Saturday, August 8, 2009
Revision to the End of Philosophy:
From Rousseaus social contract it can be inferred that man gives up his state of nature for a better chance at survival with the group. So since the group, all in all everyone is in the same playing field being happiness the end goal or the performance of a specific task the ultimate goal, there is no struggle of the instincts because we do not act so much instinctually anymore but out of love. So the question is, how much love do you give? ?
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
The end of filosofy
Because philosophy is like a puzzle, and its allure is that there is no end to it, however, there is an end, that is reality, then when the end is found, the allure of the beginning eclipses
What is the end?
Struggle of the instincts Courage, fear, love
What is the end?
Struggle of the instincts Courage, fear, love
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
madre teresa de calcuta, astute observation on the rush
People are in a rush nowadays because theird ids are not expressed--they have decisions, but they are minor ones, so they endlessly and desperately seek ways to sublimate their ids by ways of concotions--Imagination--noble venture--poor souls those who succumb to guilt, as a way of life, for whom the imagination is stuck for fear of that hot cauldron, or is it cold?
This is why indigenous people have more overall calm--more realized--because they dont have to 'act', they just live.
Religion is just a backing, a buttress, a support for one interpretation of reality. It seeks to assist those who want to live in a certain way and not in another. Sadly, it captures them sometimes, it enslaves them, those who believe in it too much and are weak, or are they weak because they believe?
Philosophers want to teach right feeling.
This is why indigenous people have more overall calm--more realized--because they dont have to 'act', they just live.
Religion is just a backing, a buttress, a support for one interpretation of reality. It seeks to assist those who want to live in a certain way and not in another. Sadly, it captures them sometimes, it enslaves them, those who believe in it too much and are weak, or are they weak because they believe?
Philosophers want to teach right feeling.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Nietzsche, birth of tragedy
This joyous necessity of the dream experience has been embodied by the Greeks in their Apollo: Apollo, the god of all plastic energies, is at the same time the soothsaying god. He, who (as the etymology of the name indicates) is the “shining one,” the deity of light, is also ruler over the beautiful illusion of the inner world of fantasy. The higher truth, the perfection of these states in contrast to the incompletely intelligible everyday world, this deep consciousness of nature, haling and helping in sleep and dreams, is at the same time the symbolical analogue of the soothsaying faculty and of the arts generally, which make life possible and worth living. But we must also include in our image of Apollo that delicate boundary which the dream image must not overstep lest it have a pathological effect (in which case mere appearance would deceive us as if it were crude reality) We must keep in mind that measured restraint, that freedom from the wilder emotions, that calm of the sculptor god. His eye must be “sunlike,” as befits his origin; even when it is angry and distempered it is still hallowed by beautiful illusion. And so, in one sense, we might apply to Apollo the words of Schopenhaeur when he speaks of the man wrapped in the veil of maya: “Just as in a stormy sea that, unbounded in all directions, raises and drops mountainous waves, howling, a sailor sits in a boat and trusts in his frail bark: so in the midst of a world of torments the individual human being sits quietly, supported by and trusting in the principium indviduationis”. In fact, we might say of Apollo that in him the unshaken faith in this principium and the calm repose of the man wrapped up in it receive their most sublime expression; and we might call Apollo himself the glorious divine image of the principium indviduationis, through whose gestures and eyes all the joy and wisdom of “illusion,” together with its beauty, speak to us.
In the same work Schopenhaeur has depicted for us the tremendous terror which seizes man when he is suddenly dumbfounded by the cognitive form of phenomena because the principle of sufficient reason, in some one of its manifestations, seems to suffer an exception. If we add to this terror the blissful ecstasy that wells from the innermost depths of man, indeed of nature, at this collapse of the principium indviduationis, we steal a glimpse into the nature of the Dionysian, which is brought home to us most intimately by the analogy of intoxication.
