Alright Faust, let's talk.

I’m not at the forums much, but I wanna talk to faust for a moment, open public I guess, philosophical, etc.

Habits can form all the way down to the unconscious and biological level. Kindof like bladdar control, when people store up and keep certain inner forces suppressed until somebody is there to talk to. Even the most secretive and devious persons in history, often seem to enjoy speaking honestly at some moment, with their fellows, or writing it all down. Old habits are so strong for these people, nothing ever gets in the way of that really.

At some point, people fabricate needs. And if someone deviates away from the fabrication, or does not respond, it keeps on being forced more and more, until a reaction is enforced, or confusion/stupidity manifests its hidden hand. Try to not respond to people or talk at all for a few days, and don’t even act like you’re there. As soon as you stop obeying the enforced “normality” of society, the paranoia builds. Oh the fear. Suddenly your a crazy bad freak. As usual, they hate what they cannot control or understand, and by default they want to enjoy the release of their own poison onto other non-normal, un-civil things.

Humans don’t just pollute and destroy their environment outside… They heavily pollute their insides, and all of the ‘souls’, too. Everything that they cannot handle (and that is allot of stuff) all gets dumped down into their unconscious, even most of their own self gets dumped down there. Human virtue is all about how to treat others, how to behave in the outside world, but man has never made a full set of virtues for himself, it’s never been a virtue to perfectly deal with one’s own internal organs.

It has been the nature of this human, english logic, to not be able to handle nature, and thus suppress it, instead. But what have they done to their inner-world, if they have done all this to their outer-world, and yet all of their ethics are also pointed outwards? – All of their own wild and unknowable nature has been kicked out, cut down and tied in a knot. You probably know the history of human medicine… Often poisons of one sort or another were used on the sick person, in these old english “societies”. What dark-ages those were, full of religious holiness and suicidal ignorance.

It is a wonder that man has even survived through his own rubbish, and this alone means he can handle things worse than nature! And so it is no surprise that he has then got overtop of all of this nature, this [eco-system,] because he has somehow gotten around his own terrible nature, too.

If we took the whole of philosophy, it would all not-only be self-contradictory, but it would also undermine everything. When an idle man internalizes his destructive reorganization, that is philosophical. It’s like putting the tree through the factory then, he names things, cuts them up, screws them together again, and sells them to himself.

As I become progressively more uncivilized, and uncultural, I become less and less philosophical. It is no-longer my goal to find and spread ideas. That goal still lingers on in me, but I let it die slowly, so that it does not attack me or make too great a fuss. In the real, wild, natural world, away from man, such things are useless. But if they try to become more natural, suppose their nature would just burrow more deeply into a greater and once-pure power outside, again?

What does “increasingly uncivilized” even mean? Have you built your own house and are now living “off-the-grid” and raising your own crops? Or are you entertaining a romantic fantasy that you are somehow separate from/beyond normal society while continuing to live off of it?

In another thread Nihilistic made some very good comments about this sort of intellectual dishonesty.

Now, unlike Nihilistic, I don’t have a problem with ritualization to allow us to reach back and form a connection with our human history. I would question, though, why one would want to reach back to a time that set the stage for “suicidal ignorance”. After all, human knowledge is limited and has always been, so I would ask why you would throw away the thousands of years of learning that has taken place. In the past, people could not help their ignorance because the knowledge had not yet been discovered. In the present age, we have the advantage of having access to knowledge painfully acquired.

Would it not be better, more authentic even, to be engaged in the process of further dispelling ignorance and dealing with the unknown problems of the now as opposed to collapsing into a pre-modern fantasy? The natural environment of modern man is what he is living in presently. The trick is to make peace with that and improve that condition.

Numb and blind from the banality, sir, you cannot fathom what I mean now, when I say “uncivilized”.

Dishonesty? :laughing: :laughing: :laughing:

That was not learning, that was a slight re-organization of bias and dogmas, but the more it changed the more it stayed the same, and as it tried to get better, it got worse. Your every word and thought is “dishonest”. And it says it’s true/honest, which makes it even more dishonest, so dishonest that it says the more honest are less honest, and that good is bad, that lies are truth, that fact is fiction, and thus, you have civilized, believable truth for me, though I do not want it.

