Challege to Zeroeth Nature viz. Self-Lightening

[Jakob]

I don’t agree with the reasoning on the last part. For a will to be free, but also for it to exist as will at all, it has to have something (another will) to discharge itself on. A will in a complete vacuum seems to me an absolutely constrained thing, not a will.

Well, yeah, but then free will is an absurd concept to begin with. It would be able to decide what it was a will to, and even whether it was a will at all…

[Edit: I only just realized you wrote “constrained”, not “unconstrained”…)

Yes, constrained by the absence of wills to dominate, and/or integrate.
Given that obviously a will can not be free from itself, from what it happens to will, I still value the concept tof freedom in terms of will, but rather see the terms as quite related. What would be the freest will? Is an interesting question to me - the answer must include both health, vigor, and a context in which these can be exerted. Caesar was a very free will; a great concentration of power with near unlimited opportunities to express itself. Not because there was no resistance, rather because there was just the right amount, gradient, and type of resistance.

By God I hate this new formatting.

As to the question of creative impulses, there remains the phenomenon of creation, of increasing in complexity, beauty, intricacy, greatness, from quark to Nietzsche…

Is there such a thing as objective beauty or greatness, though?

As for beauty, yes, I think so.
I think beauty is the shape of strength in balance. (indeed, force and form);
And I think beauty is integral to evolution. I disagree completely with Nietzsche on this.
Of course I reject the beauty standards of hard-wokeness, where a fat hairy man in a bikini is supposed to be beautiful. I simply contend that no one actually thinks of that as beautiful.
I see beauty, as also expressed as Tipharet in the tree of life, as a tight equilibrium of clean forces. Flowers, not man, as the primary example of this in nature.
I this that both the agreeable smell of a flower and their intricate colorful symmetries are instrumental to their function in nature.
(I find what I mean hard to express efficiently - my philosophy is ‘maximalist’ - it is hard to reduce into intellectual terms)

“The beautiful exists just as little as does the good, or the true. In every case it is a question of the conditions of preservation of a certain type of man: thus the herd man will experience the value feeling of the beautiful in the presence of different things than will the exceptional or over-man.” (WtP 804, Kaufmann ed.)

There will be a difference, but not an opposition.
Take your Palazzo Pitti, which you’ve used as an example of a noble beauty standard - no lowly pedestrian type will find this building ugly. They might prefer the Empire State building, but not, say, a backwater soviet housing block.

Yet:

“When the herd animal is irradiated by the glory of the purest virtue, the exceptional man must have been devaluated into evil. […Zarathustra] does not conceal the fact that his type of man, a relatively superhuman type, is superhuman precisely in its relation to the good—that the good and just would call his overman devil.
[…T]his type of man that he conceives, conceives reality as it is, being strong enough to do so; this type is not estranged or removed from reality but is reality itself and exemplifies all that is terrible and questionable in it—only in that way can man attain greatness.” (Ecce Homo, “Why I Am a Destiny”, section 5, unknown translator(s).)

Yes, but merely the terrible questionableness of it, but also its unspeakable beauties.
(I mean to juxtapose ‘questionableness’ and ‘unspeakable’.)

Only a sentient being who is reality can conceive reality as it is, i.e., can experience the value feeling of the true in the presence of what is in fact true (but this includes the fact that philosophy can—probably!—never completely resolve itself into wisdom, because of the necessity of “uncertainty, infinite perspectivity”, etc.).

Yes - only a god can value a god in its terms.
But again, a miser will still value the god (and be envious) - he just can not fathom and recognize the depths of the power and beauty of the god. He will not think the god ugly. He might object to him om moral grounds, but that is not contradicting the gods beauty.
(I use the term here instead of overman, the terms serve the same purpose here but the god represents the wisdom that may never be reached)

And only a sentient being who conceives reality as it is can be said to be objectively beautiful or to know objective beauty:

Indeed.

“Nothing is more conditional—or, let us say, narrower—than our feeling for beauty. Whoever would think of it apart from man’s joy in man would immediately lose any foothold. ‘Beautiful in itself’ is a mere phrase, not even a concept.

It is a contradiction, as beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder - but it is nonetheless a property of the beheld. Thus I see self-valuing; as interactivity in terms of valuing which leads to growth of beautiful complexity. In this way I also see evolution, and the remarkable separation between the species - at least the species in the light of day! I think that each species settled in the most beautiful form. That it is therefore that there are no endless in-between forms, but great steps, leaps.

In the beautiful, man posits himself as the measure of perfection; in special cases he worships himself in it. A species cannot do otherwise but thus affirm itself alone. Its lowest instinct, that of self-preservation and self-expansion, still radiates in such sublimities. Man believes the world itself to be overloaded with beauty—and he forgets himself as the cause of this. He alone has presented the world with beauty—alas! only with a very human, all-too-human beauty.

So I fundamentally disagree. I think a cat, a lion, a tiger is radically beautiful, and exists as such because of that property - the tight equilibrium of clean forces, which selects itself.
Only some humans are as beautiful as cats, and can judge as cleanly as cats. But the most beautiful humans are arguably more beautiful - greater in their beauty - than the greatest, most beautiful cats. And then some unfortunate cats are wretched. But all animals under the sun select for beauty, which is very closely related to health, vigor, and wisdom.

