Challege to Zeroeth Nature viz. Self-Lightening

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
101

Of course I would. In fact, I have been saying such things for about fifteen years already! In fact, the seed for this seems to have been sown almost twenty years ago:

‘I have been reading Nietzsche for about ten years, which is the entirety of my (legally) adult life. And only now, only this year, with the discovery of Leo Strauss, have I been able to reconcile seeming contradictions, which still costs a lot of effort, though success usually comes without much ado - it just dawns upon me, it does not announce itself with thunder and lightning. But it still requires good reading, resourcefulness, intelligence, patience… One should not rush these things.’

“Socrates’ arguments on the immortality of the soul sort those gathered in his cell into a rank order of the easily trusting, the not so easily trusting, and, perhaps, the never trusting. Simmias and Cebes distinguish themselves at this point as requiring a rational rigor that some of the others did not.” (Lampert, How Socrates Became Socrates, page 19.)

Simmias and Cebes belong to the middle rank (the warrior caste as found in Nietzsche’s Antichrist, sections 56-57).

“How philosophy’s deepest question can best be handled with a ‘philosophic’ audience like Simmias and Cebes requires the polytropic wisdom of an Odysseus. In the last argument of his life, Socrates will deploy his most characteristic philosophic innovation, transcendent forms, for an argument aimed at securing as his own a central Pythagorean innovation in philosophy, the immortality of the soul.” (Lampert, How Socrates Became Socrates, page 34.)

(Simmias and Cebes used to be Pythagoreans.)

102

Jakob, can you please remind me, in the Republic, who better knows an instrument, the one who crafts it, or the one who plays it, or someone else?

103

Opinion is where the feels are at (value) and things feel passing because we want them to stay.

…because the strongest hunger we don’t even think about (it just is our normal every day state, so we don’t even examine it) is the hunger for the eternal.

It’s always running in the background unquestioned like a song until you realize (understand) you’re singing it.

104

If the soul is immortal, that fact can hardly be an innovation.

105

It can still be an innovation in philosophy, since philosophy is not about facts but rather about knowing facts. So that “central Pythagorean innovation”, at least in that part of the world, was that a philosopher claimed to know that the soul was immortal. And Socrates even furnished an argument for that claim by deploying his own “most characteristic philosophic innovation, transcendent forms,” even though Parmenides had already refuted those for him fifty years earlier…

106

I get all that - it was Pythagoras’ idea, though not his innovation because it was upheld in Egypt before that for a long time and Pythagoras would have been aware of that - but okay, he was the one that seems to have introduced it in Greece. And I hold Pythagoras in the utmost esteem. He truly grasped divine forms - using them to generate divine powers, having created our musical system out of mathematics in combination with physics, obliterating the idea that art merely imitates nature. True art is an exalted form of nature, for which she has need of man to attain it.

To me Platos conception here is a mystical, not a philosophic concept - as the hypothesis of eternal forms does not imply a soul. But all this aside, the question I asked you (privately, but if it must be here then so be it) was in what way the esoteric Socrates’ position differs from the exoteric one; in the texts I quoted, he makes it clear that to him the enternal and unchangeable is what a man should focus on. This is the position that is commonly known as the Platonic one.

I asked you: Would you say this is not Socrates’ position?
You said: Of course I would.
But then what you give in explanation of this are references to a hypothetical hierarchy among Platos students in reference to their belief in an eternal soul. Which does not stand in contradiction to the texts I quoted at all. Ive been trying to pry the difference (esoteric/exoteric Plato) out of you for as long as you’ve been saying there is one, but to no avail.

Furthermore, the Pythagorean idea of soul seems to have been in contradiction to the Socratic one, if this quote is indeed correctly attributed to Pythagoras (Pythagoras certainly did keep his ideas in part to an inner circle, esoteric);

“Men are mortal by their fears and immortal by their desires.”
(the primal forms of negative and positive valuing)

107

“What shall we say about the distinction between the two doctrines so eagerly received by all the Philosophers, and by which they professed in secret sentiments contrary to those they taught publicly. Pythagoras was the first to make use of the esoteric doctrine. He did not reveal it to his disciples until after lengthy tests and with the greatest mystery. He gave them lessons in Atheism in secret and solemnly offered Hecatombs to Jupiter. The philosophers were so comfortable with this method that it spread rapidly in Greece and from there to Rome, as may be seen in the works of Cicero, who along with his friends laughed at the immortal Gods to whom he so eloquently bore witness on the Rostrum. The esoteric doctrine was not carried from Europe to China, but it was born there too with Philosophy.” (“Observations by Jean-Jacques Rousseau of Geneva On the Reply Made to his Discourse [on the Sciences and Arts]”, ed. Masters and Kelly.)

The esoteric doctrine is that the soul is not immortal, there are no transcendent forms, etc. This is the “position” attained by “the philosophers” from Antichrist 56—“perhaps, the never trusting.” They never trust/believe, perhaps, that the soul is immortal.

Do they ever believe that the soul is not immortal? Perhaps not, since then, too, they would not be philo-sophers. ‘[T]he possibility of something ultimate, however minimal’… A philosopher “should” still focus on the eternal and, in that sense, unchangeable, but it’s not a form but rather force, or emptiness.

I would say nature is a rudimentary “form” of art, and the exoteric conception of the soul is as the transcendent form of man:

“In Hades, [Odysseus] learns, there are recognizable images of men and women, but, with the exception of Teiresias, they have no mind. […] ‘Hades’ splits body and soul apart in a peculiar way: the soul retains the looks of the body, and the mind vanishes entirely.” (Seth Benardete, The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey, pages 87-88.)

