Ahyberk is not afraid of much.
Neither is this guy
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJCKQllyMIQ[/youtube]
Someone Pezer bought some equipment from.
That guy did a good job. Nice video, Fixed.
Thanks man.
For those who are interested in transhumanism
beforethelight.forumotion.com/t7 … -nietzsche
A kid taken with transhumanism has seen in Nietzsche a source of passion and is now trying to find a way to reconcile the two on a very basic elementary level of philosophy. Another poster has taken it on him to school him a bit. This process has gained my respect.
I have been kicked out of bed again to deliver this package.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHw07uKvnqk[/youtube]
Please kick Fixed out of bed and ask him to explain the difference between his take on astrology and the take of those folks who claim that the position of the stars and planets and moons is pertinent to events that will happen to us in the future.
Does he go that far?
After all, a crucial distinction between most astrologers today and most astronomers is that the latter [to the best of my knowledge] do not connect the dots between the position of celestial bodies and human interactions. Well, aside from the effect of things like gravity – tides etc.
In fact, astronomers might even point out that some of the stars that we see in the sky may no longer exist as such at all. The distances are so great that we may well be seeing only the light that was once emitted from them when they still had light to emit.
Astrology in this sense – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrology – is basically just a way in which particular folks can get a grip on all of the variables in their life they either do not understand or do not control. It is a psychologically comforting way in which to let others tell them what to do because [and this seems rather ironic to me] it is going to happen that way anyway.
In other words, I have never really been able to ascertain fully where the astrologer’s prediction stops and human autonomy begins.
Perhaps Fixed can cite particular examples from his own life.
I was sent here again, just as I came back and had my soup I was put on the horse. The message this time is that Fixed Cross appreciates the pirates on this ship and says Aye.
I shall be forthright and claim that whatever info you ask for, is in the video Fixed Cross has asked me to bring over.
My back is certain it wont be the last video he commands me to carry over… questions will always, under His Noble Reign, be answered if they are to the point of the point that was being made etc etc etc
Sigh gotta go back and its getting to sundown soon.
The sun may be dead now, it still influences you, 8 minutes.
Some people think the sun does not matter on human life, or the moon.
Astrology is the science of how if the sun shines warmer, that has an effect.
It appears [to me] that the message that Fixed Cross wishes to convey regarding, among other things, astrology and VO is alwys rather elliptical and enigmatic.
There is never quite enough information to pin him down.
At least not pertaining to those things that interest me philosophically. And I do try to avoid being elliptical and enigmatic myself.
Besides, I’m still not entirely convinced that his contributions here are were not [by and large] an exercise in irony.
In other words, he has set VO up as an example of what some “serious philosophers” are able to talk themselves into.
Fixed hammers on people understanding the aim of this thread. He had first tried to enlist Sauwelios to keep this updated but then the task fell on me. Now Im supposed to ask you to revisit this video.
I have faith he knows why. It is all a bit over my head, I can relate to your state of confusion (not confusius!) extremely well to be honest.
But personally I think these videos by Zoot are better.
In as far as the Sauwelios video goes I would like to analyze it. From where Im standing, it is as if he is saying that the superman is the creator of morality. But isnt the superman… beyond good and evil?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMLimZPbHrY[/youtube]
Now here is a video a first one where Fixed Cross took seriously the claims that people were vomiting on account of motion sickness?
Yes he goes far.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brWdbCiKTO4[/youtube]
fuckk. Any masseuses want to treat my back???
UUUUIURRRKK
this day man.
it s not just me running my ass off, theres also an election going on and people are not watching the road but their cells.
But so here I am speedily as only the barbarianhorde can run.
Fixed says to say that Nietzsche wrote very early on on self-valuing. even before his first book.
On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense
Frederich Nietzsche
1
In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history"—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.
One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it. But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that he floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world. There is nothing in nature so despicable or insignificant that it cannot immediately be blown up like a bag by a slight breath of this power of knowledge; and just as every porter wants an admirer, the proudest human being, the philosopher, thinks that he sees on the eyes of the universe telescopically focused from all sides on his actions and thoughts.
It is strange that this should be the effect of the intellect, for after all it was given only as an aid to the most unfortunate, most delicate, most evanescent beings in order to hold them for a minute in existence, from which otherwise, without this gift, they would have every reason to flee as quickly as Lessing's son.[size=85] [In a famous letter to Johann Joachim Eschenburg (December 31, 1778), Lessing relates the death of his infant son, who "understood the world so well that he left it at the first opportunity."] [/size]That haughtiness which goes with knowledge and feeling, which shrouds the eyes and senses of man in a blinding fog, therefore deceives him about the value of existence by carrying in itself the most flattering evaluation of knowledge itself. Its most universal effect is deception; but even its most particular effects have something of the same character.
