It is true that the Greeks, also the Pythagoreans, had a tradition of layering their philosophy. The student had to learn the exoteric meaning (from outside the curtain) for years, before he would be allowed to see.

I believe that the intention to transcend is already a transcending. An academic career pursued with the aim to transcend academic confines/ethics allows one to become familiar with what needs to be transcended. One might be able to transgress ethics one is not aware of, but not to transcend them.

Those times are long gone, Cross. All ideas have been spoken, all strategies implemented. You either take something by force, invent a time machine or be a CEO. Also, for a man of your personality and ambition, at least as you describe it, I find it very odd to find someone like you on the internet. Just the fact that you are interested in philosophy, tells me you are a man of thought, not action, and the fact that you are discussing philosophy on an internet forum and not at Cambridge or Oxford , doubles down on that.

Instead of in an army camp in northern Germania, in a tent filled with books, you mean?
I am afraid this war has not yet come to that stage. And by the time it has, I will be long gone.

If you classify thought and action as mutually exclusive, you would never had a thought with a consequence. Is this true?

That depends on how skeptical you are. I would say that because i’ve seen people in the same midset and they either never reach their goal or are corrupted trying to achieve it and then fall much harder.

Yes, that’s what I meant by its needing it.

I came to that view mostly by reading Lampert.

There are no philosophies, only—philosophy… Plato’s exoteric doctrine for centuries, even millennia, allowed the most spiritual men to perform the most spiritual activity, philosophising:

“Let us not forget in the end what a Church is, and especially in contrast to every ‘State’: a Church is above all an authoritative organisation which secures to the more spiritual men the highest rank, and believes in the power of spirituality so far as to forbid all grosser appliances of authority. Through this alone the Church is under all circumstances a nobler institution than the State.” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 358, end.)

Imagine a priest who successfully keeps up the appearance of being chaste in body and mind, but secretly lusts after young boys. Surely it’s useful to the priest to keep up said appearance? Well then, now replace the young boys with Lady Sophia.

As for Nietzsche’s seeing that such “noble lying” had become detrimental: I remember that during the Lewinsky affair, a young woman that was interviewed on the street said: “It’s not the sex that bothers me; it’s the lying.”

The Good in my view is the whole, the universe. And it’s good as opposed to bad, not evil (though in the Greek it’s the same word, kakos). As (pseudo-)Dionysius the Areopagite said;

“All things wich are, by the very fact that they are, are good and come from good; but in so far as they are deprived of good, they are neither good nor do they exist.” (De divinis nominibus, as quoted by Jung in his Aion, “Christ, a Symbol of the Self”.)

Well, I think now that (Plato’s) Socrates just did what was necessary—for the sake of philosophy. So yes, I praise (Plato’s) Socrates. He belongs in the list with Homer, Plato, Bacon, Nietzsche, etc.

What a radical view!

But I still do not see how.
Then, Plato has written much and I read philosophy slowly. What do you recommend, if I want to learn of the hidden layers in Platonic thought?

Very interesting that he would say that. I am not sure that I agree, because I do not see a difference between church and state, in the case of the catholic church. I do not see a difference between the highest agencies of the state and the highest agencies of the church. Compare as Nietzsche does the Jesuit order and the Prussian officers corps - the aim is power by understanding the potentials of the human being.

Ah, I see. So a kind of subterranean philosophy was born. That makes sense. There was indeed a great deal of hidden, occult philosophy going on in the Middle Ages.
So what happened then, how did the hidden brothers come into the light?

It has never occurred to me to think of philosophy as a kind of society. But perhaps that would explain a thing or to, as to how philosophy relates to power.

I agree that this is the core of philosophy.
Now, the good is approached in different context in different ways, Bacon -
No universal rules can be made, as both situations and men’s characters differ.
So no universal rules can be made about Good -
or is Good the only exception, the one universal rule?

I find Platos Socrates an undiluted wit, brilliant, I am often laughing aloud, as when reading Homer. And I may agree that he did what was necessary. But I cannot compare Socratic laughter to Homeric laughter. Homeric laughter created the Greeks, Socratic laughter destroyed them.

I like this OP.

Yes, radical in the literal sense, i.e., in the sense that I go back to the root meaning of the term “philosophy”.

How Philosophy Became Socratic, by Lampert, with the respective dialogues on the side of it. I certainly do not recommend that you just read Plato by himself!

