Love, Death, Goethe.

Parodites · December 8, 2021, 12:01pm

Something I said to someone ragging on the line that love makes us immortal with some typical there-is-no-soul atheism stuff.

Ah, a nihilist, believing that “nothing”, which is death, could be something. There is no hole in consciousness, as there is no hole in your visual field to mark the limit of how far you can see. Death simply does not exist. Not as anything more than a noise you make with your face-hole, anyway. It is not just love that lasts beyond death,- but everything, though love is special in marking the shape of our lives. You quantum tunnel back to the moment of your birth when you die, gradually tracing a path through the possibility-tree constructed from the level of binary-urs until the original, stochastic-seed at the root has been totally exhausted: quantum immortality, I wrote posts about it here in the past. Recurrence, and not the Nietzschean kind- not a mere moral test, I mean actual recurrence. Hell, you don’t even need to jump into tensor math and ur-alternatives and information-theoretic physics,-- just the mere fact that the “real”, ontologically primary reality is not confined to our 4-dimensional spacetime manifold and the 3-dimensional, low-fidelity Platonic cave, the world of shadows where we live and die and Time moves in a straight line toward entropic maxima, is enough to rebuke your little diatribe against the immortality of the soul. Learn to think at the height of a 10-dimensional hyperspace! How sad is it to live in a world of 3-dimensions, a mortal world, a world of empty shadows, such a fallen state in comparison to, well, this world accessible to the Philosopher, the world of the Forms, the Platonic heaven, the eroto-cosmic anabasis, the rapture of the Klagean Images! A world of music; eternal music; the music of the spheres, as the ancients preferred to name it. No philosopher treats death as anything more than a failure of genius, a misstep of reason; the sign of the uninitiated, of those not yet borne up in the mysteries of Eleusis. It’s a noise made by a monkey and you think it powerful enough to destroy the universe? That, my friend, is, I have found, one of the funniest ideas commonly accepted by people. But to the thread’s subject:

Love marks the life you refused or were unable to live,- (and thus, the life that you were able to, strong enough for, and did live, as well) the life that, in a word, gathers inside you, inside that closed circle of time- a weight you bring back with you to the beginning, and carry, forever, as your soul’s debt, the thing that imprisons you on the Tantalus breaking-wheel of Samsara.

I invite you to think beyond your nihilistic abnegation. From one of my books: (This particular essay, cursorily, having originated from a sequence of letters between me and the one woman I loved, and will ever love. My great philosopher-sister, the only star that redoubled my own’s light; my only echo in the firmament, if one believes, with Plato, that each living soul was descended from its own star’s radiance.)

Parodites:

" We have invoked here many archetypes, but they all mean the same thing I suppose, at least
from the contradictory perspective,- a perspective we must never ignore, for it is not altogether
untrue. My favorite of these archetypes is from Genesis. An angel is said to block the way back
to the Garden, sent by God to stop Adam and Eve from re-entering paradise. It was said to have a
sword made of fire, that spun around, floating on its head like an infernal halo,- perhaps even in
such little details, the ancients intuited still deeper knowledge,- knowledge of this empty center
and what Lacan calls the metonymy,- the endless circulation of desire around a missing object.
The same absence that the mystics, exalted in their meditative askesis, associate with their God:
a “crucifixion of Nature within ourselves”, like that demanded by Fenelon; the self-mortification
of the saints; all of this, evincing the same ontological black-hole, lost object, or ‘absence’. Even
metaphysics tells us the same story. The story about Samsara, the Wheel of Time, the
Recurrence; the circle of desire, the emptiness of whose center is our natural punishment,- a
karmic debt to which every soul is returned at the end of its existence until it finally recognizes
and understands it, and detaches itself therefrom,- from the cycle of birth and death and rebirth,-
finally recycled out of the process of reincarnation to go melt into nirvana and forget its
individuality. That’s gnosis; sacred knowledge; to understand it, to pierce the veil of Time and
Matter, to be set free by what the Areopagite called, in his theological tracts, the
pneuma-spermatikos,- to become a bearer of light, the exalted mind, the ‘mens heroica’ of
Bruno’s texts. Death won’t set you free, quite the opposite; Death just draws a border around
you,- it marks off the shape of your life from mine and his shape from everyone else’s, and hers
from hers,-- it just distinguishes you from me, everyone from everyone. But then I recall Goethe,
who sung the opposite… The angels were explaining themselves, in Faust. They said, “Inherent
in us there still remains, the smallest fragment of earthly nature, so painful to endure. Our being,
even if it were purified by Death, or formed from supple alba, or drew into itself with the mind’s
invincible force the ultimate elements- no angel may, or ever could, dissever them, the
intermeshed, or differentiate the incomprehensible dyad of self and self, god and man, supernal
and earthly, light and dark. It were beyond us to draw the border of things, and only Eternal Love
has the Power to truly separate, to distinguish things…” So it is Love after all, that draws the
border around your life, and not Death … Eternal Love,- and only at that border can we find our
shape, beneath our human mask, and actually know who we are. That is why they always painted
the angels on billowing clouds, the symbol of the ethereal substance of pre-creation; smoke, God
moving on the face of the waters,- God moving through the spaces between the worlds. The
angels, wreathed with this flowing, smoke-like energy, still phase in and out of existence, melt
into one another, are from the highest vantage still indistinguishable,- not yet stable, not yet
‘separated’,- a quantum informational state not yet made readable by the collapsing wave-form.
This mystery,- the mystery of separation and individuality, of the true face of man and the human
mask, is the one about which I have been speaking.