The intellect, as a means for the preservation of the individual, unfolds its chief powers in simulation; for this is the means by which the weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves, since they are denied the chance of waging the struggle for existence with horns or the fangs of beasts of prey. In man this art of simulation reaches its peak: here deception, flattering, lying and cheating, talking behind the back, posing, living in borrowed splendor, being masked, the disguise of convention, acting a role before others and before oneself—in short, the constant fluttering around the single flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law that almost nothing is more incomprehensible than how an honest and pure urge for truth could make its appearance among men. They are deeply immersed in illusions and dream images; their eye glides only over the surface of things and sees "forms"; their feeling nowhere lead into truth, but contents itself with the reception of stimuli, playing, as it were, a game of blindman's buff on the backs of things. Moreover, man permits himself to be lied to at night, his life long, when he dreams, and his moral sense never even tries to prevent this—although men have been said to have overcome snoring by sheer will power.
What, indeed, does man know of himself! Can he even once perceive himself completely, laid out as if in an illuminated glass case? Does not nature keep much the most from him, even about his body, to spellbind and confine him in a proud, deceptive consciousness, far from the coils of the intestines, the quick current of the blood stream, and the involved tremors of the fibers? She threw away the key; and woe to the calamitous curiosity which might peer just once through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and look down, and sense that man rests upon the merciless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indifference of his ignorance—hanging in dreams, as it were, upon the back of a tiger. In view of this, whence in all the world comes the urge for truth?
Insofar as the individual wants to preserve himself against other individuals, in a natural state of affairs he employs the intellect mostly for simulation alone. But because man, out of need and boredom, wants to exist socially, herd-fashion, he requires a peace pact and he endeavors to banish at least the very crudest [b]bellum omni contra omnes[/b] [war of all against all] from his world. This peace pact brings with it something that looks like the first step toward the attainment of this enigmatic urge for truth. For now that is fixed which henceforth shall be "truth"; that is, a regularly valid and obligatory designation of things is invented, and this linguistic legislation also furnishes the first laws of truth: for it is here that the contrast between truth and lie first originates. The liar uses the valid designations, the words, to make the unreal appear as real; he says, for example, "I am rich," when the word "poor" would be the correct designation of his situation. He abuses the fixed conventions by arbitrary changes or even by reversals of the names. When he does this in a self-serving way damaging to others, then society will no longer trust him but exclude him. Thereby men do not flee from being deceived as much as from being damaged by deception: what they hate at this stage is basically not the deception but the bad, hostile consequences of certain kinds of deceptions. In a similarly limited way man wants the truth: he desires the agreeable life-preserving consequences of truth, but he is indifferent to pure knowledge, which has no consequences; he is even hostile to possibly damaging and destructive truths. And, moreover, what about these conventions of language? Are they really the products of knowledge, of the sense of truth? Do the designations and the things coincide? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?
Only through forgetfulness can man ever achieve the illusion of possessing a "truth" in the sense just designated. If he does not wish to be satisfied with truth in the form of a tautology—that is, with empty shells—then he will forever buy illusions for truths. What is a word? The image of a nerve stimulus in sounds. But to infer from the nerve stimulus, a cause outside us, that is already the result of a false and unjustified application of the principle of reason. If truth alone had been the deciding factor in the genesis of language, and if the standpoint of certainty had been decisive for designations, then how could we still dare to say "the stone is hard," as if "hard" were something otherwise familiar to us, and not merely a totally subjective stimulation! We separate things according to gender, designating the tree as masculine and the plant as feminine. What arbitrary assignments! How far this oversteps the canons of certainty! We speak of a "snake": this designation touches only upon its ability to twist itself and could therefore also fit a worm. What arbitrary differentiations! What one-sided preferences, first for this, then for that property of a thing! The different languages, set side by side, show that what matters with words is never the truth, never an adequate expression; else there would not be so many languages. The "thing in itself" (for that is what pure truth, without consequences, would be) is quite incomprehensible to the creators of language and not at all worth aiming for. One designates only the relations of things to man, and to express them one calls on the boldest metaphors. A nerve stimulus, first transposed into an image—first metaphor. The image, in turn, imitated by a sound—second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one. One can imagine a man who is totally deaf and has never had a sensation of sound and music. Perhaps such a person will gaze with astonishment at Chladni's sound figures; perhaps he will discover their causes in the vibrations of the string and will now swear that he must know what men mean by "sound." It is this way with all of us concerning language; we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things—metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities. In the same way that the sound appears as a sand figure, so the mysterious X of the thing in itself first appears as a nerve stimulus, then as an image, and finally as a sound. Thus the genesis of language does not proceed logically in any case, and all the material within and with which the man of truth, the scientist, and the philosopher later work and build, if not derived from never-never land, is a least not derived from the essence of things.
