The Philosophers

Fixed ordered me to archive the Aristophanes play here in honor of a reference made to the play by a poster here in praising him.

The Clouds

By Aristophanes

Written 419 B.C.E

Dramatis Personae

STREPSIADES
PHIDIPPIDES
SERVANT OF STREPSIADES
DISCIPLES OF SOCRATES
SOCRATES
JUST DISCOURSE
UNJUST DISCOURSE
PASIAS, a Money-lender
AMYNIAS, another Money-lender
CHORUS OF CLOUDS

Scene

In the background are two houses, that of Strepsiades and that of Socrates, the Thoughtery. The latter is small and dingy; the in, terior of the former is shown and two beds are seen, each occupied.

STREPSIADES sitting up

Great gods! will these nights never end? will daylight never come? I heard the cock crow long ago and my slaves are snoring still! Ah! Ah! It wasn't like this formerly. Curses on the war! has it not done me ills enough? Now I may not even chastise my own slaves. Again there's this brave lad, who never wakes the whole long night, but, wrapped in his five coverlets, farts away to his heart's content. 

He lies down

Come! let me nestle in well and snore too, if it be possible....oh! misery, it's vain to think of sleep with all these expenses, this stable, these debts, which are devouring me, thanks to this fine cavalier, who only knows how to look after his long locks, to show himself off in his chariot and to dream of horses! And I, I am nearly dead, when I see the moon bringing the third decade in her train and my liability falling due....Slave! light the lamp and bring me my tablets. 

The slave obeys.

Who are all my creditors? Let me see and reckon up the interest. What is it I owe?....Twelve minae to Pasias....What! twelve minae to Pasias?....Why did I borrow these? Ah! I know! It was to buy that thoroughbred, which cost me so much. How I should have prized the stone that had blinded him! 

PHIDIPPIDES in his sleep

That's not fair, Philo! Drive your chariot straight, I say. 

STREPSIADES

This is what is destroying me. He raves about horses, even in his sleep. 

PHIDIPPIDES still sleeping

How many times round the track is the race for the chariots of war? 

STREPSIADES

It's your own father you are driving to death....to ruin. Come! what debt comes next, after that of Pasias?....Three minae to Amynias for a chariot and its two wheels. 

PHIDIPPIDES still asleep

Give the horse a good roll in the dust and lead him home. 

STREPSIADES

Ah! wretched boy! it's my money that you are making roll. My creditors have distrained on my goods, and here are others again, who demand security for their interest. 

PHIDIPPIDES awaking

What is the matter with you, father, that you groan and turn about the whole night through? 

STREPSIADES

I have a bum-bailiff in the bedclothes biting me. 

PHIDIPPIDES

For pity's sake, let me have a little sleep. 

He turns over.

STREPSIADES

Very well, sleep on! but remember that all these debts will fall back on your shoulders. Oh! curses on the go-between who made me marry your mother! I lived so happily in the country, a commonplace, everyday life, but a good and easy one-had not a trouble, not a care, was rich in bees, in sheep and in olives. Then indeed I had to marry the niece of Megacles, the son of Megacles; I belonged to the country, she was from the town; she was a haughty, extravagant woman, a true Coesyra. On the nuptial day, when I lay beside her, I was reeking of the dregs of the wine-cup, of cheese and of wool; she was redolent with essences, saffron, voluptuous kisses, the love of spending, of good cheer and of wanton delights. I will not say she did nothing; no, she worked hard...to ruin me, and pretending all the while merely to be showing her the cloak she had woven for me, I said, "Wife you go too fast about your work, your threads are too closely woven and you use far too much wool." 

A slave enters witk a lamp.

SLAVE

There is no more oil in the lamp. 

STREPSIADES

Why then did you light such a thirsty lamp? Come here, I am going to beat you. 

SLAVE

What for? 

STREPSIADES

Because you have put in too thick a wick....Later, when we had this boy, what was to be his name? It was the cause of much quarrelling with my loving wife. She insisted on having some reference to a horse in his name, that he should be called Xanthippus, Charippus or Callippides. I wanted to name him Phidonides after his grandfather. We disputed long, and finally agreed to style him Phidippides....She used to fondle and coax him, saying, "Oh! what a joy it will be to me when you have grown up, to see you, like my father, Megacles, clothed in purple and standing up straight in your chariot driving your steeds toward the town." And I would say to him, "When, like your father, you will go, dressed in a skin, to fetch back your goats from Phelleus." Alas! he never listened to me and his madness for horses has shattered my fortune. 

He gets out of bed.

But by dint of thinking the livelong night, I have discovered a road to salvation, both miraculous and divine. If he will but follow it, I shall be out of my trouble! First, however, he must be awakened, but it must be done as gently as possible. How shall I manage it? Phidippides! my little Phidippides! 

PHIDIPPIDES awaking again

What is it, father? 

STREPSIADES

Kiss me and give me your hand. 

PHIDIPPIDES getting up and doing as his father requests

There! What's it all about? 

STREPSIADES

Tell me! do you love me? 

PHIDIPPIDES

By Posidon, the equestrian Posidon! yes, I swear I do. 

STREPSIADES

Oh, do not, I pray you, invoke this god of horses; he is the one who is the cause of all my cares. But if you really love me, and with your whole heart, my boy, believe me. 

PHIDIPPIDES

Believe you? about what? 

STREPSIADES

Alter your habits forthwith and go and learn what I tell you. 

PHIDIPPIDES

Say on, what are your orders? 

STREPSIADES

Will you obey me ever so little? 

PHIDIPPIDES

By Bacchus, I will obey you. 

STREPSIADES

Very well then! Look this way. Do you see that little door and that little house? 

PHIDIPPIDES

Yes, father. But what are you driving at? 

STREPSIADES

That is the Thoughtery of wise souls. There they prove that we are coals enclosed on all sides under a vast snuffer, which is the sky. If well paid, these men also teach one how to gain law-suits, whether they be just or not. 

PHIDIPPIDES

What do they call themselves? 

STREPSIADES

I do not know exactly, but they are deep thinkers and most admirable people. 

PHIDIPPIDES

Bah! the wretches! I know them; you mean those quacks with pale faces, those barefoot fellows, such as that miserable Socrates and Chaerephon? 

STREPSIADES

Silence! say nothing foolish! If you desire your father not to die of hunger, join their company and let your horses go. 

PHIDIPPIDES

No, by Bacchus! even though you gave me the pheasants that Leogoras raises. 

STREPSIADES

Oh! my beloved son, I beseech you, go and follow their teachings. 

PHIDIPPIDES

And what is it I should learn? 

STREPSIADES

It seems they have two courses of reasoning, the true and the false, and that, thanks to the false, the worst law-suits can be gained. If then you learn this science, which is false, I shall not have to pay an obolus of all the debts I have contracted on your account. 

PHIDIPPIDES

No, I will not do it. I should no longer dare to look at our gallant horsemen, when I had so ruined my tan. 

STREPSIADES

Well then, by Demeter! I will no longer support you, neither you, nor your team, nor your saddle-horse. Go and hang yourself, I turn you out of house and home. 

PHIDIPPIDES

My uncle Megacles will not leave me without horses; I shall go to him and laugh at your anger. 

He departs. STREPSIADES goes over to SOCRATES’ house.

STREPSIADES

One rebuff shall not dishearten me. With the help of the gods I will enter the Thoughtery and learn myself. 

He hesitates.

But at my age, memory has gone and the mind is slow to grasp things. How can all these fine distinctions, these subtleties be learned? 

Making up his mind

Bah! why should I dally thus instead of rapping at the door? Slave, slave! 

He knocks and calls.

A DISCIPLE from within

A plague on you! Who are you? 

STREPSIADES

Strepsiades, the son of Phido, of the deme of Cicynna. 

DISCIPLE coming out of the door

You are nothing but an ignorant and illiterate fellow to let fly at the door with such kicks. You have brought on a miscarriage-of an idea! 

STREPSIADES

Pardon me, please; for I live far away from here in the country. But tell me, what was the idea that miscarried? 

DISCIPLE

I may not tell it to any but a disciple. 

STREPSIADES

Then tell me without fear, for I have come to study among you. 

DISCIPLE

Very well then, but reflect, that these are mysteries. Lately, a flea bit Chaerephon on the brow and then from there sprang on to the head of Socrates. Socrates asked Chaerephon, "How many times the length of its legs does a flea jump?" 

STREPSIADES

And how ever did he go about measuring it? 

DISCIPLE

Oh! it was most ingenious! He melted some wax, seized the flea and dipped its two feet in the wax, which, when cooled, left them shod with true Persian slippers. These he took off and with them measured the distance. 

STREPSIADES

Ah! great Zeus! what a brain! what subtlety! 

DISCIPLE

I wonder what then would you say, if you knew another of Socrates' contrivances? 

STREPSIADES

What is it? Pray tell me. 

DISCIPLE

Chaerephon of the deme of Sphettia asked him whether he thought a gnat buzzed through its proboscis or through its anus. 

STREPSIADES

And what did he say about the gnat? 

DISCIPLE

He said that the gut of the gnat was narrow, and that, in passing through this tiny passage, the air is driven with force towards the breech; then after this slender channel, it encountered the rump, which was distended like a trumpet, and there it resounded sonorously. 

STREPSIADES

So the arse of a gnat is a trumpet. Oh! what a splendid arsevation! Thrice happy Socrates! It would not be difficult to succeed in a law-suit, knowing so much about a gnat's guts! 

DISCIPLE

Not long ago a lizard caused him the loss of a sublime thought. 

STREPSIADES

In what way, please? 

DISCIPLE

One night, when he was studying the course of the moon and its revolutions and was gazing open-mouthed at the heavens, a lizard crapped upon him from the top of the roof. 

STREPSIADES

A lizard crapping on Socrates! That's rich! 

DISCIPLE

Last night we had nothing to eat. 

STREPSIADES

Well, what did he contrive, to secure you some supper? 

DISCIPLE

He spread over the table a light layer of cinders, bending an iron rod the while; then he took up a pair of compasses and at the same moment unhooked a piece of the victim which was hanging in the palaestra. 

STREPSIADES

And we still dare to admire Thales! Open, open this home of knowledge to me quickly! Haste, haste to show me Socrates; I long to become his disciple. But do please open the door. 

The door opens, revealing the interior of the Thoughtery, in which the DISCIPLES OF SOCRATES are seen in various postures of meditation and study; they are pale and emaciated creatures.

Ah! by Heracles! what country are those animals from? 

DISCIPLE

Why, what are you astonished at? What do you think they resemble? 

STREPSIADES

The captives of Pylos. But why do they look so fixedly on the ground? 

DISCIPLE

They are seeking for what is below the ground. 

STREPSIADES

Ah! they're looking for onions. Do not give yourselves so much trouble; I know where there are some, fine big ones. But what are those fellows doing, bent all double? 

DISCIPLE

They are sounding the abysses of Tartarus. 

STREPSIADES

And what are their arses looking at in the heavens? 

DISCIPLE

They are studying astronomy on their own account. But come in so that the master may not find us here. 

STREPSIADES

Not yet; not yet; let them not change their position. I want to tell them my own little matter. 

DISCIPLE

But they may not stay too long in the open air and away from school. 

STREPSIADES pointing to a celestial globe

In the name of all the gods, what is that? Tell me. 

DISCIPLE

That is astronomy. 

STREPSIADES pointing to a map

And that? 

DISCIPLE

Geometry. 

STREPSIADES

What is that used for? 

DISCIPLE

To measure the land. 

STREPSIADES

But that is apportioned by lot. 

DISCIPLE

No, no, I mean the entire earth. 

STREPSIADES

Ah! what a funny thing! How generally useful indeed is this invention! 

DISCIPLE

There is the whole surface of the earth. Look! Here is Athens. 

STREPSIADES

Athens! you are mistaken; I see no courts in session. 

DISCIPLE

Nevertheless it is really and truly the Attic territory. 

STREPSIADES

And where are my neighbours of Cicynna? 

DISCIPLE

They live here. This is Euboea; you see this island, that is so long and narrow. 

STREPSIADES

I know. Because we and Pericles have stretched it by dint of squeezing it. And where is Lacedaemon? 

DISCIPLE

Lacedaemon? Why, here it is, look. 

STREPSIADES

How near it is to us! Think it well over, it must be removed to a greater distance. 

DISCIPLE

But, by Zeus, that is not possible. 

STREPSIADES

Then, woe to you! and who is this man suspended up in a basket? 

DISCIPLE

That's himself. 

STREPSIADES

Who's himself? 

DISCIPLE

Socrates. 

STREPSIADES

Socrates! Oh! I pray you, call him right loudly for me. 

DISCIPLE

Call him yourself; I have no time to waste. 

He departs. The machine swings in SOCRATES in a basket.

STREPSIADES

Socrates! my little Socrates! 

SOCRATES loftily

Mortal, what do you want with me? 

STREPSIADES

First, what are you doing up there? Tell me, I beseech you. 

SOCRATES POMPOUSLY

I am traversing the air and contemplating the sun. 

STREPSIADES

Thus it's not on the solid ground, but from the height of this basket, that you slight the gods, if indeed.... 

SOCRATES

I have to suspend my brain and mingle the subtle essence of my mind with this air, which is of the like nature, in order clearly to penetrate the things of heaven. I should have discovered nothing, had I remained on the ground to consider from below the things that are above; for the earth by its force attracts the sap of the mind to itself. It's just the same with the watercress. 

STREPSIADES

What? Does the mind attract the sap of the watercress? Ah! my dear little Socrates, come down to me! I have come to ask you for lessons. 

SOCRATES descending

And for what lessons? 

STREPSIADES

I want to learn how to speak. I have borrowed money, and my merciles creditors do not leave me a moment's peace; all my goods are at stake. 

SOCRATES

And how was it you did not see that you were getting so much into debt? 

STREPSIADES

My ruin has been the madness for horses, a most rapacious evil; but teach me one of your two methods of reasoning, the one whose object is not to repay anything, and, may the gods bear witness, that I am ready to pay any fee you may name. 

SOCRATES

By which gods will you swear? To begin with, the gods are not a coin current with us. 

STREPSIADES

But what do you swear by then? By the iron money of Byzantium? 

SOCRATES

Do you really wish to know the truth of celestial matters? 

STREPSIADES

Why, yes, if it's possible. 

SOCRATES

....and to converse with the clouds, who are our genii? 

STREPSIADES

Without a doubt. 

SOCRATES

Then be seated on this sacred couch. 

STREPSIADES sitting down

I am seated. 

SOCRATES

Now take this chaplet. 

STREPSIADES

Why a chaplet? Alas! Socrates, would you sacrifice me, like Athamas? 

SOCRATES

No, these are the rites of initiation. 

STREPSIADES

And what is it I am to gain? 

SOCRATES

You will become a thorough rattle-pate, a hardened old stager, the fine flour of the talkers....But come, keep quiet. 

STREPSIADES

By Zeus! That's no lie! Soon I shall be nothing but wheat-flour, if you powder me in that fashion. 

SOCRATES

Silence, old man, give heed to the prayers. 

In an hierophantic tone

Oh! most mighty king, the boundless air, that keepest the earth suspended in space, thou bright Aether and ye venerable goddesses, the Clouds, who carry in your loins the thunder and the lightning, arise, ye sovereign powers and manifest yourselves in the celestial spheres to the eyes of your sage. 

STREPSIADES

Not yet! Wait a bit, till I fold my mantle double, so as not to get wet. And to think that I did not even bring my travelling cap! What a misfortune! 

SOCRATES ignoring this

Come, oh! Clouds, whom I adore, come and show yourselves to this man, whether you be resting on the sacred summits of Olympus, crowned with hoar-frost, or tarrying in the gardens of Ocean, your father, forming sacred choruses with the Nymphs; whether you be gathering the waves of the Nile in golden vases or dwelling in the Maeotic marsh or on the snowy rocks of Mimas, hearken to my prayer and accept my offering. May these sacrifices be pleasing to you. 

Amidst rumblings of thunder the CHORUS OF CLOUDS appears.

CHORUS singing

Eternal Clouds, let us appear; let us arise from the roaring depths of Ocean, our father; let us fly towards the lofty mountains, spread our damp wings over their forest-laden summits, whence we will dominate the distant valleys, the harvest fed by the sacred earth, the murmur of the divine streams and the resounding waves of the sea, which the unwearying orb lights up with its glittering beams. But let us shake off the rainy fogs, which hide our immortal beauty and sweep the earth from afar with our gaze. 

SOCRATES

Oh, venerated goddesses, yes, you are answering my call! 

To STREPSIADES.

Did you hear their voices mingling with the awful growling of the thunder? 

STREPSIADES

Oh! adorable Clouds, I revere you and I too am going to let off my thunder, so greatly has your own affrighted me. 

He farts.

Faith! whether permitted or not, I must, I must crap! 

SOCRATES

No scoffing; do not copy those damned comic poets. Come, silence! a numerous host of goddesses approaches with songs. 

CHORUS singing

Virgins, who pour forth the rains, let us move toward Attica, the rich country of Pallas, the home of the brave; let us visit the dear land of Cecrops, where the secret rites are celebrated, where the mysterious sanctuary flies open to the initiate.... What victims are offered there to the deities of heaven! What glorious temples! What statues! What holy prayers to the rulers of Olympus! At every season nothing but sacred festivals, garlanded victims, is to be seen. Then Spring brings round again the joyous feasts of Dionysus, the harmonious contests of the choruses and the serious melodies of the flute. 

STREPSIADES

By Zeus! Tell me, Socrates, I pray you, who are these women, whose language is so solemn; can they be demi-goddesses? 

SOCRATES

Not at all. They are the Clouds of heaven, great goddesses for the lazy; to them we owe all, thoughts, speeches, trickery, roguery, boasting, lies, sagacity. 

STREPSIADES

Ah! that was why, as I listened to them, my mind spread out its wings; it burns to babble about trifles, to maintain worthless arguments, to voice its petty reasons, to contradict, to tease some opponent. But are they not going to show themselves? I should like to see them, were it possible. 

SOCRATES

Well, look this way in the direction of Parnes; I already see those who are slowly descending. 

STREPSIADES

But where, where? Show them to me. 

SOCRATES

They are advancing in a throng, following an oblique path across the dales and thickets. 

STREPSIADES

Strange! I can see nothing. 

SOCRATES

There, close to the entrance. 

STREPSIADES

Hardly, if at all, can I distinguish them. 

SOCRATES

You must see them clearly now, unless your eyes are filled with gum as thick as pumpkins. 

STREPSIADES

Aye, undoubtedly! Oh! the venerable goddesses! Why, they fill up the entire stage. 

SOCRATES

And you did not know, you never suspected, that they were goddesses? 

STREPSIADES

No, indeed; I thought the Clouds were only fog, dew and vapour. 

SOCRATES

But what you certainly do not know is that they are the support of a crowd of quacks, the diviners, who were sent to Thurium, the notorious physicians, the well-combed fops, who load their fingers with rings down to the nails, and the braggarts, who write dithyrambic verses, all these are idlers whom the Clouds provide a living for, because they sing them in their verses. 

STREPSIADES

It is then for this that they praise "the rapid flight of the moist clouds, which veil the brightness of day" and "the waving locks of the hundred-headed Typho" and "the impetuous tempests, which float through the heavens, like birds of prey with aerial wings loaded with mists" and "the rains, the dew, which the clouds outpour." As a reward for these fine phrases they bolt well-grown, tasty mullet and delicate thrushes. 

SOCRATES

Yes, thanks to these. And is it not right and meet? 

STREPSIADES

Tell me then why, if these really are the Clouds, they so very much resemble mortals. This is not their usual form. 

SOCRATES

What are they like then? 

STREPSIADES

I don't know exactly; well, they are like great packs of wool, but not like women-no, not in the least....And these have noses. 

SOCRATES

Answer my questions. 

STREPSIADES

Willingly! Go on, I am listening. 

SOCRATES

Have you not sometimes seen clouds in the sky like a centaur, a leopard, a wolf or a bull? 

STREPSIADES

Why, certainly I have, but what of that? 

SOCRATES

They take what metamorphosis they like. If they see a debauchee with long flowing locks and hairy as a beast, like the son of Xenophantes, they take the form of a Centaur in derision of his shameful passion. 

STREPSIADES

And when they see Simon, that thiever of public money, what do they do then? 

SOCRATES

To picture him to the life, they turn at once into wolves. 

STREPSIADES

So that was why yesterday, when they saw Cleonymus, who cast away his buckler because he is the veriest poltroon amongst men, they changed into deer. 

SOCRATES

And to-day they have seen Clisthenes; you see....they are women 

STREPSIADES

Hail, sovereign goddesses, and if ever you have let your celestial voice be heard by mortal ears, speak to me, oh! speak to me, ye all-powerful queens. 

CHORUS-LEADER

Hail! veteran of the ancient times, you who burn to instruct yourself in fine language. And you, great high-priest of subtle nonsense, tell us; your desire. To you and Prodicus alone of all the hollow orationers of to-day have we lent an ear-to Prodicus, because of his knowledge and his great wisdom, and to you, because you walk with head erect, a confident look, barefooted, resigned to everything and proud of our protection. 

STREPSIADES

Oh! Earth! What august utterances! how sacred! how wondrous! 

SOCRATES

That is because these are the only goddesses; all the rest are pure myth. 

STREPSIADES

But by the Earth! is our father, Zeus, the Olympian, not a god? 

SOCRATES

Zeus! what Zeus! Are you mad? There is no Zeus. 

STREPSIADES

What are you saying now? Who causes the rain to fall? Answer me that! 

SOCRATES

Why, these, and I will prove it. Have you ever seen it raining without clouds? Let Zeus then cause rain with a clear sky and without their presence! 

STREPSIADES

By Apollo! that is powerfully argued! For my own part, I always thought it was Zeus pissing into a sieve. But tell me, who is it makes the thunder, which I so much dread? 

SOCRATES

These, when they roll one over the other. 

STREPSIADES

But how can that be? you most daring among men! 

