Because it seems like you’re talking to me, yet none of that applies or makes any sense based on our interactions thus-far.
It doesn’t make any sense to you, perhaps… But that, too, makes perfect sense to me. I’m showing you yourself in my mirror, but because your soul is so warped, it seems to you that my mirror is warped.
You may be a natural philosopher, you may honestly pursue the truth that’s out there, but you’re no political philosopher, you haven’t pursued the truth that’s in here.²
“[…] the primacy of political philosophy, or the concentration on that part of philosophy in which the whole of philosophy is in question, in which its political defense and its rational foundation are of concern, in which the self-knowledge of the philosophers has its place.” (Heinrich Meier, “The History of Philosophy and the Intention of the Philosopher”, emphasis mine.)
Your soul is warped by your spiritedness, your spirit of revenge. You’re still an angry young man or, as Faust put it, a TPN—a testosterone-poisoned Nietzschean. Yes, even and especially in your impatience with Nietzsche, not to use any stronger words.
And yes, I too used to be like that! Though not quite as bad, like I said.
The charge of “cuckoldry” is so 2016, by the way! Ah, 2016, when all manner of petty tyrants felt they were on top of the world…
This, again, suggests something that’s wrong: namely, that I agree with Blake that the wrath of the lion be the wisdom of God (or “God”). But Blake says the same thing in different words when he uses the authority of the prophet Isaiah to argue “that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God” (op.cit., plate 12). And nothing could be further from the truth:
“Nobody lies as much as the indignant man.” (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 26 end.)
One can honestly experience indignation, but this tells us nothing about whether the object of that experience is actually unjust, unworthy, etc.; in fact, in such a state one is most likely to be dishonest!
Only when your conscience is turned against itself can you separate the science from the con! “A conscience behind your ‘conscience’,” as Nietzsche puts it in The Gay Science, aph. 335…
¹ “Acceptance”:
² Chris Christie, “I Have An Admission To Make”.
“Of Spinoza’s[!] philosophy, which had failed in its attempt to refute the possibility of revelation by means of a comprehensive system that would leave no room for an unfathomable God, Strauss had said that it rests ‘on an unevident decision, an act of the will, just as faith,’ yet regarding that philosophy, he had also expressly spoken of ‘unbelief.’ By contrast, of the philosophy following[!] Nietzsche, which no longer makes any serious effort to refute the possibility of revelation but instead rests satisfied with its cruelty toward itself and, out of probity, forbids itself belief, he says that ‘its basis is an act of the will, of belief.’ Whence the difference originates between the former philosophy, which rests on an ‘act of the will,’ and the latter philosophy, which is based on an ‘act of belief,’ Strauss makes quite clear in the final paragraph of the ‘summary’: ‘A new kind of fortitude which forbids itself every flight from the horror of life into comforting delusion, which accepts the eloquent descriptions of “the misery of man without God” as an additional proof of the goodness of its cause, reveals itself eventually as the ultimate and purest ground for the rebellion against revelation. … This final atheism with a good conscience, or with a bad conscience, is distinguished from the atheism at which the past shuddered by its conscientiousness. Compared not only with Epicureanism but with the unbelief of the age of[!] Spinoza, it reveals itself as a descendant of biblical morality.’ What distinguishes the philosophy of the age of[!] Heidegger from the philosophy of earlier ages is its morality. What allows it to be based on belief are its unquestioned moral presuppositions. What constitutes its weakness in the face of faith in revelation is the insufficient confrontation with moral and political opinions not only that are determinative for its opponent but also by which it allows itself to be determined.” (Meier, “The Theologico-Political Problem”.)
Three different philosophies are distinguished here: 1) the early modern philosophy of (the age of) Spinoza; 2) the late modern philosophy following Nietzsche, the “postmodern” philosophy of (the age of) Heidegger; and 3) the premodern philosophy of Epicureanism… These are characterized respectively by 1) unbelief, or the will to security; 2) belief, or the moral will to intellectual probity; and 3) the “natural desire for truth”, or the philosophical eros. (Cf. ibid. ff.)