Let us still give special consideration to the formation of concepts. Every word immediately becomes a concept, inasmuch as it is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized original experience to which it owes its birth, but must at the same time fit innumerable, more or less similar cases—which means, strictly speaking, never equal—in other words, a lot of unequal cases. Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal. No leaf ever wholly equals another, and the concept "leaf" is formed through an arbitrary abstraction from these individual differences, through forgetting the distinctions; and now it gives rise to the idea that in nature there might be something besides the leaves which would be "leaf"—some kind of original form after which all leaves have been woven, marked, copied, colored, curled, and painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no copy turned out to be a correct, reliable, and faithful image of the original form. We call a person "honest." Why did he act so honestly today? we ask. Our answer usually sounds like this: because of his honesty. Honesty! That is to say again: the leaf is the cause of the leaves. After all, we know nothing of an essence-like quality named "honesty"; we know only numerous individualized, and thus unequal actions, which we equate by omitting the unequal and by then calling them honest actions. In the end, we distill from them a [b]qualitas occulta[/b] [hidden quality] with the name of "honesty." We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us. For even our contrast between individual and species is something anthropomorphic and does not originate in the essence of things; although we should not presume to claim that this contrast does not correspond o the essence of things: that would of course be a dogmatic assertion and, as such, would be just as indemonstrable as its opposite.
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors—in moral terms: the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries' old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth. From the sense that one is obliged to designate one thing as red, another as cold, and a third as mute, there arises a moral impulse in regard to truth. The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and everyone excludes. As a rational being, he now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions. First he universalizes all these impressions into less colorful, cooler concepts, so that he can entrust the guidance of his life and conduct to them. Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries—a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world. Whereas each perceptual metaphor is individual and without equals and is therefore able to elude all classification, the great edifice of concepts displays the rigid regularity of a Roman columbarium and exhales in logic that strength and coolness which is characteristic of mathematics. Anyone who has felt this cool breath [of logic] will hardly believe that even the concept—which is as bony, foursquare, and transposable as a die—is nevertheless merely the residue of a metaphor, and that the illusion which is involved in the artistic transference of a nerve stimulus into images is, if not the mother, then the grandmother of every single concept. But in this conceptual crap game "truth" means using every die in the designated manner, counting its spots accurately, fashioning the right categories, and never violating the order of caste and class rank. Just as the Romans and Etruscans cut up the heavens with rigid mathematical lines and confined a god within each of the spaces thereby delimited, as within a [b]templum[/b], so every people has a similarly mathematically divided conceptual heaven above themselves and henceforth thinks that truth demands that each conceptual god be sought only within his own sphere. Here one may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders' webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind. As a genius of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself. In this he is greatly to be admired, but not on account of his drive for truth or for pure knowledge of things. When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding "truth" within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare "look, a mammal" I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. That is to say, it is a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be "true in itself" or really and universally valid apart from man. At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man. He strives to understand the world as something analogous to man, and at best he achieves by his struggles the feeling of assimilation. Similar to the way in which astrologers considered the stars to be in man 's service and connected with his happiness and sorrow, such an investigator considers the entire universe in connection with man: the entire universe as the infinitely fractured echo of one original sound-man; the entire universe as the infinitely multiplied copy of one original picture-man. His method is to treat man as the measure of all things, but in doing so he again proceeds from the error of believing that he has these things [which he intends to measure] immediately before him as mere objects. He forgets that the original perceptual metaphors are metaphors and takes them to be the things themselves.
Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency. If but for an instant he could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his "self consciousness" would be immediately destroyed. It is even a difficult thing for him to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man does, and that the question of which of these perceptions of the world is the more correct one is quite meaningless, for this would have to have been decided previously in accordance with the criterion of the [i]correct perception[/i], which means, in accordance with a criterion which is [i]not available[/i]. But in any case it seems to me that the correct perception—which would mean the adequate expression of an object in the subject—is a contradictory impossibility. For between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an [i]aesthetic[/i] relation: I mean, a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue—for which I there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force. "Appearance" is a word that contains many temptations, which is why I avoid it as much as possible. For it is not true that the essence of things "appears" in the empirical world. A painter without hands who wished to express in song the picture before his mind would, by means of this substitution of spheres, still reveal more about the essence of things than does the empirical world. Even the relationship of a nerve stimulus to the generated image is not a necessary one. But when the same image has been generated millions of times and has been handed down for many generations and finally appears on the same occasion every time for all mankind, then it acquires at last the same meaning for men it would have if it were the sole necessary image and if the relationship of the original nerve stimulus to the generated image were a strictly causal one. In the same manner, an eternally repeated dream would certainly be felt and judged to be reality. But the hardening and congealing of a metaphor guarantees absolutely nothing concerning its necessity and exclusive justification.