SOCRATES

Being full of water, and forced to move along, they are of necessity precipitated in rain, being fully distended with moisture from the regions where they have been floating; hence they bump each other heavily and burst with great noise. 

STREPSIADES

But is it not Zeus who forces them to move? 

SOCRATES

Not at all; it's the aerial Whirlwind. 

STREPSIADES

The Whirlwind! ah! I did not know that. So Zeus, it seems, has no existence, and its the Whirlwind that reigns in his stead? But you have not yet told me what makes the roll of the thunder? 

SOCRATES

Have you not understood me then? I tell you, that the Clouds, when full of rain, bump against one another, and that, being inordinately swollen out, they burst with a great noise. 

STREPSIADES

How can you make me credit that? 

SOCRATES

Take yourself as an example. When you have heartily gorged on stew at the Panathenaea, you get throes of stomach-ache and then suddenly your belly resounds with prolonged rumbling. 

STREPSIADES

Yes, yes, by Apollo I suffer, I get colic, then the stew sets to rumbling like thunder and finally bursts forth with a terrific noise. At first, it's but a little gurgling pappax, pappax! then it increases, papapappax! and when I take my crap, why, it's thunder indeed, papapappax! pappax!! papapappax!!! just like the clouds. 

SOCRATES

Well then, reflect what a noise is produced by your belly, which is but small. Shall not the air, which is boundless, produce these mighty claps of thunder? 

STREPSIADES

And this is why the names are so much alike: crap and clap. But tell me this. Whence comes the lightning, the dazzling flame, which at times consumes the man it strikes, at others hardly singes him. Is it not plain, that Zeus is hurling it at the perjurers? 

SOCRATES

Out upon the fool! the driveller! he still savours of the golden age! If Zeus strikes at the perjurers, why has he not blasted Simon, Cleonymus and Theorus? Of a surety, greater perjurers cannot exist. No, he strikes his own temple, and Sunium, the promontory of Athens, and the towering oaks. Now, why should he do that? An oak is no perjurer. 

STREPSIADES

I cannot tell, but it seems to me well argued. What is the lightning then? 

SOCRATES

When a dry wind ascends to the Clouds and gets shut into them, it blows them out like a bladder; finally, being too confined, it bursts them, escapes with fierce violence and a roar to flash into flame by reason of its own impetuosity. 

STREPSIADES

Ah, that's just what happened to me one day. It was at the feast of Zeus! I was cooking a sow's belly for my family and I had forgotten to slit it open. It swelled out and, suddenly bursting, discharged itself right into my eyes and burnt my face. 

LEADER OF THE CHORUS

Oh, mortal, you who desire to instruct yourself in our great wisdom, the Athenians, the Greeks will envy you your good fortune. Only you must have the memory and ardour for study, you must know how to stand the tests, hold your own, go forward without feeling fatigue, caring but little for food, abstaining from wine, gymnastic exercises and other similar follies, in fact, you must believe as every man of intellect should, that the greatest of all blessings is to live and think more clearly than the vulgar herd, to shine in the contests of words. 

STREPSIADES

If it be a question of hardiness for labour, of spending whole nights at work, of living sparingly, of fighting my stomach and only eating chickpease, rest assured, I am as hard as an anvil. 

SOCRATES

Henceforward, following our example, you will recognize no other gods but Chaos, the Clouds and the Tongue, these three alone. 

STREPSIADES

I would not speak to the others, even if I met them in the street; not a single sacrifice, not a libation, not a grain of incense for them! 

LEADER OF THE CHORUS

Tell us boldly then what you want of us; you cannot fail to succeed. If you honour and revere us and if you are resolved to become a clever man. 

STREPSIADES

Oh, sovereign goddesses, it is only a very small favour that I ask of you; grant that I may outdistance all the Greeks by a hundred stadia in the art of speaking. 

LEADER OF THE CHORUS

We grant you this, and henceforward no eloquence shall more often succeed with the people than your own. 

STREPSIADES

May the gods shield me from possessing great eloquence! That's not what I want. I want to be able to turn bad law-suits to my own advantage and to slip through the fingers of my creditors. 

LEADER OF THE CHORUS

It shall be as you wish, for your ambitions are modest. Commit yourself fearlessly to our ministers, the sophists. 

STREPSIADES

This I will do, for I trust in you. Moreover there is no drawing back, what with these cursed horses and this marriage, which has eaten up my vitals. 

More and more volubly from here to the end of speech

So let them do with me as they will; I yield my body to them. Come blows, come hunger, thirst, heat or cold, little matters it to me; they may flay me, if I only escape my debts, if only I win the reputation of being a bold rascal, a fine speaker, impudent, shameless, a braggart, and adept at stringing lies, an old stager at quibbles, a complete table of laws, a thorough rattle, a fox to slip through any hole; supple as a leathern strap, slippery as an eel, an artful fellow, a blusterer, a villain; a knave with a hundred faces, cunning, intolerable, a gluttonous dog. With such epithets do I seek to be greeted; on these terms they can treat me as they choose, and, if they wish, by Demeter! they can turn me into sausages and serve me up to the philosophers. 

CHORUS singing

Here have we a bold and well-disposed pupil indeed. When we have taught you, your glory among the mortals will reach even to the skies. 

STREPSIADES singing

Wherein will that profit me? 

CHORUS singing

You will pass your whole life among us and will be the most envied of men. 

STREPSIADES singing

Shall I really ever see such happiness? 

CHORUS singing

Clients will be everlastingly besieging your door in crowds, burning to get at you, to explain their business to you and to consult you about their suits, which, in return for your ability, will bring you in great sums. 

LEADER OF THE CHORUS

But, Socrates, begin the lessons you want to teach this old man; rouse his mind, try the strength of his intelligence. 

SOCRATES

Come, tell me the kind of mind you have; it's important that I know this, that I may order my batteries against you in the right fashion. 

STREPSIADES

Eh, what! in the name of the gods, are you purposing to assault me then? 

SOCRATES

No. I only wish to ask you some questions. Have you any memory? 

STREPSIADES

That depends: if anything is owed me, my memory is excellent, but if I owe, alas! I have none whatever. 

SOCRATES

Have you a natural gift for speaking? 

STREPSIADES

For speaking, no; for cheating, yes. 

SOCRATES

How will you be able to learn then? 

STREPSIADES

Very easily, have no fear. 

SOCRATES

Thus, when I throw forth some philosophical thought anent things celestial., you will seize it in its very flight? 

STREPSIADES

Then I am to snap up wisdom much as a dog snaps up a morsel? 

SOCRATES aside

Oh! the ignoramus! the barbarian! 

to STREPSIADES

I greatly fear, old man, it will be necessary for me to have recourse to blows. Now, let me hear what you do when you are beaten. 

STREPSIADES

I receive the blow, then wait a moment, take my witnesses and finally summon my assailant at law. 

SOCRATES

Come, take off your cloak. 

STREPSIADES

Have I robbed you of anything? 

SOCRATES

No. but the usual thing is to enter the school without your cloak. 

STREPSIADES

But I have not come here to look for stolen goods. 

SOCRATES

Off with it, fool! 

STREPSIADES He obeys.

Tell me, if I prove thoroughly attentive and learn with zeal, which O; your disciples shall I resemble, do you think? 

SOCRATES

You will be the image of Chaerephon. 

STREPSIADES

Ah! unhappy me! Shall I then be only half alive? 

SOCRATES

A truce to this chatter! follow me and no more of it. 

STREPSIADES

First give me a honey-cake, for to descend down there sets me all a-tremble; it looks like the cave of Trophonius. 

SOCRATES

But get in with you! What reason have you for thus dallying at the door? 

They go into the Thoughtery.

LEADER OF THE CHORUS

Good luck! you have courage; may you succeed, you, who, though already so advanced in years, wish to instruct your mind with new studies and practise it in wisdom! 

The CHORUS turns and faces the Audience.

Spectators! By Bacchus, whose servant I am, I will frankly tell you the truth. May I secure both victory and renown as certainly as I hold you for adept critics and as I regard this comedy as my best. I wished to give you the first view of a work, which had cost me much trouble, but which I withdrew, unjustly beaten by unskilful rivals. It is you, oh, enlightened public, for whom I have prepared my piece, that I reproach with this. Nevertheless I shall never willingly cease to seek the approval of the discerning. I have not forgotten the day, when men, whom one is happy to have for an audience, received my Virtuous Young Man and my Paederast with so much favour in this very place. Then as yet virgin, my Muse had not attained the age for maternity; she had to expose her first-born for another to adopt, and it has since grown up under your generous patronage. Ever since you have as good as sworn me your faithful alliance. Thus, like the Electra of the poets, my comedy has come to seek you to-day, hoping again to encounter such enlightened spectators. As far away as she can discern her Orestes, she will be able to recognize him by his curly head. And note her modest demeanour! She has not sewn on a piece of hanging leather, thick and reddened at the end, to cause laughter among the children; she does not rail at the bald, neither does she dance the cordax; no old man is seen, who, while uttering his lines, batters his questioner with a stick to make his poor jests pass muster. She does not rush upon the scene carrying a torch and screaming, 'Iou! Iou!' No, she relies upon herself and her verses....My value is so well known, that I take no further pride in it. I do not seek to deceive you, by reproducing the same subjects two or three times; I always invent fresh themes to present before you, themes that have no relation to each other and that are all clever. I attacked Cleon to his face and when he was all-powerful; but he has fallen, and now I have no desire to kick him when he is down. My rivals, on the contrary, now that this wretched Hyperbolus has given them the cue, have never ceased setting upon both him and his mother. First Eupolis presented his 'Maricas'; this was simply my 'Knights,' whom this plagiarist had clumsily furbished up again by adding to the piece an old drunken woman, so that she might dance the cordax. It was an old idea, taken from Phrynichus, who caused his old hag to be devoured by a monster of the deep. Then Hermippus fell foul of Hyperbolus and now all the others fall upon him and repeat my comparison of the eels. May those who find amusement in their pieces not be pleased with mine, but as for you, who love and applaud my inventions, why, posterity will praise your good taste. 

FIRST SEMI-CHORUS singing

Oh, ruler of Olympus, all-powerful king of the gods, great Zeus, it is thou whom I first invoke; protect this chorus; and thou too, Posidon, whose dread trident upheaves at the will of thy anger both the bowels of the earth and the salty waves of the ocean. I invoke my illustrious father, the divine Aether, the universal sustainer of life, and Phoebus, who, from the summit of his chariot, sets the world aflame with his dazzling rays, Phoebus, a mighty deity amongst the gods and adored amongst mortals. 

LEADER OF FIRST SEMI-CHORUS

Most wise spectators, lend us all your attention. Give heed to our just reproaches. There exist no gods to whom this city owes more than it does to us, whom alone you forget. Not a sacrifice, not a libation is there for those who protect you! Have you decreed some mad expedition? Well! we thunder or we fall down in rain. When you chose that enemy of heaven, the Paphlagonian tanner, for a general, we knitted our brow, we caused our wrath to break out; the lightning shot forth, the thunder pealed, the moon deserted her course and the sun at once veiled his beam threatening, no longer to give you light, if Cleon became general. Nevertheless you elected him; it is said, Athens never resolves upon some fatal step but the gods turn these errors into her greatest gain. Do you wish that his election should even now be a success for you? It is a very simple thing to do; condemn this rapacious gull named Cleon for bribery and extortion, fit a wooden collar tight round his neck, and your error will be rectified and the commonweal will at once regain its old prosperity. 

SECOND SEMI-CHORUS singing

Aid me also, Phoebus, god of Delos, who reignest on the cragged peaks of Cynthia; and thou, happy virgin, to whom the Lydian damsels offer pompous sacrifice in a temple; of gold; and thou, goddess of our country, Athene, armed with the aegis, the protectress of Athens; and thou, who, surrounded by the bacchants of Delphi; roamest over the rocks of Parnassus shaking the flame of thy resinous torch, thou, Bacchus, the god of revel and joy. 

LEADER OF SECOND SEMI-CHORUS

As we were preparing to come here, we were hailed by the Moon and were charged to wish joy and happiness both to the Athenians and to their allies; further, she said that she was enraged and that you treated her very shamefully, her, who does not pay you in words alone, but who renders you all real benefits. Firstly, thanks to her, you save at least a drachma each month for lights, for each, as he is leaving home at night, says, "Slave, buy no torches, for the moonlight is beautiful,"-not to name a thousand other benefits. Nevertheless you do not reckon the days correctly and your calendar is naught but confusion. Consequently the gods load her with threats each time they get home and are disappointed of their meal, because the festival has not been kept in the regular order of time. When you should be sacrificing, you are putting to the torture or administering justice. And often, we others, the gods, are fasting in token of mourning for the death of Memnon or Sarpedon, while you are devoting yourselves to joyous libations. It is for this, that last year, when the lot would have invested Hyperbolus with the duty of Amphictyon, we took his crown from him, to teach him that time must be divided according to the phases of the moon. 

SOCRATES coming out

By Respiration, the Breath of Life! By Chaos! By the Air! I have never seen a man so gross, so inept, so stupid, so forgetful. All the little quibbles, which I teach him, he forgets even before he has learnt them. Yet I will not give it up, I will make him come out here into the open air. Where are you, Strepsiades? Come, bring your couch out here. 

STREPSIADES from within

But the bugs will not allow me to bring it. 

SOCRATES

Have done with such nonsense! place it there and pay attention. 

STREPSIADES coming out, with the bed

Well, here I am. 

SOCRATES

Good! Which science of all those you have never been taught, do you wish to learn first? The measures, the rhythms or the verses? 

STREPSIADES

Why, the measures; the flour dealer cheated me out of two choenixes the other day. 

SOCRATES

It's not about that I ask you, but which, according to you, is the best measure, the trimeter or the tetrameter? 

STREPSIADES

The one I prefer is the semisextarius. 

SOCRATES

You talk nonsense, my good fellow. 

STREPSIADES

I will wager your tetrameter is the semisextarius. 

SOCRATES

Plague seize the dunce and the fool! Come, perchance you will learn the rhythms quicker. 

STREPSIADES

Will the rhythms supply me with food? 

SOCRATES

First they will help you to be pleasant in company, then to know what is meant by enhoplian rhythm and what by the dactylic. 

STREPSIADES

Of the dactyl? I know that quite well. 

SOCRATES

What is it then, other than this finger here? 

STREPSIADES

Formerly, when a child, I used this one. 

SOCRATES

You are as low-minded as you are stupid. 

STREPSIADES

But, wretched man, I do not want to learn all this. 

SOCRATES

Then what do you want to know? 

STREPSIADES

Not that, not that, but the art of false reasoning. 

SOCRATES

But you must first learn other things. Come, what are the male quadrupeds? 

STREPSIADES

Oh! I know the males thoroughly. Do you take me for a fool then? The ram, the buck, the bull, the dog, the pigeon. 

SOCRATES

Do you see what you are doing; is not the female pigeon called the same as the male? 

STREPSIADES

How else? Come now! 

SOCRATES

How else? With you then it's pigeon and pigeon! 

STREPSIADES

That's right, by Posidon! but what names do you want me to give them? 

SOCRATES

Term the female pigeonnette and the male pigeon. 

STREPSIADES

Pigeonnette! hah! by the Air! That's splendid! for that lesson bring out your kneading-trough and I will fill him with flour to the brim. 

SOCRATES

There you are wrong again; you make trough masculine and it should be feminine. 

STREPSIADES

What? if I say, him, do I make the trough masculine? 

SOCRATES

Assuredly! would you not say him for Cleonymus? 

STREPSIADES

Well? 

SOCRATES

Then trough is of the same gender as Cleonymus? 

STREPSIADES

My good man! Cleonymus never had a kneading-trough; he used a round mortar for the purpose. But come, tell me what I should say! 

SOCRATES

For trough you should say her as you would for Soctrate. 

STREPSIADES

Her? 

SOCRATES

In this manner you make it truly female. 

STREPSIADES

That's it! Her for trough and her for Cleonymus.
SOCRATE,"
Now I must teach you to distinguish the masculine proper names from those that are feminine. 

STREPSIADES

Ah! I know the female names well. 

SOCRATES

Name some then. 

STREPSIADES

Lysilla, Philinna, Clitagora, Demetria. 

SOCRATES

And what are masculine names? 

STREPSIADES

They are are countless-Philoxenus, Melesias, Amynias. 

SOCRATES

But, wretched man, the last two are not masculine. 

STREPSIADES

You do not count them as masculine? 

SOCRATES

Not at all. If you met Amynias, how would you hail him? 

STREPSIADES

How? Why, I should shout, "Hi, there, Amynia! 

SOCRATES

Do you see? it's a female name that you give him. 

STREPSIADES

And is it not rightly done, since he refuses military service? But what use is there in learning what we all know? 

SOCRATES

You know nothing about it. Come, lie down there. 

STREPSIADES

What for? 

SOCRATES

Ponder awhile over matters that interest you. 

STREPSIADES

Oh! I pray you, not there but, if I must lie down and ponder, let me lie on the ground. 

SOCRATES

That's out of the question. Come! on the couch! 

STREPSIADES as he lies down

What cruel fate! What a torture the bugs will this day put me to! 

Socrates turns aside.

CHORUS singing

Ponder and examine closely, gather your thoughts together, let your mind turn to every side of things; if you meet with a difficulty, spring quickly to some other idea; above all, keep your eyes away from all gentle sleep. 

STREPSIADES singing

Ow, Wow, Wow, Wow is me! 

CHORUS singing

What ails you? why do you cry so? 

STREPSIADES

Oh! I am a dead man! Here are these cursed Corinthians advancing upon me from all corners of the couch; they are biting me, they are gnawing at my sides, they are drinking all my blood, they are yanking of my balls, they are digging into my arse, they are killing me! 

LEADER OF THE CHORUS

Not so much wailing and clamour, if you please. 

STREPSIADES

How can I obey? I have lost my money and my complexion, my blood and my slippers, and to cap my misery, I must keep awake on this couch, when scarce a breath of life is left in me. 

A brief interval of silence ensues.

SOCRATES

Well now! what are you doing? are you reflecting? 

STREPSIADES

Yes, by Posidon! 

SOCRATES

What about? 

STREPSIADES

Whether the bugs will entirely devour me. 

SOCRATES

May death seize you, accursed man! 

He turns aside again.

STREPSIADES

Ah it has already. 

SOCRATES

Come, no giving way! Cover up your head; the thing to do is to find an ingenious alternative. 

STREPSIADES

An alternative! ah! I only wish one would come to me from within these coverlets! 

Another interval of silence ensues.

SOCRATES

Wait! let us see what our fellow is doing! Ho! are you asleep? 

STREPSIADES

No, by Apollo! 

SOCRATES

Have you got hold of anything? 

STREPSIADES

No, nothing whatever. 

SOCRATES

Nothing at all? 

STREPSIADES

No, nothing except my tool, which I've got in my hand. 

SOCRATES

Aren't you going to cover your head immediately and ponder? 

STREPSIADES

On what? Come, Socrates, tell me. 

SOCRATES

Think first what you want, and then tell me. 

STREPSIADES

But I have told you a thousand times what I want. Not to pay any of my creditors. 

SOCRATES

Come, wrap yourself up; concentrate your mind, which wanders to lightly; study every detail, scheme and examine thoroughly. 

STREPSIADES

Alas! Alas! 

SOCRATES

Keep still, and if any notion troubles you, put it quickly aside, then resume it and think over it again. 

STREPSIADES

My dear little Socrates! 

SOCRATES

What is it, old greybeard? 

STREPSIADES

I have a scheme for not paying my debts. 

SOCRATES

Let us hear it. 

STREPSIADES

Tell me, if I purchased a Thessalian witch, I could make the moon descend during the night and shut it, like a mirror, into a round box and there keep it carefully.... 

SOCRATES

How would you gain by that? 

STREPSIADES

How? why, if the moon did not rise, I would have no interest to pay. 

SOCRATES

Why so? 

STREPSIADES

Because money is lent by the month. 

SOCRATES

Good! but I am going to propose another trick to you. If you were condemned to pay five talents, how would you manage to quash that verdict? Tell me. 

STREPSIADES

How? how? I don't know, I must think. 

SOCRATES

Do you always shut your thoughts within yourself? Let your ideas fly in the air, like a may-bug, tied by the foot with a thread. 

STREPSIADES

I have found a very clever way to annul that conviction; you will admit that much yourself. 

SOCRATES

What is it? 

STREPSIADES

Have you ever seen a beautiful, transparent stone at the druggists', with which you may kindle fire? 

SOCRATES

You mean a crystal lens. 

STREPSIADES

That's right. Well, now if I placed myself with this stone in the sun and a long way off from the clerk, while he was writing out the conviction, I could make all the wax, upon which the words were written, melt. 

SOCRATES

Well thought out, by the Graces! 

STREPSIADES

Ah! I am delighted to have annulled the decree that was to cost me five talents. 

SOCRATES

Come, take up this next question quickly. 

STREPSIADES

Which? 

SOCRATES

If, when summoned to court, you were in danger of losing your case for want of witnesses, how would you make the conviction fall upon your opponent? 

STREPSIADES

That's very simple and easy. 

SOCRATES

Let me hear. 

STREPSIADES

This way. If another case had to be pleaded before mine was called, I should run and hang myself. 

SOCRATES

You talk rubbish! 

STREPSIADES

Not so, by the gods! if I were dead, no action could lie against me. 

SOCRATES

You are merely beating the air. Get out! I will give you no more lessons. 

STREPSIADES imploringly

Why not? Oh! Socrates! in the name of the gods! 

SOCRATES

But you forget as fast as you learn. Come, what was the thing I taught you first? Tell me. 

STREPSIADES

Ah let me see. What was the first thing? What was it then? Ah! that thing in which we knead the bread, oh! my god! what do you call it? 

SOCRATES

Plague take the most forgetful and silliest of old addlepates! 

STREPSIADES

Alas! what a calamity! what will become of me? I am undone if I do not learn how to ply my tongue. Oh! Clouds! give me good advice. 

CHORUS-LEADER

Old man, we counsel you, if you have brought up a son, to send him to learn in your stead. 

