It is our tragedy because we are still waiting (us busy little bees) for the resolution. I suppose we are in a more privaleged position because we have easier access to that “luxury for transcendence”, living in a scientific era and having teachers like Nietzsche… but still as you say,
I understand this whole ordeal and dilemma well. Nietzsche talks often about strength and nobility — do you think these are just inborn characteristics of certain people? In earlier messages Arminius and I were mentioning free will and inclining more towards determinism. I believe Nietzsche’s stance is complicated because he would rather call it weak wills and strong wills, but I suppose the question still remains in this sense — I have been weak willed (though maybe other times I have been strong willed, but I am speaking mainly of my idealism in context), will that be it?
I have two questions (for being, as it were…) that are imminently connected to what I had just asked above.
You wrote that Joseph Campbell came to the conclusion through his studies that the subject-object differentiation could be overcome (as we see in Nietzsche). I was going to ask, do you think this overcoming is something to do with our historical period? But then on the other hand it seems (and I think this is in great part what Nietzsche was getting at) that the ancient Greeks had no real problem with this (At least not the nobility. We know very little, I believe, about the slaves mentality of that time). This would seem to point to an inherent nature of certain egos.
Isn’t it odd that there came periods of slave revolt, but yet the slaves (at least in this Nietzschean narrative) did not seem to learn from the experience, or is it because it was all ressentiment rather than true nobility? Hegel would imply that the slave learns from his work and it educates him to become more than he was before, to recognize his work in the world and acheive true self-consciousness (although I think the reality in our present age of consumerism and mass culture is more along the lines that we identify with our work and lose ourself in it, without really gaining a connection with being or possessing the distance to learn from it). Is this partly where Nietzsche rejected Hegel?
The other question (for being) was (and maybe this is due to my own misunderstanding of ‘the cave’ as a result of my ideal fixation), when we nagivate the world today there is a very thick barrier between us and nature, we have constructed a conventional world so complex that it begins to have its own nature. Buildings have become a new breed of unsurpassable mountains, and the beasts in the wilds are us. But there is a very vital difference, whereas primitive beings saw this wild and untamed world with new eyes, we are brought up in convention (some people call this indoctrination (ressentiment or no?)). Our lessons in convention tell us how we can navigate this “untamed-hyperconventional world”, the rest we fill in through intuition and experience. If we accept the conventions we can acheive success. If we deny them we acheive failure.
So, for me, convention is idealism (a historic idealism). Conventions must be understood ideally. We can see buildings, for example, and people in suits, but we don’t necessarily have to see “business”. Instead, we learn “business”, and hold the ideal concept and use it as our new given tool in the hyperconventional wilderness. I think it is because of this realization of the conventionality that the mind inclined towards philosophical thought desires to make changes — we see that this is convention. We don’t even need to acheive utopia anymore, but we see that life is playing with the images projected on the cave wall. It is alluring, we feel like children playing with these fantasy images (“we” are idealists).
Maybe I am wrong with my idealism —/— the hyperconventional world separates us from nature so that we deal with convention and understand conventionally, we don’t understand nature. Many of us “decadents” would die in the woods. My goal is not to create “this” (a strict designated, McDonalds for example, a building with designated behaviours, those working, those being customers, a layout to the store and behaviours designated throughout the store, stand and order here, sit here, throw trash here, go to the washroom in here, etc.) My desire is to create avenues, places of undesignation where we can reacquaint ourselves with the blankness which is our minds first meeting with nature.
Maybe I also have that desire because where I came from (and many places I’ve gone) even the wilderness cannot be touched. Where I came from you must pay to go for walks in the forest, and you must stick to the paths, and there are signs set up, don’t touch, don’t do this, don’t, don’t (designation…)
So we said,
but it feels like Nietzsche is not really the way out of the labyrinth. He took the Greeks for his model, but the Greeks lived very close to nature, but we live in hyperconventionalism. We return from our ideals into a hyperconstructed world of ideal (designations).
And so here I repose the question I asked before, is it that certain minds are naturally strong? The elite today accept reality (the reality which is now designations even designations with “loopholes”) and they exploit it, become bankers and business executives and politicians, play by the rules and maybe sometimes cheat-by-the-rules… whereas I (“we”, the ideal “we”) resent the rules, we play by the rules but we don’t really want to, and we spend our time dreaming of different rules, maybe even dreaming of nature to which we cannot return (because we have lost touch, or because there are signs telling us don’t, or both).
Maybe I’m reading this line wrong, but it seems like you’re implying that the projections on the wall of the cave are ultimately those of each individual — and I am here taking these projections not as the ideals in my mind but the conventions of society, which seems to me something like a Hegelian Zeitgeist concept. If that is so, I don’t really think I see it that way.