It is no coincidence that the deep-sea fish and beasts in the soil are hideous to us - they would be to themselves too, if they could perceive like we do. They would die out.

At bottom, man mirrors himself in things; he considers everything beautiful that reflects his own image: the judgment ‘beautiful’ is the vanity of his species. For a little suspicion may whisper this question into the skeptic’s ear: Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it, that is all. But nothing, absolutely nothing, guarantees that man should be the model of beauty. Who knows what he looks like in the eyes of a higher judge of beauty? […]
Nothing is beautiful, except man alone: all aesthetics rests upon this naïveté, which is its first truth. Let us immediately add the second: nothing is ugly except the degenerating man—and with this the realm of aesthetic judgment is circumscribed.” (Twilight of the Idols, “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man”, sections 19-20, unknown translator(s)."

So I disagree with this…

If the “higher judge of beauty” is no god (as Nietzsche goes on to suggest at that point; but cf. EH“Zarathustra” 7 (and 1-6)—Zarathustra being of course the (type of) man who conceives the type of man who conceives and is reality as it is…)—if the “higher judge of beauty” is a sentient being who conceives reality as it is, then his judgment “beautiful” may actually be said to be “objective”: at least when he’s not degenerating but flourishing, such a being really beautifies the world, because he is the world, is reality, is an image of nature, an image and individual case of existence in general.

but agree with this.

I get that you interpret this as (…) self-lightening on each other and by happenstance contributing to the becoming of a more complex phenomenon, but I am interested in the how and what, the nature of this increasing (in complexity, etc). The term ‘creation’ thus remains relevant for me. For me the conception of discharge is not adequate to that phenomenon which I observe, and which interests me.

Thus to me self-valuing, which I found nicely phrased in the passage I quoted, remains a pertinent concept. Although I recognize that it requires the arguably more primary impulse of discharge, to function.

Well, that goes a long way. And the question how exactly complexity arises certainly remains an open question, including in the context of Nietzsche.

This was the project of VO - the grand intuition that it had panted in me - the power by which things grow in complexity (which comes with greatness (in the senses of scale and power)) and beauty - two things I see as inextricably related, by the virtue of the interactivity of self-valuing, and vitality of the phenomenon value/valuing, being far more powerful than any hypothetical ‘neutral’ organizing principle, which would just lead to nano-goo, to use a term WL once used in an apocalyptic scenario. Nano-goo and worm-muck, as the antitheses of truth-bearing truth.

At the very least in the sense of emanation, which would be a kind of discharge by a void, by negative existence, as in the Tree of Life.

Effect or not: the relation between self-lightening and self-valuing as Chokmah and Binah is perhaps beyond causality in that they require each other (I still maintain that force has to be accumulated to be discharged, and that accumulating I see as only possible as self-valuing, yet for force to accumulate it also has to have been discharged), corresponding to the idea that the three supernal Sephirot are one, the distinction force/form as two sides of the unity that is Kether, unknowable source of emanation.

So the split of Kether into Chokmah and Binah is its first way of becoming knowable.

Yes, excellent. Ironically, only yesterday did I rediscover that I have to discharge myself—by “preaching my Law”, “uttering my Word”—in order to want to keep accumulating force (flourish, expand or expend in order to preserve myself)…

Good!

Frustratingly, the source I had for the yetziraic texts, polarissite.net, no longer serves. First it was closed off, now gone. I can’t find these texts anywhere else, not even chatgpt finds them. But maybe you can.

Yes, now that you mention it… I still used that site somewhat recently, myself. I think I should be abe to find the Yetziratic texts, though; what I lament more is the loss of the correspondence tables (most notably the gods; the other correspondences are mostly in Liber 777, I think). Let me take a look.

Internet Sacred Text Archive

SEPHER YETZIRAH | Sacred Texts Archive

Judaism: 1. In two and thirty most occult and wonderful paths of wisdom did JAH the Lord of Hosts engrave his name: God of the armies of Israel, ever-li…

See the Appendix, below.

Great, thanks.
So for Kether:

“The First Path is called the Admirable or the Concealed Intelligence (The Highest Crown) - for it is the Light giving the power of comprehension of that First Principle which has no beginning, and it is the Primal Glory, for no created being can attain to its essence.”

On the tables of correspondence, I roughly copied them into this thread once. I link to a place in the middle of the paths, somewhere before that I have pasted the sephirot.

The Tree of Life Exploded

And back to Earth in 22 steps: [image] Aleph Ox The Eleventh Path is the Scintillating Intelligence because it is the essence of that curtain which is placed close to the order of the disposition, and this is a special dignity given to it that it may be able to stand before the Face of the Cause of Causes. Key 0 The Fool Spirit of Aether World Color Atziluth Bright pale yellow Briah Sky blue Yetzirah Blue emerald Assiah Emerald flecked gold Direction: Above-Below Astrological: Air, …