Now in a private message I sent on March 10, 2023, I wrote:
‘[H]ere’s the thing. I don’t know how well you’re aware of this, but I’m actually an extremely proud man. But I should now say ‘vain boy’ instead: for if there is no free will, there can be nothing to be proud of! Not only is nothing my merit, but I can’t even be proud of anyone else—not even a God… And it’s not just pride that goes out of the window, but anything that requires me to identify as, or with, a free agent: cruelty, for example. In fact, I think that, insofar as one is aware of this, there can be no pleasure, joy, etc. whatsoever!’
Cruelty. The pleasure of cruelty consists in identifying with, or as, a free agent—the one who inflicts the suffering in question. (“Suffering” also in the sense of suffering enjoyment, undergoing enjoyment… In other words, the pleasure of cruelty consists in identifying with, or as, the activity or action that’s logically behind some perceived passivity or passion.)
(Quote source: https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?p=2907265#p2907265)
Now the thing is that even if your conscience is turned against itself, you still identify with a God…
“The beautiful is suddenly disclosed and visible, the whole that was perceived only piecemeal and disparately lights up in a flash, insights converge and gain an undreamt of, unforeseeable, overwhelming radiance in whose light things are no longer as they seemed, and life can no longer remain as it was. The prophet will be absorbed in the devotion to the beautiful. He is remolded, transformed, and newly minted in his individuality. He knows himself to be a vessel of God and nothing more. He will trace the happiness of transcending his own limitedness, the subsumption of the particular in the universal, his losing himself in the whole […] in awe and reverence back to the author of the whole. In his felicity he will become aware of his mission. He will place himself completely in the service of the sovereign authority and, with all the resources available to him, defend the order that it guarantees and that he craves. The philosopher turns his gaze in the opposite direction. He relates the beautiful back to the good. In his felicity he becomes aware of his own activity. In his erotic nature he recognizes the strength that carries him beyond himself and the power that enables him to find himself again in the whole. The experience of the beatitudo […] encourages him to live the dialectical tension between […] the necessarily anonymous truth and its individual understanding, between the devotion to the beautiful and the knowledge of our needy nature, which allows this devotion to be good for us.” (Meier, “On the Genealogy of Faith in Revelation”.)
If devotion to a God is good for us, there’s still a good to pursue and a self to pursue it. But what’s really the case is that there’s a need, a desire, an eros, and what’s “good” for this eros is devotion to the beautiful illusion of a good to pursue and a self to pursue it! For it’s only in the felicity this illusion provides that eros can become aware of itself, of its own “activity”:
“‘In order that there might be any degree of consciousness in the world, an unreal world of error had to—emerge: beings¹ with the belief in persisting things, in individuals etc.’ (V 2, 11 [162]). What is called the unreal world of error here? Nietzsche’s answer reads: ‘beings¹ with the belief in persisting things, in individuals etc.’ On a cursory reading, one might think that what is unreal about this world of error be only the belief of the beings¹ that populate it. But the beings¹ are actually themselves that in which they believe, namely individuals, more precisely put: that which they call their being² organizes itself through their will to be individuals. Life means self-assertion; life rests on the delusion that there were a self-identical self, which can persevere through time, which can hold its own. Greek ontology calls that which perseveres as something identical through the changes of an organic being¹ its εἶδος, its form. This form is never purely realized. It never comes into full presence. But all the phases in the development of a living being¹ may be designated as becoming or perishing, that is to say as degrees of approximating or moving away from the realization of the form. Therefore the form has the character of the τέλος—the goal immanent in each living being.