The 4 Aeons: Platonic, Machiavellian, Nietzschean, Homeric.

After reading the closing explanation of will to power, I have a far stronger sense of what Nietzsche stood for.

I like it. :slight_smile:

Good, because that is crucial: it is the key that has been truly unlocking Nietzsche’s philosophy for me since the very beginning of 2010.

Still? Honestly, what’s your obsession with him? You should of developed your own thoughts by now, or at least found better philosopher to follow. You’ve wasted at least a solid decade of your life on nothing. Do you have theories on something that isn’t Nietzsche? Just you? Some idea you developed on your own? I’m not upset anymore, just increasingly dissapointed. I don’t think your aware of the number of tracts Machiavelli wrote on Fortune. He has independent works on the subject, and his thinking is deeper on the topic than presented. He was a tactician combining diplomacy becoming strategic in scope. Fortuna was still something to be tactically manipulated, but his thought pushed well beyond this. He found elements of the typology well advanced of Nietzsche’s persona in other works, such as the Golden Ass. His tradition for fortuna has roots, very apparent roots, in Boethius more than the other writers on the topic. He was considerably more advanced in many ways over Nietzsche’s conceptions of hierarchy and nature. They seem similar at a very base face value because both held to elements from Marsilius of Padua’s earlier work, but for different reasons. Marsilius isn’t read anymore, much less as Machiavelli beyond his three famous works on statecraft. But numbskulls will read anything and everything on Nietzsche and think this way. At least Cezar makes a effort to read all the works of his predeccessors- unlike you or even Nietzsche for that matter. It’s why in short time he’ll surpass you… in a race to no where. First place gets a turd sandwich.

You ever wondered about the construction of the imaging of the Wheel of Fortune historically as a means of rationally exploring information as a mnemonic tool? The wheel holds to a scecialized method of accessing categorical information ( one method of thinking analytically) that is seperately and indepedently viewed (a sense of self independent of the first mode of analysis, but also built up from) by the sense of self that preceives that information, in a femine representative (fortuna) of activities that are essentially masculine. You end up with two modes of though, with a alchemical conjunction that modulates mood. The wheel itself explains thought patterns a ego centered mentality withdrwling from pain can’t explain- such as roles in market fluxtuations, optimization, and the realism of currency and social status. The memory of events is recalled in placement, but not the thought patterns. It’s a cover for them, explaining it as a linear, repetitive loop. A means for reintergrating people who experienced traumatic events, giving them a theory of how the world works, and a means of continuing on in accepting that the wheel eventually rises once again. The goddess as a feminine quality isn’t too different in how lady luck is a positive figure in motivating men into risky behavior.

It’s a simple cognitive map, using ancient rules of mental manipulation and common place symbology. Isn’t that complex, and Machiavelli mastered it, not Nietzsche, thanks to Boethius and Apulius. Machiavelli was the one who suffered from the depressions in going out into the field everyday in isolation. That’s why the imagery survived so long… it has a cognitive basis to it, and it’s prescriptive. Nietzsche never quite grasped it. It was just a tool for him to build on other tools.

Machiavelli > Nietzsche
Homer> Machiavelli and Nietzsche

Have you begun reading the homeric cycle beyond the Odyssey and the Illiad? Even the Odyssey and the Illiad are compilations of several authors, much like the Mahabhrata (both are recorded as being much smaller in it’s earlier known stages), so it’s wise to read the entirity of the cycle. Just portions of the cycle- the Illiad and Odyssey, are more polished than others.