Our knowledge is generally enforced, even painfully,
And most of what was acquired, if it did not fit in, would be thrown out.
You’re in the stone-age of wisdom, or even farther back, though you now have some guys at a factory building computer-chips for you.

Oh the “dishonesty” here too…
It’s overflowing.

Yes, but ofcourse. In this sort of decadent and presistant, constant and total war for blood and slow-feeding, we must make more peace, more improvement, more niceness, another tuft of flowers. A prittey pink bow over it. Perfume and a bath. Polite and quaint. Going farther into the hole they dance and sing : “How far we are now, closer and closer to the way out, the liberation, the freedom, the truth.”

If man actually wanted peace, hahahhahah,…
Oh, so “dishonest”.
Come now, let us make more improvements, more peace, more truth.
This mental skin is not yet appealing enough for the spectators.
There is still a slight chance that the dangerous reality behind it all – will be seen, unless we build up more improvements all around it.

Yes, the heliocentric model of the solar system is a reorganization of biases as compared to the geocentric model. Both are dishonest, right? Oh, wait, no. As for the concept of eternal recurrence, I’m actually something of a fan but one has to examine the context. Some things like lifespan, quality of life, ect. have indeed been changing (often quite dramatically) and cannot be said to be “the same” at all unless one’s definition of sameness is such as to render the term meaningless.

Of course that which does not fit is thrown away. That would be the normal process of winnowing and sifting in the pursuit of truth. We refine and we refine and we refine. Oftentimes there is a gap between what is practical and the refined matter, so both need to be synthesized. Nothing new here, nor is there anything dishonest. It seems the only way one can achieve honesty in your system is to possess complete knowledge, which, again, renders the term worthless.

[size=75](You’re talking to yourself, I was only reacting slightly, and waiting for faust…)[/size]

  • You don’t know anything about my system.

  • Honesty is not usury nor is it sophistry, yet both are the foundations of modern values. That is why, all things that do not use, exploit or excite – are thrown away, as they do not fit. The civilized and modern world will throw away the honest politicians, the truth, the honest talk, all thrown away, as it is “useless”, and not subversive or mind-controlling enough…

You’ve not yet taken off your collar. You’re trapped in words and all things civil. That trap is safe and secure, useful, like a trapped and caged farm-animal. My system is invisible. Your mind is based on externalizations from below and in a tiny place. That is not my place. As you try to make what I write more useful, more correct, more civilized, you reduce it. It’s not what it was meant to be anymore, and it was never understood in the first place. The useful info that fits, the useful things, are the similar and the assimilated, which are refined into the white sugar, with all roots cut, plucked from the land. Taken up and out, and turned into a thing, an object, a sensation, a concept. That entire process is not “honest”.

Exhibit A . . .

A weak response and generally the refuge of someone who is unsure of what they are talking about. I’ve seen what you’ve presented here and on other fora so I can either conclude that: 1) you are disingenuous in your presentation of your system/philosophy – at which point what is the point of your posting or 2) you couldn’t create a proper response, which is a pity.

So, it kicks off with an endorsement of esoteric knowledge that, evidently, only you possess – so, why bother? But with respect to how you view the system: when has it ever been different? The strong rule by their strength, and that is that. The trick of civil society is that brash primitive strengths have been subsumed by subtler forms of power. There is nothing more hnest than the strong ruling; indeed, that is all that has ever happened, so we must endevour to create new forms of strength or refine old ones into useful new paradigms.

As for the rest of what you’ve written – it’s pretty much a rehash of Heidegger, and I’d point out the sort of things his philosophy got him involved in. You might think yourself outside the system, but defining the bars away doesn’t make them disappear.

Oh wonderful.
Not only do I not know what I personally believe, but also, …

I don’t create responses…

Why do you bother making up all kinds of opinions and talking to the wall about me?

The cowards option is to bow out of discussion when it enters an area they are uncomfortable with. But your choices are your own. If you actually had the strength of your conviction that you “weren’t responding to me” and/or were wall like, you wouldn’t have responded.