108

Nice, so uncertainty as the general philosophical principle. I do of course agree with that and Socrates did famously touch on this in the Apology. In terms of objective fact, we can be certain only of uncertainty, and this has come to light in science through the uncertainty principle, where we are certain of a specific proportion of one uncertainty against the other. Which arguably brings proportion to the foreground even over uncertainty; and this ties back into Pythagoras’ science.

VO’s original premise was epistemological, rather than ontological - the title “value ontology” was something I adopted from a friends casual identification of my thought. The thought is: of whatever we can say with certainty that it exists, it is certain that it values in terms of its self-valuing. Referring to the necessity of resistance, which is self-reference, for capacity to be discerned from nothingness. This does indeed relate to that boson/fermion distinction you pointed out.

Could you expand on the relationship between force and emptiness?

“I would say nature is a rudimentary “form” of art,”

We agree then that nature and art belong to the same continuum.

109

Actually, I did not mean that the nonexistence of any immortal soul was as uncertain as the existence of an immortal soul. There most probably is no immortal soul. The uncertainty of its nonexistence is about as small as the uncertainty of uncertainty (there might just be something out there which would refute the uncertainty principle, for example).

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" There most probably is no immortal soul. The uncertainty of its nonexistence is about as small as the uncertainty of uncertainty"

How do you calculate that? I assume you do not take ‘there might just be’ as a discrete quantity of uncertainty to be identified precisely with another ‘there might just be’.

I really would like to see the hard logical sequence leading to your belief, starting with axioms or absolute certainties.

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111

Ill take that smiley as a no.
In that case it is only a belief.

This is my issue with atheism; I am all for agnosticism (I am technically an agnost), but atheism, as the insistence that there is not god, is as much a dogma as theism is, as long as there are no hard definitions and logic involved. By logic I mean the strict application of consequence/antinomy.

112

How much of an agnostic are you with regard to the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

113

It depends on the definition.

In general spaghetti is empirically known to not fly on its own accord. It seems to violate the defintion of spaghetti.

But, I can not disregard the notion that someone might throw a bundle of spaghetti and that, airborne, it would appear to someone like a monster.

If you are an atheist, how do you define ‘God’?

As for the soul, as you know I am compelled by the information and logical methods I have at my disposal to interpret valuing as logically-causally prior to matter. Where as you know ‘valuing’ is not meant as function of consciousness but as a form of selective response required for causality itself.

I interpret organic consciousness as a converging of different causal trajectories leading from the first principle of valuing. I am thus not able to disregard very much about consciousness in terms purely of matter. It is certain that we have not explained thought in terms of matter; it is clear that certain physical manipulations can trigger and inhibit certain throughts and modes of consciousness, but not that matter constitutes them. If I have to define the soul, despite not knowing comprehensively what it is, I am forced to say it is constituted of valuing and may or may not be independent of the type of causal trajectory we understand as time. Thus Im more sincerely agnostic in this regard than with respect to the spaghetti monster, which Im pretty sure is just a phrase devised with the aim of it being evidently absurd to everyone.

114

Plato’s (hence Socrates’) interpretations of ‘God’ are of the “Highest Good” and are only recognized by the highest-caliber of Souls (Golden, Aristocracy). Plato associates multiple values to ‘God’, such as Beauty, Truth, Reason, Justice, and Originality. The implication is that if you “trace ALL things back to their origin”, then that must be where and when “God Resides”. Obviously this is a fundamental precursor to the synthesis between Greek Hellenism and Abrahamic Judaism (via Christianity), to create the “One God” of Abrahamic Monotheism.

I see now that much of Plato has been misinterpreted by the masses. His works and main points are pretty straight forward.

“Nature”, by my interpretation, is the ‘lowly’ experiences of Man. Plato would refer to that as Tyranny and Injustice, rule of Emotion, Might is Right instead of Right is Might. Nature is more ‘womanly’ and feminine. Man is ‘above’ Nature, above Woman, Discipline, Ascetic, Reasoned, Just, Moral, Philosophical.

Let’s see what @Kallikantzaros has to say…?

First a mind must ‘copy’ a phenomenon into himself, before Nature can be understood. This is where Kant’s contributions are most important, the A Priori, Analytics. A person’s brain has a “hardwire” setting. Thus some humans naturally have inferior and superior interpretations and interactions with any and all phenomena. For example, some people are mentally ill. Some people are retarded and low-IQ. Some people are blind, deaf, mute, etc.

Where are the disagreements, exactly?

115

I’ma pass on that.

116

Plato’s Socrates is the Socrates from whom Plato learned “everything”, in a dual sense: he is the historical Socrates whose major faults Plato has corrected; in other words, the ‘platonized’—beautified, “embellished”—Socrates.

This does mean Plato’s Socrates is basically Plato’s spokesman. The word “spokesman”, however, is ironic here, since he very much also conveys Plato’s messages unspoken, between the lines. Ask yourself: whom does Socrates address? Does he address you, the reader, directly? Does he address the author, Plato, directly? Only the latter, only probably, and only in the exceptional case—proving the rule:

“When we look at the Platonic dialogues, we observe that there is never a dialogue among minds of the highest order: all Platonic dialogues are dialogues between a superior man and men inferior to him.” (Leo Strauss, “What Is Liberal Education?”)

117

Actually… Socrates is a midwife of the synthesis… that’s why Plato has people making fun of him about things like preferring his own bias/inclination as a philosopher (whilst elsewhere warning to ground the philosophers and not let them stay on skyhooks, basically). Socrates takes conflicting positions on purpose, and we’re supposed to laugh at the ones who swallow it. He also goes along with people’s conflicting positions just to set up how hilariously (or … disgustingly) absurd it is to hold them.

He was like a Greek Elijah.