Every person who is familiar with such considerations has no doubt felt a deep mistrust of all idealism of this sort: just as often as he has quite early convinced himself of the eternal consistency, omnipresence, and fallibility of the laws of nature. He has concluded that so far as we can penetrate here—from the telescopic heights to the microscopic depths—everything is secure, complete, infinite, regular, and without any gaps. Science will be able to dig successfully in this shaft forever, and the things that are discovered will harmonize with and not contradict each other. How little does this resemble a product of the imagination, for if it were such, there should be some place where the illusion and reality can be divined. Against this, the following must be said: if each us had a different kind of sense perception—if we could only perceive things now as a bird, now as a worm, now as a plant, or if one of us saw a stimulus as red, another as blue, while a third even heard the same stimulus as a sound—then no one would speak of such a regularity of nature, rather, nature would be grasped only as a creation which is subjective in the highest degree. After all, what is a law of nature as such for us? We are not acquainted with it in itself, but only with its effects, which means in its relation to other laws of nature—which, in turn, are known to us only as sums of relations. Therefore all these relations always refer again to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in their essence. All that we actually know about these laws of nature is what we ourselves bring to them—time and space, and therefore relationships of succession and number. But everything marvelous about the laws of nature, everything that quite astonishes us therein and seems to demand explanation, everything that might lead us to distrust idealism: all this is completely and solely contained within the mathematical strictness and inviolability of our representations of time and space. But we produce these representations in and from ourselves with the same necessity with which the spider spins. If we are forced to comprehend all things only under these forms, then it ceases to be amazing that in all things we actually comprehend nothing but these forms. For they must all bear within themselves the laws of number, and it is precisely number which is most astonishing in things. All that conformity to law, which impresses us so much in the movement of the stars and in chemical processes, coincides at bottom with those properties which we bring to things. Thus it is we who impress ourselves in this way. In conjunction with this, it of course follows that the artistic process of metaphor formation with which every sensation begins in us already presupposes these forms and thus occurs within them. The only way in which the possibility of subsequently constructing a new conceptual edifice from metaphors themselves can be explained is by the firm persistence of these original forms That is to say, this conceptual edifice is an imitation of temporal, spatial, and numerical relationships in the domain of metaphor.
2
We have seen how it is originally [i]language [/i]which works on the construction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by [i]science[/i]. Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions. It is always building new, higher stories and shoring up, cleaning, and renovating the old cells; above all, it takes pains to fill up this monstrously towering framework and to arrange therein the entire empirical world, which is to say, the anthropomorphic world. Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts so that he will not be swept away and lost, the scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the tower of science so that he will be able to work on it and to find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist. And he requires shelter, for there are frightful powers which continuously break in upon him, powers which oppose scientific truth with completely different kinds of "truths" which bear on their shields the most varied sorts of emblems.
The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself. This drive is not truly vanquished and scarcely subdued by the fact that a regular and rigid new world is constructed as its prison from its own ephemeral products, the concepts. It seeks a new realm and another channel for its activity, and it finds this in myth and in art generally. This drive continually confuses the conceptual categories and cells by bringing forward new transferences, metaphors, and metonymies. It continually manifests an ardent desire to refashion the world which presents itself to waking man, so that it will be as colorful, irregular, lacking in results and coherence, charming, and eternally new as the world of dreams. Indeed, it is only by means of the rigid and regular web of concepts that the waking man clearly sees that he is awake; and it is precisely because of this that he sometimes thinks that he must be dreaming when this web of concepts is torn by art. Pascal is right in maintaining that if the same dream came to us every night we would be just as occupied with it as we are with the things that we see every day. "If a workman were sure to dream for twelve straight hours every night that he was king," said Pascal, "I believe that he would be just as happy as a king who dreamt for twelve hours every night that he was a workman." In fact, because of the way that myth takes it for granted that miracles are always happening, the waking life of a mythically inspired people—the ancient Greeks, for instance—more closely resembles a dream than it does the waking world of a scientifically disenchanted thinker. When every tree can suddenly speak as a nymph, when a god in the shape of a bull can drag away maidens, when even the goddess Athena herself is suddenly seen in the company of Peisastratus driving through the market place of Athens with a beautiful team of horses—and this is what the honest Athenian believed—then, as in a dream, anything is possible at each moment, and all of nature swarms around man as if it were nothing but a masquerade of the gods, who were merely amusing themselves by deceiving men in all these shapes.