STREPSIADES

Undoubtedly I have a son, as well endowed as the best, but he is unwilling to learn. What will become of me? 

CHORUS-LEADER

And you don't make him obey you? 

STREPSIADES

You see, he is big and strong; moreover, through his mother he is a descendant of those fine birds, the race of Coesyra. Nevertheless, I will go and find him, and if he refuses, I will turn him out of the house. Go in, Socrates, and wait for me awhile. 

SOCRATES goes into the Thoughtery, STREPSIADES into his own house.

CHORUS singing

Do you understand, Socrates, that thanks to us you will be loaded with benefits? Here is a man, ready to obey you in all things. You see how he is carried away with admiration and enthusiasm. Profit by it to clip him as short as possible; fine chances are all too quickly gone. 

STREPSIADES coming out of his house and pushing his son in front of him

No, by the Clouds! you stay here no longer; go and devour the ruins of your uncle Megacles' fortune. 

PHIDIPPIDES

Oh! my poor father! what has happened to you? By the Olympian
Zeus! You are no longer in your senses! 

STREPSIADES

Look! "the Olympian Zeus." Oh! you fool! to believe in Zeus at your age! 

PHIDIPPIDES

What is there in that to make you laugh? 

STREPSIADES

You are then a tiny little child, if you credit such antiquated rubbish! But come here, that I may teach you; I will tell you something very necessary to know to be a man; but do not repeat it to anybody. 

PHIDIPPIDES

Tell me, what is it? 

STREPSIADES

Just now you swore by Zeus. 

PHIDIPPIDES

Sure I did. 

STREPSIADES

Do you see how good it is to learn? Phidippides, there is no Zeus. 

PHIDIPPIDES

What is there then? 

STREPSIADES

The Whirlwind has driven out Zeus and is King now. 

PHIDIPPIDES

What drivel! 

STREPSIADES

You must realize that it is true. 

PHIDIPPIDES

And who says so? 

STREPSIADES

Socrates, the Melian, and Chaerephon, who knows how to measure the jump of a flea. 

PHIDIPPIDES

Have you reached such a pitch of madness that you believe those bilious fellows? 

STREPSIADES

Use better language, and do not insult men who are clever and full of wisdom, who, to economize, never shave, shun the gymnasia and never go to the baths, while you, you only await my death to eat up my wealth. But come, come as quickly as you can to learn in my stead. 

PHIDIPPIDES

And what good can be learnt of them? 

STREPSIADES

What good indeed? Why, all human knowledge. Firstly, you will know yourself grossly ignorant. But await me here awhile. 

He goes back into his house.

PHIDIPPIDES

Alas! what is to be done? Father has lost his wits. Must I have him certificated for lunacy, or must I order his coffin? 

STREPSIADES returning with a bird in each hand

Come! what kind of bird is this? Tell me. 

PHIDIPPIDES

A pigeon. 

STREPSIADES

Good! And this female? 

PHIDIPPIDES

A pigeon. 

STREPSIADES

The same for both? You make me laugh! In the future you must call this one a pigeonnette and the other a pigeon. 

PHIDIPPIDES

A pigeonnette! These then are the fine things you have just learnt at the school of these sons of Earth! 

STREPSIADES

And many others; but what I learnt I forgot at once, because I am to old. 

PHIDIPPIDES

So this is why you have lost your cloak? 

STREPSIADES

I have not lost it, I have consecrated it to Philosophy.

PHIDIPPIDES

And what have you done with your sandals, you poor fool? 

STREPSIADES

If I have lost them, it is for what was necessary, just as Pericles did. But come, move yourself, let us go in; if necessary, do wrong to obey your father. When you were six years old and still lisped, I was the one who obeyed you. I remember at the feasts of Zeus you had a consuming wish for a little chariot and I bought it for you with the first obolus which I received as a juryman in the courts. 

PHIDIPPIDES

You will soon repent of what you ask me to do. 

STREPSIADES

Oh! now I am happy! He obeys. 

loudly

Come, Socrates, come! Come out quick! Here I am bringing you my son; he refused, but I have persuaded him. 

SOCRATES

Why, he is but a child yet. He is not used to these baskets, in which we suspend our minds. 

PHIDIPPIDES

To make you better used to them, I would you were hung. 

STREPSIADES

A curse upon you! you insult your master! 

SOCRATES

"I would you were hung!" What a stupid speech! and so emphatically spoken! How can one ever get out of an accusation with such a tone, summon witnesses or touch or convince? And yet when we think, Hyperbolus learnt all this for one talent! 

STREPSIADES

Rest undisturbed and teach him. He has a most intelligent nature. Even when quite little he amused himself at home with making houses, carving boats, constructing little chariots of leather, and understood wonderfully how to make frogs out of pomegranate rinds. Teach him both methods of reasoning, the strong and also the weak, which by false arguments triumphs over the strong; if not the two, at least the false, and that in every possible way. 

SOCRATES

The Just and Unjust Discourse themselves shall instruct him. I shall leave you. 

STREPSIADES

But forget it not, he must always, always be able to confound the true. 

Socrates enters the Thoughtery; a moment later the JUST and the UNJUST DISCOURSE come out; they are quarrelling violently.

JUST DISCOURSE

Come here! Shameless as you may be, will you dare to show your face to the spectators? 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

Take me where you will. I seek a throng, so that I may the better annihilate you. 

JUST DISCOURSE

Annihilate me! Do you forget who you are? 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

I am Reasoning. 

JUST DISCOURSE

Yes, the weaker Reasoning." 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

But I triumph over you, who claim to be the stronger. 

JUST DISCOURSE

By what cunning shifts, pray? 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

By the invention of new maxims. 

JUST DISCOURSE

.... which are received with favour by these fools. 

He points to the audience.

UNJUST DISCOURSE

Say rather, by these wise men. 

JUST DISCOURSE

I am going to destroy you mercilessly. 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

How pray? Let us see you do it. 

JUST DISCOURSE

By saying what is true. 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

I shall retort and shall very soon have the better of you. First, maintain that justice has no existence. 

JUST DISCOURSE

Has no existence? 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

No existence! Why, where is it? 

JUST DISCOURSE

With the gods. 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

How then, if justice exists, was Zeus not put to death for having put his father in chains? 

JUST DISCOURSE

Bah! this is enough to turn my stomach! A basin, quick! 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

You are an old driveller and stupid withal. 

JUST DISCOURSE

And you a degenerate and shameless fellow. 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

Hah! What sweet expressions! 

JUST DISCOURSE

An impious buffoon. 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

You crown me with roses and with lilies. 

JUST DISCOURSE

A parricide. 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

Why, you shower gold upon me. 

JUST DISCOURSE

Formerly it was a hailstorm of blows. 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

I deck myself with your abuse. 

JUST DISCOURSE

What impudence! 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

What tomfoolery! 

JUST DISCOURSE

It is because of you that the youth no longer attends the schools. The Athenians will soon recognize what lessons you teach those who are fools enough to believe you. 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

You are overwhelmed with wretchedness. 

JUST DISCOURSE

And you, you prosper. Yet you were poor when you said, "I am the Mysian Telephus," and used to stuff your wallet with maxims of Pandeletus to nibble at. 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

Oh! the beautiful wisdom, of which you are now boasting! 

JUST DISCOURSE

Madman! But yet madder the city that keeps you, you, the corrupter of its youth! 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

It is not you who will teach this young man; you are as old and out of date at Cronus. 

JUST DISCOURSE

Nay, it will certainly be I, if he does not wish to be lost and to practise verbosity only. 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

(to PHIDIPPIDES) Come here and leave him to beat the air. 

JUST DISCOURSE

You'll regret it, if you touch him. 

CHORUS-LEADER

(stepping between them as they are about to come to blows) A truce to your quarrellings and abuse! But you expound what you taught us formerly, and you, your new doctrine. Thus, after hearing each of you argue, he will be able to choose betwixt the two schools.

JUST DISCOURSE

I am quite agreeable. 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

And I too. 

LEADER OF THE CHORUS

Who is to speak first? 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

Let it be my opponent, he has my full consent; then I shall follow upon the very ground he shall have chosen and shall shatter him with a hail of new ideas and subtle fancies; if after that he dares to breathe another word, I shall sting him in the face and in the eyes with our maxims, which are as keen as the sting of a wasp, and he will die. 

CHORUS

(singing) Here are two rivals confident in their powers of oratory and in the thoughts over which they have pondered so long. Let us see which will come triumphant out of the contest. This wisdom, for which my friends maintain such a persistent fight, is in great danger. 

LEADER OF THE CHORUS

Come then, you, who crowned men of other days with so many virtues, plead the cause dear to you, make yourself known to us. 

JUST DISCOURSE

Very well, I will tell you what was the old education, when I used to teach justice with so much success and when modesty was held in veneration. Firstly, it was required of a child, that it should not utter a word. In the street, when they went to the music-school, all the youths of the same district marched lightly clad and ranged in good order, even when the snow was falling in great flakes. At the master's house they had to stand with their legs apart and they were taught to sing either, "Pallas, the Terrible, who overturneth cities," or "A noise resounded from afar" in the solemn tones of the ancient harmony. If anyone indulged in buffoonery or lent his voice any of the soft inflexions, like those which to-day the disciples of Phrynis take so much pains to form, he was treated as an enemy of the Muses and belaboured with blows. In the wrestling school they would sit with outstretched legs and without display of any indecency to the curious. When they rose, they would smooth over the sand, so as to leave no trace to excite obscene thoughts. Never was a child rubbed with oil below the belt; the rest of their bodies thus retained its fresh bloom and down, like a velvety peach. They were not to be seen approaching a lover and themselves rousing his passion by soft modulation of the voice and lustful gaze. At table, they would not have dared, before those older than themselves, to have taken a radish, an aniseed or a leaf of parsley, and much less eat fish or thrushes or cross their legs. 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

What antiquated rubbish! Have we got back to the days of the festivals of Zeus Polieus, to the Buphonia, to the time of the poet Cecides and the golden cicadas? 

JUST DISCOURSE

Nevertheless by suchlike teaching I built up the men of Marathon-But you, you teach the children of to-day to bundle themselves quickly into their clothes, and I am enraged when I see them at the Panathenaea forgetting Athene while they dance, and covering their tools with their bucklers. Hence, young man, dare to range yourself beside me, who follow justice and truth; you will then be able to shun the public place, to refrain from the baths, to blush at all that is shameful, to fire up if your virtue is mocked at, to give place to your elders, to honour your parents, in short, to avoid all that is evil. Be modesty itself, and do not run to applaud the dancing girls; if you delight in such scenes, some courtesan will cast you her apple and your reputation will be done for. Do not bandy words with your father, nor treat him as a dotard, nor reproach the old man, who has cherished you, with his age. 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

If you listen to him, by Bacchus! you will be the image of the sons of Hippocrates and will be called mother's big ninny.

JUST DISCOURSE

No, but you will pass your days at the gymnasia, glowing with strength and health; you will not go to the public place to cackle and wrangle as is done nowadays; you will not live in fear that you may be dragged before the courts for some trifle exaggerated by quibbling. But you will go down to the Academy to run beneath the sacred olives with some virtuous friend of your own age, your head encircled with the white reed, enjoying your ease and breathing the perfume of the yew and of the fresh sprouts of the poplar, rejoicing in the return of springtide and gladly listening to the gentle rustle of the plane tree and the elm. (With greater warmth from here on) If you devote yourself to practising my precepts, your chest will be stout, your colour glowing, your shoulders broad, your tongue short, your hips muscular, but your tool small. But if you follow the fashions of the day, you will be pallid in hue, have narrow shoulders, a narrow chest, a long tongue, small hips and a big thing; you will know how to spin forth long-winded arguments on law. You will be persuaded also to regard as splendid everything that is shameful and as shameful everything that is honourable; in a word, you will wallow in degeneracy like Antimachus. 

CHORUS

(singing) How beautiful, high-souled, brilliant is this wisdom that you practise! What a sweet odour of honesty is emitted by your discourse! Happy were those men of other days who lived when you were honoured! And you, seductive talker, come, find some fresh arguments, for your rival has done wonders. 

LEADER OF THE CHORUS

You will have to bring out against him all the battery of your wit, it you desire to beat him and not to be laughed out of court. 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

At last! I was choking with impatience, I was burning to upset his arguments! If I am called the Weaker Reasoning in the schools, it is just because I was the first to discover the means to confute the laws and the decrees of justice. To invoke solely the weaker arguments and yet triumph is an art worth more than a hundred thousand drachmae. But see how I shall batter down the sort of education of which he is so proud. Firstly, he forbids you to bathe in hot water. What grounds have you for condemning hot baths? 

JUST DISCOURSE

Because they are baneful and enervate men.

UNJUST DISCOURSE

Enough said! Oh! you poor wrestler! From the very outset I have seized you and hold you round the middle; you cannot escape me. Tell me, of all the sons of Zeus, who had the stoutest heart, who performed the most doughty deeds? 

JUST DISCOURSE

None, in my opinion, surpassed Heracles.

UNJUST DISCOURSE

Where have you ever seen cold baths called 'Bath of Heracles'? And yet who was braver than he? 

JUST DISCOURSE

It is because of such quibbles, that the baths are seen crowded with young folk, who chatter there the livelong day while the gymnasia remain empty. 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

Next you condemn the habit of frequenting the market-place, while I approve this. If it were wrong Homer would never have made Nestor speak in public as well as all his wise heroes. As for the art of speaking, he tells you, young men should not practise it; I hold the contrary. Furthermore he preaches chastity to them. Both precepts are equally harmful. Have you ever seen chastity of any use to anyone? Answer and try to confute me. 

JUST DISCOURSE

To many; for instance, Peleus won a sword thereby.

UNJUST DISCOURSE A

sword! Ah! what a fine present to make him! Poor wretch! Hyperbolus, the lamp-seller, thanks to his villainy, has gained more than....do not know how many talents, but certainly no sword.

JUST DISCOURSE

Peleus owed it to his chastity that he became the husband of Thetis. 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

.... who left him in the lurch, for he was not the most ardent; in those nocturnal sports between the sheets, which so please women, he possessed but little merit. Get you gone, you are but an old fool. But you, young man, just consider a little what this temperance means and the delights of which it deprives you-young fellows, women, play, dainty dishes, wine, boisterous laughter. And what is life worth without these? Then, if you happen to commit one of these faults inherent in human weakness, some seduction or adultery, and you are caught in the act, you are lost, if you cannot speak. But follow my teaching and you will be able to satisfy your passions, to dance, to laugh, to blush at nothing. Suppose you are caught in the act of adultery. Then up and tell the husband you are not guilty, and recall to him the example of Zeus, who allowed himself to be conquered by love and by women. Being but a mortal, can you be stronger than a god? 

JUST DISCOURSE

Suppose your pupil, following your advice, gets the radish rammed up his arse and then is depilated with a hot coal; how are you going to prove to him that he is not a broad-arse?

UNJUST DISCOURSE

What's the matter with being a broad-arse?

JUST DISCOURSE

Is there anything worse than that? 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

Now what will you say, if I beat you even on this point? 

JUST DISCOURSE

I should certainly have to be silent then.

UNJUST DISCOURSE

Well then, reply! Our advocates, what are they?

JUST DISCOURSE

Sons of broad-arses. 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

Nothing is more true. And our tragic poets?

JUST DISCOURSE

Sons of broad-arses. 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

Well said again. And our demagogues? 

JUST DISCOURSE

Sons of broad-arses. 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

You admit that you have spoken nonsense. And the spectators, what are they for the most part? Look at them.

JUST DISCOURSE

I am looking at them. 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

Well! What do you see? 

JUST DISCOURSE

By the gods, they are nearly all broad-arses. (pointing) See, this one I know to be such and that one and that other with the long hair. 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

What have you to say, then? 

JUST DISCOURSE

I am beaten. Debauchees! in the name of the gods, receive my cloak; I pass over to your ranks. (He goes back into the Thoughtery.) 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

Well then! Are you going to take away your son or do you wish me to teach him how to speak? 

STREPSIADES

Teach him, chastise him and do not fail to sharpen his tongue well, on one side for petty law-suits and on the other for important cases. 

UNJUST DISCOURSE

Don't worry, I shall return him to you an accomplished sophist. 

PHIDIPPIDES

Very pale then and thoroughly hang-dog-looking.

LEADER OF THE CHORUS

Take him with you. (The UNJUST DISCOURSE and PHIDIPPIDES

    go into the THOUGHTERY. To STREPSIADES, who is just going into his own house.) I think you will regret this. (The CHORUS turns and faces the audience.) judges, we are all about to tell you what you will gain by awarding us the crown as equity requires of you. In spring, when you wish to give your fields the first dressing, we will rain upon you first; the others shall wait. Then we will watch over your corn and over your vinestocks; they will have no excess to fear, neither of heat nor of wet. But if a mortal dares to insult the goddesses of the Clouds, let him think of the ills we shall pour upon him. For him neither wine nor any harvest at all! Our terrible slings will mow down his young olive plants and his vines. If he is making bricks, it will rain, and our round hailstones will break the tiles of his roof. If he himself marries or any of his relations or friends, we shall cause rain to fall the whole night long. Verily, he would prefer to live in Egypt than to have given this iniquitous verdict. 


STREPSIADES

    (coming out again) Another four, three, two days, then the eve, then the day, the fatal day of payment! I tremble, I quake, I shudder, for it's the day of the old moon and the new. Then all my creditors take the oath, pay their deposits, I swear my downfall and my ruin. As for me, I beseech them to be reasonable, to be just, "My friend, do not demand this sum, wait a little for this other and give me time for this third one." Then they will pretend that at this rate they will never be repaid, will accuse me of bad faith and will threaten me with the law. Well then, let them sue me! I care nothing for that, if only Phidippides has learnt to speak fluently. I am going to find out; I'll knock at the door of the school. (He knocks.) .... Ho! slave, slave! 


SOCRATES

    (coming out) Welcome! Strepsiades! 


STREPSIADES

    Welcome! Socrates! But first take this sack; (offers him a sack of flour) it is right to reward the master with some present. And my son, whom you took off lately, has he learnt this famous reasoning? Tell me. 


SOCRATES

    He has learnt it. 


STREPSIADES

    Wonderful! Oh! divine Knavery! 


SOCRATES

    You will win just as many causes as you choose.


STREPSIADES

    Even if I have borrowed before witnesses? 


SOCRATES

    So much the better, even if there are a thousand of them!


STREPSIADES

    (bursting into song) Then I am going to shout with all my might. "Woe to the usurers, woe to their capital and their interest and their compound interest! You shall play me no more bad turns. My son is being taught there, his tongue is being sharpened into a double-edged weapon; he is my defender, the saviour of my house, the ruin of my foes! His poor father was crushed down with misfortune and he delivers him." Go and call him to me quickly. Oh! my child! my dear little one! run forward to your father's voice! 


SOCRATES

    (singing) Lo, the man himself! 


STREPSIADES

    (singing) Oh, my friend, my dearest friend!


SOCRATES

    (singing) Take your son, and get you gone. 


STREPSIADES

    (as PHIDIPPIDES appears) Oh, my son! oh! oh! what a pleasure to see your pallor! You are ready first to deny and then to contradict; it's as clear as noon. What a child of your country you are! How your lips quiver with the famous, "What have you to say now?" How well you know, I am certain, to put on the look of a victim, when it is you who are making both victims and dupes! And what a truly Attic glance! Come, it's for you to save me, seeing it is you who have ruined me. 


PHIDIPPIDES

    What is it you fear then? 


STREPSIADES

    The day of the old and the new. 


PHIDIPPIDES

    Is there then a day of the old and the new?


STREPSIADES

    The day on which they threaten to pay deposit against me. 


PHIDIPPIDES

    Then so much the worse for those who have deposited! for it's not possible for one day to be two. 


STREPSIADES

    What? 


PHIDIPPIDES

    Why, undoubtedly, unless a woman can be both old and young at the same time. 


STREPSIADES

    But so runs the law. 


PHIDIPPIDES

    I think the meaning of the law is quite misunderstood.


STREPSIADES

    What does it mean? 


PHIDIPPIDES

    Old Solon loved the people. 


STREPSIADES

    What has that to do with the old day and the new?


PHIDIPPIDES

    He has fixed two days for the summons, the last day of the old moon and the first day of the new; but the deposits must only be paid on the first day of the new moon. 


STREPSIADES

    And why did he also name the last day of the old?


PHIDIPPIDES

    So, my dear sir, that the debtors, being there the day before, might free themselves by mutual agreement, or that else, if not, the creditor might begin his action on the morning of the new moon. 


STREPSIADES

    Why then do the magistrates have the deposits paid on the last of the month and not the next day? 


PHIDIPPIDES

    I think they do as the gluttons do, who are the first to pounce upon the dishes. Being eager to carry off these deposits, they have them paid in a day too soon. 


STREPSIADES

    Splendid! (to the audience) Ah! you poor brutes, who serve for food to us clever folk! You are only down here to swell the number, true blockheads, sheep for shearing, heap of empty pots! Hence I will sing a song of victory for my son and myself. "Oh! happy, Strepsiades! what cleverness is thine! and what a son thou hast here!" Thus my friends and my neighbours will say, jealous at seeing me gain all my suits. But come in, I wish to regale you first. (They both go in. A moment later a creditor arrives, with his witness.)


PASIAS

    (to the WITNESS) A man should never lend a single obolus. It would be better to put on a brazen face at the outset than to get entangled in such matters. I want to see my money again and I bring you here to-day to attest the loan. I am going to make a foe of a neighbour; but, as long as I live, I do not wish my country to have to blush for me. Come, I am going to summon Strepsiades....


STREPSIADES

    (coming out of his house) Who is this? 


PASIAS

    ....for the old day and the new. 


STREPSIADES

    (to the WITNESS) I call you to witness, that he has named two days. What do you want of me? 


PASIAS

    I claim of you the twelve minae, which you borrowed from me to buy the dapple-grey horse. 


STREPSIADES A

    horse! do you hear him? I, who detest horses, as is well known. 


PASIAS

    I call Zeus to witness, that you swore by the gods to return them to me. 


