My Musical Qabalah.

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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Well, as I wrote eight months ago:

(Source: https://onlinephilosophyclub.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=419627#p419627)

And:

(Source: https://onlinephilosophyclub.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=419798#p419798)

Why must “thought thinking itself” set in motion? Because thought cannot think itself but by reflecting itself in the motions it creates…

“The locus of self-knowledge is political philosophy, moreover, in the sense that it compels the philosopher to subject his opinions, convictions, and prejudices in things political, moral, and religious to precise scrutiny and thereby makes it possible for him to gain distance from what is dearest to him due to his origin, on the basis of his inclinations, or in view of what are supposedly matters of self-evidence in his age. […] The experience of separation and departure, which we tried to capture in the archetypal image of the seafarer, receives its individual expression for the political philosopher in his taking leave of the nationalist hopes or the socialist dreams of his youth, in his wresting himself free of the resentments cultivated by his family or the class from which he stems, [etc.…]. As for what weight is to be attributed to political philosophy regarding this fourth moment, it becomes conspicuous when one considers more closely those philosophers who have not made the turn to political philosophy—who therefore have remained ‘pre-Socratics’ in a precise sense. Heidegger would have to be mentioned here. Likewise, the diaries of Wittgenstein and Frege provide some examples.” (Heinrich Meier, “Why Political Philosophy?”, paragraph 18.)

I think you are like Heidegger and Wittgenstein in this regard. You’ve rejected Socratic or Platonic philosophy, political philosophy—not in the least its exotericism. I can’t find it right now, but a couple of years ago you even wrote here that the reason for the break between you and (some/most of) your friends was “just politics”, or something to that effect… I see this reflected in this thing you wrote in this thread recently:

This is actually the opposite of what I meant by what you were responding to:

There is as little to be proud of in one’s works, ancestors, and god(s) as there is to be proud of in oneself! (Also, the difference between pride and vanity is the same as that between guilt and shame, respectively… The Homeric culture was an honour-shame culture—that is, a vanity culture! The Platonic or Christian culture has been a guilt culture, i.e. a pride culture. And the only difference is in whether what matters more to people is whether others or they themselves think they or their ancestors etc. have freely willed great things.—)

::

Addendum: I did not distinguish between pride and vanity before in this thread, because I didn’t have to. Your recent posts in your “The Philosophers” thread prompted it, however. Speaking of which: I was recently reminded of your “clan” in reading Meier on Rousseau and les philosophes…

“Dogmatism and fanaticism, missionary zeal and imperiousness [Herrschsucht…] is incompatible with the philosophic life and has its root in a lack of self-­knowledge. The lack of self-­knowledge goes hand in hand with a lack of freedom of mind and of thorough thinking, a lack Rousseau points out to the philosophes over and over in his œuvre […]: far from freeing themselves from the opinions of their time, the philosophes remain subservient to their century. They swim in the stream of its fashions and on the waves of their popularizations.” (Meier, Reflections On Rousseau’s Rêveries, American Edition, page 57.)

Case in point:

https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?p=2903879#p2903879

(Though this guy may actually be an exoteric writer, one way or the other…)

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Re: dogmatism: Socrates had a worldview—everyone does—you do, or you would not put forth (missionary-like) your musical qabalah. Not trying to shame you. Freeing yourself of one worldview implies a changed view, not a lack of one… or did you become incapable of sight & stop seeing altogether?

Re: pride/vanity… linking up with comfort/joy…

Kant on self-esteem (proper pride, responsibility)… is possible when we say no (sacrifice) to a lesser yes in favor of a higher yes in order to develop innate capacities [see Third Proposition (in Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose) as relates to pleasure/passion/happiness not being opposed to universalized (revaluation of) duty…]

(…and this is not the only example I can pull, by the way…)

We have been given what is needed (by “nature”… wink wink, nudge nudge… he means God) to determine for ourselves what is right/good for our own and others’ well-being (happiness “as far as is possible on earth”) beyond the barbarism of bare every-man-for-himself survival: that is, the pleasures, the insight, the good will [also see Kant’s 3 syntheses in CPR, & the way he delineates judgment, understanding, & reason (respectively) in CJ]. Skip to the end - he’s talking about a cosmopolitan goal/purpose… he’s saying we can’t develop fully in isolation but need the antagonism of the other (iron sharpens iron)… just like Socrates in Plato’s Republic. Also as in The Republic, he notes we are warped wood (fragmented parts) …privation implying real wholeness … the Cosmopolitan Idea in the title. When he says nature has given us what we need to bring the Idea to fruition, he’s calling us coauthors toward a planned end/purpose.

