Right. I actually make it a point to deliberately misspell your name!!!
Jakob:
Yeah, I get that part. But so what? Whether it’s in regard to race or gender or sexuality or abortion or gun control or MAGA or any other issue revolving around conflicting goods, there are those who will insist that only their own moral or political or religious dogmas…count?
Jakob:
Look, in regard moral and political convictions, if someone is telling others to “wake up!” and think exactly like they do – or else! – that’s just another way in which to describe woke.
I personally equate woke with “my way or the highway” objectivism. Now, if someone here wants to insist that, say, this is a “category error” or technically incorrect, fine.
Again, note for us how, given the behaviors that you choose, astrology factors into your day to day interactions with others. In particular when confronting those who challenge your own moral convictions.
“Again, given my own rooted existentially in dasein political prejudices, this is fundamentally about the Deep State grappling to figure out what to do in a world where increasingly state capitalism and political autocrats are calling the shots. And with markets and cheap labor and natural resources on the line as never before Wall Street apparently wants autocracy to be one possible option.”
So are you saying the deep state struggles with autocracy and Wall Street seeks it out? That they aren’t aligned?
First, of course, I have to bring this up…Trump and Wall Street of late!
As for the deep state, here is my own take on it:
But let me put my own cards on the table regarding the American government and “conspiracy”:
I believe that America is fully invested in preserving and sustaining its “ruling class”. And that, in so doing, it will in fact plot and plan to do things that unfold almost entirely behind the curtains. And that includes Barack Obama and most of the Democratic Party.
But not a “ruling class” in the simplistic Marxist sense of “the class struggle”. That was more a manifestation of the industrial revolution. Capitalism today is of the crony rendition—it has evolved light years beyond that.
Indeed, in today’s world, delineating something as “the ruling class” does not mean that once a month…literally…the folks from The Mainstrem Media [and their Wall Street advertisers] sit down with relevant committee chairmen in Congress, Obama’s economic team in the White House, the K Street lobbyists and Henry Kissinger’s “colleagues” from Bilderberg to meticulously plan the next month’s political and economic agenda. It doesn’t work that way. Why? Because it doesn’t have to. Besides, even within these corporate/political concoctions of wealth and power, there are considerable conflicts. For example, corporations based here in America may be strongly opposed to government policies that favor companies that shift all or part of their business overseas. And companies that oppose policies seen as favorable to the interests of oil industry do so because the higher the cost of oil the more costly it is in run their own businesses profitably. As with most things global, it’s very, very complex. And that, of course, is where “democracy” comes into play. Democracy for the rich. But some of these conflagrations are titantic because so much money is at stake.
No, America’s ruling class does not encompass a bunch of secret meetings where secret conspirators plot and plan nefariously to carve up the world in Dr Evil’s secret location at Goldman Sachs.
In that context, I just don’t buy into many of the “truther” narratives—whether regarding Roswell, 9/11, Newtown or [as silly as this is] Russia. Where is the hard evidence?
Instead, the ruling class “conspiracy” narrative [mine, anyway] unfolds more like this:
From the Bullfrog Films review of the film The American Ruling Class:
**> ** > The American Ruling Class is one of the most unusual films to be made in America in recent years–both in terms of form and content. The form is a “dramatic-documentary-musical” and the content is our country’s most taboo topic: class, power and privilege in our nominally democratic republic.
**> ** > At bottom the film is a morality tale, the story of two Yale students (played by Harvard men) who seek their opportunities upon graduation. As the renowned essayist, author and longtime Harper’s magazine editor Lewis Lapham conducts them through the corridors of power: Pentagon press briefings, the World Economic Forum, philanthropic foundations, Washington law firms, corporations, banks, the Council on Foreign Relations, and New York society dinners–our two representative graduates “one rich and the other not so rich” must struggle with their responsibilities in “a world collaterally damaged by the magic of money and the miracles of science.” The real-life luminaries they meet on their journey become characters in a story about power, its responsibilities and abuses.
**> ** > All the while “the Mighty Wurlitzer” plays on, a reference to the massive propaganda apparatus invented by the CIA’s Frank Wisner, here used to signify the nocturnal philosophy of acquisition and imperial hubris which continually calls to the young men, the siren song of careerist myopia that was bred into their bones at school.
