Brainwife and -children.

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

I am concerned with the differences and the similarities between children of flesh and blood and “brainchildren”, or rather between the purpose of both. My opening contention is that both physical and spiritual propagation amounts to the passing-on of information: in the first case, genetic information, in the second, intellectual information.

Nietzsche, for example, never had any actual children, but he begot many brainchildren, his books, to which he indeed repeatedly referred as his “children”. My actual issue is formulated by him thus:

“Every animal, including also la bête philosophe [the philosophical beast] instinctively strives for the optimal beneficial conditions in which it can let out all its power and attain the strongest feeling of its strength. Every animal in the same instinctual way and with a refined sense of smell that “is loftier than all reason” dislikes any kind of trouble maker or barrier which lies or which could lie in its way to these optimal conditions (I’m not speaking about its path to “happiness” but about its way to power, to action, to its most powerful deeds, and, in most cases, really about its way to unhappiness). Thus, the philosopher dislikes marriage as well as what might persuade him into it—marriage is a barrier and a disaster along his route to the optimal. What great philosopher up to now has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer—none of these got married. What’s more, we cannot even imagine them married. A married philosopher belongs in a comedy, that’s my principle. And Socrates, the exception, the malicious Socrates, it appears, got married ironically to demonstrate this very principle. Every philosopher would speak as once Buddha spoke when someone told him of the birth of his son, “Rahula has been born to me. A shackle has been forged for me.” (Rahula here means “a little demon”).”
[Genealogy of Morals, III, 7.]

Do not actual children imperil the philosopher’s brainchildren? Does intercourse (in the widest sense) with an actual woman not mean unfaithfulness to Sophia, Wisdom?

2

As a man, I know those times a girl tells me she’s pregnant. “Oh no- child support, she might not like me, do I enjoy kids? Why do I want kids? Am I too selfish?” I plan to get clipped, but I’m in no rush.

I see little difference between propagating myself by copulation or through an intermediary pitri dish. You barely even need a hunk of my flesh, soon enough you’ll only need a database with my specific dna. And then, why mine? Why not einstein’s? Why not a combination of the best? Or a concoction from scratch?

If my genetics don’t matter, should I propagate myself through information? But won’t we build some super-computer that’ll think faster than I ever could?

If there’s little point in propagating my genes or my thoughts, what am I here for? Some random glitch amongst the cosmos in the hope that it helps propel the universe toward something preferred? I guess.

I can’t even marry myself to Sophia because let’s face it, she’s quite a slut . . . unless of course you’re monotheistic. Then she’s already taken by your creator. I can serve Sophia but does she really care that much?

In the past, it was probably almost essential to not marry in order to devote yourself to information. Have you ever seen a married couple argue? It’s a wonder they even manage to get up in the morning. But today it almost seems irrelevant. Marriage is discussed in terms of tax benefits and pleasing the elders. Obviously some pact is essential to making sure there’s order, should we want to sustain the benefits of our relationship, or should we genetically propagate- and keep our kids out of foster homes . . . if we are indeed better parents.

We are all indeed the animals you speak of. Dr. Victor Frankl argues the “will to meaning” above the “will to power.” But I’d say the cookie crumbles the same way. We’re left with simple desires to mate and propagate like an animal, philosopher or not. In between we can work and study. Good philosophers can marry.

3

Don’t matter to whom? Your mistake seems to be that you try to judge yourself from an “objective” point of view.

A computer might compose a symphony in complete accord with musical conventions, for instance, yes. But I just happened to read the following yesterday:

“It is easy enough to correct Mussorgsky’s irregularities. The only trouble is that when this is done, the character and originality of the music are done away with, and the composer’s individuality vanishes.”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modest_Mussorgsky

Is there little point? In that case, you should make more point.

As Nietzsche says, if the women are sluts, one should not educate the women better, one should educate the men better. Your Sophia is a slut because you let her be.

As the distinction between being married and not being married becomes vaguer, so does the distinction between being a philosopher and not being a philosopher. I insist on a distinct idea of the philosopher. I don’t think you have a good idea of what a philosopher is.

4

[-X …and I don’t think you have such of an understanding of what is the Nietzche’s “ideal of the ascetic man”;which I will not say by ending with a proposition. :laughing:

5

Is this an overcomplicated nature/nurture debate?

6

Yes, excellent! Nietzsche had to count on others bringing forth actual children relatively similar to him. On the other hand perhaps, those others had to count on people bringing forth brainchildren rather than actual children. Man needs both progenitors and educators. He needs both brainfathers and actual fathers.