Well, science has basically taken the place of religion, so philosophy now has the status of—at best—handmaid of science. Note: the status. That science ranks higher in the exoteric hierarchy than philosophy is in itself no problem; but like religion in Bacon’s time, science has now become a threat to philosophy. The cause of this threat is science’s imminent success at mastering nature. The mastery of nature that threatens philosophy is (especially) the mastery of human nature through the circumvention of one of the two most basic human types, the master type as opposed to the herd type. For the philosopher is predominantly a master type. So philosophy now has to step into the light and vindicate the conditions for the possibility of the master type.

It is as you have said it.
And I sense that the times are beginning to tilt towards our favor.

And this tilting is due to us.

“No longer will to preservation but to power; no longer the humble expression, “everything is merely subjective,” but “it is also our work! - Let us be proud if it!”” [WP 1059]

I had not thought that the etymological root of radical is root! How interesting. With an eye to the fact that philosophy is itself an attempt at the root of terms, things and conceptions, how would you then define the root of philosophy?

It would be the first time I begin reading a text in terms of a commentary on it. How did you arrive at this method?

I think you’ve just defined it pretty well. I was again thinking of the literal meaning—“love of wisdom”, with wisdom understood as perception of truth. And as for “truth”: this derives “perhaps ultimately from PIE *dru- ‘tree,’ on the notion of ‘steadfast as an oak.’” (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=true.) That which is steadfast as an oak, firmly rooted, changeless…

“What was Nietzsche’s task? It was the task of philosophy: gaining a comprehensive perspective on the world and on the human disposition toward the world, a perspective that could claim to be true. The older language can still be used if it is rebaptized with Nietzschean meanings: philosophy as the love of wisdom aims to overcome irrational interpretations with rational ones, interpretations guided by the mind, by spirited intellect Nietzscheanly conceived.” (Lampert, Nietzsche’s Task, opening sentences.)

“Plato and Nietzsche share […] the essential paganism of all philosophy, eros for the earth this world, not just the planet Earth], and that is the deepest sharing, for each discovered that in being eros for what is, philosophy is eros for eros, for being as fecund becoming that allows itself to be glimpsed in what it is: eros or will to power.” (Lampert, How Philosophy Became Socratic, Epilogue.)

The first book I read by Lampert was Leo Strauss and Nietzsche; I just ordered it because I was interested in both men, and it was cheap… But Lampert knows how to present the objects of his studies: in no time, he’d gotten me extremely interested in Strauss’s posthumously published essay on Nietzsche, and I rejoiced when I found that it was included in Lampert’s book as an appendix. Then, having read Lampert’s exegesis of it, I realised I could never have grasped all of it by myself—probably not even most of it. In other words, I realised that Lampert was my superior as a scholar, overall at least. This was confirmed by the next book of his I read, Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. However well I knew Nietzsche’s book, Lampert not only showed me a wealth of details I had missed, but most importantly the plan of the book, to speak with Strauss (Strauss’s aforementioned essay is titled “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil”). But just give HPBS a try: in it, Lampert makes much of an almost universally neglected fact, the chronology of Plato’s dialogues, not in the sense of the order in which Plato wrote them (he kept polishing them until his death), but in the sense of their chronological setting: Socrates is presented as evolving, learning lessons, becoming wiser… Also, Lampert presents Plato, whom Nietzsche called “boring”, as absurdly suspenseful: for example, Socrates returns as a returned Odysseus to a formerly glorious, now defeat- and plague-ridden Athens, and brings with him a newfound strategy for saving both philosophy and the city. But enough of my account of it! Lampert shows how philosophy became Socratic, and how that was for the best; and in doing so, he reclaims Plato and his Socrates, not to mention all the Platonic philosophers that followed (all the genuine philosophers up to philosophy’s becoming Nietzschean again), for us Nietzscheans!

Right off the bat, the OP is tainted by the assumption that anyone who has ever accomplished anything managed to accomplish everything they ever hoped. This is the idea that precedes the two sentences I’ve quoted here, that because your ambitions are supposedly greater than anything that has been accomplished, you must have loftier ambitions than anyone who has ever accomplished anything, anywhere. I highly doubt this is the case. The truth is that expectations and reality rarely match up. It’s next to impossible for a person to accomplish all of the things they hope to before they die.

Your ambition is not “superhuman”, it is human.