Subject change. Have you ever wondered why people gotta “identify” at all… or over a period of time that makes it count… especially post-Darwin?
Of course you have. Hence the plethora of sock puppets.
That ‘unofficial girlfriend’ I spoke of was actually a 20 year old Liberal Arts major at the time (Theater; now she’s 21 and a Journalism major)… And it was she I was especially thinking of when I said:
It’s a well-known fact that actors and actresses tend to be among the most superstitious people there are. So insecure, you know! Which also very much applies to Jakob and his obvious inferiority (“superiority”) complex.
But suppose a 20 year old Liberal Arts major girl does have the exact same position you’ve arrived at: does that then hurt your “pride”? In that case, you haven’t really arrived at my position now, have you! 
“What is clearer than the impossibility of experiencing anything but experiences! Nothing gives anything an extra-experiential being. A cave man grasping this knew all there is to know.” (Neumann, Liberalism, Chapter 4.)
“Nietzsche claims that, for science there are no facts, only interpretations or methods–methods of experience, points of view. There is nothing inherently rigorous or mathematical in scientific method which, rightly understood as it rarely is, means nothing more than nihilist experience, any way (or method) of experiencing – whether it be that of a tiger, an infant or an Einstein.” (op.cit., Chapter 1.)
“Science is the simple, readily available insight that whatever is experienced – a self, a world, a god, the law of contradiction, a morality or anything else – is nothing more than the experience of it. It makes no difference whether the experience is that of an insect, a Darwin or a Lenin: it remains nothing more than the experience.” (op.cit., Chapter 15.)
I certainly already saw this when I was 20; I just had even far more common-sense delusions back then than I have now.
“In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates tells of his unsuccessful youthful efforts to uncover the reality of things by looking directly at them. He soon came to believe that this direct approach blinded him, leaving him with nothing but incoherent experience. Unable to leave it at this nihilist chaos, he needed what Nietzsche called a world, and therefore a god or cosmic mind, an integrating principle, uniting immediate experience’s chaotic diversity into a coherent, rational whole.” (op.cit., Chapter 17 (“Nietzsche”). Note that this is, ironically, a face-value reading of the Phaedo, not an esoteric one.)
Maybe I do seem that way to you, or maybe you’re just saying that to discredit me. Christians are nothing if not mendacious, after all.
Did he honestly rage, or did he work himself into a rage as theater for the “noble”? What I think he was getting at is the hypocrisy. Christians are nothing if not dishonest with themselves, after all.
The single stronger “species” (Art) of man was the kind (Art) of man who could sustain as full a contact with reality as humanly (superhumanly) possible.
“[”]To what extent can truth endure incarnation? – that is the question, that is the experiment.["]
“Can men grasp life’s nothingness without destroying themselves?: “We are making an experiment with the truth. Perhaps mankind will be destroyed by it! Fine!” Mankind’s destruction or the destruction of all life would change nothing in a nihilist reality. Nietzsche’s experiment with the truth is the same as Heidegger’s inner truth and greatness of nazism [”(namely the meeting of global technology and modern man)“]. That experiment means to determine whether a few supermen can become alive to the truth without self-destruction. It does not mean to prove the truth experimentally. Nothing – and only nothing! – can be proven in science’s nihilist reality.” (op.cit., Chapter 16.)
Mecha Ritz Steel Rondo 1CC with TLB (Kaiensai)
It’s interesting you should mention pride.
A 20 year old Liberal Arts major never put a moment of thought in their position. They just repeat some bullshit they vaguely paid attention to while they were coordinating outfits with their friends (and gossip about why the guys in their lives are so insecure).
Tens of millions of people hold the exact, reflective position. It is manufactured by pol scis and psychologists on twitter while still half asleep, before they go do actual work.
Most people that hold this position don’t really care that this is the case. They own it, it is simple. It is what is “right,” which they know because their girlfriends say the same thing when they go shopping for scarves.
Their reasons for holding it are the same as yours. It amounts to the same. But your pride seems to hurt at this, so you write a whole library full of convoluted text to “explain” it. Not develop it, because it was already developped. The 20 year old Liberal Arts major girl already had it. From twitter.
Every 5 years or so, you slightly switch it around… to conform to the new standard!
My point wasn’t so much about pride as about exaggerated effort.
I don’t need to read a comment on Strauss’s comment on Heidegger’s comment on Nietzsche. I already know the position, and can trace it back at least 10 genealogical layers. None of which pass through a philosopher of note, it’s just basic socialist residue from the bottom of the propaganda pyramid, the product of not-even-clever manipulation of emotions.