¹ Greek ontology designates the self-identical τέλος as the true being² of each thing that moves. The designation of the τέλος as the being² of entities³ suggests itself strongly when one considers that becoming, that is, the transition into being,² is a process of approximating the immanent τέλος, and that perishing, conversely, is a process of moving away from the immanent τέλος. But with the decline and eventual fall of metaphysics, the possibility of designating a non-sensual, never given being¹ as the true being² of the temporal vanishes as well. If the τέλος has no being,² then the only remaining alternative is to interpret it as a non-being² that presents itself as a being,² that is, to interpret it as show [Schein]. Now it remains true, however, that all life is only made possible by the fact that a being¹ organizes itself in the striving after such a unity. One cannot say that the τέλος were a man-made fiction. Every living being¹ is in actual fact oriented towards an organizing unity. Thus the show of the τέλος is a show brought forth by nature itself. Show, or, as Nietzsche also puts it: error, is the condition of the possibility of life. The unreal world of error is thus no man-made fiction but the real world of living creatures.¹ All living creatures¹ whatsoever exist only through the belief in persisting things, that is to say through their striving after the organizing unity of the τέλος. But that after which they strive never has a being.² Thus they exist only by virtue of error. The ultimate truth is the flux of things with the contradiction that it contains within itself [i.e., the contradiction between past and future]. Torn into its opposites and formless, this ultimate truth is not world, either. There is only an unreal world; the real is nothing but pure negativity, time, or, as Nietzsche also calls it: suffering. But pure negativity has, by itself and out of itself, no subsistence [Bestand]: it is only as it produces show out of itself, which however, because it stands in opposition to it, is itself not real either but only a show. […W]ithout show, the eternal flux has no subsistence. It must produce show out of itself. Show therefore belongs to its truth.” (Picht, Nietzsche, pp. 250-52, my translation.)
¹ Wesen.
² Sein.
³ Seiende.
Hegel.
Nuf said.
For an object to self-lighten, it must hold itself as a standard. Moreover, the radiated piece, to be expelled with/as force, must set itself both against the standard of the piece it leaves, and as a new standard, to be able to represent a resistance that can be pushed out.
(When a photon is annihilated as it collides with matter, it gives up its being-standard, its self-relating, to be translated into force imposed on that matter - it must self-value for its annihilation to have consequence.)
I came back to this original conception just recently, after having spent years misunderstanding my own theory as representing an accumulative activity - what was originally meant was simply the being-standard as a requirement of the power to interact. I.e. to be able to be known, to be an ontological, or an epistemic value.
I had asked myself for a time how one quantum of power relates to another, without being subsumed by it as being the same quality. How it relates against the other quantum.
Apt:
Power is “characterized by the effect it exerts and the effect it resists […]. The quantum of power is essentially a will to violate and to defend oneself against being violated . Not self-preservation”
(attributed to N in various places, unspecified book)
Why?
Why?
Terminator Vs Jesus HD The Greatest Action Story Ever Told Mad Tv 1996
I take “object” and “piece” metaphorically here, by the way. They would rather be subjects or waves.
That’s interesting. It suggests to me it need not be at odds with self-lightening (self-charging rather than self-discharging).
That’s from workbook Spring 1888 14 [79], which was used in Will to Power nrs. 634 and 635:
“A quantum of power is designated by the effect it produces and that which it resists. […] It is essentially a will to violate and to defend oneself against violation. Not self-preservation: every atom affects the whole of being—it is thought away if one thinks away this radiation of power-will. That is why I call it a quantum of ‘will to power’: it expresses the characteristic that cannot be thought out of the mechanistic order without thinking away this order itself.” (WP 634, Kaufmann ed.)