STREPSIADES

    Because at that time, by Zeus! Phidippides did not yet know the irrefutable argument. 


PASIAS

    Would you deny the debt on that account? 


STREPSIADES

    If not, what use is his science to me? 


PASIAS

    Will you dare to swear by the gods that you owe me nothing?


STREPSIADES

    By which gods? 


PASIAS

    By Zeus, Hermes and Posidon! 


STREPSIADES

    Why, I would give three obols for the pleasure of swearing by them. 


PASIAS

    Woe upon you, impudent knave! 


STREPSIADES

    Oh! what a fine wine-skin you would make if flayed!


PASIAS

    Heaven! he jeers at me! 


STREPSIADES

    It would hold six gallons easily. 


PASIAS

    By great Zeus! by all the gods! you shall not scoff at me with impunity, 


STREPSIADES

    Ah! how you amuse me with your gods! how ridiculous it seems to a sage to hear Zeus invoked. 


PASIAS

    Your blasphemies will one day meet their reward. But, come, will you repay me my money, yes or no? Answer me, that I may go.


STREPSIADES

    Wait a moment, I am going to give you a distinct answer. (He goes indoors and returns immediately with a kneading-trough.)


PASIAS

    (to the WITNESS) What do you think he will do? Do you think he will pay? 


STREPSIADES

    Where is the man who demands money? Tell me, what is this? 


PASIAS

    Him? Why, he is your kneading-trough. 


STREPSIADES

    And you dare to demand money of me, when you are so ignorant? I will not return an obolus to anyone who says him instead of her for a kneading-trough. 


PASIAS

    You will not repay? 


STREPSIADES

    Not if I know it. Come, an end to this, pack off as quick as you can. 


PASIAS

    I go, but, may I die, if it be not to pay my deposit for a summons. (Exit) 


STREPSIADES

    Very well! It will be so much more loss to add to the twelve minae. But truly it makes me sad, for I do pity a poor simpleton who says him for a kneading-trough (Another creditor arrives.)


AMYNIAS

    Woe! ah woe is me! 


STREPSIADES

    Wait! who is this whining fellow? Can it be one of the gods of Carcinus? 


AMYNIAS

    Do you want to know who I am? I am a man of misfortune!


STREPSIADES

    Get on your way then. 


AMYNIAS

    (in tragic style) Oh! cruel god! Oh Fate, who hast broken the wheels of my chariot! Oh, Pallas, thou hast undone me!


STREPSIADES

    What ill has Tlepolemus done you? 


AMYNIAS

    Instead of jeering me, friend, make your son return me the money he has had of me; I am already unfortunate enough.


STREPSIADES

    What money? 


AMYNIAS

    The money he borrowed of me. 


STREPSIADES

    You have indeed had misfortune, it seems to me.


AMYNIAS

    Yes, by the gods! I have been thrown from a chariot.


STREPSIADES

    Why then drivel as if you had fallen off an ass?


AMYNIAS

    Am I drivelling because I demand my money? 


STREPSIADES

    No, no, you cannot be in your right senses.


AMYNIAS

    Why? 


STREPSIADES

    No doubt your poor wits have had a shake. 


AMYNIAS

    But by Hermes! I will sue you at law, if you do not pay me.


STREPSIADES

    Just tell me; do you think it is always fresh water that Zeus lets fall every time it rains, or is ill always the same water that the sun pumps over the earth? 


AMYNIAS

    I neither know, nor care. 


STREPSIADES

    And actually you would claim the right to demand your money, when you know not an iota of these celestial phenomena?


AMYNIAS

    If you are short, pay me the interest anyway. 


STREPSIADES

    What kind of animal is interest? 


AMYNIAS

    What? Does not the sum borrowed go on growing, growing every month, each day as the time slips by? 


STREPSIADES

    Well put. But do you believe there is more water in the sea now than there was formerly? 


AMYNIAS

    No, it's just the same quantity. It cannot increase.


STREPSIADES

    Thus, poor fool, the sea, that receives the rivers, never grows, and yet you would have your money grow? Get you gone, away with you, quick! Slave! bring me the ox-goad! 


AMYNIAS

    I have witnesses to this. 


STREPSIADES

    Come, what are you waiting for? Will you not budge, old nag! 


AMYNIAS

    What an insult! 


STREPSIADES

    Unless you start trotting, I shall catch you and stick this in your arse, you sorry packhorse! (AMYNIAS runs off.) Ah! you start, do you? I was about to drive you pretty fast, I tell you-you and your wheels and your chariot! (He enters his house.)


CHORUS

    (singing) Whither does the passion of evil lead! here is a perverse old man, who wants to cheat his creditors; but some mishap, which will speedily punish this rogue for his shameful schemings, cannot fail to overtake him from to-day. For a long time he has been burning to have his son know how to fight against all justice and right and to gain even the most iniquitous causes against his adversaries every one. I think this wish is going to be fulfilled. But mayhap, mayhap, will he soon wish his son were dumb rather! 


STREPSIADES

    (rushing out With PHIDIPPIDES after him) Oh! oh! neighbours, kinsmen, fellow-citizens, help! help! to the rescue, I am being beaten! Oh! my head! oh! my jaw! Scoundrel! Do you beat your own father?


PHIDIPPIDES

    (calmly) Yes, father, I do. 


STREPSIADES

    See! he admits he is beating me. 


PHIDIPPIDES

    Of course I do. 


STREPSIADES

    You villain, you parricide, you gallows-bird!


PHIDIPPIDES

    Go on, repeat your epithets, call me a thousand other names, if it please you. The more you curse, the greater my amusement!


STREPSIADES

    Oh! you ditch-arsed cynic! 


PHIDIPPIDES

    How fragrant the perfume breathed forth in your words.


STREPSIADES

    Do you beat your own father? 


PHIDIPPIDES

    Yes, by Zeus! and I am going to show you that I do right in beating you. 


STREPSIADES

    Oh, wretch! can it be right to beat a father?


PHIDIPPIDES

    I will prove it to you, and you shall own yourself vanquished.


STREPSIADES

    Own myself vanquished on a point like this?


PHIDIPPIDES

    It's the easiest thing in the world. Choose whichever of the two reasonings you like. 


STREPSIADES

    Of which reasonings? 


PHIDIPPIDES

    The Stronger and the Weaker. 


STREPSIADES

    Miserable fellow! Why, I am the one who had you taught how to refute what is right. and now you would persuade me it is right a son should beat his father. 


PHIDIPPIDES

    I think I shall convince you so thoroughly that, when you have heard me, you will not have a word to say. 


STREPSIADES

    Well, I am curious to hear what you have to say.


CHORUS

    (singing) Consider well, old man, how you can best triumph over him. His brazenness shows me that he thinks himself sure of his case; he has some argument which gives him nerve. Note the confidence in his look! 


LEADER OF THE CHORUS

    But how did the fight begin? tell the Chorus; you cannot help doing that much. 


STREPSIADES

    I will tell you what was the start of the quarrel. At the end of the meal, as you know, I bade him take his lyre and sing me the air of Simonides, which tells of the fleece of the ram. He replied bluntly, that it was stupid, while drinking, to play the lyre and sing, like a woman when she is grinding barley. 


PHIDIPPIDES

    Why, by rights I ought to have beaten and kicked you the very moment you told me to sing. 


STREPSIADES

    That is just how he spoke to me in the house, furthermore he added, that Simonides was a detestable poet. However, I mastered myself and for a while said nothing. Then I said to him, 'At least, take a myrtle branch and recite a passage from Aeschylus to me.'-'For my own part,' he at once replied, 'I look upon Aeschylus as the first of poets, for his verses roll superbly; they're nothing but incoherence, bombast and turgidity.' Yet still I smothered my wrath and said, 'Then recite one of the famous pieces from the modern poets.' Then he commenced a piece in which Euripides shows, oh! horror! a brother, who violates his own uterine sister. Then I could not longer restrain myself, and attacked him with the most injurious abuse; naturally he retorted; hard words were hurled on both sides, and finally he sprang at me, broke my bones, bore me to earth, strangled and started killing me!


PHIDIPPIDES

    I was right. What! not praise Euripides, the greatest of our poets? 


STREPSIADES

    He the greatest of our poets? Ah! if I but dared to speak! but the blows would rain upon me harder than ever. 


PHIDIPPIDES

    Undoubtedly and rightly too. 


STREPSIADES

    Rightly! Oh! what impudence! to me, who brought you up! when you could hardly lisp, I guessed what you wanted. If you said broo, broo, well, I brought you your milk; if you asked for mam mam, I gave you bread; and you had no sooner said, caca, than I took you outside and held you out. And just now, when you were strangling me, I shouted, I bellowed that I was about to crap; and you, you scoundrel, had not the heart to take me outside, so that, though almost choking, I was compelled to do my crapping right there. 


CHORUS

    (singing) Young men, your hearts must be panting with impatience. What is Phidippides going to say? If, after such conduct, he proves he has done well, I would not give an obolus for the hide of old men.


LEADER OF THE CHORUS

    Come, you, who know how to brandish and hurl the keen shafts of the new science, find a way to convince us, give your language an appearance of truth. 


PHIDIPPIDES

    How pleasant it is to know these clever new inventions and to be able to defy the established laws! When I thought only about horses, I was not able to string three words together without a mistake, but now that the master has altered and improved me and that I live in this world of subtle thought, of reasoning and of meditation, I count on being able to prove satisfactorily that I have done well to thrash my father. 


STREPSIADES

    Mount your horse! By Zeus! I would rather defray the keep of a four-in-hand team than be battered with blows.


PHIDIPPIDES

    I revert to what I was saying when you interrupted me. And first, answer me, did you beat me in my childhood? 


STREPSIADES

    Why, assuredly, for your good and in your own best interest.


PHIDIPPIDES

    Tell me, is it not right, that in turn I should beat you for your good, since it is for a man's own best interest to be beaten? What! must your body be free of blows, and not mine? am I not free-born too? the children are to weep and the fathers go free? You will tell me, that according to the law, it is the lot of children to be beaten. But I reply that the old men are children twice over and that it is far more fitting to chastise them than the young, for there is less excuse for their faults. 


STREPSIADES

    But the law nowhere admits that fathers should be treated thus. 


PHIDIPPIDES

    Was not the legislator who carried this law a man like you and me? In those days be got men to believe him; then why should not I too have the right to establish for the future a new law, allowing children to beat their fathers in turn? We make you a present of all the blows which were received before his law, and admit that you thrashed us with impunity. But look how the cocks and other animals fight with their fathers; and yet what difference is there betwixt them and ourselves, unless it be that they do not propose decrees? 


STREPSIADES

    But if you imitate the cocks in all things, why don't you scratch up the dunghill, why don't you sleep on a perch?


PHIDIPPIDES

    That has no bearing on the case, good sir; Socrates would find no connection, I assure you. 


STREPSIADES

    Then do not beat at all, for otherwise you have only yourself to blame afterwards. 


PHIDIPPIDES

    What for? 


STREPSIADES

    I have the right to chastise you, and you to chastise your son, if you have one. 


PHIDIPPIDES

    And if I have not, I shall have cried in vain, and you will die laughing in my face. 


STREPSIADES

    What say you, all here present? It seems to me that he is right, and I am of opinion that they should be accorded their right. If we think wrongly, it is but just we should be beaten.


PHIDIPPIDES

    Again, consider this other point. 


STREPSIADES

    It will be the death of me. 


PHIDIPPIDES

    But you will certainly feel no more anger because of the blows I have given you. 


STREPSIADES

    Come, show me what profit I shall gain from it.


PHIDIPPIDES

    I shall beat my mother just as I have you. 


STREPSIADES

    What do you say? what's that you say? Hah! this is far worse still. 


PHIDIPPIDES

    And what if I prove to you by our school reasoning, that one ought to beat one's mother? 


STREPSIADES

    Ah! if you do that, then you will only have to throw yourself, along with Socrates and his reasoning, into the Barathrum. Oh! Clouds! all our troubles emanate from you, from you, to whom I entrusted myself, body and soul. 


LEADER OF THE CHORUS

    No, you alone are the cause, because you have pursued the path of evil. 


STREPSIADES

    Why did you not say so then, instead of egging on a poor ignorant old man? 


LEADER OF THE CHORUS

    We always act thus, when we see a man conceive a passion for what is evil; we strike him with some terrible disgrace, so that he may learn to fear the gods. 


STREPSIADES

    Alas! oh Clouds! that's hard indeed, but it's just! I ought not to have cheated my creditors....But come, my dear son, come with me to take vengeance on this wretched Chaerephon and on Socrates, who have deceived us both. 


PHIDIPPIDES

    I shall do nothing against our masters. 


STREPSIADES

    Oh show some reverence for ancestral Zeus! 


PHIDIPPIDES

    Mark him and his ancestral Zeus! What a fool you are! Does any such being as Zeus exist? 


STREPSIADES

    Why, assuredly. 


PHIDIPPIDES

    No, a thousand times no! The ruler of the world is the Whirlwind, that has unseated Zeus. 


STREPSIADES

    He has not dethroned him. I believed it, because of this whirligig here. Unhappy wretch that I am! I have taken a piece of clay to be a god. 


PHIDIPPIDES

    Very well! Keep your stupid nonsense for your own consumption. (He goes back into STREPSIADES' house.) 


STREPSIADES

    Oh! what madness! I had lost my reason when I threw over the gods through Socrates' seductive phrases. (Addressing the statue of Hermes) Oh! good Hermes, do not destroy me in your wrath. Forgive me; their babbling had driven me crazy. Be my counselor. Shall I pursue them at law or shall I....? Order and I obey.-You are right, no law-suit; but up! let us burn down the home of those praters. Here, Xanthias, here! take a ladder, come forth and arm yourself with an axe; now mount upon the Thoughtery, demolish the roof, if you love your master, and may the house fall in upon them. Ho! bring me a blazing torch! There is more than one of them, arch-impostors as they are, on whom I am determined to have vengeance. 


A DISCIPLE

    (from within) Oh! oh! 


STREPSIADES

    Come, torch, do your duty! Burst into full flame!


DISCIPLE

    What are you up to? 


STREPSIADES

    What am I up to? Why, I am entering upon a subtle argument with the beams of the house. 


SECOND DISCIPLE

    (from within) Hullo! hullo who is burning down our house? 


STREPSIADES

    The man whose cloak you have appropriated. 


SECOND DISCIPLE

    You are killing us! 


STREPSIADES

    That is just exactly what I hope, unless my axe plays me false, or I fall and break my neck. 


SOCRATES

    (appearing at the window) Hi! you fellow on the roof, what are you doing up there? 


STREPSIADES

    (mocking SOCRATES' manner) I am traversing the air and contemplating the sun. 


SOCRATES

    Ah! ah! woe is upon me! I am suffocating! 


SECOND DISCIPLE

    And I, alas, shall be burnt up! 


STREPSIADES

    Ah! you insulted the gods! You studied the face of the moon! Chase them, strike and beat them down! Forward! they have richly deserved their fate-above all, by reason of their blasphemies.


LEADER OF THE CHORUS

    So let the Chorus file off the stage. Its part is played.

media figures called to trump towers admonished say it was like firing squad… they expected gifts lol
imagine a guy walking in front of a firing squad saying "this is like a Trump meeting

people gonna say this is fascist but there’s no fascism in disciplining filthy rich media liars living off the backs of thousands of thousands suffering… they would get firing squad in nations that pay them but they have no idea how privileged they are and how shitty.

mofucking newyork times worse than cancer. you dont even need a diagnosis to have the news corrupt you.

beforethelight.forumotion.com/t7 … -fantasies

there. leaving Cruxer out of this.
My goddamn back.

Update.

Pezer is in Venezuela, no doubt heavily scheming.

Trump won.

no further changes to report.

"I propose that slave morality be understood as consciousness disconnecting from the organisms self-valuing. A being can no longer rely, in its actions of acquisition of power, on what it is – it is forced to re-determine what it is in terms of the lack, the gap left by the removal of its self-valuation. Since a gap has no content, the identification is shifted to that which has caused the gap, the enemy. A moral slave determines itself in terms of what it hates, by positing itself as not-that. It posits, or attempts to posit, a self-value by establishing a sense of power over the entity that it blames for the loss of its self-value.

As it is still exerting its will to power, it still operates as an entity, a subject, so it is in fact still grounded in a self-valuing. What has been lost is the connection between self-valuing and consciousness. Consciousness has detached from nature, what results can be described as disintegration of value. As long as slave-morality persists, as the unconsciously self-valuing entity persists in its behavior of willing to power on the terms of another entity, as it tries to establish a conscious self-valuing as the negative of what it perceives as powerful (but evil), it operates directly against its natural, innate self-valuing, and this must result in decay.

I think that slave morality can not be inherited, that every new-born being has a master-morality, by which I mean that its consciousness is rooted in a self-valuing. (For example, the mother is valued in terms of the self, that is why we have the Freudian complex of interpreting the mother / parent as the self).

By the genetic passing-on and cultural / physical sustainment of forms of weakness / unhealth, it becomes more likely that a conscious being strays into slave-morality. If the being is both physically unhealthy and immersed in a culture where slave-morality is the norm, it is likely that it abandons its “child-like” master-morality and becomes a value-decaying, alike to its cultural environment. I think of the modern Islamic world, which morality is rooted in the rejection of the west (not to say that the west presently holds a master morality, but it serves as the standard of hated enemy by rejecting of which the morality is largely defined). Breaking out of this cycle, “salvation” could only occur through impulses of a freshly, life affirming nature such as is operative in children.

It seems likely that the teachings of Jesus Christ (whether this is only a metaphorical figure or if he really lived is not important) were aimed to remedy a similar condition operative in the Jews under Roman oppression – a re-establishment of self-valuing by taking on a infant-like perspective. “Render unto Caesar what is his” – his value – have for yourself what is yours – your value: “divinity” –i.e. your self-valuing

Nietzsche had good reason to say that the last Christian died on the cross, because much of Christianity as a culture was a continuation of the self-denying/ignoring against which a “spiritual rebirth” was proposed a remedy. It continued to focus on the enemy, on Evil, even if it politically overcame all enemies, and succeeded so in including in this negativity-standard against which it set its efforts, the things that naturally sustain positive valuing – beauty, strength, pleasure, the ‘good things in life’.

It seems that ultimately such a reverse valuing must come to an end, as the acting consciousness of resentment erodes the unconscious self-valuing on wich it rests to such a point that it can no longer be sustained. Physical reserves are exhausted, the psychological driving force is no longer sustained sufficiently to act aggressively-destructively, the active anti-ethics are no longer possible, nihilism is the result. Depending on the circumstances in wich the organism finds itself, this may lead to, in natural, nurturing conditions of culture, a gradual recovery of natural, positive valuation, conscious self-valuation, master morality – in less favorable circumstances, death seems the only outcome.

Now the will to power is dependent on self-valuing (the standard-setting interpreted as the root/ground of the subject), so where self-valuing is sabotaged by consciousness, as is the case where slave-morality takes hold, will to power remains operative only until it exhausts its resources, it wills the entity to death. The energy is transferred to vital subjects / structures. In such a case the will to power is not aimed at power of the subject, but rather at a transferring of power from the subject. The subject wills himself

Can the will of an entity possessed of a slave morality still be called a will to power? Can it still be called a will? What is more, can we still speak an entity? I think that the answer is: only in as far as it is unconscious. And this makes it clear how (and that, which is a departure from Nietzsches “all is blood” dogma) we may begin to dispel slave-morality" -

Yes, this is a plausible explanation. Also in combination with the examples you give later on, this calls to mind the fact that the lower functions of the organism are not what one would necessarily call conscious. Eating, drinking and sexuality are in fact means to engage in a state of being where consciousness can be suspended. In these states, it is possible, even with a completely defective morality/mentality, to life as a self-valuing. And we see that such activities are in fact often considered as the highest goods by such automatons.

It seems to be very difficult. Recently I’ve been attending a few museum- and gallery openings, where of course the art was post-modern in nature, and I am consistently appalled by the dry-ness of the objects on display. These seems to be no sap in them whatsoever. As hard as one tries to value what is placed in the space that has come into our field of consciousness as forbidding subjective/positive/affective valuation, what one values is ones own interest, ones own brave efforts to ‘make sense’ out of nothing. This is perhaps what is most admirable about out present art-scene – the critics. They, when neither the artist nor the passive audience is capable, are the ones who give, bestow meaning. In them we perceive that not all is lost, that there is still a will to value-as-self-value.

Postmodern art comes very often in the form of ‘criticism of society’, which to me is a lower form of criticism, a more resentful, judgmental, pathetic form than the criticism of the artwork that is the criticism. Perhaps through this by-way, criticism of criticism, valuation finds a way to be possible in the context of art.

We agree, environment is very likely the greatest influence here, but it is indeed thinkable that there is a genetic derangement possible, where people are born without the tendency to self-value. That the miracle/accidental genius of the code of self-valuing is undone by an enduring onslaught of dissociative permutations.

I feel that this is true. In a sense, philosophers have to become “actors” – we must not only be communicators, but also examples. How different this is from Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche – we can simply not permit going insane (at least not finding our end as such), or isolating completely from all social realms – as much as these realms “suck” in more than one meaning of the word, they suck because there are no true signifiers.

But the point is of course that there should be a kind of small multitude of such “Christs”, which means that we may have to do the work of making it possible to become such a figure. Possibly there are parallel processes, in ways similar to this one, in other parts of the world, where the cultivation of an attainable master morality is in progress. But we must take seriously the notion of spreading this idea in several forms, accessible to different minds, and inspiring to action.

Yes!
Perhaps here we may begin to speak concretely of isometries.

Let us not begin by opposing, but by proposing.
Opposition breeds too much rebelling, too much stubbornness.
We must propose new means at conscious willing, for which indeed notions pertaining to “isometries of the soul” as they exist between humans may be necessary.