Either under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which the songs of all primitive men and peoples speak, or with the potent coming of spring that penetrates all nature with joy, these Dionysian emotions awake, and as they grow in intensity everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness. In the German Middle Ages, too, singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing in number, whirled themselves from place to place under this same Dionysian impulse. In these dancers of St. John and St. Vitus, we rediscover the Bacchich choruses of the Greeks, with their prehistory in Asia Minor, as far back as Babylon aand the orgiastic Sacaea. There are some who, from obtuseness or lack of experience, turn away from such phenomena as from “folk-disease,” with contempt or pity born of the consciousness of their own “healthy-mindedness.” But of course such poor wretches have no idea how corpselike and ghostly their so-called “healthy-mindedness” looks when the glowing life of the Dionysian revelers roars past them.
Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alienated, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man. Freely, earth proffers her gifts, and peacefully the beasts of prey of the rocks and desert approach. The chariot of Dionysus is covered with flowers and garlands; panthers and tigers walk under its yoke. Transform Beethoven’s “Hymn to Joy” into a painting; let your imagination conceive the multitudes bowing to the dust, awestruck—then you will the approach the Dionysian. Now the slave is a free man; now all the rigid, hostile barriers that necessity, caprice, or “impudent convention” have fixed between man and man are broken. Now, with the gospel of universal harmony, each one feels himself not only united, reconciled, and fused with his neighbor, but as one with him, as if the veil of maya had been torn aside and were now merely fluterring in tatters before the mysterious primordial unity.
In song and in dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying into the air, dancing. His very gestures express enchantment. Just as the animals now talk, and the earth yields milk and honey, supernatural sounds emanate from him too: he feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted, in ecstasy, like the gods he saw walking in his dreams. He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: in these paroxysm of intoxication the artistic power of all nature reveals itself to the highest gratification of the primordial unity. The noblest clay, the most costly marble, man, is here kneaded and cut, and to the sound of the chisel strokes of the Dionysian world-artists rings out the cry of the Elusinian mysteries: “Do you prostate yourselves, millions? Do you sense your Maker, world?”
For the rapture of the Dionysian state with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence contains, while it lasts, a lethargic element in which all personal experiences of the past become immersed. This chasm of oblivion separates the worlds of everyday reality and of Dionysian reality. But as soon as this everyday reality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as such, with nausea: an ascetic, will-negating mood is the fruit of these states.
In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no, true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man.
Now no comfort avails any more; longing transcends a world after death, even the gods; existence is negated along with its glittering reflection in the gods or in an immortal beyond. Conscious of the truth he has once seen, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence; now he understands what is symbolic in Ophelia’s fate; now he understands the wisdom of the sylvan god, Silenus: he is nauseated.
Here, when the danger to his will is greatest, art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows hot to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live: these are the sublime as the artistic taming of the horrible, and the comic as the artistic discharge of the nausea of absurdity. The satyr chorus of the dithyramb is the saving deed of Greek art; faced with the intermediary world of these Dionysian companions, the feelings described here exhausted themselves.
The satyr, like the idyllic shepherd of more recent times, is the offspring of a longing for the primitive and the natural; but how firmly and fearlessly the Greek embraced the man of the woods, and how timorously and mawkishly modern man dallied with the flattering image of a sentimental, flute-playing, tender shepherd! Nature, as yet unchanged by knowledge, with the bolts of culture still unbroken—that is what the Greek saw in his satyr who nevertheless was not a mere ape. On the contrary, the satyr was the archetype of man, the embodiment of his highest and most intense emotions, the ecstatic reveler enraptured by the proximity of his god, the sympathetic companion in whom the suffering of the god is repeated, one who proclaims wisdom from the very heart of nature, a symbol of the sexual omnipotence of nature which the Greeks used to contemplate with reverent wonder.
The satyr was something sublime and divine: thus he had to appear to the painfully broken vision of Dionysian man. The contrived shepherd in his dress-ups would have offended him: on the unconcealed and vigorously magnificent characters of nature, his eye rested with sublime satisfaction; here the true human being was disclosed, the bearded satyr jubilating to his god. Confronted with him, the man of culture shriveled into a mendacious caricature.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Schiller is right about these origins of tragic art, too: the chorus is a living wall against the assaults of reality because it, the satyr chorus, represents existence more truthfully, really, and completely than the man of culture does who ordinarily considers himself as the only reality, The sphere of poetry does not lie outside the world as a fantastic impossibility spawned by a poet’s brain: it desires to be just the opposite, the unvarnished expression of the truth, and must precisely for that reason discard the mendacious finery of the alleged reality of the man of culture.