But man has an invincible inclination to allow himself to be deceived and is, as it were, enchanted with happiness when the rhapsodist tells him epic fables as if they were true, or when the actor in the theater acts more royally than any real king. So long as it is able to deceive without injuring, that master of deception, the intellect, is free; it is released from its former slavery and celebrates its Saturnalia. It is never more luxuriant, richer, prouder, more clever and more daring. With creative pleasure it throws metaphors into confusion and displaces the boundary stones of abstractions, so that, for example, it designates the stream as "the moving path which carries man where he would otherwise walk." The intellect has now thrown the token of bondage from itself. At other times it endeavors, with gloomy officiousness, to show the way and to demonstrate the tools to a poor individual who covets existence; it is like a servant who goes in search of booty and prey for his master. But now it has become the master and it dares to wipe from its face the expression of indigence. In comparison with its previous conduct, everything that it now does bears the mark of dissimulation, just as that previous conduct did of distortion. The free intellect copies human life, but it considers this life to be something good and seems to be quite satisfied with it. That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard-of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.
There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic. They both desire to rule over life: the former, by knowing how to meet his principle needs by means of foresight, prudence, and regularity; the latter, by disregarding these needs and, as an "overjoyed hero," counting as real only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty. Whenever, as was perhaps the case in ancient Greece, the intuitive man handles his weapons more authoritatively and victoriously than his opponent, then, under favorable circumstances, a culture can take shape and art's mastery over life can be established. All the manifestations of such a life will be accompanied by this dissimulation, this disavowal of indigence, this glitter of metaphorical intuitions, and, in general, this immediacy of deception: neither the house, nor the gait, nor the clothes, nor the clay jugs give evidence of having been invented because of a pressing need. It seems as if they were all intended to express an exalted happiness, an Olympian cloudlessness, and, as it were, a playing with seriousness. The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption—in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch. He is then just as irrational in sorrow as he is in happiness: he cries aloud and will not be consoled. How differently the stoical man who learns from experience and governs himself by concepts is affected by the same misfortunes! This man, who at other times seeks nothing but sincerity, truth, freedom from deception, and protection against ensnaring surprise attacks, now executes a masterpiece of deception: he executes his masterpiece of deception in misfortune, as the other type of man executes his in times of happiness. He wears no quivering and changeable human face, but, as it were, a mask with dignified, symmetrical features. He does not cry; he does not even alter his voice. When a real storm cloud thunders above him, he wraps himself in his cloak, and with slow steps he walks from beneath it.
I was still considering it when you started posting here. In the meantime, I had a thought…
Apart from a couple of exceptions that prove the rule, I didn’t post here after “leaving” until my State of the World Address (a title for which I hereby officially give all credit to the band Biohazard, by the way). And aptly, that OP constitutes my first typical contribution to this thread: for that video on Nietzsche’s Highest Man was kind of sprang on me by FC. My unconventionally capitalized posts are surely comparable to the videos of the others in psychological nakedness.–
As for your question about my video, I already pointed to that issue in my comments to this blog post, where I referred the reader to sections 304, 306, 308, and 980 of The Will to Power:
http://nietzschespirit.blogspot.nl/2008/07/ubermensch-and-last-man.html
Interestingly, I mention the concept of a clan in one of those comments.
I think I currently justify FC’s trust in me, not just by picking up my English translation of my tutorial in Platonic political philosophy, but also by studying Nietzsche’s Dawn with another amateur Nietzsche scholar: that book is especially elaborate on the insight that the “good” are “‘the farmers of the spirit’ who work the old fields in the old ways” (Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, page 74).
the Cross says that indeed this movement that haw now gotten Trump elected is of Overmanly quality. It is relatively extremely manly, as it has been able to compensate for the Last Man, the in vertebrate that wishes the hollow voiced woman with the dead eyes as leader because she is a woman and not a man and so also not white.
The Last Man thinks anything that is not white male is good, simply because the white male is the dominant form. The Cross has been attacked for not being ashamed of his skin color by those white males inclined to hate their whiteness and their maleness because of reasons fathomable only to the Last Man.
The Identity of Experience
by Fixed Cross
The science of being as a study in subjectivism, which has taken on fully logical form with value ontology, is approached on a higher level of organization, of more detail, of more possibility for contradiction, in the terms devised by the psychoanalytical schools. I believe all psychoanalysis revolves around the mutual requirement of the terms identity and experience.
As humans, most of our time we spend in avoiding experiences. In our seeking-out of what we aim to experience, we are shifting and sneaking along the invisible walls facing us from every direction but the one we seek to disclose - the walled off area of “the real” is however constantly accessible, these walls can be broken down with the force of intent. The lack of this intent is precisely what makes us effective as prolonged identities, which leads finally in complex beings to what we can begin to call experience.