Interestingly, Nietzsche emphasizes “be” (werden), I suppose in order to stress that it’s already thought in with the rest of the mechanistic order of being. It is the irrefutable error of free will. That is to say, every (“piece” of) self-lightening experiences itself as wanting to violate and—thereby!—defend(ing) itself against violation (and is therefore a ‘subject’); but actually, this feeling of free will is only an appearance accompanying every ‘eradiation’ of force.—To be sure, the following may still be the case then:
If there is self-lightening, it must hold itself to be something (actually, not a thing, an object, but a subject of some kind). And that of which it is lightened must hold itself both different from that from which it is lightened—and vice versa—and as ‘something’. But this is not a matter of cause and effect but rather of a necessary condition. From the AI overview of my Google search for ‘necessary condition’:
“In logic, if A is a necessary condition for B, then if B is true, A must also be true. For example, if the statement ‘it is raining’ implies ‘the sidewalk is wet,’ then ‘the sidewalk is wet’ is a necessary condition for ‘it is raining’.”
Here, the necessary condition is rather an effect than the cause. Likewise, the accompanying appearance ‘feeling of active standard-setting/holding’ is rather an effect than the cause in self-lightening. It’s certainly not a sufficient condition, let alone its sole sufficient condition.
I suppose, though, that one could argue that there even being such a mutual appearance is already a/the sufficient condition for there being an “objective” mutual resistance; more precisely, that, there being no objectivity, such intersubjectivity is already the supreme measure of actuality. Well, it’s certainly not just the will which is an appearance; force, too, is not an in-itself but a phenomenon, an appearance.
“Has a force ever been demonstrated? No, only effects translated into a completely foreign language. We are so used, however, to regularity in succession that its oddity no longer seems odd to us.” (WP 620 whole; cf. ff. and 550 ff.)
Of course, effects without a cause aren’t really effects; the concept “effect” is already an interpretation. But with this we’re back, if not full circle, then in a short circuit, at the irrefutable error of free will. Is it (humanly) possible to represent the world as representation without representing it as, willing it to be, will?—Then again, aren’t we already beyond that error in understanding that we ‘cannot get beyond it’?
As far as I understand, it must be self-relative, be a resistance. I’m not sure how else a wave can be expelled.
I could be wrong. I’m not clear on he physics here.
Same reason. There would have to be an interaction of sorts, I think.
Even though I might see a wave as an object as well, I don’t disagree.
I don’t think it is at odds, no.
That last part corresponds with what I meant.
I agree that it’s not a sufficient condition. I don’t see that it is the effect.
I see what you mean though.
The strength of the necessity of self-discharging, requiring a self to discharge, allows it to bring the semblances of such a self into being.
This caught my eye:
"The theory of chance: the soul is a selecting and self-nourishing being, which is persistently extremely clever and creative (this creative power is commonly overlocked! it is taken to be merely passive).
I recognised the active and creative power within the accidental.—Accident is in itself nothing more than the clashing of creative impulses." [WtP 673]
Yeah, by ‘rather an effect’, I didn’t mean actually an effect.
(The above was the draft I still had open on this thread. Just posting it now because why not.)
Yes. But see also section 417: in the notebooks, the first paragraph of 417 is part of a different note, whereas 673 comes immediately before the final sentence. This means it comes immediately after this part:
“1.) My striving against decay and increasing weakness of personality. I sought a new center.
2. Impossibility of this striving recognized!
3.) Thereupon I advanced further down the road of dissolution,—where I found new sources of strength for individuals. We have to be destroyers!——
I recognized that the state of dissolution, in which individual beings can complete themselves as never before—is an image and individual case of existence in general.”
But before I go into this, let’s look at the wording of 673. Whereas N first contrasts the active and creative with the passive, he ends by speaking of creative impulses—and impulses are of course not free, they’re impelled. Zufall (“chance”, “accident”), which I’ve consistently translated as ‘coincidence’, is only the clashing or coinciding of creative impulses. I’m reminded of something I suggested a little while ago to a then-contact who believes in free will: if two beings have free will, what happens when they clash? Won’t the free will of the one hamper the free will of the other, and vice versa? We might understand the doctrine of the will to power as the ontologization of the irrefutable human error of free will, which however becomes completely unfree because it’s surrounded by nothing but other free wills…
Next, let’s look at the things he says immediately before and after the parts we’ve read thus far. Before:
“veiled by delusion [is] every strong action [Handeln]
culture [is] isolated, unjust, thereby strong”
Could the sense of activity and creativity itself be a delusion by which the passionate impulses are veiled?