The contrast between this real truth of nature and the lie of culture that poses as if it were the only reality is similar to that between the eternal core of things, the thing-in-itself, and the whole world of appearances: just as tragedy, with its metaphysical comfort, points to the eternal life of this core of existence which abides through the perpetual destruction of appearances, the symbolism of the satyr chorus proclaims this primordial relationship between the thing-in-itself and appearance. The idyllic shepherd of modern man is merely a counterfeit of the sum of cultural illusions that are allegedly nature; the Dionysian Greek wants truth and nature in their most forceful form—and sees himself changed, as by magic, into a satyr.
The reveling throng, the votaries of Dionysus jubilate under the spell of such moods and insights whose power transforms them before their own eyes till they imagine that they are beholding themselves as restored geniuses of nature, as satyrs. The later constitution of the chorus in tragedy is the artistic imitation of this natural phenomenon, though, to be sure, at this point the separation of Dionysian spectators and magically enchanted Dionysians became necessary.
In the same work Schopenhaeur has depicted for us the tremendous terror which seizes man when he is suddenly dumbfounded by the cognitive form of phenomena because the principle of sufficient reason, in some one of its manifestations, seems to suffer an exception. If we add to this terror the blissful ecstasy that wells from the innermost depths of man, indeed of nature, at this collapse of the principium indviduationis, we steal a glimpse into the nature of the Dionysian, which is brought home to us most intimately by the analogy of intoxication.
Either under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which the songs of all primitive men and peoples speak, or with the potent coming of spring that penetrates all nature with joy, these Dionysian emotions awake, and as they grow in intensity everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness. In the German Middle Ages, too, singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing in number, whirled themselves from place to place under this same Dionysian impulse. In these dancers of St. John and St. Vitus, we rediscover the Bacchich choruses of the Greeks, with their prehistory in Asia Minor, as far back as Babylon aand the orgiastic Sacaea. There are some who, from obtuseness or lack of experience, turn away from such phenomena as from “folk-disease,” with contempt or pity born of the consciousness of their own “healthy-mindedness.” But of course such poor wretches have no idea how corpselike and ghostly their so-called “healthy-mindedness” looks when the glowing life of the Dionysian revelers roars past them.
Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alienated, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man. Freely, earth proffers her gifts, and peacefully the beasts of prey of the rocks and desert approach. The chariot of Dionysus is covered with flowers and garlands; panthers and tigers walk under its yoke. Transform Beethoven’s “Hymn to Joy” into a painting; let your imagination conceive the multitudes bowing to the dust, awestruck—then you will the approach the Dionysian. Now the slave is a free man; now all the rigid, hostile barriers that necessity, caprice, or “impudent convention” have fixed between man and man are broken. Now, with the gospel of universal harmony, each one feels himself not only united, reconciled, and fused with his neighbor, but as one with him, as if the veil of maya had been torn aside and were now merely fluterring in tatters before the mysterious primordial unity.
In song and in dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying into the air, dancing. His very gestures express enchantment. Just as the animals now talk, and the earth yields milk and honey, supernatural sounds emanate from him too: he feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted, in ecstasy, like the gods he saw walking in his dreams. He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: in these paroxysm of intoxication the artistic power of all nature reveals itself to the highest gratification of the primordial unity. The noblest clay, the most costly marble, man, is here kneaded and cut, and to the sound of the chisel strokes of the Dionysian world-artists rings out the cry of the Elusinian mysteries: “Do you prostate yourselves, millions? Do you sense your Maker, world?”
For the rapture of the Dionysian state with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence contains, while it lasts, a lethargic element in which all personal experiences of the past become immersed. This chasm of oblivion separates the worlds of everyday reality and of Dionysian reality. But as soon as this everyday reality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as such, with nausea: an ascetic, will-negating mood is the fruit of these states.
In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no, true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man.