The identity of experience is experience accepted into the being as its being. The same mechanisms that cause experience, also perform a lot of activity going on that is not ‘owned’ by the organism. Freud goes into this as a repressed - suggesting that the identity of this experience is already ‘the name of the subject’, but actively kept away from its consciousness. I would propose that we address this differently - as ‘untranslated affect’, affect not yet interpreted in terms of the particular self-valuing.
Psychoanalysis is not the art of retrieving experiences to consciousness, but to identify physical affect as experience. This is always done after the fact, also when there is no ‘repression’, or what I would call simply an insufficient power to identify in terms of self - the delicate dove-like beauty of the self to itself facing very dangerous and compromising affect, “raw” affect, which can not be specified, categorized in ‘true terms’ as Spinoza has it - pleasure or joy (laetitia), pain or sorrow (tristitia)and desire (cupiditas) or appetite. *
A manipulation is needed to incorporate the experience, to give it an identity, to add this experience to the identity of the being, to value it on terms of the beings valuing. Psychoanalysis is such a manipulation. Another one, much faster and therefore more dangerous and potentially destructive is Occult “pathworking”. This is the business of setting up the conditions for translating raw affect into imagined sensory experience, by entering a state of lucid dreaming armed with the intention to disclose whatever formlessness is pressing on the walls of the being into apparitions, beings the being itself is able to face as itself - and proceeding to enter the dungeon of the unidentified with the clear aim of translating all that is into experience. And there are other manipulations.
In general, I would categorize all such manipulations as the Dionysian arts, to which possibility a systematic suspension of judgment is required, and the being comes into contact with its own boundaries - its walled-in-ness becomes its walled-ness, in other words, instead of the cells core, its membrane is the identity of experience. Such experience is not merely mortal but mortality itself.
[size=95]* wikipedia: Affect (Latin affectus or adfectus) is a concept used in the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and elaborated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. For Spinoza, as discussed in Parts Two and Three of his Ethics, affects are states of mind and body related to (but not exactly synonymous with) feelings and emotions, of which he says there are three primary kinds: Subsequent philosophical usage by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and their translator Brian Massumi, while derived explicitly from Spinoza, tends to distinguish more sharply than Spinoza does between affect and what are conventionally called emotions. Affects are difficult to grasp and conceptualize because, as Spinoza says, “an affect or passion of the mind [animi pathema] is a confused idea” which is only perceived by the increase or decrease it causes in the body’s vital force.[/size]
“When an inner process can not be integrated it is often projected outward. The notion of a materialized psychism opens a bottomless void beneath our feet.”
Capable speaks here of unidentified affect, belonging to none of the three Spinozaean categories.
It appears logical that that raw affect, inner force which can not be identified in terms of the self-valuing, is projected (as a projectile) towards the Other - that which is explicitly unidentified – or quasi-identified as the Other - that which has no right to exist.
Rights are an extension of identification.
It is a reality that people(s) are simple not able to bestow rights on those with whom they can not identify. Human rights is an invention of genius, a great artifice, worthy of my respect, although I respect that they can be logically refuted. The principle offers an identification based on a purely aesthetic identification – the form of the human body, not its interior identity, i.e. the language it speaks/thinks, its ethics, its frame of action, its type.
A great assumption is made – that all those organisms which can be identified as of the same “species” - a term, not a reality of experience/identification, communication – are in fact “the same”. In reality however, man A is more alike to dog A than man A to man B, and this expresses itself in identification. What is shared in identity is experience. Such has historically been the foundation of culture - a shared frame of experience equals a shared identity predicates lawmaking, which is consensus and trust.
Back at psychoanalysis - retroactively one learns to trust the affect that is ‘repressed’… - to speak with the trauma in a common tongue, so that one can effectively agree that it exists. Agreement, this is what is created when a true Word appears. And this appearance is a physical act, a speaking.
Here has been a flaw in philosophy hitherto – being must be interpreted as given. But what, in such a case, does “given” mean? Certainly not the predicate of something else, which gives. At best, it gives itself. But to what? To what but to itself?
Does this make sense? Not much - what is more sensible is to say that I give it, as itself, to itself, which is what I amount to.
Arrangement of potentiality –
life is largely strategy, being is observingness, intelligence, rising to the occasion, seizing opportunity - it is not an objective fact - it is the bold activity of which only the very few are capable of embodying entirely. These are the agents of evolution - in every species these arise.
This principle is learned by Shamans. Death-rebirth, the consciousness of flux-depth-power, vortexes of identity around which a society gravitates. Shamans are the “black holes” of the galaxies in which men live - meaning “centers too intense to perceive”*. We circle around what we can not stare in the eye. The terrible in strength is what gives life its structure. (This is why America exists as it does, and why the power of the state must remain a terrifying and disruptive factor until all human life has organized itself around the core of the death-rebirth machinery, the magical power of the invisible center/)
A Heideggerian giving, as opposed to serving a Platonic “given-ness”. Our things flow from us, we are centers of their revolving-existing - existing is revolving, losing meaning is collapsing into the source is disintegrating. A thing becomes junk, attribute to nothingness, when it loses its capacity to revolve by the “gravity” of value to the core.