**> ** > As we watch these two young men wend their way through what is only a slight fictionalization of their actual lives and choices, as we meet former Secretaries of State and Defense, directors of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, the publisher of The New York Times, Kurt Vonnegut, Howard Zinn, Barbara Ehrenreich, Robert Altman and a host of others, we have to ask along with Mr. Lapham: “To what end the genius of the Wall Street banks and the force of the Pentagon’s colossal weapons? Where does America discover the wisdom to play with its wonderful toys?” The possible answers move beyond the empty distinction of party affiliation and into the heart of American Oligarchy itself. By film’s end, the young men must decide: Should they seek to rule the world, or to save it?
In this context, crucial aspects of American foreign and domestic policy are in fact rooted in political economy, in crony capitalism, in stuff that really does unfold behind the curtains.
Obama Inc. fits quite comfortably into this carefully calibrated cache. His first administration was veritably bursting at the seams with men and women of this ilk. For example, Bilderberg, CFR, TC folks alone included Hillary Clinton [and Bill of course], Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Rahm Emanuel, George Mitchell, Robert Rubin, Paul Volcker, Robert Gates, James Jones, Tom Daschle, Eric Shinseki, Michael Froman, Susan Rice, Jack Reed, Eric Holder, Janet Napolitano, Mona Sutphen.
Hey, it is just commonsense to point out that those who own and operate the political and economic instruments that sustain the global economy, are going to want to connect the dots with others like them around the world. They have “shared interests” that evolve from and center around transactions that swell well up into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
So, no, they don’t need to schedule a secret rendevous where they can exchange secret handshakes and secret code words with the other secret participants.
If you grasp the manner in which these folks get together to sustain their own interests you begin to get a clearer sense of why a “progressive” agenda hardly ever comes up at all. Well, other than as rhetorical camouflage to dupe the unabashed liberal intellectuals who still believe that ObamaLand and BushWorld are the antithesis of each other.
And yet, with respect to many social issues, they really are, right?
And while it is true the neoconservatives in the ruling class disdain these “internationalists”, they are both attached at the hip to Wall Street and the military industrial complex.
This is where the CTs need to aim their narratives. Or so it seems to me.[/i]
This in my view is what makes the world go around. At least in “the West”. All that other stuff – Kennedy assassination, Watergate, operation cointelpro, operation chaos, iran-contra, the war on terror etc. – is all subsumed in that. More intriguing perhaps is how [or even if] China can be subsumed in it too.
On the other hand, this too is just another manifestation of my own “rooted existentially in dasein” political prejudices.
[Note II. I just had the insight that HumAnIze is at least divided between the moral will to intellectual probity and the will to security (not to mention the natural desire for truth, of course). He believes truth is better than illusion (which already implies belief in a self and a connected good). This is the direct reason for my finally posting all this.]
“Philosophy”!
None of this is philosophy; it’s just politics. It’s not even philosophic politics. You guys don’t even know what philosophic politics is, because you haven’t seriously asked the question—which occupied me for well over ten years—why philosophy should become political… For it’s not politics which may become philosophic, but philosophy which may become political. “Political philosophy”!
Originally, to be sure, it was politics which became philosophic—“transcended” itself into philosophy. But this does not mean politics became political philosophy, but that it became natural philosophy. And it’s only natural philosophy which can become political philosophy: namely, when it learns it has not truly transcended politics—in other words, when it learns it has not truly exited the cave…
“Wisdom is an idol of the cave.” (Benardete, Socrates’ Second Sailing, p. 179.)
In this sense, wisdom is indeed received wisdom (as in Kabbalah)… The very idea(l) of wisdom is received—not from Gods but from one’s fellow mere mortals. Understanding this is what makes one a philosopher proper (eigentliche Philosoph, “genuine philosopher”), i.e. a political philosopher. And if one then arrives at an ontology, the only thing preserving one’s status as a philosopher is the understanding that it’s a speleontology: to the philosopher who has “returned” to his cave and seriously examined it, it really appears to be part of a boundless cave supersystem (and to have countless subsystems)—but still only appears that way, “thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
::
Now when Jakob asks, “Does western philosophy thus[!] turn out to be irrelevant, futile, impotent?”, he’s assuming philosophic politics should serve a purpose beyond philosophy: that it should “resurrect the west”, or rule out or at least postpone “the death of humanity”, or “prepar[e] for a renaissance, a birth of a superior human consciousness”, etc. The truth, however, is that, even if it does such things, it ultimately does so for the purpose of understanding. If not, it’s not philosophic!