Now no comfort avails any more; longing transcends a world after death, even the gods; existence is negated along with its glittering reflection in the gods or in an immortal beyond. Conscious of the truth he has once seen, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence; now he understands what is symbolic in Ophelia’s fate; now he understands the wisdom of the sylvan god, Silenus: he is nauseated.
Here, when the danger to his will is greatest, art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows hot to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live: these are the sublime as the artistic taming of the horrible, and the comic as the artistic discharge of the nausea of absurdity. The satyr chorus of the dithyramb is the saving deed of Greek art; faced with the intermediary world of these Dionysian companions, the feelings described here exhausted themselves.
The satyr, like the idyllic shepherd of more recent times, is the offspring of a longing for the primitive and the natural; but how firmly and fearlessly the Greek embraced the man of the woods, and how timorously and mawkishly modern man dallied with the flattering image of a sentimental, flute-playing, tender shepherd! Nature, as yet unchanged by knowledge, with the bolts of culture still unbroken—that is what the Greek saw in his satyr who nevertheless was not a mere ape. On the contrary, the satyr was the archetype of man, the embodiment of his highest and most intense emotions, the ecstatic reveler enraptured by the proximity of his god, the sympathetic companion in whom the suffering of the god is repeated, one who proclaims wisdom from the very heart of nature, a symbol of the sexual omnipotence of nature which the Greeks used to contemplate with reverent wonder.
The satyr was something sublime and divine: thus he had to appear to the painfully broken vision of Dionysian man. The contrived shepherd in his dress-ups would have offended him: on the unconcealed and vigorously magnificent characters of nature, his eye rested with sublime satisfaction; here the true human being was disclosed, the bearded satyr jubilating to his god. Confronted with him, the man of culture shriveled into a mendacious caricature.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Schiller is right about these origins of tragic art, too: the chorus is a living wall against the assaults of reality because it, the satyr chorus, represents existence more truthfully, really, and completely than the man of culture does who ordinarily considers himself as the only reality, The sphere of poetry does not lie outside the world as a fantastic impossibility spawned by a poet’s brain: it desires to be just the opposite, the unvarnished expression of the truth, and must precisely for that reason discard the mendacious finery of the alleged reality of the man of culture.
The contrast between this real truth of nature and the lie of culture that poses as if it were the only reality is similar to that between the eternal core of things, the thing-in-itself, and the whole world of appearances: just as tragedy, with its metaphysical comfort, points to the eternal life of this core of existence which abides through the perpetual destruction of appearances, the symbolism of the satyr chorus proclaims this primordial relationship between the thing-in-itself and appearance. The idyllic shepherd of modern man is merely a counterfeit of the sum of cultural illusions that are allegedly nature; the Dionysian Greek wants truth and nature in their most forceful form—and sees himself changed, as by magic, into a satyr.
The reveling throng, the votaries of Dionysus jubilate under the spell of such moods and insights whose power transforms them before their own eyes till they imagine that they are beholding themselves as restored geniuses of nature, as satyrs. The later constitution of the chorus in tragedy is the artistic imitation of this natural phenomenon, though, to be sure, at this point the separation of Dionysian spectators and magically enchanted Dionysians became necessary.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Zoe and the Priest
A priest in infinite wisdom said...
Priest: there are only two paths in life: the chaotic and the hopeful. The inference is clear. Believing in an afterlife brings hope, whereas not believing, brings chaos.
Zoe: There is another teaching that says, that only when we lose all hope, are we at our most free.
Priest: Not believing brings uncertainty. There is no answer, so its better to believe in one.
Zoe: Here is where love of fate comes in, believing in destiny, whatever it might be.
Priest: People don't think that way...because its not too comfortable to think that way.