Indeed, it is crucial to realize that time has progressed, that circumstances are more favorable. Nihilism is unable to do this, so is pessimism, and these two account for the great majority of thinkers these days. It is true that there is much foulness and danger in our time, but this only overshadows the surplus value when this value is not ‘capitalized’ on. And nihilism/pessimism prevent from capitalizing – in short, power is left for those without a social conscience, because power is regarded as corrupting. A more dangerous belief than “power corrupts” is hardly thinkable. In fact, real power (not an automatons place in the hierarchy of a machine) cultivates responsibility.

Death, or a constant ever-present decaying that never quite leads to death. A stasis of decay and destitution, perhaps. This would be a relative loss of almost all emotional and conscious potency, imagining, will, and the adoption of a more mechanical and closed pathos that literally drowns itself in distraction and mindless, soul-less work. Corporate CEO’s come to mind here, as does the typical wage-slave worker who goes every day to the factory, mindlessly performs the same tasks without feeling or hope, and returns home to drink himself into a stupor or turn off to TV or other useful distractions, only to repeat this cycle without end or fail. This sort would be an example where a relative stasis has been attained, self-valuation perhaps cannot realisticaly sink any lower, or rather the separation between self-valuings and consciousness cannot get any larger, so the body-mind effects a certain ‘balance’, this gap rests on the relative consistency of one’s life-situations and the lack of anything which might shake or disrupt this stagnant consistency.
[/quote]
Another useful insight, applying value-ontology to understand the dire state of things we seek to improve. The subconscious self-valuing persists on an animal/reptile level, the superior faculties of awareness are exhausted, sabotaged, or put to use against the interests of the entity.

This is an extremely interesting suggestion.
We might do well to put some work in developing such programs conceptually.

Ah yes, I was going to say “The subject wills himself into oblivion” but actually meant to erase the entire phrase, because it presents some un-clarities.

Exactly. The difference between “stealing” / isolating power versus investing / sharing-reaping power is made clearer.

Let us work on this angle, vis a vis the idea of communicating value-ontology on different levels, besides directly/conceptually also indirectly/symbolically.

"a comment on the occupy movement as (yet) dominated / signified by slave-morality, but representing desire for a master-morality. Taken from here.


The problem the Occupy movement is facing is a classical case of slave-morality versus master-morality.
Holding a slave-morality means to not have ones natural self-valuing produce a conscious notion of self-value self-value. It means to adopt a conscious self-value by the negative valuation of the/an Other.

The Occupy movement has a lot of vitality and good will, but is not able to formulate its values beyond “away with the evil X”. It is not able to posit a value in its stead. It does not have its own value, for its value it is entirely dependent on the thing it is protesting against. As long as this is the case, it will have no effect, it could not possibly have an effect.

There is of course a lot of self-valuing going on within the movement, i.e. people, organisms. But all these are subjecting themselves to what is, thusfar, a slave-revolt. Nothing wrong with a slave revolt, but it will not see any of its demands realized if these demands are not formulated as positives, meaning formula’s capable of replacing the “evil” ones.

This is the finest tip of the iceberg of what can be said of Occupy in terms of value-ontology. The bulk of it would come down to actually formulate a (possible) philosophy for it, to forge it into a “Master Signifier” - an authentic, original voice. Of course value-ontology pertains quite acutely to the financial world and what is wrong with it. To begin with, all of the disasters and exorbitant payments to the masters of these disasters, are based on disregarding, or rather violating, the concept of value. In short: speculative value has replaced functional value. That which is of value to value-determining institutions (Moody’s, etc) does not have anything whatsoever to do to what is of value to a human.

Value needs to be restored in its definition. The speculative market will have to be dramatically curbed and reformed, rationalized. Without joking, we now have the tools to do this. A thorough understanding of the concept value was lacking. This is how it could be diffused through focusing on very conditional/context bound derivatives as if they are the actual concept, thereby gradually disconnecting the notion value from its conceptual root, which is actual, real-world value, i.e. that which is valuable to (a) (human) life.

This is where the Occupy movement may look for its signifier (instead of bloody-faced idiotic grins) - to collect/assemble around it those things which are of real value to the participating people. To create/build a “mountain of wealth” in human terms – that is to say not hummers, prostitutes and dollar bills, but – the diversity of real-world value coming together wherever many people are assembled for a long time, which translates into ‘culture’." [src]

is this true?

“Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.” (Thomas Carlyle)

I worked on a bit on this here.
I wrote the following:

Leaving behind us (behind me at least) now the de debate over whether or not value ontology holds water / is “superior” to the will to power, on to an indication of its uses. For this I introduce this topic:

“Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.” (Thomas Carlyle)

If this is so, and this is no rock solid fact, but at the least a tempting thought, scientific thought would be the result of a valuing the world negatively in terms of self-value. To realize this is of course useful. It gives us the suggestion that science, if we do not radically deviate from our approach to it, and question the nature of its analyses, will keep on trying to negate, which means level.

Science does not permit inequality. Its logics are based on standardizing al value. What remains is value that van be standardized against the ground-value of science, which is not mans self-valuing per se. Science after all arose out of the minds who had to arm against nature, not in those who were “fit to it”.

Philosophy, this is at least the tast that I see now as possible, would have to bestow a new, affirmative morality onto science. Science may, as further understanding into in the future be employed to invest in the world as it is (grows, becomes, emerges, stands forth), instead of trying to subdue this becoming.

A further study of the theme Nietzsche opens with, in the Birth of Tragedy, would be useful. Because the Greeks, in creating Apollo / the Apollonian did the same thing as what the scientist / inventor does - arming against the terribleness of nature – but they did so by positing their own aesthetics against it, rather than to simply submit their judgment of nature to what was possible as a functionality of dominion. In other words, they created something that they could value higher in terms of self value, than they could value nature herself.

This is the genius of the Greeks, their noble genius, set against what must have arisen as the all-too-human genius which Carlyle describes. We must look at this dichotomy, science versus the Apollonian, to recognize in our own culture these two different types of valuing, for they both exist next to / intertwined into each other. In order to ‘heal’ our culture, to truly improve it, we have to make it possible first to distinguish what is Greek, and what is, in short, “nature-hating-ape”."

"From Nietzsche’s Nachlass, summer 1872-begin 1873:

“We are not concerned with a destruction of science, but with controlling it. She is in all here goals and methods through and through dependent on philosophical perspectives, but forgets this easily. The controlling philosophy must concern itself with the problem to which degree science may grow, she must determine the worth.”

"Proof of the barbarizing workings of the sciences. They lose themselves in the service of “practical interests”.

Capable:

I think this forumulation must be for the most part a correct one. Science digs in where it sees need for imroved understanding, it addresses reality in terms of “problems”, sees every situation as a problem as such, a problem of thus-far unrealized knowledge-utility. Over time this problematizing becomes so given that we do not even see it, it becomes entirely normal to look at reality and the situations in reality with which we find ourselves confronted and see these problematically, as things to be “negated” (“solved”), at least in part.

Sinec this solving takes place with respect to the platforms which have come before and over-determine the methodologies and intentions involved, we can indeed state that this negation is also a leveling.

Absolutely! Heidegger does a wonderful job outlining the “nature of technology” as schematization/control/leveling, an essential closure-ing (that is also nonetheless and often despite itself a disclosing of precisely the ‘human element’, if we know how to look for this). As Nietzsche also understood, science (or, with Heidegger, technos) needs to be submitted to a broader encompassing human will (valuing), and the extent to which we fail in this task is the extent we are co-opted by these processes and subdued within them, over-determined by their own logics and functionalities. Man developed as a product of these, this is very true, we are as much a product of technology-science as technology-science is of us. Yet at some point we must rise and take control, assert our own HUMAN will against the essentially inhuman will governing science/techos and its productions.

Yes this is plausible. In “arming ourselves against nature” we posit “otherness” as the threat of raw uncontrolled nature as the higher value, the only thing above which is our ability for resisting this uncontrollability. Science continues to operate on the assumption that endless control of nature is ideal, to not have essential control is ruin.

Some control is of course required, as goes without saying, since man itself is indeed a controlling-nature, in large part. This is what we ARE as a species, a being. But what else resides within, what other potentials exist? As you say we cannot continue to posit values only negatively, against the other, what are needed now are affirmative, positive valuations. The negative valuations of the past may form part of our platform going forward into the future, and indeed these essentially closed forms are necessary for what is build upon and after them, in the same way that our own imaginative-creative thinking is dependent on the regular and entirely restrictive-closed organic-biological processes composing our physical body.

Yes, but even the Greeks posited from an essentially negative position when they proposed aesthetic “solutions” (Gods) to the fury of nature (and of human nature, their internal experiences of affects-desires-drives). If viewed in this way we first see what appears as a digression from Greek to scientist. But this must also represent a progression, an evolving: the valuing negatively with respect to and against “nature” (uncontrollability/unknowability as such, externally and internally) moving from an early stage to a later stage. I can see science as representing very much a more “authentic” or honest negative valuing, the Greek form of this negative valuing being an early pre-cursor or crude beginning positing form, less refined, less “itself”. Science becomes a monster precisely because it takes the internal “contradiction” (to affirmative valuation as self-value, i.e. this contradiction being the negative valuing supplanting a more affirmative valuing potential) and exposes it, welcomes it openly, develops it further and brings it more fully in/to itself.

You are right we must learn to distinguish the Greek from the scientist – in this distinction we can find a relief, a topography emerges wherein we begin to grasp precisely what it is about these valuing positings that is so detrimental and restrictive, so harmfully self-destructive. Of course if we employ Hegel here, it might indeed be possible that mankind must move through these stages dialectically in order to emerge at the other side, the inverse of all negative values-positing. In the present stage we then must work at forging the synthesis. [src]

Capable:

Value-ontology might show us a pathway through the winding, twisting sinew-like birthings of straying and new identities of forms – and as we shall see, a point of arrival at Heidegger also marks the point of our next departure. What links derivations of difference to derivations of sameness? One emerges from the other in sequential patterns, as ideas give birth to precisely their own novelty-in-thought where pursued diligently to (an) end. This novelty emerges as an Identity to itself, being a fully-formed (completely derived) with respect to its incipient foregrounds. This ‘with respect’ extends into whatever merges into/alongside/with these foregrounds, and decreases to an comparable extent as does this element of association. Being an Identity, or a ‘count-as-one’ to employ Badiou, this emergence confounds exegesis and disseminates haphazardly on the basis thereof. To be sure, mechanisms exist which seek and succeed at limiting or outright blocking this dissemination. Analysis now raises to a new level, the level of meta-exegetical concerns which subordinates analysis to analysis-as-utility. This ‘as-utility’ is more properly defined by its “as-utility-for” which first falls within the purview of systems-management and containment-as-closure. This is containment as control. To the extent that methods of control have been raised out of the unconscious and into consciousness a lessening of the strictures of this closure may occur, where disseminated implications of identities are allowed increased freedom of movement to alter and set their own trajectories. It seems at about the point where this movement reaches a sufficient auto-regulating-as-utility-to-analyses that a new threshold of thinking emerges, a new possibility for a new sort of thought-engendering.

It is here where isometries begin to be seen. We get glimpses of strange samenesses of form lurking beneath outward appearances, we are told these are archetypes or some reference is made to genetics or to common cohort-like effects. What is really going on here? To what extent can we state that creation dictates form if we merely fill in our own perhaps largely arbitrary contents upon always and everywhere prescribed forms? This quickly appears as the relative impotency of creatiion, which has yet to extend its influence into the more form-al. A certain condition of this extension clearly being a growing unwillingness for influence-qua-content, for influencing and being influenced by content/s. At an even higher peak threshold this unwillingness becomes inability, blindness. Even higher still, a willing blindness. Zarathustra stood on the mountain top and willed form, but he did not will UNDER form – his willing was not itself a form. Even Zarathustra still willed under content, as a content/s, making use of possibility rather than making of use itself a new possibility as such.

Valuing might shed light here. What is the hand-rail along this pathway that winds and climbs up from the soul of whence to the soul of when to the soul of where-fore? Is the substance of this hand-railing composed of valuations and valuings? Here novelty seemingly aporiatic results from this insertion and we get what seems to be a new identity, a new count-as-one, incomprehensible, impenetrable even here. Even here, value is the ground from which ever-new questions and questionings spring. Heidegger’s “Man is a question” might be as close as we come to a filled-in content-qua-abstraction, but value gives us the form after which we follow these contents questioningly.

It would appear we can ground the isometries of the soul in a values-ontological platform. Set therein we see these isometrical configurations as the still too silent guardians of our valuations, configurations which enable values and the valuings which produce them, isometrical as allows for the possible communication and transmission of these and their conditions from one level to another as well as from one individual to another. We might therefore make even the boldest claim and leap yet: that of isometry being the form-as-such of valuation, its most sufficient (self-)actualization. Does this make sense? Concerns here seem placated when we understand how self-valuing interact, how these valuings must co-occur to be said to have occurred at all. Herein opens forth a new space, unexplored and uncharted. Yet it seems, and even necessarily so, that we nonetheless already possess a certain familiarity with this space, itself still so alien to our consciousnesses! And is this not more precisely what Heidegger was reaching for with his notions of averge-everydayness, ontical proximity and the pre-ontological understanding of being? The point of further productive departure here, the way to continue forward seems to be a further analysis of Heidegger’s meanings and terms/grammars from the position of a value-ontological perspective sufficiently configured so as to include essentially its own isometric conditions of possibility.

Fixed Cross:

Here the next necessary step has been identified. It rises from the proper identification of the locus to which the first step, of formulating / understanding value-ontology, has brought us – the aporia of completely renewed / stripped naked awareness of what existing means to a conscious being. We can no longer take consciousness as the thing that separates us from the non-rational, the animals and the stones, but we now see it, and with it ourselves, in a much sharper light, which illuminates us-as-consciousness, as still infant-like, as a seeming chaos of affects, with as the only consistency this one given, our valuing activity.

Where before, superstition gave us a sense of inner order, now we have the clear perception of an inner turmoil, revolving around itself much like the activities in an atmosphere, unpredictable and too complex to be rational in its interrelating, but to which self-valuing is the Earth and Sun, by which certain revolvings much of the weather-at-large can be predicted

Identifying/creating isometries to the rudimentary cause of these pre-rational conditions to which even our use of rationality must be counted, means creating a grid by which the axiom of self-valuing can be procreated, furthered as a logic, expanded while maintaining its structural integrity.

I propose that the notion of circularity / periodicality must be central to any such isometry. Thereby I mean that no entity may exist as a “block”, with a number of “facets” but always as a coming-back-to-itself, whereby on every cyclus “it” may have acquired new contacts and therewith substance.

It is not a sign of weakness that much of what will be formulated will sound familiar, refer to aspects of known mathematics, physics, common sense, mysticism, perhaps even all other fields of thought, as what we are doing is newly arranging what is already known / been observed. We may be the first to attempt to logically systematize in a fluid, non-exclusivist way. Indeed it would be wise to look at what Heidegger has already done. He did not yet propose such an order as is made possible by value-ontology, but he did outline the conditions of this new type of logic, so much greater in scope and more benevolent to man / nature than the binary method of definition by exclusion.

All is included. But how can we understand this myriad of contradictions, as one system? The key to this is given, the turning of it is requires that we formulate isometries, and establish a grid wherein this particular type of sameness can be reproduced.

Capable:

Additional related commentary:

Fixed Cross: It just occurred to me how fast and uniform things would go if time were in fact linear. It occurred to me that time is obviously spiraling, periodic. It moves “forward” in two directions at once: the curve of the spiral itself, and the consecutive levels of periodicity. Synchronicity then means that occurrences in the two levels of progressions are at positive interference with each other , due to —

This then would be the way to further enlightenment: to find ones own periodicity. It is perhaps here that we maky speak of isometries of the soul.

Capable: I have heard somewhere before of how it is possible to learn one’s own “periodicity” with respect to creative-productive energy, positive vs negative flows or cycles of mood and intellect. What you posit creates a possible rational basis for this idea.

Might we perhaps understand the curved nature of the ‘forward’ progression in the sense of this motion’s impossibility for being totally linear? Linearity would seem to imply a flat medium/space, which appears never to be the case. So we get non-linearity as the possibility for motion, on even (and especially) the “smallest”, most micro levels. Thus: curved traces, arcs cutting through “mediumistic space” (whatever happens to be that through which this particular or other movement moves) that would tend, after the manner of attraction/will to power/self-valuing (however we might conceptualize here), to organize around each other, forming arcs or loops.

What is most interesting to me, then, based on this model, is to try and see how such activity becomes circular, spiraling. As this seems to allow for an augmenting of the influence/s of that particular motion, maybe a simple evolutionary selective principle fills the gap here?

Fixed Cross:

In general this is how I tend to interpret origins in the logic of causality, but it just occurs to me perhaps the very notion of linearity is misplaced, by its application of it to the physical world. Parallel with overcoming the belief that the Earth is flat, we may be headed towards overcoming the idea that linearity exists at all.

Every straight line is a segment of an ellipse, an energy-path (energy may have to be defined as a path, instead of a quantity-form following a path, being now here then there ). Any lineair demarcation of the wold seen as an uprooting of the physical world into a non-physical paradigm upheld only by learning of certain codes, methods. Linearity not as metaphysical, which I take to mean an unconditional definition, an astracted essence, but actually anti-physical, antithetical to ‘nature’, being.

How science cuts into life; blindly. Why it is always fundamentally wrong in predicting its effects, why the “side effects” are aways at least as significant as what is deliberately attained. There is not yet an experience of precision, the general method of science is a blunt instrument, designed to cut off, to uproot, to detach from self-valuing and submit. It is therefore a means to misunderstand, to remove understanding from the utilized, to dis-identify with the course of flux in which the object arises.

It is a powerful means - but to what? The notion of linearity has made it possible to dislocate self-valuing, to eliminate being.
If we know this, then we have a criterium to set a limit to what science may offer us – the elimination of space-time.
As Aldous Huxley observed in a psychedelic vision, “speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure”. It may be the only thing that science is worth to us – transportation and communication. All physiology may be dealt with by the mind.

To link the mind to the root of matter, energy-paths, is to overcome the adolescent will to know it all, to directly apply mind to form.
The well adjusted mind knows its periodicities instantly; the immediate mind, actuality. One can not solve a problem by destroying the context wherein it exists, the problem will live forth in the mind of the destroyer. The problem must be understood as an opportunity. This is the will to power in a political sense - power to interpret the other as oneself, oneself as the ‘master’ of the other - as being at root of the new other.
Real power makes the subjected stronger by subjecting it - it makes of the subjecter and the subjected one triumphant entity.

Wow, that’s a lot of bullshit that matters to nobody.

Fuckhead choose a hell of a retarded time to return. See if he can get me a stack of those 100 Bolivares. I’ll hand them out as novelty presents, each one is worth 1.5¢, not even worth counterfeiting at this point, and they are technically not Eben legal currency at this point.

PARODITES:

I’m a fairly long time friend of aletheia. He has directed me to this forum, and a good first post would be a message I sent him comparing value-ontology with my own project. The self-quotes are all from a book I am writing, Hamartia: An Essay Toward A Speculative Ethic.


I want to offer a brief comparison between my project and your own. We both, to my mind, are attempting to recover the valuing subject.

I will begin with a sentence from Fichte.

“The positing I, through its most wondrous capacity, holds fast the diminishing accident [an emotion or experience] long enough to have compared it to that which displaces it. [ a succeeding emotion or experience.] It is in this almost always unrecognized capacity that knots together unity out of perceptual oppositions, that intervenes between moments that would cancel each other out, and thereby preserves both; it is what alone makes life and conscious possible.”

The positing I, or what I call the empirical ego, or empirical self-consciousness, is the self which consists in the consciousness that there is something that endures through time and experience, as opposed to the transcendental ego or self, which is that which endures. This capacity for the empirical self-consciousness to hold an emotion or experience in memory long enough to be able to compare it to the next emotion or experience is, for Fichte, that which makes the totality of experience conceivable, ie. the transcendental ego. But this capacity, this wondrous capacity as Fichte refers to it, is only possible if the empirical consciousness originates in a passive state, as opposed to an active one: it’s capacity relies on a more fundamental incapacity.

I speak of this here:

" Plato and Aristotle agree that philosophy begins in a passive state, as opposed to a creative state, of the soul. This state they call wonder, thaumazein. This word, however, does not simply imply sublime awe, but rather the capacity to intimate the unknown and strange, to recognize some obscure connection between one’s self and the foreign. It is in this sense that the Greek poets use it to refer to the gods, for they could intimate something of their divinity, and still further, realize in the image of this divinity something of their own humanity. This obscure relationship between the self and the world, the ego and the cosmos, man and his gods, is the essential relationship which all philosophy has explicated over the centuries. The passivity, then, is not one of impotence, but of pregnancy.

Man can only sustain himself as man by delving into that obscure relationship, which must necessarily silence him, or set him aflame, as was the fate of the Gnostic angel upon re-entering the world of mortals. He is like a character designed by a poet and thrust into the scene of some play, and can hold his personality and identity in existence only by continuing to engage in the play, even though this grants him an incomplete personality and identity, powerless to shape its own fate. In a certain sense he, like the tragic actor, can only maintain his identity by continually denying it. This disturbing quality of the passivity in which genuine consciousness originates, Kierkegaard spoke of in his conception of despair.