After:
“Against the paralyzing sense of general dissolution and incompleteness I posed the eternal recurrence!”
We have to be self-destroyers, we can complete ourselves as never before in self-dissolution, by discharging ourselves on our surroundings, thereby “re-creating” them:
“NB. The highest man [is] to be conceived of as an image of nature: monstrous abundance, monstrous reason in particulars, as a whole squandering himself, indifferent thereto:——” (Workbook Spring 1884, entry 25 [140] whole, my translation; cf. BGaE 9. WtP 417/673 is from workbook Winter 1883-84, by the way.)
And against what sense of general incompleteness there remains, Nietzsche poses the ER… Yet the ER can also be understood in a completely opposite sense:
“Against the feeling that ‘all is the same, all was’, Nietzsche summons all the uncertainty, infinite perspectivity, chance, and creativity of the universe.” (George Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, “Dionysos”; cf. WtP 1059-60.)
So for those for whom the sense of general unfixedness is the problem, the ER is the solution; whereas for those for whom the sense of general fixedness is the problem, the pride of strength, of creativity, of agency is the solution…
“You have nothing in your hands. Any power you have comes to you from far beyond. Everything is fixed, and you can’t change it!”
—Jesus Christ Superstar
“This teaching is mild against those who do not believe in it, it has no hells and no threats. Whoever does not believe has a fleeting life in his consciousness.” (Workbook Autumn 1881 11 [160] whole.)
I suppose then the ontologization of free will also requires its quantization. Otherwise, every being would have an equally strong unfree will, since it would have a completely free will if it were the only existing being. (More precisely, of course, there are no beings, but only (un)free wills, or in other words the beings don’t have will, they are will.) Thus: there is a smallest quantum of will, which by itself would be completely free, but two of such quanta combined are stronger than a single one. So two quanta can “cancel each other out” (hold each other completely in check), or they can—redouble each other.
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.
As to the question of creative impulses, there remains the phenomenon of creation, of increasing in complexity, beauty, intricacy, greatness, from quark to Nietzsche… 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. 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.
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.
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.
As to the question of creative impulses, there remains the phenomenon of creation, of increasing in complexity, beauty, intricacy, greatness, from quark to Nietzsche… 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. 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.
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.
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”…)
Is there such a thing as objective beauty or greatness, though?
“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.)
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).)
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.).
And only a sentient being who conceives reality as it is can be said to be objectively beautiful or to know objective beauty:
“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. 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. 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)."
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.
Well, that goes a long way. And the question how exactly complexity arises certainly remains an open question, including in the context of Nietzsche.
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)…
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.
See the Appendix, below.
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 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)
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.
Yes, but merely the terrible questionableness of it, but also its unspeakable beauties.
(I mean to juxtapose ‘questionableness’ and ‘unspeakable’.)
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)
Indeed.
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.
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.
So I disagree with this…
but agree with this.
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.
Good!
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.
By the way, I use the concept of cat as a means to clarify my not-anthropo-exclusive conception of beauty, not to make a point of arguing for it as a standard. Don’t pin me down on it. I might as well have used a falcon. It must be an animal with sharp senses though, taking pleasure in clarity, reality.
Associations: Flowers as eyes on the central power, reality. Why women like flowers; not just because they are beautiful and smell good, but because they imagine they are looking at them. Photosynthesis relating Tipharet and the Sun. Beauty as a reflection of true power; flower (beautiful) relates to Sun (Tipharet) as Tipharet (beauty) relates to Kether (unknowable, absolute). Beauty as the reflection of the unknowable.