But the end/goal is not mere utility or agreeableness, as if we could just pump everybody full of drugs & be done with it or something. Again … growth requires challenge. Ease doesn’t spur freedom/responsibility (not to lay blame, but gratitude). Choice/challenge is required to develop the innate capacity toward the higher yes/meaningfulness of self=other/us=them (the guiding principle he elsewhere calls the categorical … universal … imperative… & see 5th proposition).

[Side note: There is a difference between reification & revaluation, and between reification & realization/fruition/finishing well (the already eternal Idea).]

He was not about base pleasure or privation, but about higher joy and wholeness. Creating towards the eternal.

To esteem yourself rightly is neither false humility nor overinflated pride. It means you know your strengths and weaknesses are innate (given), and your moral vices and virtues are chosen in collaboration (concurrence) with the one who gave you the innate capacity, and there would be nothing to choose otherwise.

Scroll to Third Proposition.
drive.google.com/file/d/1wtXoLk … p=drivesdk

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…the intentions, in One’s path, that we are comfortable with… so a medley of various intrinsic and extrinsic factors, so influenced from within/ourselves and without/others.

I do recall that thread… your philosophy seems to merge aspects of some religions in with your philosophical beliefs.

How did you come by/choose those aspects of those religions? I have always wondered that, since your early days as Sauwelious.

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Aw, Fixed Cross missed the magic moment when I had 234 posts and his Go(l)d ex-friend had 765!

On the contrary: a Socrates—like me—is freed from the narrow chinks of his cavern; he does not fall into the darkness of a new cave after exiting the one into which he was born, but sees that the world outside his old cave appears to be entirely composed of caves—a cave supersystem! Like I wrote last Christmas,

Compare:

“For Socrates, philosophy is knowledge of ignorance. But one cannot know that one is fundamentally ignorant without knowing that the world poses fundamental questions to which one does not have the definitive answer. Knowledge of ignorance, then, is not ignorance; it is knowledge. It is knowledge of the permanent problems, the fundamental perplexities that stimulate and structure our thinking. For the skeptic Socrates, then, these questions (and not the eternal Ideas) are the most fundamental and permanent beings that he knows, beings that continually summon him to thought. He experiences the whole as neither perfectly transparent nor perfectly opaque, but elusive and alluring. And this experience derives not simply from the limitations of human reason but from the character of the world: hiddenness is a property of being itself. Nature is esoteric.” (Arthur M. Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing, page 234.)

And:

“The third stage of Socrates’ philosophic education initiates him into an ontology based on understanding the nature of the human as eros; it is an account of beings as a whole based on acquaintance with the being most intimately knowable. As an ontology it occurs within an understanding of the limitations on human knowing, the dreaming and shadow-painting that inevitably construct the forms and particulars of human experience blocking all direct access to beings. And as Socrates’ ontology it can be sheltered comfortably within a refuted teaching on irrational forms that he advocates to the end. […] The Parmenides shows the necessity that the philosopher gain knowledge of the nature of knowing, of the limits on all possible human knowing. The Symposium shows that a philosopher, within those limits, can gain insight into the nature of all things, an ontology grounded in self-knowledge.” (Laurence A. Lampert, How Socrates Became Socrates: A Study of Plato’s Phaedo, Parmenides and Symposium.)