7

Having a wife and/or children takes one’s eye away from one’s task (unless that task be bringing up fine children). I think a philosopher really has to choose one or the other, at least during different periods of his life, otherwise he does a mediocre job of both. Ariadne however is not such a burden :wink:

8

Do you know what Ariadne is?

9

Why certainly. The wife of Dionysus, of course.

‘…for I, together with Ariadne, have only to be the golden equilibrium of all things, we have in each doing those who are above us… Dionysus.’ - Nietzsche, letter 4/1/1989

10

I enjoy watching men do this debate subject. It does give some insight.

So far no one has thought of Rennisance.(spelling?) A human of true intelligence would be able to have and do both with great success. Sacrifice is not needed. Both can inspire the raising of the other. Why have intelligence if you cannot pass it on in both ways.

Only doing it one way weakens the species and yourself. Intelligence and wisdom does not require monkish behavior, infact you hinder it by isolating yourself from a sharing social life. How can you the social human animal philosophize if you are not social? You can’t. Mere observation does not give true insight. Those that would seperate from a social family in order to increase knowledge of the species are failing to see the whole species.

11

I was referring to the following passage:

“Nothing like this [The Night Song from Thus Spake Zarathustra] has ever been written, felt, or suffered: thus suffers a god, a Dionysus. The answer to such a dithyramb of solar solitude in the light would be Ariadne… Who besides me knows what Ariadne is!.. For all such riddles nobody so far had any solution, I doubt that anybody even saw any riddles here.”
[Ecce Homo, on Thus Spake Zarathustra, 8.]

The location of this passage gives excellent clues as to what Ariadne was for Nietzsche. But the passage you provide is enlightening as well:

I believe this letter is among his so-called “Letters of Insanity”. I will now give my interpretation of Nietzsche’s Ariadne.

Ariadne is the “soul” (as is witnessed by the final remark in Zarathustra’s speech Of the Sublime Ones), i.e., the ego, the (lower) personality. Dionysus, on the other hand, is the Self. We cannot simply infer (from the passage you provided) that, in the Wagner-Nietzsche-Cosima triangle, Wagner was Theseus, Nietzsche Dionysus, and Cosima Ariadne, according to Nietzsche. It is the magician who, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, sings the song which Nietzsche later, in his Dionysus Dithyrambs, titled “Ariadne’s Lament”; and the magician is a parody of Wagner. So on this occasion, Wagner is Ariadne. But in his early years (between 1859 and 1864 - I don’t know the actual year), Nietzsche wrote a poem titled “To the Unknown God”, in which he obviously takes the role of Ariadne (and of course, it was Nietzsche who wrote Ariadne’s Lament, as well). So Ariadne was Nietzsche’s ego and Dionysus Nietzsche’s Self; only when he went “mad”, i.e., when his ego was totally extinguished, did he wholly identify with his Self (among whose symbols were Dionysus, Caesar, and the Crucified One). Upon this total extinction followed his Umnachtung, literally “night falling around him”, in which he lost his reason and consciousness. As Jung says;

“Naturally there can be no question of a total extinction of the ego, for then the focus of consciousness would be destroyed, and the result would be complete unconsciousness. The relative abolition of the ego affects only those supreme and ultimate decisions which confront us in situations where there are insoluble conflicts of duty. This means, in other words, that in such cases the ego is a suffering [passive] bystander who decides nothing but must submit to a decision and surrender unconditionally. The “genius” of man, the higher and more spacious part of him whose extent no one knows [his “unknown god”!], has the final word.”
[Christ, a Symbol of the Self.]

Of course, according to Nietzsche, the ego was always a suffering bystander to the unconscious decisions of the Self; but usually it at least feels in control, believes it is in control. As Nietzsche said, man would go mad without the feeling of free will (though, on paper, he might well do without the belief in free will).

12

“We have already seen that each of us is the final Heh [of Yod Heh Vau Heh], the Princess living in Assiah [the Material World] far from our original estate. But who is this Vau, the Prince to whom we must surrender and who will be our Secret Lover and champion? Where do we seek the Prince? In the Western Hermetic Tradition he is called THE HOLY GUARDIAN ANGEL and “he” is closer to us than our own heart-beat. He is our Secret Lover.”
[“The Pathworkings of Aleister Crowley”.]

“Chastity may thus be defined as the strict observance of the Magical Oath; that is, in the Light of the Law of Thelema, absolute and perfected devotion to the Holy Guardian Angel and exclusive pursuit of the Way of the True Will.”
[Crowley, “Little Essays toward Truth”, Chastity.]