Interesting, yes I like this - we are given as soon as we are taken - and there is no one to take us but ourself. We can be taken by others but this means disintegration when it is not serving our own taking-our-givenness. Consuming being. This adds a ‘hedonistic’ aspect to the ethics that may follow from value ontology. That would help to make it accessible as therapy. Modern therapy is in part hedonistic, indulging. We consume our psyche.
And so also a being-there-to-take.
This is how “good karma” can be seen - if one has a tendency to give, to ‘create the world’ if one “bestows”, the world attains a nature of being-to-take. That means that one is a master of ones fate. If one takes what happens to be given one steals it, and it transforms. This is why pure political initiatives get corrupted by followers, why politics only work to constructive aims where there are conspiracies, and never when there is dictatorship of the vote.
Can we identify this in corporeal terms? A universe of symbolism mapping given-ness, the world as a web of threats originating in subjects - a fabric of histories, with crossings of perspectives as wars and cultures – this “monster of energy” - yes, the dragon thou shalt is made of a great number of potential “I wills” and at root made possible by “I am”.
The transformation of the spirit of Zarathustrian man is a collapsing inward of the self-valuing. Courage is needed to move beyond the skin of the dragon and to embody its will. To become part of the dragons inner world means to dissolve the dragon in ones own world. To become invisible in ones workings, to become “deep” - to command, to become an enigma.
A not-yet-givenness, a potential, a void even - void as space.
In any form a givenness may arise around a void, like a castle is built around a room.
the “hearth” at the center of this room is that which has been called by the most loving and admiring names, which I will not utter, as they are not my words - - but this hearth is the completion of the given-ness of the room, the crown on the work of which the wall-building was the physical part and the room-conceiving the ‘philosophical’ part, the thinking-building serving ‘dwelling’, the being itself.
Men gather around fires. Words can also be fires, around which walls are built to contain the words in spaces where men dwell. Men will no be guided where no fires are made. Good philosophy is a torch. It creates the will-to-dwell, which is the will to think and build. Religion is a damp torch emitting only smoke, and the will to sleep. Myth has been a healthy torch in many cultures but we have moved beyond the possibility of myth - myth points to the past, (our) philosophy points to the future. For the rest they are in a sense the same; they make of man a given-to-take. They make man possible to himself, as man, as Dasein.
Intention. We can only recognize the ‘eternal parent’ of this givenness as something real, present in us. On this level we have to abandon the abstract and create ‘occult experience’ - knowledge beyond language, ‘it-ness’. We can approach this asymptotically, and become wiser and more powerful along this line and feel more justification, more certainty than one would ever imagine passible when certainty is understood as logical truth, instead of knowing by being.
“God” is the measure in which this certainty is recorded by ‘prophets’. The divinity can always grow, become greater, stand farther from the populace. It is never ‘already there’. It is the measure in which consciousness attains to its root, and this measure depends on the quality of the consciousness aside from its inward attaining as well as on the penetratingness of its inner gaze. So sacredness exists in two axes - worldly quality and the drive pertaining/attaining to what Nietzsche called the ascetic ideal. We can not formulate a definition, we can only point to the means to attain a greater depth of knowing/being. For this is the purpose, the telos - to enable, increase, potentiate -
Whatever we identify as given, is separate from our identifying it. Only when the identifying becomes inseparable from the given-ness do we attain clarity. An overwhelming beauty is the result.
We can use it as a grid. This is the greatest problem here - what we have unearthed so far is still invisible to those who do not think as deeply, and will remain so wherever we do not fill it in with ‘flesh’ - which means, world-implication. The ‘key’ to this task I see now is that there is a great fulfillment in coupling concepts to their value-root, to their primordial emerging. It is not a ‘dry’ subject, but a feast of iconoclasm and archaic mythmaking, and when we see how the archaic myths are populated, by what sort of creatures, we can see the value that philosophizing will have to man when he truly sets to shape his world, when fires are ignited around which new thinking-dwelling emerges. We have built the walls, we need to ignite the fire. In this we do not stand separate, absent, but give ‘acte de présence’ as Lord - this is the only way in which culture grows: by example.
To give act-of-presence means to stand within given-ness as its signifier. It means to give the world to man anew. This can happen on every scale - for the philosopher it is different from a football-player, but the principle is the same. Philosophy is not simply labor, it is also identity. And to make identity felt one requires character, and let this be the very thing that the traditional conception of truth does not allow. All philosophers, in their proclamations about what is universal, have been poseurs, without knowing it they made statues of themselves, testaments to existence. But what type of existence did they testify to? It was, most of the time, rather hollow. No wonder that most of these philosophers were recluses and fools, that no exemplary philosopher has lived since the idea of Truth is Out There came to rule, by hands of Plato, the last thinker who was also a ruler.