Unity of understanding and action is a bitch, ey? Back to the comment I kicked off with . . .

I didn’t bow out of discussion.
You made up crap about me, talked to yourself, then later implied that I was a coward, simply because I did not submit to your provocative misunderstandings, and every time I do not submit to your style in this way, I am to blame and am at a demerit, because I didn’t go through your factory and play by your rules.

I started this thread and the OP, because I wanted to talk to faust later about it. About how humanity turns original nature into human-nature, and some of the details of this process.

I find your logic, at the root, to be intensely virul, also. Extremely extroverted in blame and in assumption. Self-confident, arrogant, and falsely humble all at the same time.

There’s simply nothing to disguss.
You started talking, right away, emediately, about somebody else.
About Nihilistic’s thread, and then,
You, not even knowing my system
Emediately associated it with someone else other than me.
I’m emediately of a certian class now, to you.
Also I’m cowardly, dishonest, etc.
Emediately, and you don’t know jack-shit about me or what I am actually thinking.

Well, Dan~, I guess I wish I had seen this sooner. Busy weekend. I agree that Xunzian has taken this thread in a new direction - arbitrarily.

Seems almost that there are two OP’s in this thread. In any event, I read your post much differently than Xunzian seems to. You are using a Nietzsche-like device - a metaphor that isn’t completely a metaphor. That’s a difficult device to use, and, for those not used to it, to understand.

Dan~ - in your Nietzsche-like way, you harken back to a Greek ideal - one that I have always wondered if it was ever actually practised by the Greeks, but which appears in their writing. That ethics begins at home, that morality best exists in concentric circles, beginnning in our own chest - or probably abdomen.

Peoples don’t like to hear this much, I have found - because it’s not the kind of morality that we can keep our distance from. It can’t be a mere academic exercise. There is no possible disconnect between theory and practise. It frightens people. And, to those overwhelmed with christian morality, or at least its burnt residue, it doesn’t seem like morality at all. It didn’t to Nietzsche.

But it points out that we created civilisation - to then become a slave to it.

“Dr Frankenstein, we have an emergency on the ground floor”.

Philosophy is, indeed, useless in the wilderness. Because in the wild, there is no one to talk to. Philosophy, as you know, is not about truth, it’s about conversation.

BTW, Dan~ - an exceptionally well-written OP. You got da shit, brutha.

I did nothing of the sort Dan, I pointed out what was crap in your OP, how it was crap and, at that, not even novel crap. As for “knowing nothing”, again, that is arguing from weakness – either you have made 5676 posts on ILP (and more on other fora) which in some way represent your view, or you hold your view to be unattainable to anyone but you . . . which is intellectual dishonesty to the highest degree. The coward’s way is aloofness when threatened, if you have the courage of conviction behind your thought, show me where I am wrong. I am always willing to learn. As for the point of the OP – if you actually wanted it to be private, you would have made it private. By making it public, you invited discussion so here it is.

As for Faust’s comments . . . just what I said, Heidegger said it first and better and look where that got 'im.

What I wrote in the OP was not my whole position on the issue.
It can be easily misunderstood because of this.
Also it was not crap.

Your later post was not crap, either.
You began to talk about things, like the usefulness of knowledge and human behavior. I’m not in disagreement with it, and I refused to argue with you. You called that cowardly. You came her, and decided to take the defensive-left. You essentially tried to turn the conversation into a bigger issue, to make it into a right-vs-wrong issue, and then overcome my wrongs with your rights. This is the essence of moralization, and even the “amoral” philosophers at ILP often tend to do this. The impulse to overcome something or someone overpowers the neutral awareness of the world.

A single monastic view requires the ignoring or refutation of all other views and perspectives. Therefor I Will not to have monism. Therefor I am neither on the right or the left. I view your posts as neither good nor bad. My main point was to try to tell you, that you’re just talking to yourself, ignorant of me.

If we were talking face-to-face, you’d probably be showing more respect, and also, it would be more clear, because a physical conversation is more clear than typing.

Yes you’re righteous, good for you.
I’m not turning this into a moral conflict.