Kierkegaard conceives of the self as a synthesis of the infinite and finite, though an incomplete synthesis: he essentially presents a form of Kantianism which lacks the idea of a final synthesis which would inform the unity of the self and moreover serve as something analogous to the categorical imperative by which an absolute basis of the self and of human action could be determined. This lack of an absolute basis for the self and human action is the source of Kierkegaard’s despair: for him it is only in god, not within the self, that this basis can be found. He thus stands among all of those beautiful but innocent mystics, granted that his mysticism is articulated in a purely philosophical language and thus serves as a healthy curiosity for all philosophers. We have here, with Kierkegaard, rejected the hope of a completed synthesis, but we have also rejected the hope that in God there could be found any absolute basis for the self and an active power, since only in that obscure relationship between the Gods and man, self and world, can consciousness be maintained, and we cannot degenerate into mystical self-oblivion: the ego, the self’s reflexive and empty self-image, the psychological expression of the principle of identity, lives and takes on shape, and becomes pregnant, through the reconciliation of the ego and non ego, through their co-extension along the fundamental spheres of though; the living consciousness in which the ego indwells is eternally bent toward the self’s true being, which cannot be absorbed into any dialectical system and stands always outside of thought. The fact that consciousness thereby exists as an endless determination of this true being of the self, not suspended between two infinites as Pascal would lament, but embodying their eternal conflict, and out of joint with himself just as much as the world, is the source of that disturbing quality of the passive state in which man finds himself." - Hamartia

So the empirical ego thrusts itself into a process of reconciliation with regard to its fundamental principles, the ego and non-ego, the infinite moral will or potency and finite time and reality, freedom and necessity. The deeper it thrusts itself into this process, the more powerfully it is able to sustain itself, nonetheless as something incomplete, so that it most posit something not involved in this process of reconciliation: the transcendental ego, the self as such. The empirical self can only exist by the positing of something beyond it, that exceeds it. Men have called this something God, have represented it with different ideas and philosophical systems, but it is simply the absolute subjectivity. This part of my philosophy came to me when reading of a concept elaborated by Schleiermacher and Feuerbach called absolute subjectivity. The former said “Emotions are significant not simply because they are ‘felt’, but because they are inward witnesses and responses to realities other than the self.” They used the concept to explain religion in the following way… Man objectified in his Gods these inward witnesses of his own sensations and qualities; they represented the omnipotence of feeling. They represented aspects of human nature freed from time, place, nature.

This “self as such,” the transcendental ego, belongs to that transcendental order which values, philosophical and moral ideas, and Gods represent. These values and ideas are not positive objects of knowledge, but merely representative, representations of this order:

"Kant’s philosophy is essentially an attempt to relate transcendental and empirical apperception; to unite the original consciousness of man as a particular subject, as a being in possession of a soul, as a self, to the consciousness of this self enduring throughout many changing experiences. He attempted to do what Aristotle had failed to do, namely extrapolate from the conception of the universality of experience the universality of knowledge. This concept of the universality of experience, which is the basic insight of Kantian philosophy; the concept of a totalizing power on the part of human reflection, which realizes its objects in synthetic union, is however antithetical to the form which philosophy must assume. These two consciousnesses cannot be united, but only inter-related, for the simple reason that the former cannot be positively designated as an object of knowledge. " - Hamartia

Philosophy, beginning with Plato, has understood itself as only a representative knowledge, while ethics and morality have in a sense degenerated, in the attempt to be positive objects of knowledge- facts, or sets of particular knowledge, particular virtues and vices. As the ideas of philosophy represent the transcendental order, so I want to establish a new morality wherein values represent the process of analogy by which the empirical and transcendental egos might be and are related to one another. Philosophy is the revelation of the transcendental order to which the self belongs and by virtue of which it has existence, while morality must be a system of relations which allows the empirical ego to grasp its own nature as analogous to the transcendental ego. Morality would thus exert a transformative power rather than a prescriptive one.

This analogizing or transformative power, I call the “daemonic.” A Daemon in Greece was a half-god, between man and god, which carried humans from the mortal to divine sphere. Eros or love was, itself, referred to as a daemon. I take this term from Bruno. I offer some formulations of the daemonic, what I conceive to be the fundamental moral reality, here:

"The life of the self is a continual ascent and descent through these different modes of existence, [egoic and nonegoic, freedom and necessity, etc.] a continuous articulation between these two different spheres. Giordano Bruno regarded the self in this way, namely as a kind of expectant disquietude which must continuously articulate itself amidst opposing forces; between the ego and non-ego, freedom and necessity, spirit and flesh, in his concept of love. In love’s attempt to spiritualize itself, to overcome finitude, the limitation of bodily existence, mortality, and necessity, it is deceived by the image of beauty and falls only into sensuousness, in which its spiritual ecstasy is annihilated. Thus love is committed to a cyclic process of ascent toward the spiritual and descent into sensuality, which Bruno calls the heroic frenzies. Through love, it is as though the seed of the eternal takes root in time, the seed of the spirit takes root in flesh; the attempt love makes to make itself spirit is not paired to a desire, for desire is already directed toward beauty, nor to a state of inebriation, but rather to the disunion within the lover himself, which expresses itself not through a synthesis of the contrary forces which war within him, but through a continual division of these forces into objective relations between freedom and necessity, truth and beauty, spirit and flesh.

One should recall the words of Aeschylus:

oneirophantoi de penthēmones
pareisi doxai pherou-
sai kharin mataian.
matan gar, eut’ an esthla tis dokōn hora,
parallaxasa dia
kherōn bebaken opsis ou methusteron
pterois opadous’ hupnou keleuthois.’

Why does Aeschylus use the word “keleuthois” to designate the path which the deceptive images of beauty take in leading man to the sleep of empty, hopeless longing? Both Hesiod and Parmenides used this word when making the point that day and night, sleep and wakefulness, are caught up in eternal alternation, and so pothos or longing, the sleep of love, continually awakens us to eros and the definite object of our longing, and this awakened love must in turn fall back into itself, must sleep.

Ει ουν φιλοσοφητέον είτε μη φιλοσοφητέον, φιλοσοφητέον, [Man, by virtue of his daemonic nature, must be a philosopher, rather he wants to or not, rather he philosophizes or not.] to speak with Athanasius. We cannot, in the manner of one of the old Greeks, name the world a cosmos and beauty until we have named our own soul a cosmos and beauty; to behold and grasp all the world in an idea we must first have come to know ourselves as one particular being and no other and have had everything good and evil rent from the trembling heart and held, not in time, which diffuses our being like colors from a ray of light, but in eternity, which concentrates it. Every man of genius has believed in the eternal, that belief is the very condition of his vitality and flourishing. Perhaps this belief serves as nothing more than an obscuration of the spirit, which man requires if he is to ascend into the highest possible regions of his genius; perhaps he must find all the earth wanting if, like Cassandra of Ilion, he is to utter things not fit for the earth, but it is always the same, and we become like that angel whose wings were set aflame when he reentered this world, if one can entertain the old Gnostic myth. We suffer upon turning back into ourselves, we suffer from the failure to seize upon that inner motion of the heart’s genius, which alone could move us to acknowledge the ideal as fate; the consequence of that strange lust which compels us to embrace obscurity, darkness, and uncertainty, but moreover to prefer this benighted world of the self over that law which strikes against the heart when love, fully matured, overcomes and inspires us to act with proud indifference against the hazards of our mortality. Dei virtutem dei sapientiam, [knowledge, for god, is a virtue] or if one may reverse the old theologian’s paradox: yes, and man’s sin; or, to reinterpret the account of Genesis, what flowered with the greatest sweetness in heaven is reaped with the most bitterness upon the earth.

Making use of Bruno’s account of love, I call the resolution of the disquietude of the self the heroic, and it’s return into itself, the daemonic. The daemonic leads to a polarization of the individual through a series of subjective transformations, as he is led to find his place anew in each of the oppositions which have been established between the principle of the ego and that of non-ego. This concept of the “daemonic” I venture as the perfect articulation of the incongruous position of the Pascalian man, as well as that disunion which lives from within man himself." - Hamartia.

Thus I have recovered the conditions and fundamental reality behind the valuing subject, the empirical ego, which Nietzsche failed to do, but without any reference to his philosophy, and outside of any Nietzschean framework. Though, to speak like him, my philosophy/morality is “beyond good and evil” in the sense that all the virtues and vices and systems of value are equally representations of the transcendental order.

"Philosophers have proved incapable of conceiving of good and evil, freedom and necessity, the finite will and infinite creative power invested to man at the same level of moral reality, although Spinoza should be commended for making a brilliant attempt at doing so; one is always the negative expression, or lack, of the other. The fact that the empirical, lived self-consciousness can only preserve itself as an incomplete process, with no final synthesis of its contents which would allow it to grasp its freedom, not as the disparate extension through various transformations in life, but as a singular will and imperative, a categorical determination of its character, in the language of Kant- that is the source of “evil,” that is, what the Platonists formulated in the proto-moral conception “akrasia,” acting against ones own ethical and rational principle. Insofar as man’s fundamental experience as an ethical, moral, or meaning-seeking being is one of limitation and finitude, his fundamental experience as a free being in possession of a will must be one of “sin,” of corruption. In the first case man takes freedom as a representative idea, as a representation of the transcendental self-consciousness and ideal ego, but in the second case he must realize this “ethical idea” in some objective specification of knowledge, in order to exercise his will and moral potency; he must realize it in a particular canon of virtues and vices. But as was shown in the previous essay, his moral potency does not truly belong to the will, to his free agency, but rather to his capacity, as an empirical or lived ego, as a daemonic being, to be stimulated by the transcendental ego, that is, to preserve himself as an empirical self-consciousness, as a living ego and in the spirit of daemonism, by positing an ideal representative of the transcendental, toward which he must direct himself, even though the preservation afforded to him in this process is a preservation, a being held in existence, as only an incomplete being, a sinful being, a corrupted and limited being. " - Hamartia

Fixed Cross:

A rich injection of value into this young venture. I will formulate a quick overview of the immediate identifications my mind makes.

Where value ontology works as an abstract logic, wherein fundamental processes may be formulated, here is a concrete psychological approach, already beset with explicitly human meaning.

I already see the framework of a bridge to be built between these logical and psychological paradigms. Your work, what is here, coincides with the theme I have not yet dared to address, I preferred to keep grounding my logic by challenging it over and over. Behind my arrogance there is of course a fear - that what I say might at any time be broken by a superior logic or worse, a flaw in my own. But it has survived and in the meantime the question has remained: if the definition of the verb ‘being’ is ‘self-valuing and valuing in terms of self-value’, then what precisely constitutes self valuing, and what valuing in terms of self-value?

Yesterday night it occurred to me that self-valuing must be entire invisible. It can only be inferred from everything one does, and it can not be stimulated directly. (Self-help therapy - “you-are-worth-it!” does not work, as the will to make such a statement departs from the premise that one feels that one is not-worth-it. “Is that all you’ve got?” should be the exclamation. The acknowledgement of disappointment is crucial.)

The instinct to self-valuing can however be trained, indirectly, it first appears as faith. A more advanced clarity as to how matter stand between the empirical self-consciousness and the transcendental self exists in the state of zen not typically seen in monks as much as in the strong and morally dominant people of an ascending race; the pure clarity of deliberate good expectation. What might be seen as a third stage of mastery is play. From this, art, but also science, and in general the manufacturing good fortune by interpreting the chasm between the reality man and mans sense of reality as ‘opportunity’ as positive, as real, as working.

Forgive this bland term opportunity (opportunism stands to honor as valuing in terms of self stands to self-valuing), as it is very closely related to value – it designates the bridge across the abyss of knowledge of good and evil, as taken in the irreconcilable terms you have described. The “product of faith” is a formulated will to rationally/morally arrive at what one irrationally/immorally desires.

This accounts well for the paradoxal nature of consciousness, which seeks certainty in unification but stabilizes as the realization of an unbridgeable gap. And this realization is the bridge - as it posits the gap as a lack of moral dynamism.

You have already made clear that morality must be an activity, and activity is per definition creative, making use of actual conditions, sharp, observing – the first words abstracted from the playful flux must have begun by sharp, actual minds catch-grunts, and down the line, such actualizations of the immediate context into a centralized sense of identity, have evolved into philosophies, all the way up to the scientific paradigm.

We are now at the point of realizing this ‘catching’ for what it is - its perimeter is secured, truth-creating has arrived at a definition of itself as the opportunistic business of reproducing life itself. Where nature had before only (though already a feat of cosmic proportions) posited itself as good, it now is able to observe that it has done this – and admire it- now her-self for it all the more! As perhaps nature made beauty because it wanted to reward itself for creating herself against all odds out of her unnecessary absence, thereby making herself even more likely to exist, so now philosophy can ornament itself, reward itself for having produced the concept “truth”.

This has been the central task of art - to make nature appear to man, man to himself, as true, viable, likely to exist, in the terms that are closest to honesty.

In general, what is man - that which knows truth, or that is truth? Can one be truth and know it? This knowing-being must go by the exclusive name of philosophy.

Parodites:

You are quite right, self-valuing cannot be stimulated directly. The instinct for it can however be indirectly trained, the ancients did just this.

One of Holderlin’s most beautiful pieces of poetry may be found in the sentence, “If once the divine succeeds through the poem so near to my heart, then I welcome the grave’s eternal silence.” The recognition of something beyond the sphere of the poet’s individuality and experience is the necessary precondition for his flourishing, and the Greek pantheon served in just this way for Holderlin himself as well as for the ancients. Through such a recognition the mortal act is prevented from being closed, and the possibility of the divine announcing itself through it can be entertained indefinitely; through the great symbols of their mythology the ancient Greeks succeeding in transforming the mortal sphere, the domain of “eternal silence,” into a genuine depth, into which one might venture in the hope of discovering some new datum of experience yet to be formulated. Mortality and finite, lived experience for the ancients became a womb, the “secret birth of things,” to cite Schiller, into which they willingly entered when the light of their ideas no longer bore enough of itself to kindle the heart of the poet. It is with this piece of poetic wisdom that Holderlin wrote his tragedy about Empedocles. What I have called the “daemonic,” then, finds its most poignant expression in the birth of poetic inspiration. The light of our ideas has faded as well, and yet we do not know how to conceive of our mortal life in this way, as a depth- only through the recognition of something beyond our individuality and experience, only through the refusal of hypostasizing experience as an absolute, can the circle of mortal life remain opened.

It is not only in a religious sense that one should understand this for indeed all of our truly philosophical ideas, comprehended not as positive objects of knowledge and hypostases of experience, but as representatives of this transcendental order- that order of things exceeding the sphere of individuality and experience, have equally allowed the finite and transitory ego to exist as an open rather than closed circle. The Gods as representatives of this order were imagined when the continuity between the language of ideas and experience had not been precisely delineated through a philosophical vocabulary. We must, now armed with such a language, realize the “transcendental unity of ideas,” through a new morality that aims, not to hypostasize experience and grasp in positive knowledge a series of particular virtues and vices, but rather to fully explicate this continuity; where philosophy exists to represent this transcendental order, morality most exist to mediate the two spheres, the spheres of experience and ideality.

Self-valuing is the correspondence between these two spheres. Holderlin enacted this correspondence when writing about the death of Empedocles (Empedocles wanted to prove he was an immortal God by jumping into mount Aetna, and as he did so, he perished.) One can only accomplish this by recognizing something that exceeds one’s own personal existence, (for Nietzsche, eternity) an excess which represents an order to which the self that is bearing recognition actually belongs. Nietzsche had to recognize an eternity beyond the sphere of his own empirical, lived existence in order to finally recognize himself as an eternal being, in order for the empirical and transcendental aspects of his ego to finally correspond.

But everything about our modern world and the direction that science and philosophy have taken seems bent on “closing the circle” of mortal life, on annihilating any possibility of mediating the transcendental and empirical spheres of the ego.

::

What real domain can the human being claim for itself, when its most vital existence is found in the correspondence between the finite and transcendental spheres, when- to speak with Hippocrates, it finds in all men something divine, and in all divinity something of its humanity? This daemonic nature is the alien intelligence with which the will operates and is not itself a master; the symbols of myth and the host of philosophical ideas, as the most profound exertion of the human will, have not evolved by some merely inventive poet to represent an arbitrary reality of his own design, but have evolved rather out of this daemonic nature, in the pre-reflective state in which the poet recognizes something outside the border of his own experience and is in this way opened up to the deeper life. These symbols and ideas, like the eternity of Nietzsche, or the Prometheus of Aeschylus, are not linguistic in the same way that our common speech is linguistic, for they originate in the daemonic nature which is the precondition of human self-consciousness, and as such represent things not yet able to be fully articulated by the self-conscious human being; the myths and philosophical ideals are all true, for there is a human being to debate rather or not they are true. They are the precondition of human self-consciousness, the mere fact that we can debate them signifies their truth.

The contradictions and disputes among philosophers arise from a spirit philosophizing out of something other than the spirit of daemonism, something other than that middle-position and pre-reflective state which opens up the sphere of the mortal being to the immortal sphere.

The ancient philosophies were all spontaneously engendered through the daemonic, they served as a horizon through which the self-consciousness could take shape. They served as a limit to what could be expressed in human tongue.

And this is one of the greatest of mysteries. Language can only evolve when something has placed a limit to what can be expressed; there must be a limit placed upon language before language can evolve. Language only makes sense when it begins through a passive state, that of the daemonic being which has been opened up to “the deeper life.” I can only speak the word “man” when the word “god” has served as a limit to the former conception. So on and so on, down to the first word, so to speak.

Philosophy, as that essential thing which a daemonic being does, as the fundamental nature of a daemonic being, (the only one we know of is the human) is the ground of this mystery.

Capable:

This passivity I would call an essential unknowability unto oneself, the disappearing self within oneself. We might call that passive which is not yet capable of harnassing its own indeterminateness toward some projected and protracted end-use. That this ‘obscure relation’ between finite and infinite, constrained and limiteless objectification and perception is that middle-ground wherein, necessarily, the play of forces surfaces to condense, distill out a more or less common element, a ‘summational movement’ deriving from the movements both up and down, in and out, yet wholly reducible to neither. And due to the unknowability, the void of self-disappearing which arguably is the impetus for the emergence of the transdendental sense itself, this summational movement also cannot be reduced to the supposed union of empirical with transdendental.

The incapacity of the ‘empirical’, the inability for an erected structure of total self-enclosure necessitates, where this inability comes to directly and sufficiently inform the more central functionalities of consciousness in its multitude of manifestations and modes - in other words in man, who has become a consciousness sufficiently conscious of, responsive to, itself in terms of itself - the fabrications of exteriorities into which displaced machinic operations may be put, failing as they do to find anything tangible, “empirical”, substancial to couple with/in.

So not only have we traced the origins of the trancendental fabrication, but we (you) have also posited this as the medium-framework by which the sustaining-maintaining of inner experiences (“an emotion or experience”) is made possible; i.e. if the empirical consciousness lacks the incapacity for grasping-holding sensations long enough to effect sufficient comparison to what came before and what comes after, then the transcendentality can find no point at which to hook into this empirical relationality, the middle ground is obliterated. Man’s consciousness grew up from ape to the extent of becoming self-definitive and self-sensing enough that the void of unknowability became know to man; when this void came to be known to consciousness it fractured the unity of this consciousness, broke open the (superficial semblance of) connective-temporal continuity of conscious experience/s. This created the possibility for the transcendentality to take over the role as “connective tissue” via positing an-other exteriority. Additional to all the other utilities of this positing, of central importance here is that we get a increase of the empirical capacity to relate across time without sacrificing its awareness of the void. Void is sustained because temporality effected and becomes that by which positions are more essentially posited and projected (of course this transcendentality always ultimately wraps back onto the “empirical consciousness”, onto the affective-intensive conditions and environmentally-interposed movements comprising the psyche in its actuality).

The passive state as the inability to more fully reconcile two opposing spheres of conscious experiencing, an essential incapacity for unification. This strikes me as perhaps nothing more than a necessary distancing of organic parts from each other, being as they are separate and incapable of becoming-one. The necessity of time-space separation between those which are other than each other, regardless of the extent of their mutual co-relationality, being, particularly with respect to the vastly deep and intricate relations attained between these spheres of consciousness, perhaps the sufficiency of these very spheres themselves. As you write later, language must be limited, subject to limitation in order to grow. So it is with all things, no form can attain to a limitlessness, and where it is not cognizant, influenced by its limits it swims in a sea of ineptitude and arbitrariness, disconnected from its actual conditions (and the conditions of its own possibilities) in reality.

Unlike Kierkegaard I do not lament the separateness of the “consciousnesses”, the fact that man is a being-machine composed of separate functionalities and spheres of experiencing-determining. As the immediate knowledge of man’s own essential unknowability penetrated into his consciousness it became necessary to posit with respect to this void, this incapacity. Why? Because to not have done this would have been for man to stagnate at the pre-self-conscious level, for knowedge of void to have acted as an absolute barrier to further growth. Man ingeniously (naturally) found a way (adapted) around this problem, found a means to continue growth in the face of the severe implications steming from the direct knowledge of the void. We can understand and appreciate this adaptive process which has given birth to man as he is, to the “schizophrenized” “bi-polarized” consciousness that divides functions among the various parts of itself, not sparing any function from this division, even the highest (most emergent-summational). Philosophy needs to learn to function within this intermedial space, learn to exist as the possibility for a bridge across the otherwise (with respect to otherwise transcendental visions of absolute unification) incommensurate.

Yes, morality as the “philosophy” (the self-experience) of the empirical ego, where traditional philosophy serves as that of the transdendental ego. You see this as a bringing-down-to-“earth” (to the actual lived reality of the subjectivity) of philosophy? Ethics serving as the anchor by which philosophy is grounded to “the world”?

As we can never reach a state where one “half”, one side of the equation of self-subjectivity - world or heaven, finite or infinite, real or imagined - is annihilated, being as they are each conditions of and for the other, man thus far fluctuates between these as his desires lead him now up, then down. It does seem centered around desire, longing, but we might conceive of the more essential-foundational movements (e.g. love) as being derivative from a less developed “desire” and more so a direct manifesting of structurality itself, of the conditions of this internally-divided (two-part) consciousness. If so then love becomes not only the most powerful attempt at unification but also the best way inside the divide, in terms of direct sensing. So the task of philosophy, and of your ethical project, is to further delimit this inner divide and objectify its conditionalities toward the end of effecting new couplings between empirical and transcendental “egos” (qualified-aggregate form/s of constancy of experiencing/s) such that we begin to develop representational understandings (analogies, metaphors) of these spheres of consciousness - of the conditions of the empirical ego - rather than, as ethics (and an unfortunate amount of philosophy as well) has tranditionally been known to do, arrogantly and arbitrarily impressing artificial impositions from without which have little or no substantive bearing upon that which is actually being impressed-upon?

