A balance of both is balance i.e. order.
Organisms are moving in the direction of order, not in the direction of chaos. They absorb chaos, that is true, but that’s because if they didn’t they would have ended up becoming chaos.
Magnus, “chaos” is nothing but the ordering activities of other beings–that is, as seen from the outside. To order something is to change it.
Surely chaos is also randomness in the world, and probably at the base qm level too. There would be patterns to order without chaos, but wherever we look e.g. With music, we see patterns + chaos. Same with the mind/thought? the universe isn’t clockwork but includes that and broken clocks.
Order in the physical universe is the filtering or rectifying of chaos.
… locally.
Can you see the mistake you’re making? You’re presuming that the universe is ordered (or doing the ordering.) Chaos, for you, is not the universe itself, but a mere sensation of another’s ordering. The underlying assumption is that everyone is ordering, because if everyone is ordering, then so are you (i.e. you have no need to doubt your efforts.)
That last part makes no sense to me. I’m ordering. I see (human) beings around me ordering. I postulate that all beings are ordering, because I think that’s less far-fetched than to postulate anything else about them. I do not need to excuse my ordering.
What about the neutral stance? How did you move from neutral to positive stance? Is it not possible that some people are ordering and that some are not? Consequently, is it not possible that you are disordering while thinking that you are ordering?
One of the ways we sense flux/chaos is through unexpected divergence in our models of reality. The previously certain becomes uncertain, the previously improbable becomes probable. When one is incapable of enduring such divergence/uncertainty (when one is incapable of responding to it with appropriate, symmetric, rhythm) one becomes motivated to respond to it with excessive convergence, by inventing a logic that makes erupting possibilities impossible. Satyr calls it “top<>down thinking”, scientists call it “ad hoc rationalization”. Assuming that the universe is ordered is the most obvious manifestation of that sort of thinking.
phoneutria
I’ll let Magnus speak for himself but insofar as my username goes, I love stars and I had changed my name from rising to descending in the hope of being aware and more mindful that I might reflect deeper and deeper (decend) into the nature of myself and of nature. At times, I do see that I rise up more than I descend but eh awareness is seeing, right?
You yourself have quite a flamboyant description ~~ purveyor of enchantment, advocate of pulchritude AND venomously disarming…
Thank you also for caling me Arcturus - so often “arc” loses something in translation.
Okay, it’s possible that I mis-interpreted it. The above doesn’t necessarily say that there is no discipline within that. Of course there has to be. There can be a balance between letting that daemonic spirit flow, pushing us further into creation and self discipline. Self restraint does not necessarily mean that we give up imagination and the lust for creation that is required becomes blocked.
Yes, indeed.
.
One might call that sexual energy or the lust to create. It doesn’t have to be contained by “will”. But awareness/mindfulness
yes.
Hmmm…okay, when you or he speak of “control over self”, you’re just speaking of the present moment, right…you’re not speaking in terms of abandoning one’s mental and physical health for the sake of the art…like many great artists truth seekers have - true look what they created and accomplished but at what sacrifice to their selves. I was speaking more to that.
What I said here though I stand by - though I misinterpreted him.
Why do will and desire have to be separate here, but maybe you haven’t ~~ they are encompassed within one another.
Arcturus, they have to separate, because of the will to form, and then the will to re form.The formal elements of logic assert their power to do so. In spite of top down thinking, to break the cycle of logical aesthetic constraint. This type of constraint had surfaced with the surrealists, and justified as a method. They were in suspense during their short lived effort, due to their political views being challenged.They were in an intolerable situation, they were hemmed into a neutral position, from which they needed to get out, because, the suspense was killing them. The will had to differentiate itself and stasis at that level was intolerable not primarily for them, but for those who had come to the end of the neutral, negated position. They could not be silenced, their will was not their own, their manifesto made sense to them at that time. They had no choice here, they would have rather be ignored, then then not go on. Their thinking was built on the absurd notion that things can not remain the same.
I think I understand what you were saying now, Magnus. You were not saying I was trying to excuse my own ordering. You were saying I was pretending that my disordering was ordering. I think you reasoned like this:
If what I say is too complex for you (or Satyr) to comprehend, it cannot be that it’s sensible nonetheless; it must be that I myself cannot comprehend it, either, but am just making a light (chaos) so blinding (so chaotic) that it looks like darkness (order) to me [you used silence as a metaphor, but I’m using darkness instead].
This is precisely what Value Philosophy predicts. Every being values everything it encounters in terms of itself. If, for example, something is too large for an amoeba to assimilate, it does not even exist for it. Likewise, if something is too complex for you to make sense of, it simply does not exist for you as something sensible.