My point about honesty/dishonesty, which was not stated as an absolute, and which you have not yet seen from me, is this:

A desire, in general, or a survival instinct, itself is not “honest”.
Life is controlled by dishonesties, and illogical forces, which operate outside of, and beyond the reasonings of peoples. This makes the world appear to be immoral, unreasonable, and generally flawed, only in so far as the flaws and incapacities of the logic project unto others their defaults.

If I am not understandable by you, that is suddenly my fault, and not yours. It is my moral demerit, and then you want me to submit to your system.

You’re not “wrong”.
This isn’t about virtue…

Historically, men have rarely been alone, even in the wilderness. Man is a social animal. The wild, uncivilized, loner state where one stops talking to people until they think he’s a freak is the state that’s unnatural. Attempting to live in that state smack dab in the middle of society, with computers and coffee shops close at hand, seems even more unnatural. Yet, I’m not a fan of the “natural/unnatural” distinction. Natural is just what you are adapted to do at this point in your life.

Nowadays society, despite being based on increasingly vast and complex networks of specialized cooperation, has ironically made it easier to be a loner. You can work from home, have groceries delivered to your house, pay your rent without ever talking to your landlord, pay your taxes, etc. without ever having to deal with a person or communicate much at all. Not so in the wilderness, where the difficulty of life forces people into tight-knit social networks – often with equally tightly wound moral codes to protect them from predatory and self-destructive impulses. Modern society has given man the opportunity to be alone right in the middle of the crowd.

I agree with Dan that if you stopped respond to people they would start to fear and dislike you. I’m disagree that this is merely the result of a “fabricated” need to be responded to. Instead, it is a natural and ancient response to potential danger. A man who doesn’t talk to people signals that he is not emotionally attached to society. He is free to do what he likes to it, since he is an outsider. That is dangerous. He may happen to wish society no harm, but how are we supposed to know? This asocialite is an unknown yet proximate danger if he happens to be standing nearby, and that scares us. The point of the fear is to mark and control the potential danger of an outsider. It’s no different than if you see a tiger nearby. It’s big and powerful and you doubt that it cares about you or your family. The fear response is not fabricated but a natural product of our systems of self-preservation and danger avoidance. The non-communicator must reach a compromise with society, to communicate at least that he means it no harm, but just isn’t much of a talker.

Society, like any life form, has expanded aggressively at every opportunity and crowded out both other species and other ways of life within our own species. Whether you view that as good, bad, neutral, or a bit of each depends on how you function in the world. I am a mathematician and as such I depend heavily on society in order to function the way I have adapted myself to function. On the other hand, I am uncomfortable with the way that industrialized society has aggressively expanded in the past centuries, crowding out other ways of life. That, like Dan, seems to me a sort of spreading of poison. Yet within society life does not seem so bad. If only we could learn more compassion to go with our strength, life for everyone could be very harmonious.

Thanks Dan and faust for insightful posts… I will be coming back, if you don’t find my excessively social viewpoint too annoying.

Nietzsche’s philosophy was not really an absolute. Because of this, there are many different interpretations of it, and one man’s “nietzschian” may be opposite of another’s. Interpretation of a non-absolute can go anywhere, but it’s basically a failed interpretation, if it’s made into an absolute. In that way, it is “difficult to understand”, because it’s not so moral.

The greeks got their philosophical fundamentalism from many other cultures, not just their own, and they got it from other religions, mainly. An example of this would be, when the stoic guys snatched ideals from india.

At the root, that whole greek virtue moralism is a religion, in disguise. It did not actually begin at home, for them, but it was taken home. A quest for an holy and super-human trueness, whilst all other people and ideas are untrue. As if truth was not as mutable as the universe. As if truth was only one. And then it worked its way into the foundations of this culture.

I’ve seen christians before, saying how bad Nietzsche is, and not even reading or understanding his books, before saying that.

Generally critics do not fully understand what they criticise,
And especially the moral critic, whom claims something is barbaricly wrong, generally does not understand the whole process behind the natural event.

Both mental and physical slaves, making all things useful and in some way civil. Even though, as it becomes more useful to one, it also automatically becomes less useful for another, and thus, one kind of nature destroyed another. Most of the wildness of humanity is gone now; especially in these american places.