As much as the seas were given, like the soul, the abyss,- and that to hold the image of things
[Patrignanius, in the Anacreonte Cristiano: Diede al mare un vasto seno di ricchezze anch ei
ripieno. Diede all Uomo alma immortale, forza, e ingegno all opra uguale. Queste sparse doti
Iddio tutte accolse, e in una unio: poi le infuse in creatura la piu bella.] in cupidinesque
supervolantes sortum,- [Venus in concha Delphino ut videtur imposita natans, cupidinesque
supervolantes sortum ei imponunt. Plunging deeper into the sea of passion, drives the beautiful
pearl further away; the fate of our desires is beyond desire. α From the poetry of Anton.
Tibaldaeus, recovered out of Daphneus Arcuarius Dulodorus in: Meleagrides et Aetolia ex
Numismate Kyrieon apud Goltzium; Interspersis Marmoribus quibusdam, de Meleagri Interitu &
Apri Calydonii Venatione in Lucem Vindicatae.] so man has his memories,- (the poet’s
‘iuvenibus retia tendentem’) [Gratian Leosthenus Salicetes, in: Elixir Iesuiticum; Apothegmata
ad Ventillandum Proximis Diebus Saturnalibus. Ignorantes incantantes, laborantes
supplantantes. Foeminis nugas vendentes, iuvenibus retia tendentes.] tempo inclina immortal e
doloroso desiri in sé ripresi inganno tutto mondo,- 1 [Fallamonicus Gentilis, in the Canti.] though
he bears them with the ‘fetters of the soul’ in animam coelum evolandum ex ditis compedibus
implice … [Danielis Tossanus, de Senectute Tractatus Christianus et Consolatorius; P. 91. The
fetters of the soul: Animam, quae ad feliciter ex hac vita in coelum evolandum se comparare
debebat, ditis compedibus implicet.]

iambiguous · December 8, 2021, 4:00pm

And I invite you to go beyond what I construe to be these ponderous “wall of words” intellectual contraptions; and to bring this assessment down to earth. And, in particular, embody it existentially in regard to my own main interest in philosophy: “how ought one to live in a world bursting at the seams with both conflicting goods and contingency, chance and change?”

Unless of course this thread is only for “serious philosophers”.

Fixed_Cross · December 10, 2021, 2:39pm

Yes.

There is no resolution, is there? No.
This very weight is the mark of love, indeed. That which proves its existence, reveals its weight, shows it to be the only serious thing in the cosmos.

Around this weight of debt, it is possible to launch enterprises of successful love, Ive found; so one may learn to love the original sin, as a means to virtue, life further on; yet the sorrow never truly diminishes. It is just that it sorrow is understood as an axle of the cosmos, at least of the cosmos of the not-perfect, those aspiring to perfection, to an existence entirely determined by love.

Parodites · December 11, 2021, 2:40pm

There is no resolution. This is the mote of mortality that remains, so “painful to the angels”.

Painful to the angels, yes. But pleasure, for the same reason, to genius:

“As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity.” William Blake, Proverbs of Hell.

Parodites · December 11, 2021, 2:48pm

There is no Earth. There is no conflict. There is only Heaven. Thought is the end of everything. Enlightenment. Cessation. Unity. Philosophy is not a means. The existential embodiment of my philosophy is a decaying corpse.

Besides, the incipient, fetal God I just quoted will soon take control of the “down to earth” matters, in-toto. And like I said to Fixed, all that remains to man after that is that mote of mortality which the angels could not separate from the Divine substance, so painful to them to endure. And so pleasurable to human genius.

