The Aesthetics of Self-Mastery

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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This thread is going to be a reiteration on the aesthetics of self-mastery, also known as asceticism or self-control. I already made a thread on asceticism, but this one will go into more detail.

Life is resistance to disorder, to entropy. All organisms consciously and unconsciously seek to maintain their cohesion as entities in a world, which perpetually heads towards increasing chaos and disorder. Disorder is the natural predisposition of the cosmos. The universe, initially, started as order, as a singularity - but now heads towards disorder, i.e., entropy. Organic life is a resistence to this cosmic flow, it is a contra-movement upstream. Life is an ordering principle, a nostalgic animism for the primal state of the cosmos.

Order < > Disorder: this dialectic characterizes the universe on so many levels. It extends from the fundamental, material nature of the cosmos all the way to the idealogical and symbolic. People’s ideologies can be seen as entropic or orderly. Conservatism is viewable, as a resistance to the flow of decadence, a maintaining of traditional values against the trenchant impetus of postmodernism and other such deconstructive isms, which run contrary to order, to the past.

For this current post, I’m more interested in exploring the aesthetics of individualized self-mastery. As prior mentioned in my other thread, I’m against the extreme form of asceticism, which entirely forbids worldly indulgences; I believe in harmony and balance. Though the extreme ascetic is of a strong will, he destroys himself with his own power. Extreme asceticism is just as bad as prodigal self-indulgence; symmetry is balance of these polarities — and that which is symmetrical is beautiful.

Religious ascetics abstained from fleshy desires, in order to purify themselves and, thus, appease their god(s). But my asceticism is secular, not based in appeasing some divine other, but rather myself — a strengthening of the will, in order to become more powerful as an individual. I don’t perceive my asceticism as some bland, tedious or onerous task that I must endure; I see it as confluent with the fundamental nature of life, of the cosmos. There is a sublime beauty to it, an aesthetic value.

Men of power have traditionally been considered to be great conquerors of the world, such as Hannibal of Carthage, Alexander the Great and Napoleon. But how about the one, who conquers and masters his own internal drives? Nietzsche believed that this type of man was the greatest. For Nietzsche, there were two forms of ascetics: the tyrant, who gains control over his impulses through peremptory vehemence ---- and the artist, who sublimates his lower drives into artistic creation. The latter was preferred, over the former.


Is this not what gives the martial-artist his aesthetic value: his mastery over the body - and discipline of the will? The concentration of energies into an order of lethal explosiveness.



The self-mastered soul is a noble soul, something to behold. All of the greatest monuments of antiquity are those that have endured the longest, who’s constitution remains the most ordered, the most intact. The self-mastered man possesses an aesthetic quality for his endurance and self-order, just like the Pyramids of Giza do, for enduring through so much time and retaining their supreme constitutive natures.

From my perspective, asceticism is a quasi-divine practice in an ironic sense, as I reject the conventional, religious form. I see self-overcoming, self-mastery as a self-deification — a return to the original, primal state of the cosmos: near absolute order, the singularity, " God “. Since I’m not a monotheist, the use of the word " God " is merely symbolic. Self-mastery is a microcosmic, symbolic " Big Crunch”, which occurs within the soul of the individual ---- " God " consciousness and will-power re-manifested.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oHOv9p9dHQ[/youtube]

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Here is one visual clue toward the principles of Self-Mastery;
youtube.com/watch?v=0mWc1Y2dpmY

The above clue into the need to understand the necessary neural correlates and develop those set of neurons to develop is system of controls, i.e. self-mastery.

With the development of the generic self-mastery system, the person would be able to in control of the many aspects of his life to sustain optimal living.
Asceticism is one method, but it is based on the black box hit and missed approach while development of the self-mastery set of neurons is more specific.

Despite Neuroscience being very new, it has given clues to the directions we need to take to develop self-mastery.

IMO, certain aspects [not asceticism discouraged by the Buddha but practiced by some monks] of Buddhism are very effective to develop self-mastery, e.g. certain types of vispassana are very effective when combined and facilitated with elements of neuroscience.

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Note to Prismatic that strictly speaking self-mastery is not a state, let alone final state, but a process, a tendency towards the minimization of oscillation. A man is forever oscillating around a point, a center, he never stops at the center, he merely moves towards it, and when he arrives at it, he passes it by and catches himself off-balance again. Man is, therefore, always off-balance, and the point of self-control is not to stop at the center, but to identify one’s position in relation to the center so that one can apply appropriate force in appropriate direction.

To pose self-mastery as a goal, as a final state, to desire to eliminate the state of imbalance, to eliminate the possibility of being pushed away from the center, is a sign of continuing loss of control, of resentment.

You cannot choose what kind of force you will receive, you cannot obtain absolute control over the world, all you can do, and should do, is to take this force and distribute it across all of your body (in the case of mind, across all of your passions) so that no individual part (no individual passion) receives too much damage, like jumping off a high place and rolling to disperse the momentum. If you don’t do this, you will break and, in the case of psychological fall, split into multiple identities. Depending on the kind of break, one can become a tyrant/masochist (a hard conscious break that is felt and hurts a lot) or a hedonist (a soft unconsciouss break, dissolution, that is not felt and is actually enjoyed.)

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True and as well for nations and the entire world as a whole.

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I did not assert that self-mastery is a state nor a final state [I am not too sure what you meant].
What I presented was, self-mastery is a competency that has its neural correlate in the brain.

For example when one has mastered any life skills, it is represented a set of the relevant neural correlates. Thus if one has mastered the skills of playing tennis, this mastery is represented by its relevant neural correlates. This mastery can of course deteriorate when one’s brain atrophize or there are lesions to the relevant neurons in the brain.
Such principles are similar to self-mastery.

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Self-mastery is not an isolated phenomenon, it is not a quantity, it is a quality. For example, you can be a master at some skill (a specialist, say, a very good scientist) or a half-master of many skills (a jack of all trades) and still lack balance/self-mastery. It is not something you can separate from the world.

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It’s in the harshest moments, when you are in the eye of the hurricane, that you have the opportunity to show your true, inner might and grit. Commanding your impulses and drives during rainstorms is easy, but when you are at your personal nadir, in the eye of the hurricane, that’s the most challenging obstacle to overcome and when you can truly shine. It’s those arduous moments that separate the boys from the men.
Will you acquiesce to a temporary indulgence, or endure and overcome for an eternal pride?