The above reminded me of the following:
“The way I envisage it is that every specific body strives to become master over all of space and extend its force (—its will to power) over it: and to knock back everything that strives against its extension. But it continually hits upon similar strivings on the parts of other bodies, and ends up coming to an arrangement (a ‘union’) with those which are sufficiently akin:—thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on…” (WtP 636, my trans.)
This “kinship” is of course precisely what you, Jakob, have brought attention to and ventured to explain. Now Lampert claims that “the relation among them [is] simply that of greater or lesser;” (What a Philosopher Is. Becoming Nietzsche, p266n29)—and at least this makes sense if, say, we compare quantum-mechanical scales with classical-mechanical ones: on the scale of our naked eyes, for example, the quantum world is not directly discernible, and even indirectly hardly noticeable.
Yes, Nietzsche more or less says this, too, in TI “Skirmishes” 38:
“[W]hat is freedom! That one has the will to responsibility for oneself. That one maintains the distance which separates us. That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one’s cause, not excluding oneself. Freedom means that the manly instincts, which delight in war and victory, dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of ‘happiness’.” (Unknown translator(s), emended by yours truly.)
I however don’t think this is true freedom, just the feeling of freedom. The will itself I see only as the feeling of freedom which accompanies every ‘eradiation’ of force (as N puts it in a note). In fact, I see this as part of his exotericism, by which he seeks to inspire (cf. EH “Zarathustra” 3) the second caste (cf. AC 56-57).
Well, an even fatter, even hairier man might see your man in a bikini and see the rise of his type reflected in him…
“[N]othing is ugly [hässlich] except the degenerating man—[…] A hatred [Hass] is aroused—but whom does man hate then? There is no doubt: the decline of his type. Here he hates out of the deepest instinct of the species; in this hatred there is a shudder, caution, depth, farsightedness—it is the deepest hatred there is. It is because of this that art is deep.” (TI “Skirmishes” 20 end, unknown translator(s).)
I once coined the word ‘sursumgeneration’, generation upwards, for this, thinking of “The Bestowing Virtue”:
“Tell me, my brother, what do we think bad, and worst of all? Is it not degeneration?—And we always suspect degeneration when the bestowing soul is lacking.
Upward goeth our course from genera on to super-genera.” (Z I 22 1, Common trans.)
I think, like N it seems, that, when one sees anything as beautiful, one does so because it reminds one of the rise of one’s type.
Slavoj Zizek on the Horror of Tulips
“The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion.” (William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Proverbs of Hell”.)
I thought of this earlier in writing this post, but I will say it now: did you know stunted birds, birds who have lived in too small cages, will prefer other stunted birds of their species over non-stunted ones? And do you think this is modesty on their part?
Well, yes, but then I also think terror is subjective…
Well, I think it’s not beauty, but that which is held to be beautiful which is a property of the beheld: symmetry, for instance (or even just seeming symmetry—I mean a superficial symmetry which suggests a deeper one which is not actually there. Then again, like symmetry and other fitness indicators themselves, dissimulation, too, is costly. I’m reminded of a documentary with David Attenborough about the false cleanerfish: after an elaborate metamorphosis, it was able to get close enough to a bigger fish to get a few bites out of it instead of cleaning it like the actual cleanerfish—after which it had to reverse its metamorphosis again.)
Well, when the fossil of an unknown in-between form is finally discovered, “skeptics” can always say: “Yeah, but where are the forms which came between that form and the ones we already knew, huh?” (In other words, I’m ‘skeptical’ about such skepticism…)
I think a healthy (big) cat reminds us of the health of our type—in part because of such properties which they share with us, yes.
Wisdom, I don’t know. Health and vigor, yes. I’d say beauty is whatever reflects—for us—the health and vigor of our type.
Ha, no, I don’t think it’s like that at all. I mean, sure, “if they could perceive like we do”. But that isn’t because we’re superior perceivers, but because it would constitute an extreme decline of our type to mutate into them in our natural environment.
Thanks, I’m bookmarking that.