*or: realities too significant to be identified.
This is a fitting context for the following excerpt from Nietzsche’s notebooks, or “The Will To Power”.
Brilliant!
Regarding “philosophy as the highest form of suspension of judgment” - we might say that the philosopher is the one who has turned out best.
Indeed, to acquire effectiveness in the natural world from a self-created historical perspective/agency is precisely the task with which our type of philosopher is faced. After Plato, philosophers have accepted that their capacity as historical agents came with the price of being vulnerable natural entities, their influence and very sustenance was dependent on political rulers. But with our type, there has appeared a new scale to climb, something that has not existed since Plato made his stabs at politics. The natural human world has perhaps never been less naturally responsive to philosophy as it is now, politics are entirely separated from philosophy, meaning, teleology - so the philosopher must enforce his historical agency in the natural world. We are still at the very beginning of this undertaking. Thus from a disadvantage an impetus to advance is born: the philosopher must become the philosopher-king.
Regardless of whether or not we are capable of accomplishing/becoming this, that is the point to which the political and technological (natural) world has evolved. This is not to say that all philosophers have to ‘‘get out there’’ and enforce their will on other people, but they do have to organize in groups of which some fulfill this kind of ‘‘military’’ task. In this age of ripe nihilism, where there is no more worldly autority that is not deemed inferior to the mob by the mob, where there is no more ground for teleological reason (such grounds have always been in part superstitious and/or idolatory) this ground must be enforced by the type of human that is aware of the substance of such ground: our type.
It is of the utmost importance that we keep on visibly setting our type of thinking as a standard. Our philosophy must become regal not only in substance but in appearance - it must crown itself.
“Spirit” could, in spite and banishing of the deeply embedded confusion around and by that word, aptly be translated into “self-valuing”. By this I mean that it is breath, the necessity, the pulse of life that makes it ‘a life’ - a continuous self referent and thus radically limited - phenomenon. A spirit - a one who values his breath in reflection of his breath in - and around. And between in and out, there is a reflection, and upon that reflection, a valuing - experience is identified after the breathing in. To breathe out completely is to enable the experience of identity. That choice still must be made there, This choice is probably at the basis of all profound religious airs - *
After the final, exhausted ssssssssh, there is an expanding, a corner of our soul which is then identifiable - and this is where evolution takes place. Only those who find in their breaths limits the limit that is transcendible, grow upon their soil, their blood, to a new ‘word’ - a new moral code, a newly discovered form of courage.
Granted, we are not Gods, we can only reflect this metaphors perfection in a few breaths every month perhaps, some of us might attain it once or twice a week - but we can imagine how this, if we are more aware of those breaths in fellow men, hissing us by in the dark, faint shadows of suspected purpose - allows us to reflect, if ‘fortune Strikes!’, incidentally upon them, and cause - what?
Love is a danger to the soul, why to encounter it deliberately? As with all dangers to encounter it in will of it is to conquer a priori all who do not take this course. Napoleons first breath of Corsican air - his identity superimposed on that experience by time, parents, France - and powerful enemies on the warpath…
[[[[ *the Catholic, fully bathing in the identity, versus the protestant, ‘up to the next cycle, the next harvest, the next profit!’ Capitalism is made out of a lack of Catholicism…]]]]
The value of this observation I draw as follows:
The particular follow-through of the entity after its identification of its world by drawing in experience, determines not the extent to which he will follow through that particular experience. His identity is reflected wholly of his ethics, his working, warring or simply waking - or on the other hand a wanting, worrying, wrecking ‘code’ - continuity of action, value-projection by anticipation. Here is the technical definition of ‘the power of faith’ - the gift of being allowed to project an infinity of value, by the declaring of love for an infinite bestowing virtue.
The problem of religiously inclined people is not that God is dead (he always was ‘unchanging’), but no longer great enough. He’s not greatly dead, his deadness is puny.
We could change that only by creating a new one. And by God I simply mean the absence of self-inflicted restrictions, physiological moral conditioning, in trade for ones “soul” - ones highest and final love.
What a breath of fresh air if we stopped loving ‘humanity’ and selected a nature more lofty and less neurotic. Perhaps what we have called “soul” throughout the ages is in reality the same thing as “music” or “a great aesthetic idea” - The things for which certain humans live, for which these humans form a medium - perhaps what we call identity is merely our temporary and imperfect relation to something less conditioned by decay - the soul as something that has to find its way into the world through the vessel of flesh and blood.