of course he says that… because he’s never been to prison.
for me, a greater demonstration of strength would be in staying out of prison.
Did you call the officer like I told you to? I swear you were running around like a chicken with his head cut off.
You are the smartest guy in the forums, you can do this. Make me the fucking machine, I know next to nothing about nanobiology. I mean I know their are T cells, proteins, mitochondria and shit, but that’s about it.
I’m pretty sure Nietzsche did quite a bit of suffering himself.
Well, then you have your work cut out for you, don’t you!
oh and one more critically important point. suffering, yes, handle it, endure it, sometimes even seek it out to harden yourself. BUT, let it be suffering you’ve caused yourself, not suffering because of someone else’s bullshit.
I want problems…but I don’t want other’s problems to become my problem. I don’t want to find myself in a world of shit because of somebody else’s lies and/or incompetence. fundamental difference.
Who’s lies and incompetence?
But what is the ‘type’ in question here regarding jakob? A genetic or memetic heritage? If the former, remember N’s comment in the third book (I believe) near the anti-darwinism aphorism. That the concept of species is shortsighted… that in reality, all we see is several approximately similar individuals appear simultaneously at a moment along a continuum. I have given up trying to explain this to racists. They cannot survey the long distances required to see this, instead holding on to something that is already history by the time it is recognized. But some travel faster than others and see thousands of years flash by in seconds. The slower traffic stays right like it should, I suppose.
On that note, for jakob to feel anguish at the loss of merely genetic relatives is sentimental at most. There is no jewish ‘type’ genetically… nor even is it a race. There are no races, to be sure, but collections of phenotype/genotype sets that are constantly changing.
(Jakob knows this… and I think rather that he likes to enrich his life with meaning that transcends him as an individual… by identifying with a cause. Perhaps the fact that Jakob has jewish heritage and that he is constantly surrounded by anti-Semitism at the forums has caused him to revolt in a sense by standing up and putting his foot down. “Yeah I’m jewish. What of it, punk?” I like this attitude very much.)
So then is it a feeling of memetic type? In that case, there is nothing relating jakob to those lost relatives that is exclusive only to them (and him). That a few people who called themselves ‘jews’, and who happened to be related to jakob genetically, are now dead, is no loss to the meme itself. As long as the ideas are preserved the family lives on, does it not? In this case jakob has millions of relatives that are living and will soon be living.
What exactly is jakob identifying with then? The thirteen… for what reason is their loss profound? Why is the loss of his thirteen family members worse than the loss of someone else’s thirteen family members? If it is simply the hatred originating out of the experience of the decline of one’s type, then this is true for anyone who is naive enough to believe there is such a thing as a type.
No, there must be an even greater kind of suffering than N describes in those epigrams. Perhaps it is the fact that such ‘stupid forces’ can hinder the development of something great that, if the ER is true, will forever be hindered. Shit what a dreadful thought.
Forgive me for seeming rash. In the first place I belong to no culture, have no family, and identify with no philosophy or creed. In the second place, these circumstances permit me to see very clearly what N meant. Of course, people are naturally inclined to a conservative understanding of culture; they want to preserve what they know directly, and leave little open to the dumb mechanisms of nature and evolution. Wonderful, but naive. In five thousand years these arguments won’t even exist.
No and no and no. Hardly the smartest, can’t make a DNA machine and am anything but a nanobiologist.
What I am is a charismatic sophist with intermediate-to-master level rhetorical skill. Protagoras? I could take him, no problem.
Well, there is of course the consideration that some of Jakob’s family members who knew those family members did survive, and mourned their loss very much–on a personal, not a genetic level. Jakob, in turn, knows or knew those surviving family members personally. This is something I consciously refrained from addressing before.
I’m reminded by what you say of the following, indeed puzzling, passage:
[size=95]“The richest and most complex forms—for the expression ‘higher type’ means no more than this—perish more easily: only the lowest preserve an apparent indestructibility. The former are achieved only rarely and maintain their superiority with difficulty; the latter are favored by a compromising fruitfulness.
Among men, too, the higher types, the lucky strokes of evolution, perish most easily as fortunes change. They are exposed to every kind of decadence: they are extreme, and that almost means decadents.