Please move on from Nietzsche, stop misunderstanding Machiavelli, and stop beating on Fortuna- the physical abuse towards women mentality… just pathetic and the positive message that can be retrieved is smaller than the reality of the metaphor- men beating on women. It’s a memonic device, and it’s not a good one for explaining how strategic though operates as it substitutes for several of it’s necessary cognitive operations. A Machiavellian would seek to overcome the underlining need for such pedological tools in the first place… Machiavelli was always searching for new techniques that expanded beyond his former understanding of his Art of War. The Wheel of Fortune is just a representation of the functions of the classical understanding of Eudaimonia. It’s not something to base one’s life understanding on… especially since you’ve never seemed to of figured it’s classical synthesis and reason for being out. We have better formulas, it’s but a single psychological subset, and it by default has to wallow in it’s pity while holding out hope for brighter days ahead. There are much healthier ways of thinking. Look at Machiavelli’s comedy… he’s the best of the Italian comedians of the reniassance. He pointed fun at the very process of the seperateness of fortune and individual’s farsical attitude to it.

Again? Honestly, what’s your obsession with me? You should shut the fuck up.

I equate this to “please be silent about the matter”, but then it is reduced to swear words to add a hostility factor.

I thought it was interesting, Sawelious.
Some questions first…
About Homer, in the first schema he is described as deifying nature, but later as making a shift from visible to invible gods. Wouldn’t this be deifying the transcendent?
How did Plato shift the culture from shame to guilt? It might also be helpful if you could define those terms (guilt and shame) since when I look at shame-based cultures, I do not in any way see master morality.
It seems like you are equating what you are calling in Nietschze, nature worship, with the deification of nature? It seems to me you are slipping religious concepts into his desacralized outlook. Or am I missing something? I can see nature love, to use a rather drab phrase, but nature worship, especially if it slides into deification, seems like a number of unjustified leaps. Just noticed that you referred to it as a non-theist deification which seems like an oxymoron to me.
What do you think N was getting at here…

since what he seems to be snide about is, well, where we are now.
Christianity according to the schema would be Platonic.
It seems to me however that pagan and indigenous religions don’t fit anywhere. These are not only positing immanent entities, but also invisible ones. And these traditions persist.
Also, then Buddhism, seems to not quite have a home here.
Not that you were necessarily trying to cover all ground, but it reads a bit like that.

No, the Homeric gods do not transcend nature; they live in the world, not beyond it.

By commanding and legislating a Christianity for the lower nobility (the higher nobility being commanders and legislators like Plato himself).

Well, maybe you entertain a different definition of master morality. The Japanese and the Arab cultures, of whose noble classes Nietzsche says—in the Genealogy—that they have the blond beast at their root, are examples of shame cultures. The Homeric culture, which was obviously master-moral (and indeed, Nietzsche mentions “Homeric heroes” in the same list with the Japanese and the Arab nobilities), was a shame culture, as is evident from Sophocles’ Ajax, for example.

Apparently, yes: namely, that the death of God is only the beginning for Nietzsche.

I meant “theism” in the sense of personal gods. Zeus is a theistic god; the Sun is not.

I think he was getting at the fact that where we are now is a necessary bad.

Yes, as Christianity is Platonism for the people.

Not in the Western world, they don’t. And as I said earlier on in this post, immanence and invisibility do not necessarily preclude one another.

Which is quite in order, as it belongs to the Orient.

I was indeed wrong when I said that Nietzschean science was knowledge conceived as an end in itself. After all, Nietzsche says:

[size=95]“Knowledge for its own sake”—that is the last snare of morality: with that one becomes completely entangled in it once more. [Beyond Good and Evil, Zimmern translation, section 64 whole.][/size]

Nietzsche’s philosophy is completely nonteleological. Therefore, knowledge cannot even be an end in itself for it; it does not have any ends at all, not even ends in themselves.

[size=95]“[W]hy knowledge at all?”—Everyone will ask us about that. And we, thus pressed, we who have asked ourselves the same question a hundred times, we have found and can find no better answer… [ibid., section 230.]