“Does faith rest for the believer on an unevident decision, or does he regard it as the work of him who is the truth? Can he be satisfied that faith in revelation originates from an act of the will? Is he permitted to ascribe to himself faith as an achievement of his own will? Or does he thereby fall prey to the temptation of pride? Does the obedience to the God of revelation not require that one overcome the vice of pride and exercise the virtue of humility? Yet humility, which finds its completion as the virtue of obedience in not knowing itself to be virtue, proves itself in attributing faith to the grace of God. If humility commands the believer to believe that faith rests on an act of the unfathomable will of God, the certainty of his faith must already be a sign of pride. A faith that cannot know itself and a virtue whose true mark of distinction is ignorance necessarily lead to a circulus vitiosus [vicious circle].” (Meier, “The Theologico-Political Problem”.)

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“Philosophical beliefs” is a paradox to say the least. Anyway, I like the term “religious philosophy”, as analogous to the (Straussian) term “political philosophy”.

I grew up in North-Western Europe, which is still very much a Christian society. When I asked her, as a kid, my paternal grandmother told me her dog was now in Dog Heaven. During my adolescence I liked to identify myself as a kind a rebel angel; I came across William Blake and John Milton. These could be called “proto-Jungian” influences. Then I discovered Jung, and in my early twenties a couple of Krishnaist and Thelemic books happened upon my path, which I then read in a Jungian fashion. This way of reading could be called “proto-Straussian”, for me: reading between the lines. This is just a fragmentary account of my development during those years, but I’ll leave it at this (for now).

66

How dare you snub your nose at old, empty caves in exchange for newer, shinier caves like you know they are right & the old caves are wrong… & act like that doesn’t say exactly what I said about donning a new worldview when you shed an old one. You may as well keep the analogy the way Plato originally had it. That Socrates didn’t want to midwife a wind egg did not mean he had nothing to birth. It meant gestation / synthesis takes time. History… to process in minds & cultures. He believed in a god behind all his questions in dialogue, and was given the hemlock for questioning the grounding (& thus authority) of other gods used by those in power to manipulate those under them. And so it still goes today.

How does your music set the people free to enjoy life harmoniously together without manipulating them?

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You seem to have completely misunderstood what I said:

‘he does not fall into the darkness of a new cave after exiting the one into which he was born, but sees that the world outside his old cave appears to be entirely composed of caves—a cave supersystem!’

In other words, he does not exchange an old cave for a new one, or newer ones, but for the whole supersystem of old and new caves—the whole universe!

You know what Socrates believed? Was it revealed to you by your god? Or do you just know what Aristophanes, Plato and Xenophon wrote about him? Or not even that? (Hint: the first caricaturized him, and the others wrote exoterically!)

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All his dialogues birth him, and The Apology credits him. Plato was a very worthy student.

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I have a new signature! Not that I necessarily agree with the distinction between natural and voluntary; but one has to rend them asunder before one can bind them together… All natural beings are will, but not free will; in other words, not will, but eros that’s not under will… But, far from undercutting what Mahdi suggests—the necessary connection between willing voluntary intelligible notions into existence and knowledge or theoretical understanding of these notions—, Athelema means one must desire and decide to bring any being into existence if one is to understand it! As I wrote in my ‘Dionysos the Bodhisattva? Nietzsche’s Ariadne as the Target of the “Buddha of Europe”’ (not ‘Dionysos the Bodhisattva. A study in Nietzschean religious philosophy’—let alone ‘Dionysus the Bodhisattva’…),

‘Strauss starts from the premise that reality is will to power and nothing besides. But Nietzsche did not start from that premise. It’s not some kind of axiom. If you want to start from the object of knowledge, not from the subject, you may start as follows: “Knowledge in itself in a world of becoming is impossible; so how is knowledge possible? As error concerning oneself, as will to power, as will to deception.” (WP 617, Kaufmann trans.) So you start with the (Heraclitean) observation that the world is a world of becoming. You then infer from that that all knowledge must be will to power. But if all knowledge is will to power, the only way there can be a harmony between the knowing and the known is if the known, too, is will to power. More precisely, the knower must will the known to be will to power, for that is the only way he can “know” it, relate to it,—exegete it.—If all exegesis is eisegesis, the only way it may still be considered exegesis is if the exegeted is itself eisegeted to be eisegesis.—And this act can only be directed toward the future: we can only will the past to be will to power by willing it to recur, in the future, as will to power.’