Zoe: Well then they are cowards. Or they want nothing from this world besides comfort. Cults come up, and all of this religion stuff can be seen as a joke. One guy creates a relligion and becomes a savior, and thus obtains the greatest power one can have over a person. By saving them, they are in your debt. By feeding them the answer, they are forced to swallow the heavy rocks. Then the question is, what should move the soul? Comfort or the unknown, danger, adventure, love. I think its a vicious circle because the mechanizing world which we live in eliminates the possibilities for creativity and adventure and seeks out comfort and certainty. It doesnt laugh at fear, it views it as a serious threat. This is the position of modern psychology...or at least teh one shown by their support for pills and stuff...those make you like a zombie. If you are pissed at the world and easily angered by it, you get pills that slow down your nervous system so you dont perceive what you dont want to perceive. Children should be the philosophers. They should be the statesmen and the politicians. Christian ethic...it teaches you to distrust yourself...to trust society before yourself. Guilt and shame are societal tools...to create a society, not to maximize the potential of the individual. Theres where nietzsche comes in, he looks at the individual before he looks at society. He looks at the nervous system before he looks at ideas and values.
Priest: there are only two paths in life: the chaotic and the hopeful. The inference is clear. Believing in an afterlife brings hope, whereas not believing, brings chaos.
Zoe: There is another teaching that says, that only when we lose all hope, are we at our most free.
Priest: Not believing brings uncertainty. There is no answer, so its better to believe in one.
Zoe: Here is where love of fate comes in, believing in destiny, whatever it might be.
Priest: People don't think that way...because its not too comfortable to think that way.
Zoe: Well then they are cowards. Or they want nothing from this world besides comfort. Cults come up, and all of this religion stuff can be seen as a joke. One guy creates a relligion and becomes a savior, and thus obtains the greatest power one can have over a person. By saving them, they are in your debt. By feeding them the answer, they are forced to swallow the heavy rocks. Then the question is, what should move the soul? Comfort or the unknown, danger, adventure, love. I think its a vicious circle because the mechanizing world which we live in eliminates the possibilities for creativity and adventure and seeks out comfort and certainty. It doesnt laugh at fear, it views it as a serious threat. This is the position of modern psychology...or at least teh one shown by their support for pills and stuff...those make you like a zombie. If you are pissed at the world and easily angered by it, you get pills that slow down your nervous system so you dont perceive what you dont want to perceive. Children should be the philosophers. They should be the statesmen and the politicians. Christian ethic...it teaches you to distrust yourself...to trust society before yourself. Guilt and shame are societal tools...to create a society, not to maximize the potential of the individual. Theres where nietzsche comes in, he looks at the individual before he looks at society. He looks at the nervous system before he looks at ideas and values.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
take it for what it is, not for anything else
Taking the moment for what it is, not misrepresenting it. Because in the end everything is all about interpretation. There are no real forces out there, only the ones we believe are. From our interpretation of them comes our reaction. The idea behind the christian ethic is to structure the moment, to make it seem like we were in mom's belly again, where everything is warm and juicy, slow and calm. Morrison described the modern man as a little plastic soldier in the miniature dirt war. We create 'selves' to protect ourselves. So we throw dirt at each other, hoping to hurt each other. And we throw pretty things at each other when in the end all we want to do is play with each other like little tigers rolling on africa's grass fields.
Nietzsche and the christian ethic
Guilt and shame are checks on experience, they attempt to invalidate experience by claiming that it is wrong or laughable, claiming that the experience itself is not the experience of the infinite. Guilt and shame attempt to cut man's legs from under him, to make him mistrust his judgment and his soul. They want to make him timid, make him move slowly, watchfully, carefully. Thus, these people compete with each other about what experiences they have and are sure to create boundaries, controls...just for the sake of them...because they must show they have some control on experience (we can be trusted they shall say, they whisper to themselves). Somehow trust of the many becomes more important than trust of oneself. The wise experience the controls of experience as a handicap...they seek liberty, spontaneity, non-judgment.
And so, these people control each other to a point of non-movement...or very little movement...because change is dangerous, and danger is not welcome. They think that as their mothers brought them up so shall everything else come on to them, slowly and gently. They forgot that its up to them to treat the present slowly and gently. Nietzsche said that great things must first be terrible in order to inscribe themselves unto the hearts of humanity. just ride the snake... jimmy....
And so, these people control each other to a point of non-movement...or very little movement...because change is dangerous, and danger is not welcome. They think that as their mothers brought them up so shall everything else come on to them, slowly and gently. They forgot that its up to them to treat the present slowly and gently. Nietzsche said that great things must first be terrible in order to inscribe themselves unto the hearts of humanity. just ride the snake... jimmy....
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