Than what? The accused has no better answer than the answer just given that there are two natural inclinations of mind. Or the answer given in the following section that philosophy is an inescapable gift of nature. Or the answer given in the whole book that philosophy accords with what it discovers, the way of all beings, and glimpses a new ideal of affirmation of all beings and sets in motion the ultimate politics on behalf of the natural order of the beings. The accusation of cruelty is the accusation already made a hundred times: “Why philosophy at all?” [Lampert, Nietzsche’s Task, page 231.][/size]

We formidable exceptions seek knowledge because it’s in our nature to seek knowledge, to be cruel to ourselves by forcing ourselves to see the truth. This does not mean, however, that the truth must needs be “deadly”:

[size=95]Whoever has endeavored with some enigmatic longing, as I have, to think pessimism through to its depths and to liberate it from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness and simplicity in which it has finally presented itself to our century, namely, in the form of Schopenhauer’s philosophy; whoever has really, with an Asiatic and supra-Asiatic eye, looked into, down into the most world-denying of all possible ways of thinking—beyond good and evil and no longer, like the Buddha and Schopenhauer, under the spell and delusion of morality—, may just thereby, without really meaning to do so, have opened his eyes to the opposite ideal: the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and world-affirming human being who has not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever was and is, but who wants to have just what was and is repeated into all eternity, shouting insatiably da capo, not only to himself but to the whole play and spectacle, and not only to a spectacle but at bottom to him who needs precisely this spectacle—and who makes it necessary because again and again he needs himself—and makes himself necessary——What? And this wouldn’t be—circulus vitiosus deus? [BGE 56 whole, Zimmern trans.][/size]

If I remember right, Faust said how the eternal recurrence isn’t a state of reality, it is a state of mind. Live like you would have it repeat forever, and want it to repeat forever. This is slightly like the catagorical imparative, but it is like an upgrade. What is good for one may not be good for all. But the catagorical imparative democratic crap universalizes good in a way where only what is good for all is “truly good”. Eternal recurrence also relates to “the love of fate”. Being beyond good and evil means we accept nature, basically, since it should be obvious that in many ways nature is amoral. Some people consider it evil, even. But it is our source and we should deal with it and affirm things instead of trying to deny reality.

Your theory of “the four great ages or Aeons of the Western world” is too much originated from Friedrich W. Nietzsche, thus too much Nietzsche-orientated. Long before Nietzsche there were Goethe and many philosophers of the Deutsche Romantik (German Romantic) who deeply idealised the nature, so that one can speak of a very strong deification of nature. Most of them were pantheists. A deification is always theistic. Of course. Duh! A “non-theistic deification” is not possible.

So at least your 4) has to be corrected:

  1. the Romantic Age as the age of the pantheistic deification of nature.

Homer, Plato, and Machiavelli came out of the blue just as little as Nietzsche. Also, Nietzsche was ultimately no Romantic; to the contrary. Of his predecessor Schopenhauer, who heavily influenced the ultimate Romantic Wagner, he said that he’d come a long way but did not know how to deify his “Will”. This in turn is what Nietzsche did, and thereby he is the initiator of a new age, like Machiavelli, Plato, and Homer were before him.

As I wrote in the leo-strauss list on Yahoo Groups in this context:

[size=95]“non-theistic” is about the absence of theistic gods like Zeus, but not necessarily of nature deities like the Sun (cf. the end of Strauss’ 13th paragraph [of his “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil”], where he says that “in a manner the doctrine of the will to power is a vindication of God, if a decidedly non-theistic vindication of God.”)[/size]

Had I meant “theistic” in a general sense, then you would have been right, as theos and deus are basically the same word. But I meant it in a specific sense, in which anthropomorphic deities are theistic whereas deified animals, objects, etc. are non-theistic.

[quote=“Sauwelios”]
I recently came to understand the last four great ages or Aeons of the Western world as follows:

  1. the Homeric Age as the age of the theistic deification of nature;
  2. the Platonic Age as the age of the theistic demonisation of nature;
  3. the Machiavellian Age as the age of the non-theistic demonisation of nature;
  4. the Nietzschean Age as the age of the non-theistic deification of nature.
    ][/quote

how useless.

A suggestion for further reading: my “The West. A Straussian Metanarrative.” (http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?p=2487862#p2487862)

Nontheistic deification of nature is an oxymoron.

What do you mean by impersonal God?