The first of Nietzsche’s Eight Principal Questions is whether one wants to become more multifarious or simpler; that is to say, whether one wants to make one’s urge towards unity greater or one’s urge toward variety, difference, inner disintegration–respectively. Consider:
[size=95]“That commanding something which the people calls ‘spirit’ wants to be master within itself and around itself and to feel itself master: out of multiplicity it has the will to simplicity, a will which binds together and tames, which is imperious and domineering. In this its needs and capacities are the same as those which physiologists posit for everything that lives, grows and multiplies. The power of the spirit to appropriate what is foreign to it is revealed in a strong inclination to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the complex, to overlook or repel what is wholly contradictory: just as it arbitrarily emphasizes, extracts and falsifies to suit itself certain traits and lines in what is foreign to it, in every piece of ‘external world’. Its intention in all this is the incorporation of new ‘experiences’, the arrangement of new things within old divisions–growth, that is to say; more precisely, the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power. This same will is served by an apparently antithetical drive of the spirit, a sudden decision for ignorance, for arbitrary shutting‑out, a closing of the windows, an inner denial of this or that thing, a refusal to let it approach, a kind of defensive posture against much that can be known, a contentment with the dark, with the closed horizon, an acceptance and approval of ignorance: all this being necessary according to the degree of its power to appropriate, its ‘digestive power’, to speak in a metaphor–and indeed ‘the spirit’ is more like a stomach than anything else. […] This will to appearance, to simplification, to the mask, to the cloak, in short to the superficial–for every surface is a cloak–is counteracted by that sublime inclination in the man of knowledge which takes a profound, many‑sided and thorough view of things and will take such a view: as a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste which every brave thinker will recognize in himself, provided he has hardened and sharpened for long enough his own view of himself, as he should have, and is accustomed to stern discipline and stern language.” (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 230.)[/size]
He who hath ears, let him hear.
Values are a way organisms are trying to unite their disintegrating identities. What one values is conditioned by what one is, that is true. But what you miss, however, is that the universe, being flux, continually creates cracks in one’s identity thus changing it and necessitating an updated set of values. This means that values are not static (active, merely determined by one’s self, nor reactive, merely determined by the other), but dynamic/interactive.
What makes you think I miss that?
You are emphasizing the self. If valuing is interactive, why self-valuing? why not other-valuing?
When the universe breaks you (as it does all of the time) no return to your previous self is possible. The new self is established and all of the values must be changed to suit it. The universe also has the power to break you to such an extent that you are basically forced to REINVENT yourself. Cripples, we call them. Few, however, have the will strong enough to endure a crippled state, so what happens most of the time is denial, which can manifest itself as a desperate desire to return to one’s older self (self-exaggeration) or as a desperate desire to reinvent oneself but without paying the full price (self-denial.)
“Basically” forced? Of course you’re not forced, you can also resign to your broken state, or even to your being broken further, possibly to death. Anyway, yes, your self, which includes your will, can be changed by other beings. Still, it is then that changed self which values itself, values everything in terms of itself, and posits itself as a value. One’s values are determined by one’s self, but one’s self in turn is determined by other beings. Now:
Do you mean, why not say that beings exist inasmuch as other beings value them, or why not say that beings exist inasmuch as they value other beings? Whether either or both, here’s the thing. When a being values other beings, it values them in terms of itself–that is, it values itself in them. You can say that that self and thereby its values are determined by other beings, but ultimately you come to the question where the first being(s) came from–or, if you don’t believe in (a) first being(s), to an endless chain of beings. In the latter case, however, you could place a zero point anywhere on the chain, and say that the “first” being(s) came from an endless chain of earlier beings, from infinity. This would be no less inconceivable than saying, in the former case, that the first being(s) came from nothing. So we may just as well say that the first being(s) came from nothing. How did they/it come from nothing? By asserting themselves as beings. Logically it does not matter whether the self is asserted by nothing or by itself (a circularity); but why do Satyr and his buddies not call their forum Know Thy Other, or Know Nothing? Are they perchance narcissists?
lol
Of course you are. To think that you cannot be forced is a form of vanity, stubborn resistance to the idea that you can be completely owned by the other (blinding you to the reality when it manifests itself in such a way.)
You are forced into one of the following:
- endurance of your crippled state (hoping you will heal at some point, and as a consequence of that become stronger than you ever were, even though there is no guarantee for that)
- clinging onto your older self, leading to self-exaggeration
- reinventing yourself but without paying the full price (which can only be done through #1)
The fourth option, return to your previous self, is not a choice.
You are decomposing interaction, reducing it to self (activity) or otherness (reactivity.)
There is no first/second, beginning/end, there is only continuity.
And my battery is low so I will end my post here and finish it some other time . . .
That’s all very nice, but you said “you are basically forced to REINVENT yourself”–which I take to be #1. And as I said, there is a fourth option, namely resignation.
This contradicts “the idea that you can be completely owned by the other”: for there is then no you and no other, no owned and no owner; there is only “continuity”…
I am going to sound like Satyr, but, there are people who cannot “think outside the box”. These are people who refuse to update their models of reality when reality presses them to do so. Reality being dynamic, interactive and continual means that models of reality are never complete, necessitating their continual adaptation. So instead of updating their models of reality what they end up doing is forcing them onto reality itself – they reduce interactivity to activity. This does not mean they never update/adapt their models, it simply means they do not do so continually (scientists, for example, update them, but only during “scientific interaction” such as during scientific observation and experiments, whereas in all other circumstances they force them onto reality without adapting them.) Healthy individuals strive for continual adaptation, whereas unhealthy (we call them nihilists) seek to put an end to this continual need for adaptation. The latter have a negative view of the concept of contradiction: everything that contradicts is automatically assumed to be wrong.
So what you’re doing here . . .
. . . is forcing your own model of reality (your own logic) onto reality, instead of shaping it to fit reality. There is both me, the other and continuity, and yet, you tell me the idea of continuity is somehow incompatible with the first two? I don’t know how to respond to this . . . I’ve faced similar situation many times in the past and I never managed to explain this to people who refuse reality simply because it contradicts their models of reality . . .
A symptom of order-addiction . . . no sight of disorder is tolerable. You expect everything to be completed, no sight of incompleteness, of work-in-progress, is tolerable . . .