“Dr Frankenstein, we have an emergency on the ground floor”

I’d say it’s not just about conversation…
It’s ultimately about mind-control. Taking all human constructs, altering them, then using them all again, in order to deal with it all more easily. Because of this, the philosopher is generally resistant or immune to both political brainwashing and religious brainwashing, but!.. the philosopher-politician is terribly crafty, and the “theologist” also may be more skilled at controlling the minds of others.

After the mind-control is established, value is also established, because value is based on usefulness, and use is control. So, there is both slave-morality AND slave-logic, in this civilization.

Thanks.

Dan says:

Your perception mirrors my own.

Why is the veil of ignorance and the circumstance of not knowing such a problem with you?

Dear Xunzian , what exactly is your instrument of measurement?

I hate how humanity categorizes everything in existence as it makes living much less spontaneous and it takes out all the enchantment in life.

Dan in my thread called, Accidental Consciousness that is basically what I am implying also.

In my view religion was the first crossroad that transformed our original nature into a constructed ideal of human nature.

And thus, the strong, self-sufficient, un-lonely, un-sick wild men were extincted and whiped out by the weak, needy, jealous, fearful mobs. The result is domesitacation, which makes wild things weaker, fatter, and more dependant. And, in essence, their demand for civility/goodness in others – was accompanied by incredible cruelty, slavery, oppression, judgmental fundamentalism, religious conquests, etc. Until the whole planet was made sick, polluted, and many species all were made extinct…

Most thinkers can’t handle the distinction because they don’t want to owe up to the fact that their whole reality and existence could infact be a lie.

Did you quote some new hip new age book or somthing?

Blast, lost my post. Let’s try this again:

First off, good, you’ve given me some meat to respond to. Ritual is flexible in this regard and there is nothing wrong with being harsh to get the marrow out when it is reluctant.

While I agree that we can never fully present the entirety of our thoughts and that at a certain point the hermeneutic cycle makes communicating those ideas difficult, I would say that to reach for the extreme of “know nothing” from this is a mistake. There is plenty of room between perfect knowledge (unattainable) and no knowledge.

It has less to do with right/wrong than it does with authentic/inauthentic. This is especially important since you have presented a view whereby modern society (society in general, actually) in an inauthentic process reaching back into pre-modern times for something more real. The problems with this sort of view are what I outlined. So, I wouldn’t call it “moralizing”. Though I will point out that I am not a relativist, so I do think that ultimately we are left with ideas that are more right and others that are more wrong. Appreciating Greek thought, as you seem to, you should be familiar with the notion of conflict as a means of resolving this matter. While I tend to favor harmony over conflict as an ultimate vehicle, I have no problems with striking down the occasional discordant note or retuning the orchestra to match it, if it proves to be aesthetically superior. Which brings me to . . .

I think you are creating a monism/relativism distinction here that is quite dangerous. Your views on monism are quite correct; however, to go from there and embrace relativism is silly since not only is relativism simply another extreme at the end of the spectrum, but it also further forces all manner of silly divides within the self that leads to a quite unsatisfying philosophical stance. Pluralism would be the middle path here, not relativism.

We’re always limited by the medium we present in.

Who is dealing in absolutes here? Again, I think you run from one extreme to another. I also think you need to work on your definition of “honesty”, especially with respect to reason. Reason is, after all, morality codified, so I am unsure that we can call survival “dishonest”, when ultimately all our honesty is predicated upon our being in the process of surviving. Likewise, logic is a human construct designed to understand the world, so I would argue that none of the processes in the natural world can be dubbed “illogical”, save as a failing of human logic. Recognizing a failing can only become a good thing when one engages themselves in removing that failing or accepting it and working around it in such a way that it is no longer a failing at all. You seem to be content to stop in isness, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness applied to thought, as it were.

That contradicts your OP.

Joker,

I addressed your concerns in my response to Dan. A rejection of nominal constructs doesn’t really get anyone anywhere, and as I’ve described to you before, taking such a stance to its conclusion leads to enslavement – something I’d rather avoid.