The opposite of a personal God: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_god

You’ve probably had this conversation before, I’ve had it a few times myself.
For me, it’s just confusing to call the absolute, the all or the ground of being, God, and hardnosed, scientific materialists, who wouldn’t dream of ‘deifying nature’, thinking of or describing themselves in such a manner, also believe in absolutes, like gravity, or in a unifying principle behind gravity and all the other forces and processes, like Einstein’s relativity.
And I mean of course there’s totality, there is one thing, like a chair, there is many things, like all the stuff in, on and around planet earth, and there’s everything, how could there be some things without there being everything?
A ground of being?
That’s what quantum physics is.
It seems to me there is no difference between your Machiavellian (I prefer modern) and Nietzschean (postmodern) ages other than semantics, or even if there is, I wouldn’t liken it to a deification, or demonization.

If there is a difference between the modern and postmodern age, I would say postmoderns aren’t terrified of their subjectivity, the way moderns were, and are, they fully embrace their emotions, values and individuality, their creativity, without objectifying it, trying to turn it into some external entity like Gods or ghosts.
Art, poetry and creative passion becomes paramount, as opposed to the religion and mysticism of the premodern age, or the dry, intellectual detatchment of the modern one.
And abstractions like language/cognition are increasingly viewed as pragmatic, as tools of measuring and evaluating nature, rather than as, things in themselves, in the Platonic, transcendent or Aristotelian, imminent sense.

So the subjective is permitted its sphere, its domain, without it being (mis)construed as objective.
We are free to wonder, speculate, emote and judge without getting too, hung up on them.
The postmodern age isn’t so much a rejection of the modern as it is a further development of it.

What the transition from paganism (immanent, pluralistic theism) to monotheism (transcendent, monistic theism) to modernism and postmodernism represents, is the desubjectification of reality.
Postmodernism is the latest development in this process, it’s even more objective than modernism, in that not only is it atheist and aspiritual, it doesn’t impose or project morals and values, nor cognition and language itself onto the things it’s thinking and talking about.

Interestingly, In the west, moderns got hung up on this idea of pluralism, that things were fundamentally separate, where as in the east, they got hung up on that idea of monism, that things were fundamentally together, where as postmodernism recognizes that things are neither necessarily pluralistic, nor monistic, it’s the rejection of both metaphysical extremes.
For the postmodern, one and many are just imperfect tools we can apply, or misapply to stuff, same as mind and matter, the confusion comes from going to extremes, from making a false dichotomy out of them.
This doesn’t mean postmodernism is dualistic, or nondualistic for that matter.
Postmodernism is all things, as it is no things, it is a kind of cognitive, linguistic and, metaphysical pragmatism, not going to extremes.

The transition from paganism to postmodernism hasn’t exactly been linear, the Greeks and Romans, or at least their academia, and I’m sure some of it trickled down to the people, were able to go from paganism straight to something akin to modernism and postmodernism, bypassing the monotheistic phase, or at least not getting caught up in the monotheistic phase present in Plato and Aristotle’s thought.
And if it’s not at all linear, in the future we may find ourselves going back to the modern, monotheistic or even pagan stage, I mean for some, neopagans, this going back has already occurred, but could it occur for humanity as a whole?
We shall see, especially if our civilization was to collapse back into an agrarian or scavenging one, we may find that under such conditions, paganism comes more naturally to us.

A couple of things. First, you’re replying to a five-year-old post. Second, I said in that post:

“We are now in the transitional period between 3 and 4, in which the two overlap. The necessary link between the two is nihilism.”

Back then, I would have placed postmodernism in the transitional period, not in the Nietschean age (4). Today, I’m a bit more favourably inclined to postmodernism, but still wouldn’t quite identify it with the Nietzschean age, which is in great part still to unfold.

As for the rest of what you say, it’s good that you have your own take, and it’s a sensible-sounding one. I don’t think it’s at odds with my own, though:

pagan : Homeric
monotheistic : Platonic
modern : Machiavellian
postmodern : nihilistic/Nietzschean
postmodern/pagan : Nietzschean