The brief spell of beauty, of genius, of Caesar, is sui generis [one of a kind]: such things are not inherited. The type is hereditary; a type is nothing extreme, no ‘lucky stroke’—
This is not due to any special fatality or malevolence of nature, but simply to the concept ‘higher type’: the higher type represents an incomparably greater complexity—a greater sum of co-ordinated elements: so its disintegration is also incomparably more likely. The ‘genius’ is the sublimest machine there is—consequently the most fragile.” (Will to Power 684, Kaufmann trans.)[/size]
This once made me wonder aloud: is the “higher type” not a type? And indeed, I think that the higher type is no genetic type, but a memetic type: compare Nietzsche’s hyperbolic claim in Ecce Homo that one is related least of all with one’s parents, and that Julius Caesar or Alexander could be his father (“Why I Am So Wise” 3). The above paradox is almost explained by that remark:
[size=95]“One is related least of all with one’s parents: it would be the uttermost sign of commonness, to be related to one’s parents.”[/size]
In other words, the commoner a person is, the more he belongs to his genetic type; the rarer he is, the more he belongs to a memetic type–a “higher type”. Compare:
[size=95]“[T]he gang [of robbers] returns for the second item on both lists, a duty to honor parents [which is notably taken to be the defining feature of the Jewish people by Zarathustra (TSZ “Thousand and One Goal”)]. No gang is mentioned regarding the first law of the moral minimum in order to have the reader think of their absence, to find out why they’re absent only for the prohibition of lying. As for honoring parents, Strauss must work to make it fit the gang: Ibn Tibbon’s translation makes it honoring fathers, and Strauss understands them as advisers or teachers: ‘according, [the scholar] would signify that even a gang of robbers cannot last if they do not respect those of their fellows who are their intellectual superiors.’ A gang of robbers must observe the first as well: not deceiving one another, they deceive their neighbors in order to last. By reverting to a gang of robbers (cf. 20) and making them the smallest and lowest, Strauss forces his reader to recall that the scholar spoke of a community of robbers (30) and distinguished them from the smallest and lowest (32). Strauss is not careless on a grave question: these shifts are his intentional surprises inviting interpretation in the light of the topic of his essay, what a philosopher is in relation to social or political life. The community of robbers then is ‘the most noble community’ (cf. 20). Halevi and Strauss redeploy a famous original from Plato’s Republic that they refuse to mention; they honor the greatest of their intellectually superior fathers by using an image Socrates used in his argument with Thrasymachus through which he aimed to establish community with an apparent rival. The community of robbers is the community of philosophers; they rob from social life only those like themselves, readers who can think independently and find out the arguments of the absent philosopher in Halevi’s dialogue–and Strauss’s commentary.
Is a community of philosophers odd, genuine philosophers being solitaries whose way of life is asocial (29)? No, they are a community across time, and while their individual surviving depends upon deceit, their lasting as a community depends upon a prohibition on deceiving one another, upon truthfully supplying their reasoning to one another, as Halevi did in his dialogue, making the truth accessible to the reader he surprises and turns into a hunter. Halevi is a model community-member; obliged by justice to his own kind and that alone, he addresses them out of his implications and silences while addressing his defence of Judaism ‘to naturally pious people only’ (15). But when it becomes apparent that the most noble community is a community of philosophers, a whole series of ‘I mean to say’s’ is needed because the language of morality, a language of obedience, does not fit the community of questioners. Instead, the two items of its ‘moral’ minimum must be construed not as obligatory or prescriptive but as descriptive; they state what its members do, not obediently, but out of the wellspring of eros that drives them, love that to say the least includes self-love. The doing and speaking of each honors the fathers out of erotic gratitude, and each takes care not to deceive the potential ‘puppies of his race, by whom he wants to be loved in turn’ (PAW, 36). The true history of philosophy is the story of a community of lovers stretched across time. The purpose of their exotericism is to preserve their community across time and to enlarge it one fit reader at a time. Strauss’ treatment of his community looks back in honor to his intellectual superiors and looks forward expectantly, lovingly, to the reader of his kind. With this 1943 essay Strauss takes up membership in the community of robbers.” (Lampert, The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss, “Exotericism Embrace: ‘The Law of Reason in the Kuzari’”.)[/size]
The–genetic–type is only the soil, even the dung, out of which the flower that is the “higher type” may grow:
[size=95]“We must think of the masses as unsentimentally as we think of nature: they preserve the species.” (WP 760.)[/size]
Were the relatives of Jakob’s who were destroyed by the Nazis envious and resentful Jews? Possibly. Were they destroyed by envious and resentful failures? Most probably! Thus Lampert emphasises Nietzsche’s many warnings against envy, and asserts:
[size=95]“[I]t was precisely the order of rank of the natures that caused the deepest suffering: envy and self-hatred. These twin fountainheads of revenge were the moving force behind the human will to correct faulty nature. This disguised ‘second and more refined atheism,’ as Nietzsche called it (BGE 22), is hatred directed against anything favored by grace or chance[.]” (Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, pp. 105-06.)[/size]
This is the counterpart to Nietzsche’s noble suffering: the luckiest strike, the genuine philosopher, suffers from the sight of the failures, and the failures suffer from themselves at the sight of the lucky strikes.