The philosopher is Ariadne, and Sophia is his Dionysus. Note that Ariadne betrayed Dionysus for Theseus:

“Ariadne betrays the god when she helps Theseus kill the Minotaur, the crown giving off the light that Theseus needed to negotiate the very dark passages of the labyrinth. Ariadne betrays the god and gives his gift to the lover who replaces him.”
[Kalev Pehme, “Note on BG&E, graph 15”.]

Ariadne was a Semitic princess. Was she perhaps tempted by the serpent? The serpent represents materialism and sensuality, whereas the eagle (a bird) represents the spiritual.

“The Rig Veda samhita 1.164.20-22, Mundaka Upanishad 3.1.1, and Svetasvatara Upanisad 3.20, 4.6-7, speak of two birds, one perched on the branch of the tree, which signifies the body, and eating its fruit, the other merely watching.
The first bird represents a Jiva, or individual self, or soul. She has a female nature, being a sakti, an energy of God. When the jiva becomes distracted by the fruits (signifying sensual pleasure), she momentarily forgets her lord and lover and tries to enjoy the fruit independently of him. This separating forgetfulness is maha-maya, or enthrallment, spiritual death, and constitutes the fall of the jiva into the world of material birth, death, disease and old age.
The second bird is the Paramatman, an aspect of God who accompanies every living being in the heart while she remains in the material world. He is the support of all beings and is beyond sensual pleasure.”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_Jiva_and_Atman

“Philosophy as love of wisdom, up to the wise man as the most beatified, mightiest, who justifies all becoming and wants to have it again, - not love of man, or of gods, or of truth, but love of a condition, of a spiritual and sensual feeling of perfection: an affirmation and benediction out of an overflowing feeling of shaping power. The great distinction.”
[Nietzsche, Nachlass.]

13

Moderation is a great virtue. I am inclined to explore too widely the vastness of this symbolism, and thus make no more than speculations, or speak out unfinished lines of thought. I will refrain from doing so.

What I will do is let loose the Anima theory on the story.

Ariadne appeared to Theseus as an Anima apparition. That is, Theseus was able to project his Anima (his personified unconscious, which in the case of a male is feminine) on her. Ariadne was also able to project her Animus (Dionysus) on Theseus; but whereas Theseus was capable of seeing Ariadne for what she was - a mortal woman who could help him, as an Anima-figure -, Ariadne was not capable of separating the man Theseus from the god Dionysus. Thus she did not really “betray” Dionysus; she simply mistook someone else for him… Theseus left her behind at Naxos: to hang herself, by some accounts, and so “return to her god” after death; or, as it is my contention, to be driven mad by despair and thus be “possessed” by the god.

“If you have the great good fortune to meet your beloved again, the her of him, in one of the turns of your wheel, don’t make the mistake of marrying her. You would both be destroyed. What you must do is help her to die outside you. Love her as if you were committing a crime. The beloved must die in order to return to life as an immortal, placing her eternity in your hands. This is the true Her, who leads the warrior to heaven, who is not all illusion, who does not drag him down into hell, profaning him, castrating his magic virility, turning man into woman. She is not the devouring mother, the widow who is not the Widow, because she does not resign herself to her widowhood and so castrates her son. Parsifal and Alexander [heroes, like Theseus] had to employ Phobos (Hatred) in order to escape from the Great Mother, the little widow, so as to achieve the Grail, the Stone of Change, which the Greeks called Xoanon. Totality.”
[Jung, as documented by Miguel Serrano in the latter’s NOS.]

Theseus meets Ariadne, his beloved, his Anima, but does not marry her. He lets her die outside him (whether literally or metaphorically), so that she may return to life as an immortal, placing her eternity in “his” hands - i.e., in Dionysus’ hands, Theseus being Ariadne’s Animus-figure.

“The initiation of “loveless love” has been destroyed, and man has gone over to the diffusion of a physical, matriarchal love, centred purely on the physical body of the woman, in which the externalised Eve triumphs, desecrating the warrior, imposing her female urgency and her “Demetrian” fever for procreation. Love has become human, all too human. The “loveless love” of the warrior, of the troubadour, is the mystery of the Grail. The love of the unresurrected woman and man is the Church of Rome, lunar Christianity. The initiatory poem has deteriorated into the novel, the popular literature and the unhealthy sexualism of our day.”
[Jung, ibid.]

Thus the converse of Yod Heh Vau Heh is Heh Yod Heh Vau - Vau, in this case Theseus, seeing the first Heh, the true Her, reflected in the second Heh, Ariadne, which vision causes him to transfigure - be beatified - into Yod, his higher self (but still individuated from the unconscious, i.e., not umnächtet but enlightened).