Yes, this is all beautifully said, and how you define the opposition is wonderously useful and inspiring. We have a platform from which to grasp these transformations of sorts which are the basis of an evolving and expanding subjectivity. The condition of the eternal for such expansion-growth - the direct manipulation of the horizons and substantive fabrications of this eternality therefore the condition of the possibility for self-grasping and self-directing one’s own transformations of consciousness. This is very “occult” at heart: we set the limit of ourselves, against ourselves, in order to generate resistances productive of new evolutionary potentials; we explore further definition along the edge/s of certain horizons of our being in order to effect better representational analogies between the internal mechanics of these limits and that which is most limited by them. This is philosophy as powerful, conscious utility.

The valuing subject then being that which exists in terms of the conditions of its own self-valuing, the conditions imposed upon itself by itself. Clearly this occurs most in the most “developed”, internally complex being, e.g. man. The “void of unknowability” representing the ultimte threshold for self-valuing in that self-valuing can never truly (directly) value ONLY in terms of its “just itself”, being as it is both essentially unknown (closed) before itself in its being as well as being a largely contingent manifestation of its embedded situatedness within “the world”. Neither can this self-valuing get control of this world nor of its own eternally escaping mnemosyne. In man then we see the highest synthesis of the possibility for self-valuing projecting from within the constraints of these world-conditions. As man continues to operate within the intermedial space between his projected-imagined self-valuings and his concrete-actual self-valuings (valuing with respect to either the cohesive-interpositional fabrication/s of images of unity or the emergent structural-architectural embodiments of his more functional-reactionary biological-psychological being) he experiences his own expansion, his own “controlled schizophrenization” that can never stray too far too fast just as it can never cease expanding altogether.

Parodites:

I will write out a longer response to you soon, for at the moment I am withdrawing pretty badly from opiates. I have been here before, when my seemingly faithful muse, opium, shows me its graver aspect. But all pain surges up from within one’s self, and is never, nor can ever be, the product of a merely external influence… so nothing can prepare one for it, for pain. In pain there is an alien presence which everything in your nature tries to reject, to push away, but it cannot, for this alien presence is someone connected with you, its life is in fact your own life.

You are quite right, my ethics is aimed at rooting philosophy in the element of genuine experience. To let my book speak for itself:

"… The only man that has ever appeared before the eyes of the philosophers is the man in a sickly, diseased state, the man enraptured with idealities, upon whose imagination plays the whole throng of human fancies and manias. The man who has cloistered himself up beyond the influences of such things never enters into their considerations, for it could only be a philosopher who had been spared such a fate, never a man. We lack any concept of a true and vital struggle with illusion, of a vital and human struggle in which philosophy may perhaps at one time have found its origin. "

This vital struggle with illusion… is what morality should have been.

::

“So the task of philosophy, and of your ethical project, is to further delimit this inner divide and objectify its conditionalities toward the end of effecting new couplings between empirical and transcendental “egos” (qualified-aggregate form/s of constancy of experiencing/s) such that we begin to develop representational understandings (analogies, metaphors) of these spheres of consciousness - of the conditions of the empirical ego - rather than, as ethics (and an unfortunate amount of philosophy as well) has tranditionally been known to do, arrogantly and arbitrarily impressing artificial impositions from without which have little or no substantive bearing upon that which is actually being impressed-upon?”

Yes, precisely.

And now, I venture to the modest servants of the God Asclepius. Doctors…

Fixed Cross:

I am tempted to use this for a reversal of values ‘certain’ and ‘potential’. Now that the real-world, experientially human definition of potentiality has been given as the space between the divide of transcendent and empirical, we may consider this invisible field of potentiality as the certainty, and the limits between which this space exists as the potential. In other words, we suspend the visible and the seeing, in favor of the primacy to a synthetic experience as the benefactor of the entire delineated spatiality - in this a sense of natural ethics is acquired – first incidentally, through cultivation and writing, formulating creating sediment. This works as a penetrating influence both on the transcendent experience and the empirical ego, who now find a limitless space to experiment, rooted in a new meaning – no longer the basis of certainty, but the means to experience.

Where we have always sought experience, we will be able to cause it. Our influence on the empirical world as directly on the cognitive process, no longer via ‘verification’ through a model of objectivity.

This experience is at first assumed, as in strictly postured mediation - it is in any sense not a given. This is how it is alike to morality - it is active, flows forth from posture of the organism to its experience, in which two principles that may go by a thousand names are observed: rootedness/balance/endurance, and openness/willingness/ concentration. I think that these two refer to respectively the transcendental and the empirical.

We agree then, that morality can only be trained indirectly, as an instinct, a “tendency to be in the position to judge”.

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“Where we have always sought experience, we will be able to cause it. Our influence on the empirical world as directly on the cognitive process, no longer via ‘verification’ through a model of objectivity.”

Yes, exactly!

I have been trying to connect my two separate projects. My theory of consciousness and my ethical project. This causing of one’s own experience I formulated in the following terms:

" The great pregnancy.-- Primitive life which could only respond in an immediate way to stimuli would have remained on the earth for only a short while, for a more refined life endowed with what we call “consciousness” had to arise. These new forms of life gained the capacity to react, not immediately to an external stimulus, but mediately, to an internal world, by engendering a mental affect, a “thought” which, in this context, is only a kind of reflex. “Thinking” is only this mediation carried to further and further extents. With this consciousness, behavior was rigidified into instinctual organizations of mental affect, what we call impulses or drives. What we call a behavior, a reaction, is only the reconstitution of certain mental affects, by means of a reflex- namely, that reflex or fundamental schema of consciousness introduced by the development of primitive sensation in response to primitive stimuli: it is the induction of a certain chain of mental causes and effects which nature, experience, and memory have rigidified into hierarchy and organization. This reconstitution is the basis of all consciousness, which is to say, of all stimulation. Egoic consciousness, however, that self-consciousness peculiar to man, has emerged out of this reflexive organism, as its highest power, in accordance to which a new means of organizing the affects has been realized.

The qualia of an experience is directly analogous to a quanta of consciousness, that is, of reflexivity. The instincts, or “drives,” to use the language of modern psychology, are not really singular affects, affects with an immediate character. They are organizations of a kind of primordial sensation, a character-less affect, which have been produced by the reflexive coordination of this primitive sensation. In the lower forms of life this reflexivity endows the affect with character, in the form of pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion, and the character of the affect becomes more nuanced in higher life, and in relation to the development of a more complex sensory apparatus. In man, the reflexive organization of mental affect led to his awareness of enduring states of emotion, of sense, and eventually of enduring things, and of himself as an enduring entity. Language and self-consciousness here emerges, as the highest degree of reflexivity. In accordance to this new self-consciousness and language, which eventually became reason, man has begun to organize the affect in a different way, a non-reflexive way. He is organizing it in accordance with his reason. This marks the beginning of modern consciousness, an active organization of the affects, in accordance no longer to the primeval schema of consciousness, but in accordance to conceptions, ideas. Two different modes of consciousness are, as it were, existing side by side in man: the left-over of the older, reflexive consciousness, and this new, active one. To enlarge itself, the active consciousness must decompose the reflexive one. Reason introduced into that structure of man’s drives which nature, over the thousands of years, had produced, a disharmony, a breakdown. This turmoil and war among the drives is what we have called our “unconscious.” The completely active consciousness has yet to emerge… An applicable metaphor to describe the reflexive consciousness is memory. Memory relies on the capacity to perceive similiarity among objects; an animal, after eating a fruit that has a particular smell and falling ill, realizes in another fruit that also possesses this smell a danger. The sensuous element, the smell, is endowed reflexively with a qualia, in accordance to the organization of characterless affect or sensation. Once a suffienct store of this affect has been organized, an instinct is produced … Consciousness itself possesses a metonymic structure informed by this principle of similarity. It produces similarities to establish the contiguity of experience through the reflexive organization of affect until it reaches, in man, the abstract and linguistic, the archetypal. In accordance to these types, the new consciousness, the active consciousness, then decomposes similarity, realizing differences in objects, collapsing the contiguous or metonymic structure of temporal and spatial relationships. Further, it’s affects are no longer organized reflexively, but with relation to the various producible types. The human capacity to regard futurity, to plan, and to reason, is essentially a differentiating, a distortion and reintegration of the contents of the metonymic consciousness, its work being essentially the reverse operation of memory. It involves, ultimately, discoordinating the structure of the drives established by the older consciousness. It has not yet gained sufficient power to endow the characterless affect with quality; this new, active consciousness, is incapable of producing passions and drives in accordance to its own principle, that of differentiation. Man does not “feel” through this active consciousness, all of his passions still belong to the reflexive or metonymic consciousness. The structure of reflexive consciousness, of the metonymic consciousness, along with the instincts and various passions which it produced that continue to live through man, are of course erroneous, are of course constituent of a false consciousness, however beneficial they were for animal existence- for the concept of similarity is erroneous. Language, reason, and the active consciousness function on a very different principle, and that human in total possession of this later consciousness has not emerged yet. The passions and drives which live through and exercise themselves upon me, are only so many memories passed down from animal life, which are structured in accordance to a principle, namely that of the similar, which is contradictory to the principle which informs the very language and reason with which I regard the work of these passions and drives.

Perhaps what separates man from the animals is not his intellect, but the fact that he needs this intellect; the fact that, in relation to the other animals, whose various drives have been carefully organized into succession, rhythm, and functional hierarchy, man’s inner life is characterized by a contrary state of turmoil, of contradiction and war amongst the drives. It is thought that man could carry on as he does not, purely instinctually, that his “self” is somehow a superfluity of nature. That is not possible. Consciousness arose only to make sensation possible, for the mediation of the inner world which is essentially what consciousness consists in is necessary for sensation to take place, and self-consciousness in the human sense of the word is only this same mediation carried to the highest power. As a result of developing this self-consciousness, man’s attempt to accomplish an active as opposed to reflexive organization of the drives in accordance to his language, ideas, and reason, implies the destruction of everything formerly “conscious,” implies the destruction of this pre-existing reflexive consciousness, and induces the conflict among the drives.

It is only now that the various impulses of man’s nature (the impulse to truth, to justice, etc.) have been isolated and delimited to the extent that their universal turmoil, the universality of the war amongst the drives, and the complete annihilation of this former consciousness can be grasped by those new philosophers in whom it must find expression. Above all else one must keep in mind that it is a superficial conception of the unconscious to regard it as merely a store-house for repressed or forgotten objects of experience, for in fact it is constituted by this conflict among the drives, and is pregnant with a new, as yet unforeseen consciousness, a consciousness developed through the active organization of mental affect and wholly opposed to the reflexive consciousness through which man has to the greater extent operated in the course of his history- a creative, as opposed to “re-creative” consciousness, so to speak. Where it was the task of the older consciousness to organize mental affect reflexively, it will be the task of the new consciousness to exploit the basic schema in accordance to which the reflexive consciousness has transformed the uncoordinated and formless affect- that is, to “think” into this formless affect, producing that effulgence of new passions and unremitting sensation, which flourishes and dies in the same breath, which will one day be called the “self”.

Reason, fundamentally, disqualifies the affects, it disrupts the structure of the affects which qualifies them as drives, as passions, which gives them quality, be this quality pleasant or unpleasant. Spinoza accomplished the most systematic disqualification, reducing the affects to one basic quality, passion, and emotional state, namely joy, and considering all the “bad passions” merely corrupted qualifications of joy. He is an example of what I called the active consciousness. An imperfect example, but an example. Not to disqualify the affects through the hypothesis of a fundamental quality, (for Spinoza, joy, for Nietzsche, power) but by their complete reduction to quantities of consciousness… (consciousness is only the metonymic structure which qualifies them, which endows them with quality by configuring them as single passions and drives, more consciousness equals more sharply defined affects.) Who has done that? I’ve elected it as one of my tasks. A truly active consciousness could arise only after this total reduction was accomplished."

::

And in another place:

“The musical animal.-- The development of human language only becomes comprehensible when one proposes some purely representative language out of which it evolved and eventually adopted the power of communication. It is probable that the first man Adam did not comprehend things in name, but in song. Music is just such a kind of purely representative language, when one regards it in its most essential sense, as an art whose own medium or manner of depiction serves as the depiction itself; music is the primeval nature out of which man first began to take cognisance of the world through his intellectual, abstracting power, rather than his brute sensibility, in which all things first suggested to him their “meaning,” in which every being stood frozen in a moment of revelation and betrayed its form to him, rent open by the entry of his voice. The dream of all poets has been to realize this purely representative language in words rather than in tones, but unfortunately the instinct or need for communication, which grew up within man much later, only after the utility of form was realized, and has thereby been insolubly bound up with words, always makes itself known, and renders this goal unachievable. In music itself this instinct has been exerting a retroactive influence, imbuing mere tone and sound with communicable significance, so that rarely even in this domain does man attain to that state of complete suggestibility which is called “inspiration.” We cannot discover this primeval consciousness by realizing it through the analysis of our own music, but in the terms already ventured here one could imagine it as that point at which the consciousness, in its reflexive organization of the affects, first achieved that degree of reflexivity necessary to produce self-consciousness in our human sense of the word, when the enduring forms out of which our experience is constituted began to appear as such, as enduring, as form. That power which has transformed and has been transforming consciousness, that power for actively constituting the mental effects rather than reflexively, in accordance to our language and reason, in accordance to our more refined self-consciousness and the real utility that we find in the apprehension of form, namely logic and communication, will one day be controverted, as the last remnants of the older consciousness are annihilated through the new means of organizing the affects, so that the new state in which man might one day find himself, a purely active consciousness, will be quite analogous to that “musical consciousnesses,” to that absolute suggestibility before the world, in which all things intimated to man their being, which we cannot now imagine. But this new consciousness shall not represent, it will not represent at all, but only create, only declare; this consciousness of absolute communication, of absolute expression and engendering, will be more similar to the older consciousness of absolute representation than it is to our present one, to our now chimaeric nature.”

::

You may notice that I have succeeded in equating consciousness with sensation. Sensation emerges as affect without character, affect yet endowed with quality by the reflexive operations on which consciousness is founded. As I put it here:

"The inevitability of consciousness.-- Why did nature see fit to endow us with a consciousness whose only use, at times, seems to be in allowing us to apprehend our own pain? Why could we not have been slightly more ethereal beings, as whisks of smoke which this world might have stirred for a moment and in the next instant wafted into nonentity? Why must this consciousness preside over us, cleaving to the remotest tremor of hunger or pain, and so needlessly torturing us? Why could we not have been as but images cast in the waters? All would be as it is now, only without this consciousness which convinces us that it is we whose images have been so cast. These questions are attractive in their naivete, yet sensation and consciousness cannot exist without one another, in fact they are simply two aspects of a single faculty. The peaceful, insensitive, oblivious life which nearest approached a merely mechanical existence could not have abided long upon the earth- nature does not rest. These more fortunate creatures, possessing no sense as we understand it, were soon educated with that primeval formulation: Pleasure and Pain. Here consciousness arises. For, rather than behaving out of pure mechanism, as did their ancestors; rather than reacting in an immediate way to the world about them, nearly blind, these new beings could now react reflexively to secondary affects produced upon their inner conception of the world, they could entertain a sensation of alluring or repulsive character. A noxious odor, a sound, an image, a memory; these all became ripe with meaning for the new creatures. This is of great import to the living being, and it is also why, in giving to us those supreme tools of pleasure and pain, we were inevitably cursed with consciousness; consciousness is simply the reflex itself, or is constituted by it at any rate. Sensation and consciousness are fundamentally identical, they are two words describing a single faculty. "

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To actively think into the formless affect of sensation, producing new passions, new qualities of affect, endowing the formless affect with quality through reason, qualifying it in accordance with reason… Is the future of philosophical method. An actual production of experience, rather than impotent reflection on it. This can only take place after the reflexive consciousness, its remnants at any rate, are completely dissolved. We are in a privileged position to do this, seeing as how the reflexive consciousness with all its various passions, with all its various qualifications of affect, as the impulse to justice, knowledge, morality, etc… has been fully delineated by our philosophical predecessors.

::

As I say in the 291st aphorism of my first book, “Towards the good conscience.”

“Toward the good conscience.-- It is probable that the greatest human beings were in actuality the most child-like, but also the most courageous; who, by virtue of their courage, found the greatest beauty in emblazoning all their lives with hope’s plaintive colors, their greatest happiness in the bountiful enthusiasm of desire. The misfortune is, that in time one of their hopes must be realized, one of their desires attained, in which case their good conscience about things becomes poisoned by reality, which forms only the lowly dregs of a wine that has long since run dry and, in relation to their ardent dreams about life, must always corrupt them. Hence, the great commandment of Epicurean morality to throw off all the dregs of reality, which of course means to throw off reality itself, to dwell silently in one’s little garden all life long. A Stoic, possessed by an opposite nature, and perhaps also by an opposite courage; incapable of hoping and desiring with a good conscience, without the birth and death pangs of expectation and dissappointment, aims to so wholly indwell in reality that he forgets how to desire and to hope completely, but with the same final aim as an Epicurean: to maintain a good conscience, only with respect to bearing the truth. These are both quite violent methods toward securing a peaceful breast; have we developed no subtler means of reconciling the ideality and actuality of man, of taming the heart than- Epicureanism and Stoicism?”

::

Fixed Cross:

I want to think more about the daemonic and the heroic. For now I address those things which point directly to the possibility of creating new methods, whereby a fully active consciousness can be made to emerge.

If I understand correctly: The subconscious not as “nature” or simply the un-self-conscious, but as the battleground in which reason tries to kill “nature”. I interpret this is a reversal of the traditional approach, which has things emerge from the subconscious to be grasped by reason - here reason submerges itself, as a weapon, into the animal consciousness and ravages it, much like industrial man does to his surroundings.

Yes, an important point here (you have made many) - the human organism is organized by itself teleologically - its instincts are arranged to serve an abstract purpose. The nature of this purpose differs. Religions are invented to the end of setting a cultivating purpose, commerce works to arrange instincts in another way - no generalized goal/method so far, in our time, has proven to arrange the affects in a way that produces a truly happy creature. But man is capable, in some cases, to set for himself such a goal, to arrange his own affects, on an individual basis. These are “free men”, in command of themselves. Corresponding with what has been covered above such successful command is indirect. In this case it works by strategically projecting a goal, the attainment of which is not important. The goal serves to arrange the affects in a certain way.

Another practically useful definition. I have before attributed to the human the capacity to re-write memory. The “faculty” doing this is what you describe.

I suppose that this is true, yes. To a large extent, perhaps there are already some small exceptions. Perhaps in some humans, the new consciousness is able to produce, momentarily a kind of proto-affect. For the most part you are right, it seems - I notice in myself that the great passion of triumph that should come (that I would expect) from creating a new rational philosophy is entirely absent. It leaves me cool, calm, simply more conscious. We must perhaps actively create, forge such passions as what came before us has forged the instincts.

This appears as a very dangerous idea when put raw like this, to which defense I propose that it need not be antithetical to the old consciousness, and its ‘ingredients’. Rather, the new, active consciousness will have to make use in every possible way of what presents itself to it as the material of his former nature, the technical possibility of drives, conditions of organic life, chemistry. The only thing that is fundamentally changed is the order of determination - science has to do away with its false modesty, what may also be called its unjustified claim to objectivity. What “is” in man-as-animal is no longer ground, ‘canvas’, but rather ‘paint’, material. It need not be erased in order for its hegemony to be broken and its powers placed under the rulership of the new consciousness.

This is a crucial insight. From here on new methods can be devised, and the methods that work the best in what has been considered “treating the subconscious” (imaginative re-creation of the interior world) can be explained, and expanded.

::

In the terms we have, the significance of this is literally unspeakable.

" It is probable that the first man Adam did not comprehend things in name, but in song."

And this is how we should attempt to approach ourselves from here-on. Not as regressing back to Adam, but to approach meaning in a more direct way, no longer as that which is waiting for us to pick it up and use, but as that which needs us to exist, and between “us” and “it” this “musical” - which then must be closely related to the daemonic.

We are honored to have your writing published here. It is fortunate that our two logics are brought into contact. I can not oversee the potential, there is a dark green ocean in high turmoil between here and the horizon. The work of taming this nightly ocean will be done bit by bit, mile by mile. But the end is clear:

Outstanding. Yes, this garden. My obsessive thinking, from childhood on, has been aimed at making the world subject to the laws of my garden. In this I did not seek to lie to myself about what the world is. On the contrary, I sensed that it is always lying to itself, ‘it’ here being ‘the world at large’ - the statistical world, hell of hells. I held it as necessary that what has been called to be the ‘spirit of play’ and which now you have designated in terms of the daemonic, would be the law of the world, instead of confined between fences excluding the world of politics, common sense, business.

How can this spirit rule? In order to solve this question, value-ontology was formulated - I had to formulate why it must rule. The purity of self-valuing, the solid, philosophical establishment of its primacy, over all the terms now constituting ‘reality’. Of course, it does rule, where/whenever true rulership is exercised. The workings of all leadership can be understood by value ontology, and the consciousness of all true leaders or “master-signifiers” as the daemonic. It is the only type of spirit that may properly rule, actively direct, justify a priori its consequences.

::

Allow me some experimenting. I may be deviating from your definitions as I use your terms. Please step in when I make them unrecognizable.

A meaning of the ‘heroic’ is beginning to dawn on me, in the terms of leadership I just described. As leadership always requires sacrifice of the objective, an enforcing of the subject-as-art on its less than perfect canvas, there is always a certain danger involved, an ‘against the odds’, a going-down, the certainty of a compromise - not made my the subject but by fate, between the subjects inner ‘structuring’ as ‘daemon’ and the subjects outward ‘unraveling’ as ‘heros’ - the modus in which his value is perceived, spent.

There is always this dialectic, a frenzied activity indeed, between the hearts genius and all compromising means to “grasp” this, or “have it grasped” - see it confirmed. Such means can be refined, by the introduction of music, but in this first the essence of the loss becomes more apparent - the tragic. The effect that this tragic, the essence of lost self-valuing (a kind of value-sediment) revealed, has on the spectator is ultimately the value being transferred from the hearts genius of the falling hero to potential new self-valuing, in other subjects.