Nietzsche writes:
[size=95]“Order of rank as order of power: war and danger the presupposition for a rank to retain the conditions of its existence. The grandiose prototype: man in nature—the weakest, shrewdest creature making itself master, subjugating the stupider forces.” (Will to Power 856.)[/size]
Exactly nine years ago to this day, I wrote the following about this in Moody Lawless’ Yahoo Group, which was then called “Aryanosophy”:
[size=95]"Is this ‘grandiose prototype’ not also the prototype of the Jew?
Did not the Jew, the weakest, shrewdest man, make himself master - subjugate the stupider, (physically) stronger, more noble natures?"[/size]
In the discussion that ensued between Moody, Lyssa and myself, in which I compared the warrior and the priest to the lion and the fox, respectively, Moody said:
[size=95]"I don’t find the ‘fox’ to be ‘calm’ - he is rather a wretched creature, whose disposition is no doubt formed by his need to use wily cunning in order to survive.
There is nothing calm about the fox which always looks slyly behind itself as it skitters along.
The lion on the other hand is a noble beast, who eminates supreme calm. His attack is ferocious and passionate, but it is also decisive and concise.
Once done, he settles back into the kingly and dispassionate disposition to which he gives his name."[/size]
Does not his description of the fox remind us of Erik’s recent description of Jakob? And indeed, there’s something to be said for it. All of this can be found here, by the way: https://uk.groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Moody_Lawless/conversations/topics/704
Only when one has arrived at the top of the “food chain” can one take one’s calm. I hope Jakob soon finds the place where he belongs, so that he may finally fully manifest the lion in him. But is it not only in Plato’s ideal state–his Socrates’ “city in speech”–that philosophers are overtly kings? Or has all that finally changed by now?
[size=95]“With Nietzsche’s new moral postulate, ‘Be what you are, be eternally what you are,’ with this unbounded Yes to everything that was and is, philosophy itself comes into the open. The ugly caterpillar metamorphoses; the butterfly spreads its glorious wings. With ‘pride, daring, courage, self-confidence,’ with a ‘will to responsibility’ (GM 3.10), the philosophic spirit points to itself, points to its own nobility as a primary ground for gratitude for the goodness of the world.” (Lampert, op.cit., pp. 108-09.)[/size]
Jakob is the noblest soul I know in real life.
Well… the two “highest” men in the last 400 years are Shakespeare and Nietzsche…Both Northwestern Europeans… Both a considerable leap from higher men before…So there’s something to be said about that soil…Shakespeare never left England and Nietzsche had to return North for his courage.
Are you saying the Nazis were too sentimental?
A fox, Sauwellios?
More like a shark, who Jacob should have never tried to bait with his silly flattery and homoerotic video.
He tried to establish dominance over me, tried to do a violence to me and he whines and b-tches, when I attack him for this.
“Pity me…pity me! Look how much I’ve suffered…”
Hardly what one would call “grit”.
A warrior does not b-tch and moan about how much he suffers; he shuts the fuck up and takes the pain like a man and continues on, unfazed.
That’s grit, that’s endurance.
Jakob knows nothing of this, evidently.
Yeah, PB and Sauwelios, I understand what you are trying to say. Unfortunately I can’t relate to your notions of “highest” types.
Philosophers and playwrights, in my opinion, are not the greatest kinds of men… but rather lower individuals in the service of the greatest types; they propagate ideas which are actualized… put into deed and action by higher types.