[Note. It does not suffice, as Lampert says, to take “action on behalf of the human in its highest reach, its reach for understanding.” For this is “driven by love of the human”. But ‘the human’ is like Odysseus’s ‘lies like the truth’: “the nature of the individual is to be understood as the individual nature”. This is also why understanding requires eternal rather than merely historical recurrence.]
This is not to say philosophy’s end is extrinsic to itself. Understanding occurs precisely in the practice(!) of philosophic politics itself!
“Only a being—God—whose end is intrinsic to its action could act without acting for an end distinct from the action itself.” (Jaffa, “Neumann or Nihilism”.)
Arthur Melzer: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing
::
Anyway… With the said preserved status as a philosopher, we’re back at this post:
Why did Spinoza need “to refute the possibility of revelation by means of a comprehensive system that would leave no room for an unfathomable God”? Why couldn’t he just “live the dialectical tension between […] the devotion to the beautiful and the knowledge of our needy nature, which allows this devotion to be good for us”? Precisely because of the then-regnant idea of an unfathomable God, of course! Because of that, Spinoza could not be a Platonian, but had to be a Machiavellian.
But Machiavellian philosophy’s attempt to refute the possibility of revelation was a failure, and its will to security, to secure reason against revelation, had to make way for the moral will to intellectual probity; Machiavellian philosophy had to make way for Nietzscheist philosophy (cf. Gay Science 344). But it seems Heidegger, whose thought constitutes the hard center of that philosophy, was unaware of philosophic esotericism (cf. Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, page 7). As such, he seems to have identified with the outer or lower aspect of cruelty toward oneself (cf. BGE 30 and 225).
“Surely our probity must not be permitted to become the ground or object of our pride, for this would lead us back to moralism (and to theism).
[…We must] realize the fact that egoism [—which is fundamental—] is will to power and hence includes cruelty which, as cruelty directed toward oneself, is effective in intellectual probity, in ‘the intellectual conscience’.” (“Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil”.)
Heidegger, it would seem, was still proud of his probity… But it’s not in the pride of suffering cruelty, but in the joy of inflicting it that the delusion of Thelema can securely meet the Truth of Athelema.—I cut short my last post, which originally continued and ended as follows:
‘Now in order to understand my own personal solution, you first have to know my own personal understanding of the problem. The problem is the uncertainty, if not the denial, of the will. And to me “free will” is a tautology: the will is the feeling of freedom, power, agency. But what if it’s only a feeling, and there is in reality no such thing? My solution is that the will is preserved in the teeth of the insight into its (possible, if not probable) non-existence, in the form of the will to precisely that insight. For the will to that insight precedes that insight—if not chronologically, then at least logically: without that will, in oneself or others, the insight naturally fades away. The will, albeit itself only an irrational impulse, is yet experienced as free.’
::
The will to insight into the truth of Athelema cannot be a will to security, for the truth is no better than illusion (though also no worse). So if love must be under will, the “natural” love of truth must then be under the moral will to intellectual probity. Yet this “moral” will itself contains immorality or amorality: the inner or higher aspect of cruelty toward oneself (not even to mention the “immorality” of pride…).
But if the truth is no worse (and no better) than illusion, how can the will to intellectual probity contain cruelty? What’s cruel, then, about driving toward the truth? The whole point is that the will is delusional. But if this is so, can’t it be a will to security after all? The fact that the truth is no better and no worse than illusion itself belongs to the “cruel” nature of truth.
And I’m not talking about the first time one has the said insight. What I’m talking about is when one already knows it’s most probably true. This already eliminates the “natural” desire for truth: there is no lover (no self) and no worthy belovèd (good)—in fact, the most worthy belovèd would be the will!
::
It makes sense that HumAnIze should say, “at least I have sex and my whiskey bottles to give some meanings back.” Sexuality and intoxication. Leaves out the "rock ‘n’ roll"¹, though—which also makes perfect sense. You guys are still “moral”, i.e. resentful (just look at the context in which he said that). In fact, unless it’s understood as the reciprocal form of self-lightening, VO might also be called PO, Politics Ontology:
“Politics always is serious and potentially, if not actually, tragic. The main political passion, moral indignation, the hatred of enemies and craving for vengeance against them, springs from the political faith that one has or needs common goods without which life is not worth living. Hatred and desire for revenge is the natural reaction against enemies, whoever threatens one’s common or political good.” (Neumann, “Politics or Nothing!”)