They’re not sock puppets if they exist only linearly, and everybody knows I am pezer under each account.
I guess at the outset I do wish to not be seen to be pezer, so I can maybe talk about interesting things without the love-hate of my fan base. But a moafucka can’t help being a moafuckah, and it takes two or three posts for me to be found out.
And then I go through a process whereby I realize nothing interesting could be talked about in this crowd, or probably any crowd, so I accept the identification of me and just squeeze whatever juice is in the lemon there.
Then it’s not their position.
Then it’s not a reflective position.
No they don’t. Is this what you think owning an exact, reflective position means? 
No they aren’t, and it doesn’t. I can do this all day!
Nonsense. I think you’ve just described the way you read me (“vaguely paid attention to while they were coordinating outfits with their friends”; “on [their cellphones] while still half asleep, before they go do actual work”; etc.).
No you don’t, and you can’t.
Well, I can see I have already helped.
We have dispensed with the superfluous endless quotes and analyses, and arrived at a formulation much more suited to the intellectual level:
“Nuh-UH!”
Not immediately I did.. Did you specify that you were? Or did you just “proudly” presume that, because you’re sooo special and unique, people would know at once?
Ah, I see. Yes, Jakob also really liked being perceived as a hot young girl for—well, many years, really! (I suspected it was him from the beginning, but I didn’t know until recently—possibly because I didn’t find “her” interesting enough to happen upon the posts in which he may have specified it one way or another.)
See everything I’ve said in this post.
No, because somebody always comes out and says “this guys is pezer.”
I think we’ve established what owning an exact, reflective position means to you.
It doesn’t “mean something to me.” It means something.
For goodness’ sake.
What, they make some kind of global announcement of which everyone receives a notification? I must have missed that.
Well I mean they damn near do. It’s embarassing.
Or it would be if I didn’t hold it to apply to a bunch of animals.
You think that’s what it means objectively? lolololololol I’m reminded of your good friend ProfessorX (to just name the latest(?) of his many, many aliases). When he values something, that’s because it’s objectively valuable! Good is good and bad is bad and yes, it really is that simple! My god, how many clowns fit in a clown van, exactly..
Well I mean I’m sorry if it means something and that hurts your feelings.
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“Pleasure to me is to wonder - the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.” -Howard Phillip Lovecraft
One of my favorite quote! The last part means finding the generalizable patterns or laws underlying the diversity of the phenomena as they appear to us. That means of course developing models of what is veryseemingly true beyond the limits of our perceptions. Truth might be approached by science, although there is no way to be sure of it. That is done by making models reliablly predicting perceptual occurences, tradditionnaly called empiricism. Roughly speaking, science can be seen as an attempt to ontology through methodic phenomenology.
Lovecraft’s ontological intuition unfortunately was too closely attached to what is immediately substantiatable by science. The emotiono-philosophical conclusions he derived from that made his heart sick.
All those rants reflect also what you said here:
@Jakob you read it?
Not in its entirety. His work is very dense. I read philosophy slowly, in general.
With Nietzsche: true philosophy is written in blood. Its not healthy to read too much of it at once. This is a reference to N’s work but it applies to genuine philosophy in general. One sentence may keep me thinking for a long time. Most philosophy though, every sentence makes me laugh. I recently read some Wittgenstein again. So silly.
But, to the point, I gathered insight from what I did read of this book. Which is rare even for philosophical writing. I would not be putting myself through this ordeal (I hate such computer chores and they take me forever) if I did not think the work deserves, or needs to be out there. P does things that connect the ancients, prePlatonic and foundational Socratic, with reality in a more vital and less obedient way than what has generally been done. He re-orients on the Aporetic nature of truth rather than engage in dialectic as a response to this nature. To him, dialectic is an eroding force. And I agree.
I am now working on a second edition by the way, because the format this came out as was not as I intended.
I don’t agree with him on everything. I don’t share his view on Nietzsche, for example. But then he very rarely mentions Nietzsche in his books, the moderns are not his focus.
His disagreement with Nietzsche is not uninteresting, by the way - Parodites is an advocate of the phenomenon of morality as an essential structure of consciousness, to him the quest for morality is a transcendent one and one that Christianity has only nobly attempted, but not accomplished. He sees America as a project advanced by the freemasons to accomplish it, centralizing the idea of Man within the framework of metaphysics. I do agree with that. This project is now facing a great challenge, needs to make a step that frightens people all across the spectrum. All the more reason why these works are relevant.