Example: Marx and Engels were in service to the great revolutionary vanguards. The ideas of socialism did not reach a level of greatness until Mao swept across Asia with an army of garden rake wielding peasants, or Lenin over Russia with his industrial proletarian army, or Castro over Cuba with a team of 82 soldiers.
The philosopher and playwright is not the architect. He is the helper, the propagandist, the midwife.
Jakob isn’t a noble type, he’s an egoist. He is a tribalist and a moral relativist. That pretty much settles it.
If you mean “whom” (and “Jakob”, and “Sauwelios”), then you’ve misunderstood me. What I said was this:
[size=95]“Does not his [i.e., Moody’s] description of the fox remind us of Erik’s recent description of Jakob?”[/size]
I will try to make it more clear to you by giving the corresponding referents distinct colours:
[size=95]Moody’s description of the fox
Erik’s description of Jakob[/size]
You see now? I never denied that you’re a massively imposing shark.
I was specifically referring to this description of yours in Magnus’ recent Rant thread:
[size=95]“The subject is very anxious in his videos, looking side to side, back and forth,
constantly, as if in a state of panic.”[/size]
::
“PB”, I hope to write and finish an in-depth response to you tonight, in which I may also address Zoot’s post in which he implicitly calls me Saujellios.
True, but a warrior among his warrior peers will seek to establish his rank by informing them of his experience in battle. When the one eyed warrior removes his eye patch to reveal the empty eye socket, he is not looking for adulation or pity. Rather he is saying “look what I have survived.” This earns him respect from the other warriors. Showing off battle-scars, as it were. Try to understand it like that, erik.
Now I’m not one to say who has and hasn’t really suffered because I don’t know enough about anyone here to make such a judgment. There are both kinds; the pretenders and the real deal. Hard to tell who is who.
Yes.
I supposed this is what Sauwelios implied.
Sauwelios, brother, your words are way too exalted for this thread. And there is no need to hope, there is after all necessity.
As for the rest;
Perfect example. That was so dumb it gave me the creeps. I repressed it by making a detached technical comment; I remember the sword itself was retarded, which was at least comical.
::
For those interested in my current understanding of the game that I subconsciously engineered to create an environment; I used to have the attitude of disregarding posters debilities in favor of possible or rather imagined strengths. As you can see I went extremely far in trying to see merit in the essentially worthless.
I realize now, talking to a lot of social rejects, old gansters and illiterate fighters in this divebar downstairs that many people are extremely disturbed when they get the feeling of someone trying to value them beyond what they sense or know they are worth. It confronts them, I suppose, with what thet try to repress - the notion that it is possible, in theory, to value oneself in a way that is not a joke. I realized some things the last days. The day before yesterday some morons jumped me when engaged one of them in a serious conversation. He actually lost his power of speech, calling out what appeared to be the word ‘terrorists’ a number of times trying to start a sentence before he decided to attack and his friends joined him. I had to fend them off for a while without actually hitting them in the way I am trained, which would have caused a world of chaos given that I live upstairs.
Ive learned this now; Never stretch to take people seriously, it is not generous but cruel, and has nothing to do with them. I used the existing phenomenon of antisemitism of which so many worms are a derivative function as a means to pretend to see some seriousness in what otherwise is just an undifferentiated ooze of subterranean muck. Pain is after all more fertile than nothing. In this way I suppose I created something out of nothing (my own response to that pain), but now that Im terminating the experiment we have a board infested with bewildered sub-entites exposed to the cruelty of daylight, that live at this point for no other reason than to fend off the difficult idea I or we gave them of themselves. My apologies for and to all the real entities that have left in the process. The best policy will indeed be to let their parasitic spirit starve and know they will eventually sink back into that ooze from which they were so unnaturally extracted.
You and your jews created these monsters, these oozes, these smoozes. Thanks to your Torah you butchered Erikman’s genitals. His penis was severed by your Jewish blade! Why do you think he is so violent? Because he was traumatized as a baby. I bet 9 odds that Erik’s circumcised. and if he’s not, all the more noble for him opposing this meglomanical Jewish tradition. Do you even know how insane you all are? i mean, you wear little caps that makes you bald when you get old. Grow up. What a bunch of primates and religious idiocy high fives Mr. Kevin Solway
What exactly are you referring to with this last bit (“Nietzsche had to return North for his courage”)? Wasn’t the best climate he could find the north-west of Italy/the south-east of France/the south of Switzerland?