I have wondered how the mechanism of self-valuing might be spread - it now seems to me that here a reaching-out and risking is involved. But the heroic could not be effective to this purpose if the daemonic is not immediately re-attained. The dynamic between these two is the truly dizzying, the frenzy, the inspiring. By its negation, the ‘truth of the daemonic’ is exposed, after which it is drawn in again by its affirmation.

Parodites:

“If I understand correctly: The subconscious not as “nature” or simply the un-self-conscious, but as the battleground in which reason tries to kill “nature”. I interpret this is a reversal of the traditional approach, which has things emerge from the subconscious to be grasped by reason - here reason submerges itself, as a weapon, into the animal consciousness and ravages it, much like industrial man does to his surroundings.”

Yes, exactly. Our consciousness is essentially a metonymic structure… intended to grasp temporal and spatial relations through contiguous impressions. To do this there had to arise a primordial, pre-reflective affect in the conscious animal. This is “sensation.” The first sensation was the first moment of consciousness. In the terms I have been setting forth, they are describing one faculty, that faculty which organizes, reflexively, the affects into contiguous impressions. This reflexive organization is essentially the creation of an internal conception of the world by qualifying, endowing with qualia, this primal affect of sensation. Through the metonymic relations carved out by an animal’s personal experiences, it learns to associate the raw information of a sense like a peculiar smell- say a poisonous fruit it ate once, with the ill feelings imposed by its poisoned state. This “bad” character of the primal affect, the sense, then, is the qualia. Over time these reflexive organizations play off one another, generating a richer inner conception of the world, and more intense qualia- qualified affects that no longer need an external stimulus to be invoked, are created. These would be analogous to what humans call fears, but in any case as they grow more complex they become recognizable as “passions,” as the beginning of a psychology. Eventually this process produced the human consciousness, which is so refined in its inner conception of the world that it is capable of using words, and of reasoning, and has been endowed with the sense of self. In accordance with these things a shift in the structuring of the consciousness began. No longer are our affects being organized reflexively, but rather in accordance to reason, to our thoughts. This has introduced turmoil into our passions, which are no longer held together in the coordinated organizations nature produced, and their war with one another has been deceptively called our “unconscious.”

Thus:

“Reason, fundamentally, disqualifies the affects, it disrupts the structure of the affects which qualifies them as drives, as passions, which gives them quality, be this quality pleasant or unpleasant. Spinoza accomplished the most systematic disqualification, reducing the affects to one basic quality, passion, and emotional state, namely joy, and considering all the “bad passions” merely corrupted qualifications of joy. He is an example of what I called the active consciousness. An imperfect example, but an example. Not to disqualify the affects through the hypothesis of a fundamental quality, (for Spinoza, joy; for Nietzsche, power) but by their complete reduction to quantities of consciousness… (consciousness is only the metonymic structure which qualifies them, which endows them with quality by configuring them as single passions and drives, more consciousness equals more sharply defined affects.) Who has done that? I’ve elected it as one of my tasks. A truly active consciousness could arise only after this total reduction was accomplished.”

This is what I mean by the disintegration of the reflexive consciousness within us, the remnants that it has left behind and through which we feel. Our active consciousness, as Spinoza and Nietzsche’s case prove, has never been capable of producing its own passions, of qualifying the affects on its own. The most the former two were able to do is reduce all the affects to one fundamental quality, joy and power, respectively. To grasp all the affects, all the passions, as only quantities of consciousness, as only different degrees of reflexive organization, would allow the active consciousness to finally begin qualifying the primal affect of sensation on its own, producing its own qualities, qualifications of this affect- its own passions.

::

I would agree with these terms and your picture. The most painful depth of daemonic existence must immediately thrust one into the heaven of heroic philosophy, and vice versa. Modern man has been prevented from attaining that depth of daemonic existence though, as a consequence of the radical divide between the languages of the empirical and transcendental, of experience and philosophy. Hence my new morality, which would aim to reinstate the continuity between these two languages, between the empirical and transcendental aspects of the self, would have as its goal the production of a new heroic philosophy, and new heroic philosophers, a new “mens heroica,” to use Bruno’s own term, or “heroic mind.”

Fixed Cross:

The creation of new, realer passions then! This is necessary now as water is to fish, In terms of what I used to know as enthusiasm, I can hardly breathe in this new space, it is too heavily charged with real possibilities, possibilities for transformation of my environment. So the forging of an at least higher, deeper and wider passion seems to me indeed a necessity, even to express the fact that we have embarked on this journey to open up reality, open it up to its potential, directly, after all this preparation, from reflexive organic learning to the last poems of philosophical yearning for honesty.

What kind of passions may we imagine here? What is felt? Of course, the ‘it’ of feeling is a sediment of the passion itsefl - but the sediment is needed to begin to institutionalize such deliberate sensation into categories, which must take on a form of context in which the passions may emerge, not of description of what they are.

Pondering, again I come up with the idea that ‘our nature’ as we perceive it must still be used, though not as a hegemonic drive, but as a pool from which to delve useful elements to fit and sustain the architecture of our drives, the newly attaining form of passion we seek, whereby the world is transformed.

It is my strong believe that whereas the daemonic informs us about what it is that needs to be attained and what it is that is attained, the heroic does not inform us at all, but inspires us to inform ourselves. It draws us outward, it is the tragic fall fo self-valuing emitting the music that beckons others to value the tragic hero as themselves - i.e. value themselves in these heroic terms.

Parodites:

Yes, that’s why I titled my book which deals with these ideas, Hamartia. Aristotle’s term for the tragic element of the heroic figure.

Value ontology is a philosophy that reads between the lines.

Value ontology equals self-valuing logic; the logic of beings, rather than of Being. Beings are given, Being, in as far as it would be a unified state inclusive of all things, is a hypothesis.

‘A’><‘A’ ; within a logic of the ontos, difference is as fundamental to entity as it is to identity. Mathematical abstraction is a creative artform, not a faithful representation of reality.

New philosophical axiom:

Being is a word.

or

“Being” “is” “a” “word” (,:;?.!)

That is to say it might only be that. Unless we ‘mean it right’, ‘shoot straight’ - but for this our grammar is yet too crooked!

Grammar is under fire here. Grammar forms the lines between which philosophy must operate.

But this is not necessary. It is possible to approach language in the same way as one would approach physics; by first setting the terms, the calibrating operations to the reference frame. For this a term is required that refers to both physics and the human psyche. The terms “attraction” and “will to power” have been coined. These are both accurate, but not they do not produce a grammar around them. They do not explain themselves.

Philosophy crosses the long distance between word and reality. Or it has tried. By analogy, I would be claiming that value ontology is an arrow that hit the bulls eye. And this means there might be others that hit it - let’s say Nietzsche was the first to hit the board, to prove it exists. In that case, VO might be just one ring closer to the center. But this is only a metaphor. As is “everything”.

From hereon, we shall thus discuss “being” thinking of it as “the word “being”” . *

Into the words then. To value means to hold something distinct from another. “Being” = “Self-valuing” or extended “valuing registration (impacting physis) in terms of self” whereby “self” refers to the continuous (so as to be registered as existence, ‘affect’ if you will) form of the valuing, not to anything besides valuing, which if it is destined to be more than dissolution, entropy, amounts in self-valuing.

“self-valuing” is thus indirect, as is “being”.

What is ‘direct’ is action. It is involuntary but it produces our notion of will, this is enough for now to describe the power of its difference from being. Action is related to the term ‘event’ one action is never reducible to a single self-valuing. More on this, infinitely more, at a later stage.

All synthetic thoughts are actions; our nervous system pushes us to action, either inward or outward. Inward actions have formed the brain, through the organisms tendency to maximize its own self-awareness toward pleasure on a spectrum that all behavioral psychologists use.

Directness is what one might call a radical form of being, caused by a dense configuration of passive being that begins to be changed by the fact that its internal logics contradict the others, when they are in the same place at the same time. This is when the will to power arises; when self-valuing becomes active, an valuing becomes a matter of overcoming resistance and thereby inadvertently self-overcoming. Unless one is literally made out of gold, which can not be changed, and is thus perfectly self-valuing. Gold acts on its own terms; that is why the ancients called it a noble metal.

Some actions lead to death. An action also “self-values” but it has a very limited lifespan. An organic being is a collection of actions and results on the capacity to sustain similar actions.

Some beings develop a greater range of successful actions, others die and whither off because their range wasn’t sufficient to experiment. Experiment is the only way to acquire power. When one is given great influence but no experience, what some would call power quickly turns against and very likely annihilates its wielder.

Self-valuing logic is born out of endurance, out of rugged naked experience with the wild. It is both psychedelic an analytics. It is life, the circle, the imperfect always improving excellence of being that Homer sings about and that shall be exalted even above Homers imagination, to Olympian laughter among humans being as common as birds among a song.

Objects or characters or natures or individuals are no longer given. They are there only in as far as they ‘give themselves’ - self-value. Their nature is not different from their cause. Thus it includes many other natures by implication. But not, as ooSpinoza argues, all natures, for there is no whole; such a thing is not given, but again a hypothesis.

For instance: a tree still falls if there is no one around and it produces turbulence in the air and ground but it does not produce ‘sound’. That is a phenomenon that derives from our eardrums, i.e. the thing between the phenomenon and ‘that which gives’ - the ‘giver’ - and I mean of meaning, of character, objectivity, nature, individuation; being-as-such. ‘Sound as such’ namely does not exist; there must be ‘a sound’ or ‘several sounds’ for ‘sound’ to exist. That means that it must becomes something within something else; a human experience. Therein can it self-value; i.e. respond to its environment in such a way as to continue to exist. That might be as an idea written down in a book, or as some grooves in a vinyl disc, or the memory of it in a mind… it needs to be recalled, ordered to presence to be verified but if it can be verified in theory, it ‘exists’.

That is never to say ‘strictly to itself’; often the level of involvement with other being determines simply the level of our involvement in our own being. This is very slippery ice; one can, with some discernment, become deeper and richer and ‘happier’, but many lives, most civilized lives perhaps, are lived excessively by other self-valuing terms than the ‘spirit’ of that person, the entity that might emerge if the mind was dead-seat on the values its spirit, fire, will sets for it. Such an entity can not be pulled into a Frankensteinian quasi existence by unknown hyperbolic assumptions. Detach! But slowly we proceed, in degrees.

What we need is visceral pathos, passion of the heart to direct the brains great madness, the violent ventures of which a man is inadvertently capable and often inclined, which must ultimately result in mastery of the Earth; that is to say, to behave in such a way that makes it possible to ay that the Earth self-values. Right now, man is a contradiction to that. A great one, requiring a great solution. Man is not capable of this in general, he needs his excessive warriors or that. These have now taken up the sword. Sword? what a I saying – the pen. Far more dangerous.

  • The word refers to a complex arrangement of things, namely everything. It does not, thusly, appear to do its object of reference any justice. It does not even show how precisely it must, as a word, contain itself within the vast, or infinite expanse of its reference.

But there never was a way to particularize the term being so as to represent, rather than to refer. Or so it seemed: in this very yearning for such a way was the way itself. The thinking mind needed required a ‘self’ (this is what philosophy is, the search for the self of thought), but it was looking in all the wrong places. It was looking at everything besides the ends to its passion. It could not acknowledge that all is selective passion, valuing, because that seems not noble enough. And - it wasn’t. Man could not believe this, because he was not noble enough. He did not deserve to believe it.

[OP]

Value and Value-Judgments

Value is a word indicating a relationship.
The relationship is between an observer and the observed, therefore it only has meaning in relation to living organisms within world.
In it most basic form it is an organism evaluating an otherness in relation to its needs.

Humans, having the ability to go beyond the third level of cognition, can evaluate a behavior, a choice, in relation to a projected objective, an abstract ideal.
In other words he can extricate his own needs from the process and compare an action to an ideal.

This ability can produce the value represented by money, or the value of numerical measurements representing the phenomenon’s activity measure against an abstract, immutable standard.
This is how we can measure temperature, or speed.

Value only has meaning in relation to a motive, a goal, an objective.
Value is not an intrinsic part of a pattern.
A phenomenon lacks value, but only in relation to a motive, such as measuring its activity, its energy, relative to the observer, or some standardized abstraction.
A stone has no value. It is pattern, or a congruity of patterns that may be measured by an external consciousness that first differentiates it from the background, from its pile of stones it is among.
A stone is given value either in relationship to this standard, ideal, usually mathematical, or in relation to a goal, such as building a house.
Similarly, a stone has no name unless there’s a consciousness present to give it a standardized noetic model, such as language a symbol, a word associated with its pattern.
Stone, the term, is not a intrinsic aspect of its existence.
Similarly speed-of-light has a speed.
The value we give to this activity we call velocity, which is nothing more than its pattern, is based on human standards, which are, in turn, founded on human metabolic rates.
It can be 299792458 metres per second or it can be 186,282 mi/s.
The numbers are not an intrinsic part of light. The value they represent is a representation of its behavior, its pattern (inter)acting. In this case in a vacuum where interaction is minimal to the point of being inconsequential relative to human lifespans, and speeds of awareness.

The type of pattern determines its (inter)activity, therefore it determines how an organism such as man using light as a medium will perceive - interpret the phenomenon.
if the medium is not light, not visual, but acoustic then it is how atmosphere, the patterns we know as gases, (inter)act with a given phenomenon, and then the eardrum.
We give sound value according to this interpretation of (inter)activity, based on our organic limitations. We give it a tonal value, we interpret it as noise or as ordered noise we call melody, or music.
Sound is vibration which is another way of saying pattern.
Light is also vibration, energy - the fastest pattern man can process, making it a metaphor for human awareness, the extent of man’s perceptual-event-horizon.
Sound has no value in and of itself. It is given value, either as a way of categorizing it, or in relation to the organisms needs. A particular sound may mean dinner, or a coming threat.
Sound is simply patterns (inter)acting.
Man gives sound value in order to categorize it, to know it and then to understand it.
Sound resonates, in other words it (inter)acts via the medium of atmosphere with an organism.
It has a psychosomatic effect.

Value only has meaning in relation to a goal, an objective, or what is called an ideal.
The most abstract ideals being mathematical 1/0 binary.
The word has no meaning outside this relationship of actor, within world, using the objective as the standard.
Anyone using the word in any other way is attempting to hide nonsense, or plagiarism beneath verbal confusions, and then excuse it using mystical innuendos.
His motive - goal, objective - is something other than clarity.
The ideal, or objective or goal is not automatically equal to any other.
It is evaluated not only in relation to how realistic it is, or how close one can come to achieving it, but also by the consequences of striving towards it, by the kind of psychology it produces.
Consequences are what we call the cost/benefits produces by striving towards the objective, even if it is not attainable, and/or when it is attained, to whatever degree.
Consequences not intervened upon by some external force that would adjust the costs/benefits, making the actor believe that its judgment is no different than any other.
With no skyhooks, no human interventions, what is left is a mind measuring itself against world, in competition with others doing likewise.
There is no “I say so”, “He says so”, “God says so” or the democratic authoritarianism of the majority imposing itself on the individual of “We say so”.
There is only a mind, an actor, subjectively judging world, including all other actors participating within it, indifferent to its choices, facing the consequences of its judgment calls.
We call this natural selection.
To determine natural from artificial environments, one must eliminate ALL human interventions, including technologies.
There’s a reason why females have the form and the psychology they do. In nature their reproductive role burdens them on the back-end cost, whereas for the male the costs were front-loaded and had no, or minimal, back-end costs.
This is not Paternalism.
This is why human morals began by shifting from a purely bonding mechanism to one intervening upon human choices and behaviors. But they were not very effective being that they were human contrivances, using a natural behavioral mechanism for human social engineering.
This is why morality, imposed by Abrahamic religions with a carrot-stick approach, had to also include the penalty of law.
The objective, the ideal, the goal, here was to intervene upon naturally evolved human behaviors to achieve social harmony, or artificial tolerance.
Monogamy and the institution of marriage were additional human contrivances aiming for the same goal, the same ideal.
Yet, despite all those human inventions and interventions human still manage to revert to their evolved behaviors, particularly when stress decreases the frontal cortex’s dominance over the reptilian brain.
Take adultery as another example.
No matter how many rules, regulations, peer pressured and enforced norms, how many moral laws, or human laws are in place, even under the penalty of death, humans will still cheat on their mates, particularly the more base animalistic types. The less evolved ones.
Behavior evolved before and outside human societies still overwhelms human judgments, and “I say so” rules. Because the authority is inside each and every individual…and it is called genetics.
The meme is like a cover evolving out of, or contrary to this genetic past/nature.
Nihilism produces the most past/nature annulling memes…which would include morals, ideals, and socioeconomic ambitions.

What a fitting name, Crow.

The only way I can value this so-called “Satyr” is by imagining him as weaving his old crow’s nest of a persona out of overfulness, in order to be a rod, an absolute negative scaring others into relative positivity, colour, beauty.

It’s as a means to this, then, that he denies all life, all valuing, in the inorganic–and even to a great extent in most of the organic, even most animals, even most people. I wonder if he has thought the experiment of the Weltbild.

In any case, if my most generous suspicion, my most beneficial doubt is correct, he will understand that goals, objectives, or ideals are themselves values: not in the sense that they necessarily have intrinsic value, but in the sense that they are necessarily valued by those pursuing them.

Likewise, that the carriers and manifestations of genetic blueprints are but the environment of these τέλοι, these Ideas,–these qualia.

Good Disciple, and forever loyal follower of the cock’s crow, and the pussy’s bark, I salute your tireless commitments as wife-maiden and poet, designate, of the royal court.
With so much supplicant back-slapping you will certainly find a place on the master’s table, and will be forever canonized, as one of the original founders, and knowers of the true heir.

When Christianity 2.0 finds its way into the catacombs where freaks, and geeks still hide, unaware that the second coming has come, and new and improved Messiah walks upon the earth, they will storm out into the streets to bring about a revolting revolutions, of revolving Revelations.
The substitution of ‘love’ with 'value, so as to usher in, through the Pagan’s “back door” Nietzsche, the big cock himself, was brilliant.
Finally Judaism and Hellenism will synthesize in a successful and glorious monstrosity, saving all from this cruel, and unjust cosmos.
All will love themselves and god, no…sorry, value themselves and life.
And though we can find self-loving and sell-valuing, in the self-preservation department, we shall not buy such simple products but choose to challenge our witless-wits and mystify it, color the box with mysterious icons, runes, magical incantations offering immediate physical rewards, not to be confused for Placebo effects and psychosomatic influence, as the faith healers performed on the Christian flocks.

And all with a simple and shameless change of words, and then its validation no less complex and “philosophical”, to impress the potential buyer, like Sauwelios, the head of the marketing department.
Why use proper terminology when inappropriate words, like ‘value’, as the Christian used ‘love’ to describe their Nihilistic miasma, can produce the right amount of confusion, and perplexity, permitting plausible deniability to forever claim to be misunderstood by the nay-sayers, and only felt as true by the faith-believers.

How ironic that the old half-breed, used to bridge Hebrew and Hellene, has been replaced by a new, cRapping one…born among the lowly and impoverished, no doubt, and not among the spoiled and pampered.
How ironic that Nietzsche is now the icon, as Jesus was, that will head the church of the new-Christian era.

Do not Christians accuse skeptics of negativity, of hating and fearing their God, of not understanding Scripture sufficiently?
Straight out of the degenerate manual you come, Sauwelios.
You are the old, recycled, turned to mulch and then sold to the hungering masses as nectar.

From a chaos is born a dancing star, is that not what your idol said?
For he can speak and do no wrong. He the alpha and the omega, in the church of VO, for little boys and girls, in this Modern era.

As such…from the ‘negative’ the ‘positive’ emerges, you faith-believer and forever follower of the impressively, plumed self-handicapping pea-cock.

For when a man creates a meaning, he must draw it from nature’s order, and when he constructs a meme, it must be in harmony with nature’s genes.
Ideal and Real must be as close to harmony as possible, for a beautiful melody to echo.
Declaring yourself master exposes a miserly spirit, hoarding accolades, desperately seeking approval.

Ideal must align with past/nature, with the individual the conduit, the willing chain in the link, proud to pass on what has come before, and not seek to stand out, like an artist desperate to become Tupac, or Madonna creating pop music for fame and fortune.
A true artist, like a true philosopher, does it for the pleasure of the work, because he must, as it is in his nature, and fame and fortune may come or may not, but this does not motivate him, and so it does not dissuade him either.

Speaking lies, after you’ve convinces yourself of their validity, and covering up your motives with excuses, is vile.
The ideal that perfectly reflects the rel, the natural, needs not speak of its nature. It excused it in simple things.
A strong man does not need to call himself powerful, or have others acknowledge him as such…he is it. He cannot stop being it.

The crow scares away the feeble, the cowardly, the sickly, the desperate for easy solutions, and self-flattering lies.
The crow exposes plagiarizing hypocrites and degenerate liars.

Crow says:
Life is beautiful as it is.

Crow fails to understand even among the most basic points of VO, which is that a “sensation” or “observing” are things that all entities do, even non-living ones. When a force impacts a rock this force transfers into and passes through the rock, disturbing the molecular structures of the rock; if the force is strong enough it will break molecular bonds and the rock will crack or shatter. The only difference between that and a living organism here is that when a force passes into a living organism the force is divided into various channels of effects, namely the organism is far more responsive to the original force than is a rock, but they both respond to it.

Consciousness is about responsiveness. Someone infinitely more intelligent that Crow once said that if nature can be said to have any goal at all it would be the goal of producing the maximum response from the minimum stimulus; what we call “sentience” or “subjective awareness” is just a very very complex and derivative kind of responsiveness, fundamentally no different than the much more basic and linear responsiveness of a rock to whatever is able to cause an effect upon it. The only difference is that a living thing can respond to a much wider range of stimuli and that a living thing has many more kinds of responses available to it. A cow has more access to ontic nature and truth than does an apple, an apple has more access to ontic nature and truth than does a rock, and a human has more access to ontic nature and truth than any of these, yet all do have some access to it. There is no fundamental difference in this regard, even differences of quality appear because of differences in quantity.