My speleontology should rather be called NO, of course:
‘Love is itself an empty heart, or—’
‘“Or an empty pussy” is what I didn’t say. That is, I meant love as (Platonic) eros. Thus that Kali-yantra (“maternal ouroboros”) is basically a yoni-symbol. I don’t celebrate Christmas, but I did have a fitting insight on Christmas Day, namely that Dionysos and Ariadne (the philosopher and the Goddess) are to replace Jesus/Isa and Yahweh/Allah (the prophet and God), with the maternal recurrence replacing the Creation-Last Judgment timeline. I’m talking about the true politicization (religionization) of philosophy, the turning of the Question into the Answer…’
(Written right around Christmas 2022.)
“[T]he nature of nature is universal process, a becoming that is an internal drive to fulfill itself whose product is an internal drive to fulfill itself.” (How Socrates Became Socrates, page 190.)
¹ “The states in which we infuse a transfiguration and a fullness into things and poetize about them until they reflect back our fullness and joy in life: […] Three elements principally: sexuality, intoxication, cruelty—all belonging to the oldest festal joys of mankind, all also preponderat[ing] in the early ‘artist’.” (Will to Power # 801, Kaufmann ed.)
GOP attacks on woke America are ‘hypocrisy of the highest order’
by Brad Bannon
at The Hill
Like any good interviewer, Stewart let his guest hang himself with his own words. He branded Dahm’s support for a ban on drag performances and opposition to steps to reduce gun violence “hypocrisy of the highest order.” Stewart pointed out that there were lots of children who died from gun violence — in fact, it’s the leading cause of child mortality in the United States — yet, no documented cases of kids dying from exposure to drag queens.
On the other hand, for any number of truly hardcore moral and political zealots, the only people who ever get hung – “my way or else!” – are those who refuse to join the clique. For example: AGORA
Those who insist that only liberals can be “woke” because historically it’s linked to the civil rights movement. As though it is simply ludicrous to ascribe it to conservatives who insist that others are obligated to “wake up” and parrot their One True Path to enlightenment. Or those who go even further and include immortality and salvation in the “wager”.
Which is why my own frame of mind here revolves around the assumption – the political prejudice – that democracy and the rule of law reflect “the best of all possible worlds” in a No God world.
Think of those here like henry quirk. His view regarding guns is, in my opinion, woke on steroids. Then the part where it’s all linked to a God, the God, his God.
As for drag queens and kids, my own particular prejudice “here and now” revolves around the assumption, i.e. a political prejudice rooted existentially in dasein, that this is not something which seems reasonable. Only for others it is entirely reasonable, They merely start with a different set of assumptions regarding the human condition.
Okay, how would the deontologists among us resolve this? Guns, transgenders and…the optimal assessment?
No, it’s what I construe to be a political prejudice rooted existentially in the life that I have lived. In other words, given the assumptions – prejudices – that work for me here and now. On the other hand, in no way am I arguing that others are obligated to think as I do.
My own prejudices are derived from the points I raise in the OPs here:
Jakob:
Where do you see the rule of law in general, in terms of ‘my way or the highway’? What is the link between laws for all and Dasein?
Permit everyone their values/Dasein as much as possible without them compromising other Daseins?
The links here are themselves, in my view, rooted existentially in dasein.
But: what is by far the most important factor here in any given community is, I believe, the extent to which social, political and economic interactions revolve around particular combinations of might makes right, right makes might or moderation, negotiation and compromise.
What’s all this fuss about? Humans are tools of cognition, used by the Universe through the uniqueness of human stupidity — the inability to know beyond their own nose and the ability to fantasize about anything. Tools that are not pitied at all — they reproduce themselves and even think they are the ‘center of the Universe’
Yes, Sauwelios, sure. The fruit of philosophy is cruelty. Philosophical politics is barbaric frenzy.
Very deep.
That you think the value of a selfvaluing (or even anything at all) is determined by how much it has cost, is astonishing. But fitting to the rest of your thought. It certainly explains how VO could throw you in the abyss.