In any case, I do of course agree that Nietzsche is one of the highest men of the last 400 years (though not necessarily one of the two). As for Shakespeare, I’m not sure. To be sure, for many years, and until very recently, my signature quote on the ThinkHumanism forums was Moody Lawless’ saying that the whole reason for a culture to exist is to bring forth a Shakespeare (for which it must of course be healthy enough). However, I don’t always agree with Moody, and one reason I recently changed that quote is that I don’t necessarily agree with what he said there. That is to say, I’m a philosophical supremacist, and am not so sure Shakespeare was a philosopher. Of course, he was a very great poet, and the poet has been one of the most effective guises for the philosopher in history; but the only evidence I know of his being a philosopher is found in Time-Fetishes by Ned Lukacher, who shows how Shakespeare alludes to the secret doctrine of the eternal recurrence in the Sonnets. And, though successful great poets always have a cultivating influence, I have no reason to think he was a political philosopher.
Then there’s the question of who we’re talking about when we say “Shakespeare”. The actual William Shakespeare may never have left England; but Edward de Vere certainly did (he visited the north of Italy if memory serves me–“in fair Verona, where we lay our scene”). Nietzsche was convinced that the poet of Shakespeare was Francis Bacon; and though this seems quite unlikely considering the evidence, it would make him one of the highest men of the last 400 years–a genuine philosopher, one of the founder-legislators of Modernity, perhaps greater than Machiavelli and as great as Nietzsche. Note that I’m saying this about Francis Bacon as he was, not as he would have been if he’d also written the work of Shakespeare (which would be somewhat like Nietzsche’s also having written the work of Wagner).
By the way, how were Shakespeare and Nietzsche considerable leaps from higher men before? Lampert for one does not consider Bacon and Descartes any less great than Nietzsche. And what about Homer and Plato? Not to mention any of the other genuine philosophers the West has brought forth–let alone the East, of which I don’t suppose you know much more than I. As Strauss says:
[size=95]“The greatest minds to whom we ought to listen are by no means exclusively the greatest minds of the West. It is merely an unfortunate necessity which prevents us from listening to the greatest minds of India and of China: we do not understand their languages, and we cannot learn all languages.” (Strauss, “What Is Liberal Education?”)[/size]
More on China later. But first, some more about Shakespeare. Nietzsche was of course not von Nietzsche (and Goethe was not originally von Goethe). Depending on who the poet of Shakespeare was, however, he may have belonged to the nobility. Since the Battle of Hastings in 1066, there have basically been two classes in England: the nobility, which we may call the purebreds, and the populace, which we may call the mongrels. Here’s a nice illustration of the difference:
[size=85]
Photograph: “Class difference in England”, early 20th Century.[/size]
Now a little less basically, there has also been a third class (I’m not speaking of the clergy; many non-firstborn sons of noblemen entered the priesthood). This has consisted of well-to-do commoners; one might call it the bourgeoisie. I will simply call the nobility upper class, the bourgeoisie middle class, and the populace lower class here. The poet of Shakespeare must of course have belonged to the upper or the middle class.
What characterises the middle class is not just that they are well-to-do, but that they try to emulate the upper class. So perhaps it does not matter if the poet belonged to the upper or to the middle class. If the latter, then he could never have attained such greatness if there hadn’t been an upper class to emulate. A classless society could never have brought him forth. After all, such a society is a society with only a lower class.
I only mentioned Nazis in my next post. Anyway, do I think they were too sentimental? If I give them the benefit of the doubt, I say they only played at sentimentality in order to appeal to the sentimentality of the masses. But according to a delicious book I’ve read about the Berghof, Hitler’s idyllic mountain cabin/mega resort (…), Hitler once lectured to some of his guests that he had to have the wasps in the neighbourhood exterminated, for if he did not do so, they would kill his bees and steal the honey. Those poor, fuzzy, hardworking bees and those mean, sharp, rapacious wasps!