In fact, I have yet to correct an error I soon discerned. You don’t start with an observation, for that would still be a kind of knowledge in itself. Rather, it’s as Picht says:

“Nietzsche does not say, as would have to be said from the standpoint of metaphysics: The will to truth is the will to knowledge of the steadfast, the true, the permanent; he rather says: ‘The will to truth is a making steadfast, a making true/permanent’, a reinterpretation of show [Schein] into Being [Sein]. When one first makes what is to be known as true oneself, when one gains Being only thereby that one reinterprets show into Being, then the will which accomplishes that cannot avoid eventually discovering that what it must first make steadfast is not yet steadfast by itself, and that the permanence which it must first create is not already given in advance. As Nietzsche puts the concept ‘will to truth’ in place of knowledge of the truth, he has thus carried out the great inversion.” (Georg Picht, Nietzsche, page 281, my translation.)

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“not yet steadfast by itself”

contrasted with “love is not love without demonstration,” the first statement is just gaslighting

(triggers a Kierkegaard quote in my brain, but… he’s the one who let his lady get away

So.

What a tragic travesty.

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So? Kierkegaard was a philosopher, not a gentleman; a real real man, not a “real man”.

The irony is that if there’s any people who see only what they wish to see (as per your signature), it’s believers like you. You wishfully think of “him who is the truth” (as per that last Meier quote), a man who is steadfast in his love for you, but the truth is it’s a will to truth on your part and not knowledge of the truth. In fact, you escape Meier’s verdict of pride because, as is so blatantly obvious, you’re not certain in your faith. You’re just trying to convince yourself that you are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS088Opj9o0[size=4](Madonna, “Frozen”.)[/size]

Love, the feeling, is its own demonstration. And if I love you, what business is it of yours?

72

You’re guessing wrong.

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Guessing what wrong?

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All of it.

75

Well, I’d like to focus on this part, then:

‘[Y]ou escape Meier’s verdict of pride because […] you’re not certain in your faith.’

If you are certain in your faith, then you don’t escape the verdict of pride.

“[H]umility, which finds its completion as the virtue of obedience in not knowing itself to be virtue [virtue being by definition “an achievement of [one’s] own will”], proves itself in attributing faith to the grace of God. If humility commands the believer to believe that faith rests on an act of the unfathomable will of God, the certainty of his faith must already be a sign of pride.” (Meier, “The Theologico-Political Problem”.)

If your faith exists by virtue of the will of God, and not of your own free will, the certainty of your faith implies that you have fathomed the will of God.

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Unfathomable … hm.

Let’s talk about the ocean. Let’s talk about what’s beyond the visible universe. Let’s not deny they exist just because they are … unfathomable. Even if we have the math to do stuff that turns your brain inside out… it touches nothing!

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You’re turning things around. I’m not claiming the will of God is unfathomable. I’m not even claiming a God exists. If the will of God is unfathomable, though,—in other words, if the unfathomable will of God is—, then God exists, yes… In fact, God exists even if the fathomable will of God is.

If you’re certain in your faith that your God exists, then either you believe you’ve fathomed his will—namely, if you believe your faith is his gracious gift—, or you believe your faith is an achievement of your own free will.

“Does faith rest for the believer on an unevident decision, or does he regard it as the work of him who is the truth?” (Meier, “The Theologico-Political Problem”.)

78

Asking, seeking, & knocking are free acts. So is intentionally ignoring. So is forgiving.

Grace is resistible. The Spirit is quenchable (resistible). Love is a choice. Even if you are a Paul on the road to Damascus, or the 1 who is separated from the 99.

Called… drawn… “found”… but not against your will. That’s why faith is required, and where it is lacking, he pulls back.

But if faith is in nothing, there is no one pulling back. No one silent. No one patient. That is not me being uncertain.

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Note: The special gift of faith is not the same faith of all who believe/trust. It is also not irresistible.

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…a much more simple and organic process for you, than I thought it would have been for you… though I’m not sure why I thought it should have been. [a slight projection there, perhaps]

Which leads me onto another question… seeing that you found your religious epistemology and it hadn’t found you, then you have nothing to denounce/to cerebrally wrestle with … or do you?