Here’s what I actually wrote in that other thread you’re referring to:
‘I think that, other things being equal, and if there be talk of value at all, the value of a human being depends on age. A child may have the potential to become a fully developed human being, but if it dies at twelve instead of at twenty-four, it has cost much less and therefore had much less value, anyway. […] Of course, the value of a human being likewise also declines after a certain age—unless […]’
So I’m saying that, if other things are equal (which is what “other things being equal” means), and if there be talk of value at all, the value of a self-lightening—which is to say anything at all—is determined by how much it has cost, yes.
This actually follows directly from VO rightly understood, i.e., self-valuing as the reciprocal form of self-lightening. In the post I made right after that long one above, and to which you also seem to be referring, I said:
‘Self-lightening is the bestowing of value, namely the bestowing of the bestowing of value, etc.; one of my words for it is ‘self-bestowing’.’
The “value” of anything at all is determined by how heavy of a self-lightening it is. And this, in turn, depends on how much other self-lightenings have lightened themselves upon it. (It doesn’t even have to be “self-lightenings”, plural.)
Do you now see that there is no difference between how much anything at all has been valued and how much it’s cost? Also between this and how deeply it can value.
And if you had studied my post instead of just browsing it for things to “find”, you might have found that what you said about “the fruit of philosophy” is doubly wrong. First and foremost, the “fruit” of philosophy is philosophy. Second, cruelty is not the fruit of philosophy, but a root, so to say. It’s a will under which the love that is philosophy may be. It’s one possible source of frenzy or intoxication (Rausch), as is lust. In fact, the love that is philosophy is itself a form of lust! To be sure, the early Nietzsche called their combination “the genuine ‘witches’ brew’” and connected it with the barbarians, but then, Bill suggested the early Nietzsche was a prude.
For the lust that is philosophy not to need to be under will, the idol that is wisdom must still make the philosopher mad with that lust, as a (human) animal may do to another (human) animal with lust in the usual sense of the word. But the idea of received wisdom in the sense of revealed religion makes that impossible; his lust would then drive the philosopher to become a religious fanatic or zealot or whatever. Spinoza seems to have thought that the splendor of logical necessity sufficed to place philosophy under will; but the splendor of logic is itself the will to power, i.e. the cruelty of striving to overpower (Dawn 113; cf. Will to Power 55). And, for God’s sake, what’s wrong with cruelty?
“Do you now see that there is no difference between how much anything at all has been valued and how much it’s cost? Also between this and how deeply it can value.”
No, equating that to cost is nonsense. It must have to do with how love to you is an empty heart.
I tried studying your post but it is the same circular stuff as ever. I did not try to find something specific.
'Philosophy is important, because philosophy, because rausch, because philosophy… politics… because philosophy and rausch…
The only notion you have is VO and your own version of it, and of course its root, the WtP. Yes, I know logic is WtP.
‘What is philosophical politics? Well, its philosophy, but politics’
What is philosophy?
‘the philosopher must have his rausch and his cruelty and his solitude’
you make it seem like philosophy is just an elaborate form of solitary lust.
but this is not what Bacons or Nietzsche’s philosophy was, or what VO could have become.
Honestly man you’re being very eloquent and erudite but you’re saying very little.
rausch?
mass orgies?
mass cruelty?
a death metal concert?
btw deathmetal (or whatever that stuff is) is pure fear of death.
“For the lust that is philosophy not to need to be under will, the idol that is wisdom must still make the philosopher mad with that lust, as a (human) animal may do to another (human) animal with lust in the usual sense of the word. But the idea of received wisdom in the sense of revealed religion makes that impossible; his lust would then drive the philosopher to become a religious fanatic or zealot or whatever.”
What a mess you make. So youre renouncing will, so you will philosophy to not be under will, so it must be under lust… but but… revelation… oh no… dude i cant even… if i ever knew a religious/mystical zealot it is you. mysticism as in obscuring.
‘self-lightening’… what have you even done to my perfectly clean doctrine? Why have you made Nietzsche unrecognizeable in it? It was an epistemology as much as an ontology. Youve completely misread that part. Your thing is unverifiable. It lacks philosophic power. You cant analyze with it as a tool. Its mysticism.