“[P]recious stones are precious because they bear a faint resemblance to the glowing marvels seen with the inner eye of the visionary.”
[Aldous Huxley, “Heaven and Hell”.]

Likewise, men find those women beautiful who bear a resemblance (I would not call it “faint”) to their Anima. And, as in the case of precious stones, he who is attached to them is lost: he is dragged down from his Heaven by their weight.

Instead of feeling their vanity hurt by the fact that the true man does not admire them for themselves, women should feel proud in assisting him in his pursuit of self-realisation. For procreation is not justified in itself; rather, it should be directed towards a goal: to the end that one’s near or distant offspring may enhance the human race in a definite way. Woman’s purpose is the rearing of the genius, sage, or overman - whether in the present or in the future. Indeed, it is this ambition which makes a lady.

14

I think it’s a matter of Dionysus having two aspects: Dionysus the lover, and Dionysus the destroyer and creator, which is above the former.

‘No doubt, most people would only be impressed by Dionysus if he took them to bed.’

An egoless action would be one not experienced by the mind. For example, an involuntary movement of my arm that I am not at all consciously aware of (for example, because I am completely unconscious at the time, or perhaps dreaming of something else entirely). Such things do indeed occur.

15

You’re making the unjustified assumption that a spouse and offspring cannot be a source of many factors that enhance one’s power to generate ideas. A fulfilled personal life, especially with a spouse who shared common facinations, the pleasure of imparting them to your children and learning from their responses especially upon their reaching maturity, or just the opportunity of witnessing up close their cognitive development can give one insights that more that offset the investment parenthood might demand. It’s an open question which I suggest, from my experience, substantiates a tentative conclusion that marriage (which is reversable) and having children can enhance the material for the “brainchildren” to draw on

16

Yes, marriage is reversable today, which is a good thing, I think. It was a stupid institution anyhow: forcing a man to jeopardise his whole bloodline by limiting himself to one woman!

Also, I never meant to make that “unjustified assumption”. My only contention is that those ideas and brainchildren won’t be philosophical. As Harry Neumann writes;

“In any human or bestial herd, the main concern of herd members always is to get or to preserve what is good for themselves. The “themselves” here are not experienced as isolated, nihilist individuals who are nothing more than a chaos of arbitrary sentiments or experiences. The herd member’s self-knowledge is political. It is of himself as a father and citizen, a member of his herd. Thus obtaining or preserving what is good for himself is interpreted in terms of communal or political, not private, goods. No real privacy is available to, or desired by, herd members; everything crucial in their lives is political.”
[Politics or Nothing!]

Parents and spouses are dependent.

17

Your suggestion appears to be that a philosopher who has children can expect to see his work suffer. The implication is that, for a philosopher to do his best work he should remain childless. Or, in more general terms, he should attempt to live life in such a way that distractions are minimised.

I would argue two points:

(a) Such a view, in Kantian terms, would be impossible to universalize and therefore is immoral. For any philosopher to exist himself, it was necessary for him to have been the product of reproduction. All philosophers were themselves children, once! So, to argue that having children is a bad idea seems absurd, since the reproduction which gave rise to the philosopher was a necessary precondition of his being able to argue such a view.

(b) Surely having children would be a very good course of action for an empiricist philosopher? A philosopher with a child will acquire more extensive experience which could be used in the formulation of his ideas. Having a child will give the philosopher wisdom that he would not have been able to acquire had he remained childless.
[/quote]

18

Took the words out of my mouth. :sunglasses:

19

Kids definitely add new perspective and “enhance one’s power to generate ideas”. Any interaction with anyone does. but having your own kids is unique in terms of truly having children that are also ‘brainchildren’.

20

I am a Nietzschean, and thereby, an immoralist.

I never said that having children was “a bad idea”.

What would be absurd would be to say that nobody should have children anymore, or that everyone should be a philosopher.

For an anthropologist or a children’s psychologist that would be useful knowledge; but a philosopher need be neither of those. Also, consider the following:

“Surely doing heroin would be a very good course of action for an empiricist philosopher? A philosopher with a heroin addiction will acquire more extensive experience which could be used in the formulation of his ideas. Doing heroin will give the philosopher wisdom that he would not have been able to acquire had he remained clean.”

“Surely losing a leg would be a very good course of action for an empiricist philosopher? A philosopher with a handicap will acquire more extensive experience which could be used in the formulation of his ideas. Losing a leg will give the philosopher wisdom that he would not have been able to acquire had he remained two-legged.”

Etc. etc.