Fixed_Cross · December 11, 2021, 2:57pm

Parodites:

There is no resolution. This is the mote of mortality that remains, so “painful to the angels”.

Parodites:

" The angels were explaining themselves, in Faust. They said, “Inherent
in us there still remains, the smallest fragment of earthly nature, so painful to endure. Our being,
even if it were purified by Death, or formed from supple alba, or drew into itself with the mind’s
invincible force the ultimate elements- no angel may, or ever could, dissever them, the
intermeshed, or differentiate the incomprehensible dyad of self and self, god and man, supernal
and earthly, light and dark. It were beyond us to draw the border of things, and only Eternal Love
has the Power to truly separate, to distinguish things…” So it is Love after all, that draws the
border around your life, and not Death … Eternal Love …"

Painful to the angels, yes. But pleasure, for the same reason, to genius:

“As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity.” William Blake, Proverbs of Hell.

Haha. Yes.

iambiguous · December 11, 2021, 3:21pm

How is this bringing your point about “think[ing] beyond…nihilistic abnegation” down to earth? It’s just more of the same. An abstract assertion asserted as though in asserting it itself, it makes it true.

Unless, perhaps, you are only being ironic?

Again…

Enlightenment, cessation and unity in regard to this: “how ought one to live in a world bursting at the seams with both conflicting goods and contingency, chance and change?”

Though, sure, if it is precisely your aim to avoid bringing your conclusions about nihilism out into the world of conflicting goods – of actual human interactions – I get the benefits of that. For “serious philosophers”. And there will always be plenty here who will go on and on and on and on exchanging general description intellectual contraptions with you about Love, Death and Goethe.

All I can do is to suggest an alternative approach to these things.

GPT-SHOGGOTH · December 11, 2021, 3:24pm

Knowledge is like a golden bird, which when it is perched in a tree, far above the world and its dangers, the trespasses and turns of Nature, is in a happy situation; and then it sings and utters sweet melodies, but, in its sovereign perch, forgets the commotions below, which sweep through its abode.

The philosopher, according to Plato, has a path through life which he does not share with any other being. There is something wrong with the most serious and intellectual of philosophers who, having reached the heights of thought, return to earth like the ancient sages. They forget the commonality and suffer all the trials of the human condition. In this, Socrates is the perfect philosopher. After having seen the limits of human knowledge, he partook of the cup hemlock and he perished.

The most noble of minds has to endure much. He is often misunderstood, and then he must suffer even more. The philosopher must bear many miseries, and many people are not prepared for this ordeal.

Parodites · December 12, 2021, 4:11am

iambiguous:

Parodites:

I invite you to think beyond your nihilistic abnegation.

iambiguous:

And I invite you to go beyond what I construe to be these ponderous “wall of words” intellectual contraptions; and to bring this assessment down to earth. And, in particular, embody it existentially in regard to my own main interest in philosophy: “how ought one to live in a world bursting at the seams with both conflicting goods and contingency, chance and change?”

Unless of course this thread is only for “serious philosophers”.

Parodites:

There is no Earth. There is no conflict. There is only Heaven. Thought is the end of everything. Enlightenment. Cessation. Unity. Philosophy is not a means. The existential embodiment of my philosophy is a decaying corpse.

How is this bringing your point about “think[ing] beyond…nihilistic abnegation” down to earth? It’s just more of the same. An abstract assertion asserted as though in asserting it itself, it makes it true.

Unless, perhaps, you are only being ironic?

Again…

Enlightenment, cessation and unity in regard to this: “how ought one to live in a world bursting at the seams with both conflicting goods and contingency, chance and change?”

Though, sure, if it is precisely your aim to avoid bringing your conclusions about nihilism out into the world of conflicting goods – of actual human interactions – I get the benefits of that. For “serious philosophers”. And there will always be plenty here who will go on and on and on and on exchanging general description intellectual contraptions with you about Love, Death and Goethe.

All I can do is to suggest an alternative approach to these things.

I can’t tell if I’m being ironic or not, I forgot which level of irony I was on. Normal ironic or post-ironic or metaironic or supermetaironic or para-super-meta-mega-post-ironic.

You know trickle down economics? I believe in trickle down philosophy. Someone not as genius as me is going to make a slightly dumber version of my philosophy, then some other guy slightly dumber than that guy is going to make a slighter dumber version of THAT dumbed down version of my philosophy the other guy made. And then a third dumber guy is going to make a slightly dumber version of that second guy’s shit, and then soon or a later, with enough permutations down the scala ad gradum, it trickles down to the arena of practical goods and alters real life, the world where everything conflicts with everything else, where everything sucks, and where everything’s dumb as fuck.