I’m not renouncing will, I accept that there is no will, i.e. that the will is not free. And I’m not saying philosophy must be under lust, I’m saying that it is lust. [An elaborate form of solitary lust, yes; but not “just” (see the next paragraph).] And even though there is no will, philosophy must be under will, at least in modern times.¹
I didn’t say philosophy was “important”. Important for what? You very much seem to think that philosophy is a mere means, which would mean you’re no philosopher (which would not be surprising).
Philosophic politics is politics in which the philosopher reflects.
“Political philosophy is the part of philosophy in which the whole of philosophy is in question. […] For the sake of his self-knowledge, the philosopher must make the political things the object of his inquiry and observation.” (Meier, “Why Political Philosophy?”, paragraph 16.)
¹ “That we must speak of two accounts of reason, the ancient and the modern, can be seen in the fact that for the ancients thought was at its height, not an action, but what they called a passion. Whatever the differences in what came to us from Jerusalem and from Athens, on this central point there was a commonness. The height for man was a passion. In modern language we might weakly describe this by saying that thought was finally a receptivity. We can see that this is not true of modern thought because its very form is the making of hypotheses and the testing by experiment, something intimately connected with the acts of our wills, the controlling of the world, the making of history.”
" You have always just wanted to make history."
In your destitute imagination. You are truly like Snadert. Zoals de Boer is vertrouwt hij zijn gasten.
I have always only wanted to experience myself. Creation was part of that.
To separate action from passion is an error. Or at least a sign of the stuntedness of both.
All this ‘it must be’ (yet it is not important for anything – ughh the levels of deceit, inconsistency you manage) is NEVER going to amount in a clarity, forthrightness, is it? It will always be mere statements in your carousel to satisfy your lust. “Philosophy”
I was a philosopher in as far as I resolved some existential contradictions that had existed before me. I dont care about your definitions.
"Okay, but is there or is there not the conservative equivalent of this? Liberals go after those who don’t think like they do about race or gender or sexual orientation or abortion or capital punishment or gun control or religion. What, and conservatives don’t in turn insist that in order to be truly “awake”, others are obligated to think as they do? There’s not a right-wing rendition of “politically correct”?
Aren’t the moral and political and religious objectivists here often fanatically “woke”? You think like they do or you are stupidly sound asleep to reality."
“conservatives and liberals are two sides of the same coin. they both have the same target, the same enemy: you, me. both want to entangle you in a certain narrative. and both, yes, have a politically correct and a politically incorrect, both have a right and a wrong, both want to reshape the world, only, the world (=you and me) cares little about them and goes ahead…”
GOP attacks on woke America are ‘hypocrisy of the highest order’
by Brad Bannon
at The Hill
Republicans have blamed progressive woke policies for everything from the tragic train crash in East Palestine, Ohio to the failure of the Silicon Valley Bank. GOP politicians criticize “woke” morning, noon and night. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a prospective Republican presidential candidate, seems to invoke “woke” anytime someone turns on a microphone and points a camera at him.
Here, however, things can get tricky. There are, after all, any number of politicians who practice “the politics of convenience”. They tell the voters what they think they want to hear. Especially on the campaign trail. Everything revolves around the election cycles, which can often revolve around “show me the money”…the part that sustains the deep state embedded in crony capitalism.
It might be liberal dogmas or conservative dogmas. But to the extent those in power demand – command – particular
moral and political prescriptions/proscriptions, it often comes down to their capacity to enforce sets of assumptions: warnings, fines, arrests, imprisonments, executions, internment camps, gulags, gas chambers…?
That sound you hear is all of this going in one ear and out the other. And in regard to radicals at both ends of the ideological/deontological spectrum.
Not that any of this will put even a dent in the dogmas of most objectivists. And, in my view, that is because their convictions revolve more around what they believe, and what they believe comforts and consoles them.
It’s more about human psychological defense mechanisms and how consciously or otherwise they create the objectivist frame of mind.
That is, I meant love as (Platonic) eros. Thus that Kali-yantra (“maternal ouroboros”) is basically a yoni-symbol. I don’t celebrate Christmas, but I did have a fitting insight on Christmas Day, namely that Dionysos and Ariadne (the philosopher and the Goddess) are to replace Jesus/Isa and Yahweh/Allah (the prophet and God), with the maternal recurrence replacing the Creation-Last Judgment timeline. I’m talking about the true politicization (religionization) of philosophy, the turning of the Question into the Answer…’