I could answer that only by quoting extensively from the book. The Glorious Risk is really not something that can be captured in a catchphrase, or in a single paragraph. It really is a substantial idea.
Like if you were to ask me to summarize Plato’s mission in the Republic. It can’t be summarized. You need to read every sentence in context of every other sentence you already read. Im not sure if this work is as hermetic as that, as I said I havent finished it. But any writing that can be summarized without sacrificing its meaning is not philosophy, or even proper literature.
What happens in a book of philosophy is a thought process, that is to say an unfolding thought. P said that he only has one thought which he is continuously unfolding. The quality of a singular, life-spanning thought is what one is gleaning when reading a real thinker. One can not absorb this thought whole, but one can be instructed, liberated, put to work, initiated by it.
Im glad someone actually looked him up though and cherry picked through some writing. Look at the thread on Liberty, if you can find it. Or if you want more easily digestible writing which nonetheless offers properly new insights into our present situation, get the Trump book thats offered in the link I gave. There’s writing from me as well there, not my best. I tried to endorse politics, a novelty for me then, and approach it head-on, in the raw present, whereas the ‘present state’ of politics is of course always a mirage.
If you get this book just discard what I wrote. His writings in it alone are worth it, amusing and instructive, not at all cryptic, with some cool anthropology in there that’ll change the way you think about human thinking and its evolution.
Could be.
Interesting thought.
What? No.
New Age?
No I think you might actually need to read the book just to see how some moderns actually do not disappoint, do not reduce to banalities.
Not about Capitalism. What New age guy has given a technical economic-political analysis of 4 stages of capitalism? What New Age guy has ever given any technical analysis? This analysis is not present in this first book though, part of it is in the Trump book. But there is plenty of systemic analysis on more timeless subjects here. And his political economic predictions have been coming true. He understands Capital, which is exciting. Not many do.
No no no.
It used to take me an hour sometimes to grasp a sentence of his, but when I did grasp it I had learned a new way of thinking.
Obviously such sentences are still rare in his work, but then such power to transform my intellectual M.O. is much rarer online outside his work than inside of it.
On the internet only one other person has managed something like that, and only once.
His full on cryptic writing only took off after 2020, by the way. This book is not nearly as cryptic as some of these posts he put in here. I mean it’s often very dense but in fact not cryptic at all.
His venture into full on… um, crypt… went hand in hand with his venture into AI. He was one of the first to get the engine from I think open AI, in 2020 I think, and trained it using some powerful hardware he bought from some money het got into, using extremely obscure literary sources which I have no idea how he found them. He had this AI log on and post here under the name of Shoggoth. I at the time had no clue about LLMs, as this was before they came onto the market, and approached it with a very simple attitude. In any case, this whole project may have been what changed his attitude to literature. Maybe he felt he had to do something the AI could not possibly even seem to be able to replicate. Or the AI just turbocharged him to a level I wont ever comprehend. I don’t know.
I do wish he wrote some colloquial books. He’s good at that. But this is what there is.
When I first encountered him I had, like anyone, the same thoughts as you express here. This guy seems to just be obscure for the sake of it. With trouble I deciphered some of his aphorisms with not too much Latin in them, and they were meaningful, evoking a paradigm I had not yet encountered. It’s a great thinker, one of the few of this age you can actually learn something concrete from. His attitudes don’t always match mine but his task is real.
There is a generous sample there in amazon under the cover image…
By generous I mean: quite a lot of pages you can read before buying. Certainly enough to get the style/voice of the writer.
My take is the longer prose doesn’t really organize anything. It’s a collage with a lot of name dropping, but I don’t see anything building. It’s got a lot of posturing, the persona of a battle-tested, world-weary sage (“What do men of today know of love…”).
The aphorisms are better because the guy has some real wit and can observe. Some seem formulaic but others like 47 and 79.
He benefits from losing the Victorian fluff of the previous pastiche-ish text.
I did wonder for a bit if he was completely taking the piss, given the name. But it doesn’t match that.
I think you’ll get enough of an impression from what is offered as a sample to know if you want to buy the book.
And I guess I’d add. I think this guy needs a blunt, very intelligent editor. Go for work of really solid, building something 200 pages. Justify the mood of that persona instead of displaying it. (and take out the typos and misformating). Perhaps he had an editor, but I doubt it. It needs someone blaming themselves for what’s unclear and fluffy. And since the word editor can freak some people out, like they are actually editing the text. I think he needs someone who can be blunt about what isn’t working. Parodites can edit or not from there. With this much persona, the editor needs to be someone P really respects.
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