In that next post, I said that the relatives of Jakob’s who were destroyed by the Nazis were possibly envious and resentful Jews. But this was before I remembered a conversation I once had with his mother. Those people were precisely what Strauss called “naturally pious people”: they went willingly on the train to the death camps, because they truly believed God would never let anything like that–like being destroyed like diseased cattle–happen to them. Only Jakob’s grandfather, who was not naturally pious, escaped–in fact, escaped multiple times. He later wrote a book titled Praise of Unadaptedness (an obvious reference to Erasmus’ Praise of Folly).
In an article on Hitler.org, it says “the jews” (sic) are a good example of a National Socialist people. And indeed, the Jewish people has been an especially fruitful soil for great minds. To be sure, such minds could never be good Jews; they could at most pretend to be so, like Halevi, Maimonides, and Strauss; and in many cases they could not pretend to be so, like Spinoza, Heine, and Jakob’s grandfather. The Jews are probably the most naturally pious people, which is to say the “best” people:
[size=95]“The race of Cain ends with the song of Lamach, who ‘boasted’ to his wives of the slaying of men and of being superior to God as an avenger. In contrast, the race of Seth (the replacement of Abel) cannot ‘boast’ a single inventor. Its distinguished members are Noah and Enoch who were righteous and ‘walked with God’. The contrast between the race of Cain, the founder of a city, and the race of Seth, leads Strauss to conclude that ‘civilization and piety are two very different things’. But he does not elaborate. It seems that those who walk with God cannot aspire to greatness. Those who aspire to greatness must renounce God. Strauss repeats Nietzsche’s claim that for the Greeks the individual is marked by the pursuit of excellence, supremacy and distinction, but for the Jews the individual is marked by honoring mother and father, or living a life of obedience to the ancestral. Not only are the Jews not lovers of philosophy as Spinoza observed, they have failed to found a great civilization. The latter requires not only philosophy, but craftsmanship and the arts, which are an extension of man’s love of knowledge; they are part of his revolt against God and his aspiration to compete with God by remaking the world to his own liking. By their great words and great deeds (not good words and good deeds), men aspire to the immortality of the gods. The Jews failed to found a great civilization because they ‘walked with God’." (Shadia Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, “Philosophy’s Hidden Revolt against God”.)[/size]
This was the soil Hitler sought to destroy, ultimately at the cost even of not protecting his “bees”: resources that could have been used for his two-front war were used instead to maximise the “production” of the death camps. Perhaps he saw the irony in protecting his bees and their honey, their mediocre gold. As Heidegger points out, the will to power drives to self-preservation as well as to self-overcoming; the pursuit of supremacy cannot endure without piety. Nazi Germany was a very crude beginning to something resembling the Roman Republic, and had to focus on the foundation, the lowest and broadest layer. It had to practice what Nietzsche called “Chinesery”, but then “Germanry”; its attempt at breeding an aristocracy with the SS Lebensborn project was preposterous, an attempt to do in a few years what naturally takes God knows how long.
The Chinese, a propos, have been much more successful at National Socialism. So-called “Communist” China is really National Socialist China. It is not Communist, as Marx’s Communism concept is the concept of a stateless commune; his Socialism concept is the totalitarian state that must necessarily precede it. And Marx called for the unification of the proletarians of all countries. The movie Apocalypse Now Redux features a French colonist in Vietnam pointing out to the American Captain that “you Americans” never understood that the Communists in Vietnam were Vietnamese Communists–i.e., national, not international, Communists. And as for the Soviet Union, it’s a well-known fact that Hitler greatly admired Stalin. Stalin had actually succeeded in heading a Russian Socialist state that subsumed the surrounding countries under the pretense of an international proletarian union!
The term “proletarian”, by the way, stems from the Roman Republic and refers to those people whose only valuable contribution to the State is their proles, their offspring. “They preserve the species.”
::
Zooty, was my humour too dry? In any case, I have a question that will singly destroy your “argument”. What is the telos of National Socialist China, National Socialist Russia, or National Socialist Cuba–the sprouting of new “supreme men” like Mao, Lenin, or Castro?
My mistake, I misread.
Jakob is not a lion, nor a fox; he is more like a weasel.
Let me put this in multiple colors, to make it clear:
Jakob, I am not a homosexual, like you are.
Don’t ever try to mess with me, in any shape or form, whatsoever - or else I will tear even deeper into your burnt out psyche, more than I already have.